VirPed Panel: 26 August 2024

Anonymous asks:

How do you feel about pedophiles who commit offenses?

Defining “offending” is important here, also important is to be sure the offender is actually a pedophile, and not just a deviant individual. It’s important to remember that not all people who sexually harm children are pedophiles, some are simply out to harm others, regardless of age, or sex, such as a sadist.

As far as offending behaviors go, I feel an offence needs to have a victim. A child being directly or indirectly harmed by the actions of an offender. There are some blurry lines here. If I draw a picture of an imaginary child in a sexually charged scene, has a child been harmed? I argue no, nobody has been harmed here.

Physical sexual contact with a child is an easy yes, there is a victim. The same can be said for creating or trading CSEM. The file lives on the internet forever and the victim is essentially harmed over and over every time someone views it. In both of these cases a child has been harmed, and it shouldn’t be difficult to determine whether or not a child has been harmed, but the debates and research continue on, and outlets for non-offending pedophiles are constantly restricted.

Ok, now that I’ve outlined some of the details, I have two very simple guidelines for my thoughts on offending pedophiles.

1 - I hold a very firm “no harm” belief, and I am 100% on-board with children not having the ability to consent, and I want children to have a safe and secure upbringing, far away from the sexual drive of adults. Most of us tackled our attractions while we were still children ourselves, and that fact provides me a rather strong empathetic view of children, and I cannot see them harmed in any way. I believe people who harm children should be dealt with, but I would also like to see some compassion from the public that would help them sort through their issues and rejoin society in a meaningful and supported way. In the current state of the system, we don’t even have a great process for providing the children the help they need, and we tend to throw these offenders away…

2 - I feel rather strongly that most offenders see their actions coming long before they act. That is of course if they are actually a pedophile, and not just a sadist or some other category. If these people had the ability to reach out for help before acting, and in doing that, not be cast out by society, fired from their jobs, and thrown out of their houses, I think we could do some real good, and really help protect children. As it is, you can’t tell anyone about this attraction without doing irreparable damage to your image, even if you have never offended in any way.

So I believe in a no harm stance, but I feel strongly we do need legal outlets that can’t be twisted into supporting a criminal case, and we need a non biased support system designed to help rather than cast out offenders and potential offenders.

The reason this question is so challenging is that the term “offending” has such broad interpretation, particularly among MAPs. I think it’s viewed by members of the public as breaking a law, specifically one that relates to an attraction. Those laws differ considerably from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Offenders can include those who looked at drawings or AI depictions or teens exchanging selfies or those who violently raped a child. Sometimes reading a news article doesn’t make it totally clear what their offence was. But I’ve met a lot of sex offenders, both knowingly and unknowingly. It’s more difficult for me to accept someone who committed a hands on offence, but I try to get to know them well enough to understand what occurred and how it happened. I don’t think that they should be paying for what they did for their whole life. In the two cases where I had no idea that people I had befriended were child attracted, I had to read about what happened in news articles, and there was no mistake about what was alleged to have occurred, I was unable to forgive or condone. But in general, I try not to be judgmental. While I have never or would never have sexual contact with a child, I still accept the feeling of There but for the grace of God….

What do we mean by offending pedophiles? Does it have to be a recent offence, or does it include those who have offended years ago and have already done their time in jail? Are we talking about offenders with multiple victims, or those who did something once and never again? Is it just contact offences, or are we talking about people who view (not produce) CSAM? What about people who view CGI of children (loli/shota) or drawings, or written erotic fiction involving minors, all of which can be illegal in some countries?

There are lots of variables as to what counts as offending, and different people may give different answers. Personally, I don’t consider those who use CGI or stories as offending, as no real children are involved, even if they are illegal in some countries. CSAM is a difficult case: real children were abused to produce that content and the production of it should absolutely be illegal. Is someone who passively views CSAM in the same category as someone who produces it? I don’t think so. Many people become addicted to CSAM and want to stop, but are afraid of reaching out because of the legal consequences. I think we should focus on helping these people, rather than arresting them when those resources could be used to catch the producers and shut down CSAM sites.

Those who have committed a contact offence have harmed a child in some form, and such actions are never acceptable. Depending on how much remorse the offender shows, I think it’s better to focus on rehabilitation rather than punishment, and to understand that people do make mistakes and deserve a second chance (without taking away the seriousness of their actions). This is a position I hold for all crimes: rehabilitation is always more important than punishment, and in principle I am against the death penalty. I am also in favour of abolishing the sex offender registry, as there is insufficient evidence to show it actually protects children (in fact, there are minors as young as fourteen on the registery!) and serves as a permanent, unnecessary punishment.

There are VirPed members who have committed a contact offence in the past. They have done their time, and some are in a sex offender treatment program. Should we shun these members? Our image would look better, but I believe everyone deserves support, and if past offenders show remorse, they deserve to move forward and learn from their actions. If we told them to get lost, that would make them more isolated which could make things worse, not better. Obviously their past actions were absolutely immoral and unethical, but that doesn’t mean the individual isn’t irredeemable.

Note how I always used the term “offender” rather than “pedophile.” Not all pedophiles are offenders, and not all offenders are pedophiles. It’s important to keep the two terms distinct.

The question is open-ended enough that the best I can do is address some points.

1 - When offenders harm a child I’m as upset as anyone. Maybe more so when it is a young girl since I want the very best for young girls more than the average person.

2 - First a parallel case: Parts of the LGB community have an extra layer of hate for pedophiles, even non-offending ones. When people follow the science and decide maybe pedophilia is a sexual orientation (it sure looks like one and quacks like one) that complicates the simple story they would like to tell that supports their legitimate goals. But extra hatred of pedophiles for that reason is selfish and unethical. Similarly, offending pedophiles give a bad name to us non-offenders. There’s some tendency for us to try to outdo the general public in just how much we hate them and how severely they should be punished. I think this is similarly selfish and unethical of us.

3 - Consider the various sex crimes that men commit against women that are bad but not the very worst. With strangers, hands accidentally lingering on breasts or butts. Frottage in a crowded subway. Wolf whistles. Starting with consent for some level of intimacy, completing intercourse when they thought they had consent for full sex but found they didn’t, or with a very drunk partner. The one thing we don’t ever put on those men is, “What a sicko for wanting sex with a woman!” We condemn them for violating boundaries, but not for their underlying desire. I think offenders against children should be given that much of a break, and they rarely are. If a man caresses a child “in the areas bathing suits cover”, or asks a girl to get naked and play with herself, or jerks off in her presence, those are all serious boundary violations deserving vigorous condemnation. But society’s wrath is hugely amplified by the sense that he is evil for feeling a gut-level desire to do those things in the first place. It shouldn’t be.

This shows up with crystal clarity when “offending” involves reading an erotic story involving children, or looking at cartoons of children in sexual situations. There are no boundary violations because there are no real children, there is just wrath at the idea that pedophiles find such things sexually appealing.

I will take “offending” to mean, “pedophiles who have interacted sexually with a minor.” I have mixed feelings about offending pedophiles. On the one hand child abuse is always condemnable, and I do. On the other hand, I have deep sympathy for pedophiles who who were victims themselves and go on to molest kids because the boundaries were blurred for them in their childhood. It pales in comparison to my sympathy for the new child victim, but it is there. I have significantly less sympathy for pedophiles who are especially sadistic or sociopathic in their offenses. For them, I would say I have a deep anger. Overall, the whole subject makes me pretty sad.

My main feeling is that I’m glad I’m not one. I don’t think I personally could live with myself in that situation.

If you ask how I feel about those who sexually abuse children, putting their own pleasure ahead of the welfare of the child, I don’t understand what causes that behaviour, or why that person doesn’t heed their awareness that it’s illegal and likely to cause a lot of harm. I wish we could understand that. I do have some insight into it, I guess, since I know what it feels like to have sexual desire for a kid, and how much you wish it was true that some sort of romantic relationship could work out. But on the flipside, I have the realism to know it couldn’t.

I feel strong empathy with the child victims in those cases, and some anger that they went through what they did.

It’s not possible to look into the twin topics of pedophilia and child sexual abuse without becoming aware that there isn’t just one kind of offender, or one kind of abuse. The people who break laws related to sex and children fall into a huge number of different categories. They include rapist murderers; they include groomers; they include people who film themselves abusing children; they include people who just view those images; they include people who view cartoon images; they include people who as minors themselves sought sexual experiences with younger minors. There’s a lot of variation.

Society at large has the same opinion about all of them, but in practice, making no distinction is less useful when the person is a member of your family or friend group, or you’re the professional tasked with resolving the situation.

Some situations are open and shut. The person is a terrible risk to children’s safety and always will be. It is best to put that person out of harm’s way, and never really let them live in society. This applies to the most extreme cases.

However, unless you are willing to do this to literally everyone who transgresses the by now very wide range of laws (and remember it is now illegal in many countries for anyone to view certain cartoons that are published legally in the US), then you have to somewhere along the line say that you can’t arrest your way out of all the different cases. That means there will be offenders who are going to re-enter society, and some who remain in it even if they’re caught. I think at the moment society does a poor job of acknowledging and making the best of that situation.

If you’re also aware of the number of people who are offending but without being detected or arrested, then you will hope it’s possible to prevent such crimes upstream of the first victim. This means reaching people at risk of offending before they offend, or reaching people who have committed low level offences before they escalate. For this you need to make it possible for those people to reach out for help, rather than leave them feeling that having crossed a single line once, they will be treated as badly as if they had done much worse crimes. We are doing this very badly as a society, too.

I am not an offender, and I am hopeful and confident that I never will be, but you can’t really be in online pedophile spaces without meeting some people who offended, got caught, and paid the price. Talking to such people has enlightened me somewhat about how they got into the situation. I don’t think it’s encouraged me to change my views about what’s acceptable behaviour, but I have understood their regret and anguish and in some cases the pointlessness and cruelty of things like public registries. I’m also aware of pedophile communities where pedophiles are radicalised and glorify offending. I don’t like that a bit and I avoid those places. That’s why VirPed is so great, because it makes space for the pedophiles who basically agree with society that adult-child sex is wrong and always will be.

Long before I realised I was a pedophile, I was never the sort of person to join in with the cries of the mob, even when something terrible has been done that should never be done. As a boy, whenever I would read about someone getting condemned from every side, it would increase my desire to understand what happened, without getting misled by emotion. I think curiosity of that kind is a good thing versus condemnation. I wish it was more popular. So while it’s tempting, for optical reasons, to respond to the question with expressing hatred toward offenders, I feel it’s more like me to express dismay, and a desire that we can find the answers that help prevent people hurting chidlren in the future.

Hearing about children getting deeply hurt makes my stomach turn. Watching the perpetuation of a flawed system that mistreats offenders and victims and families alike makes my stomach turn. We’re losing good people here, and the world isn’t ready to stop it. It keeps happening. There’s millions of suffering souls we’ll never reach. It breaks my heart.

I downloaded CSEM fifteen years ago, so I am an offender. But I believe people can change and I believe I can change. And I was an exclusive pedophile when there was no help for people like me. I tried so hard to be “good” and avoided contact crimes, but became addicted to porn and caught by the internet. I do not have a history of “hands on” offenses, but that does not mean I think I am better than those people. I am just lucky I wasn’t abused myself and that my parents loved me. Without those things I could have become a very bad man indeed.

Our job at VP is to try and help people avoid traps that hurt themselves and others. Being exclusive attracted to children carries a much higher risk for offending than people who are not exclusively attracted. No one asks for this sexuality, any more than you ask for congenital blindness or other diseases or conditions. But trying to figure out how to live this way with no help, no support, only the enthusiastic hatred of others makes the difficult task of handling an unwanted sexual attraction almost overwhelming. You can hate the behavior (I hate mine) without hating the person.

I do not believe you have to make a choice between wanting the best for victims and wanting the best for offenders. I think wanting the best for offenders will result in fewer victims, but I know getting past the disgust is difficult, and usually a process. I appreciate that at VP I still have a voice as an “offender” who wants very badly to live a more virtuous life.

If someone is actively engaged in behaviors that are harmful to others, I take issue with that and will encourage them to stop and get whatever help they need.

If someone is currently living their life in a way that does not cause harm to others (or at the very least trying to), I support that and will treat them like anyone else who lives their life in such a way.

Getting caught up in people’s past reduces the incentive for them to be better in the future. Why would someone care about improving if they’ll always be seen in the context of their worst actions?

Of course, there are some exceptions. In particular, if someone does not regret the harm they caused in the past and is choosing to be better now for reasons unrelated to morality, that’s probably not someone I would associate with.