I can’t understand how women can do this to their own children

A man has been charged with hitting his girlfriend’s five-year-old son. The boy has been described as autistic, as though it makes any difference. All five-year-olds are extremely vulnerable, whether they are autistic or not.

They can’t hit back or defend themselves in any other way, and they can’t get away. They don’t understand why they are assaulted, they think the one who assaults them is right because he is a grown-up, and they can’t or won’t explain themselves sufficiently to another adult and seek protection.

Now everybody will blame the man, who is obviously the one to blame. But what of the boy’s mother? I will never understand how women can do this to their own children. Do they really expect a man to love children who are not his own, just because he is sleeping with their mother?

Even if he loves their mother – a rare thing – it does not follow that he will love her children. At best he will be kind to them and a little fond, and will protect them from harm while they are little, but not out of love. All normal, decent people are protective towards children, even the children of strangers. It’s a hallmark of civilisation.

A man will love children who are not his own only if the situation makes them his own, as with adoption, when they are legally his and there is no other man or father on the horizon. In that situation, he usually raises them from birth, too, so he is socialized into fatherhood exactly as he would be if he were the biological father.

When I consider small children, and even older ones, who are forced by their mother to live with step-fathers or boyfriends, I always wonder about the stress they must be under.

I put myself in their position – as a child or teenager, I would have absolutely hated, hated, hated living with a man who was not my father. What sort of role can somebody like that have in the household, when children are playing up and teenagers are staying out all night and getting into trouble? “You are not my father.” Damn right he’s not.

And how terrible must it be to have to come down to breakfast to find another man in the kitchen while your own father is in some other house, probably with some other woman.

How awful, how truly awful, to be five years old and left in the care of your mother’s boyfriend who merely sees you as a problem, an obstacle, a bother and little better than an irritating, barking pet dog.