Pedophilia frightens people because of the recidivism rate, the damage it causes to the victim and the fact that the young age of the victim means they will live with the consequences of the crime against them for decades.
The stereotype of the evil drooling paedophile lurking behind the bushes by the school gate with a panel van and a sound-proofed cellar back home is vanishingly rare, but it makes a good target for psychological projection.
Denial can be a powerful thing.
Reminded of a fact that the most likely person to abuse or even murder my children is........ me.
That's kind of just a random food-for-thought that your wording put into my head, but I guess it leads onto a more interesting question - do sexually-abusing parents (and extend that to other sexual abusers, or indeed other criminals) see it coming from the start, and therefore are always at a state of either "I must try to resist" or "I must wait for a good time"? For example, fathers who raped 10 year old daughters, how many of them were waiting ten years for it, how many didn't think about it until shortly before? No idea if there's any answers to this question though.
Often, (not at all a majority,) the child feels anything but damaged. In fact, they feel like the centre of the universe. Only afterwards, once the councillors, etc have gotten to them, do they understand that they are supposed to feel damaged. The damage and hurt they end up dealing with for decades is what happens when the state rushes in and destroys a relationship they themselves had little problem with, and they see their "partner" humiliated and hauled across the coals, while some nasty adult coaches them in to being a victim.
Oddly, in that sort of scenario, the parents can be the ones who have most to deal with. Guilt, failure, etc. Then blame the child for it, because the child doesn't seem damaged.
My only point here, is that society has us believe that these relationships are default abusive, nasty, even violent and coercive. There is a spectrum, from my example above to the traditional view.
And all this because of an arbitrary age of consent, which changes from country to country, culture to culture.
I'm not one for requiring a fully cited research paper for random internet debates, and I think the "citation needed" meme is extremely tired and only serves to stifle discussion. But in this case it was totally appropriate and the only way to continue on a discussion like this productively.
OC made several claims about which respondent could be asking for a source. I'll assume it's the claim that the reactions of other people causes the "damage" since that claim's implications are most relevant. To which I wonder: Can respondent provide academic sources demonstrating that societal or cultural response doesn't exacerbate (or largely cause) victims' feelings of acute horror?
I have a couple of impressions about this. The average person isn't all that good at understanding where their feelings come from or separating whether they come from a specific event or the culture's evaluation of the rightness and wrongness of that event.
I also notice that academics often have a hard time getting funding for things that might have unpopular results. One only need to review the comments section of any article that mentions pedophilia to know that citizens are united on both sides of the aisle regarding how we should feel about it.
Unfortunately, most of our judgments in life still have to be made without the benefit of academic sources, simply because the number of such sources are rare and ambiguous signposts on the vast territory of decision-making we trek through. Instead we have to turn to other means of rationality.
I happened to come across an interview with one self-aware victim who was able to separate the event from society's reactions to it. This kid Jody Plauche was molested by his karate coach. Later, after the coach was in custody, his dad Gary Plauche shot him to death.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Plauche
ESPN had a good article about the case in which they interviewed Jody.
And how did the boy feel? He was angry -- at his dad.
"I didn't want him dead," says Jody Plauche, now 40.
"I just wanted him to stop."
Jody went on to be a four-sport letterman in high school,
but the most important thing he's done is teach parents
how to reduce the risk of pedophiles such as Doucet and
Sandusky molesting their kids, through his work at a
victims' services center in Norristown, Penn.
"I got a letter once from a woman, who wrote, 'I told my
daughter if somebody ever touches you inappropriately,
it's not murder. It's worse than murder. It kills a
child's soul.' So what's that little girl supposed to
say if she ever gets molested?" says Plauche. "She
doesn't want her soul to die. So she doesn't tell
anybody."
Jody's dad made the same mistake.
"My dad was absolutely too extreme," Jody said. "He used
to tell people, 'If anybody ever touches my kid, I'll kill
him.' I knew he wasn't kidding. That's why I couldn't tell
anybody. And that's exactly what he ended up doing."
While this may be true, it does not mean that we cannot try to look for what research we do have available says. Often times we can find research on related questions which may inform our opinion, and we may find papers in which a researcher in the field compiled the results of many studies to attempt to address more directly the question we are trying to ask.
I have yet to find a single question where I could not find scientific papers which shed light on the answer. Furthermore, in absence of evidence to the contrary, I believe that humans are fundamentally rational, and that being sexually abused as a child will not have significant negative effects outside of the cultural influence.
Is it the end of science, then?
>Furthermore, in absence of evidence to the contrary, I believe that humans are fundamentally rational
There's a multitude of evidence to the contrary, and very little evidence for.
A later paper that provides a list of statistical complaints against Rind et al., finds some of them plausible, but replicates the main findings of Rind et al. is
That is probably the most disturbing thing I ever read. State and Federal legislatures unanimously condemned the study because it was used by a group they disagree with. I knew we were bad, but ... unanimously?
The book you reference appears to address post pubescent children and specifically mentions teenage sex being natural. It does not appear to address pedophilia.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/22/us/florida-18-year-old-arr...
Most child abuse happens in families.
Incest is a strong taboo in very many cultures.
"not at all a majority" != "just about all"
Also, he's not saying it's OK and fine, he's saying it doesn't necessarily damage the children.
> [PDF] recidivism rates for pedophiles - Université d'Ottawa
> No differences were found between pedophiles and nonpedophiles with respect to recidivism rates
Are you perhaps spreading a very nasty myth?
1: http://www.courseweb.uottawa.ca/PSY3171/personalwp/P38%20Rec...
I could see it being recidivist though, as it's an innate drive.
Should people get "discount" for hurting terminally ill patients with no more than a few months to live?
Now replace the 85 year old retiree with a 40 year old at the peak of his career. Attorneys will chomp at the bit for this case because you've caused literally millions of dollars in damages.
To go further down your tangent, after witnessing my terminally ill mother die from cancer after months of morphine-clouded torture I would have thanked anyone that would've ended her suffering early in a way as humane as we treat dogs at the end of their life.
Does the recidivism rate matter as much as the number of pedophiles? Even if every real pedophile committed the crime 3 times, that's the same as having 3x as many first time offenders. The rate and the number of pedophiles is far more important.
Unless we buy into the idea that pedophiles are lurking around every corner, the recidivsm rate should't scare us.
If we as a culture were to truly value and care for children, this wouldn't be a problem because we'd stamp the fuckers out of existence. But we are a sick society, unfortunately.
I have looked at the sex offender registry. I'm not too frightened by the "sex offenders (L1)" that were peeing in the woods near a kids' soccer game, mooned some girls, or were convicted of statutory "rape."
> They're like cockroaches that we as a society tolerate because there are so damn many of them and there are enough sympathetic people in power to allow this atrocity to continue.
Please back this up with some hard numbers. There are 251 registered L3 sex offenders in Boston. http://www.city-data.com/so/so-Boston-Massachusetts.html
I have volunteered helping the victims of these people. When you have heard the desperation of a woman crying at 3:00AM calling to talk to a stranger on a hotline because of the horror show her life has become, you tend to take a dim view of the perpetrators. Every single call, and they are numerous, sticks in your head forever. All because some subhuman wanted to get his rocks off and didn't care who he hurt.
We live in a society where you can get an order of magnitude more prison time for distributing weed than for raping children. If that's not a sympathetic public, I don't know what is.
Zero? Without the numbers, i might as well also create a fiction that supports my argument. 251 in a city of millions.
> We live in a society where you can get an order of magnitude more prison time for distributing weed than for raping children. If that's not a sympathetic public, I don't know what is.
That is a ridiculous conclusion. If anything the public supported the massive prison time for distributing weed because of politicians being "tough" on crime -- not the other way around. The public is completely irrational when it comes to "saving the children." Why do you think urinating in public (a non-sexual act in most cases) is a L1 sex offense?
I saw a referee of a children's soccer game run into the woods at halftime to go to the urinate. According to the current laws, he should have been arrested, locked up, required to register as a sex offender, and prohibited from being any where near kids. Those laws are sympathetic?
> Every single call, and they are numerous, sticks in your head forever. All because some subhuman wanted to get his rocks off and didn't care who he hurt.
That's awful, but I don't think this means the public is soft on perpetrators.
That's very different than people thinking being upset that getting spammed CP into your inbox makes you an instant felon. Or that a 16 year old girl becomes a sex offender the second she sexted a nude photo of herself to her 16 year old boyfriend. Or if he forwards it to a group of school friends that they are all instantly felons.
The number of people doing truly horrible things to children is not small in that you have to organize groups of people just to deal with the wake of psychological destruction they leave behind, and we are disturbingly soft on those perpetrators if you ask me. That we have convicted violent child rapists out there to register in the first place is a problem.
I happen to think part the reason for that is that we don't truly care that much about kids and they have no voice to protect themselves. There are those who say "it's not that big a deal" - respected people who are in positions of authority- cops, judges, attorneys. It is a big deal, though.
Now, by extreme reaction I mean the "stamp the fuckers out of existence". Personally, I'm in favor of life in prison for convicted violent child rapists. But I don't think it should be treated as a punishment or revenge (including for the problems I mentioned above), but because we simply can't allow that to happen again.
I certainly don't advocate teaching children to fear strangers or filling them with thoughts of horrible boogeymen sex offenders. But once in hand, and convicted, the punishment should prevent further abuses by the offender.