Pedophiles

I was molested for about two-and-a-half years from about age eleven to about age thirteen and a half. The individual who did so was my favorite relative until he began hurting me. He also stopped of his own volition and later made amends to me, a story told elsewhere.

So I had difficulty writing him off as a monster and I spent a lot of time trying to make some kind of sense of what happened. I eventually saw information from a small study saying that one of the few things we know is that pedophiles typically have a head injury prior to age thirteen.

I know of three head injuries my brother had prior to age thirteen. And it makes sense to me to say this is rooted in brain damage and is not merely a normal variation on human sexual orientation because I see ZERO survival advantage to harming your young.

In contrast, we have animal studies suggesting that some animals that don't reproduce are highly protective of related individuals who can pass on the same genome. So homosexuality or being asexual can be made to logically fit with our scientific framework of survival of the fittest.

At one time, popular conceptualization was that alcohol caused pedophiles to offend. This is in line with historical tendencies to blame the alcohol for alcoholism.

That's roughly the Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) model: I have no control over my drinking. 

The problem with the AA model is that it began as a small number of people hospitalized for their decades of alcoholism and dying who "gave it up to God" and accepted their lack of control, but these days any nineteen-year-old college student who goes on a bender even once can get labeled an alcoholic and sent to AA.

The book The Truth About Addiction and Recovery documents that:

1. You see more alcoholism in cultures that agree with the meme about blaming the alcohol and not holding people responsible for their behavior.

2. You see less alcoholism in cultures that give you a pass for minor dumb stuff while drunk, but don't allow you to go off the deep end, behavior wise, and then blame the booze.

3. Treatment or no treatment, most people drink less as they get older. It's generally not necessary to send a nineteen year old for "treatment." He'll probably "grow out of it," so to speak.

More recent studies concluded that child molesters plan their crimes and they drink or drug to facilitate the bad acts they are planning. 

Alcohol gets called a shot of liquid courage and it is known to lower inhibitions. So it makes it easier to do things you feel bad about and know you shouldn't do. 

But I have never heard anything that suggests in the slightest that normal people get drunk or high and suddenly think kiddies are attractive. So it doesn't make sense to blame the alcohol.

Once is an accident.

Twice is a coincidence.

Three times is a pattern.

If someone gets drunk once and does something bad they didn't plan to do, fine. "Shit happens." 

But if you habitually get drunk or high and then "OOPSIE" molest kids and tell yourself "I couldn't help it!", that's a NO from me.

You knew before you took the first drink or first hit where this was going. Most likely, you continue drinking and or drugging beforehand because MORONS around you buy this bullshit. So it's a good excuse that let's you get away with it and THAT'S the primary purpose of the drugs or alcohol.

Because after molesting hundreds of kids, you no longer need a shot of courage. You're extremely comfortable with this DEPRAVED behavior.

But you do still need to get other people to look the other way and feel sorry for you and not call the cops on you. Because people around you probably have some idea of what you are up to and you avoid jail by promoting the idea that you have a sob story and they should feel sorry for you instead of for your victims.

If it's happened multiple times before, you consciously decided while still sober what you were going to do after you were under the influence.

Someone once said to me "Sex is a substantial human need." I agree with that and I believe the world needs to try harder to make it possible for people to meet their sexual and emotional needs in a healthy fashion because lack of good outlets actively promotes problem behavior.

Historically in Europe, the Pope allowed for use of condoms to control STDs even though it's a form of birth control because they felt it was problematic to entirely deny young men any sexual outlet and it was pragmatic to account for them seeing sex workers.

I don't think that's crazy talk. 

Currently in the world today, terrorist organizations are associated with countries that are religiously extremely conservative and expect both genders to be virgins until marriage and where it's typically difficult for young men to meet social expectations of paying a bride price or similar.

Organizations made up of all men are typically more violent than mixed gender organizations and arguably all nations with standing armies take advantage of the potential for violence in young men with high testosterone.

Testosterone seems to be good for two things:

1. Sex.

2. Doing "dirty jobs" we need done that no one really wants to do.

However, celibacy is practiced by many people and it won't actually kill you and there are other ways to meet some of the emotional and physical needs rooted in the human sex drive.

Plenty of people just say no to sex or they masturbate. It isn't the case that you must have sex whenever the urge strikes or DIE.

Some years ago, an article was posted to Metafilter about a sixteen year old pedophile -- someone attracted to children -- who founded a support group for pedophiles to try to help them not molest children.

There was also a comment somewhere on Metafilter by someone who inferred that a man he knew was a non-offending pedophile who had carefully arranged his life to never be alone with children.

Maybe someday we shall be able to effectively treat most pedophiles so they don't feel tempted to do terrible things.

But child molesters aren't merely pedophiles. They are pedophiles who plan their crimes and cover them up for years.

If they have sufficient executive function to do that, they could instead develop plans for figuring out how to stop and trying to figure out how to not be like that.

Footnotes

I was Michele in California on Metafilter. For the record, I don't believe either my father or my brother were really pedophiles.

My brother's not that much older than me. My father was newly head injured in the Vietnam war and I don't think he really intended to molest me. I was ridiculously cute and bubbly much of the time, enough so my mother sometimes called me Shirley Temple. I think Dad wanted to focus on me and forget the war and things got weird