All of our hearts went out to the Idaho children who were kidnapped, molested, and one probably killed, by a previously convicted sex offender.

Why are there so many sexual predators?

Clearly, in the more distant past, sexual crimes were committed but the victims had no recourse and accepted their fate with only impotent protest. Slaves, concubines, war captives, indentured servants, and lowly peasants all suffered frequently at the hands and genitals of powerful men. Prostitutes have always silently borne more than their fair share of violence and depravity. Domestic violence, spousal rape, and incest have traditionally been a family secret, unpunished in the ages when a wife and children had status only as chattels of the family leader.

Even discounting the power of the media to bring every incident into the limelight, it still intuitively feels as if the perverts amongst us are multiplying faster than the general population. America has always been a violent nation, wresting her unparalleled natural resources out of the wilderness with dynamite, pickaxe, and drill. Not too many decades ago, hand guns or rifles were carried by every man in the West. Later came the machine guns of the mobsters and the Saturday night specials of the gang bangers and drug dealers.

But why the present pervasiveness of sexual violence?

One might point to a variety of possible causes. There is the explosion of increasingly sadistic pornography that has emerged from the backroom peepshows and darkened adult movie theaters to flash into our living rooms through the Internet portals. Everything from coeds with Web Cams, groping grandmas, and unbelievably over-endowed naked bodies, to child porn, animal-human sexual contact, bondage and (questionably real) snuff films flow onto our desktops, uninvited and aggressive.

We have heard, repeatedly, from the convicted sex offenders themselves, that their earliest catalyst into the fantasies that they eventually acted out, was pornography. In Asia, pornography has far more limited exposure, yet thousands of children disappear each year into the sordid world of the child sex slave.

What triggers men (by far the primary offenders) to subvert a normally reciprocal and mutually enjoyable activity into an act of violence and rage? For thousands of years (with the exception of isolated matriarchal anomalies), men have been at the top of the pecking order. Being male assured a certain degree of personal power no matter what their economic or social level.

With the advent and growth of the women's movement, the pecking order changed. In a world where brute strength and ancient taboo had little to do with success, power and social position became determined by characteristics that belonged equally well to either gender: intelligence, education, motivation, flexibility, and the ability to communicate.

Men who possessed such skills were perfectly happy to compete and cooperate with their female cohorts. It was those men lacking the ability to compete who had the furthest to fall. They lost the self-assurance and ego strength that had previously been their right by the random arrangement of chromosomes. Without the personal competence to rise above the lowest link of the cultural chain, their rage at their loss detonated. Unable to express themselves verbally, they mutely lashed out with their old reliable commodity, physical strength, against those who were most defenseless: women and young children.

Experts have long asserted that rape is not a sexual offense but an act of violence. We have pushed the inept and primitive among us against the wall and they have come back, flailing and slashing, to make someone pay for their pain. Our civilized conduct and collective success have labeled us all as potential victims, vulnerable and insecure as we warily watch and wait for an eventual attack.

Virginia Bola is a licensed clinical psychologist with deep interests in Social Psychology and politics. She has performed therapeutic services for more than 20 years and has studied the effects of cultural forces and employment on the individual. The author of an interactive workbook, The Wolf at the Door: An Unemployment Survival Manual, and a monthly ezine, The Worker's Edge, she can be reached at http://drvirginiabola.blogspot.com