When you confront a police officer who has just told a child that he wants to have oral sex with her but that she can’t tell her daddy, you expect him to react in a certain way. You expect him to sweat, to punch you in the face, to deny everything.

You expect him to refuse to believe that the person in front of him is not a kid but an under­cover journalist. You expect fear, denial and stress. And you get all of that. But then, there are the reactions that you don’t expect.

Weekly didn’t expect, when we conducted an undercover investiga­tion on sexual predators targeting children online, that the police officer who we caught would blame… the child. 

In the dark parking lot where the officer had arranged to meet 14-year-old “Stella” (our reporter), he did his best to get this message across: It was her fault. She shouldn’t use social media; it’s not safe (that's true, genius, but only because of people like you).

We tried to figure out if he blames all victims for the crimes commit­ted against them. If, for instance, a child is severely beaten by an adult, is that the kid’s fault too? “No, but that is not the same thing,” he replied. If my purse is stolen tomorrow, will that be my fault, or the perpetrator’s? “Not the same thing”.

We aren’t just dealing with one man’s defence speech, here. While most readers who saw our report hit down hard on the men, some blamed the (fictitious) kids. Kids in their early teens don’t have the right to use the internet because adults can find the photographs of them tempting, they said. And if kids still go online to chat with their friends, it makes them “disgusting girls” who deserve to be abused for having an online presence in the first place.

Surprised by that reasoning? No, you are not – although you (hope­fully) find it disturbing. We all know that when it comes to the female body, normal logic does not prevail, even when the body is that of a child. Girls are made to understand, from a very early age, that we are at least partially responsible for everything that happens to our private parts. There is a sense of shame involved in sex crimes against girls and women which just isn’t there when it comes to other types of crimes.

It’s not merely a side-effect of living in a conservative country that hasn’t yet introduced sex education in schools. It’s so deeply engraved in all of us, this sense of shame, that even countries that are perceived as socially advanced aren’t spared. How to stop it? By constantly repeating that the blame for a crime always falls on the perpetrator, never on the victim. 

So, no, Mr. Policeman – it was not that child’s fault that you wanted to have oral sex with her.