FORMER Oxford University lecturer Richard Dawkins has come under fire after suggesting recent child sex abuse scandals have been overblown.

The author of The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion told The Times that he could not condemn the “mild paedophilia” he experienced at boarding school.

Mr Dawkins, pictured left, said: “I am conscious that you can’t condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours.

“Just as we don’t look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism, I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild paedophilia, and can’t find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today.”

He also said, making a distinction between paedophilia involving rape and murder and “mild touching up”, that “we must beware of lumping all paedophiles into the same bracket”.

The NSPCC’s Peter Watt told The Times: “Mr Dawkins seems to think that because a crime was committed a long time ago we should judge it in a different way.

But we know that the victims of sexual abuse suffer the same effects, whether it was 50 years ago or yesterday.”