He compulsively views the same pictures of a certain young boy being raped. He is drawn to the images with a drive he cannot even fathom controlling. It is an obsession that has been raging for years now.

He looks like you might expect: dirty, unkempt, bearing the scars of a life between shelters, temporary housing and the streets. His odor repugnant. Literally and metaphorically, he is known as a “dirty old man.”

But how much of his story will we bother to hear?

The pictures he views — the images of the young boy being beaten, tortured, and sexually assaulted — these are photos of the man himself, as a boy; the sole remnants the childhood that shattered his life. For the past thirty years the images have been a relentless magnet of pain: inescapable, insurmountable, suffocating. Yet he cannot stop reliving them, scrolling the pictures past his eyes.

What do you have to say to a man convicted of viewing child pornography when the pictures he views are of himself as a child?

Perhaps the antidote to our smug, self-righteous indignation is a realization: the things we ever-so-justifiably decry as “evil” are so often the coping mechanisms people use to deal with trauma that the majority of us can not even imagine.

I do not tell this story to “justify” any kind of immoral deeds: this is not an excuse for the unlawful or an endorsement of any obscene behavior. Rather, this is an invitation to suspend your high moral attacks against one man — just long enough to listen to a story you will never understand.