Are you a paedo?

There should be a distinction made between peadophile and child molester. The former has not necessarily done anything illegal. They may know their feelings are wrong and dont act on them. But if we equate peado with molester, few peadophiles are ever going to come forward looking for help and we may be pushing them deeper. Repressed feelings then

Dont get me wrong- child molesters should be branded on their foreheads. But I do feel we should be doing better to address peadophiles before they act out and first step is ensuring the distinction between paedo's and child molesters is clear.

It depends on how nice the feet are.

Mucky_Tackies wrote: »

There should be a distinction made between peadophile and child molester. The former has not necessarily done anything illegal. They may know their feelings are wrong and dont act on them. But if we equate peado with molester, few peadophiles are ever going to come forward looking for help and we may be pushing them deeper. Repressed feelings then

Dont get me wrong- child molesters should be branded on their foreheads. But I do feel we should be doing better to address peadophiles before they act out and first step is ensuring the distinction between paedo's and child molesters is clear.

I would agree with that, but it is a position that I have seen often, including in a thread on this very site 2 or so years ago, that will bring the rage down upon you if you express it to the wrong users.

Many people think that, to DIRECTLY quote one person from that thread in question, "Being attracted to kids is enough to warrant removal from society." while another user on the same thread said "a paedophile saying "I promise I'll never rape a child" is just not good enough for me."

And this seems to be quite a common attitude to the whole thing. To the point that the latter user above seriously went off on one at any suggestion to the contrary. Telling us things like any pedophile who believes they will never act on it should therefore happily consent to "being monitored, boundaries set, restricted access etc. as a safeguard for when/if they ever have a moment of weakness or temptation."

So in other words merely HAVING such attractions, and nothing else, warrants Orwellian 1984 style monitoring of the individual for all time. You know, just in case.

You are right that this kind of atmosphere could lead to people not coming forward for help (though how you worded it sounds like their acting out is somehow inevitable, when I suspect the vast majority of people with such attractions never act on them). But I would add to this that they ALSO do not come forward for study.

As such when we are studying pedophilia, and trying to learn it's causes, roots, treatments and so forth we generally end up only working with the pedophiles we know about..... the ones with convictions. But that is an incomplete data set by far. If we are ever going to fully understand the underlying causes and roots of it, methods to treat or mediate for it, and ways to support people like that......... we need to study more than just convicted abusers.

Take for example some studies a few years ago which suggest that it is possible SIMULATED child pornography.... such as cartoon porn or CGI generated or whatever, actually has a quelling effect on many pedophiles desire to actually act out and desires or temptations they have. IF true that is very useful information.

But how do we test that? We need actual pedophiles with temptations to act out, without such temptations, AND convicted for those temptations to study to get as full and comprehensive a study group as possible. Are we going to get that with such attitudes around? Are they going to come forward for study openly? Some will I am sure. Many will not.

And for every one of them that abuses or rapes a child, there are likely NUMEROUS ones that never do, never will and never would. My suspicion is that the number of people actually with such an attraction FAR outweighs the number of them we are aware of by their actually acting on their desires.

Clearly finding a way to foster a community where people who have this can step forward and say "I have this, what can we do about it?" is going to help us not only deal with this, but develop ways and methodologies to diagnose where on the continuum people lie and to make informed decisions on who simply should be made to avoid all contact with children because they simply can not be trusted in any workable scenario otherwise.

But right now we do not have anything but wild, and wildly varying, estimates of how many people in our society HAVE such feelings and attractions at all. We guess a lot by extrapolating from vague numbers such as convictions and the like. But actual accurate data on pedophiles is so small that not only do we know little about them, we do not even know how many there are.

Senor Fancy Pants wrote: »

Everyone calm down.

The OP is only 7 but he's single 'n ready to mingle. He's jus' lookin' fo' a suga' daddy 'sall.

Carrying on that way alright

I'll go with no, unless proven otherwise.

But I'm the type of person you just wouldn't be completely sure about :P

DEFTLEFTHAND wrote: »

I do have sympathy for people born with this deviancy and who don't act on it. It's the way they're wired and they can't do anything about it.

How would you even go about treating a person with such tendencies? Things like Conversion Therapy are pretty much proven not to work.

Persephone kindness wrote: »

I don't have any sympathy. And please excuse this I mean no disrespect you are very very naive.

You're right I probably am. I want to try and understand the issue better

I know that there is another school of thought that paedophilia is more nurture based over nature, as in there seems to be a correlation between abused children being more likely to become a predator themselves in adulthood.

Being interfered with in a sexual manner at an early age could have a serious impact on a persons sexual development. I find these cases utterly tragic on every front.

Ok I'll admit it I'm a Pedrophile, mmmmhexicans.

DEFTLEFTHAND wrote: »

I do have sympathy for people born with this deviancy and who don't act on it. It's the way they're wired and they can't do anything about it.

How would you even go about treating a person with such tendencies? Things like Conversion Therapy are pretty much proven not to work.

What about people like me who are attracted to 19-year-old Swedish girls? I never act on my impulses either. Well, they won't let me.

Why don't people sympathize with my affliction? Eh!