Did some research and it depends on several factors:
An ephebophile is someone who is attracted primarily or exclusively to post-pubescant teenagers (i.e. past the onset of puberty but barely and probably not fully grown) may or may not be attracted to the same gender in their adult sex drive. It seems to be tied into the sexual maturity level (regardless of age) of the object of their attraction as well.
Someone who is attracted to adult men AND to 16 year old boys is gay but not an ephebophile because the adolescence is not a requirement of their lust- it’s just that some 16 year olds are more sexually mature than others, and said person (who I’ll just call “a dirty old man”) is straight then he’ll be attracted to 25 year old women and also the occasional 16 year old girl.
In short I’m a bit confused. Apparently ephebophilia is not somebody who finds the occasional underage person desirable (which is just about all of us [not saying all of us would pursue, just most people would be turned on by a physically mature and good looking 16 year old]) but somebody who is almost unattracted to anybody over puberty and if they’re interested in a 16 year old it’s likely to be one on the sexually immature side. In short I’m a bit confused by the various definitions.
I agree that normal homosexual males are more likely to feel attraction to 16-year-old boys than normal heterosexual males are (and vice versa for attraction to 16-year-old females). But AFAICT homosexual males are not actually more likely to molest underage males than heterosexual males are.
In short, there seems to be something about the impulse to sexually abuse minors that’s somehow orthogonal to the abuser’s adult-focused sexual orientation. The extent to which adolescent boys are sexually abused by their own fathers :eek: is an illustration of this.
I also was curious–why are there so many more male victims than female? In general in terms of child sexual abuse, isn’t abuse of girls much, much more common?
This article notes that the percentage of girl victims of sexual abuse by priests may be significantly underreported, but I think the predominance of male victims is mostly because of the much larger role in Church activities traditionally reserved for boys rather than girls.
The only difference between the Catholic Church and most other churches is that the Catholic Church has a hierarchy that controls who works where. Hence, if a priest molests a 14 year old boy, he answers to a bishop who may answer to another bishop, who may ultimately answer to Rome. Far too often, bishops have paid hush money and then re-assigned guilty priests to other parishes.
Does that happen with, say, Baptist churches? Yes and no. If the youth minister at a Baptist megachurch is found to be messing around with teenage boys, he doesn’t have to answer to a bishop. He answers to the church’s board of elders. What will they do? Most likely, the elders will want to avoid embarrassment and scandal, just as Catholic bishops do. So, they’ll ask him to resign quietly, and even give him a decent (though not glowing) letter of recommendation. He’ll move on to another job at another church, and the affair will be kept as hushed up as possible.
The gym teacher that I had (Jr. Highschool) did exactly that. He was caught, confessed, and the school fired him. They did however, provide him with references, so that he was able to get another teaching job in another state-where he promptly started trolling for more victims! :mad: