5 Ways We're Making Pedophilia Worse
Before we get started, can we all agree that there's a difference between trying to understand something and condoning it? There's nothing on Earth so awful that we should avoid talking about it completely. If anything, the more scared you are of a thing, the more you should try to understand it. Talking about a subject like pedophilia isn't going to make it worse. But
refusing
to talk about it -- or accusing those who do of glorifying it or normalizing it -- definitely will. No problem has ever been solved with ignorance.
And we
are
ignorant; pedophilia is almost a total mystery to modern science. We don't know what causes it, or how to prevent it, or how to cure it (short of a form of castration), because the moment a test subject admits they're a pedophile, they're ruined for life. Why would anyone ever come forward? Thus, society's insistence on taking the harshest possible position winds up exacerbating the problem.
So, here it goes: We sat down with several self-professed (but non-offending) pedophiles, as well as David Prescott (a therapist who specializes in sex offenders) and Dr. James Cantor (a scientist who studies their brains). They said ...
#5. Not All Pedophiles Molest Children
This is going to be the most controversial statement in the article, so let's rip the Band-Aid off right now: There are pedophiles in the world who don't molest children, and never will. No one disputes that fact. So what portion of pedophiles actually victimize kids? We have no fucking idea. That is, in fact, the point.
"Ehhhhh?" really isn't the kind of answer you want for a question like this.
Hell, we don't even know what percentage of the population are pedophiles --
estimates range from one percent to an astounding 20 percent. Most people aren't going to freaking admit they're a pedophile on a survey, and we haven't yet developed magical scanners that can reads people's sexual desires from afar (note: society will
profoundly change
the day such a device is invented). So let's lay out some numbers that are going to blow your fucking mind:
In surveys,
18 percent of males admitted to having sexual fantasies about children, eight percent said they'd masturbated to those fantasies, and four percent said they'd have sex with a child if they could get away with it. "But that's just a survey!" you say, "They could be lying in either direction!" True. So the researchers took a bunch of subjects and
hooked them up to boner detectors. Depending on the experiment, the percentage of subjects who got turned on by naked children (under age 12) ranged from 17 percent to 50 percent.
"But those results are all over the place! Surely it can't be that high!"
All right, how about this: there are enough pedophiles to keep
four
million
child porn websites in business, and enough paying customers to build an international industry worth as much as $20 billion. Ten years ago,
the feds shut down a single site that was getting a million hits a month. Throw in the fact that not every pedophile is looking at kiddie porn, and it starts to look like there are
way
more adults with sexual urges toward children than you'd think.
And we don't know shit about them, because they can't admit it openly.
Yet we have rigorous statistical analysis on almost a thousand Pokemon.
What data we do have is skewed, because pedophiles can't come forward to be studied for fear of being burned at the stake. So the only studies have been done on prisoners -- meaning our subjects are limited to those who A) acted on their desires and B) got caught.
But they can't be representative of the whole group, by any means. It would appear that the vast majority of pedophiles don't actually commit sex crimes, for the same reason the rest of us don't: if given the choice between "no sex" and "victimizing an innocent person," most people choose the former. But since "child molester" is literally the worst thing you can be in our society, these abstaining pedophiles don't dare speak up.
It's like you not talking about that one fantasy of yours, but 10,000 times moreso.
Yeah, that fantasy. You know the one.
The source we'll call "J" told us:
"In the online community, most people use the acronym MAPs -- minor-attracted persons. But pedophile ... the way that's supposed to be used is for someone who is attracted to children, people of a certain age -- and by that definition, yes, I'd refer to myself as a pedophile. But the media uses that for child molester."
And if that person wants to reach out for help, to make sure they don't harm anyone? Too bad. For you see ...
#4. Society Has No Idea What to Do With Non-Offending Pedophiles
Weirdly enough, while we (correctly) vilify people who diddle kids as the predators they are, basically no one is willing to take the time to help pedophiles who
don't want to do that. Which is nuts, because that would, you know, save freaking children from being victimized.
Think of the children. Seriously, think of the children!
David Prescott is a therapist who has spent much of his career working with "minor-attracted persons" and says,
"If we think of people who wind up with a sexual interest in children ... it's a little like growing up and realizing there's something about you that makes it impossible for other people to love you. Imagine growing up under circumstances where you can never truly give love in a way that is legal or considered normal by others."
At the moment, Germany seems to be the only country making any real progress on helping pedophiles who dedicate themselves to not molesting kids. Say hello to
Prevention Project Dunkelfeld, which provides "confidential treatment, free of charge" for anyone who is attracted to kids and/or teenagers and is trying their damnedest not to act on it. Again, it's German, so of course it comes with terrifying ad campaign:
But over here in the non-Teutonic chunks of the world, people attracted to kids have to rely on each other for help. They've formed an organization called "Virtuous Pedophiles," or Virped. We got in touch with most of our sources through that site -- and the professionals we talked to spoke highly of them. Mr. Prescott compared it to Alcoholics Anonymous:
"One thing that impresses me about Virped ... it goes back to the early days of alcohol treatment. Human services did not respond well to alcoholism back in the day. So people took it upon themselves and said, 'we don't have professional training, but we're going to try and help.'"
And that's about all they can do, because ...
#3. Society Doesn't Recognize It as an Illness ... Even Though Science Does
Dr. James Cantor is one of -- if not the -- world's leading scientists on a wildly under-studied subject: the brains of pedophiles:
"Our culture is hysterical over the issue. The U.S. will spend enormous amounts of money to lock a person up, but not spend a fraction of it to learn how to stop pedophilia from developing in the first place. I don't think any modern politicians have the cojones. The amount of money I needed to run my MRI experiment is less than what it takes to keep just one person in jail."
"Sorry! There's no rehabilitation-industrial complex."
Yeah, about those MRI experiments -- he and his team have
successfully identified
physical differences in the brain matter of pedophiles, and demonstrated that being into kids isn't a choice, or
necessarily the result of abuse.
"So really, what it seems like ... is that there is a kind of cross wiring. Portions of the brain are responsible for our social instincts -- responsible for figuring out 'this is a person I take care of,' 'this is a person I run away from,' and 'this is a person I flirt with.' To most of us, a child naturally evokes our nurturing instincts. It's as if, when there's not enough connectivity, the instincts get a bit fuzzy ... and when a pedophile sees a child, instead of their brain triggering nurturing aspects, it triggers sexual arousal."
You think someone would want to choose these thoughts?
Mr. Prescott didn't disagree with Cantor's findings, but he did point out that a lot of pedophilia comes from exactly where you'd stereotypically expect -- abused kids:
" ... there are people directly sexually abused as children, and may experience that abuse as the closest thing they experienced to love. And it's possible the person abusing them had genuine warm feelings for them, even though the behavior is completely unacceptable. So that person may develop some belief that there is something genuine [in pedophile/child relationships]."
Once again, you think someone would want to choose these thoughts?
Dr. Cantor countered by pointing out that most of the evidence that sex offenders commit sex offenses due to some past trauma comes from interviews
of sex offenders
-- that is, people with motivation to make themselves look like victims. He pointed out a study by the hilariously-named scientific duo of Hindman and Peters
in 2001, who quizzed sex offenders and found that 67 percent reported suffering from sexual abuse as children. But when those same offenders were polygraphed, only 29 percent were willing to claim they'd been abused.
Confused yet? Now try this on for size:
some studies claim that only half of molesters
are actually pedophiles -- the rest have some other disorder or a violent streak, and the young victims (often family members) just happened to be what was available to them.
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