“I was 12 years old and I took my bike,” begins Sabine Dardenne’s memoir, I Choose to Live. Books like hers, about being kidnapped by a pedophile, aren’t often written, since the potential authors usually die fast. But Ms. Dardenne, now 21, is an unusual young woman in her character and perceptions. She is tough. We have a lot to learn from her.

One thing I have learned, partly from her memoir, partly from a string of what I call atrocities and others call the misfortunes of childhood, is that Western society does not actually like children. The idea came to me many years ago as I opened a heavy door for a pregnant woman with a stroller while other people simply strolled. You’re punishing the children, I thought, but via the mother.

Ms. Dardenne was kidnapped for 80 days in 1996 by Marc Dutroux, the Belgian pedophile who had already kidnapped and murdered four girls, two of them teenagers whom he buried alive, and another two eight-year-olds, whom he starved to death.

They died in a dark man-made cellar like a mousehole-sized grave in his basement. Ms. Dardenne, drugged, tortured and going mad, was rescued.

Mr. Dutroux’s crimes soaked into Belgians. They permanently lost faith in their police force, whose failure to hear children’s cries as they repeatedly searched Mr. Dutroux’s house parallel the Ontario police’s failure to find Paul Bernardo’s poorly concealed torture tapes.

Ms. Dardenne (I cannot call her Sabine; never patronize grown women by using their first names) says she was born rebellious and “never one to let myself be trampled on without a fight.” She proudly recalls the girl she was as a “stroppy little madam” and she hasn’t changed.

In other words, she was never really a child.

One thing still bothers her. Passing trains used to shake the death cell; to this day, she hates trains. And yet she climbs on a train each day to go to an office job she hates. Ms. Dardenne’s mental survival is her own achievement. Could no one buy her a car and erase a daily trauma? But it’s either soldier on, or become a permanently damaged woman, like raped children who watch their torturers get a derisory sentence.

Parents are reduced to standing in St. Peter’s Square as the new Pope arrives. They hold up pictures of their children who were sodomized by men being protected by men inside the church itself. Children who were abused at Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens throw themselves off bridges while their rapists get a year in jail, if that.

I don’t like adults much; I like children very much indeed. Ms. Dardenne feels the same. “I have found the courage to retrace my stations of the cross,” she writes, to fight the “terrifying naiveté” most adults have about pedophiles. Never underestimate them, she warns. Always understand that they are candidates for life in prison, not for a psychiatrist’s chair. She slept padlocked to the rancid Mr. Dutroux. She knows.

Last week, the Supreme Court of Canada heard the case (the women’s equality group LEAF intervened, which is superb) of Barney v. Canada and the United Church. These dry words conceal the fact that Ottawa thinks raping, physically and emotionally abusing a little aboriginal boy in residential school does not warrant full compensation. Lower courts say only the sexual abuse is worth compensation; as for the cultural genocide, the humiliation, the hunger and the life destroyed, they are considered separate wrongs and without value.

What did that little boy, kidnapped from his parents by the government rather than a Mr. Dutroux, ever do to deserve such disregard?

CBC journalist Michael Enright studies the media portrayal of children. “We love our children,” he says, “but don’t really like children as a category of people.” They are simplistically shown as “either angels or demons.” Eventually, we see nothing in between.

In Ontario, where I live, the Liberal government disdains autistic children, who must have expensive behavioural therapy to help repair their brains. Unprofitable children and their grabby parents. Ugh.

I cannot reproduce a computer picture of Tennyson Quance, my four-year-old autistic friend, whose parents are forced to borrow $80,000 a year for her transforming therapy. Only the top right quarter of Tennyson’s face emerges from my printer. She is a great beauty. Her almond-shaped eye and perfect brow preside over my computer as I write this. I am intensely curious about the countless synapses behind that immaculate forehead. Tennyson’s mind is leaping ahead as her parents go broke. We do our best to help with local fundraisers. I hear the subterranean government hum of child dislike.

We disapprove of public breastfeeding, we make it hard for single mothers or fathers to combine job and family, we run schools on the cheap and we do next to nothing to help women escape brutal husbands who drop children off bridges.

Britain’s Philip Pullman, the most successful children’s author after J.K. Rowling, says the Swedish government “genuinely stands up for children, and their world and their rights in every sense.” In Britain, he says, children’s books are reduced to sales figures and children to their school performance. It appalls him.

When I see adults reading Harry Potter, I wonder if adults resent children having created a space for themselves. Would adults prefer to be kids? The infantilization of American culture is terrifying. Smart Americans emigrate to escape it.

Does child-dislike stem from jealousy? Or is it a result of our ever-present dislike of women, those “whores” and “pretty dipsticks” who dare to demand more? Anything born of woman must be distrusted, until it becomes a man?

I do not know, can only speculate. I have protected children all my life, even as a child, because I sensed a generalized menace in adults, handed down to the child bullies.

The shock came when I grew up and discovered I was right.