How big a problem is pedophilia, really?

Great Debates
1

Not sure if this should go in GQ or GD . . . Mods, move as appropriate . . .

I’m a big fan of the Law & Order shows, especially SVU. These shows are supposed to be very well-researched and realistic – but, of course, the world viewed through the eyes of a sex-crimes specialty squad might be kind of distorted. One gets the impression that NYC, and by implication the whole world, is simply swarming with pedophiles, lurking in wait to abduct and molest children. They even have their own underground social clubs where they swap stories and porn. I find myself wondering how bad the problem is IRL. Whenever you see a milk carton with a missing child’s picture on it, is that probably a pedophile’s victim? What’s the estimated percentage of pedophiles in the general population? And, of those, how many are aggressive and dangerous (which I guess we should define broadly as any who actually does anything about his/her impulses), and how many are merely more-or-less-harmless passive consumers of kiddy porn? How many children are actually victimized by pedophiles in a given year?

And . . . Are the ephebophiles of NAMBLA, etc., a part of this problem at all? Is there a big difference between a pedophile and an ephebophile? I’m inclined to the view that it is a fundamentally different phenomenon – a 14-year-old is a very different creature than a 9-year-old – but I’m not familiar with any expert opinions.

2

Back when the child abduction crisis was at its height, I read a report that the actual statistics were nowhere near as huge as most people believed. The report said that most “missing” children were either runaways or custody abductions. The number of children in the United States who were actually abducted against their will by a stranger was approximately fifty a year - a child is statistically more likely to be killed by a parent than abducted by a stranger - and the rate was pretty steady over the years. Obviously there are genuine cases of child abductions and they are tragedies (as in many cases are the runaway or custody situations). But the problem was never the common occurence that some people thought it was.

3

Child kidnapping is rare. As Nemo said the number of real child kidnappings is around 50 a year, the rest are runaways and one parent kidnapping the child from another parent.

As for pedophilia, It is my understanding that about 10-25% of children are sexually abused. However what constitutes ‘sexual abuse’ is never really defined. It could be something serious like serial rape, it could be something minor and isolated like attempted groping once when you were 14.

4

Furthermore, The Authorities can easily inflate statistics to increase panic (and so funding). Can you define pedophilia?

How about an eighteen-year-old-boy who has a fifteen-year-old girlfriend? Maybe a schoolteacher who has photos of all his twelve-year-old female students in their gym togs? And of course the computer techs at Best Buy always seem to find computer files on hard drives that come in for repair.

I am sure there is an Official Definition somewhere, but as you can see, it is easy to inflate the figures.

5

I’m sure the alarming nature of child molestation makes people worry about it way out of proportion to how much it really happens. The way in which it’s covered in the news also makes it seem more common, I’m sure.

6

“Of the 2,873 substantiated cases of child sexual abuse reported during the year for which this information is available, the parent (natural, adoptive, step, de facto or foster) was believed responsible in 994 (34.6%) of the cases and a guardian in 2 cases. A sibling or other relative was believed responsible in a further 656 (22.8%) of the cases, and a friend or neighbour in 794 (27.6%) cases. In only 427 (14.9%) of the cases was the person neither a relative, guardian, friend or neighbour”

http://www.australianparentsformeganslaw.com/docs/paedinoz.tpl

This gives some idea of the classic ‘stranger danger’ risk for child sexual abuse, its really only a minority of cases. Still, 15% isnt non existent either.

While rare stranger paedophiles can have a fairly disproportionate effect due to how many victims they can sometimes find before they actually get caught. Some of them have victims in the hundreds.

Otara

7

I have a very vague recollection of hearing something that one of the reasons kidnappings are likely so low to day is the FBI taking such a massive interest when it does happen. I’m not sure when or why the policy started but kidnappings left the realm of minimzl police resources not doing much to a disproportionate weight of federal law enforcement chasing kidnappers. It made the crime of kidnapping and getting away with it a very low success prospect.

Mind you I am glad this is what happens…wish they could so thoroughly discourage other crimes in the same manner.

8

The FBI comes down hard on all kidnapping. I have never encountered a media report of a kidnapping-for-ransome case where the crooks got away with it. Or at least in the last century.

9

I think you’ve got it backward (and pedophilia isn’t hard to define, although not everybody has a clear picture of what it is). Politicians like to look tough on crime, but generally I don’t think they get tough until they see that people are worried about it.

10

NAMBLA contains pedophiles and ephebophiles both, and supports no age-limit on sexual consent at all.

NAMBLA doesn’t have a concrete position on what they feel is the youngest age at which someone can consent to sex; it’s my guess they don’t have a concrete position because if they set it at puberty, then it would lose them the support of any members who want/engage in sex with pre-pubescent children.

Throughout the last 25 years or so several NAMBLA members have been arrested and convicted of raping pre-pubescent children as young as age six.

NAMBLA as an organization probably doesn’t do anything illegal, but it’s barely an organization at all. It’s extremely decentralized, in recent years it has been heavily infiltrated by the FBI and there are rarely any meetings, etc. But the fact remains several NAMBLA members throughout the last quarter century have been found guilty of sex with extremely young children, so to say NAMBLA is exclusively an organization of ephebophiles is incorrect.

11

It is kind of interesting. If L&O were to be believed (and I’m a shameless L&O watcher CHUNG! CHUNG!) there are vast communities of pedophiles carting children around the US and having swap meets where they trade slaves like comic books. That was the show about a month ago.

12

I don’t know about vast communities, or their numbers, but I can testify that they do exist, in places you’d never imagine.

We live in a small town in the rural midwest. My husband works in a prison, and works closely with the prosecutor. Not too long ago, they discovered a cache of photograps of several children being molested by a host of different adults. From clues within the pictures themselves, they were able to dicover the perpetrators and make arrests.

13

This goes back to an event that occurred around the time NAMBLA was formed. It was in Boston in the 70s and a pedophilia ring was discovered in which men were sharing children and such.

Nothing actually involving NAMBLA itself has ever been proven, but there has been instances of similar “pedophilia rings” involving individual members of NAMBLA.

And “pedophile trips” overseas has also indeed happened in real life.

Remember that the SVU covers the entire city of New York (iirc they are a special squad that deals with heinous sex crimes across the city) so that’s a lot of people. That there’s like 22 episodes a year and not even all of them deal with pedophilia, and many of them that do deal with incestuous abuse pedophilia which really is unfortunately widespread enough to justify the number of cases we see on the show.

14

In high school a group of about 10 girls were sitting around talking and 8 of them admitted to having been sexually abused at some point.
Then again, I had a devout christian tell me that the reason my father was able to molest both me and my sister was because God knew that we were strong enough to handle it and it would help make us better people.

Yes, I told him to shove it up his ass, I would prefer the both of us to be lesser people, thankyouverymuch.

With the whole “recovered memories” fiasco a few years ago, it seemed it was the de facto thing to say happened to you. I know that in my family, only my mothers side ever acknowledged it, and my fathers side said that I had made it all up. I was 3 when I told my mom. From what I gather, I was pretty darned explicit and descriptive. Far beyond what a 3 year old “should” know.

I also had a boyfriend that was molested by the neighborhood weirdo, who later went back and beat the crap out of him with a baseball bat, talk about closure, I envy him.

Just my experience, but at least two of my teachers in high school acted way, way, way out of line. I would say that you can inflate all the numbers you want and they won’t come close to the number of people that won’t/don’t/can’t talk about it.

The flip side is, there are many men out there who are wonderful with children, who mean them no harm and are afraid of the stigma involved. My daughter is babysat by a man and I am more worried about my mother keeping her than I am him.

OT, but why the hell aren’t pedophiles prosecuted more severely? Who is it that stands up and asks for less jail time for these sicko’s? We couldn’t even get Georgia to go after my father, they completely blew us off. Is there some organization I am not aware of that has all kinds of lobbying power to lessen the jail terms?

Repeat offenders are common. There is no cure. They get out of jail, if they ever see the inside of a jail, and act again.
Auntbeast Really getting my $14.95’s worth just this week alone. I am member, hear me roar!

15

I’ve never been able to find studies I trust on any of these questions. For one, most people who are pedophiles do not admit to being so. Secondly, there are many pedophilies who claim to be non-active, non-dangerous, but I doubt that some of them really are as harmless as they claim. As for finding out how many children are victimized, again, that depends on how broadly you define pedophelic action. The current view is that the child must be under 12 or pre-pubescent and his molestor has to be 5 years older and post-pubescent. So, an 11 year old engaging in sex acts with a 16 year old is a victim of child hood sex abuse. But that is very different than a 7 year old with a 30 year old. Some studies even include victims of flashers as abused child.

Of the pedophiles that I’ve met, those who are non-exclusive tend to be less dangerous. While I would not leave my kids alone with any of them, the non-exclusive ones seem less likely to attack small children. Most of the non-exclusive ones I know are in relationships/marriages with fellow above-age people and realize that their attraction is wrong.

The non-exclusive ones I worry about. Most of the pedophiles I’ve met claim that they have no desire to harm children. I was just engaged in a debate with one who said that he didn’t even look at child porn but just pictures of cute young girls. He said that he was harmless, but he also said that he thought pedophelia was completely natural and normal (tried to say it was encouraged in ancient greece/rome which isn’t true) and that if pedophelia were legal he would engage in it. He also had a “little girlfriend” that was his 7 year old cousin. I worry more about him than about the pedophiles I’ve met who’ve said “It’s wrong, I know it’s wrong, and I wish I didn’t feel this way.”

Yes, the two are very different. Most ephebophiles I know can not stand pedophiles and look upon it as very wrong. There are cultures where ephebophilia was allowed, encouraged, and even part of rituals were every member of the group was engaged in it. I can not think of any culture where pedophelia was accepted to the level that ephebophilia was.

16

Hey, so did Lewis Carroll! :slight_smile:

Yet there was (probably) nothing in his character that should make a responsible parent hesitate to choose him as a babysitter.

17

Cite?

18

In regard to SVU having a lot of child molestation cases…

Sometimes when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I took a human sexuality course (and actually had some techniques demonstrated to the class by the 70ish year old lady prof - the kookiest part is that later when I decided to give them a try - they worked! Ahem - getting off topic here).

So anyhow - human sexuality course. We had a guest speaker who’s practice was focused on working with women who had sexual dysfunction. This speaker said that he believed that 95% of women had been sexually molested as children.

Most of the class, as well as the actual prof (who was the visitors wife) disagreed. While it’s possible and probable that 95% of this mans clients had been abused, it didn’t make any sense to extrapolate that to the general population. I have many very close female friends - VERY few of them were abused as children - less than 25% - which I believe is the most common statistic passed around.

So - on SVU they tend to have a lot of that kind of case because that’s their specility. I imagine on the vice squad, it’s much less, but they have many more prostitues.

Does that make sense?

19

Heh-heh . . . heh-heh . . . You said “getting off” . . .

I guess maybe Dr. Ruth Westheimer actually might have known what she was talking about . . .

BTW, alice, what can you tell us about ol’ Lewis Carroll? :slight_smile:

20

Does Oprah count (not after the whole Frey thing, I guess)? She said today on her show that 1/4 children were molested.