Paedophiles

jive wrote: »

I'd also LOVE to know how many paedophiles there are in comparison to those who have acted on their urges and have been convicted for it. I'm trying to think of an estimate but it's actually impossible because there is just no way of knowing. I'd like to think that there are lots of people who just don't confess they are paedophiles and don't act on it.

Well on the one hand I would like to think that people's humanity wins out in the vast majority of cases and they manage to keep themselves under control. But on the other hand I'm not exactly loving the proposal that lots of people are paedophiles

Mawbish wrote: »

There is indeed a group that wish to remove laws that make their 'Child Love' an illegal act. They are based in the USA and I can't for the life of me think of the name of the group or find them on the internet....then again thats one website I can do without viewing.

Nambla. I think.

It's a rather bizarre organisation, their entire argument being based on the idea that paedophilia can be a consensual act of love and caring. The obvious problem being that asking a child to consent to sexual acts is like asking a dog to consent to being spayed. They are simply incapable of understanding what it is you are asking of them and its ramifications and instead will just go along with you because they trust you.

Why would a person who is having such thoughts and being fully aware that society at large is against these thoughts still go on to commit them?

Because they can't help themselves - and to a certain extent while they acknowledge that society deems it "wrong", they may not consider it wrong, or perhaps not as wrong.
Morality and wrong and right have certain inbuilt components. It's not something which sprung up overnight or which was invented by religion. Humans are naturally moral because being good to other humans ensures that you have a place within in a community and therefore benefit from the ability to procreate and survive.
Hurting other humans causes ostracisation and will result in the person not procreating and therefore being removed from the gene pool.

That's the basis of morality, but it has all sorts of shades and what some people consider right -v- wrong varies between individuals. This thread gives a good example. Most people would say that it's wrong to kill your neighbour because you feel like it. But some would say that if they're a paedophile it's OK to kill them. That's moral relativism and it's part of our nature.
We have built up a much more rigid structure of morals which sets out exactly what is right and wrong - a set of averages, if you will, that society can agree on.

But the individual will still retain their moral relativism; some consider rape a more serious crime than murder, and some will consider that there's not really anything wrong with a little bit of social welfare fraud, the only bad thing about it is getting caught.

This is where paedophilia comes in. Some people will feel, despite it being legally wrong, that it's not actually all that wrong to act on it, for whatever reason. I imagine in most of their heads they feel that it's an act of love and they're not causing any suffering.
Others may simply be sociopaths with the inability to relate to other humans as people, much like serial rapists and so on.

If someone were to have such thoughts towards a child they should seek immediate help from a GP - to STOP themselves from commiting abuse on a child

Well, this is the tough one.

We don't know what the law is here or what the law says here. And if I was one of these people I'm pretty sure I would not be happy telling anyone else, lest it become public knowledge.
Even telling a GP or a Psychologist, patient confidentiality notwithstanding, they may have legal obligations which trump everything else and oblige them to inform the Gardai that Joe Bloggs is a potential sex offender.

I imagine a GP if confronted with this information would be equally conflicted between treating his patient and serving the public's best interests. This would especially be true if the GP himself has kids.

It's a symptom of a lack of information, and the current public thinking is that paedophiles are just animals with no self-control. AIDS went through the same ignorance hysteria when it was discovered to the extent that people were afraid to even speak to someone HIV postive, lest they catch it.
Paedophilia is obviously not new, but as we've all said, we have so little information on it that most people are just insanely hysterical about the whole thing.

This is a notoriously hard condition to study for many obvious reasons from the ethics of the studying to the general hatred and taboos towards people who are attracted to children.

To highlight just how problematic it is, imagine an analogy to medicine. If a doctor receives a patient with a given symptom the first step is to establish if the symptom is caused by the patient having something…. Say a disease, infection etc…. or because the patient is lacking something… a required mineral or vitamin in the diet for example.

Scurvy for example, before it was explained, had people coming up will all kinds of theories, and most of them involved the sick people having caught something. Very few people came up with the idea they were lacking something in the forms of vitamins… before the cure was found to include many lemons in a ships stores (or limes if you were cheapskate British people… hence the name “limeys” for brits).

Clearly both understanding a condition AND treating a condition are massively contingent on knowing if a patient has something, or lacks something.

The issue is that our knowledge of pedophilia has not even reached that level and from what I have read on the subject… the idea of whether pedophiles are sick in that they have something wrong with them that we do not (some mental perversion for just one example), or sick in that they lack something we actually have (certain mental blocks for just one example)… actually divides the community of those with expertise on the issue almost in half.

I tend towards the latter, that they lack something we have, but my reasons for this are not all that strong, but those who lean the other way have similar problems. All we do know is that this is an area we desperately need to know more about.

what a weird thread??op do u like pre pubescent children urself

Freddie59 wrote: »

And highly organised - as has been proven.

Actually it hasn't been proven. Not by a long shot. We've seen that in some cases, they are highly organised. So too can burglars, car thieves and terrorists be highly organised. And just like those types of criminals, we have also seen paedophiles who have acted alone and without any organisation.

But you fail to address the possibility of closet paedophiles who do not act on their feelings.

You use the term "evil" like it's a technical fact. It's an emotive term which fails to recognise that all morality is relative and few people are so morally skewed as to be completely without redemption.

In fact yourself and irish_bob have pretty much proven my point that any attempt to have a rational discussion about the problem of paedophilia gets shot down as an attempt to somehow legitimise it.
You've taken to the media spin that all paedophiles turn into inhumane monsters, drooling at the sight of children and getting involved in paedophile rings at the first chance they get.

Yet it's highly, highly likely that some (most?) paedophiles never act on their feelings. The problem is that any attempt to study it is met with the kind of rabid stonewalling that yourself and irish_bob display here.

Chuck Stone wrote: »

The OP (and responders) are confusing consensual behaviour with deviant thought.

Well I'd say it's deviant thought but as long as they don't act on the thoughts, there is nothing to consent too, consensual behaviour doesn't come into the OP's point?