We were horrified and outraged when we recently read the statement that James Hockenbury gave police after he was arrested in April for a first-degree criminal sexual act, a felony.

He described how he took a 3-year-old boy for whom he regularly babysat to the playground at Westmere Elementary School in Guilderland. Because he is a diabetic, Hockenbury wrote, he has to “pee frequently,” and he relieved himself on school grounds. The 3-year-old, he wrote, walked over to him, and Hockenbury encouraged him to touch and lick his penis, which he briefly did.

We were shaking as we read his words; our stomach turned. It was hard for us to get past the protectiveness we felt for the child and the anger we felt toward Hockenbury to absorb the rest of his statement. Hockenbury, 48, wrote that, for more than a dozen years, he had felt a sexual attraction for children but had never before acted on his desire.

“I feel like shit for what I did. I hate myself for it and wish it never happened,” he wrote. “I wish I got help when I was younger to deal with my problems that I had then. I wish I could take back what I did, but I can’t. I want to get help for this problem I have; I am sexually attracted to children and I need help.”

Our Guilderland reporter, Elizabeth Floyd Mair, in covering the story talked to an expert in pedophilia, James M. Cantor, a research scientist and clinical psychologist, who draws an important line between being a pedophile — something one is born as — and being a child molester — something one chooses to do.

Based on years of research and magnetic resonance imaging scans, Cantor believes that pedophilia is caused by a developmental disorder, a cross wiring in the brain. Pedophiles, he told Gawker in 2012, have less white matter, less cabling to transmit signals in the brain, than most people.  “So instead of the brain evoking protective or parental instincts when these people see children, it’s instead evoking sexual instincts,” he said. “There’s almost literally a crossed wiring.”

So, what if we set aside our anger and outrage for a moment to look at pedophilia as a medical rather than a moral problem?

One thing we discovered in doing this is a program in Germany, perhaps the only one in the world, offering anonymous treatment for pedophiles. It’s named Prevention Project Dunkelfeld — “Dunkelfield” means “Dark Field”— and estimates that one in every hundred men is born a pedophile.

Founded in Berlin in 2005, the project’s slogan is, “You are not guilty because of your sexual desire, but you are responsible for your sexual behavior. There is help! Don’t become an offender!” The treatment, which is free, involves cognitive behavior therapy, and sometimes drugs to reduce sex drive.

We also found a group in this country called Virtuous Pedophiles. “We do not choose to be attracted to children, and we cannot make that attraction go away,” the group’s website says. “But we can resist the temptation to abuse children sexually, and many of us present no danger to children whatsoever. Yet we are despised for having a sexual attraction that we did not choose, cannot change, and successfully resist.”

Many pedophiles live entirely celibate lives, Cantor told us, and never act out against any children. Many of them spend a lifetime resisting and refusing to give in to their own impulses — a fate “that they did not choose and that most of us cannot imagine.” Cantor says that could make us consider them “more virtuous than the rest of us.”

The Virtuous Pedophiles website has a cry for help from a 20-year-old man who has been attracted to young girls since he was 13. “I wish with all my soul that I could have a brain that’s wired normally,” he writes.

“I know that I can never act on what I feel but I need to speak to a therapist because I don’t think I can get through this on my own. But if I talk to a therapist, he could report me…I think about suicide a lot.”

Cantor underlines this as a problem: Well-meaning regulations on mandated reporting have the unintended result of making it impossible for pedophiles to talk to a therapist or anyone else about their desires.

So, Cantor points out, our society’s response to pedophiles focuses on punishment after a crime is committed rather than preventing the crimes from happening in the first place.

Although Cantor was not speaking specifically about Hockenbury’s case, he said that, if a pedophile who works in child care, as Hockenbury did for 30 years, were able to see a therapist, he could be steered away from such a career.

The cost for childhood sexual abuse in the United States each year is tens of billions of dollars — the cost of incarceration for the perpetrators as well as health care for the victims is staggering. And that is not even counting the cost of human suffering.

We could reduce the suffering, and the financial costs, if we got past our revulsion and anger long enough to see that preventative steps could reduce the problem.

“Imagine for a moment that it was your child who was unfortunate enough to be attracted to children,” posits the Virtuous Pedophiles website. “According to leading scientists, there is approximately a one percent chance of this happening no matter how good a parent you may be.

“What would you want for your child? Would you want him or her to be alone, full of self-hate, forced to bear this burden without help? Or instead, would you want your child to be treated with sympathy and respect, to have access to help so your child could live a happy, productive and law-abiding life?”

Hockenbury wrote in his sworn statement that he can’t take back what he did. The little boy he says he violated will have to deal with that for the rest of his life. The hurt from such crimes never ends.

But can we help prevent similar crimes from happening again?

Hockenbury also wrote, “I wish I got help when I was younger to deal with my problems that I had then.”

Can we, as a society, make it easier for people who are, through no fault of their own, born with an attraction to children, to get help?

We can and we must.

— Melissa Hale-Spencer