I have only once “accessed” child pornography. It was a ghastly experience. Following up a strange story about some recently discovered Victorian photographs of children, which turned out to be 20th-century fakes, I found myself looking at negatives of scenes that slid almost imperceptibly from the winsome to the sexually charged to the simply vile. I passed them rapidly on to the police, but the images haunted me for weeks afterwards.

I cannot imagine what the officers of Operation Chandler must have experienced as they scrolled through the thousands of obscene pictures they had to compile as evidence before identifying the paedophile ring that was broken this week, and rescuing the children who had been subjected to awful abuse. As Jim Gamble, head of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop) admitted, it has been an ordeal for his team, and some of them have needed counselling as a result.

So it was brave of him to say that, in his opinion, not everyone who logs on to a child pornography site is necessarily a predatory paedophile. Brave, because he is challenging popular perceptions of a crime that has grown to become little short of a national obsession. Brave, too, because he questions the easy assumption that every adult who is drawn to sexual imagery involving children should automatically be classified a criminal.

Mr Gamble argues that for some of those caught downloading child pornography, treatment in the community is a more intelligent approach than sending them to prison. “If someone is at the beginning of the spiral of abuse, where there is evidence to indicate during the investigation that this person may benefit from a police caution and be managed, then of course that needs to be done,” he said. Those with a “deviant sexual interest in children” should get help before they attempt to live out their fantasies. “We shouldn’t be sending everyone who commits an offence – particularly of the viewing kind – to prison,” he said, adding that it was better by far to maintain their lives and their contact with the family than to assume that they were already on the road to committing a serious offence.

Almost inevitably, Mr Gamble’s assertions have been attacked as dangerously liberal. Anything short of a “zero tolerance” approach to paedophilia will never be acceptable to those for whom the merest suspicion of deviant behaviour is enough to invoke instant retribution – if not revenge. Michele Elliott, director of Kidscape, the children’s charity, says: “I believe that if you download child pornography, you are just as guilty as the people who are taking the photographs.”

Others argue that there is a seamless link between the mildly curious teenager logging on to a forbidden site and the child-snatcher hanging around the playground ready to snatch his victim. In Peter Kinsley’s new novel, To Catch a Paedophile, a sinister picture is painted of the paedophile, who portrays himself as a protector of children only to exploit that trust and abuse it, showing the narrow line that divides the befriender and the predator. The chilling name given to the chat room that was revealed this week as a centre for a network of paedophiles was “Kids The Light of Our Lives” – an Orwellian title concealing a dark pattern of cruelty and exploitation.

Whipping up exaggerated fears, however, is always harmful to society. We are in danger of starting a new witch-hunt, one in which the smallest suggestion of sexual deviancy is enough to bring the mob on to the street. Newspaper campaigns to “name and shame” offenders who have served their time in prison do nothing to combat the threat they are said to pose. This is the mentality of the lynch mob. It does nothing for public safety, and the net result is merely to drive the wretched paedophile farther underground, making him a far greater threat than if he had been gradually accepted back into the community.

At the same time, fear of the predator has induced a culture of suspicion. According to some children’s charities, men are refusing to do voluntary work with children because they are worried that they may be accused of paedophile tendencies, or else are finding themselves the target of false accusations of sexual abuse by the children they are looking after.

Nothing in the crime figures justifies this national trauma. The number of cases of child abductions remains tiny, and though we are horrified by the case of Madeleine McCann, hers is, thankfully, the rarest of cases; our children live lives that are generally far safer than we think. The many thousands of families who will travel abroad this year may perhaps feel the need to watch their children with an extra degree of caution, but they can be assured that, despite the warning headlines, they will be able to play, eat and sleep in perfect safety. The threat from outsiders is minimal – most abuse, sadly, happens in the home, too often unseen and unreported, rather than on the streets or in the park. Simply ratcheting up the fear of the deviant will do little to bring down the figures for sexual assault.

Mr Gamble draws a clear distinction between those who regularly access child pornography sites, compiling hundreds of pictures of children, and those who may be driven by little more than curiosity. He is right to do so. The idea that everyone who strays into this forbidden territory is invested with a specially pernicious trait that can never be eliminated is an absurd neurosis. It suggests that this is some latterday version of original sin rather than a condition that can be treated and contained. We grew out of these Old Testament doctrines some time ago. Perhaps we should do the same with paedophilia.

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