Pedophilia and sex tourism are grave crimes of child abuse, which affect millions of children every year. Sex tourism is a global industry bringing billions of dollars, wherein children from Brazil, Cambodia, Thailand, Colombia and Kenya are prey to well-situated Wester customers. We would like to think this industry is absent in Hungary, but sadly, this is not so. Boys and girls from poverty-stricken regions are put on sale. Children in state care are exploited as an industry, and sexual abuse against them is hidden, kept secret.

Naturally, those who afford it prefer to go abroad – there it is even harder to get caught. EU statistics from 2019 say that more than half of the victims of human trafficking from Hungary are children, and 95% of them are taken abroad to be sexually abused and exploited. This is not a joke. You cannot ignore it if someone tells you about this, let alone mention it convivially on a TV show.

It would be extremely important to take it seriously: there must be zero tolerance regarding all forms of child sexual abuse. What we do and say matters. What public figures do and say matters even more; they can influence how seriously people take these matters, whether they consider them private affairs or act responsibly and stand up for the children affected.

In such issues there is no friendship, it is not a question of comradeship. Whether it is domestic violence, child abuse or sexual abuse, there is zero tolerance. And that means that the victim’s, the child’s interests override everything.

This year the whole country was enraged when, through the case of our former ambassador to Peru, they faced the fact of online sexual violence. The websites and file sharing sites specialized on online child sexual abuse, largely operated and used by pedophiles, are also a crime – and the basis of a profitable industry. I have sworn never to write again the name of G.K., who will go to court because he possessed 19 thousand photos and videos of child sexual abuse. Yet it is important to recall this case because it sensitized Hungarian society to this problem. More pedophile photos have been reported, more court cases have started, which is a good thing. Because this is the only way we can protect the children: if we recognize abuse and act against it.

What happened in the summer of 2020? Online child sexual abuse has ceased to be a private affair and became a public one. Something one cannot pass by because violence is never a private affair.

And similarly, we cannot just pass by a statement that someone travels abroad to have sex with children. Just like it should not occur to us to turn our head if a child we know is abused. This is not a private affair.

In contrast, homosexuality is. A private affair.

In Hungary the age of consent – which means the lower age limit of having consensual sexual relations – is 14 years, and a 12-year-old may also have consensual sex with someone under 18. The law does not differentiate between homosexual or heterosexual, or for that matter, between couple and group sex.

You may have your private opinion about these regulations. I keep repeating that it would be terribly important to discuss why these regulations, whether they are suited to contemporary Hungarian reality, and what we could do to keep our children safer. But what is important in this particular case is not to confuse homosexuality with pedophilia.

In no way should sexual contact with children be included among the rainbow colors of sexual orientations. And neither should sexual abuse under any circumstances.

Until 2002 Hungarian law named homosexual sex “unnatural fornication”. This term and the related regulations were deleted by the Constitution Court, which emphasized that they were contrary to the ban on discrimination based on sexual orientation to punish same-sex relationships in situations where different-sex relationships would not be. The issue is not sexual orientation but consent. Without consent – if forced through coercion, threats, blackmail, emotional or physical violence – it is not sex but abuse. And if the partner is a minor, consent is not possible, so it can never be sex, just abuse. And abuse is never a private affair. It is something that concerns all of us, something we are all responsible for.

Let us respect children and the victims of sexual abuse by not treating abuse, sex tourism or pedophilia as private affairs, political questions or jolly jokers in conflicts between political groups, but as the most important public affair.