So the child rapist had best kill the kid to get rid of the only witness?
With this I agree. Though my gut tells me that all child rapists – hell, all violent rapists – should be decapitated and their heads stuck on pikes, my head replies that you’ll just be causing more rape-murders. I’m against that.
Wouldn’t they do that now if they thought they wouldn’t get away with it?
I see the problem here. I think they should be incarcerated for life, to protect society. I don’t generally believe in the concept of punishing criminals because it doesn’t work. I have no problem with the colony concept for those convicted. I just don’t think you’d get volunteers.
The OP starts with the idea that this desire is inborn; I think it would take a lot more studies for us to be able to say that.
In any case, just because something is inborn doesn’t mean people can’t learn to work against it. There are much worse ‘disabilities’ that people manage to cope with, usually with society’s help.
What could help? Fake child porn is certainly worth a try, isn’t it? Would it put all peadophiles off? Maybe not. Some? Probably.
It would also help a hell of a lot if there were somewhat less demonisation of people who think they might be paedophiles. They should be able to have somewhere to go for advice and help and therapy, for free, without any repercussions. Your kids won;t get taken away, you won’t lose your Scout leadership role, you won’t be hounded from your home. You haven’t done anything, and you’re taking steps to make sure you never will.
As it is, I bet they’re all terrified that they’ll be outed as soon as they admit it to anyone. Who does that leave as a support group? Paedophiles who are actually abusing children. It’s like sending meth addicts into a room full of dealers.
How this could be done practically is difficult. Any govt. that decided to set up a system whereby people could call up or go online and talk about their problem would be villified. There’d be a really high chance that someone would leak the details of anyone who took up the services. But it seems to me that it’s the best method of helping people who aren’t abusing children yet.
It only really deals with people who haven’t actually abused children yet, but reducing the network of supportive people would make it much more difficult for active paedophiles to carry on.
Someone else is eventually going to bring up the ‘paedophilia is the same as homosexuality’ argument soon. Someone who I’d never suspected of being so uninformed did that on another thread just the other day. So I’ll get in there first - it’s not the same because a) sexuality is about more than just sexual attraction and b) it depends on a partner who can truly be a partner. A pre-pubescent or early teen child can’t. Saying paedophilia is inborn is kinda like saying wanting to rape is inborn.
If anyone does think that wanting to rape is inborn, then they can argue for that, but not to the extent that the rapists should get away with it. Anyway, thinking about rape is condonable - it’s doing it that’s the bad thing.
Hell, I’m gay, and if I knew that I could only have sex with the gender of my choice when they were unable to consent, I’d be able to hold back.
WRT the age of consent: many countries have varying ages of consent, (usually within 2-4 years above a certain age), so that an 18-year-old having sex with a consenting 17-year-old would never be convicted of sex offence. I appreciate that such convictions are still rare in real life, but it is better if such a charge is never on the books. It also makes it clearer when it comes to sex with older teenagers - that it’s about exploitation and inequality rather than just sex.
Puberty is not a straight marker for whether the young person can fully consent to sex, because the visual signs of puberty don’t necessarily tell us whether the brain has gone through all the significant changes that puberty brings about - there are huge and measurable changes to the connections to the frontal lobe, for example; they tend to happen later than outward physical changes.
(I can’t link to any cites on this computer, btw - it’s a borrowed one that crashes if it has more than one tab open).
There actually is a good argument for linking a person who wants sex with a person who is too young and a homosexual. Neither one is a choice. It is who you are and how you were born. Both can have terrible consequences if acted upon. in large parts of America, we are far more accepting about homosexuality. But that is not true everywhere. And not long ago it was a dangerous problem with severe consequences. I suppose their is plenty of anguish growing up with a desire outside of societies norms.
If you want to discuss the victims of a person who wants youngsters, that is another discussion. They are not mature enough and may well suffer damage in an encounter.
But when you deal with the potential pederast and a gay, there are valid comparisons.
What? No. A person who wants consensual sex with another person of the same sex cannot be “linked” to a person who wants sex with a person too young to consent to it.
Did you actually read all of what he wrote? It dosn;t seem as though you did. He is saying they are alike because neither is a choice. To blame a person for being attracted to children would be the same as blaming a person for being attracted to there own gender.
Media mass hysteria aside…is pedophilia really such a major problem? Do we have any idea of the extent of it and if the problem is getting better or worse?
On a similar note, a century ago statutory rape/age of consent only applied to girls. If a man had sex with a young boy, that would be sodomy, but it wasn’t distinguished from sodomy between two adult men. (A woman having sex with a boy was legal.) And the age of consent used to be 12, at least most commonly. Not particularly relevant, but it’s interesting how society changes how it views these things.
Much of this change, I imagine, (also accounting for why we have an age of consent very divergent from the age of physical sexual characteristics appearing) is due to our increased understanding of the practically-unique way humans develop–the latest studies are showing that humans don’t reach full mental maturity until their early 20s, and as we are intelligent and have emotional and intellectual reactions to sexual activity, it makes sense to take that into account. Further, because of our (again, so far as I know uniquely) large craniums even as infants, immediately post-pubescent but not fully-grown women are at a significantly higher risk of pregnancy complications.
There’s a lot of biology that I’m given to understand is pretty unique to humans.
Except that, like I said, paedophilia depends on attraction to someone who can’t consent. That is a HUGE difference.
You keep stating that ‘paedophilia is inborn’ as if it were a fact; you should provide a cite for that. Hell, there’s not even proof that homosexuality is inborn, although it seems likely.
Whether pedophilia is inborn or whether it develops some other way, it seems indisputably permanent. It can’t just be made to go away. So, taking into consideration the fact that pedophiles are who they are, and cannot change their attraction to children, what do we do?
Interesting ideas, but, of course, the devil is in the details. What about people who are not actually inclined to sexual crimes trying to get in to the colony, perhaps because they believe that the culture there would be more accepting of them, because they believe that the job prospects are better there (e.g. hey, I’m a <profession>, and there are not many pedophile <professions>, so I could really clean up and make a good living with little competition), or because a close friend or family member lives in the colony?
For those who elected to enter the colony voluntarily (before being ordered into it as a consequence of a conviction), can they just leave at will, or do they need to see a therapist to determine if they are “dangerous”?
How to articualte this, b/c this is a very tough topic. …But it does seem that a lot of pedophiles are almost …Asperger’s Syndrome-y. Like very socially and emotionally stunted, and they ALSO tend to have a fixtation on kids…which they then mistake for love. I wonder if medication to deal with obessive complusive thoughts might help. I think too that a lot of the ones who were molested are trying to “heal” b/c they think by reenacting the abuse, they will be able to heal.
That’s all true, but I think that the change is due more to the changing roles people have in society. Once upon a time, most 13- or 14-year-old girls knew everything they needed to know to be a good wife and mother–they could cook and clean and take care of children and milk cows and sew stuff.
Today, though, not many of the girls of that age could make regular mortgage payments or choose a supplemental insurance plan or balance the stresses of both motherhood and career.
Times have changed and our roles in society have changed with them. It is no surprise that the rules and norms of that society have also changed.
Probably off-topic:
When we’re searching for mating partners, I wonder how much of our decision is based on primal physical characteristics and how much of it is based on modern societal norms. Do we have a mental checklist we unconsciously go through whenever we encounter a member of the opposite sex?
For a guy, it might be:
Is that female physically able to have sex with me? Check.
Does she have good child-bearing hips? Check.
Nice full lips, indicating fertility? Check.
Can she drive a minivan to soccer practice? No. Oh… she’s still a baby, then. Moving on…
I think there are a number of sexual attraction patterns that appear in us humans and, as far as we know, other species as well. These include heterosexuality, homosexuality, pedophilia, necrophilia, sadism, masochism, and others. They seem to be innate by the time people are expressing them, and don’t seem to be elective or amenable to intentional alteration. I can’t abide hating people just for the attractions they feel, even if I don’t feel them. I don’t like licorice, but can’t hate people who do just because they do.
We’re weird about them all, except the ones that are so common and apparent that we get accustomed to it. Heterosexuality has been there for a while (though there are plenty of examples of it not being fully embraced as acceptable). Homosexuality is there, too, for most of us anyway. The others are mostly unacceptable to most people, but enjoy acceptance in limited communities.
There is a whole other question as to whether expressing a particular attraction pattern through shared physical activity is good or not. Pedophilia is a bad thing to express because informed consent just can’t happen for prepubescent children. The bad things about expressing pedophilia through shared physical activity overwhelmingly outweigh the satisfaction this may bring the pedophile.
I think the top priority for handling active pedophiles should be protecting children, probably through incarceration, but I can’t see vigorous punishment of pedophiles, unless their activity seems to incorporate an intention to do harm per se (as opposed to an intention to have sex with children for the sake of the sex without relishing the harm). For one thing, having sex with children seems to me so repulsive it’s hard to imagine a punishment that would feel worse than the crime does. Comfortable and productive incarceration seems perfectly appropriate to me. If it can be sufficiently comfortable that its disadvantages from the point of view of the pedophile are less onerous than the burden of suppressing one’s urges and keeping one’s dark secret, so that voluntary incarceration is attractive, so much the better. Better for pedophiles, sure, but most important, better for the children saved.
These are complicated things to work through. I hope the gradual progression of human understanding and sophistication can deliver us less conflicted approaches to dealing with them.
I think that’s the key: look all you want, but don’t touch. It’s the people who don’t have the self-control to keep their hands off that are the issue.
We have something of a ghettoization of convicted child molesters going on right now. Kentucky law stipulates that convicted child sex offenders stay/live 1000 feet away from schools, playgrounds, parks or other places where children may be present. That has lead to very few housing options in Metro Louisville, and unofficial steering of offenders to specific apartment complexes that fit the distance requirements of the law. This was brought out in the news recently, with some hand-wringing over the geographic concentration of sex offenders. To my knowledge, there haven’t been any problems, and the offenders are free to come and go as they please.
There was also the case of Cecil New, who kidnapped, molested and then killed Ivan Cano. Cano’s body was found in a garbage truck, and eventually New was charged with several crimes. New plead guilty, and during the sentencing phase, it was brought out that New and his siblings were physically and sexually abused at home. It was also noted in court that New would step in and receive physical abuse meant for another sibling.
Here we have a case of a sexual offender who was himself a victim and admitted responsibility for his crime. In the public’s eye, he was lumped in with others, including several Roman Catholic priests convicted locally of child sexual abuse. Yet amid all of the public hysteria and calls for his castration, lynching or death, there was no way to discuss the fact that New was a victim as well. There was no legal means of recognizing that New, as a child, was horrifically treated while at the same time holding him accountable for his own horrific treatment of Ivan. Any kind of rational discussion about New’s circumstances was impossible because of our current attitude regarding children, sex and the nature of sexual deviancy.
New was both victim and perpetrator, which evoked conflicting, if not contradictory feelings that few people were willing to face and discuss. It highlighted to me how dysfunctional we are regarding our sexuality and the disconnect between our policies and the desire to protect our children. Everyone was all for finding justice for Ivan’s abuse and death, but no one seemed interested in what Cecil went through at that age. Nor was there any expressed interest in preventing another victim/perpetrator like Cecil New from occurring, and in a city the size of Metro Louisville, I’m sure that that is happening as I write.
Damn right I’m not interested. The man murdered a four-year-old child.
The judge at the trial seems to agree. (YouTube link)
Yes. We call it “marriage.”
(Thanks, I’ll be here all week! Tip your waiterfolk they’re working hard … and try the veal!)