Slashdot Mirror
Internet "Creates Pedophiles" According to "Expert"
Brian Ribbon writes "In the latest sensationalist article about pedophiles on the internet, the director of a Spanish vigilante organization has claimed that the internet 'creates pedophiles'. While conflating pedophilia with child sexual abuse, the 'expert' quoted in the article incorrectly states that 'studies show that some pedophiles feel attracted to children from an early age, but the majority of them develop the tendency later on'; he then claims that 'the internet can become a catalyst for people belonging to the latter group.'"
Couldn't this very likely be true? And, more importantly, if it is, so what?
The internet is an enabling technology for an awful lot of things, and the information easily available via the internet has, I'm sure, acted as a catalyst or even an initiator for all sorts of interests, even interests some may consider distasteful or even illegal. Fortunately, the positive aspects of this information tool are viewed by the vast majority of people to outweigh its negatives.
This submitter appears eager to dismiss something that is probably quite accurate; namely, that the internet can catalyze or even create an interest in a predisposed person, who might not have had the opportunity, inclination, will, or knowledge to pursue it otherwise, absent this tool. Why don't we instead simply agree that while this state of affairs may be the case, it isn't the "fault" of the internet?
The internet is a tool for access to information. That tool allows someone who may not have explored their pedophilia 50 years ago to do it now, simply because of the privacy and ease, and may even catalyze it or allow it to grow. That is, essentially, creating -- or at least solidifying -- "pedophiles", and I am not making any value judgment whatsoever. Just as the internet "creates" people who enjoy online games, or who have discovered and embraced any of a number of other topics they otherwise might not have without the unique and easy exposure the internet can provide in the comforts and privacy of one's home 24 hours a day, it is so for this as well.
And why can't it follow that however small an increased number of people -- however small -- may act on those feelings of "pedophilia" who wouldn't ever have gotten to that point before because of their own inhibitions or any number of other reasons, jumping the gap to what the rule of law in many societies currently defines as illegal in the form of either child pornography or child sexual abuse, regardless of consent? (Whether pedophilia does not always equal child sexual abuse and vice versa is irrelevant.)
The internet makes a great deal of things much easier. As such, it is going to support much easier access to information -- text, images, video -- and like-minded individuals that can undoubtedly support or encourage interest in just about any topic one can imagine.
What is so hard to believe about that?
Perhaps "gives an opportunity for people with such inclinations to learn more" I suppose...but really, you may as well say that public libraries, with their chemistry and physics books, their copies of the communist manifesto and other 'inflammatory' tracts, create bomb-firing terrorists.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
i heard that ideological motivation can destroy a person's ability to reason
and that some people called "experts" mistake indoctrination into an agenda for actual education
ban ideology!
ban "experts"!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If there's anything leading to Pedophilia being activated later in life it's the over-sexualization of our kids, not the internets. It's all around us all the time...but the key here is "activating" them. None of this "creates" Pedophiles, but some of it might push someone on the edge over the brink.
"Life's short and hard, like a body building elf." -- The Bloodhound Gang
...film at 11. C'mon, if you removed all the ill-informed people offering speculation and unfounded personal opinion as fact from the Internet, there'd be very little left apart from busty substances and badger paws.
It doesn't matter what you believe or are feeling, the Internet is big enough that you can find a group of people just like you. The "I am not alone" feeling in combination with the protection of anonymity dissolves the taboo in the individual, which is the psychological wall that separates the acceptable from the unacceptable. After that point, nothing is preventing you from examining and exploring your thoughts, which naturally can cause them to grow, especially when you have others legitimizing them. You can't rationalize it until the taboo is broken. On the extreme end, this acceptance INSIDE the group leads the group to feel that there really is nothing wrong with what they believe, and they start working on legitimizing themselves. You can see this happening online today. there are already activists for such causes. They are explicitly using the civil rights and gay rights movements as templates for creating social acceptance. Keep an eye out for it.
Anyone with an agenda can push any "theory" they like.
Example? Water is dangerous and deadly... we should ban that, right? After all:
It causes death due to accidental inhalation, even in small quantities.
Prolonged exposure to water in solid form causes severe tissue damage.
Excessive ingestion produces a number of unpleasant though not typically life-threatening side-effects.
It's is a major component of acid rain.
Gaseous water can cause severe burns.
It contributes to soil erosion.
It leads to corrosion and oxidation of many metals.
Contamination of electrical systems often causes short-circuits.
Exposure decreases effectiveness of automobile brakes.
Found in biopsies of pre-cancerous tumors and lesions.
Given to vicious dogs involved in recent deadly attacks.
Often associated with killer cyclones in the U.S. Midwest and elsewhere, and in hurricanes including deadly storms in Florida, New Orleans and other areas of the southeastern U.S.
Thermal variations in it are a suspected contributor to the El Nino weather effect.
And on, and on and on...
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
Pedophiles are the modern equivalent of witches, used to rile up the mob. Even if they never touch a child, they are often treated like depraved criminals and imprisoned or murdered.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
...by the criminal statistics I've seen. Yes, the number of child pornography charges have exploded but the number of child molestation charges have not. All that's happened is that thousands of pedos have pooled all their pictures and videos made over decades and copied them around the internet. I guess it's something like the Drake equation, even if you assume this few are pedophiles, this few molest children, this few produce video, this few share it with anyone, this few leak to pedos in general - when you start out with billions of people spread over decades it hardly takes much for that to add up to quite a lot.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Pedophilia is the sexual attraction by adults to prepubescent children. There is no specific act associated with pedophilia, outside the mind of the pedophile. You are advocating thought crime.
Creation/possession/distribution of child pornography and child molestation are not the same thing as pedophilia.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
This trend of classifying anyone attracted to teenagers as a "pedophile" or "sex predator" isn't helping.
Someone sexually attracted to 5 year-olds and someone attracted to 15 year-olds is not the same thing. Not the same thing at all. Yet the "sex predator" hysteria in western countries has all but eliminated this distinction. Throughout most of human history, it would be perfectly natural for a someone to be attracted to a post-pubescent teenage male or female, but today many people arrested for sex offenses involving teenagers are mistakenly classified as pedophiles by the media, the public, and often even the arresting officers and the court system.
For an adult male/female to have sexual contact with a teenage girl/boy demonstrates a bad sense of judgment, yes, and very likely they should be punished. However, classifying them as some sort of mentally-deranged freak isn't helping anything. It is natural for a male to be attracted to a fertile teenage girl with wide hips and large breasts. No amount of legislation or public hysteria will change that.
Oh come now. Obviously the hidden paedophile who can practice his trade in secret for decades but doesn't attract the attention of the wider world is far preferable to the easily tracked, yet obviously far worse internet version.
After all, it's not real rape unless its on the internet.
Better than that, and no, I'm not posting AC... The basis of this business is to criminalize and excoriate one particular sexual proclivity.
Recent and mounting evidence showing genealogical links to sexual behaviors supports the theory that ALL human sexual deviations are simply part and parcel of the wide array of possible human sexual behaviors.
In civilized society, we generally deem pedophilia as abhorrent, aberrant, and evil but that does not mean those who practice it are necessarily evil. If indeed, there are genetic causations for such behaviors (namely ALL human sexual behaviors) then simply criminalizing it, and punishing those affected, and tarring all technologies involved with 'bad' labels is simply a head in the sand reaction to what is not understood, and consequently not tolerated.
I believe that some study of ancient Greek society will show that pederasts were respected men of society, and only thought poorly of if their interests in the children did not benefit the child in an acceptable manner.
So before we all start tarring people with the kristo-fascist brush, perhaps it is better to take a holistic approach to the problem. Punitive prohibition has not worked well for anything that I can think of.
I'm not saying that we should all accept pedophilia as just another part of life, but I AM saying that the point-n-persecute justice system is not the right way to handle things because along the way someone will blame it on the Internet, or full moons, or the use of aspartame or some other crap that the sheeple will believe and vote for.
God forbid that we should have to teach our children about society before they are 35....
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For offending male sensibilities. Or for any women in caught in public without a burka for enraging male sexuality.
I'd subscribe to your newsletter, but you are full of crap.
I love how the the slashdot crowd will respond to an unfair blaming of technology with an equally idiotic response.
A 14 year old who has the hots for her 5-year-old babysitting client discovers she's a pedophile "at a young age."
Ditto the 18 year old who finds he likes the 10-year-old girl next door.
The 35 year old who realizes his 8 year old son turns him on more than his wife, not so much.
What the article is saying is there may be some people out there who are "predisposed" to such thoughts but who haven't been "catalyzed" into thinking about kids that way until they get exposed to the idea later in life. 50 years ago "later in life" might have been "never." The 35 year old father in this example might look at his son, get turned on, and think "this is just wrong." These days with all the stories in the press and access to child porn and pedophile-affirming web sites supposedly available to anyone who cares to search the Internet Underbrush[TM], this catalyzation may happen in the middle- or later-adult years. The father may say "Look at Michael Jackson. I'm not the only one who feels this way."
As one of the first responders said, "so what." This is an inherent side-effect of freedom of information.
The solution is not to hide the information, but rather to
1) fight information with information by making it clear to would-be perps that such behavior is unacceptable and providing a safe way for them to see a shrink without jeapordizing their family life, their livelihood, and their freedom, or other negative consequences,
and
2) providing parents, youth, and children with the physical and emotional tools they need to recognize when they are being abused and the tools they need to report such abuse,
and
3) providing safe environments for our children that limit the opportunity for would-be offenders to offend.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I scratch my head at all those teenage girls that dress like hookers, but if you think that that's all it takes to turn men on, you have a pretty narrow perception of what male sexuality can be like. I would bet that most child molesters are turned on by the children's perceived *innocence*, and as such I'd sooner expect someone like that to go after a girl in a modest, flowery dress, than one in hip huggers with a tongue piercing. A lot of guys are turned *off* by that kind of overt sexuality, and deviants (no judgement here) probably even more so than others.
If I ever catch my neighbor hitting or otherwise terrorizing his kids because his boy wants to look like a hippie or his girl wants to bare her midriff, I'm calling social services on the bastard.
Pedophilia is whatever the psychiatric community says it is.
Child porn and child abuse are whatever the lawmakers and courts say it is.
The two are not the same.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It may be the medium...
Or it may be the idiots going around trying to entrap out of a sense of outraged righteousness.
There's a reason why cops aren't allowed to go up to guys on the street, hit on them, take an otherwise disinterested person and pretty much seduce him, drop in that it'll cost him, then prompty arrest him for solicitation. It's called entrapment. You're not catching criminals, you're making them where they didn't otherwise exist.
Unfortunately, as To Catch A Predator has demonstrated, vigilante groups set up, hide their own law breaking, then self congratulate whe they manage to catch people who may well never have been an issue save for their aggressive response.
Who's the real criminal here? The person who was minding their own business but slipped up when pressure sold? Or the person who does every last thing they can to inspire the crime and then self congratulates themselves for catching it?
Yes, the internet breeds paedophiles. The question is whether it's anything inherrent in the net... or if it's the by product of righteous but misguided idiots who do everything they can to entrap people.
I'm going to reply to this one, anonymously, for reasons that should be clear in a second.
I lost my virginity at 12 years old, with someone the same age, consensually. Did it mess me up? No. I think I'm a fairly well adjusted person, I just happened to be fairly promiscuous from a young age. But it did give me something to spend a fair bit of time thinking about now that I'm older.
Being in my mid-twenties, I've spent quite a bit of time thinking and dealing with the idea of seeing young teenage girls as attractive. I do not see myself as a pedophile, because I'm not attracted to children. Pre-pubescent girls are not attractive to me in the least. However, society as a whole demands that I view anyone under the age of 18 as a child. I think this is rather insane and, bluntly, running against a millions years of evolution.
I've dated younger girls, but never more than socially (and of course legally) acceptable. I've been in situations where a relationship WOULD have been socially unacceptable, and managed to avoid them. Intelligent, mature (yes, they do exist) and attractive 16 year olds are hard to turn down.
I'm not trying to excuse real pedophilia, nor would I. But the article suggests that a 13 year old is a child. They may mentally be a child, and they may not. They may physically be a child, and they may not. Many people, at 13, have gone through puberty, and may already be having sex. If I find a 13 year old to be sexually attractive, I am not a pedophile. I was having sex before then.
If I ACT on my attraction, that is where the issue comes up.
I admit I've never really said anything about this before, and slashdot seems a wierd place to do it, but after having spent several years with this concern, wondering if I was sick, etc, coming to this conclusion is the only way I can resolve it. The social pressure to view teenagers as children has caused me a lot of discomfort in dealing with this as I grow up, and I think that this hype of pedophilia is simply making it worse.
I recall an 17 year old who made a sex tape of him and his 16 year old girlfriend. He turned 18, he was arrested and charged with production of child pornography. Congratulations, you've just destroyed someones' life for being human.
no child is harmed in the act of possessing or distributing child pornography. The harm is in the *creation* of it.
So we have already legislated the existence of thoughtcrime.
+++ATH0