pennylane, all we can know is what he told us before the thread was deleted. In that thread he said that he has never acted on his fantasies, he doesn’t believe there is an age “limit” (as in, too young), he has had relationships with adult women, he’s exclusively attracted to females, and there’s a difference between him and “bastards that rape children”.
As others have pointed out in this thread though, some of his wording was a little ambiguous and it gave the impression that he had acted on it, though he was still “different” from the “bastards that rape children.”
Maybe he thinks he’s different because he only believes in consensual sex with children. Which in my mind, doesn’t make him all that much different. Thanks for the clarification, pepperlandgirl. Still sounds a bit bizarre, but I think I have a better idea of what was said.
Thanks for the links, TubaDiva, I’ll take a look at them.
bdgr, I’m skeptical that the rate is 100%. The quotes TubaDiva posted in this thread stated that the rate is significantly higher than for other types of criminals, but still quite a bit less 100%.
Let me just add that whole thing made me very uneasy, and I was wondering if anyone else who read the post felt like they’d slowed down to gawk at a horrible car accident.
There was something about the thread that made me think, This must be like what watching a snuff film is like.
Or a Faces of Death video.
I sure as hell felt dirty. And I think it was the very quality of “By reading this, I am, to whatever degree, lending these beliefs some credibility.”
Badtz Maru, the guy squirmed a lot when directly asked about ages. Right before the thread closed, Qagdop MD asked the pedophile straight up the same question you just posited. Earlier in the thread, the pedophile did say (as some will remember) something to the effect of “he would be comfortable in a society that set a legal age of sexual consent at six years of age.”
Please close this one too!
I didn’t mean to cause a big flap, but merely give my opinion on why the thread has remained open. I don’t have any desire to see posters take pot shots at one another, or cause pain to previous victims of sexual assaults. Neither do I want to see posters I respect inadvertently offend the Mods.
I still stand behind my assertions for why the thread should have remained open, however in the interest of civility, I request that you also lock this thread.
Yuck. I missed that delightful lil comment.
[comic book guy]There is no emoticon for what I am feeling now.[/comic book guy]
I thoroughly disagree with this. By that belief no one should ever read Mein Kampf again.
I’ve read thousands of case studies, interviews with rapists and pedophiles. It, in no way, makes me believe or condone what they do.
jarbaby
I didn’t see the thread. Whilst I can see pldennison’s point that such discussions should be possible, I don’t think they are here for a number of reasons that others have already stated. So I have no problem on balance with the thread being closed. Nor do I have a problem with moderators failing to post reasons cabable of withstanding the most intense of abstract scrutiny.
However, I do think that Tuba’s swipe at phil is a problem. I guess it was made in haste and in less than reasoned anger, as a number of things around here have in the past fortnight. But I’d really like to see it withdrawn. pldennsion is not deserving of it. I disagree with him on occasion, and he’s a tad curmudgeonly here and there. But I can’t see how his sincerity in this matter - misguided or not - could be doubted. His track record is too long and too consistent.
It was not directly personally at you, Phil, and was not in any way meant to imply anything. I’m sorry if you took it as such.
I was horrified and greatly upset by what I saw yesterday and some of the posts I made were colored by those emotions. As someone who has seen at very close view how sexual predators can hurt children perhaps I have a quicker and more visceral reaction to seeing this sort of thing in action. We’ve also had a few of these incidents in the news here lately, including one where a young man killed a child during a rape. You can’t take all this in without being affected.
That doesn’t make losing my temper right – that was wrong and I apologize for that – all I can do is apologize for my missteps and endeavor to do better.
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
I, for one, am grateful to Czarcasm and TubaDiva for closing the thread in question. Giving a monster (yes, pedophiles are monsters) a forum to explain his actions and to offer self-justifications for his evil is wrong. Period.
Hsving that thread open was not “fighting evil,” it was giving legitimacy to something foul.
IMO, any person who feels the desire to harm a child should, as Dennis Miller put it, take one for the team and commit suicide before he contaminates a young life forever with his sickness.
STOID –
I think it is stupid verging on moronic to conclude that a person with admitted criminal tendencies, not to mention desires he knows are offensive to most of society, would not lie about whether or not he’s acted on those desires.
Spare me. :rolleyes:
Jarbabyj:
I never said that reading that thread makes you sympathetic to child rapists.
I said reading it made me uneasy.
And I don’t imagine that reading Mein Kampf or the case history of a rapist or molester gives you a warm or fuzzy feeling, either.
That’s all.
Please don’t extend the remark to lengths it was never intended to go.
85% of the stuff I read on SDMB doesn’t give me a warm, fuzzy feeling. Just because something is unsettling doesn’t mean we shouldn’t read it.
But upon rereading your comment, I see that you were attributing the feeling of accomplice to yourself and not everyone. So I apologize.
I debated for a while about posting to this thread. I read the thread in question in its entirety, and even posted to it. I felt it had potential for interesting and rational discussion. I also felt it had even more potential for trouble. I felt it was tipping towards the latter when the Op’er started citing various societies where child-adult sex was presumably not a problem (polynesia, to be specific). I was about to launch into my refutation of the myth of innocent and consequence-free child/adult sexual relationships in Samoa and elsewhere when the thread was locked, then vanished.
Overall, I was a bit sorry to see the thread go prematurely. (One definition of premature: before I got to say what I wanted to!) But the thread was already dividing itself into camps which would have spelt its demise anyway; one referring to the poster as an irredeemable monster, one hypothesizing situations where the child-adult sexual relationship would not be bad. Thus any legitimate discussion would most likely have been drowned out.
I had hoped to hear more from this (hypothetical) individual who stated he had pedophilic urges, but had not acted on them. I’ve encountered patients before who’d claimed the same restraint. But there are other legitimate places for me to get this type of info.
QtM
Sigh.
C/M are NOT “untreatable”. The data I’ve seen (over a period of years) shows a lesser than average recidivism rate for molesters, and that treatment increases the chance of low(er - est) recidivism.
links in
most recently here
here
I don’t doubt it, and that’s what drives me NUTS about this.
There seems to be this assumption that if one is sexually attracted to children, that this takes over one’s life and character and transforms one into a lawless, heartless monster. Which is, in a word, ** bullshit. ** Lots of people have lots of sick, kinky, strange sexual thoughts and feelings. And lots of those people ** never do a single thing about it. ** Depending on how disturbing it is, they may never even be able to say it out loud in a room containing no one but themselves.
This assumption that if someone has these thoughts and feelings, that all kinds of other evil follows is just fucking ludicrous, and it grinds my ass.
Because here’s the fact: * no one has control over what turns them on. * No one. So perfectly good, kind, nice, loving, thoughtful people may have really horrifying sexual thoughts. * That they have no control over. * But because they are in fact, good persons, they DO have control over their * behavior *, and they * exercise it. *
Dammit.
And if anyone comes along to tell me that good, loving, kind people would never have these kinds of feelings, please don’t bother, because you are wrong. We are not defined as people by the things which make our sexy bits swell up. ** Thoughts do not constitute crimes. **
stoid
You mised the point that the OP made in that thread that he ws not ashamed and that he hadn’t acted only because he hadn’t the opportunity to find a willing child, as if that made it better.
Sure, decent people may have horrifying sexual thoughts, but, being decent people, they either seek professional help or they repress those urges. THEY DO NOT BRAG ABOUT WANTING TO HAVE SEX WITH CHILDREN ON A PUBLIC MESSAGE BOARD.
Wring: I’m not saying it is not there, but those are lengthy discussions; could you point out specifically [preferably something with a cite] what it was you were drawing attention too? My understanding is that recidivism is indeed high.
From the Gale Encyclopedia of Psychology:
Only castration resulted in what could be called a sizeable reduction in recidivism:
Please note the agreement of the large rates of recidivism for those who did not undergo this radical treatment.
Well this is ridiculous. What’s the point of any of us being here, then? I’m not gay, Eve isn’t an historian, and you’re not a lawyer. Never mind that we have interesting discussions - everybody go home now.
Esprix