Not sure if this topic is “hot” enough: This might belong more in the “General Question” section, but I figure, better safe than sorry.
Now I realize that it’s hard to know this, but what do you think is the prevalence of pedophilia in the general population?
With every day yielding multiple stories of someone being revealed to be a pedophile, one gets the impression that there might well be far more of them out there than we’ve ever known before.
Yes, I realize that “anecdote is not the singular of research” and the news often gives a false impression by focusing on the unusual and making it seem commonplace. But the news coverage is only part of what has lead me to wonder about this subject.
The way I see it, pedophilia is a communicable disease. If someone is the victim of childhood sexual abuse, they are far, far more likely to become a pedophile themselves. I won’t go into the details as to why, but trust me, this is born out by the statistics.
So pedophilia spreads. And a single pedophile can molest many children during his or her lifetime, so even given that not every molested child grows up to be a pedophile, it’s not hard to imagine that the number of pedophiles could very well be growing over successive generations. This is especially true given that there’s a lot of pedophiles who were never molested, who simply occur spontaneously in the population and then begin to spread the meme.
So I worry about this. What if in a few generations, they’re the majority?
So what do you think, Teemers? Is this something to worry about, or am I just making up problems for myself?
Okay well let’s take the “one a day” number. I presume that to mean within the United States.
Currently, approximately 4,000,000 babies are born each year in the US (according to a quicky google.) That’s roughly 11,000 babies a day.
So, roughly one out of every 11,000 people is a pedophile.
To compare this, roughly 1.3 million out of 300 million people in the US is legally blind. That’s one in every 230.
So you’re 48 times more likely to meet someone who is legally blind than someone who is a pedophile.
How many blind people do you know?
And this is all assuming that there actually is a new pedophile found each day. Probably that’s really like one a week. True, probably only like a fourth of pedophiles are discovered, but that still halves our above estimate.
So ultimately, you’ll do better to live in fear of your toddler being knocked over by a blind person, breaking her neck, than that she will be snatched by a pedophile.
Since you were wavering on which Forum to post to, I just want to congratulate you on making the correct choice. The problem is not that the topic is too “hot” for GQ- we can certainly have a fully GQ-appropriate discussion of pedophilia.
No, it’s the “trust me” angle that keeps this out of GQ. Bastards in GQ like cites.
Well, for starters, we’re finding more than one pedophile a day. And those are just the ones we find. Considering that being a pedophile is about the worst thing a person could possibly be in society today, I think it’s safe to assume that the “Cockroach Rule” applies here, namely that for every one you find, there’s many you did not.
Now, about worrying about your toddler : most molestations, the vast vast majority, are not the result of a random snatching. So you’re right, that’s not something you should worry about. Most crime, especially random, untargeted violent crime, is extraordinarily rare. Accidents are far more likely.
I think Michael is right; there must be many more paedophiles than we realise. He hasn’t even taken into account the fact that these days, with cosmetic surgery becoming the norm rather than the exception, there are some damn sexy babies out there.
There ought to be a distinction made between a paedophile and an ephebophile, because a lot of people seem to brand a person who does naughty things with a 15 year old a paedophile, when technically that’s not true.
It’s certainly illegal, arguably immoral, and it’s true that 15yrs is legally considered to be still a child, but sexual attraction to an adolescent is not paedophilia.
Quoting to get another appearance of the word “ephebophile” into the Thread.
Although with sex laws varying from state to state there are some laws that do distinguish between sex with a (physically) sexually mature minor vs. sex acts perpetrated upon a prepubescent child, there is still a tendency to discuss all sex acts between adults and minors as if all cases can equally be described as pedophilia.
Not really possible to have a functioning discussion of pedophilia unless a distinction is made between pedophilia and ephebophilia.
I also think it may be worth distinguishing between “child molester” and any kind of -phile, pedo or ephebo. When I have heard of cases of this from people I knew personally, it generally wasn’t an adult who had a preference for children. It was a situation where an adult who generally had sex with adults but also had a lot of psychological problems got their boundaries completely screwed up and initiated sex with a kid. One example, a woman whose father started having sex with her when she was twelve after her parents divorced. He didn’t have any general “preference” for twelve year olds, he just took what was there. I suspect that when you hear about “convicted of child sex offense,” there is a lot of that in there.
So are you implying that pedophiles who act on their impulses create more pedophiles? Do you have anything to substantiate this claim, if that is indeed what you meant?
You hear more about pedophilia now, and it is a good thing. Not the pedophilia, but the fact it’s out in the open.
How many people growing up in the twentieth century had an “odd” uncle, babysitter, teacher? People didn’t talk about it, and rarely did anything about it.
Children who are victimized by child molesters have been known to victimize younger children, in a misguided attempt to gain some power over the situation. Here is a good article by child sexual abuse expert Andrew Vachss. The children’s stories will break your heart.
OK, let’s perform a math experiment. And I’ll use really stupid numbers to do it.
Let’s first assume that pedophelia didn’t exist in this world until 1607. One sorry crewman on the boat to Jamestown got hit in the head with a plank and suddenly decided to screw children.
Now let’s assume that during the course of his life he diddled five kids. The kids are now likely to become pedophiles themselves, right? Let’s assume that two turn out normally and three of them go on to commit the same act in the next generation. That next generation is 20 years away.
With me so far? So every 20 years, based on this premise of 5 kids molested, three becoming pedophiles, the population of pedophiles triples per generation. Where does that leave us?
In 1967 there would be 387,420,489 pedophiles, more than the entire population of the US. In 2007 there would be 3,486,784,401 pedophiles, or 60% of the world’s population.
OK, what if we toned it down a bit? What if three out of the five turned into pedophiles every other generation and two out of five turned into pedophiles on the other generations?
The numbers get smaller. By how much? In 2007 there would be 60,466,176 pedophiles or 20% of the US’s population.
Better hide your kids! From everyone!
Here’s another fun fact. Remember back in, what was it? 2004? When all summer long the news ran stories of shark attacks and shark fatalities. You couldn’t turn on your television that summer without hearing about another grizzly attack. You know how many fatalities in the US we’ve had this decade? Less than 15. Same as pretty much every other decade going back forever. You know the ratio of sharks we kill to sharks who kill us? About 1,000,000 to 1.
But the news was obsessed with shark attacks and people became afraid to go in the water.
I think we all need a bigger boat.
Good point by Harriet – reported “child molesters” would include not only people whose primary behavioral deviance is pedophilia (plus ephebophiles who may be only *“statutorily” * offenders), but also persons with other “issues” that lead to these sorts of antisocial behaviors.
In any case, yes, most published studies say that the “fear your toddler will be snatched by a pedophile” is misplaced, in the sense that most child molestation (and child abduction in general) arises within the immediate circle of trusted familial or social relations – because it is a crime highly dependent on access and trust both for the opportunity to begin with and for covering up in the aftermath. Besides the family’s understandable Denial Effect of expecting it to be an outsider that would do such a terrible thing, the “stranger’s van” scenario is justifiably scarier because of the potential dire consequences of an assailant with no bonds to the victim/family (Father McPheely, or Uncle Ernie, may feel you up, but at least you will get to go home at the end of the day as he expects to meet your parents for dinner on Friday. The meth-head in the parking lot, OTOH …).
Absolutely right and I think this is partially responsible for the exaggerated view people have on the frequency of pedophilia. There was a man in the town where I live about whom I was warned and told was a pedophile, who had allegedly molested his girlfriend’s small child and the only reason he wasn’t in jail was because of some loophole or another.
It turned out that the girlfriend’s child was seventeen and had accused him of making inappropriate comments, which promptly resulted in her mother dumping the man.
Child molestation is a real problem. Adults taking advantage of teenagers is a real problem. They aren’t the same problem, however, and simply referring to how frequently one hears stories about either one and using that as evidence of the frequency of pedophilia proves nothing.
If in a given week there are news stories of a 20-something teacher and a 15-year-old student, some controversy about To Catch a Predator, new statistics on the majority of teen pregnancies being fathered by adults, and a man convicted of molesting an eight-year-old, then there was only one news story about a pedophile.
I want to see evidence that kids who are sexually abused are LIKELY to become pedophiles. Certainly, those who abuse were often abused themselves, but how this gets turned into the idea that those who are abused will therefore likely abuse is beyond me, especially given how very many people also report knowing lots of women who were abused and yet so few offenders are female.
…).