Still falls under a paedophile though. The severity of which can be debated.
I don't think this line of debate has even been touched beyond the OMG PEDO DEFENDER rhetoric.
Do I think it's acceptable or moral to think sexually about children? No, no I do not. The problem I'm attempting to discuss through the sound of REEEEEEEEEE is what do we do about it and what happens when we do what ever that is about it.
I don't believe so, I think they should seek treatment.
I think we can agree on those points, or at least the fundamentals. Now, I am not going to charge in and say "well obviously
this is what you do about it". What I'll say is that -- whatever else is a part of the method to deal with it, discourage it, etc -- the part that I insist on is that we should not relax our society's harsh attitude toward pedophelia at all.
The big disconnect for me is that the "way to deal with it" is already available to pedophiles just like anyone else suffering from a harmful (yes,
harmful, in spite of what the DSM-V may say) deviancy. Just like a person suffering from suicidal or murderous thoughts is ultimately responsible for how they choose to handle it. They might not be "to blame" for those thoughts, and that isn't the goal here. Blame and responsibility are actually two different things. A person who has ongoing pedophilic thoughts is still responsible for whether or not they'll reach out for help. They are not "to blame" for simply having these thoughts; they are only "to blame" when they are presented with opportunities to course-correct and yet they choose not to (for whatever reason).
If I'm understanding what some of the posters are saying in here is that we should "have sympathy, not make them out to be monsters, and the end result will hopefully be more pedophiles are willing to reach out for professional help". I can understand that mentality, but I am going to repeat myself: loosening or normalizing any facet of pedophelia runs the risk of making it seem acceptable to
some people.
And these "
some people" are mentally ill, according to your constant reminders. If the person is mentally ill already, what makes you think that a tolerant and loose standard towards pedophilic urges will make that mentally ill person think "gee, society sure is being tolerant of me and it has made me realize that I really have something wrong with me. I should go get help"? As a matter of comparison, can you show me clinical data in handling schizophrenics or those with bipolar disorder with "tolerance" and how that helped them? "Oh, the doctors let me live in my delusions for a while, but then I realized they were ironically agreeing with me. Hah! Got me, Doctors. It finally helped me accept that I'm schizophrenic."
This pie-in-the-sky view of how mental illnesses are handled is simply not rooted in reality. You are literally taking the absolute best-case scenario here and extrapolating it across the board. "If only we didn't make them out to be monsters, then so many more of them would come forward and it would be worth the risk!" I mean, really? First of all, how many more of them would come forward? I'm interested in hearing that if you can manage it.
But no, it's not "worth the risk". Pedophelia should always be viewed as monstrous because then -- when the person is alone with their own thoughts and their own devices -- they will at least be ingrained with the sense that society cannot tolerate the sort of ongoing thoughts they are entertaining. When their own brain has failed them because it doesn't scream out
this is deviant, the voice of society still has a chance of convincing them to pursue help or at least avoid the behavior.
The victims here are the children. Their safety takes priority, and
then those with the mental illness can be addressed in a manner that keeps the risk to children at an absolute minimum.