For discussion: If you were a pedophile

[classicman]

I'm not buying any justification of sex upon children in any way, shape or form. You can tell me how its a disease or some other form of sickness or depression... whatever. I couldn't care less. You try that shit with one of my kids and I'll kill you - very painfully - PERIOD.

[DanaC]

From http://www.seattlepi.com/local/36800...fenders23.html

They were neighbors, aged 13 and 10, who played together in a toy fort at the older boy's home. But one summer afternoon, the teen began talking about masturbation, then performed oral sex on the younger boy. He said they should do it again the next day. And they did.

Soon after, two sheriff's deputies arrived at the adolescent's Eastside home to read the seventh-grader his rights. Within two months, he was a registered sex offender, convicted of first-degree child rape.

"I didn't know that what I was doing was a crime -- that's not to minimize it -- I just didn't know," said Tyler, now 23, who agreed to talk with the Seattle P-I if identified only by his middle name.

"I was just some stupid kid growing up, who had an urge and he didn't know how to cope with it. Afterward, I always wondered, 'Is there something wrong with me? Is there some malfunction in my brain? Am I a pervert?' But it was just my inability to understand what I was feeling."

Since 1997, more than 3,500 children in the state -- some as young as 10, though on average about 14 -- have been charged and convicted as felony sex offenders, a mark that remains on their records forever, barring them from careers in medicine, teaching or a host of other professions that serve the vulnerable. It also frightens many into under-the-radar housing arrangements to avoid landlords who require background checks.

and this from http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/22/ma...uvenile-t.html

Sex-offender therapy for juveniles was a new field in the 1980s, and Longo, like other therapists, was basing his practices on what he knew: the adult sex-offender-treatment models. “It’s where the literature was,” Longo, a founder of the international Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, told me not long ago. “It’s what we’d been doing.”

As it turns out, he went on to say, “much of it was wrong.” There is no proof that what Longo calls the “trickle-down phenomenon” of using adult sex-offender treatments on juveniles is effective. Adult models, he notes, don’t account for adolescent development and how family and environment affect children’s behavior. Also, research over the past decade has shown that juveniles who commit sex offenses are in several ways very different from adult sex offenders. As one expert put it, “Kids are not short adults.”

That’s not to say that juvenile sexual offenses aren’t a serious problem. Juveniles account for about one-quarter of the sex offenses in the U.S. Though forcible rapes, the most serious of juvenile sex offenses, have declined since 1997, court cases for other juvenile sex offenses have risen. David Finkelhor, the director of Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, and others argue, however, that those statistics largely reflect increased reporting of juvenile sex offenses and adjudications of less serious offenses. “We are paying attention to inappropriate sexual behavior that juveniles have engaged in for generations,” he said.
....

Longo and other experts have increasingly advocated for a less punitive approach. Over the past decade, however, public policy has largely moved in the opposite direction. Courts have handed down longer sentences to juveniles for sex offenses, while some states have created tougher probation requirements and, most significant, lumped adolescents with adults in sex-offender legislation.

...

Community notification makes people feel protected — who wouldn’t want to know if a sex offender lives next door? But studies have yet to prove that the law does, in fact, improve public safety. Meanwhile, when applied to youths, the laws undercut a central tenet of the juvenile justice system. Since juvenile courts were created more than 100 years ago, youths’ records have, with exceptions in some states, been sealed and kept out of the public’s hands. The theory is that children are less responsible for their actions, and thus less blameworthy, than adults and more amenable to rehabilitation. But by publishing their photographs and addresses on the Internet, community notification suggests that juveniles with sex offenses are in a separate, distinct category from other adolescents in the juvenile justice system — more fixed in their traits and more dangerous to the public. It suggests, in other words, that they are more like adult sex offenders than they are like kids.

...

Last year, an eighth grader at a Delaware middle school arrived one morning to find kids in the hallway pointing at him and snickering. At first, the boy, Johnnie, who asked me protect his privacy by identifying him by a friend’s nickname for him, was confused. He thought it might be because of his new haircut. Then one kid called him a rapist. Another jeered, “Hey, aren’t you a sex offender?” One teenage boy threatened to beat him up.

Four years earlier, when Johnnie was 11, he put his hand on his 4-year-old half-sister’s vagina over her underwear. And then several months later, he told her to perform oral sex on him, which she did. When Johnnie’s mother found out, she called the police. She may have felt she could no longer control Johnnie, who, according to his grandmother, both adored his sister (he made pancakes and snowmen for her) and tormented her (he punched and bullied her). Perhaps his mother also worried that her son might abuse other children. It’s hard to know what went through her mind that day, because she never explained it to Johnnie or to her own mother, with whom Johnnie eventually went to live. And she did not return my phone calls.

Johnnie, who has sandy-colored hair and freckles, did not resort to violence or use a weapon, according to police records, and when a detective interviewed him, the fourth grader admitted what he’d done. Soon after, Johnnie was sentenced to a residential juvenile-sex-offender program, where he spent 16 months. By the time he was released, he was considered a role model in his program, according to records that Johnnie’s therapist, Marc Felizzi, of the Delaware Guidance Services, received from the facility. His mother, though, had little interest in reuniting the family, so Johnnie bounced from a foster home to his uncle’s before going to live with his grandmother and then, ultimately, his father.

It was just two months after starting at a new school near his grandmother’s house that Johnnie’s childhood offense became the gossip of the hallways. It wasn’t entirely clear how kids found out. Johnnie heard that the mother of a girl to whom he’d written a love note discovered him on the Delaware Sex Offender Central Registry Web site. The mother may have typed in Johnnie’s last name. Or she may have been scanning her ZIP code for local sex offenders. In any case, she found him. And there on the Internet was a photo of Johnnie when he was 11, along with his address, birth date, height and weight at the time of his offense. Below that were two police charges: one was a misdemeanor for the touching over his sister’s underwear; the other was a felony for engaging his sister in oral sex, which because it involved mouth-to-genital contact was charged as “rape second degree.”

In dozens of interviews, therapists, lawyers, teenagers and their parents told me similar stories of juveniles who, after being discovered on a sex-offender registry, have been ostracized by their peers and neighbors, kicked out of extracurricular activities or physically threatened by classmates. Experts worry that these experiences stigmatize adolescents and undermine the goals of rehabilitation. “The whole world knows you did this bad thing,” notes Elizabeth Letourneau, an associate psychology professor at the Medical University of South Carolina and an expert on juveniles with sex offenses. “You could go to treatment for five years; you could be as straight as an arrow; but the message continues to be: You are a bad person. How does that affect your self-image? How does that affect your ability to improve your behaviors?”

Just because we haven't caught the news stories doesn't mean they aren't there. And not all incidents make the news. Sex crimes in adults are on the wane. Juvenile offenders are increasing. Some of that may be an actual increase, but some of it may be classifyling as a crime an instance where the child didn't know or understand boundaries. Perhaps the part of sean's post which you considered insincere and dishonest may actually have some foundation. I'm not suggesting that the young lad who abused his little sister didn't need teaching those boundaries; nor am I saying it wasn't abuse. But I am suggesting that he may have been engaging in sexual curiosity; the two young lads who'd been friends for years, though there was an age gap, may have been experimenting. I'm not even suggesting that classifying these as assult is wrong: but I think it does show that there may be some basis for sean's claim that child sexuality is in itself deemed a problem, even if there is no 'abuse'. You don't need to agree with him. But I think it's unfair to take that as an indication of any lack of sincerity on his part.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by classicman

I'm not buying any justification of sex upon children in any way, shape or form. You can tell me how its a disease or some other form of sickness or depression... whatever. I couldn't care less. You try that shit with one of my kids and I'll kill you - very painfully - PERIOD.

Second. Well stated.

[DanaC]

I didn't see justification for adults having sex with children. I saw some insights into what it's like to grow up finding yourself attracted to children.

[Cloud]

Sean, thank you for your posts. I think you've addressed the questions I had in a frank and thoughtful manner; probably more thoughtful than the tone of my original post deserved!

[Clodfobble]

Originally Posted by DanaC

I'm not suggesting that the young lad who abused his little sister didn't need teaching those boundaries; nor am I saying it wasn't abuse.
... I'm not even suggesting that classifying these as assult is wrong: but I think it does show that there may be some basis for sean's claim that child sexuality is in itself deemed a problem, even if there is no 'abuse'. You don't need to agree with him. But I think it's unfair to take that as an indication of any lack of sincerity on his part.

When he says

Originally Posted by sean

Of course children deserve protection from sexual abuse, but all too often this 'protection' is simply a cipher for social control of their sexuality and of sexuality in general.

it makes me question this

Originally Posted by sean

As somebody who is attracted to children --and who has been conscious of and self-conscious about these feelings since well before puberty, and who has NEVER committed any kind of sexual offence--

Because I wonder if he's merely quibbling over definitions, as in 'I've never abused anyone because what I did wasn't abuse, it was love.' Maybe his statement can be taken at face value, maybe it can't. But his sexuality is what's in question, not that of the children. Making anything about the children's sexuality gets perilously close to the concept that all children are being "teases," as was discussed earlier in the thread.

[sean]

Originally Posted by Clodfobble

I was able to follow along with what you were saying, right up until this point...

I know where you're coming from, Clodfobble. I have a similar reaction to 'child love' advocates claiming to be working for the sexual emancipation of children. The problem for me is, philosophically I have to agree with them. Social control of sexuality, beginning in childhood, is the bedrock of authoritarian culture.

When you use lines like the standard party line of many abusive pedophiles you are simply inverting my own impulse to reject the 'standard party line' of sex negative puritans.

As a Popperian, I understand the difference between absolute and relative belief, and central to this is the significance of falsification. Like black swans, positive childhood sexual experiences with adults do occur, however rarely. These occurrences require us to reject the hypothesis that such experiences are necessarily harmful. The parameters of what we should term 'abuse' are therefore subject to negotiation.

But before you burst a blood vessel, I have to tell you that as an autonomous being with a capacity for independent thought, rather than a mouthpiece of the 'abusive pedophile party', I have given a great deal of thought to resolving these areas of conflict, especially where they impact on my personal relationships. Whatever my personal beliefs, I understand the social constraints on adult sexual conduct with children, and I'm quite able to conform to them.

That said, I've never compromised my personal beliefs or logic to ingratiate myself with friends, even tho there have been many occasions where it would have made my life much easier. What I have done is learn to hear their side of the story. This has been made much easier for me by their reciprocal respect for my own point of view. Being listened to and having people seek to understand why I feel the way I do has made it much easier for me to respect their feelings; in particular their visceral and intuitive, but not always logical protective instinct for their children.

There's a lot to this. I don't need to be convinced of the absolute need for particular limits a parent wishes to place around another adult's conduct with their child. The parent has a right to place those limits, however trivial. (And in the case of children for whom nobody cares, well perhaps love is something they can use, even if it includes an element of desire. What I won't forgive is adults who exploit disadvantaged children for their own personal satisfaction.)

Also, and this is important too, if the harms of non-violent, non-coercive adult/child sexual contact (or 'abuse') are primarily sociogenic, as I believe they are, that does not mean they are not still harms. Teaching a child to swim is not generally considered harmful, but if the water is infested with sharks, as these waters assuredly are, then it would be irresponsible to lead a child into them. Involving children in transgressions, causing them to keep secrets, exposing them to shame and embarrassment, all of these are clearly potentially harmful, even tho they are all consequences of society's negative evaluation of sexual pleasure. Nobody who claims to love them could expose children to any of this with a clear conscience.

But fabricating and exaggerating extreme harms as a putative consequence of certain kinds of benign childhood sexual experience, as occurred during the masturbation panics of the past two centuries, and as is now occurring with respect to childhood sexual experiences with adults, amounts to a kind of hate speech directed against paedophiles. The suggestion that paedophilia is a kind of praeternatural evil, that calls for extraordinary measures outside the usual limits of law enforcement, is no different to the mass hysteria that drove the witch trials and constructed the Third Reich. I don't want to strike a note of aggression, but I've suffered at the hands of this moral panic, and I have a right to defend myself against it.

Finally, children do routinely suffer institutional abuse as a consequence of normal sexual conduct, in my country and in yours. I could provide more specific and recent references than I have (below) but I'm sorry I don't have them at my fingertips. One very recent case near where I live involved a six year old boy excluded from school, exposed to a wave of community hostility and subjected to intervention by child protection agencies following his pulling down a little girl's pants in the playground. I have no doubt he was harmed by his experience, and frankly it makes me nauseous to think of it. I don't want to get into a poor me thing here, but as a child I suffered serious physical and emotional abuse at the hands of adults in authority as a consequence of harmless sexual exploration. I'm irritated by your suggestion that this kind of thing is trivial or nonexistent.

Here are a couple of articles you might find enlightening.


m o l e s t e d
A mother discovers that the legal system's nightmarish "cure" for child sexual abuse can be worse than the disease.

A Question of Abuse
An influential group of therapists is promoting a new scare: children who molest other children. Those who question the murky evidence are said to be in denial. But it is the kids, taken from home and given intense therapy, who might be sufferering the most.


I'm sorry my sincerity has taken a hit. I'm trying to be as open and honest about my situation and beliefs as I can be in the circumstances. Why should your disagreeing with me constitute a mark against my honesty?

[DanaC]

I can see where you are coming from. But because it came after a description of his own experience of being a child with those leanings (11) I got the impression he was empathising with kids who find their early explorations put them into an unsympathetic and potentially damaging system.

I do think there's a profound danger in attributing sexual curiosity and desire to young children in the context of an adult with that desire. But I do also think that there is a danger in denying children's sexuality as well. I got the impression he was adding that bit on, as someone who's exprienced growing up with his sexual orientation unacceptable. And pointing out that we have reached a level of unease, as a society, with child sexuality that we respond in an over the top fashion, even when it is two children, rather than an adult and child involved, and even when it is something which in another time might have been considered simple experimentation.

The nature of offences which can get someone (possibly someone as young as 10) onto a sex offenders' register, for life, includes such things as exposing themselves, inappropriate touching, and 'voyeurism'. A boy hiding in a tree and watching his friend's sister get undressed might be considered a criminal on that basis.

[TheMercenary]

A very common sense solution for people who have love feelings for children which are sexual in nature:

[DanaC]

You're a callous bastard Merc. Having love feelings and acting them out are two different things. We don't choose what provokes sexual desire.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by DanaC

You're a callous bastard Merc.

Fair enough. Having sexual feelings for children is one step away from acting them out. People who have such feelings are in great need of help from the mental health system and should be isolated from children to prevent them from ever having the opportunity and chance of taking the next step.

[sean]

Originally Posted by Clodfobble

...I wonder if he's merely quibbling over definitions, as in 'I've never abused anyone because what I did wasn't abuse, it was love.' ...

What I said was that I have never committed any kind of sexual offence, as formally defined by legal statute.

Of course, you'll have to take my word for that. The bottom line is whether or not you can accept that a paedophile can be a good person and speak honestly about his life and experiences.

[Clodfobble]

Sean, in your experience with the pedophilic community, how many would you estimate have biological children of their own? Does being presented with this fundamentally different relationship with a child change anything for those who have them, or does it make no difference?

Originally Posted by sean

The bottom line is whether or not you can accept that a paedophile can be a good person and speak honestly about his life and experiences.

I can accept that possibility. I cannot, however, accept this one:

Like black swans, positive childhood sexual experiences with adults do occur, however rarely.

[sean]

Originally Posted by Cloud

Sean, thank you for your posts. I think you've addressed the questions I had in a frank and thoughtful manner; probably more thoughtful than the tone of my original post deserved!

Well it was a good question and well framed, otherwise I wouldn't have bothered. People need to ask these questions and think about the answers, otherwise the dialog is dominated by people like TheMercenary, and that helps no one.

[DanaC]

Sean: I have to disagree with your analysis of the societal nature of the harm. Though, I think that is a definate factor. I do believe it is damaging to children to engage in sexual activity with adults, aside from the socialisation aspects you mention. In terms of moulding that cjhild's sense of their sexual self, it places as much power into the hands of that 'loving adult' as you claim is currently in the hands of society. However lovingly that relationship is forged (if we hypothetically place ourselves into a society which does not deem it intrinsically wrong) the power difference between an adult and a child is vast. The need a child has for adult approval places them in a vulnerable position emotionally and an adult may contribute to forging that child's sense of self in ways they could not predict. The brain does not reach full maturity until around the age of 17. Emotional maturity is an essential component of understanding one's sexual self, and without emotional maturity a person has less understanding of what they want/need, and what they don't want/need. Without the ability to define that for themselves, let alone articulate it, a child engaged in sexual activity may inadvertently be led into acts they are not emotionally ready for without the ability/capacity to change that path (without hurting someone they now feel they wish not to hurt). These are emotional conundrums that are hard enough to deal with when one has a fully developed brain, let alone when it is still forming.

That said, I don't see anything 'evil' in being attracted to children. I do think society's red line on acting on that attraction sexually is well placed tho:P