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--- pedophilia [2026/03/27 10:14] – ultracomfy
+++ pedophilia [2026/03/28 00:22] (current) – ultracomfy
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 People with pedophilia are generally, as a group, regarded to as suspicious and, in many cases, treated like sexual offenders regardless of whether they actually offend or not. They are seen with contempt and are fundamentally ostracized from society. Disparaging individuals with pedophilia or disparaging their sexual attraction is problematic because no amount of negative reinforcement will make pedophilia go away. Casting a group of people from society for something they aren't to blame for causes immense suffering. Worse yet, being a social outcast promotes developing antisocial personality traits. One of the, if not //the// principal indicator for whether a person engages in crime is whether they have antisocial personality traits such as impulsiveness and callousness. Evidence suggests that this is equally as true in pedophilia in the question about how likely individuals are to offend (see [[https://www.uottawa.ca/faculty-medicine/directory/dr-michael-seto|Dr. Michael Seto]] in [[https://psychwire.com/free-resources/q-and-a/nq86y2/the-psychology-of-pedophilia|Psychwire - The Psychology of Pedophilia]]).
-Almost all the worst criminals you've ever seen, serial killers, sexual abusers and the like, they all have in common the fact that they were socially isolated and had nothing but their own thoughts to live with. (Almost) Nobody who lives a regulated life with a job and friends and family just decides to go on a killing spree, and the same applies to individuals with pedophilia. The risk of someone offending is a thousand times higher if they have been rejected and shamed by society, have no support network and have nothing to lose. Telling people that they are the problem and that they are depraved causes suffering, makes their symptoms worse, breaks trust and makes them less likely to seek help. Seeking help requires trust in an individual and society at large. Broken trust makes it harder for an individual to seek therapy and open up to the therapist. And, broken trust makes it harder for the individual to trust society at large that, if they are able to control their pedophilia sufficiently, they will be accepted, allowed into society and treated well. As it stands, the stigma around pedophilia is so extreme that affected individuals have to expect total social annihilation.
+It is important not to shame or stigmatize people solely for having pedophilia. There is the argument that stigma is useful in discouraging offending, and that's why individuals with pedophilia should be stigmatized whether they offend or not. This is not correct, as stigmatizing everyone by default means that a potential offender will be stigmatized no matter what, which renders the stigmatization useless for deterrence. How will stigmatization deter a potential offender if they receive the stigmatization anyway? At this point they might as well not care.\\
 Read more about this: [[Pedophilia#Addendum: A response to City Journal  - Pedophilia Destigmatization|A response to City Journal  - Pedophilia Destigmatization]]
+Almost all the worst criminals you've ever seen, serial killers, sexual abusers and the like, they all have in common the fact that they were socially isolated and had nothing but their own thoughts to live with. (Almost) Nobody who lives a regulated life with a job and friends and family just decides to go on a killing spree, and the same applies to individuals with pedophilia. The risk of someone offending is a thousand times higher if they have been rejected and shamed by society, have no support network and have nothing to lose. Telling people that they are the problem and that they are depraved causes suffering, makes their symptoms worse, breaks trust and makes them less likely to seek help. Seeking help requires trust in an individual and society at large. Broken trust makes it harder for an individual to seek therapy and open up to the therapist. And, broken trust makes it harder for the individual to trust society at large that, if they are able to control their pedophilia sufficiently, they will be accepted, allowed into society and treated well. As it stands, the stigma around pedophilia is so extreme that affected individuals have to expect total social annihilation.
 ===== Child Pornography =====
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 Secondly, there's reasonably strong support from prevention research that people with these attractions are more likely to seek therapy, peer support, and self-regulation strategies when they don't expect total social annihilation. The claim that broad stigma reduces offending is much more speculative and hard to isolate causally; if anything, stigma tends to correlate with secrecy, isolation, and avoidance of treatment, which are known risk factors in other domains. So, this really should sit with anyone arguing stigma has net protective effects rather than harm.
+Most importantly though, the premise isn't logically sound. If the goal is to use stigmatization to discourage offending, then you shouldn't just stigmatize everyone indiscriminately. If someone with pedophilia will be stigmatized no matter what, where is the discouraging effect?
 City Journal says that by being understanding (or worse, //compassionate//) towards people with pedophilia we would be //less discouraging// of child molestation. I disagree with this connection. Individuals with pedophilia know that child molestation is wrong and blanket ostracizing everyone from society purely because they have pedophilia does not communicate the wrongness of child molestation any more than a good therapist, integration into society and - if all else fails - years in prison, ever will. The only thing such indiscriminate pedophile ostracization will achieve is creating an isolated group of individuals who are miserable, feel wronged by society, disillusioned and - being ostracized from society - will develop antisocial traits, which is one of the best established predictors for crime of **all** sorts. You can't expell someone from society and then expect them to be reverent about playing by society's rules.
-While I'm sure that such aggressive, indiscriminate negative reinforcement may deter //some//, I am absolutely convinced that making life miserable for anyone is much more likely to cause them to do things we would rather they did //not//. So yeah, for some the stigma will marginally reduce child sex abuse, but for most it will probably make the odds worse, not because I or Allyn Walker are making a wild guess, but because we //know// from adjacent fields how people left behind by society act.
+While I'm sure that such aggressive, indiscriminate negative reinforcement may deter //some//, I am absolutely convinced that making life miserable for anyone is much more likely to cause them to do things we would rather they did //not//. So yeah, for some the stigma will marginally reduce child sex abuse, but for most it will probably make the odds worse; not because I or Allyn Walker are making a wild guess, but because we //know// from adjacent fields how people left behind by society act.
 ++++