I don’t know how to address it really. I just don’t think people continue to commit these crimes because they’re afraid to seek help. If they do seek help, or they are caught, it will often be after multiple offenses. I feel sympathy for those who have these urges to start with, but very little for those who act on them. I’m more afraid of persecution leading to false accusations and unjust convictions than anything else.
I just plain hate this subject. I’d like to think there’s a way to solve the problem if we only applied reason to it, but I also see people who are as dangerous as a rabid animal living amongst us. The immediacy of the problem seems to outweigh the potential of a solution. Plus I have kids, and the instinctual reaction is strong.
I don’t think pedophiles WANT to be pedophiles myself. If we just had a commercial on TV that would recommend those attracted to children receive free and anonymous counselling I think our children would be safer.
There are many people who voluntarily check themselves into mental institutions for help. Even though they know they will lose control over their fate once they enter. Some people are pretty much in there for life once they enter because their is no cure for their conditions.
Possibly there are pedophiles who do this, but perhaps we should be more proactive about offering help to them. Of course if it was a free service it would be more appealing. If we’re willing to pay taxes to put in jail, I’m not sure why we would be against getting taxed to put them in an institution where they will get real help.
I think in about 20 years we will have cures for many mental illnesses. Possibly using nanobots to change neural pathways. We will also probably be able to detect them with simple brain scans and blood tests. Then this will be a non-issue.
I’ve lived in a society where 12-15 was considered the ideal marriage age, with 17 year olds being old maids.
It was not somehow truer or more natural. It was a power play, and a fucked up one at that. It was about keeping a human being as a slave, not some charming noble savage thing that has fallen by the wayside in our somewhat silly and indulgent moder times.
Besides not having the power to choose their marriage (I don’t think any society with extremely early marriage ever gives the girl any real choice), they also don’t have the power to protect their bodies by insisting on condoms or spacing their births, to have any say in how often they get pregnant, to refuse sex, to refuse to get beaten, to associate with their friends and families freely, to continue their education, to prevent their daughters from suffering their fate, etc. Young marriage was just one more way to keep them controlled- without an adult support system, an education, much life experience, etc. they would grow to turn entirely to their husbands and be entirely relient. It’s also very convient for housekeeping. When a woman cooks, washes, cleans, and does every single household task, it’s really worth it to get someone as soon as possible.
Anyway, it’s not some kind of normal thing, any more than enslaving black people is normal because a whole lot of societies have done that. Young teens having sex with other young teens may be fairly natural, but a 12 year girl with a 40 year old guy never was.
even sven,I hope you’re not claiming I was condining such marriages. I don’t know that it was, objectively, normal, just that it occurs in multiple human societies all over the world. So does violence and murder and a whole bunch of other things that are rather bad. My point was only that early teenagers and babies, while both developmentally children, are at completely different stages of development and should not be placed in the same category, as evidenced by the fact that some societies condone marriage for 13-year-olds but no one condones marriage with babies.
In case I need to be clear, I do not advocate sex or marriage for girls in their early teens. I am on the fence about marriage (for anybody) in their late teens.
I also do not condone sex between any two individuals where there is a real difference in power in other aspects of their life (teacher / student, boss / employee, etc.).
ETA: And I certainly never said “truer or more natural.” Ick. Please tell me you were just making a general point, and not attributing that sentiment to me.
20 years is very optimistic for anything but a genetic marker, and that may not apply to the majority of cases. Nanobots are definitely not going to be curing pedophiles by rewiring neural pathways in 20 years (and I’m glad I’ll be dead when that type of technology exists).
It is a terrible problem. These people infect the minds of children, some of which will repeat the behavior as adults. These victims are likely to end up with multiple problem behaviors, making it less likely they will be able to control their urges and seek help. It is like a virus which weakens the host’s immune system. Lives are being destroyed. It’s very difficult to feel sympathy for a pathogen.
So by your rationale, a person who is molested and then becomes a child molester deserves no sympathy? Should we not feel sympathy for a person who was physically abused and becomes violent later in life?
In your scenario you treat the person as the pathogen and not the defect. Perhaps though I can see your point.
If a person has AIDS I feel sorry for them, but if a person with AIDS has sex and infects their partner (knowingly) I no longer have as much sympathy.
This is the way I feel about pedophiles. I feel bad that they have this disease and hope someday they can be cured, but once they cross the line and harm a child I no longer feel bad for them.
Is that a fair compromise? Also why would you want to be dead when nanobots are rewiring our minds? I’d love it! Imagine being able to cure schizophrenics and those with Alzheimer’s with a simple injection.
A perfectly willing 13 year old is still a 13 year old. A 13 year old is still a kid. They may be very smart in a some areas but they don’t have much wisdom or any real idea of long term consequences because they haven’t been alive long enough to truly understand long term consequences. When you’re 13 long term is next month. You should be ashamed. You say yourself, when the child is over 12, child. You should absolutely be ashamed to think that an adult who tries to sleep with a child isn’t worthy of special contempt.
Why would an adult want that, why would an adult want to sleep with a person who hasn’t had time to form their own opinion and evaluation of who they are and what they want unless they’re hoping to take advantage of that particular situation? Because of the other bad things that happen in this world you find it hard to find a special contempt for rape? You can hate murder and you can hate frauds who fleece the unsuspecting of their life savings and at the end of the day you can and should still be able to find it in your heart to hate child rapists. It’s not like you have to pick only one.
You started this thread thread asking why people who try to get sex from underage girls deserve 2 years in prison, and now you’re here questioning the repulsion people feel towards this particular crime. I don’t want to draw the ire of the Mods Above, but I’m curious as to why this theme seems to be your starting line in posting on these forums.
As to the OP, I remember when Cesario was posting here, he tried so hard to logic his way into justifying his beliefs and he ignored anything that countered them. He was gross. I also remember another poster who made a thread stating that, as a result of the cesario threads and all the fallout from them, he was going to seek help for this impulse that he’d never acted upon but that tormented him. I feel pity for him. It’s a mental illness, those afflicted with it can deal with it one way or another. The ones who seek help should be applauded. The ones who try to justify it as normal deserve to be villainized.
I don’t know what to think really. What about the mentally handicapped. Or even immature adults. What you say about not being able to evaluate the consequences applies to them as well. There are some who hire prostitutes for their mentally handicapped SONS. Why? Because they know that it is an enjoyable experience and they want their kids to be able to enjoy it.
I don’t know of any instances where this happened in the case of daughter, and I think that’s the crust of it.
Honestly… I think about mentally handicapped girls and their lives still being run by their parents treating them like children (because essentially they are), but they might desire to have sex just like a mentally handicapped boy.
I must admit though, I would find it much worse for someone to hire a stud to sleep with their mentally handicapped daughter.
I knew a girl who was actually mentally disabled. her parents allowed her to date. She WAS very attractive (which is rare), but I couldn’t help but feel like it was wrong for her to be allowed to sleep with men.
I realize now that I find it impossible for men to actually care about her. They obviously like her because she has a good body. But maybe I am wrong. Maybe they actually do care about her and they aren’t just using her.
I don’t know, but there has to be a psychological reason why I find these things abhorrent. I just don’t understand why I am so much more accepting of the males enjoying sex.
I think you are chasing red herrings. And maybe herrings of other colors as well.
The problem is not that people are sexually attracted to children. The problem is that people are coercive in satisfying their sexual urges, at least in the larger sense of coercion that includes undue and inappropriate forms of persuasion in unequal relationships.
Eliminate coercion (in that larger sense) and you eliminate both rape AND child molestation. And sexual exploitation and harassment for that matter.
As far as why some people are sexually attracted to children, some people remember BEING children and remember being sexually attracted to other children back when they were children. For most of us it’s a vestigial-memory sort of thing and isn’t something we want now. I assume that the ones who pursue it are somehow blocked from healthy possibilities with folks their own age (+ or - a bit) and that they ARE in fact making use of inappropriate forms of persuasion in power relationships because that is something they can make work whereas they can’t, for some reason, negotiate sexuality with an equal.
Bottom line, though, is that the perversion consists of abuse of power, not the sexualization of children. Children ARE sexual. If you think you weren’t, you may not be remembering your childhood very clearly.
I remember being very sexual as a kid. I was constantly stealing playboys from my dad. But I am not sexually attracted to kids. In fact i was always into older women until recently.
Are you saying that it’s okay as long a the underage girl pursues the sexual relationship and only wrong when the male is coercive?
Certainly there are young girls who pursue older men, but I still find it horrible.
Somehow if a woman seduced a boy… I don’t mind it as much. I think… what a lucky kid. Like that South Park episode (though I would be sickened if the kid was as young as Ike). I am thinking more about a 13 or 14yo. I would not find it traumatic at all.
Why is it then that when it comes to older men with younger girls I find it sickening?
Sunny Northern Cameroon, where I was a Peace Corps volunteer. Marriages were always kind of a bummer, because the guests would be singing and dancing while the poor girl sat there crying her eyes out.
Sorry, didn’t mean to imply anyone advocated child marriage. I do think there is a bit of an undercurrent on this boards that preteen/early teen marriage of girls to older men is the natural human condition and thus somehow benign because hey man, it’s what evolution wants us to do. It’s not. It’s the product of power relationships, and it sucks for the girls.
I think the problem stems from a conflict between the variable, gradual development of an organism vs. the yes/no nature of laws.
It’s not only the sexual arena that this arises. For example, we say that a person of age 16 and over is fully capable of driving, but 100% incapable the day before their 16th birthday. That may be the legal stance, but it’s obviously absurd. Your brains aren’t withheld, then inserted at your birthday party.
Children biologically mature over years, not overnight, and they don’t all mature at the same rate. They are genetically programmed to become more sexually attractive over time, not instantly on their birthdate. The attributes a “suitor” desires are present, in some percentage, at all ages, and that percentage increases up to and beyond the legal age.
It’s perfectly natural for an attraction to exist across these artificial boundaries. It’s only the law that declares it to be wrong.
We don’t really know what evolution “wants” us to do wrt human sexual relationships, so I think you are overstating what is or is not “natural”. That is not to say that we shouldn’t, as humans, set societal standards to prevent the abuse of adolescent girls by older men.
Although we don’t know how our ancestors formed relationships, I think it is unlikely that women/gilrs had much choice in who their partners were or when they were paired up with them for most of our evolutionary history.
I agree, but I think the REASON that child abusers have practically no defenders in the public/political arena is that most adults who have kids are very strongly inclined to protect their kids, and so adults who are inclined to have sex with their kids are considered especially monstrous. That whole “protect my child” thing gets coupled with “attack the different ones!” and it’s a fairly powerful mix.
Throughout most of recorded history, girls tended to get married soon after they started having their menses. And they started having their menses fairly early … as I recall, the age of puberty has been moving up in modern society. So for much of human history, what we would call child abuse has been the norm. I’m not defending it … for much of human history, and in most cultures, enslaving other human beings has been the norm. Historicity does not make it right.
My point being, probably since we were proto humans, males have taken women as mates as soon as they became capable of bearing children … life being so short, brutish and nasty and all. So there probably isn’t anything developmentally abnormal about ephebephiles, except in the sense maybe that the extended childhood that is the norm in most cultures outside the Third World means that men who lust for teen girls are getting into that child molesting thing.
People who lust for kids who are not sexually developed probably do have a screw loose somewhere. It goes against most of human history, and probably against the normal instincts people develop. I find the thought of having sex with a child all kinds of squicky … well, that doesn’t really describe it properly … a really intense disgust at the thought is probably more accurate. I’m glad I feel that way, for my sake, but I do not consider it a moral achievement. I’ve never had any impulses toward children as sex objects, that I know of, so I’ve never had to develop any moral bulwarks against it.
My primary concern in social terms wrt child abuse is to keep children from being sexually molested. Jailing and killing child abusers are both methods of LOWERING the incidence of child abuse, as it prevents repetition, but if you REALLY want to PREVENT child molestation, we are going to have to seriously study it, figure out exactly what makes it happen in psychological terms, and then figure out what we can do to prevent it, hopefully as humanely as possible. Because it’s more important to prevent kids from being raped than to get any jollies from punishing child abusers. Good luck with getting that idea to fly in the larger society, though, however rational it might be. Rational ideas are not popular in politics nowadays.
I don’t think there is one answer to this question.
Some people are attracted to certain qualities, and no number of laws will change this. People like what they like.
Maybe these people lack self-confidence and prefer easy targets. They are insecure with their sexual prowess, so they go after kids who have never had any sexual encounters before, that have nothing to compare to.
Maybe these people are afraid to lose control of a relationship. Kids are easy to control. They don’t make too many demands, especially on the emotional front. You don’t have to worry about a 12-year-old asking, “We need to talk about that fight last night.” Because there won’t be a fight, and if there is, you can just holler at her real good and she’ll be too scared to talk about it ever again. They are also easier to please. Take a 12-year-old to the mall and buy her a five dollar watch at Claire’s and she’ll do whatever you want her to. Try to pull the same number of a 20-year-old and she’ll be all, “Say what?”
Maybe they are very immature. Grown-ups intimidate them, but kids are easy to relate to.
Maybe they were abused as kids, so the only kind of relationship they know is an adult-child one.
Maybe they are secretly gay, but are too afraid to do it with a grown-up for a number of reasons. Find a gay teen, though, and he’ll go along with whatever you want to do and no one will suspect a thing.
The question, IMHO, isn’t “Why are people sexually aroused by children?” I mean, we could spend all day asking why people are sexually aroused by one thing or another. The question I’m curious about is what makes some people actually act on their urges while other people just fantasize about acting on them. What are the personality traits that distinguish the two? People can’t help what they like, but they can help what they do. That’s a far more interesting question to me than “why”.
Other way around- the average age of puberty has been decreasing since historic times.
Some societies have certainly condoned marriage at very very young ages- I even remember reading of a (slightly conditional) engagement taking celebrated between a 1 year old baby and a fetus. Whether the marriage was a purely symbolic act before puberty is harder to say.
Personally, though I do have some sympathy towards people who are only aroused by something they really cannot have- that sympathy evaporated if they stop believing it is something they cannot have.
I also think the realities of potential pregnancy do make it different having sex at a very young age for girls compared to boys; especially with someone older, who you expect to be more aware of the risks and reality of a baby- plus the perception that it’s a lot harder mechanically for a female to rape a male, so people are more likely to really believe an underage boy to be willing and actively participating than a girl (and speaking as a girl- you you really think none of us fantasise about teachers too? Really?). The level of disgust normally shown to anyone accused of homosexual paedophilia outweighs that shown towards accusations of hetero paedophilia, so it’s not a simple double standard towards gender, but one of percieved roles.
I don’t think it’s mechanically harder to rape a boy (if it’s an older woman). I think it’s MUCH easier. I believe the average male adolescent is much more curious about sex than a female. I am not sure how sexual orientation affects it, but certainly a woman would have an easier time seducing a young boy.
Keep in mind, I am not saying I don’t think it’s gross or wrong (perhaps I have given the impression that I would be accepting of it). I just don’t think there is any trauma. I am almost certain most boys would consider it to be something to boast about (even later in their life).
This is completely untrue in the case of the girl.
My question is: should it be this way? I personally don’t even want to think of it, but imagine a girl talking a way a boy might. If she spoke of her sexual conquests as an adolescent it would seem quite out of place wouldn’t it? If a man talked about how he had sex with his teacher when he was 14, suddenly I am not quite as disgusted. Probably because the person boasting about it views it as something positive.
But a female could NEVER look at her sexual experiences as a child in a positive light.
Perhaps it has more to do with the intentions of the adult involved. Maybe I see encounters with females to be less malicious.