According to BBC Breakfast a survey of teenagers from around the world has shown that they consider terrorism to be the biggest problem facing the world. Surprisingly this came out ahead of environmental problems and global warming - something children in the western world have been learning about now for years in school.

Terrorism has probably killed a conservative total of perhaps 50,000 people worldwide in the last ten years. Approximately one in three of the teenagers surveyed will have been subjected to invasive sexual abuse and only about one in three of the victims will even be remotely aware of the fact. the ones who are not aware will go on to lead lives out of control: they will make up 90% or so of the next generation of prostitutes, drug addicts and imprisoned criminals. Between them they will extrapolate their own unmanageable lives to those around them through crime, drug use and violence.

In the third world the problem is even worse: 250,000 or so children in South Africa alone will be violently raped next year. This does not include those who will be subjected to quiet ongoing abuse in their own homes. The number is a wild guess, of course, but it is the best guess of those in the field and in the know: and in South Africa they know more about this subject than almost anyone else.

Replicate this throughout the third world and add in the victims of fatherly abuse  and rape from the middle east and other Muslim countries and you start to see the picture. As I have written before you do not become angry enough to kill yourself and several thousand other humans by flying a plane into a building unless you have endured a childhood replete with pain and injustice: you just don’t grow up with that potential unless control of your own body is violently forced from you at the hands of an adult.

In short childhood sexual abuse will in the coming year produce one hundred times as many victims next year as terrorism has in the past ten, it will be responsible for most of the social ills of western society, and it produces adults capable of rage so great they become terrorists. The kids got it wrong. They, like government and almost everyone else, are pointing their fingers at the wrong kind of terror: One that is much more socially acceptable and supports the unsupportable theory that we are civilised.