re: tOfficial "Alahunter is Insufferable" thread

quote:

---

However, I've always been more of a practical, matter of fact type of person. One has within themselves, the ability to change..

---

Psychology does not play with those same rules. In psychology, there is ton of gray that needs to be sifted -- each individual case has to be taken on its own but usually there's a trend, a pattern in human thought and impulse control.

With pedophiles, this pattern is being better outlined, and we are starting to understand it in a way that we never had before.

There has to be a way to deal with them, one that won't immediately imprison them or put them on some list to encourage vigilante justice.

And it has to start with admitting that they're sick. They're not well. They have problems in their brains that need to be addressed, and we those that want help should be offered something.

Violent child victimizers were substantially more likely than those with adult victims to have been physically or sexually abused when they were children.
- BJS Survey of State Prison Inmates, 1991

The reliability of the notion that pedophilia is caused by sexual abuse in childhood was explored by examining retrospective self-reports of 344 males. Included in the study were 77 heterosexual pedophiles, 54 homosexual pedophiles, 51 nonpedophilic sex offenders against children, 36 sex offenders against physically mature females, 75 heterosexual paid volunteers who erotically preferred mature females, and 51 homosexual clients who preferred mature males. For each sex offender the differential diagnosis of an erotic preference for minors vs. a preference for physically mature partners was made by means of the phallometric test of erotic gender and age preferences. The analysis of self-reports confirmed that the proportion of pedophiles who report having been sexually abused in childhood by mature persons is larger than that of men who were not charged for or accused of a sex offense against a child though the difference is relatively small (28.6 vs. 13.9 and 10.7% for the heterosexual pedophiles and the two groups of gynephiles, respectively, and 25.9 vs. 11.8% for the homosexual pedophiles and androphiles, respectively). Further analysis demonstrated, however, that pedophiles who admitted having an erotic interest in children significantly more often claimed that they had been sexually abused as children than pedophiles who did not admit having such feelings.

I imagine that most of these people did not receive any counselling or did not report being molested or raped.

I also imagine that when they themselves developed these tendencies they were incapable of bringing themselves to actually tell someone.

The fact is: If we want to deal with this problem, the sooner we can catch it, the better.

And if we can stop them from molesting, we can break pieces of the chain.