Seth wrote:I think it's probably much easier than that. I think an important factor is a society where pre-pubescent children are viewed as sexual objects combined with psychological maladjustment on the part of an individual when it comes to social barriers and mores and a personality defect that allows the individual to believe that the pleasures of sex that they experience when they molest a child are shared by the child. I think there is a distinction between a rapist who uses sex and pain as a punishment and domination and a pedophile who is seeking sexual pleasure with a child. I suspect that most pedophiles "groom" their victims precisely in order to not only convince the child to "consent" to the activity, but also to self-justify and rationalize their own behavior as that of giving pleasure that the child is seeking to the child.
The overt sexualization of young children in a culture I believe certainly contributes a lot to both the existence and ability of pedophiles in that society to molest children. After all, if society sexes-up young girls and boys in the media, it gives a degree of license to someone who is already sexually attracted to children to follow their desires, and it also gives the wrong message to children about their sexuality.
Yes, good points. It's certainly a disturbing trend and it's somewhat fascinating that very adult labels like "Playboy" have now created clothing lines aimed at children, so you see 8 year olds with "Playboy" written across the ass of their mini skirts... So I imagine that it probably doesn't help that society as a whole is encouraging the implicit idea that children can be sexualised and otherwise "normal" people will probably find themselves attracted to younger and younger people.
Seth wrote:And it's important to note that it is a fact that not all "sexual abuse" of children by pedophiles is either unwelcome or not enjoyable for the victim. Some children are sexually precocious and seek out adult sexual encounters, and can be quite aggressive in doing so. Combine a sexually aggressive child with an adult with even minor sexual personality defects and it's a recipe for trouble.
Certainly, and in a society where children are scantily dressed popstars singing about wanting to make love all night long or whatever, I suppose it would blur the line for the fringe population who were trying to contain their urges. (Obviously this doesn't excuse their behavior though, children cannot consent - I think everyone here accepts that).
Gallstones wrote:I want to know why it is, that of those children who are sexually exploited, it is the males who are more likely to go on and offend as adults.
Is that true?
I imagine there would be difficulties in measuring these things because of the general difficulty in measuring the true rate of female pedophiles. Due to factors like societal acceptance of older women with younger boys, greater access and privacy, etc. So the difference between rates of men and women offenders is nowhere near as large as what it is perceived as being, and I imagine the true numbers would necessarily change the rates of offenders who were molested as children.
floppit wrote:Pappa wrote:Or a rapist, serial killer, etc.?
I think most people would probably accept that in the right circumstances a person could be pushed over the edge to murder, but could the same be said for other terrible crimes?
http://www.prisonexp.org/
Yes.
I think Zimbardo tries a little too hard in this book
http://www.lucifereffect.com/about_synopsis.htm to disolve or reduce culpability/responsibility. I kind of felt it was influenced by his own feelings having stood by through the prison experiment. But, yes I think there is repeated evidence that group psychology, group conflict, and negative 'other' group beliefs have persistently lowered compassion. Historically too, I think many of the above horrors have at times been socially acceptable and us getting more 'normal' as a species just wouldn't fit the bill by way of explanation.
I agree with your point that social norms have produced some horrific behaviors from 'normal' people, but Zimbardo's prison experiment was a pretty poor experiment and due to the lack of any kind of rigorous methodology I don't think the results can tell us anything particularly important. Most troubling is that following attempts to replicate his findings have failed to show the same results.
apophenia wrote:One problem I see with this discussion, aside from the utter vacuum of hard evidence, is the tendency to view mental health as some kind of linear scale along which "normalcy" rests in a certain spot along the continuum. Abnormality alone is a very complex phenomena, even accepting that rapists, paedophiles and murderers are in some clinical sense abnormal.
I might be misunderstanding you, but "normal" and "abnormal" (or "mentally healthy" and "mentally ill")
does rest on a continuum. There is no fundamental difference between the behaviors of someone with schizophrenia and a healthy Joe from the general population, the only difference is in the severity of the behaviors which affects the functioning of the individual. That is, we all see and hear things like the schizophrenic, but the difference is that our auditory and visual hallucinations are trivial and inconsequential, like thinking you heard the phone when you didn't, or seeing a friend in a crowd but when you look again they're not there, etc.
apophenia wrote:There is a danger in defining behaviors you don't like as pathological, simply as a way of demonizing those who engage in such behaviors and distance yourselves from them. This was the situation in the U.S. prior to the blossoming of the gay power movement here following the Stonewall Riots. Prior to then, homosexuality was ghettoized, prosecuted and subjected to all sorts of horrific treatments in the name of curing them (IIRC, this was also the age of the ice pick lobotomy;
Lobotomies of gay people stopped in Western Germany only in 1979.). I see a similar trend among some atheists, who would like to persuade people to view beliefs they don't like as pathological -- evidence of a sick mind.
I agree that the general public do tend to try to call someone or something as 'abnormal' because they don't like it, but you're wrong to confuse that with the decision to include homosexuality into the DSM. Whilst I'm sure that the homophobic nature of society at the time probably made them less critical, homosexuality wasn't included because it was "different" or because they thought it was "icky", it was included because it correlated significantly with a number of pathological conditions. In other words, it was included based on medical reasons, not political ones. To overturn this decision, many researchers had to gather evidence to demonstrate that the associated pathological conditions were not an inherent part of homosexuality, and instead were caused by various other factors that were largely unrelated to the homosexuality itself. The main problem with the initial research on homosexual behavior was that psychiatrists were using highly selective samples - i.e. people who came to see them because they were depressed, anxious, suicidal, etc. When researchers like Hooker and Kinsey actually went out to get more representative samples and gathered data from homosexuals without any mental disorders, they found that there was no real association between the sexual orientation and the various pathological conditions.
nellikin wrote:I think it should be clear that there is a clinical definition of paedophile which distinguishes the vast number of child sex offenders (who more often than not come from the child's known environment) from the 'true' paedophile, The distinction is, to the best of my knowledge, that a paedophile ONLY feels sexual excitement with children and is incapable of finding sex with adults arousing. Their sexual fixations are solely with children. Many (perhaps even most) child sex offenders, on the other hand, have or have had adult partners they enjoy sex with (and often have children with), making them not paedpohiles in the clinical sense.
The distinction of "true pedophile" isn't one that rules out people who are attracted to adults too, but rather it distinguishes between "exclusive" and "non-exclusive" pedophiles, both are accepted under the clinical definition. All that is required under the definition, at the very least, is to have a persistent attraction to children under 11 for 6 months or more. No sexual assault needs to take place, and it doesn't need to be exclusive. Unfortunately, most data we have on pedophiles isn't collected using the clinical definition, and instead pedophilia (under law) usually is just considered as being 'having sex with a minor' - hence why male pedophiles largely outnumber female pedophiles (due to the different laws regarding male and female sexual activity, and societal pressures expecting an older man with younger woman, etc).
“The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.” - B. F. Skinner.
