If you truly understand (not just from the TV and mainstream medias) what it means that someone is a pedophile, you can easily skip this article and do something else, because this would not be anything new to you; otherwise please read on. This text tries to dispel some (by medias supplemented) folk superstitions about pedophiles. They are without exaggeration the most hated minority in our society; so hated that even a variety of activists fighting for minority rights are distancing from them, because they do not want to commit a social suicide.
What do most people think “pedophile” is? The evil man who, in all sorts of ways, attracts young children to situations where he can sexually abuse them, rape them and sometimes, because of fear of revelation, he kills them. Such behavior is naturally condemned by decent people, and no one has compassion with such individuals; and little wonder, because who hurts children who have typically very limited opportunities to defend themselves does not deserve anything good.
But this point of view does not really match with reality. So what does the word “pedophile” really mean? It is an individual with sexual deviance (a disorder of sexual preference) and this individual is sexually attracted to children (and it is worth pointing out that this does not mean “persons under sixteen or any other number”, but “persons without secondary sex characteristics, no matter what their age are”). That’s everything... nothing else. It is NOT an individual with a higher tendency to commit violence, harm others (or children), rape, enforce sex and so on; all these things are as spread for pedophiles as for any other people (actually, pedophiles are slightly less dangerous in this comparison, but the reasons are beyond the scope of this article). From normal people, therefore, pedophiles differ only in sexual preferences, nothing else.
So if someone is a pedophile, it does not mean he will try to rape your children; claiming the opposite is similar to supposing that the fact that someone is a heterosexual man means that he will try to rape your wife. Pedophiles can control their sexual instincts just as much as everyone else; and just as you, dear readers, you mostly do not rape the objects of your sexual passions, and pedophiles will typically not rape your children, even if they were the objects of their sexual imaginations. The pedophile teacher in the kindergarten is therefore no more risk for your five-year-old child than the heterosexual teacher at the secondary grammar school for your seventeen-year-old daughter with developed secondary sex characteristics.
And the whole truth is a little more complicated: not only that every pedophile is not a sexual rapist, but not even every sexual rapist who chose a child as his victim is a pedophile (in fact, just in exceptional cases is the rapist real pedophile). In other words, most of the sexually motivated attacks on children are not done by pedophiles, although the media use these terms essentially as synonyms: whenever someone sexually attacks a child, the media immediately says that the aggressor is a “pedophile”, regardless his real sexual preferences.
Who then sexually hurts children? On the one hand, sexual sadists are excited by pain and suffering and a clean sadist do not really care whether his target is a woman, man or a child (although some of them have their preferences, the suffering of the victim is the main aspect of his attack); for these sexual predators, children are easy targets for purely practical reasons: they are trustworthy, weak and small (if it was easier to hunt adults, they would probably do so). Other typical offenders of child sexual abuse are frustrated ones, mostly under-intelligent and often drunk attackers who try to satisfy their sexual instinct and are willing to rape an object that does not entirely meet their sexual preferences; it is similar with necrophilia... the most of individuals who raped a corpse would prefer a living woman, but sex with the corpse represents the easiest way of sexual satisfaction (alternatively, these people can abuse also animals or children).
It is absolutely natural that parents are able to go far with protecting their children which is only right; however, it is reasonable to properly evaluate the risk. And in this particular case, I only have to say that parents, who already lives in a big fear of pedophiles and who would not hesitate to lock them somewhere for the good of their children (or even worse), is just wasting energy to eliminate a group that statistically hurts their children in a negligible degree, while the more risky groups are ignored. Statistically, it is far safer for a child to have a pedophile neighbor than a neighbor who is sexually frustrated alcoholic with lower intelligence. The chance that your child would be abused by the pedophile is far less than the chance that your child is abused by someone else.
I have been involved in many discussions about this and I would like to say that this article is not a defense of people who rape children; of course, I do not talk in their advantage and, for example, killing a person who raped a child seems to me as an adequate response. On the other hand, I believe that putting an equator between a sex offender and a pedophile is inaccurate (most pedophiles are not sexual offenders, and most sexual offenders with child victims are not pedophiles), and it primarily makes a hell from the lives of decent pedophiles who have never even touched a child and they do not plan anything like that and the only thing why they are guilty is their non-standard sexual orientation they cannot change. There is no treat for pedophilia... there is no way to change one’s sexual preferences; there are conflicts about the extent to which these preferences are inherited, and to what extent it is affected by the environment in their childhood but how to change them, no one has yet discovered, so the cure of a pedophile is a task of such difficulty as a change of homosexual to heterosexual and vice versa. Today it’s simply not possible.
Česky: http://dfens-cz.com/o-pedofilii-a-pedofilech/
Author: Urza
Who is him?
Urza is Czech anarcho-capitalist author, he has written about thousand of libertarian texts on the web and printed media and also the first Czech book on anarcho-capitalism. He lectures at schools and conferences, made a number of videos and is often invited to many discussions.