This year Adrian Lyne’s film of Lolita was finally approved by the British Board of Film Classification. It is the second film to be made of Lolita; the first was by Stanley Kubrick. In both films, the 12-year-old child of Nabokov’s novel is transmogrified into a 14-year-old girl who looks even older. (And for the sex scenes, Lyne uses a double who is older still.) In this sense, the films seem to make something of a travesty of Nabokov’s novel.

There is not, of course, anything in the least bit dangerous about the book or the films. There have occasionally been films (violent ones) of which it has been claimed that they have incited illegal behaviour. No evidence whatsoever has ever been produced for this in the case of Kubrick’s film (and none so far for Lyne’s, but that’s only just come out, of course), and it is doubtful that it ever will. Nabokov had trouble getting the book published too; serious publishers worried about its subject-matter, whilst readers of pornography complained that the book was not in the least bit titillating or erotic.

No doubt that among those complaining about any film exploring the subject of paedophilia will be religious bigots - such as the "moral majority" which has so far succeeded in preventing Lyne’s film from finding a distributor in the US. Never mind the fact that religious bigots are among those most likely to commit paedophilia (the number of cases involving Catholic priests sexually abusing children goes up and up). And never mind the fact that this is nothing less than unashamed censorship in a society that supposedly prides itself on freedom. If the distributors were refusing the film because they believed it would not sell, or lacked merit, that wouldn’t be censorship; but they are refusing it because of pressure from those who enjoy being outraged - now that is censorship, and there’s no way of getting around that fact.

For much of this century, paedophilia was something that society just ignored. It went on, but we pretended it didn’t exist. Now that we are unable or unwilling any longer to deny its existence, we fling outselves into puritannical outrage at works of art or at perfectly innocent acts. Last year, a popular TV presenter was falsely accused of paedophilia just because she had taken photographs of her young children in the bath. The kind of action that not so long ago would have been recognized as perfectly innocent - photographing one’s own children - now seen as automatically and universally suspect. Then there was the case of the teacher who was found to possess child pornography. This disgusts us, but there is no reason whatever to think that just because someone has child pornography, they are liable to abuse children (that’s like thinking that just because someone has pornography, they are liable to commit rape). The teacher, who did not live long enough to have the benefit of a court of law, committed suicide as the public summarily tried him and found him guilty, presumably of paedophilia, a crime that society now hates more than any other, including mass murder.

The fact that we have woken up belatedly to the fact that child abuse of various kinds is a big problem in our society should not blind us to the fact that even paedophiles are, like us, humans.

Nor should it prevent us from admitting that different societies have different opinions on these issues. There are some societies that permit paedophilia. There are others that turn a blind eye to it in practice, as our own countries used to. Then, even among Western democracies, there are differences of opinion: we all disapprove of paedophilia, but at what age does a person reach sexual maturity? Is it acceptable to have sex with an 18-year-old? Surely, yes. A 16-year-old? Yes (at least in Europe?). A 14-year-old? A 12-year-old? A 10-year-old? (Surely not a 10-year-old.) Richard II of England married a 9-year-old French princess, but had to promise not to have sex with her until she was 12. There are some countries where girls still habitually or legally marry at 12 or 14 years old. In the West, sex is legal (for heterosexuals) at 16 in Britain, but at 14 in several other West European countries. There are no simple answers.

We know that we in the West believe that paedophilia is wrong because sex is wrong if one of the partners is not mature enough to consent to it or if they are in a position subordinate such that they feel compelled to consent to it. But this does not automatically tell us at what age sex becomes morally permissible - or whether it depends on the child in question, on the age of just the younger partner or of both the partners. Still there is a tendency in some of society simply to deny that children are sexual beings - as if we can deny the fact that 12-year-olds find each other sexually attractive and are so found by many adults. Freud told us that children are sexual beings; he was right.

The fact that society has belatedly recognized that in the past we have had too little concern for the welfare of children - especially for the welfare of children in homes or looked after by priests - does not mean that we should now close our eyes to difficult questions; does not mean that we should deny the common humanity of those who abuse children; does not mean that we should retreat into puritannical hatred of others; does not mean that we should censor films we don’t like.