From Thursday's Globe and Mail

The sacred space of our children's sexuality is safe again — or so we may think. The Mounties arrested their man, a repeat offender who told prison officials he fantasized every day about sex with young boys. We'll soon find out why the legal controls on Peter Whitmore failed, and why, with passionate speed, he could sweep across the country until he found two vulnerable boys.

A borderless boundary of kids and sex is the reality we live with. Our tax dollars have had to adjust to the appetite for this crime in amounts that are shocking. In Toronto, 17 police officers are dedicated full-time to stemming child pornography. Paul Gillespie, the former head of the sex-crimes unit, says he could have used three times that number and still be struggling with the task. He's bothered that in 2005, his officers opened 585 files, all with solid evidence, but he only had the staffing to arrest 42 people — and that with an almost 100-per-cent conviction rate. Across the country, every major police force scrambles to understand how best to mobilize Integrated Child Exploitation teams to track those who would sin with children and sex.

Last week, we learned two sisters tipped off Edmonton police to a 21-year-old Kingston man who police allege victimized “well in excess of 100” children.

Former Crown attorney David Butt saw enough crimes against children in his area of expertise, child porn in Canada, that he now fights the cause with Beyond Borders. “The Internet has transformed sexualization of everyone,” says Mr. Butt. “It has facilitated the wide spread of destructive sexuality — and people will have debates on what is destructive sexuality — and however you define it, it is flourishing on the Internet.”

There are two important approaches to how we protect children in this new age of sex. First, the practical dilemma as old as having kids: Can you talk to them?

“Kids create space from parents in adolescence — and that's not wrong. The problem is when you combine the natural tendency to disconnect from your parents with the Internet, an adolescent can find themselves in deep trouble very quickly, either exposed to deeply pornographic material or in the hands of a predator,” said Mr. Butt.

Secondly, we have to admit that sex, and knowing how to discuss it with our kids, is a spiritual challenge for us. This is an issue about the inner person, and we are the generation that moved through sexual limits with such speed our kids are now watching Oprah show off parents who invite strippers to 16-year-olds' birthday parties. Our own sexual pasts are riddled with mistakes; we stumbled along learning what hurt, and what didn't. We don't know how to articulate to kids that we have a foundation for teaching sexual protection, because we've so shaken our own foundations.

My children have left me with an empty nest this year, but I can't recall a time I caught them reading one of the sexual purity books I got for them. Nor were they the ones to tell me a youth pastor was teaching them that sex was like a chainsaw.

Terrible analogy, but I had to agree it made the point that sex needed boundaries and proper use because it was so powerful. I know that it's hard for a parent to be the source on such important values when kids naturally tune you out. These are new days of teaching the kids to look out for their well-being, and we are going to need to teach together as a community. We need each other to tackle consumer addiction to an oversexualized media culture that tells us sex is power, including power when you're invited to pop your top for a webcam, just like the graphic pop-ups on a computer screen that are a first exposure to sex for countless young kids.

I'm not asking for the days when authority figures modelled that we should stuff our sexuality inside, or we faked it through denied longings and called each other perverts. Rather, we need to openly discuss what are the best possible conditions to experience sex in, and why we've come to those conclusions — that's what needs to be passed on to our children.

Lorna Dueck is the host of Listen Up TV, a spiritual perspective on current events seen Sundays on Global TV, and weekly on CTS, Salt and Light TV, and Christian Channel TV.