I should probably preface what follows with the glad tidings that I am a Belgian national, and am familiar with the notion that my old motherland is best summed up as being good at chips, chocolate and paedophilia. The thing about national stereotypes is that, like the best clichés, they are usually true.

When I left Brussels, aged nine, to come and live in London, my grandmother’s cook looked at me with great pity and informed me that I was moving to a country where people ate meat with jam and where men wore ladies’ underwear. The latter, while not technically 100% accurate, is essentially a good encapsulation of the British sexual psyche: correct on the outside, Max Mosleyish within.

So perhaps any Austrian readers will forgive me when I say that, no matter what has been said about Josef Fritzl’s horrendous, stomach-churning crimes not being indicative of any malaise in that country’s psyche - the Brits have, after all, produced Fred West and Ian Brady among others - Austria is quite a strange place.

A few years ago, I went to write an article about a (wonderful) health clinic there. It was in a small village on the banks of the most spectacular huge lake. The air was clean, the light was amazing, the lake water pure enough to drink, the church a baroque jewel, and within a few hours I felt I’d discovered some marvellous secret destination: forget renting overpriced houses in Italy, I thought to myself, from now on we’re spending the summer in one of these charming villas on the water, with pleasingly rustic shutters and Heidi-style roofs: sehr gut.

Then my “treatment” - starvation, basically - started, and as the days went past I began to feel a bit strange. I kept seeing posters with a vaguely familiar face on them but couldn’t work out who the man was, until I realised it was Jörg Haider, the extremely right-wing - some might say fascist - politician, who’d been booted out of his far-right party for being a bit OTT. He’d become an independent and was governor of the charming province where I was staying.

Then, as I wandered around trying not to think about food, I started asking myself about all the old men who were also there for the cure and wondering what they’d got up to in the war. Then I realised I was the darkest person around for miles - I am half Pakistani - and wondered if Austrians had perfected the German trick of setting fire to potentially Turkish-looking people.

What was oddest of all was the literature in the clinic’s waiting rooms: glossy magazines containing hundreds of photographs of minor European royalty disporting themselves in, more often than not, traditional costume - a gräfin in a dirndl here, some count in lederhosen there. Interspersed with these not unamusing images were ads for sadomasochistic brothels (prostitution is legal in Austria), featuring an image of some huge-bosomed, bewhipped Amazonian fraulein in a leather basque, shackles and cuffs glinting promisingly in the background. It was weird: there was no variety in the ads, no hint that anybody might fancy any other kind of sexual scenario, which suggested the national taste went one way, and one way only.

Then the Natascha Kampusch story broke (she was kidnapped and locked in a cellar for eight years, also in Austria). My friend Maria arrived that day. One evening we shuffled out in our institutional dressing gowns, too weak to get dressed, and sat in a cafe. Elderly men kept wandering past, busily on their way somewhere, but there was nowhere to go. “Look at them,” Maria muttered. “All off to check on their dungeons.”

Some stereotypes exist for a reason. I find the Fritzl case so grisly - I’ve read the stuff and wish I hadn’t. The detail is soul-polluting.

However, to those who advise us to be wary of pointing the finger, looking to Britain’s own rich and varied history of appalling rapes and murders, I would say: that’s the point, its horror is rich and varied. Austria seems to specialise in a particularly vile, furtive, freakishly awful kind of abuse, involving keeping women or children as slaves in dungeons. The Fritzl case, while perhaps uniquely monstrous, is the third of its kind in recent memory.

This week a bill banning “violent extreme pornography” is set to become law in the UK, although it is perhaps too optimistic to hope that this will have any impact on the thousands of porn websites that specialise in images of abused women - gagged, bound, sedated, bruised or bleeding, locked into dog crates, shackled in cellars, sometimes unconscious: all yours at the click of a mouse.

I believe the advent of political correctness has meant that men’s rage against women is manifesting itself in increasingly underground and deranged ways. I liked it better when you could call your female boss a “stupid bitch” without fear of getting taken to an industrial tribunal. Silence makes people do weird stuff, like Googling abuse porn. There’s nothing more dangerous than hostility, or a sense of injustice, festering in secret; Austria is quite good at festering, and at concealing unlovely realities.

When my teenage boys ask me about the Fritzl case I make no apologies for my reply. They are obsessed by the details: by the alleged innocence of Fritzl’s wife Rosemarie and the profoundly disturbing notion of a mother standing by, doing nothing, claiming not to know, powerless to help, as her child is raped and bred in captivity; by the fact that, as in a horrible dark fairy tale, nobody heard the cries and nobody came, as the years and decades ticked by, even though lots of people must have seen a man wheeling barrowfuls of food to an apparently empty basement and even though it must be hard to install a metal door weighing several tonnes single-handedly. And by the fact that the story is pitch-black, with no redemptive anything: no good person, no hope, no happy ending, nothing.

I can’t explain any of this, so I say what I do know: “Austria is quite a weird place. Beautiful, and full of culture and good people, but weird.” Perhaps that is reinforcing the exact kind of stereotype that helped Austria, unlike Germany, keep its ugly secrets to itself for so long; perhaps it is an immoral and devastating thing to say. Or perhaps it’s just the truth.

Times Recommends

• Farwell to the stiff upper lip
• It’s about who runs the US, not health
• The Iron Lady and her blue felt-tip sympathy