THERE is something very sick with my sex – something very wrong with men. When you think of a violent sexual offender, a rapist, a paedophile, a predator, an abuser – you do not picture a woman, do you? You picture a man – and rightly so.

That’s not to say no woman has ever committed a violent or sexual offence – an infinitesimally small proportion of women have – but to compare such offences by women to offences by men, is to weigh a gnat against a mammoth.

I’m not even going to rehearse the ‘not all men’ argument – that ‘not all men’ are abusive or predatory. I detest those three malignant words – they are a great wall standing in the way of men confronting the problems of their sex. Those words prevent our betterment as men. When I hear the words ‘not all men’, I see an apologist for misogyny – an enabler who is part of the problem.

Readers will be aware that over the last few days, I’ve written about the experiences of my youngest daughter, Caitie, after a man tried to lure her into woods, exposed himself, and masturbated in front of her. Caitie, a university student, ran to her place of work, Silverburn shopping centre in Glasgow, and rang the police. The offender had mental health problems and police would not interview him. As a result, he was never charged or prosecuted. To compound her anguish, the man stalked her at work. Experts in male offending fear my daughter remains at risk as long as he remains at large.

My concerns over what is wrong with men do not simply stem from the crime committed against my child – though that has certainly crystallised the thinking of decades. The words ‘toxic masculinity’ didn’t exist when I was a young man, but they express the curdled disgust I’ve felt throughout most of my life at the behaviour of many of my sex.

Since my teens, I’ve lost count of the number of close women friends who have told me of the sexual harassment and abuse they have endured – with offences ranging all the way up to rape.

I should not have been astonished, then, that over the last few days, after I wrote about my daughter, that I was met with a tidal wave of pain from women contacting me to tell of victimisation and abuse. But I was astonished. Hundreds of women contacted me through social media or by email to offer their love and support to my daughter, many said they empathised with her because the same, or worse, had happened to them. These were women I’ve never met, that I do not know – they had no reason to share their suffering with me, a man. But these women were outraged on behalf of my daughter, and they wanted to share their anger. Their words and kindness often moved me to tears.

Many told me they or their daughters had gone through exactly the same set of circumstances as Caitie. One woman said Caitie’s story ‘resonates personally due to my own daughter’s appalling experience’. Another told how she was the victim of a stalker and ‘lived in hell for three years while the police did nothing’.

Read more: My daughter's hell

Another woman described how a man exposed himself to her aunt and a friend and were laughed at by police when they reported it. Some women spoke of being victims of sexual offences but keeping silent because they believed the police would not help them, due to the experiences of friends and family. A woman even said that a police officer asked her for oral sex and then told her he knew where she lived. A psychologist said they had heard many stories of police failings by victims of sex crimes.

One terrible story was of a disabled woman being sexually assaulted and the case quickly closed. In one of the most distressing stories, a woman reported being sexually assaulted by a man in a town street while police watched, and did nothing. One mother told of police humiliating her teenage daughter during an interview after she was the victim of an offence – in the end there was no prosecution either.

The dreadful truth, though, is that none of this is new. It wasn’t new last year when a predatory president walked into the Oval Office with a string of sexual assault claims hanging around his neck, and it wasn’t new millennia ago either. Women are the historic victims of men.

Sure, there is change in the air across the world – women’s marches, the rise of MeToo, the shaming of corporations over pay inequality – but dear God, this is 2018. Humanity has had its time on earth for 250,000 years – scientists are contemplating a mission to Mars – but still one sex rides roughshod over the other. As long as women fear walking alone at night and men don’t, we are a failure as a species.

There is change afoot at home as well. I was heartened to hear our Justice Secretary, Humza Yousaf, say that the Government is considering making misogyny a hate crime. Well done. About time. A clear message needs to be sent to men that if you offend against a woman, simply because she’s a woman, then the justice system will come down on you like a ton of bricks. Only yesterday this paper’s front page revealed that one in three schoolgirls has been sexually harassed by a man in public – with children as young as eight being victims. Here’s a suggestion: start putting these men, who are little better than paedophiles, in cuffs and chuck them in prison. Ruin a few of their lives for a change.

From the US Supreme Court to the suburbs of Scottish cities, women are being failed, abused, traumatised and killed – and for too long they have fought their battles alone, with only minimal support from their fathers, brothers, husbands and sons. It’s long past time for every man to stand up alongside every woman. Only then will men– all men – begin to fix what’s broken within ourselves.