Yeah, but there’s always hope of getting a girl. And even if you can’t you’ve got options. you’ve got porn, which is (mostly) legal, and prostitution, which isn’t legal, but isn’t a huge crime among adults. The pedophile doesn’t have these outlets. Even his porn is reprehensible and illegal with pretty strict penalties.
That said, I think there probably are paedos who don’t act on their urges, not even to the extent of getting porn. But we’re not going to know a lot about them, because they’re not going to talk about it publicly.
First answer is that some (few) people do go out and rape someone. Second answer is that as a (somewhat–at age 70) active heterosexual, I have many perfectly legal (and slightly illegal) ways of getting my sexual kicks; a pedophile has none. I am sure that many manage to control themselves, even get married, father kids (are there pedophile women?), and lead relatively normal lives. Pedophiles have no legitimate outlet for their sexual desires.
I also question what a psychiatrist or psychologist could do. On this point, I would be happy to be proved wrong.
That’s an excellent point. There really isn’t much they can do to release their urges. Congress has even tried to make it illegal to have drawings, computer images, or photos that look like child porn.
Since child porn is illegal, though (and since simulated images, while i think still legal, are likely to raise a stink), perhaps we could get some rough idea by comparing the number of people known to have molested children with the number of people we know did have porn but who never approached a child.
Really though, it seems like someone ought to have done an actual study on this. With all the sex surveys like Kinsey and Masters & Johnson, didn’t anyone ask if the subjects want to diddle kids? It would be hard to get good results, but not harder than some of the other things that have been studied, like bestiality.
All serious studies that I have ever read about indicate that pedophilia is a very common. I’ll look up the DSM IV figure later. I’ve heard it been said that “everybody knows a pedophile”. Pedophilia also occurs in women. I’m not a clinician, but my guess would be that the vast majority of all pedophiles suffer from massive ego dystonia over their sexual orientation, and do everything in their power to suppress intrusive thoughts involving sex with children. My guess would be that pedophiles only act upon their inclinations when their desires are superimposed on a lack of a properly developed superego, such as would occur in antisocial personality disorder. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that pedophiles who do not act on their desires have an extremely high rate of substance abuse problems.
The show you’re refering to is the Steve Wilkos show in case anybody is intrested. He used to be the Bald headed security guy on the Jerry Springer show.
I was going to watch that episode but his constant “I’m gonna kick your ass!” vibe grates my nerves to no end.
Me too.
The pedophile’s name is Keith something. I must say, it had to take something to go on the show and admit to what he did. He did not evade questions nor did he try to excuse his actions. He did turn himself in, though the host tried his best to get full credit for that by acting as you stated. A written statement at the end said something about him being released, but I didn’t find more about that.
We need to try to stop holding our noses and confront the problem head on, before kids get hurt, if possible.
