VirPed Panel: 16 December 2024

Acanthos asks;

Considering that many pedophiles do not want to reveal that they are such and that those who break the law are actually a very vocal minority, are the majority of pedophiles in hiding virtuous?

I think about this a lot. I feel like most pedophiles must be non offending, if I had to guess I’d say the % of offenders among pedophiles might be similar to the % of sex offenders among non pedophiles, maybe a little higher since being a pedophile generally fucks your mental health up, but I don’t think offenders are the majority

Probably? It’s difficult to say for certain, but I certainly was a virtuous pedophile in hiding. I’ve made it a point when communicating with people that the majority of us probably don’t offend and don’t talk about it so you never see us and just assume we don’t exist.

It seems likely that the majority of people with these attractions are just living with them, not abusing, not doing anything illegal, not even associating with other pedophiles, and certainly not engaging in “maptivism” of the Ask the VirPed Panel kind.

Perhaps in the last 30 years or so more of us have reached out into the internet, hoping that anonymity would make it safe to find some sort of outlet, and a lot have probably found something that’s legal and adequate in that zone. Others will manage without any more than an occasional awareness when they’re out in public that some of the kids seem attractive and that they seem to sometimes creep into sexual fantasy.

To be honest, the impression I have is that very few of us really square up to the fact of our pedophilia or consciously explore its moral implications. By the same ticket, only a minority of us surface the attractions enough to get into illegal behaviour, although those pedophiles define our whole public reputation.

More of us will simply dodge around the awkward fact - putting it aside, letting it lie, pretending it isn’t what it is or trying to contain it in the smallest possible compartment of our lives - not letting it conflict with the life we hope to live. We do this unless or until it forces its way into vision somehow. There are good and bad ways this can happen.

Hard to blame anyone for putting their head in the sand when there are zero rewards for honesty - at least outside of the tiny online pedophile ghettos. Is it virtue when you do the right thing as part of avoiding thought or reflection about what you are? Hard to say. Each of us makes our own contribution to the silence that makes life intolerable for many of us - but the outcome is often “no harm to kids” anyway, and that’s no small thing.

I wouldn’t say that “those who break the law are a very vocal minority”. I would say those who are caught breaking the law are a visible minority. There is a vocal group of pedophiles online who want to make adult-child sex legal. Those two groups overlap Venn-diagram style. The ones who break the law and are caught may well not say anything (and if they get legal advice, it will typically be to not say anything). If they were in the pro-contact intersection, they may stop talking after they get caught.

There is some data on what percent offend. There was a recent study that looked at a community sample of German men that did not have blatant and obvious bias to it. Answers were anonymous so there was no obvious incentive to lie. From that they got a percentage who were pedophiles, and a percentage of those who had offended either hands-on or with images. It might be this

It is of course just one study, but there are comparatively few such studies.

We cannot avoid the fact that many pedophiles do offend and don’t get caught. It would be far better if there were a lot fewer of them, for the sake of the children – and (as a distant second) for the reputation of us pedophiles. The primary justification for treating pedophiles well is that a lot of us don’t offend, and as in any group we should be assumed to be innocent unless and until proven guilty. That’s true whether we non-offenders are 95%, or 50% or 30%. There are a lot of ordinary men who rape women and never get caught too. If we counted harassment and unethical sorts of advances that fall short of rape, the percentage would be much higher.

We don’t know for certain, precisely because there are so many of us hiding away. The strong presence of communities like VirPed and MSC show that non-offending, anti-contact pedophiles are prevalent, even if we don’t know for sure if we are the majority of pedophiles. I like to think that most of us don’t offend, and that there are many of us in hiding who don’t come close to harming children. It took a lot of courage for me to join VirPed at all, and before then I was one of those silent pedophiles who wasn’t harming children. Many of my current VirPed friends joined the community after I did, so there was a point in time when they were silent non-offenders until they discovered VirPed.

It’s safe to assume that there are many more silent pedophiles who don’t harm kids and are simply unaware of VirPed or other support communities, and it’s dangerous to assume that the offenders who make the news are accurate representations of the entire pedophile population.

It’s impossible to tell, and I’d argue that everyone here has a bias to assume that more people would be like we are rather than pedophiles that molest children but are not caught. I’d certainly like to believe that most that have this attraction do not act upon it. Non-pedophiles do molest children for reasons not related to actual attraction, so that would have to be filtered out as well.

Though everyone feels psychologically safe when given a direct and definitive answer, I think it’s never wrong to openly admit that you don’t know something. I don’t think anyone knows the answer to this question, at the moment.

Part of the incentive to hide something is because the cultural narrative sees it as damning, dangerous or debilitating (Law of Prevalence : Anything people have a strong incentive to hide will be many times more prevalent than it seems). We live in a society that is very vocal about its hatred and disgust of pedophilia, so it’s not surprising that most people who are concerned with pedophilic feelings remain hidden. This has a definite impact on the way paedophilia is portrayed.

Moreover, it’s possible that the current stigma and confusion surrounding the term “paedophilia” (e.g. paedophilia = child molester) means that many people with an attraction to minors might never identify themselves as a paedophile. Because of that, I personally I spent over 10 years believing that I couldn’t be a paedophile because I had no desire to commit acts related to my attraction to minors.