In the movie Happiness, one of the characters (a middle-aged man), likes little boys, in a sexual sense.
If he had confessed to his problem to a doctor or a psychiatrist, could he have gotten some kind of treatment but NOT have his confession ruin his life? Meaning, would the doctor/shrink be obligated to reveal that information to the authorities, thus risking his children being taken away and possibly risking his career?
That’s like asking if a patient can tell a shrink he feels like killing someone without being reported to the authorities.
If, hyopthetically, a 50 year old man admits to having pedophile fantasies but has never acted on them the doctor in question may judge that there is no real risk to anyone, particuarly if this hypothetical person doesn’t work in a profession with a lot of contact with kids and goes on to explain how he keeps his urges suppressed/under control and otherwise restrains himself. Lots of people have evil fantasies, but if you never act on them you have committed no crime and aren’t supposed to be punished.
On the other hand, if this hypothetical patient has constant contact with children in the “desirable” age group as well as detailed fantasies as to how to obtain/seduce children, what he would do in detail, and perhaps keeps various paraphenalia on hand at home or wherever… well, then the risk is considerably higher, isn’t it? And I think in that case the doctor would be obligated to report a risk to the community.
The biggest problem, though, is that there is no cure for pedophillia. There isn’t even a good treatment as far as I know.
It’s not illegal to like little boys in a sexual sense. It’s only illegal to have sexual contact with little boys. If you confessed to your psychiatrist that you intended to molest a child, she or he would have to report it in order to prevent a crime. As long as you’re talking about your sexual desires and not future activities, you would be protected by the doctor patient relationship.
When they say that pedophiles can not be cured, they mean that the desire to have sex with children will never go away, not that the molester can not learn to control his behavior. There’s reason to believe that some molesters, at least, can be stopped by treatment.
Confessing a past crime might or might not get you in trouble. Maybe someone with better data on that will drop by.
To me that sounds suspiciously like “Heterosexuality cannot be cured, but there’s reasont to believe that some rapists, at least, can be stopped by treatment.”, yet are there even attempts to be made to treat one-time rapists in any sense of the word?
It may sound like that to you, but it sounds nothing like that to me. There is a significant difference between a rapist and someone who is sexually attracted to children. The big difference of course is that the rapist has already acted on his impulses, and the pedophile has not. The OP specifically referred to preemptive treatment, that is to say, treatment to prevent molestation.
And why do you think that there are no attempts to treat rapists? There are hundreds of programs intended to stop sexual volence, some in a prison setting for convicted felons, and some like this one designed to be preemptive.
Umm if you read again what I said I am comparing attraction to children to heterosexuality and child rape to hetereosexual rape.
That “molester” at the end instead of “pedophile” does kind of make it sound like that. But I think what Bill Door meant was more like “Heterosexuality cannot be cured, but there’s reason to believe that some people, at least, can learn to remain celibate.”
Ok that makes sense then. However, I think an important factor is that we have very little idea as to how many do - I’ve seen studies ranging from less than 1% of the population to up to 50% of males being attracted to children. The majority of studies are done on offenders and studies relying on self-reporting, especially when it comes to something like this, are inherently unreliable.
I’ve started a thread before about prevalence of various paraphilias and I didn’t get a definitive answer about anything, but also it’s not clear to me that there is one or can be one. Since we don’t know how sexual attraction to children affects one’s likelihood to offend in general, it’s hard to extrapolate from other data. For example, one approach would be to assume sexual attraction to children does not affect one’s likelihood of becoming a rapist and extrapolate from there - i.e. take the approximate ratio of heterosexual rapists to heteresexual individuals and use that ratio to extrapolate the number of pedophiles based on the number of pedophile rapists. Anybody up for the task?
That sounds to me like not everyone is using the same definitions. Does it count if an adult thinks that a 17 year old is hot? What about a minor being attracted to another minor? Or how about “I’ll bet (insert name of child here) will be a real hottie when he/she grows up”? Torture the definitions enough, and you can probably construe close to 100% of the population as being “attracted to children”.
Well yes, but that’s only one of numerous problems. For each definition a given study will have to apply that definition somehow as a test, in a form of a self-reported question or a physiological test to stimulus. Any self reported test also relies on you clearly communicating the question in a relatively unbiased manner.
Showing a picture of a 14 year old girl and asking men to rate attractiveness would be a very obvious faulty example especially if they are in no way expecting the person to be underage to begin with. If they are, it’s also faulty but for different reasons. It’s just a very very very hard thing to study objectively and a lot of tests that would be reasonably valid in other scientific areas will produce highly off-the-wall answers here. Nobody in our society wants to be labeled a pedophile, and that is thoroughly entrenched in a lot of aspects of our society and personalities.