Thanks for sharing!

Yes, thanks for sharing. I'm in favor of considering pedophilia as a public health issue instead of a criminal issue, as the doctor said.

I agree honestwitness.....this whole issue needs to be handled differently.

What is depressing 1) they group all sex offenders as one who preys on and molests children and 2) it is continually brought up as protecting the children, but nobody asks to cut off the hands of someone that has repeatedly beat or abused a child.

Excellent points, catspaw. Unfortunately child abuse does not include the word S*E*X and sometimes does not have a sexual connotation to it. Most people think of physically injuring a child and not sex abuse when they think of child abuse.

As a result, since there is no connotation of sex with child abuse, at least in the public's eyes, politicians cannot get as much political mileage and get re-elected for running on a child abuse platform as opposed to running on a anti-sex offender platform. DAs cannot get re-elected as easily for the same reason.

Don't ever kid yourself, most of the unjust sex offender laws and the sex offender registry is fueled by politics.

rewdiazepam

I seriously get soo irritated when I read about this..I would like to ask them sometimes..I wonder what we would see if God allowed a video of your life for all to see..

I think there were two good points made: 1) This is a public health issue; 2) That there needs to be dialouge about it.

It was interesting that the lady with the gray hair spoke extensively about the mythology of the 50% re-offense rate and then the blonde lady said, like it was an undisputed fact, that there was a 50% re-offense rate. Good grief!

Chemical castration has its place for extreme offenders who are suffering because of their sex drive. To make a blanket law that says anyone who molests according to some irrational guidelines gets physically mutilated will do nothing to protect children. The truth is that punishment after the fact is not a deterrent no matter how much people want to believe it is EXCEPT in the case of people who have already offended.

If people are really serious about wanting to decrease the incidence of child molestation, the "treatment" has to take place before the fact. That is what public health does. It provides education and treatment to the whole population and sets forth a pathway for those who identify themselves as having the targeted issue to get the help they need. Think about how this process de-stigmatized getting treatment for AIDS.

No one chooses to be a pedophile and "conscious choice" has to be placed in context. Decisions about sex do not come from the same place as decisions about, say, the color of your carpet. Decisions about sex come from our deepest, most primitive instincts. Rational, conscious choice is bypassed by the strength of those drives EXCEPT when the decision-making process is strengthened through the practice of inhibiting the primitive instinct. The most effective way to do this is through support groups with others who have the same issue. No one chooses to have pedophilia. It is a deeply emotionally painful condition for many, and many people would choose to get help if they could do it without the tripwire of the mandatory reporting laws.

So this little group of TV people are essentially on target. The key is to open the dialouge so that the real issues (as opposed to the mythological issues) can come to the fore. If that were to happen, even to a certain extent, there could be enough de-stigmatization of pedophilia to allow people affected by it to come together to develop ways to inhibit their instincts through support. THIS will prevent many children from being harmed.

This is actually already happening in some states and in some small circles of people, but this is a widespread problem that needs the kind of widespread resolution that can only be carried out by public health programming.

So...while mutilating men might make some people feel superior (and some politicians seats safe) and feel "safer", as we say many times on this board, those feelings are completely false. People don't realize that by insisting on after the fact punishments, they are preventing the real solutions. THAT is the real danger to children.

Well said, peekkachu.

Thanks for being honest, Honest!

Nobody wants to think about the fact that we, as human beings, while having free will and intellect, are also very much under the influence of our primitive natures and the hierarchies of our central nervous system, which have developed over the millennia for self-preservation. We all want to think we are above that, but truth be told, none of us are. If you're human, you have primitive instincts. Otherwise, you would be dead.

Of course, sometimes those primitive natures override our free will and intellect. This is especially true for our most basic needs. Our nervous systems are wired to prioritize them over everything else. And when it comes to basic needs, like food, sex is right there!

An interesting example was an article I read in Scientific American Mind a while back. Studies had demonstrated that our perceptual system is set-up to magnify the object of our desire. So this was done with food. People who were hungry and who were not hungry were shown picture of food. The people who were hungry consistently estimated that the food was closer to them than the people who were not hungry.

So what do our perceptual systems do to our sexual objects of desire? We ALL know what our perceptual systems do to our sexual objects of desire and we all probably would be embarrassed to talk about it. A classic way to cope with this embarrassment is to project it onto someone else. To my way of thinking, this is the core problem for sex offense in general. Its easier to "make someone else bad" than to look inside and face who we really are.

Too many people don't want the problems to be solved. They are too invested in having to have somebody to make bad so they don't have to look at themselves. Human history is full of lists of groups of people who have been made into ego scapegoats (We can all think of many!). It is not truth that holds these things together, it is groupthink.

But history is also full of examples of how groupthink shifts and changes over time. Public health movements are really good at shifting the mass consensus to be more reasonable. I hope we start seeing more of this.