For the purposes of this discussion, I’ll define the following:
Pedophile: a person who is sexually attracted to children, but has not yet acted on those urges (e.g. by molesting children or using child pornography).
**Child molester: **a pedophile who has engaged in sexual activity with children or used child pornography.
With those definitions in mind, are there professional resources available to help a pedophile who wants to avoid acting on his urges? Are doctors allowed to offer chemical (or even surgical) castration for a patient who requests it? Counseling/therapy? If a pedophile declares his urges to a doctor, does the doctor have a mandate to report this to the police? I would guess a pedophile wouldn’t be registered as a sex offender (since he/she hadn’t yet committed a sex offense), but would he/she end up on some kind of registry?
There’s a pretty good episode of L&O SVU exactly about this situation. From what I can gather, it’s still “innocent until proven guilty” therefore part of the definition of pedophilia would include an actual act first.
What muddles the issue though is that we still don’t know what causes pedophilia (among many -philas, e.g. necrophilia) therefore the shotgun method would be extremely difficult, expensive, and time consuming. It could also partly be caused by childhood traumas, where until we invent a time machine, are irreparable.
One thing I think might help is that I saw a documentary on the infamous Mustang Ranch in Nevada, where one of the prostitutes was a midget. Morally questionable, but absolutely legal. If they were available to pedophiles, and protected children, this could be a viable option.
However, one of the big issues, especially in the US, is the Puritan morality about sex. Until we get over that, we will have a hard time maturing as a culture.
To answer one of your questions, the therapist is only required to report actual deeds as confessed in therapy. Urges by themselves are not actionable by the law. (This is in California, it may vary by state.)
I don’t think it’s clear that talk therapy has a clear path to any sort of cure for pedophilia. Sexual attraction seems to be pretty well set by the time one is an adult. Voluntary castration is, I think, an unlikely alternative.
The problem is that if this is one’s only sexual fixation, how is one to find a sexual outlet? (For the record, I think the criminalizing of animated child pornography is a very questionable decision, since it is one potential outlet for which no child needs to be involved.) Also, under the influence of unsatisfied sexual desires many people are capable of great self-delusion about any actual harm done to the child victims (witness NAMBLA), so self-policing based on guilt is not a reliable preventive measure.
People can and do lead celibate lives, but the urge towards sexual activity is very strong and even among those who have made the most solemn pledges to their deity, they often fall short of their professed goal.
The only path out of this would seem to be research to find the causes of pedophilia and then those results should lead to at least potential cures or at least effective sublimation strategies. I don’t have much hope for this, at least not in this country, for it would require a generosity of spirit that is rare and a willingness to spend public funds on a project that would be distasteful if not scandalous to most people. Perhaps with private funds and performed in secret, unlikely as that all sounds.
Actually imho this is better to get them help. The pre-pedophile may not have the resources or insurance to get advanced treatment. If the government, rather than put this person in prison, uses their greater resources, this could help provide solutions for others in the future, before there is a first victim.
Because of the Puritan morality I mentioned earlier, there will never be funding to see if adult midget prostitutes can reduce the number of sex crimes on children.
The problem is that our society is more inclined to go on a witch-hunt than help people. Witness the recent thread where someone expressed the desire that Jared Fogle be beaten to death in prison by a fellow prisoner. There was the thread about Marion Zimmer Bradley where some parties argued that people should never read anything by her again and destroy her entire body of work. It’s not just about punishment anymore, it’s about unmaking and obliterating the existence of not just convicted child molesters but those accused but never brought to trial.
For such people, to whom a child molester represents and evil horror to be beaten to death and the corpse set on fire, there is no compromise. A person expressing such desires who has harmed no one but is seeking help to prevent harm would be someone to be locked up and treated as a criminal even prior to any crime taking place.
As a result, no one can study the problem. We have no idea how common or rare such impulses are in the population. We have no idea if there is a way to distinguish between those who have bad urges who can control them and those who are a real threat to others. We have no idea if some of these people have chanced upon effective ways to avoid giving into those urges that could be used by others. We have no idea if giving those with such urges an alternative outlet (like maybe, as noted, animated child porn involving absolutely no real children) could help or hurt.
No, instead we get hysteria, witch-hunts, and in some cases lives ruined by a mere accusation where no actual crime has been committed, while forcing people who are seeking help to remain in deep hiding instead. Then there is the issue of guilt-by-association that spills over to the pedophiles’ family and a bunch of other secondary effects but that would be getting off on a tangent.
in his book Journey into Darkness retired FBI agent John Douglas writes there’s nothing wrong with having the desires of a pedophile as long as you do not exploit children in any way. He considers talking to or taking photos in public of children, using them and children’s toys to masturbate acceptable.
Child pornography or Internet sites is wrong and illegal.
This. Letting ANYONE know you have pedophiliac tendencies, even in thought alone, can not only lead to severe tarring, but actual punishment of various kinds.
I honestly can’t think of any other personality disturbance that would be so reviled and so… overreacted to by almost every person and institution. Not even necrophilia, since that’s embedded in a lot of extreme fiction, metal music, etc.
If there’s not a safe place someone can get help, the problem just festers and eventually causes someone else - from child victims to family members - great harm.
Is there any precedent for such a pre-offense registry? For example, something like the following:
Hiring Manager: “I’m sorry, we cannot offer you the position of second grade teacher due to an unacceptable background check.”
Candidate: “I’ve never committed a crime against a child. In fact, I have no criminal record whatsoever.”
Hiring Manager: “That may be true, but your background check shows a diagnosis of pre-offense pedophilia in 1995. Get lost, sicko!”
I know that some jurisdictions have “child abuse registries” that do not require a criminal conviction for someone to be listed there, but typically they require that
Social Services at least make an administrative finding that an actual act of abuse was most likely committed.
I’ve done some reading in the sexual offense treatment/therapy literature, and the first thing that becomes obvious is that it is vastly different from the main body of psychological, medical, and social work literature. The social sciences, in general, treat sexual behavior as a relative thing, that is good or bad depending on the circumstances and in any case is there to be observed and researched, not arbitrarily condemned. In a rural medieval village in AD 1300, getting married and having sex at age 13 was somewhat common and un-remarkable and we have to accept that that was how society worked then. Nowadays, we have changed our mind about that… Nobody (at least nobody who is sane) is proposing that we all go and dig up our ancestors’ graves and put them all on the sex offender registry.
Sexual offense treatment literature, however, is focused on accepting local laws as the final and definitive definition of deviant sexual behavior, and has no room for therapists to shrug their shoulders and say, “Oh, it may have been illegal, but it was reasonably reasonable under the circumstances, like someone who steals a loaf of bread to feed their starving family. The real problem is that society isn’t set up properly to deal fairly with people <cries>. I will see what sort of social programs are available to help the client as they struggle through their jail sentence and probation, and also call my senator and propose that he introduce a bill to repeal these unfair laws.”
One fascinating look into the problem can be found in the literature here. It’s a bit dense at first, but it becomes a hard-hitting look at how the typical response to sex crimes may be more similar to a system of social control (in which those with power get to impose their will on everyone else) than therapy (which has, as its goal, the betterment of the patient and potentially humanity).
However, would reporting bare urges and adamantly asserting to the therapist that no act had (yet) been committed be sufficient to preserve confidentiality, or would a therapist be legally able to “suspect” abuse based solely on an admission of urges? Consider, as an analogy whether a therapist that is told by a patient that they have urges to become a serial killer can therefore reasonably suspect that the patient has already murdered someone.