The part you’re leaving out is that doing it would cause grievous injury to a child. The comparison to wanting relationships or sex with women is nonsense. This is a desire to hurt children. I don’t feel sorry for them. There are perves who obsessively fantasize about raping adult women too, but no one feels sorry for them. Wanting to rape children is even worse.
Error.
In the eyes, minds and hearts of pedophiles, they do not **desire to hurt **children. They **desire to love **them. They desire to love them in inappropriate ways that are generally harmful, but the desire itself it to love, not to harm.
Kind of like Lenny in Of Mice and Men — he just wanted to pet and love the rabbits, he had no desire to harm them.
Bullshit. They desire to rape them.
I think what Stoid’s saying is that IN THEIR MINDS, they themselves don’t see it as rape. WE know it’s rape – but many pedophiles see themselves in a different light.
Of course, it is rape. But, in their own minds, they’re not harming said children. They don’t think of themselves as rapists.
Remember Cesario? He really believed that little girl was flirting with him. He really believed that children could consent to sex. Just because you’re a wanna be rapist doesn’t mean you can’t be delusional.
Note: I don’t feel sorry for them, exactly. I pity them in that as of right now, there’s no cure for pedophilia. But if you don’t realize or admit there’s something wrong with you, or attempt to get therapy, well, screw you.
They are not mentally retarded. They know what those actions would do to children. It isn’t news to them. They generally are not psychotic.
Being delusional doesn’t equal psychotic or retarded. Besides, not all pedophiles think alike. And I’m sure they do, but many of them have convinced themselves otherwise, or simply don’t care. Or some of them are just too stunted socially and cognitively.
But I’m not a criminal psychologist. According to wiki, alot of them seem to have impaired social skills, naturally.
Like I said, I’m not an expert. However, I do remember reading an article on rape, and it included a segment on pedophilia. And what it said was that unlike rape, where rape is generally about power and control over the victim, pedophilia is generally about sex. The molestor isn’t trying to control his or her victim – it’s about gratifying their sexual desires, rather than humiliation, or harm. (NOT saying that might not be a part of it, but it seems that’s not the main criteria)
This arrest may be a mistake. The law may end up getting declared unconstitutional when it could have been used for legitimate issues.
I think the basis of the charges is that it actually depicts children involved in sexual acts, which goes beyond just describing hypothetical tips for adults who might be hypothetical child rapists. Whether through illustrations or textual descriptions I don’ t know, but if these depictions were graphic enough to titillate a child molester then how would that be different from other forms of child porn? Short of that though, if the stated premise of the book were true it should be protected under free speech, much as a possible future book “101 Ways to Kill a Pedophile” should also be protected.
Say that you have a genetic inability akin to prosopagnosia, where you can’t recognize the age of the person you are interacting with. You meet a girl, talk, seem to get along, go to bed together, and have sex. This happens many times in your life with many different women, each of whom is of indeterminate age. Did you rape all those who were under the age of 18?
Look, Dio, I think you’re overanalzying it. The point is they have a mental impulse telling them to do something that’s horrible and illegal, and they can’t shut it off. If you don’t think that a person with such a condition doesn’t deserve some pity, then I don’t know what to say.
Absolutely.
How does it deserve any more pity than a desire to rape adult women?
Then I’d say that your definition of rape doesn’t mean what anyone else on the planet thinks it to mean. I’ll grant that your definition is more likely to match a legal definition, but I wouldn’t expect to be able to convince anyone that we should all start using the word according to legalities instead of using it according to general English parlance.
Unless force or underhandedness was involved, it’s not rape.
Check your local statutes.
Rape is sex without consent. All sex with children is sex withoiut consent.
And just to be clear we ARE talking about actual pedophilia here - sex with prepubescent children, not teenagers. If your hypothetical person can’t tell the difference between a 10 year old and a 30 year old (which I don’t buy for a second), then he shouldn’t be sticking his dick in anything until he knows exactly what he’s sticking it in.
That’s a legal definition, which has nothing to do with what anyone on the planet thinks the word means until they are actually in a courthouse.
I wasn’t making a point. I was clarifying whether you were insane and somehow believed that all people who have sex with children do so using force/underhandedness, or if you were using the word in the legal sense. Most people on the board know you well enough to presume insanity, but I figured to give you the benefit of the doubt.
But I will note that even using the technical, up-to-date legal doctrine that a person under the age of 18 can’t “consent”; to the guy who has a primal urge to mate with young children, he’s liable to take the child’s seeming consent as being being just that, regardless of legal philosophies that say otherwise. He’ll convince himself that the child knows her own mind, likes him, and that they’re just the equivalent of a boyfriend and girlfriend. And just the same in 1800, gay men probably convinced themselves that they were just the equivalent of boyfriend and girlfriend and proceeded to have sex. Today we say it’s patent nonsense that a child can consent. In 1800 we would have said that it’s patent nonsense that God won’t damn you to Hell for sticking your penis up another man’s pooper.
Ultimately, it’s a given that where people have a primal urge to do something that society forbids, some percentage are going to give in to their urges. You can’t just say that they should be able to intellectually understand that they aren’t supposed to do X and so never do X, no matter what. Some people just can’t convince themselves that the rest of society are in the right when sexual needs start to come into play. And given that in 1800, it was probably perfectly legal for a respectable man to use force to procure sex with prepubescent girls, there’s also a case to be made that society’s rules maybe aren’t always in the right. A 15 year old is probably really too immature to be having sex with 30 year old men, but is the girl really very likely to suffer any particular issues later in life because of it? Probably not, and yet it’s illegal. Realistically speaking, I don’t even know what percentage of prepubescent children who experienced sex actually develop any issues, let alone if we only consider cases where force wasn’t used. I suspect that it’s a fairly high percentage who do, and yet most of that might be due to social stigma. E.g. the child later learns that the pleasant squishy thing they did with their dad when they were young was actually “rape”, and suddenly they realize that they were being taken advantage of this whole time and can’t trust their own parents – but that’s only because society doesn’t allow any definition of sex where it isn’t taking advantage of the child. If society considered sex to be equivalent to hugging and kissing – something pleasant and friendly, but not really meaningful otherwise – there would be no way to abuse your partner, regardless of their relative age or relationship. One child would say that her dad did that warm squishy thing, the other child would say, “Oh yeah, mine too!” And they’d both go on thinking everything was right in the world. Ultimately, I’m not certain that society has bothered to study the topic well enough that we can say that the current laws and moral codes match real-world necessities.
Personally, I wouldn’t advocate any changes to the laws or moral code that we have in place right now, but simply calling every pedophile a want-to-be rapist is mental laziness. Some percentage of them probably just want love from the person they happen to be attracted to. Others are just sick bastards who know that children are easy targets.
All sex with prepubescent children is rape. All sexual attraction to children is an urge to rape. I don’t see how it can be defined any other way. They know that sex with children hurts them. Therefore, they want to hurt children. How can that even be argued with? Their urges are urges to violence.
Why do you have to be so completely black and white in everything you say? Can you not for one moment entertain a viewpoint that is even slightly different to yours?
Okay, let’s try another tack here. Yes, sex with children (i.e. prepubescents) is always going to be rape, because they legally cannot consent. However children don’t know that sexual activity is supposed to be off limits to them until someone tells them otherwise, hence why they do things like play doctor, kiss and masturbate together/each other (it happens, don’t try and claim it doesn’t).
From what I have read about paedophiles most of them don’t want to penetrate chidlren, they want to cuddle them, kiss them, engage in sexual frottage and masturbation and oral etc. Again, doing this is clearly rape in the legal sense, but I can conceptualise lots of situations in which an adult created an environment in which this kind of activity happens and the children could think “this is kind of fun, I didn’t know my weiner could do any of this”. These cases are miniscule compared to the number where the child is probably more likely thinking “this is horrible and I want to leave” but can’t because they’re a child with an adult, who is most likely closely related to them or in a position of authority over them (statistically speaking).
So whilst I’m not arguing with you that sexual contact with children is rape by definition, it’s not the same as a man going out with the intention of raping an adult woman who *knows *what sex is and *doesn’t *consent, and makes her have sex with him anyway. That to me is a more grievous rape than doing something innocuous with a child. Yes the child will potentially be affected but I can’t help but wonder if it doesn’t help that kids who end up having sexual contact with adults are pretty much bombarded with the message that they’re the victim of the most heinous crime imaginable to humanity for years on end. The advice on dealing with victims of molestation I’ve read has been to keep the attention to the crime proportionate, to make it clear to the child they did nothing wrong and that they are loved and no different to who they were because of this, and let the child lead those around them in deciding on how much of a problem it is. Sobbing in front of your child perpetually “I can’t believe I let my child be raaaaaaaaaaaaaaped” probably doesn’t help them even if it might feel cathartic to the parent, and likewise getting together a vigilante mob together to break the dudes kneecaps is going to make any difference either.
Okay I’m starting to ramble here, so my point really is that your simplistic “any and all sexual contact with children is rape and even thinking about it is pretty much a crime in itself” doesn’t help anyone, and if anything you’re simply impeding an attempt to have a rational discussion about what to do with actual cases of child molestation by continually wheeling out your black and white moral understanding of the subject.
I’m not trying to downplay how serious child rape/molestation/sexual abuse is, but I think there has to be some kind of perspective when looking at cases that is more sophisticated than rape/not rape and into degrees of just how damaging and unpleasant it might have been for the sake of trying to help the victim. In your case **Dio **I get the sense that your position is driven more by a sense of wanting to be morally righteous on the subject, which really is precious little help to anyone.
Gay sex sends your partner to Hell.
I really, seriously hope that you’re sort of joking and that I’m just not hearing that huge “whoosh” here :eek:
I’m no expert, and this is most probably anecdotal, but I’ve never heard of any child molestation victim describe any pleasant “squishy” thing they did. Now, unpleasant, icky squishy things, those I’ve heard about.
As recounted later? Or at the time of the event?
It’s worth noting that it’s quite likely that a higher percentage of offenders (as compared to the general populace) were themselves “victims of molestation”, and seem to describe their adopting the habit as something like “sharing the gift” or as regaining an experience that they’d long-since lost. That makes it seem unlikely that they didn’t have some pleasurable experiences (as they understood it).
And, of course, remember that like 90% of offenders aren’t pedophiles. Most cases of sex with prepubescents is by sociopaths looking for an easy target to use for sexual purposes. Children are nice because they’re weak, they accept you as an authority figure, and they assume that you know more about the world than they do and they can take your word on whatever it is that you’re telling them. Adult women are much more difficult targets, and adult men even harder (due to size and musculature). There aren’t that many mentally handicapped people around, and you can’t trust that they won’t squeal to someone. Physically handicapped people are probably better targets than a healthy adult woman, but you still have to worry about them talking with other people. But really, that’s all the sociopath is thinking about, not physical attraction. And nor is he thinking about -trying- to make it a pleasurable experience for his partner, so in most of those 90% of cases, no, it’s not going to be a pleasurable experience most likely.