Australian columnist and TV personality Mia Freedman has been caught in a social media storm after comparing pedophiles to gay people. Freedman’s gaffe didn’t warrant the furious response it got; the response seems mainly the product of people’s inability to understand how analogies and similes work. Freedman, arguing in favor of a public sex offender’s register, claimed that we ought to expect pedophiles to continue to be a danger to children, because they can’t change who they’re attracted to, just like gay people can’t change who they’re attracted to. Freedman’s point was that we used to think that gay people could be ‘cured’; we now accept that that’s a fantasy. So we should say the same thing about pedophiles.
But while I don’t think she ought to be condemned for homophobia as so many people on twitter seem to think, I think the analogy is a bad one. The reason we don’t think that homosexuality can be cured is partly a normative one: you can’t be cured of something that is not a disease or illness. We do combine this with an empirical claim, but that claim is inseparable from further norms. We think, or we ought to think, that gay people can be celibate (because we think, or ought to think, that anyone can be celibate). But we think it is unreasonable to expect gay people to be celibate because having close and loving relationships is (at oncee factually and normatively) partially constitutive of a flourishing human life. It is a good that people can be expected willingly to forgo only under special and limited circumstances. It very difficult (empirically) to forgo such goods because of their place in a flourishing life, and it is (empirically and normatively) unreasonable to expect someone to make this kind of sacrifice.
Pedophilia is not like that all. The pedophile is not seeking a loving intimate relationship, though he may delude himself into thinking that that’s what he wants. That kind of relationship is a relationship between equals. It is incompatible with too big a disparity in capacity and status. In asking the pedophile to forgo sexual satisfaction, we do not ask him to forgo any especially great good. We don’t ask him to bear an especially great burden. Our demand is not unreasonable, and the costs he will pay to abide by it are correspondingly smaller. For this reason, the expectation is neither normatively nor empirically all that burdensome.
So Freedman’s analogy was not a good one. Her mistake wasn’t merely to compare gay people to pedophiles. Her point wasn’t an offensive one (she could have made the same point using heterosexuals: we don’t think that heterosexuals can change who they’re attracted to, so why should we think that pedophiles can). But it was mistaken. In asking that people with healthy sexualities abstain from sex we ask them to bear a burden that we do not ask pedophiles to bear when we ask them to do the same thing.
Two brief remarks/objections:
Well, I don’t think paedophiles would agree with you on that. Paedophiles do seem to be very difficult to cure precisely because, even though they are aware that doing what they are doing is somehow wrong (i.e. in the sense below), they just do seem to regard the satisfaction of their sexual desires as constituting an important good for them.
Second remark: fortunately, we don’t need paedophiles to think otherwise (at least, not as a part of a justification for moral blame). Paedophilia just seems to be intrinsically harmful to children (would be regard paedophilia as morally permissible if that was not the case? I highly doubt we would) just as sadism is intrinsically harmful to anyone that is the object of a sadistict behaviour. Sadism would still be morally impermissible if satisfying sadistic pleasure constituted a good for the sadist.
Therefore: “constituting a good for someone” is not an essential component of the disanalogy between paedophiles and homosexuals.
You are using terms very imprecisely. Paedophilia is a sexual orientation, no one choose it. So what about it can be morally permissible?
“Paedophilia is a sexual orientation”
Well, is it? Childhood is not a sex, and in fact the main bodily thing that distinguishes children from adults (after size) is their much less differentiated gender. Many paedophiles prey on children of both sexes, and if there is a preponderance, it may have more do do with opportunity. Boys are given more freedom than girls, especially to be alone with men. I understand paedophilia better as a paraphilia, like an attraction to feet or hair, to the exclusion of a personal relationship with the owner.
I wonder if, on compassionate and also harm-reduction grounds, more leeway might be granted people with paedophilia to have access to non-exploitive (such as CGI) means of gratification. Or would that risk a slippery-slope effect? Evidence either way would be useful.
As far as I know, the availability of child pornography generally reduces the number of child abuse, see for instance: http://phys.org/news/2010-11-legalizing-child-pornography-linked-sex.html
but child is a person. You can not understand paedophilia, if you are comparing it with attraction to feet or hair. Attraction to child can be as complex as attraction to adult person, with romantic feelings and love.
I’m sure you’re right that many (though very far from all) wouldn’t agree. So what?
So what? Here is what: you are making up a whole argument out of a wrong claim — that paedophilia is instrinsically bad, while you could simply look at the consequences that are typically associated with paedophilia, viz. harm to children, to support the disanalogy you were after.
“Pedophilia is not like that all. The pedophile is not seeking a loving intimate relationship, though he may delude himself into thinking that that’s what he wants.”
This is a prejudicial statement. A vast majority of pedophiles desire a loving intimate relationship. Based on what do you claim the opposite? Evidence? (And note that you made a very general statement so the evidence would have to be based on a representative sample of pedophiles.) How do you even want to test such claim? Pedophiles have very analogous feelings towards children that gynephiles have towards women and androphiles towards men.
It’s not that pedophiles don’t have the same desire for romance and intimacy and sexual release. I can agree that it’s more difficult to forgo something one has no good reason to forgo than something one has a good reason to forgo. So it’s easier for pedophiles to forgo sexual activities with children (at least if the pedophile think such activities are wrong). Also pedophiles don’t have to forgo sexual satisfaction completely. They can masturbate, they can use their fantasies, they can use some materials they find arousing (though it’s pretty limited legally, in some cases I think irrationaly – for example pictures of fictional child characters being banned in many countries). But I agree that being erotically attracted towards children doesn’t make it morally permissible to engage in sexual activities with children, there are more than one person involved in the activities and consequences for all participants has to be taken into account. If we consider sexual activities with children harmful to children then it’s morally wrong to engage in sexual activities with children. And our judgment of sexual activities between adults of the same sex is different because 1) we don’t think there is such harm present 2) adults are more mature and we don’t need to protect them as much as children.
Also you don’t represent well the Mia Freedman’s point. She was confusing pedophiles and people who sexually abuse children and I think she was making a claim that it’s unreasonable to think that child molesters rehabilitated because pedophiles can’t be cured of pedophilia. Which is a non sequitur, first not all child molesters are pedophiles, next, being a pedophile doesn’ŧ mean one has to molest children.
I don’t think this assumption is justified at all. Parents and their children very typically have loving intimate relationships without being physical or intellectual equals. Neither do people typically assume romantic or sexual relationships require equality of capacity and status, in order to provide value to either party. Certainly not traditionally.
This doesn’t even follow from the assumption. But we can test it empirically by treating social status loss, guilty conscience and criminalization risks as costs, and then looking at how willing people are to pay those costs for sexual satisfaction. (Though there may be methodological problems in determining how many closeted pedophiles there are)
I’m tempted to ask: Which one? There is probably a linguistic term for this pattern where a large set of different people are lumped together into one stereotype with the use of a singular. It is most often found in propaganda (e.g. “the Jew” instead of “many Jews” or “most Jews”) to create one singular enemy image whose attributes can be projected onto the whole set.
All in all, a very low quality post.
“The pedophile is not seeking a loving intimate relationship”
How do you know that?
How do we know a pedophile is not seeking a loving intimate relationship?
BECAUSE ABDUCTION AN RAPE OF A CHILD I NOT AN ACT OF LOVE YOU BLITHERING $@&?!’
But what about religious groups who say homosexual activity is wrong just like pedophilia is wrong?
Are people on these comments defending pedophilia because they are pedophiles?
That would make sense. Muddying the conversation by say religious groups condemn both homosexuality and pedophiles is ridiculous.
First off, homosexuals are consenting adults that willing engage in sex. Children have no choice in the matter, Children do not willingly engage in sex with adults, they are either forced ot coerced.
how can anyone defend a pedophile. I guess beastiality and necrophilia are o.k. too right.
forgive my typos,,,, ipad keyboard is awful!
I’m not entirely convinced that pedophilia – as a sexual desire towards children – is itself immoral. I think that the propensity to act on it often is overwhelmingly harmful, and therefore to be condemned, but I’m not sure the desire itself is enough to label people with that desire immoral. I worry that in doing so, we might lead to a case where pedophiles start to internalise that to the tune of ‘Well, everyone says that I’m an evil person anyway, so I might as well act on it’.
It seems to me that what would be better is to condemn the actions, but to also divert money into preventative and therapy programs for those with that desire. If our aim is to protect children – rather than to punish for the sake of it – I think that might be a better approach.
That said, I also can see that this is such a terribly emotive issue and even philosophers’ judgments can be clouded by this. I say this now with my philosopher hat on, not having children, or knowing many young children at all. If I were a parent with a toddler, I can imagine that my position would be less nuanced.
I’ve been thinking about offering to give a lecture about my children’s school about sexual abuse and prevention. It won’t happen any time soon, with my children still being too young to comprehend, but I want it to happen eventually. Often when people talk about prevention, they mean that victims should step forward to help stop their abusers from claiming more victims. That’s certainly important, but people often fail to take into account how traumatic that experience too can be, especially if it means sending a loved one to prison, breaking up an otherwise functional family and so on. My mother was abused but kept quiet about it for decades, and it probably was for the best because she was apparently her father’s only victim and even her own mother may have chosen to side with him.
So prevention is all the more important. Unless we want a society where we trust no-one, including our closest family members, the path to prevention starts with acceptance of pedophiles (and hebephiles) as human beings. It’s always going to be my responsibility to stay clear of any situation that could lead me to harm a child, but that shouldn’t have to mean that I must isolate myself. If that’s the only option, people like me will say nothing, pretend they are normal and continue to take risks. Imagine if instead I can tell my friends that I’m attracted to girls like their daughter and that I’d rather not be left alone with her, and my friends could still accept me as a friend and not treat me differently aside from honoring my request.
And you know what? I have friends like that. Can you imagine coming out to your friends about being in love with their 12-year-old daughter, and still have those friends offer support? Oh, how I love them for that. And thankfully I was able to get over my feelings for the girl, and although I still find her amazing and attractive I’m not going to act on it in any kind of sexual way. But I’m open about wanting to spend time with her and her friends as long as they’re fine with it, and amazingly they’ve agreed to a play date (of sorts) with me and my kids at the girl’s house this weekend. It’s totally strange, yet perfectly innocent. (The only problem is that by the middle of next week I’ll be feeling like I’m coming down from a particularly good drug trip, but I’m learning to handle that too.)
To add to the point of several of the previous posters, especially HT, there is nothing to say that a “loving intimate relationship” has to be sexual in nature even if it is between a pedophile and a child who isn’t his/hers. The whole discussion is also seemingly based on the idea that a pedophile’s sexuality is a lot less nuanced than everybody else’s. For teleiophiles we have concepts like aromantic, asexual and polyamorous, and some of these could also be applied to pedophiles, in addition to the whole dimension of being attracted to different ages (and sexes) in different ways.
I see nothing wrong with pursuing a loving friendship or uncle-niece type relationship. It’s of course very asymmetric, with the adult admiring and caring for the child and the child rewarding the adult with trust and affection. But if both parties gain long-term happiness from it and no laws are broken, then what does it matter that the adult sometimes feels a desire for sex or romance? The important thing is to be sure that such feelings never turn into actions.
In past year I have come out to my closest friends and family as some kind of hebephile who is sexually attracted to anything from pubescent girls to middle-aged women but romantically attracted primarily to girls between, say, 8 and 20. Being open about being different has allowed me to come to terms with who I am, and with the confidence and support I’ve found I’m much better equipped to handle my own children and their friends growing up. I may have a bit of a crush on some of their classmates, but acting on it in any sexual way is completely out of the question, both now and 5-10 years from now when they’ll be most attractive to me.
There are millions of people with pedophilia who choose not to sexually interact with children. I provide small group consultation for those who are ready to work on their issues, whether it be self-acceptance, pornography, or the risk of sexually interacting with a real child. I use the Good Lives Model based on the Prevention Project Dunkelfeld. I find a wide variety among the hundreds that I have communicated with. My service is free and confidential. I Love Children is on the net.
Professor Tromovitch and the psychologist Bruce Rind (of Temple University) in 1998 published an article written together with based on a peer-reviewed meta-analysis of 59 studies which used the self-reported experiences of child sexual contact with adults by 35,703 college students. A substantial majority of the people in this study did not report any harmful effects of (non-coercive) sexual experiences (as opposed to victims of coercion), and a substantial minority even stated these intergenerational sexual contacts and relationships had a positive effect on their life. This article was published in the Psychological Bulletin, the prestigious, official journal of the American Psychological Association (APA).
Predictably, this caused a storm in the mass media and in the political elite. Apparently for the first time in US history, both the US House of Representatives and the US Senate condemned this scientific paper and threatened to withdraw funding from the APA, so the APA apologised for publishing it. 12 past and present presidents of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex sharply protested against the APA’s response to the public and political pressure surrounding the study, stating that it “cast a chill on all such research”. The American Association for the Advancement of Science refused APA’s request to review the study, stating they saw “no reason to second-guess the process of peer review used by the APA journal in its decision to publish” and that they “saw no clear evidence of improper application of methodology or other questionable practices on the part of the article’s authors”.
More recently, the Harvard lecturer Susan Clancy came to the similar conclusions in her book “The Trauma Myth”. In the 1970s and 1980s, Donald West, Professor of Criminology from the University of Cambridge, advocated the abolition of the age of consent in scholarly books. See also Professor Richard Green’s article (he is a psychiatrist from Cambridge University and UCL) “Is Paedophilia a Mental Disorder”.
In the words of Karin Freimond (file:///home/chronos/user/Downloads/etd8167_CFreimond%20(4).pdf): “Many adults who are attracted to minors experience intense suffering as a result of contemporary attitudes about them and current methods of relating to them. Even when no crimes have taken place and no sexual interaction with people below the age of consent has occurred, people who are sexually interested in children and adolescents encounter incredible stigma. They experience fear about the possibility of their desires becoming known to others, and they cope with depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts. These individuals are often completely alone in dealing with their feelings, as they may be too worried about the negative consequences that could arise from talking to loved ones. Further, they may feel restricted in seeking help from therapists, as mandatory reporting laws in many jurisdictions require counsellors to report their clients to the police if they express sexual interest in children. If the nature of their sexuality is revealed, these people are at risk of experiencing physical violence, losing relationships with their friends and families, being fired from their jobs, and encountering financial destitution. The situation facing this population is troubling, and researchers argue that a new, more compassionate approach is needed in order to help people who are attracted to children lead more positive lives (see Cantor, 2012; Goode, 2010).”
Much more pleasurable to dehumanise all the paedos regardless of their behaviour, to cage them or drive them to suicide. As Felix Guattari wrote (“A Shock to Thought: Expression After Deleuze and Guattari”), there is a certain “Jewishness” about paedophiles which provokes a “racist” reaction.
Professor Tromovitch and the psychologist Bruce Rind (of Temple University) in 1998 published an article written together with based on a peer-reviewed meta-analysis of 59 studies which used the self-reported experiences of child sexual contact with adults by 35,703 college students. A substantial majority of the people in this study did not report any harmful effects of (non-coercive) sexual experiences (as opposed to victims of coercion), and a substantial minority even stated these intergenerational sexual contacts and relationships had a positive effect on their life. This article was published in the Psychological Bulletin, the prestigious, official journal of the American Psychological Association (APA).
Predictably, this caused a storm in the mass media and in the political elite. Apparently for the first time in US history, both the US House of Representatives and the US Senate condemned this scientific paper and threatened to withdraw funding from the APA, so the APA apologised for publishing it. 12 past and present presidents of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex sharply protested against the APA’s response to the public and political pressure surrounding the study, stating that it “cast a chill on all such research”. The American Association for the Advancement of Science refused APA’s request to review the study, stating they saw “no reason to second-guess the process of peer review used by the APA journal in its decision to publish” and that they “saw no clear evidence of improper application of methodology or other questionable practices on the part of the article’s authors”.
More recently, the Harvard lecturer Susan Clancy came to the similar conclusions in her book “The Trauma Myth”. In the 1970s and 1980s, Donald West, Professor of Criminology from the University of Cambridge, advocated the abolition of the age of consent in scholarly books. See also Professor Richard Green’s article (he is a psychiatrist from Cambridge University and UCL) “Is Paedophilia a Mental Disorder”.
In the words of Karin Freimond (“Navigating the Stigma of Pedophilia:
The Experiences of
Nine Minor-Attracted Men in Canada”, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Simon Frasier University, 2013): “Many adults who are attracted to minors experience intense suffering as a result of contemporary attitudes about them and current methods of relating to them. Even when no crimes have taken place and no sexual interaction with people below the age of consent has occurred, people who are sexually interested in children and adolescents encounter incredible stigma. They experience fear about the possibility of their desires becoming known to others, and they cope with depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts. These individuals are often completely alone in dealing with their feelings, as they may be too worried about the negative consequences that could arise from talking to loved ones. Further, they may feel restricted in seeking help from therapists, as mandatory reporting laws in many jurisdictions require counsellors to report their clients to the police if they express sexual interest in children. If the nature of their sexuality is revealed, these people are at risk of experiencing physical violence, losing relationships with their friends and families, being fired from their jobs, and encountering financial destitution. The situation facing this population is troubling, and researchers argue that a new, more compassionate approach is needed in order to help people who are attracted to children lead more positive lives (see Cantor, 2012; Goode, 2010).”
Much more pleasurable to dehumanise all the paedos regardless of their behaviour, to cage them or drive them to suicide. As Felix Guattari wrote (“A Shock to Thought: Expression After Deleuze and Guattari”), there is a certain “Jewishness” about paedophiles which provokes a “racist” reaction.
In the last two paragraphs of his article “The Prospects of Radical Politics Today” – http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol5_1/v5-1-article3-zizek.html – Slavoj Zizek criticizes the dominant ideology surrounding the issue of pedophilia and child sexuality. Very interesting! Who knows what the mores and attitudes about pedophilia will be like in a few decades…
“In asking that people with healthy sexualities abstain from sex we ask them to bear a burden that we do not ask pedophiles to bear when we ask them to do the same thing.”
I don’t think the author made much attempt to actually establish this in his arguments. I see no reason to assume that adults whose sexualities are focused exclusively on people below the age of consent would experience a lifetime of celibacy as less personally burdensome than it would be on people attracted to adults, if adult/adult sex were made illegal. The fact that there are legitimate reasons for protecting children from adult sexual advances is unlikely to somehow make the paedophile’s experience of celibacy less psychologically taxing. Furthermore, I’d question whether any forms of human sexuality, included the socially accepted ones, can realistically be classified as a “great good”, as opposed to a rather primitive (and often troublesome) part of our evolutionary baggage.
Celibacy is a burden we reasonably require paedophiles to bear, but we could do more to assist them in adjusting to it, especially when we’re talking about young paedophiles who receive very little guidance on how to cope with the prospect of a lifetime in which their sexuality is expected to be firmly “walled off” from any kind of social interaction.
Maybe in 50, a 100 or 200 years the current anti-paedophile hysteria will be (rightly) perceived as bigotry. Just the RInd et al study on more than 30.000 people showed how full of lies is the notion that intergenerational relations are necessarily harmful. The prevalence of paedophilia among the bonobo chimpanzees (who are far more nonviolent and egalitarian than human societies according to the studies of de Waal etc.) is also illustrative (see Waal, F.B.M. de, Sociosexual Behavior Used for Tension Regulation in All Age and Sex Combinations Among Bonobos in: Feiermann (ed.) Pedophilia: Biosocial Dimensions, Springer, New York, 1990).
“Maybe in 50, a 100 or 200 years the current anti-paedophile hysteria will be (rightly) perceived as bigotry.”
I think paedophiles need to ask themselves: in a progressive society in which the needs and rights of children are more respected with the passing of time, is it likely there will be more, or less tolerance of adults who wish to have sexual intercourse with children? In the 19th century, adult sexual exploitation of children was commonplace, with little or no penalty for the offenders. Over the course of the 20th century, responsibility for the care and protection of children was gradually taken more seriously and today, very few progressive-minded people would consider paedophilia to be anything more than an irrelevant, manipulative and damaging intrusion of adult sexuality into the lives of children. Ethical progress inevitably ensures that paedophilia is viewed as socially dysfunctional and potentially dangerous.
I hope you’re right that such an ethical progress exits. We could certainly use it in other areas of life.
But if Rob’s assumption of currently overperceived harm is true, then wouldn’t we hope for the social mores to become more calibrated to the evidence? Otherwise it’s not progress.
I think some aspects of the anti-pedophilia trend show it’s not really about protecting children from harm. Banning virtual child pornography of various sorts makes no sense under this premise. This is especially true if you consider law-enforcement expenditures to compete with other spending to improve children’s lives.
FWIW, I really don’t think sexual orientation is a problem in 50, a 100 or 200 years. By then people will probably be able to choose what they are attracted to. Pedophilia will then cease to exist, just like homosexuality.
Humans being able to choose their sexuality would certainly result in fewer paedophiles, but would likely result in more homosexuality (probably in the form of bisexuality). For men at least, gay sexual encounters tend to be more easily available than straight ones, with fewer social obligations involved.
It is not “just” Rind et al. – the Rind study is a meta-study of 59 previous studies, on 35,000 people! And there are many more studies (before, e.g. the Constantine and Theo Sandfort ones, and even some since) which have destroyed the popular argument about the intrinsic harm of cross-generational sexual relations. But society prohibits even non-sexual emotional relations between non-family adults and children (which includes contact between platonic paedophiles and children).
Thankfully the latter part is not universally true, depending on what exactly you put into “emotional relations”. I’m a 37-year-old man who’s recently befriended a 14-year-old girl through mutual friends. My wife is aware of this, as are members of the girl’s family, and I’m open about what I want. With the help of mutual adult friends we were able to have a play date recently together with some other girls, and it went well. Even in the presence of other adults I’m not hiding my affection for some girls.
You befriended a “14 year old girl” Disgusting. I hope she gets the help she needs because clearly her parents have no idea what a pathetic subhuman scum you are. As a 37- year old man you should be cable to form relationships with other adults, then again you are not human. I will explain how a human male works. After the age of 25 a human’s brain is fully developed. The last part being the prefrontal cortex (decision making, I bet pedos wiring causes them to not think like humans). Pedos like you “love kids” which means once you are done abusing her when she becomes an adult you will toss her out and look for a new girl to exploit. Pedos don’t respect human life nor understand it. Listen pedo, all kids grow up to adults. (I m sure you are unaware of adult females because they are invisible to pedos, must be part of their subhuman brain).
Fucking sick that any adult would just let you use and abuse girls.
Leslie, your conformist hatred, profound ignorance about and dehumanisation of paedophiles are awful.
Lay off the bad dope, man.
As a 37-year-old man I’m perfectly capable of forming relationships with other adults, thank you very much. But why wait? Do you really think so little of children that you see no value in being part of their lives? As a parent I am proud of my children and it brings me joy to see them learn and develop, just as it brings me joy to play with them and care for them and show them that I love them. Some children stir the same feelings in me, and so what if I find them physically attractive when they are far too young for sex and romance with somebody my age? There are plenty of attractive women in this world if I ever want to cheat on my wife.
You thoroughly fail to understand that a person who really loves children will not allow himself to hurt them regardless of his own desires. In my case it’s easier still: what I most desire from my little friends is not sex or even romance, it’s just love of roughly the same kind that I share with my children. The only thing that sets me apart from a normal person with a love for children is that I’m drawn to cute girls. I see them, I hover around them and I talk to them if I get the chance, but not about inappropriate matters and never with a sinister purpose.
Persecuting pedophiles does considerable harm to both pedophiles and children, and is probably even a side effect of attempts to control children.
Not only is such persecution not harmless, in forbidding the beginning of relationships between men and girls it also prohibits the natural development of such relationships into child-bearing partnerships, and when combined with other factors such as removing children from the care of pedophile parents such persecution is clearly genocide as defined by the international Convention on Genocide. It gets much worse, however – when one considers the links between pedophilia and neoteny.
Neoteny and the related phenomenon of self-domestication are largely responsible for humanity being humanity, specifically our plasticity of mind, cooperation, and low levels of aggression compared to other species. To persecute those most most central to this evolutionary process, therefore, is effectively to wage war on humanity itself.
Interesting how it was the Peace News, Allen Ginsberg, Hermann Hesse, the National Coalition for Civil Liberties, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Deleuze, Guattari etc. etc., and similar peaceful and progressive people and organisations that would today be accused of “promoting child abuse” (due to their outspoken unconventional views on paedophilia) by the “child protecting” neo-conservative media and mob which don’t pay much attention to the mass misery of Third World children through hunger, disease, and Western bombing campaigns.
The nonsense about how open sexuality would prevent paedophilia is disproven by a) the example of the bonobos, our closest animal relatives, who lead much more open sexual lives and where paedophile relations are the norm (the poster above references the data) and b) by research which shows that around 89 per cent of men showed some arousal to prepubescent girls in penile pletysmography tests, and a quarter of men (from a “normal”, community sample) showed arousal which equalled or exceeded arousal to images of adults (e.g. Briere and Runtz, University males’ sexual interest in children: Predicting potential indices of “pedophilia” in a nonforensic sample, Child Abuse & Neglect: The international Journal, 1989; Hall, G.C.N., Hirschman, R., & Oliver, L.L. (1995). “Sexual Arousal and Arousability to Pedophilic Stimuli in a Community Sample of Normal Men,” Behavior Therapy, 26; Byers, S.E., Purdon, C., & Clark, D.A. (1998). “Sexual intrusive thoughts of college students,” Journal of Sex Research; Green, R. (2002). “Is pedophilia a mental disorder?,” Archives of Sexual Behavior, 31(6)) and so on. Summaries of this and other research (much more has been written on this) are available online.
Here is an overview of those studies about the prevalence of paedophile attractions:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/44284820/Prevalence%20-%20Trom%201.JPG
Sad to read comments of people who support pedophiles. Do not trust pedos when they say they are “good” and when they say “they care about kids”. I discovered my bf was a pedo….I saw the for I’m he belonged to, they are preparing to revolt.
They don’t. They have very sick agendas and they must be stopped.
Facts:
Pedos are inherently evil/abusive/hateful subhumans. Do not buy into their lies and Delusions. They love trying to recruit people because being with adults disgusted them. They also want to kill any female over 18 because they hate women. They also believe that kids like being raped, tortured, killed, used as an object of sexual pleasure, making them cry, making them perform ungodly acts. They only interact with adult females to get access to her child. They also want to get women pregnant so they can engage with incest or to force the woman to abort to rape the unborn fetus.
They also have plans to take over the school systems to teach kids that they want to be raped and tortured. They will also claim that children must try very hard to please you adult master.
They laugh at parents who are devasted about the action they committed into their child.
They want to make relationships between adults illegal because they hate women and feel disgusted at the idea that an adult can be attracted to another adult. This is part of their illogical Delusions.
If kids don’t want to please them they will murder the child. Pedos are vicious savages. Don’t fall for their lies. They want you to believe that they don’t want to hurt kids. LIES. They are not humans and thus do not deserve humanity. Society must become radical with pedos. They already think that raping/killing/torturing kids is healthy, they want us to believe “I’m born this way”(lies because if pedos are born that way we would do DNA testing and have women abort baby’s with those genes as well as assist sucide to kill the living ones), they claim that children porn lowers sexual abuse(no it actually encourages it because pedos become delusional think that watching other pedos abuse kids is okay. If you believe you should watch child porn then consider sucide), they don’t want kids to grow up so they are finding ways to kill and make sex dolls from the deceased child, they also want to buy, own, sell and trade kids, and they want make people believe they are human beings that deserve “equal rights” No. They do not even deserve life. I hope people keep their kids away from you pedos.
I recommend all pedos to choose suicide you presence is inherently evil and you need to know that because you have no sense of humanity being removed from earth is the best gift to give.
Pedos don’t have a conscience, Their brains are inferior to healthy adults, they are savage and animalistic, they aren’t human beings.
It is scary to think that pedos and their non-pedo supprters( which is a lie “pedo supporters are just to cowardly to admit to being subhuman), they don’t care about kids if they did they would not be raping and killing them. Then again they have no conscience and are illogical. Ways to help kids does not invoke raping and killing. It is disturbing to see pedos who aren’t shamed of themselves. These pedos think they are good people!!! Then again they probably only talk to other pedos that indulge their ways. No healthy adult would encourage child porn. There is plenty of legal porn, but pedos choose to be obses sed with raping and killing kids.
Of course the pedos here will disagree but according to them all us healthy adults are the real bad guys because we “dont allow them to kill women off, rape, touture and abuse kids.
Non pedos, keep kids away from them. They are good at pretending to be human. They will even claim they care about kids. They don’t they will psychological damage your kids.
Additionally pedos are dangerous, when people find out about them they usually brutally rape children then kill them. If you see pedos doing these: watching child porn, raping a child, talking about their attraction to kids, talking about their fantasies, telling a child that they want sex from them, pedos trying to explain they are human, talking about killing equal rights, compare it to homosexuality, etc it is well within your right as a human to beat up the subhuman creature and depending on the situation using lethal force. Pedos must be put in their place, they are becoming delusional and we must stop them, which can include deadly force.
I hope one day pedos reach extention.
ProtectorOfKids, It’s so easy to judge and slander a group of people who you know practically nothing about. Of course all pedophiles are criminals in your eyes because in our current society no sane, law abiding pedophile would out himself.
Your post made me sick. You will never understand what it’s like to grow up with a sexual preference for children, to fall in love with a child, and to desire a relationship with that child that can never be, and never be able to tell someone about your feelings because of the sheer ignorance surrounding this subject. Pedophilia is not a rape fetish, it is an attraction to children. Most people are capable of experiencing love and desire for someone without wanting to kill and rape that person, and that certainly includes pedophiles. Pedophiles who want to hurt children are not the majority. Pedophiles who believe sex with children is okay are not the majority. Pedophilia is no excuse for immoral behavior.
In response to the article itself, I’d just like to say that not being able to share a loving relationship with someone you desire is a huge burden to bare regardless of the age of the people you’re attracted to. Don’t tell me that’s not what most pedophiles desire, I don’t care that you think it’s not a relationship between equals. It is possible to love someone who is not equal to you in every single way.
Why aren’t my comments showing up?
Pedophiles are sick criminals who should be executed or labotomized and castrated. nuff said.
This is the key post of the whole thread. If the dominant discourse was based on real science, it wouldn’t have to resort to suppressing science:
Professor Tromovitch and the psychologist Bruce Rind (of Temple University) in 1998 published an article written together with based on a peer-reviewed meta-analysis of 59 studies which used the self-reported experiences of child sexual contact with adults by 35,703 college students. A substantial majority of the people in this study did not report any harmful effects of (non-coercive) sexual experiences (as opposed to victims of coercion), and a substantial minority even stated these intergenerational sexual contacts and relationships had a positive effect on their life. This article was published in the Psychological Bulletin, the prestigious, official journal of the American Psychological Association (APA).
Predictably, this caused a storm in the mass media and in the political elite. Apparently for the first time in US history, both the US House of Representatives and the US Senate condemned this scientific paper and threatened to withdraw funding from the APA, so the APA apologised for publishing it. 12 past and present presidents of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex sharply protested against the APA’s response to the public and political pressure surrounding the study, stating that it “cast a chill on all such research”. The American Association for the Advancement of Science refused APA’s request to review the study, stating they saw “no reason to second-guess the process of peer review used by the APA journal in its decision to publish” and that they “saw no clear evidence of improper application of methodology or other questionable practices on the part of the article’s authors”.
More recently, the Harvard lecturer Susan Clancy came to the similar conclusions in her book “The Trauma Myth”. In the 1970s and 1980s, Donald West, Professor of Criminology from the University of Cambridge, advocated the abolition of the age of consent in scholarly books. See also Professor Richard Green’s article (he is a psychiatrist from Cambridge University and UCL) “Is Paedophilia a Mental Disorder”.
In the words of Karin Freimond (“Navigating the Stigma of Pedophilia:
The Experiences of
Nine Minor-Attracted Men in Canada”, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Simon Frasier University, 2013): “Many adults who are attracted to minors experience intense suffering as a result of contemporary attitudes about them and current methods of relating to them. Even when no crimes have taken place and no sexual interaction with people below the age of consent has occurred, people who are sexually interested in children and adolescents encounter incredible stigma. They experience fear about the possibility of their desires becoming known to others, and they cope with depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts. These individuals are often completely alone in dealing with their feelings, as they may be too worried about the negative consequences that could arise from talking to loved ones. Further, they may feel restricted in seeking help from therapists, as mandatory reporting laws in many jurisdictions require counsellors to report their clients to the police if they express sexual interest in children. If the nature of their sexuality is revealed, these people are at risk of experiencing physical violence, losing relationships with their friends and families, being fired from their jobs, and encountering financial destitution. The situation facing this population is troubling, and researchers argue that a new, more compassionate approach is needed in order to help people who are attracted to children lead more positive lives (see Cantor, 2012; Goode, 2010).”
Much more pleasurable to dehumanise all the paedos regardless of their behaviour, to cage them or drive them to suicide. As Felix Guattari wrote (“A Shock to Thought: Expression After Deleuze and Guattari”), there is a certain “Jewishness” about paedophiles which provokes a “racist” reaction.
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