I hazard that most of the most interesting answers to this question are not safe to post even with a dummy account, and therefore you won’t hear them here.
However, a reasonably boring one: somewhere between one third and two thirds of all sexual assaults committed against children are not committed by people who have any sort of substantial or persistent sexual attraction to children (i.e. pedophiles) but are rather crimes of:
a) power (i.e. the abuse is about exercising their dominance rather than satisfying their lust)
b) opportunity (i.e. the person wants to use someone as a sexual object and the child merely happens to be someone they can successfully intimidate or manipulate)
This is a fairly well-documented set of facts that can be confirmed by talking to basically anyone who actually deals with sex crimes and their perpetrators and victims (veteran cops, forensic psychologists, social workers, etc). The fact that close to half and maybe more of all child rape and child molestation has nothing to do with pedophilia is, in fact, a fact, and it’s not one that society seems to have any interest in reckoning with (much to the detriment of the victims, who are as a result not protected against what is a substantial chunk and quite possibly the literal majority of the danger).
Going further, when pedophiles do do it, it’s as likely to be beneficial to the child as harmful, if not more likely, due to being rooted in love rather than the desire to use, manipulate, etc. Plenty of evidence (mostly censored / ignored, of course) shows that children are perfectly capable of consenting to sex and finding it a good part of their lives, including with adults, and that there is nothing intrinsically traumatic about it. The trauma mostly comes from being treated as a victim by those adults who find out and who have been indoctrinated with society’s assumption that this is necessarily evil, horrible, and traumatic. Being treated as a victim is traumatic, and alienating.
Note for clarification: I’m speaking only of the actions of mentally healthy people, here, not the actions of those who wouldn’t even be able to have a beneficial relationship with an adult. And I also disclaim any harmful, manipulative, coercive, selfish, objectifying, etc actions, and do not intend to encourage anyone to act contrary to their conscience or the law. Merely stating facts.
Er. I think this comment would’ve benefitted from being more careful/less slapdash (at the time of my reply, my votes rescued it from negative territory).
I think you are making the following claims:
Given that someone is already transgressing society’s protections and boundaries and interacting sexually with a child (i.e. restricting the observation to the set of children who are already being touched), it’s more likely that the interaction will be less harmful if the adult involved is a pedophile motivated by affection than if the adult involved is someone motivated by power or desire-to-dominate or pure selfishness or whatever.
(This seems reasonably likely to me, but also people do in fact fuck each other up pretty badly acting out of love and pure intentions, so I wouldn’t be shocked to see that it proved empirically false, just surprised.)
There’s data about [child sexuality] and [the ability of minors to fulfill all of the necessary conditions for informed consent] and [cross-generational sexual interaction] that our society is censoring/ignoring/suppressing.
(This one is true, though I’m trying to stand ten feet away and am holding my pole. One notes that our understanding here, as a society, is exactly isomorphic to the understanding we would have of [sexuality in general] if we only drew our conclusions about sex from studying convicted rapists and their victims; it’s quite a large filter.)
There are children who engage sexually with an adult and are not traumatized until the society intervenes, at which point society’s intervention can cause genuine trauma where otherwise there would not have been any (or would have been less).
(This is straightforwardly true according to a) a conversation I once had with an on-the-ground expert with multiple decades treating both victims and offenders, and b) direct self-reports I have received from actual people reflecting on their childhood experiences.)
Children who have a) interacted sexually with adults, and b) are subsequently traumatized, are mostly, in practice, traumatized by society’s reaction, rather than by finding the interaction itself traumatic.
(Seems overconfident to me; again, just looking at the base rates of how people fuck each other up in sexual contexts period, it seems like there would indeed be a high rate of bruises or scars that don’t require society’s intervention, especially given power and maturity imbalances and the fact that adults acting contra to society’s taboos are likely to be less conscientious and less self-controlled even if motivated by positive feeling. It also seems worth noting that people do, in fact, sometimes regret, and are sometimes traumatized by, things they genuinely thought were okay in the moment, only after years have passed, and I do not think this is totally explained by memetic injection.)
In any event, this was a comment on a post about “conversations it’s hard to actually have” and I expect to find the actual conversation not possible to safely have, here, so this is my last contribution. I’ll note on my way out that rape is bad, gaslighting is bad, coercion is bad, manipulation is bad, violation of one’s sovereignty is bad, gambling with someone else’s health or happiness for your own local selfish satisfaction is bad, and that, even though I think society is screwing up royally here, to the detriment of vulnerable victims, it is correct in principle to try to layer in extra protections for those who are especially powerless or vulnerable. It’s not that the goal of the people trying to save children from being raped is wrongheaded; all good people should share that goal. It’s that they’re going about it extremely poorly.
I hazard that most of the most interesting answers to this question are not safe to post even with a dummy account
I’m really curious what the most interesting answers are that you refer to. I’d be willing to pay (in crypto, or quila-intellectual-labor vouchers) for such an answer[1], proportional to how insightful I find it / how much I feel like I was able to make a useful update about the world from it from its existence (to avoid goodharting by e.g making up fake beliefs and elaborate justifications).
If anyone is interested, message me (perhaps anonymously) so we can operationalize this better.
If you don’t want me to post the answer anywhere, I won’t. I also have a PGP key in my bio, and am willing to delete the message after decrypting+reading it so it’s not even stored on my device.
I hazard that most of the most interesting answers to this question are not safe to post even with a dummy account, and therefore you won’t hear them here.
However, a reasonably boring one: somewhere between one third and two thirds of all sexual assaults committed against children are not committed by people who have any sort of substantial or persistent sexual attraction to children (i.e. pedophiles) but are rather crimes of:
a) power (i.e. the abuse is about exercising their dominance rather than satisfying their lust)
b) opportunity (i.e. the person wants to use someone as a sexual object and the child merely happens to be someone they can successfully intimidate or manipulate)
This is a fairly well-documented set of facts that can be confirmed by talking to basically anyone who actually deals with sex crimes and their perpetrators and victims (veteran cops, forensic psychologists, social workers, etc). The fact that close to half and maybe more of all child rape and child molestation has nothing to do with pedophilia is, in fact, a fact, and it’s not one that society seems to have any interest in reckoning with (much to the detriment of the victims, who are as a result not protected against what is a substantial chunk and quite possibly the literal majority of the danger).
Going further, when pedophiles do do it, it’s as likely to be beneficial to the child as harmful, if not more likely, due to being rooted in love rather than the desire to use, manipulate, etc. Plenty of evidence (mostly censored / ignored, of course) shows that children are perfectly capable of consenting to sex and finding it a good part of their lives, including with adults, and that there is nothing intrinsically traumatic about it. The trauma mostly comes from being treated as a victim by those adults who find out and who have been indoctrinated with society’s assumption that this is necessarily evil, horrible, and traumatic. Being treated as a victim is traumatic, and alienating.
Note for clarification: I’m speaking only of the actions of mentally healthy people, here, not the actions of those who wouldn’t even be able to have a beneficial relationship with an adult. And I also disclaim any harmful, manipulative, coercive, selfish, objectifying, etc actions, and do not intend to encourage anyone to act contrary to their conscience or the law. Merely stating facts.
Er. I think this comment would’ve benefitted from being more careful/less slapdash (at the time of my reply, my votes rescued it from negative territory).
I think you are making the following claims:
Given that someone is already transgressing society’s protections and boundaries and interacting sexually with a child (i.e. restricting the observation to the set of children who are already being touched), it’s more likely that the interaction will be less harmful if the adult involved is a pedophile motivated by affection than if the adult involved is someone motivated by power or desire-to-dominate or pure selfishness or whatever.
(This seems reasonably likely to me, but also people do in fact fuck each other up pretty badly acting out of love and pure intentions, so I wouldn’t be shocked to see that it proved empirically false, just surprised.)
There’s data about [child sexuality] and [the ability of minors to fulfill all of the necessary conditions for informed consent] and [cross-generational sexual interaction] that our society is censoring/ignoring/suppressing.
(This one is true, though I’m trying to stand ten feet away and am holding my pole. One notes that our understanding here, as a society, is exactly isomorphic to the understanding we would have of [sexuality in general] if we only drew our conclusions about sex from studying convicted rapists and their victims; it’s quite a large filter.)
There are children who engage sexually with an adult and are not traumatized until the society intervenes, at which point society’s intervention can cause genuine trauma where otherwise there would not have been any (or would have been less).
(This is straightforwardly true according to a) a conversation I once had with an on-the-ground expert with multiple decades treating both victims and offenders, and b) direct self-reports I have received from actual people reflecting on their childhood experiences.)
Children who have a) interacted sexually with adults, and b) are subsequently traumatized, are mostly, in practice, traumatized by society’s reaction, rather than by finding the interaction itself traumatic.
(Seems overconfident to me; again, just looking at the base rates of how people fuck each other up in sexual contexts period, it seems like there would indeed be a high rate of bruises or scars that don’t require society’s intervention, especially given power and maturity imbalances and the fact that adults acting contra to society’s taboos are likely to be less conscientious and less self-controlled even if motivated by positive feeling. It also seems worth noting that people do, in fact, sometimes regret, and are sometimes traumatized by, things they genuinely thought were okay in the moment, only after years have passed, and I do not think this is totally explained by memetic injection.)
In any event, this was a comment on a post about “conversations it’s hard to actually have” and I expect to find the actual conversation not possible to safely have, here, so this is my last contribution. I’ll note on my way out that rape is bad, gaslighting is bad, coercion is bad, manipulation is bad, violation of one’s sovereignty is bad, gambling with someone else’s health or happiness for your own local selfish satisfaction is bad, and that, even though I think society is screwing up royally here, to the detriment of vulnerable victims, it is correct in principle to try to layer in extra protections for those who are especially powerless or vulnerable. It’s not that the goal of the people trying to save children from being raped is wrongheaded; all good people should share that goal. It’s that they’re going about it extremely poorly.
I agree 100% with everything you said and think you stated my point far better than I did! Thank you!
That’s just the pedophile version of “rape isn’t about sex, it’s only about power”. And that one’s false, so I’m skeptical about this one.
how do we know it’s false?
The thing that makes “rape isn’t about sex, it’s only about power” false is the absolutism.
Rape is often more about power than sex, and is occasionally only about power. It’s just not usually not about sex.
That’s true about the option (a).
The option (b) is clearly about sex. It says that “sex, now!” is more important than “sex with a hypothetical ideal partner” for many people.
I’m really curious what the most interesting answers are that you refer to. I’d be willing to pay (in crypto, or quila-intellectual-labor vouchers) for such an answer[1], proportional to how insightful I find it / how much I feel like I was able to make a useful update about the world from it from its existence (to avoid goodharting by e.g making up fake beliefs and elaborate justifications).
If anyone is interested, message me (perhaps anonymously) so we can operationalize this better.
If you don’t want me to post the answer anywhere, I won’t. I also have a PGP key in my bio, and am willing to delete the message after decrypting+reading it so it’s not even stored on my device.
(Does not include ‘standard controversial beliefs’ which I would already know that some portion of people hold)