15 replies to this topic

[Wolf O'Donnell]

Well, it's time to bring out the faggots again. We've got paedophiles to burn at the stake and paedophilic dogs to execute. As the Paedofinder General says... "Everyone is innocent until speculated guilty."

The UK appears to be on the brink of a witch hunt, although perhaps I'm a bit late in posting this now.

The media, which has only just recovered from a public inquiry into its conduct is even now potentially making things worse again for people.

It all started off with a claim that a now deceased celebrity, Jimmy Savile, was a paedophile. Eventually, more claims were made against him. I think the number eventually went up to 300 or so. No trial has been done yet, but he's guilty, through virtue of public opinion. he has suffered what the ancient Romans called, damnatio memoriae. All trace of him has gradually been removed. Even his tombstone is gone and there are now calls to exhume his body, cremate it and take the remains... elsewhere.

But it hasn't stopped there.

The scandal has seemingly drawn others in. There were police announcements that they were investigating other household name celebrities. Then other claims started rolling in.

Already, an innocent man, has somehow had his name tarnished, although the victim has only very recently apologised (today).

Personally, I think the media is causing this.

Just take the Schofield incident where a television presenter hands the PM a card with a list of politicians that may be involved in the child abuse scandal... a list the presenter admitted to having obtained from the Internet after a three minute search.

Quite frankly, there's a lot to debate here.

However, I think it all boils down to one question.

Are we being unfair to paedophiles?

We revile them, we hate them, we fear them, we would rather see them dead. But say you woke up next morning and suddenly realised you were sexually attracted to underage children and you go to a doctor or a psychiatrist and say, "I've got this unnatural attraction, can you help me?"

What do you think is going to happen?

They're not going to get the help they need to overcome this. Obviously, we've got to do something about those who go out and enact their desires. We can't let them do it. But should be treating them as evil and demonising them? Does it help anyone to demonise paedophiles?

[Veteran]

Look for Channel 4 to inevitably rebroadcast the 2001 paedophilia special of BrassEye which I caught the first time round and it is just as awesome now as it was then.

Link for UK users.

Can't find a link for everyone else, there are only clips of the full episode on Youtube. That is scientific fact. There's no real evidence for it, but that is scientific fact!

But no, I don't think it boils down to being unfair to paedophiles. It's always, always the same question when it comes to media coverage: "should I be scared of being ______ed by a _______ in the street all of a sudden?"

Like the late 90s the blanks are currently fucked and paedophile. In the 00s it was killed and terrorist. Hell, I remember having to evacuate from a pantomime of all things because in the late 80s it was bombed and IRA nut.

Things do get blown out of proportion, but this - paedophilia - is the cream of the crop because it's the sheer revulsion of it. I think they linked Saville to necrophilia in one article I read. The difference here is the scale of it. Years and years of it. And when you hear people being interviewed, and how the stories they have are so similar to one another, I am inclined to believe people when they say Saville is unarguably guilty.


On a less-serious and synical note, witch-hunts when it comes to paedophiles are brilliant. There is nothing more sardonically exciting than waking up to fresh juice about some politician/famous person worrying in their gold-plated socks that they'll be found out. The regular people rejoice! Our lives suddenly look better.

[Hana-Nezumi]

I don't know anything about these things going on in the UK, but I am bothered by the demonization of pedophiles in society. The general public doesn't seem to know the difference between a pedophile and a child molester, and there definitely is a difference. It's entirely possible for a person to have an attraction to children and never act on it, or even consider acting on it. I think pedophilia in itself should be considered a mental illness, not the crime against humanity that people make it out to be. Yes, it's sick and wrong, but lets focus on locking up and shaming the ACTUAL child molesters, not the people who just have fucked up fantasies.

[Kwicky Koala]

Isn't it ironic that with all that satire of witch-hunting - Monkey Dust, Brasseye etc - this country can't even identify the paedophile staring at them in the face? There were always rumours surrounding Saville, so the fact he couldn't be brought to justice and shamed while he was alive is doubly frustrating when you know that people were protecting him, even if they weren't meaning to. Protecting the corporation's reputation amounts to protecting your own, something that seems to be the primary concern of every faction in this divided country. As for the police, well, who really knows what their 'endgame' is, but its certain that they delayed many of these things coming to light over the decades.

Every few years in the UK a scandal arises over child abuse - Jimmy Saville and the North Wales care home, going back there was the 'baby p' thing, then the decades long abuse in a care home on Jersey, the murder of James Bulger, all the way back to the Moors Murders and even further. And these are only the ones that make national news, open any British paper and you can read up on other abuse cases, no less foul and in many cases exceeding these acts in depravity, that did not reach a national level. The paedophile rings are another faction, and they will protect their own too.

These things occur in every country, most probably. But that does not make it any more palatable.
Put simply, British people got some problemsss.

I don't see why we spend so much on nuclear missiles (yes, I know its a common liberal thing to complain about, but whatever) and wars when we need money to improve social services like care homes in our own country. What gives us the right to push around Afghanis and tell them how to behave when we can't even get our own shop in order? Why can't we wage war on those in our own midst, those who obtain sex through coercion, intimidation and violence, from minors, from anyone? We're afraid to look; afraid, in our phlegmatic British way, to care.

Wolf, your argument about 'being unfair to paedophiles' is old hat when we can't even catch the bastards. Of course give them psychoanalsis once they're behind bars, so we can find out how and why they did the things they did. It's a common belief that child abuse is self perpetuating after all. But for god's sake catch them. We need to put money into communities to ensure that abused children have someone to talk to about their abuse. We need to listen and believe them - the police haven't, not in the past certainly, as the Wrexham case showed. There's a desperate need for things to be brought into the light. Not that the media aren't their usual awful selves in capitalising on tragedy to sell papers. But that's a secondary concern.

[Hana-Nezumi]

Wolf, your argument about 'being unfair to paedophiles' is old hat when we can't even catch the bastards. Of course give them psychoanalsis once they're behind bars, so we can find out how and why they did the things they did. It's a common belief that child abuse is self perpetuating after all. But for god's sake catch them. We need to put money into communities to ensure that abused children have someone to talk to about their abuse. We need to listen and believe them - the police haven't, not in the past certainly, as the Wrexham case showed. There's a desperate need for things to be brought into the light. Not that the media aren't their usual awful selves in capitalising on tragedy to sell papers. But that's a secondary concern.

See, that's exactly what I mean. You're making the assumption that all pedophiles are child abusers. Wolf wasn't talking about being more fair to child abusers. He was talking about when people demonise pedophiles who have NOT abused children.

[Kwicky Koala]

I was only suggesting, I think, that the demonisation of paedophiles is an issue for another day, given the dire revelations of famous people getting away with child abuse in the UK at the moment. Its a good liberal question, but frankly 'paedophile' is so ingrained in British consciousness as a pejorative that I didn't look beyond that definition. I do know that not all people with those proclivities offend, and those that don't I wouldn't even describe as paedophiles, since to do so would be an insult, though I admit it is an accurate term technically. But to my mind, if there is a demonisation (I would say an ignorance) of those people in the UK, the real issue of today is the cack-handedness surrounding the apprehension of real abusers - and its an issue that can't be wished away after a few months as it has so many times in the past in this part of the world.

[SOAP]

Well this certainly is an uncomfortable subject!

On one hand, I wouldn't stick up for someone who gets off on taking advantage of a child who isn't on the same mental/emotional level to defend themselves against an adult. On the other hand witch hunts are dangerous. People have a funny way of always losing their head when they take justice into their own hands. Sure it's good fun to see a bunch of rich untouchables get what's coming to them but it never just stops there. Soon people are going after neighbors, teachers, even their own family members just for looking at a kid funny. It won't be long till parents get accused of molesting their own kids and you have children being ripped from their families left and right.

I wouldn't pity a child molester. A lot of them seem to always be well protected in one way or another. I guess you'd have to be to indulge in something like that. But I wouldn't want people to take justice in their own hands. It should be handled by people with cooler heads who know what they're doing. Now if it's the case that there's corruption amongst the police or the justice system in general, then there's a bigger issue than an epidemic of child molestation.

[Alastair]

There is a genuine problem in that accusations of abuse are often not taken seriously - to a considerable extent due to the accusers being young children. The solution is not a witch hunt. If reasonable standards of evidence are dismissed then inevitably innocent people will be victimised. A shocking example is the case that Wolf linked to.

Just take the Schofield incident where a television presenter hands the PM a card with a list of politicians that may be involved in the child abuse scandal... a list the presenter admitted to having obtained from the Internet after a three minute search.

A daytime TV presenter spends three minutes browsing the web, and from this produces a list of 'paedophiles' that he sanctimoniously hands over to the Prime Minister. Unfortunatly idiots watching the program will follow this example, and believe that speculation, rumour and innuendo constitute irrefutable evidence. Guilty until proven innocent, eh?!!!

[SOAP]

There in

There is a genuine problem in that accusations of abuse are often not taken seriously - to a considerable extent due to the accusers being young children. The solution is not a witch hunt. If reasonable standards of evidence are dismissed then inevitably innocent people will be victimised. A shocking example is the case that Wolf linked to.

Just take the Schofield incident where a television presenter hands the PM a card with a list of politicians that may be involved in the child abuse scandal... a list the presenter admitted to having obtained from the Internet after a three minute search.

A daytime TV presenter spends three minutes browsing the web, and from this produces a list of 'paedophiles' that he sanctimoniously hands over to the Prime Minister. Unfortunatly idiots watching the program will follow this example, and believe that speculation, rumour and innuendo constitute irrefutable evidence. Guilty until proven innocent, eh?!!!

There in lies the problem then. Go with every accusation and bit of speculation and flying with it, innocent people get branded as child molesters, a heavy accusation that they'll still carry even when found innocent because it's already in the public's mind. Don't take accusation seriously because it comes from a child then real criminals will be harder to catch because the only witness to the crimes are the victims which are children. I think that accusations should be taking seriously no matter the source and especially because of the source but that they shouldn't immediately involve public opinion. Innocent until proven guilty should still hold, even in the case of child molestation.

[Egann]

So this famous (dead) guy may or may not have been a pedo. The only responsible course of action is to try to prove it in court and have his estate pay damages. Except that if you do that, you're damaging his inheritors' estates, and they are guilty of no wrongdoing.

So this desire to exhume his body and cremate it is about finding some way to extract punishment when it's already not possible. Next, someone will want to decapitate the corpse and display the head in a public place, like the year is 1312. Look, just close the case already and let the Elvis-UFO tabloids do their thing.


Innocent until proven guilty is a nice rhetorical flourish, but it should only apply to legal proceedings. If you don't want to associate with someone for any reason, that's your right, and there are worse reasons than "he's a suspected pedo." Heck, if you feel so inclined, you shouldn't have to associate with people of a certain sex for no reason other than you don't want to. It would be outrageously stupid, but that's within your rights. Governments shouldn't convict people for stupidity.

It is not within your rights to commit a crime against someone under any circumstance. Just because someone is suspected or is even actually convicted of a crime doesn't mean they aren't a citizen anymore. That is not a license to do whatever you want to do to them.

[Wolf O'Donnell]

So this famous (dead) guy may or may not have been a pedo. The only responsible course of action is to try to prove it in court and have his estate pay damages. Except that if you do that, you're damaging his inheritors' estates, and they are guilty of no wrongdoing.

So this desire to exhume his body and cremate it is about finding some way to extract punishment when it's already not possible. Next, someone will want to decapitate the corpse and display the head in a public place, like the year is 1312. Look, just close the case already and let the Elvis-UFO tabloids do their thing.

Not precisely. People just feel uncomfortable with him in the same cemetery. Granted, he hasn't been proven guilty yet and I doubt he ever will, because I have severe doubts that they'd put a dead guy or at least, his estate, on trial. Which, I think, is pretty sad.

Guilty with no trial, because you're dead. Still, I could be wrong.

[Egann]

I'm sorry, but what's a dead body going to do? Infect people with the spiritual vibes of pedophilia?


I just read this article and this article (awkward picture warning). A logical argument that porn is increasing pedophilia. Interesting position, anyway. Let me see if I can rehash the ideas.

Orgasms rewire the brains reward circuit.
Risk heightens sexual reward.
Child pornography is illegal.
Most porn models look young and have shaven genitals to make the porn more arousing.
Children look young and have hairless genitals.
Porn users tend to develop a tolerance to porn and search for more potent material over time.

End result: Some porn users who are not otherwise predisposed to be pedophiles stop using regular porn and switch to child porn. Not only are their brains getting a more potent reward because it is illegal and brings an adrenaline rush, but their brains are pre-conditioned to be aroused by it.

Hmm. Not sure what to make of that.

[Oberon Storm]

I don't know anything about these things going on in the UK, but I am bothered by the demonization of pedophiles in society. The general public doesn't seem to know the difference between a pedophile and a child molester, and there definitely is a difference. It's entirely possible for a person to have an attraction to children and never act on it, or even consider acting on it. I think pedophilia in itself should be considered a mental illness, not the crime against humanity that people make it out to be. Yes, it's sick and wrong, but lets focus on locking up and shaming the ACTUAL child molesters, not the people who just have fucked up fantasies.

It is considered a mental illness.

The only pedophiles I know of are people that get caught in the act, people that get caught watching it, or people that form online support groups to reassure each other they are perfectly normal and society is unfair in expecting them to not act on their desires. I have no doubt there are those that do not act on those desires and are not members of these support groups. I have no doubt some may even be gettign help for their condition. We probably will never know who these people are. I understand that they probably don't tell anyone about it because they don't to be ostrisized for it.

Here's the rub. I feel my wish to not have my daughter come near these people outweighs their wish not to made to feel bad.

[Hana-Nezumi]

I'm sorry, but what's a dead body going to do? Infect people with the spiritual vibes of pedophilia?


I just read this article and this article (awkward picture warning). A logical argument that porn is increasing pedophilia. Interesting position, anyway. Let me see if I can rehash the ideas.

Orgasms rewire the brains reward circuit.
Risk heightens sexual reward.
Child pornography is illegal.
Most porn models look young and have shaven genitals to make the porn more arousing.
Children look young and have hairless genitals.
Porn users tend to develop a tolerance to porn and search for more potent material over time.

End result: Some porn users who are not otherwise predisposed to be pedophiles stop using regular porn and switch to child porn. Not only are their brains getting a more potent reward because it is illegal and brings an adrenaline rush, but their brains are pre-conditioned to be aroused by it.

Hmm. Not sure what to make of that.

No. Shaved crotches and pornography don't cause pedophilia. There's no reason to assume pedophilia is increasing in the first place, it's always been around. Reported cases may fluctuate, as societies have changed to be either more or less vigilant about seeking out these people over the course of history, but we have no way of knowing whether the actual number has stayed about the same or not.

I don't know anything about these things going on in the UK, but I am bothered by the demonization of pedophiles in society. The general public doesn't seem to know the difference between a pedophile and a child molester, and there definitely is a difference. It's entirely possible for a person to have an attraction to children and never act on it, or even consider acting on it. I think pedophilia in itself should be considered a mental illness, not the crime against humanity that people make it out to be. Yes, it's sick and wrong, but lets focus on locking up and shaming the ACTUAL child molesters, not the people who just have fucked up fantasies.

It is considered a mental illness.

The only pedophiles I know of are people that get caught in the act, people that get caught watching it, or people that form online support groups to reassure each other they are perfectly normal and society is unfair in expecting them to not act on their desires. I have no doubt there are those that do not act on those desires and are not members of these support groups. I have no doubt some may even be gettign help for their condition. We probably will never know who these people are. I understand that they probably don't tell anyone about it because they don't to be ostrisized for it.

Here's the rub. I feel my wish to not have my daughter come near these people outweighs their wish not to made to feel bad.

Yes I know it's considered a mental illness. I meant that it should be TREATED as mental illness instead of some kind of ultimate evil, because as you say, we have know way of knowing who the ones are who don't act on their desires or talk to anyone about it, and they could VERY possibly be the vast majority rather than the exception. I DO think molestation is a serious crime and child molesters should be SEVERELY punished, and I also think that parents are entirely justified in trying to be careful and keep their kids out of situations where something can happen to them. What I don't agree with is lumping together the real predators with the people who just have very bad thoughts. Or the "witch hunts" where people end up getting accused of things with no evidence just because it happens to be the latest moral panic.

[Mark]

In my youth I found this kind of thing rather worth ridicule.
where on the one hand in society:
a sexual attraction to the same sex = 'just a preference', 'ok', 'be proud of it', 'acceptable', 'natural' and sometimes 'normal'
a sexual attraction to the young = 'not acceptable', 'an abberation', 'not ok', 'unnatural+abnormal', 'disease/illness', or 'serious problem'

I found it laudable because it seemed that we were all prudes - at least in some sense.

(curious about how much of a 'mental illness' you fellas think a sexual attraction to the old is?)

though I still find it odd how it is considered that children are deemed unable to concent to sex except to people of their own age.

however I accept that adults who force themselves onto children are doing a crime - ie. that they are using force to take away the child's sexual innocence. in this case I dont currently have too much issue stating that the magnitude of the crime is to be proportional to the damage.

so riddle me this: how much damage is that?
for what is sexual innocence in a person worth? (some people behave as if it is worth nothing) and what influence (if any) should age have to do with how much it is worth? surely if a person is not ready to engage in a sexual act the suprise of experience may be damaging - but how much damage?
I do not yet have strong answers to these questions and hence I do not have strong oppinion as to how bad (or how much punishment should be given) to child molesters.

Let me see if I can rehash the ideas.

Orgasms rewire the brains reward circuit.
Risk heightens sexual reward.
Child pornography is illegal.
Most porn models look young and have shaven genitals to make the porn more arousing.
Children look young and have hairless genitals.
Porn users tend to develop a tolerance to porn and search for more potent material over time.

End result: Some porn users who are not otherwise predisposed to be pedophiles stop using regular porn and switch to child porn. Not only are their brains getting a more potent reward because it is illegal and brings an adrenaline rush, but their brains are pre-conditioned to be aroused by it.

possibly true to some extent or another.

[Wolf O'Donnell]

I'm sorry, but what's a dead body going to do? Infect people with the spiritual vibes of pedophilia?


I just read this article and this article (awkward picture warning). A logical argument that porn is increasing pedophilia. Interesting position, anyway. Let me see if I can rehash the ideas.

Orgasms rewire the brains reward circuit.
Risk heightens sexual reward.
Child pornography is illegal.
Most porn models look young and have shaven genitals to make the porn more arousing.
Children look young and have hairless genitals.
Porn users tend to develop a tolerance to porn and search for more potent material over time.

End result: Some porn users who are not otherwise predisposed to be pedophiles stop using regular porn and switch to child porn. Not only are their brains getting a more potent reward because it is illegal and brings an adrenaline rush, but their brains are pre-conditioned to be aroused by it.

Hmm. Not sure what to make of that.

I would argue that it is in the opposite direction.

We demonise paedophiles, we ostracise them and hate them. Then we as a society allow them to be bombarded with this, this, this and outrageously this and this. We allow child beauty pageants where underaged children are tarted up with make-up and dress up in bikinis.

Even the so-called "Christian" Justin Bieber has this for an album cover.

How old is he? Like five?

Mind you, I've kind of defeated my original position by quoting hysterical articles by the Daily Mail. But yeah, we can't be saying one thing and then allowing another. Although, I guess we aren't because we're complaining about it.

Edited by Wolf O'Donnell, 11 November 2012 - 05:51 AM.