WHERE does a man go who thinks he is in danger of abusing a child? Where does he turn if he starts having sexual thoughts about youngsters or is tempted to seek out images on the internet?

Surprisingly, given the efforts of both the authorities and charities to tackle child abuse, services to help to prevent potential abusers from offending are virtually non-existent.

Yet the evidence shows that accessing pornography on the internet in particular is no longer a marginal issue. BT says it blocks 35,000 attempts to access child pornography every day. So far more than 3,744 people have been arrested in the UK under Operation Ore, using information collected by US police from a Texas-based child porn website.

The actor Chris Langham is the latest of 1,451 people to be convicted.

However, one charity is attempting to fill the gap. The Lucy Faithfull Foundation was set up in the 1990s to treat convicted sex offenders. More recently, it realised that those people who had not offended but thought that they might were completely isolated.

“In the past, people who felt they were at risk of offending probably might have spoken to a clergyman or their GP. But now people like that have reporting responsibilities and must inform the police or social services if the person has any contact with children,” says Donald Findlater, director of research and development at LFF.

“That is why the question of where to go has become a significant problem. We are so busy trying to protect children and close all the loopholes of people working with children that those at the earliest stages of fearing they might one day offend have nowhere to go to get help. That is why we set up the helpline.”

The Stop it Now! programme and helpline was set up in 2002, funded largely by the Home Office, which agreed there was a gap in the system.

The helpline is not just for those who think they may be at risk of offending, but for relatives and friends who are worried about the behaviour of others, including their children. Crucially, all calls are confidential.

Since it was set up five years ago it has dealt with about 8,000 calls — a source of enormous frustration to the charity.

“The potential demand, given what we know about the scale of the problem, must be ten times that,” Mr Findlater says. He has received numerous reports about people being arrested under Operation Ore who later told police that they had been desperately looking for help to stop accessing child porn for years but had nowhere to turn.

Money is tight, but an intensive marketing drive in Surrey three years ago, during which leaflets were left in libraries, GP surgeries and posted through letterboxes, led to 7 per cent of calls to the helpline coming from the county. The population and demographics of Surrey suggest that it should make up only 2 per cent of the calls.