Naked Science Forum
Life Sciences => Physiology & Medicine => Topic started by: Pecos_Bill on 23/05/2015 06:28:10
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National Public Radio carried this report two days ago, "Revelations Of British Paedophile Ring Spur Flood Of Abuse Reports"
Recently I learned how to access "the dark web". I was amazed to find several forums which were crawling with paedophiles seeking to hook up. (Uff da!)
So it raises the question in my mind, "Is Paedophilia a mental illness or a cultural phenomenon?"
The whole idea seems absotively bizarre to me.
PS: There appears to be no shortage of "funny uncles" here in America.
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To boldly step into a can of worms....
The characteristics of an illness are surely the adverse effect on the patient's wellbeing, functionality or, in the case of some mental illnesses, social acceptability. The adverse effects of paedophilia seem to be on other people rather than on the paedophile, and whilst that aspect of his behaviour may be socially unacceptable, his ability to indulge it depends on an exceptional degree of visible social acceptability, including holding public office or being a high profile entertainer. And unlike psychopaths, who have no concern for their victims, paedophiles often claim to be in love with their targets and show signs of genuine affection.
So in my book there is no underlying illness, just a chosen route to self-gratification. And like some recreational drugs, it seems to be addictive.
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Upon reflection -- and mindful of a 16 year old relative who was seduced by a 24 year old cockroach -- I think there is always a predatory aspect to it. Or that the perps are always some screaming great jessie who is unable to relate intimately with another adult for whatever reason.
There was a notorious case of a teacher who got involved with a high school student -- and married him after she was released from prison. People (some) looked at it as some sort of star-crossed lover thing, but looking further she had had a bizarre and tragic childhood with a notoriously bizzare ultra right wing orange county congressman for a father.
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National Public Radio carried this report two days ago, "Revelations Of British Paedophile Ring Spur Flood Of Abuse Reports"
Some issues have been discussed here before, you might be interested in this thread http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=53821.msg448494
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I looked at that thread. It begins with an assertion that most people using TOR to access the deep web are pedophiles. While they are certainly around, you have to go look for them.
I just used TOR to visit the "Imperial Library of Trantor" anonymously to see if there were any new ebooks I might want to read without paying the extortionate price-fixing amounts demanded by the suits running the publishing cartels. I don't see any "chickenhawks" there. That is not something that can always be said of the Sonoma County Central library.
I can think of any number of legitimate reasons to want a conversation which is not snooped by NSA or anybody else. A deepweb chat room via the TOR browser is a good place to start.
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Thought there might be something in that thread that might help answer your question.
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Upon reflection -- and mindful of a 16 year old relative who was seduced by a 24 year old cockroach -- I think there is always a predatory aspect to it. Or that the perps are always some screaming great jessie who is unable to relate intimately with another adult for whatever reason.
There was a notorious case of a teacher who got involved with a high school student -- and married him after she was released from prison. People (some) looked at it as some sort of star-crossed lover thing, but looking further she had had a bizarre and tragic childhood with a notoriously bizzare ultra right wing orange county congressman for a father.
Not sure these cases would count as paedophilia on this side of the pond. 16 is the age of consent in the UK, and whilst statutory rape of an underage male by a female is indeed an offence, it is rarely prosecuted - if the high school couple subsequently married there is some implication of mutual consent.
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So the age of consent is 16 in Britain? Sounds like the wilds of Mississippi. Something straight out of "God's Little Acre".
So a sixteen year old boy may legally give "consent" to sleep with some 50 year old dude? The plot thickens. Just how wretched do one of them have to be in order to be considered a pedophile?
I make little doubt that if some 24 year old dude hooks up with a 16 year old girl you care about, your first (and righteous) thought will be about breaking his knees.
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Yup, that's the law in these here parts.
And even that simple, arbitrary line causes sleepless nights to the authorities. What do you do with nice, ordinary 15 year old kids doing their thing behind the bike sheds? Drag them through the courts and destroy their families? Smack them round the head and end up in prison for assault? Give them a long, shaming lecture about hellfire and damnation that will make them feel guilty about sex and turn them into politicians?
It's difficult enough for a father, but what, for instance, should a teacher do: tell the parents? tell the police but not the parents? take the law into his own hands? ignore it and be accused of condoning it?
A simple question, with, I think, a very complicated answer. Let's have your two cents' worth, Bill.
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My two cents is that it's hard to beat Colorado's program of providing free IUD's to teenage girls upon request. They have cut their teen pregnancy rate by 40%. The God Squad are outraged and out to kill the program.
Read about it here...
http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2015/04/28/colorados-teen-pregnancy-prevention-program-works-thats-conservatives-want-kill/
Still, there is an immense difference between a pair of kids playing "pin the tail on the bunny" and some adult predator chasing teen-age kids. The idea that a 16 year old is adult enough to consent with an adult is simply daft and the loonies are obviously running the show.
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Have you never played in a rock band? Predatory teenagers are a professional hazard, which is why I prefer jazz. (Pace "Play Misty For Me", predatory soccer moms are a delight, and as every musician knows, the older we get, the better we were.)
I'm in two minds about dispensing IUDs to kids. They aren't without hazard and don't protect against disease. UK policy is based on free condoms, which are marginally less effective as contraceptives but do inhibit disease transmission, are something of a badge of honour for young lads to carry, and seem to have very few contraindications.
Some years ago I was in a government health strategy committee. The question was put "What should we do about teenage pregnancy". I said "encourage it - far fewer complications if you finish breeding before age 25". All the doctors, nurses and scientists on the committee applauded and all the sociologists and policymakers were horrified.
But I digress. The essence of paedophilia is the inability of one party to give informed consent. "Informed" is still not clearcut, as any randy teenager will tell you, so we set a legal limit on the age of consent and let common sense discriminate between kids mucking about, statutory rape, and paedophilia - in my book, that would be repeated attempted or actual statutory rape.
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Oh Ah.
The reduction of 40% in teen pregnancies speaks for itself. The comparison of relative risk for an IUD compared to that of an underage pregnancy also speaks for itself.
In California we have an entire state "hospital" devoted to sexual predators of all sorts. Pedophiles thrive about as well as ex-cops in the general prison population. they are always lo0oking to hire new guards there. Do they have such places in Britain?
http://dsh.ca.gov/Coalinga/default.asp
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"Underage" pregnancy is not necessarily risky. If your local age of consent is 18 and minimum school leaving age is 16, a fair percentage of the population will have passed their fitness peak by the time the law allows them to give birth. But whilst I have no truck with the God Squad, I would be inclined to ask why a 14 year old needs an IUD. And there we are, entering the fuzzy region between law and common sense, consent and coercion, and all the rest....
AFAIK most convicted paedophiles in the UK get a degree of protection from their fellow prisoners and all are offered counselling but I have no deeper knowledge of the subject, nor any wish to enquire further.
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I don't mean to be argumentative, but some innocent soul might not be able to recognize that you are uttering demonstrable untruths. That would be bad.
As to the risk of adolescent pregnancy, let's compare fetal mortality
Fetal mortality (per 1,000)
age < 15 13.12
age 15-17 7.63
age 18-19 6.98
age 30-34 5.40
CDC , National Vital Statistics Report Pp. 6
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr60/nvsr60_08.pdf
ARE IUD'S SAFE FOR ADOLESCENTS?
"Intrauterine devices are safe to use among adolescents."
American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists
Committee on Adolescent Health Care
Long-Acting Reversible Contraception Working Group
http://www.acog.org/Resources-And-Publications/Committee-Opinions/Committee-on-Adolescent-Health-Care/Adolescents-and-Long-Acting-Reversible-Contraception
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As to pedophiles' fate in the US prison general population - the lucky ones are only traded around the cell block for cigarette's.
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Good statistics, but correlation is not proof of causation. It is worth suggesting that fetal survival is in proportion to the "wantedness" of the fetus and the social status of the mother, both of which are correlated with maternal age. You would do well to consider the implications of Table D of your reference. There is also an anecdotal suggestion that second and subsequent pregnancies are more likely to go to term, so the cohort of older mothers will have fewer fetal deaths per live birth.
None of which condones paedophilia.
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I did not have time to winkle out the complete statistics on adolescent maternal morbidity and mortality. That is not needed, however.
It is obvious upon reflection (and certainly so by my clinical experience) that the risks of adolescent pregnancy is orders of magnitude higher than for use of an IUD. If only because teen age mothers tend to present to the emergency rooms with no prenatal care and crowning -- if they don't deliver in some bus shelter.
I have provided statistical evidence that this is so and all you have provided is your own personal opinion. Kindly show some evidence to support your assertion.
PARTICULARLY because it is in direct contravention of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
Numbers talk. Unsupported opinion walks.
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And as to your assertion that pedophiles are looked after by other inmates in British prisons. I have found this recent account of one such getting gutted like a deer in one of HM's prisons. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, "If this is how her majesty treats pedophiles, then she doesn't deserve to have any."
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2011/10/03/pedophile-gutted-in-british-prison/
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I have just spent one year in a HMP prison and also another year in a prison abroad in Europe. This has given me a unique experience in that I was able to observe convicted pedophiles in an enclosed environment. I can safely say that generally these characters appear to be dysfunctional at a social level and many of them are not able to empathize with others.
When you first see one, you could easily mistake the behavior they demonstrate as normal, until after about one month when you begin to notice that something is just not right about them. I expect that in the normal day to day living of public life, these characters would be able to generally escape from attracting unwanted attention through their abnormal behavior. However in a prison environment they cannot escape and eventually you begin to see through the facade. There are different types of pedophiles, there is the manipulative type for one, the business man who extorts and sells the services of younger people, and then you have the recluse. In my opinion the recluse is probably the most disturbing genre of pedophile, as they seem to be obsessed with young children and in my experience these people definitely show signs of psychological problems. Wether or not this is a mental illness is hard to say. Many of them will try to justify their behavior and do not appear to realise that what they do is socially unacceptable. The more intelligent ones use history as an example to justify their behavior as nothing abnormal.
In the UK, prisons have a protected area secluded from the main population, this area is for sex offenders and also people waiting for extradition or who have not yet been convicted, the so called vulnerable prisoners. Upon entering this area, as an extradition case, it does not take long to identify the pedophiles, bizarrely a lot of them seem to have odd phenotypes! I have observed people who were prolific offenders with sentences of over 20 years.
Ironically the prison does not provide any kind of psychological treatment for these people and some of them even manage to obtain illegal material from outside the prison.
The philosophy seems to be that for public protection, they are removed from society and simply released when the sentence is finished. A very high percentage of them are known to re-offend, which begs the question what's the point of locking them away without treatment.
So generally pedophiles seem to be narcissistic and completely self indulgent, with no concern for other people or the consequences of their actions.
Through my experience in having to share a space with these individuals, there were many times when I felt physically ill when I had the misfortune to speak with them.
I don't think many people would have the experience I did and be able to maintain their sanity, It was a living nightmare!
I was also sharing the same space with murderers and rapists, I did notice that they all seemed to share the same trait. An inability to empathise, and a complete disregard for the welfare of other people.
I have heard many pedophiles state that they feel that they don't have a problem and that pedophilia should be classified as a form of sexual expression such as being heterosexual or homosexual. These were some of the times when I felt physically ill.
On another note I had the misfortune to share a cell with a person who I suspected was a pedophile, I was woken up one morning by his hand under my bedsheets stroking my backside, I jumped out of bed and punched him hard in the face. I was punished for assault but afterwards I was allowed to have what is called a single cell, this partly saved me from going insane. I wont discuss the other things that happened because I intend to write a book about my experiences which I sincerely think you would have trouble thinking was not fictional.
If anyone has any questions that might help them resolve the question in this thread and thinks my experience studying the behavior of pedophiles might help, then feel free to ask.
A final note on this post, should you be wondering why on earth I opted to study these people, I will respond by saying I studied everything about the place I was in and the people around me. When life gives you lemons make lemonade!
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And as to your assertion that pedophiles are looked after by other inmates in British prisons.
You have misinterpreted my statement. They are generally protected by the prison authority from other inmates. See Airthumbs on this subject.
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Dear AirThumbs,
Thank you for your tale of woe and intrigue. Do they not have library access in HM prisons?
I think that you have given the definitive answer to whether pedophilia is a mental illness. You would <<have>> to be barking mad to risk getting jammed up just to dally with some fat little kid.
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"Et in Arcadia ego"
We hear today that a certain primary school teacher in China was executed for molesting 26 school girls.
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Dear pecos_bill,
There was library access that was supposed to be once a week. However due to some very unhappy guards we were lucky if we got this once a month. The guards in HMP Wandsworth also refused to take people for appointments with the Dr inside the prison. The reason for this is that they were unhappy with staffing cutbacks. In effect the guards seemed to be deliberately trying to coax some kind of riot.
Regarding your logic on having to be mad to go into prison. This would not only suggest that paedophiles are mentally ill but all criminals. Not only that but remember laws are not the same in all countries, so if you buy weed in England your mad but not in Holland or parts of the U.S.
Having just been through a pretty tough period I am sure you will also understand that I want to try and forget about it. So it is for that reason and my mental health that I do not reinforce the traumatic experience I suffered by discussing it any further. I hope you can understand.
On a final note; I think they are mentally ill. I am pretty sure most people would agree with me.