6 ms·

Pedophilia frightens people because of the recidivism rate, the damage it causes to the victim and the fact that the young age of the victim means they will liv

by 300bps 13y ago

Pedophilia frightens people because of the recidivism rate, the damage it causes to the victim and the fact that the young age of the victim means they will live with the consequences of the crime against them for decades.

cstross 13y ago
It's also a classic case of projection -- roughly 90% of cases of child sex abuse occur within the family and are perpetrated by direct relatives of the child, or close family friends. The stereotype of the evil drooling paedophile lurking behind the bushes by the school gate with a panel van and a sound-proofed cellar back home is vanishingly rare, but it makes a good target for psychological projection.
- alan_cx 13y ago
  Indeed. Reminded of a fact that the most likely person to abuse or even murder my children is........ me.
  - corin_ 13y ago
    I'm not sure if this is a statistics or a philosophical (or third category) question: given you are the one making that statement, is it still true? I.e. statistically over a population it may be true that I could look at you and make that claim, but based on your own feelings, is it possible for you to know "I will never abuse or murder my children"? That's kind of just a random food-for-thought that your wording put into my head, but I guess it leads onto a more interesting question - do sexually-abusing parents (and extend that to other sexual abusers, or indeed other criminals) see it coming from the start, and therefore are always at a state of either "I must try to resist" or "I must wait for a good time"? For example, fathers who raped 10 year old daughters, how many of them were waiting ten years for it, how many didn't think about it until shortly before? No idea if there's any answers to this question though.
  - leephillips 13y ago
    Typical confusion about the meaning of statistical data. Did you know that far more children are physically abused by women than by men? Does that change your estimation of the "most likely" person to abuse your children? Should it?
- rmc 13y ago
  Apparently the old wives tale of getting a sexually transmitted disease of a toilet seat was due to doctors not being able to figure out how a young girl would wind up with the same sexually transmitted disease as her father. I mean, the father is an upstanding member of society, and a respectable church going pillar of the local community (yadda yadda), so he can't have sexually touched her, it must be from something like a toilet seat. Denial can be a powerful thing.
3825 13y ago
>victim means they will live with the consequences of the crime against them for decades. Should people get "discount" for hurting terminally ill patients with no more than a few months to live?
- 300bps 13y ago
  Can't speak to "should" but I can speak to that's how it is. Cause a car accident thereby turning an 85 year old reiree into a quadriplegic. The 85 year old will be lucky to find an attorney because his actual damages are fairly low. Now replace the 85 year old retiree with a 40 year old at the peak of his career. Attorneys will chomp at the bit for this case because you've caused literally millions of dollars in damages. To go further down your tangent, after witnessing my terminally ill mother die from cancer after months of morphine-clouded torture I would have thanked anyone that would've ended her suffering early in a way as humane as we treat dogs at the end of their life.
nijk 13y ago
By far the greatest damage of pedophilia is the shame, stigma, and secrecy. Ironically, if pedophilia were treated less harshly, it would do less damage to victims, and possibly easier to discover and prevent.
alan_cx 13y ago
Damage? Often, (not at all a majority,) the child feels anything but damaged. In fact, they feel like the centre of the universe. Only afterwards, once the councillors, etc have gotten to them, do they understand that they are supposed to feel damaged. The damage and hurt they end up dealing with for decades is what happens when the state rushes in and destroys a relationship they themselves had little problem with, and they see their "partner" humiliated and hauled across the coals, while some nasty adult coaches them in to being a victim. Oddly, in that sort of scenario, the parents can be the ones who have most to deal with. Guilt, failure, etc. Then blame the child for it, because the child doesn't seem damaged. My only point here, is that society has us believe that these relationships are default abusive, nasty, even violent and coercive. There is a spectrum, from my example above to the traditional view. And all this because of an arbitrary age of consent, which changes from country to country, culture to culture.
- cpfohl 13y ago
  Source? Academic sources only please.
  - pitay 13y ago
    Here is a book which is full of them. It is called 'Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex' by Judith Levine. http://www.amazon.com/Harmful-Minors-Perils-Protecting-Children/dp/B005UVULC6/ http://www.amazon.com/Harmful-Minors-Perils-Protecting-Child...
    - 300bps 13y ago
      Pedophilia is about sexual attraction to prepubescent children (generally < 11 years old). See http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedophilia http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedophilia The book you reference appears to address post pubescent children and specifically mentions teenage sex being natural. It does not appear to address pedophilia.
      - gverri 13y ago
icebraining 13y ago
Being technically correct - the best kind of correct - pedophilia itself is just a paraphilia and doesn't cause any damage, child molestation (or behaviors that cause it) does. Though I'm not sure what's the incidence rate, so the point may be moot.
xenophanes 13y ago
Why do you say this? If you google pedophilia recidivism rate you will immediately see things like: > [PDF] recidivism rates for pedophiles - Université d'Ottawa > No differences were found between pedophiles and nonpedophiles with respect to recidivism rates Are you perhaps spreading a very nasty myth?
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- flog 13y ago
  I guess it'd be similar to other paraphilia (how do you pluralise that?). I could see it being recidivist though, as it's an innate drive.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- bhitov 13y ago
  Unless you are trying to argue that we are incorrectly using the word pedophile, I don't think that study[1] is relevant to this discussion. It is a comparison of recidivism between child molesters, some of whom meet certain criteria for 'pedophile' and some of whom do not. I think informally they would all be considered pedophiles. 1: http://www.courseweb.uottawa.ca/PSY3171/personalwp/P38%20Recidivism%20in%20Pedophiles%20%20different%20diagnostic%20methods.pdf http://www.courseweb.uottawa.ca/PSY3171/personalwp/P38%20Rec...
darkarmani 13y ago
> Pedophilia frightens people because of the recidivism rate Does the recidivism rate matter as much as the number of pedophiles? Even if every real pedophile committed the crime 3 times, that's the same as having 3x as many first time offenders. The rate and the number of pedophiles is far more important. Unless we buy into the idea that pedophiles are lurking around every corner, the recidivsm rate should't scare us.
- damoncali 13y ago
  Pedophiles are lurking around every corner. Check out a sex offender registry and look at a map. Those are just the ones that got caught. They're like cockroaches that we as a society tolerate because there are so damn many of them and there are enough sympathetic people in power to allow this atrocity to continue. If we as a culture were to truly value and care for children, this wouldn't be a problem because we'd stamp the fuckers out of existence. But we are a sick society, unfortunately.
  - darkarmani 13y ago
    > Pedophiles are lurking around every corner. Check out a sex offender registry and look at a map. Those are just the ones that got caught. I have looked at the sex offender registry. I'm not too frightened by the "sex offenders (L1)" that were peeing in the woods near a kids' soccer game, mooned some girls, or were convicted of statutory "rape." > They're like cockroaches that we as a society tolerate because there are so damn many of them and there are enough sympathetic people in power to allow this atrocity to continue. Please back this up with some hard numbers. There are 251 registered L3 sex offenders in Boston. http://www.city-data.com/so/so-Boston-Massachusetts.html http://www.city-data.com/so/so-Boston-Massachusetts.html
    - damoncali 13y ago
      251 registered, and how many unregistered? That, to me, qualifies as "around every corner" - not some rare boogie man, but I'll leave semantics alone. I have volunteered helping the victims of these people. When you have heard the desperation of a woman crying at 3:00AM calling to talk to a stranger on a hotline because of the horror show her life has become, you tend to take a dim view of the perpetrators. Every single call, and they are numerous, sticks in your head forever. All because some subhuman wanted to get his rocks off and didn't care who he hurt. We live in a society where you can get an order of magnitude more prison time for distributing weed than for raping children. If that's not a sympathetic public, I don't know what is.

by 300bps 13y ago

cstross 13y ago

It's also a classic case of projection -- roughly 90% of cases of child sex abuse occur within the family and are perpetrated by direct relatives of the child, or close family friends. The stereotype of the evil drooling paedophile lurking behind the bushes by the school gate with a panel van and a sound-proofed cellar back home is vanishingly rare, but it makes a good target for psychological projection.

alan_cx 13y ago
Indeed. Reminded of a fact that the most likely person to abuse or even murder my children is........ me.
- corin_ 13y ago
  I'm not sure if this is a statistics or a philosophical (or third category) question: given you are the one making that statement, is it still true? I.e. statistically over a population it may be true that I could look at you and make that claim, but based on your own feelings, is it possible for you to know "I will never abuse or murder my children"? That's kind of just a random food-for-thought that your wording put into my head, but I guess it leads onto a more interesting question - do sexually-abusing parents (and extend that to other sexual abusers, or indeed other criminals) see it coming from the start, and therefore are always at a state of either "I must try to resist" or "I must wait for a good time"? For example, fathers who raped 10 year old daughters, how many of them were waiting ten years for it, how many didn't think about it until shortly before? No idea if there's any answers to this question though.
- leephillips 13y ago
  Typical confusion about the meaning of statistical data. Did you know that far more children are physically abused by women than by men? Does that change your estimation of the "most likely" person to abuse your children? Should it?
rmc 13y ago
Apparently the old wives tale of getting a sexually transmitted disease of a toilet seat was due to doctors not being able to figure out how a young girl would wind up with the same sexually transmitted disease as her father. I mean, the father is an upstanding member of society, and a respectable church going pillar of the local community (yadda yadda), so he can't have sexually touched her, it must be from something like a toilet seat. Denial can be a powerful thing.

3825 13y ago

>victim means they will live with the consequences of the crime against them for decades. Should people get "discount" for hurting terminally ill patients with no more than a few months to live?

300bps 13y ago
Can't speak to "should" but I can speak to that's how it is. Cause a car accident thereby turning an 85 year old reiree into a quadriplegic. The 85 year old will be lucky to find an attorney because his actual damages are fairly low. Now replace the 85 year old retiree with a 40 year old at the peak of his career. Attorneys will chomp at the bit for this case because you've caused literally millions of dollars in damages. To go further down your tangent, after witnessing my terminally ill mother die from cancer after months of morphine-clouded torture I would have thanked anyone that would've ended her suffering early in a way as humane as we treat dogs at the end of their life.

nijk 13y ago

By far the greatest damage of pedophilia is the shame, stigma, and secrecy. Ironically, if pedophilia were treated less harshly, it would do less damage to victims, and possibly easier to discover and prevent.

alan_cx 13y ago

Damage? Often, (not at all a majority,) the child feels anything but damaged. In fact, they feel like the centre of the universe. Only afterwards, once the councillors, etc have gotten to them, do they understand that they are supposed to feel damaged. The damage and hurt they end up dealing with for decades is what happens when the state rushes in and destroys a relationship they themselves had little problem with, and they see their "partner" humiliated and hauled across the coals, while some nasty adult coaches them in to being a victim. Oddly, in that sort of scenario, the parents can be the ones who have most to deal with. Guilt, failure, etc. Then blame the child for it, because the child doesn't seem damaged. My only point here, is that society has us believe that these relationships are default abusive, nasty, even violent and coercive. There is a spectrum, from my example above to the traditional view. And all this because of an arbitrary age of consent, which changes from country to country, culture to culture.

cpfohl 13y ago
Source? Academic sources only please.
- pitay 13y ago
  Here is a book which is full of them. It is called 'Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex' by Judith Levine. http://www.amazon.com/Harmful-Minors-Perils-Protecting-Children/dp/B005UVULC6/ http://www.amazon.com/Harmful-Minors-Perils-Protecting-Child...
  - 300bps 13y ago
    Pedophilia is about sexual attraction to prepubescent children (generally < 11 years old). See http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedophilia http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedophilia The book you reference appears to address post pubescent children and specifically mentions teenage sex being natural. It does not appear to address pedophilia.
    - gverri 13y ago

icebraining 13y ago

Being technically correct - the best kind of correct - pedophilia itself is just a paraphilia and doesn't cause any damage, child molestation (or behaviors that cause it) does. Though I'm not sure what's the incidence rate, so the point may be moot.

xenophanes 13y ago

Why do you say this? If you google pedophilia recidivism rate you will immediately see things like: > [PDF] recidivism rates for pedophiles - Université d'Ottawa > No differences were found between pedophiles and nonpedophiles with respect to recidivism rates Are you perhaps spreading a very nasty myth?

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
flog 13y ago
I guess it'd be similar to other paraphilia (how do you pluralise that?). I could see it being recidivist though, as it's an innate drive.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
bhitov 13y ago
Unless you are trying to argue that we are incorrectly using the word pedophile, I don't think that study[1] is relevant to this discussion. It is a comparison of recidivism between child molesters, some of whom meet certain criteria for 'pedophile' and some of whom do not. I think informally they would all be considered pedophiles. 1: http://www.courseweb.uottawa.ca/PSY3171/personalwp/P38%20Recidivism%20in%20Pedophiles%20%20different%20diagnostic%20methods.pdf http://www.courseweb.uottawa.ca/PSY3171/personalwp/P38%20Rec...

darkarmani 13y ago

> Pedophilia frightens people because of the recidivism rate Does the recidivism rate matter as much as the number of pedophiles? Even if every real pedophile committed the crime 3 times, that's the same as having 3x as many first time offenders. The rate and the number of pedophiles is far more important. Unless we buy into the idea that pedophiles are lurking around every corner, the recidivsm rate should't scare us.

damoncali 13y ago
Pedophiles are lurking around every corner. Check out a sex offender registry and look at a map. Those are just the ones that got caught. They're like cockroaches that we as a society tolerate because there are so damn many of them and there are enough sympathetic people in power to allow this atrocity to continue. If we as a culture were to truly value and care for children, this wouldn't be a problem because we'd stamp the fuckers out of existence. But we are a sick society, unfortunately.
- darkarmani 13y ago
  > Pedophiles are lurking around every corner. Check out a sex offender registry and look at a map. Those are just the ones that got caught. I have looked at the sex offender registry. I'm not too frightened by the "sex offenders (L1)" that were peeing in the woods near a kids' soccer game, mooned some girls, or were convicted of statutory "rape." > They're like cockroaches that we as a society tolerate because there are so damn many of them and there are enough sympathetic people in power to allow this atrocity to continue. Please back this up with some hard numbers. There are 251 registered L3 sex offenders in Boston. http://www.city-data.com/so/so-Boston-Massachusetts.html http://www.city-data.com/so/so-Boston-Massachusetts.html
  - damoncali 13y ago
    251 registered, and how many unregistered? That, to me, qualifies as "around every corner" - not some rare boogie man, but I'll leave semantics alone. I have volunteered helping the victims of these people. When you have heard the desperation of a woman crying at 3:00AM calling to talk to a stranger on a hotline because of the horror show her life has become, you tend to take a dim view of the perpetrators. Every single call, and they are numerous, sticks in your head forever. All because some subhuman wanted to get his rocks off and didn't care who he hurt. We live in a society where you can get an order of magnitude more prison time for distributing weed than for raping children. If that's not a sympathetic public, I don't know what is.