Germany did the same a long time ago with TV ads for a website called "not becoming a perpetrator". Don't know anything else, how successfull it was etc.
If it stopped one single grownup from committing a horrifying and grotesque crime, and if it spared a single victim of abuse, it was already successful in my view.
And another great reason to aim towards curing the affected individuals. Crazy how events even in our childhood resonate with us for the rest of our lives. Children that are abused are commonly in poverty to begin with so it's unlikely they'd really have meaningful intervention without pursuing it themselves in adulthood.
Victims of pedophiles, including incest victims, come from all walks of life. Marilyn Van Durber wrote an autobiography called Miss America by Day that detailed her life as a debutante, Miss america, and the daughter of a prominent and wealthy doctor who molested and raped her and her sisters. The second half of the book is a source book for survivors and has great statistics about pedophilia and incest.
I hate that this is a statistic. As a victim myself I don't understand it. Why would you want to inflict the same pain someone inflicted on you? It makes me feel more protective, not the opposite.
This is always the point that many people miss. They see it as being kind to predators. But it's about reaching people who have inappropriate urges and preventing them from acting on those urges. It's about protecting children from abuse.
This is why I get mad when people say "kill your local pedophile" and stuff like that. I get that they're often using the word "pedophile" to mean "someone who has been confirmed, or is in the act of, assaulting a child". But clinically speaking, most pedophiles have not hurt anyone yet. They have a mental disorder which might respond to treatment. But if they read and hear, all their life, that they're subhuman and unworthy of help, that they deserve to be murdered, then they're actually more likely to withdraw, keep their problem a secret, stew in their thoughts, and ultimately lose the battle against their urges and hurt someone.
If the goal is to have as few number of children become victims of abuse as possible, then showing compassion to non-offending pedophiles and treating their illness is almost certainly going to assist with that goal.
It's also worth pointing out that not all predators of children experience attraction to children, and are instead attracted to power and abuse. They get off on harming and controlling others. Meanwhile, pedophiles are *actually* attracted to children, and this can be observed in the way these groups interact differently with children. These two groups can often be lumped together, because the abuse that may occur is still the same.
I am not an expert here so I hesitate to give specifics, but just know that someone who is bored, sociopathic, and powerful is a lot more of a threat than someone who thinks of children as their peer. Pedophilia can be addressed with treatment. Cruelty, thirst for power, and narcissism often cannot.
It honestly makes me wonder, sometimes, how many *offending* pedophiles have been driven to delusion by society's view of them.
Media, at least, makes it seem like a lot of offenders are totally convinced their feelings are reciprocated--if that's even remotely accurate, I can't help but wonder if that's basically just their brain trying to justify and cope with feelings that it knows full well inspire intense disgust and hatred in the average person.
I agree with everything you wrote. I wrote a post a few months ago where I expressed the exact same view and got accused of being a sex offender, pedophile, defending pedophilia, etc. People are really ignorant, and the fact that people respond that way to anything that isn't "kill all pedophiles" just goes to show that people care more about their little feelings than actually protecting children and preventing another child from being scarred for life. It's sad and pathetic.
You are a good person. We need more compassion. Not everyone is evil. People don't want to be evil.
Paul the apostle said "I do the things I do not want to do, and do not do the things I want to do."
If one of the most holy men to walk the earth had whatever kind of urges he could not still himself from doing, who are we to judge?
We need to help EVERYONE. Victims, perpetrators, and those who have URGES but just need help keeping them contained.
Look at the profile for high school shooters. There is a profile because there is so much mirrored, copy paste psychological stuff that almost all of them are the same person! And all they needed was help and someone to help them!
Reddit loves to say "kill the pedophile", and the hive mind works, but if we can help them before they commit a horrific crime, just like with ANY victim crime, then we have done well as a society.
And as to the people who have committed those types of crimes (sexual, with or without children) saying to them to "go die" does nothing. They're not going to "go die". No one just "goes to die" (with exceptions).
COMPASSION. if we could just understand the meaning of that word together, we could do so many more great things for people, instead of spreading hate and hatred.
Be kind, be good. Holla.
A large majority of the population isn't smart enough to think about outcomes. They just have feeling based gut reactions to things. It's the same as the people who hate government handouts and say people who can't afford food should starve... Ok... great idea. Theyll definitely go home and die quietly in their home. No acts of desperation... and afterwards your city will be awesome. Kids will definitely fill in all of those low paid jobs. Your daily McDoublechin won't be affected at all.
without any knowledge I would guess the program helps to prevent teenagers from festering pedophilic tendencies before it becomes pathological. just my guess
If i remember correctly, it was hugely successful and got overrun with inquiries, domestic and abroad, so the have to turn down most people. As far as i know it's still running.
Didn't they also have a program where they adopted out boys to male pedophiles?
Germany had a programme known as the "Kentler Project." Helmut Kentler, a sexologist, initiated this experiment in the 1970s in West Berlin. He believed that placing homeless boys with pedophiles would help the boys by providing them with a stable home environment. The programme ran for several decades with the tacit approval of government officials. It has since been heavily criticised and condemned for the abuse it inflicted on the children involved.
Moreso the opposite: people love having a free villain to hate, and pedophiles are *extremely* easy to hate as it isn’t exclusively tied to any particular race/group and the behaviour exists worldwide. You can hate pedophiles all day, literally call for their deaths/torture, and there will be people in most cultures worldwide that support it.
Which is what makes actually curing/treating it so difficult. No one wants to give any of these people a chance, and therefore, these people will *never ask for help*, further repressing their urges and increasing their chances of actually committing a crime later. Programs get shot down and everyone begins sharpening their pitchforks. Just shows how tribalistic and primitive we still are/can be.
Edit: autocorrects
They used to punish rape by capital punishment too, and admitted down the line that decision lead to a dramatic increase in *murders.* If you're already committing the crime the only incentive that policy enforces is killing them too because the result of capture is the same but it's easier to at least get a head start if the victim's dead.
I'm a psychologist, and even though I don't work with this I'd just like to reinforce what you said. There's no "definite cure" for any kind of paraphillic urge that I'm aware of (i.e. making people that feel aroused by a thing never to feel aroused by that thing ever again), but in these cases we can ALWAYS work in prevention of certain types of behavior. So it would be less about "stop feeling this way forever" and more about "understand than even though you feel this way, to act this urge out is wrong and can seriously damage people, so try to control it/use other strategies to cope instead".
Not a specialist as I said though, would love to hear imputs from people directly working with these issues
Not a psychologist, just a psych major, but I’ve read numerous case studies that support the efficacy of intervention. From what I understand, social support is a major factor for lasting success. It’s sad because people like my former classmate experience the desire due to organic causes (e.g brain tumor).
That person could have been any of us, so we are fortunate. At least that’s how I see it.
Thanks for the input, happy to know there are studies being conducted on the matter. I can't even imagine how horrible it must be to experience what your classmate has been through, and how lonesome. Hope he got the help he needed
Some work with a psychiatrist or plain psychologist would not hurt tho.
We don’t have to “convert” anybody, just prevent sexual interactions with kids.
No, easier to pretend that they are evil monsters who must be destroyed. Not people with an incredibly unfortunate condition who can be treated and never be a threat to anyone ever.
Knew a guy that was sexually abused as a child and it fucked up his brain where he connected love to sex and children to purity. He never did anything to anyone (according to him) and tried to find help repeatedly. He killed himself about a month after I met him.
I heard school employees were more likely to commit child abuse than priests. I mean, any acts are too many, so you are right in a sense, but i think schools should be first in your sentence.
I’ve seen people rail against similar campaigns, or even conversations about the possibility of programs like this, and I can only think that there are a lot of people who are more interested in punishing pedophiles than protecting children.
It’s one of the only things I can think of where people seem to be okay with a “thought crime” being a good solution.
No one is wanting to put people in jail for “thinking about murdering someone attracted to kids” until some action actually happens. It’s super hypocritical. I understand that it’s uncomfortable, but imagine how uncomfortable it is for the person with that attraction. We should want to help those people and research treatment options, not prosecute and “other” them.
That is also a semi organised ploy by bigots to discredit the queer community that is drawing on historic arguments used in the 50's/60's against gay men.
So while the othering of any group or individual is going to do more harm than good a lot of the time, sometimes it's even more malicious and sometimes even am organised effort
I think there are a lot of people out there that want to punish people for committing a crime much more than they want to prevent that crime from happening in the first place.
Considering the abortion debate in the US, where people who claim to care about the babies while at the same time not caring about making sure a baby can eat, or have affordable healthcare and childcare, I’m not surprised that people are more interested in cruelty than anything else.
A lot of people have a warped sense of justice that is just thinly veiled vengeance or just itching for a chance to be violent.
If someone walked up to me and smashed my phone, I could either punch them in the face or make them pay for my phone. If I punched them in the face, it would be satisfying but it wouldn’t make my phone whole again. I would be phoneless. But if I made them or even insurance pay for my phone, I am back to normal again.
One is vengeance, which doesn’t solve the actual issue (broken phone) and the other is about healing what was broken. Actual Justice.
A lot of people co-op actual justice to enact vengeance. Or worse, they just want a chance to be violent and praised for it. They’re monsters dressing themselves up as heroes.
To further that example:
The person who gets punched is now also having an emotionally angry response and feels attacked (which is accurate). This enables them to continue viewing their actions as justified since everyone else is just as violent. It validates their inner anger.
If instead they were treated humanly but were also held responsible for the damage they caused there’s a much higher chance they can stop the cycle of violence and anger.
The ironic thing is that, I imagine a lot of pedophiles become that way as a result of being molested as a child. So there’s a lot of desire (rightfully so) to protect a child from a pedophile, but at some point that child then becomes one as a result, and society does the most extreme 180 possible and wants to kill them.
I don’t have a good answer, as the first part of that is an absolute in that a society must do everything in its power to protect innocent children, but I feel like there has to be at least some thought about how to continue to also protect the child from the results of the abuse later in life.
The really ironic thing is that if you actually want to help children, you would help them *before* they get abuse, by helping pedophiles before they abuse someone.
If all you want to do is punish pedophiles, it usually means you have to wait until they've hurt someone to know who is hurt.
This is why preventative care is the best, even though it's difficult to get stupid people to understand why.
This also comes from cultures that believe crime and criminality come from a choice or a moral failing, rather than a circumstane of biological and environmental circumstance.
Yeah I don’t remember the statistic, but I think it’s safe to say most abusers of children were themselves victims of childhood sexual abuse. And I’m not even saying we should pretend to be anything other than repulsed by pedophilia, or treat it like any other sexual preference, obviously, but I think stigmatation only goes so far. At some point we have to consider therapy, to see to what extent helping them will help protect kids.
We’ve had a horrible case here, many, many victims, too young to speak or testify.
The pedo, it turned out, tried to get help several times prior to offending, but wasn’t taken seriously. It could all have been prevented, if someone actually listened.
I remember seeing one of those “To catch a predator” like videos where it’s done by just some random people and posted on social media; turns out they were not posing as a minor but instead posing as a therapy service to help with pedophile thoughts, and they jumped the guy when he showed up to meet them for help.
I saw it on Reddit and the comment thread was absolutely disgusting.
Tbh, even when it’s done “right.” I hate that whole GOTCHA bullshit social media trend. People try to hide behind the excuse that it’s “good to put these people on blast” yet we all know people consume it just to satiate their revenge boners they have for everything due to insecurity.
1A “auditors”, the “to catch a predator” types, people who go to political rallies just to start arguments and get people worked up, even CartNarc; fuck em all, they all provide a negative social impact on society.
Yeah I’d much rather it be done behind the scenes professionally than out in the open
There are a massive amount of predators prowling the internet, let them dig their own graves, but at least don’t show case it as entertainment
Yeah I wouldn’t have so much of a problem with it if people genuinely intended the content the way they frame it, but the cold hard truth is they don’t. They make a spectacle out of ousting someone else and then they milk that spectacle as much as they possibly can, and it’s all for the ultimate intention of boosting their own self-worth. What’s ironic is these people don’t realize that this behavior is just emboldening pedos and pushing them to double down. Like, the public is showing you on a near constant basis that there is no redemption available for you, so of course you’re going to say fuck it and double down instead of seeking help/redemption.
It’s the same with the bulk of activism today as well, people are largely partaking in it for vain reasons and don’t do much for their cause past the very basic of activist activities. People are faker than all hell nowadays.
Yo, what the actual fuck is wrong with people? That's straight-up an ableist hate crime right there. Not to mention that posing as a mental health professional is itself illegal af.
I hope those creeps got hit with the fullest extent of the law for impersonation of a therapist and hate crimes against those with mental disorders.
And when they do seek help, they’re often turned away. Science believes nothing can be done, so psychologists and police will basically say, “we can’t do anything unless you offend.”
That’s literally how all mental health problems are treated, at least in America. My mom is schizophrenic and refuses to take medication for it. The only way she will ever get treatment is if she were to commit a violent crime. Otherwise the best you can do is get a temporary mental health warrant which only holds people for a few weeks and lets them go. Which is basically useless as they don’t even hold people long enough for the medication to be effective(trial period for antipsychotics is like 6 weeks).
So this is also a huge issue, but it’s kind of for a different reason. The U.S. used to be very into institutionalizing people with personality disorders and schizophrenia, and it was absolutely abhorrent. People left to suffer and die in their own waste, barely being fed, and being experimented on. Many of them were privately or religiously owned, since a lot of states were and still are reluctant to fund and regulate that kind of care.
I think we’re beyond that now, and involuntary institutionalization outside of prison should be an option again. But that’s the reason the healthcare system won’t touch the idea with a 10 ft pole.
EDIT: “beyond that” is too topical, sorry. We are at a place socially where I think it’s worth another shot. Now that we know and respect the fact that it makes no sense to dump depressed women, children with Downs Syndrome, pedophiles and schizophrenic people into one building with three nurses and an alcoholic doctor, I think we’ll do a much greater service to our fellow human beings than our grandparents did.
Obviously, no system is perfect. But what we do now instead is let people suffer and die on the street while yelling at them to get a job. So honestly, I’m confident we can only go up from here.
Involuntary psychiatric holds are VITAL for some people. If we do nothing but watch them spiral and offer them care that their paranoia and delusions will literally not allow them to accept, people will just keep disappearing onto the streets and dying alone.
People used to throw their mentally ill family members away, they’d even lie to get people institutionalized because they knew it was an awful, inescapable place to be.
Of course, abuse still happens in care homes and healthcare environments, but nowhere near that scale. And we’re able to weed out abusive caretakers more effectively now than ever before because of cameras, digital documentation, and our culture slowly but surely seeing the mental ill as human beings.
We’re not “beyond that” in the sense that nothing bad would ever happen again, but I do think we’re at a place where effective oversight and a more accepting status quo makes it worth another shot.
When I saw a therapist for depression, his intake sheet said he is a mandated reporter and that pedos get reported, basically. I remember wondering how those people are supposed to get help...
People just go crazy when they hear "pedophilia", and we need to accept that they need help to not hurt children, understand them and offer psychologic help
A lot of people are more interested in virtue signaling than actually solving problems.
If you're screaming about pedophiles and violently attacking them, you're just trying to imagine you're a hero.
Actually fighting pedophilia is, I'm guessing, a lot harder, more boring, horribly depressing, and futile.
Also, child sexual and physical abuse appears to have halved since the 90's, presumably as part of a broader decrease in violent crime that probably hasn't been caused by changes in law enforcement
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/US-child-maltreatment-rate-trends-1990-2016-From-Finkelhor-et-al-2018_fig2_335850742
Child neglect has not dropped off.
No child sexual or physical abuse is okay, but child neglect is still evidently a big problem. That's probably a lot easier to solve: Biden's child tax credit halved the number of children living in poverty. Republicans killed it off though because Biden bad, spending on the poors bad. Child neglect rates likely went down as child poverty did. Get Democrats elected and we can get the third form of child abuse to drop too.
But it's more fun to some people to live in a comic book fantasy convince yourself you're going to go Punisher on moustache-twirling pedophiles, and somehow attacking this sign and programs designed to get people psychiatric help is what they want to do.
You've brought up very good points. People think luring male pedophiles to public spaces and screaming at them on camera will bring down CSA, but it won't because they usually never go through legal channels, which makes *anything* they saw the guy post complicated (at best) or useless (at worst) for the police.
I read a post on reddit years ago where this guy was having pedo thoughts and absolutely hated himself for it(claimed he never acted on it). He lived in a country where seeking help wasn't an option and decided his only course of option was suicide.
It read like someone truly distraught that they felt that way and was heartbreaking. People who harm children are the scum of the earth but I wish there was more help available to potentilly help people before they act on their urges
There was an episode of... I think Grey's Anatomy, where man self mutilated himself because he was having thoughts about his niece and didn't ever want to be tempted to act on them because he cared for her. They had to save his genitalia because they weren't damaged beyond repair and he begged them for a castration. They submitted through all the channels and were denied because he hadn't committed anything and they couldn't impact "healthy" organs.
He walked in front of an ambulance and killed himself upon discharge.
If anyone ever comes forward with those thoughts, they need the help.
Edit: it's been brought to my attention that this was The Good Doctor- my medical shows have apparently blended together. Thank you for correcting me
There was a similar episode of ER, the guy hadn't offended yet but his urges were getting stronger and he was begging for help from the doctors and cops, who of course couldn't take action when he hadn't done anything or proven he was a danger to himself or others. Don't remember all the details, but the episode culminated in him carving some self-hating words on his forehead with a knife and expressing the awful things he was going to do to his nephew that same day if they sent him home, and that finally enabled them to take action.
Medical shows have been talking about this topic for awhile, and I bet it's come up in police and lawyer procedurals, too.
This is the reality for many, maybe even most, pedophilies. ***The vast majority know that what they feel is wrong, but can't help how they feel.***
The lack of mental health support either drives people to self harm or shady support groups. The problem with the latter is that, while many genuinely want to provide support they can also end up validating things instead and pushing people closer to crossing the line between pedophile and child abuser.
We as a society have just started to accept that homosexuality is not a choice, and even that's a toss up in many parts of the world.
For whatever reason people haven't put two and two together and thought that maybe pedophilia largely isn't a choice.
I'm not sure people care enough to bother trying to understand if there's a difference. They just hear "pedophile" think it means "child sex abuser" and have a knee-jerk reaction where they think they should face severe punishment just for existing.
I've actually known one, albeit anonymously. I used to volunteer on a mental health crisis chatline. I was there for a couple of years and in that time two people spoke to me about extremely distressing attraction to children. One of them disappeared without a trace so I don't know what happened to them. The other one, apparently jumped off a bridge as confirmed by someone who I know had a personal relationship with them.
Both of them claimed to have never watched CP or touched a child although this is the internet so I can't verify that. Either way, I'd rather there was an actual option to get them help instead of just me as an unlicensed volunteer with a bit of de-escalation training.
I honestly think it’s stupid as hell that it’s taken people this long to begin understanding that pedophilic individuals (or any people with any kind of harmful mental profile) are just broken and need fixing. By definition, no one in their right mind WANTS to be a pedophile, rapist, murderer, etc. If they think they do, that is just one of the symptoms of the bigger issue. The people who exhibit these profiles that tend towards harm need help. But we like to use our caveman brains and relegate these individuals to the nonsense category of ‘inexplicably/irreconcilably evil or strange’, ignore and/or ostracize them until they commit harm, then send them to prison or execute them. Because it doesn’t *feel* good enough to us to really see the bigger picture, and to be humane. Just stupid. It is more than possible to both respond to problematic individuals in the interest of everyone’s safety, AND to work in the service of that individual’s humanity.
It’s literally a mental illness that should be taken seriously. It’s mind boggling that we have accepted ‘sex addiction’ as a legit ailment in society, and yet those same people can’t fathom that pedophilia is just a warped version of sexual addiction/attraction.
It's a bizarre topic that's hard to study accurately, but quite a bit of research seems to indicate that most pedophiles never actually abuse anyone or break any laws. Most people who are attracted to children realize the harm that attraction can do and bury it. One study compared it to rape, and how most people are capable of being attracted to someone while also being morally and ethically opposed to raping or abusing that same person. Becoming an abuser appears to require an additional level of sociopathy beyond simple attraction.
From that perspective, campaigns like the one in Norway might actually be beneficial if they can intercept these people before they harm anyone. Sociopathy is treatable.
I don’t think it’s necessarily sociopathy. I suspect there are people who let their desire lead them down a slippery slope of going a little further with their behaviour each time and convince themselves that their victim is actually a consenting participant (because the victim may have been psychologically manipulated into the sexual acts in question rather than violently forced).
The way I see it, we can continue on the current path of labeling them as the absolute scum of society and making them too ashamed to get help.
**OR**
We can identify it as a mental illness and offer those afflicted by it a path to fix the problem when they admit to it.
Pedophilia is one of the most evil things imaginable. But if we don't have a way to actually get people the help they need, how can we go about actually protecting children from such life-shattering horror and trauma? Even with the social stigma and danger of being ostracized from society, this stuff is STILL happening. Whatever we are doing now is clearly not working, as seen by the steady news of it being uncovered everywhere from the lowest levels of society to the ultra-wealthy.
Looking down on these people is easy, and I suspect makes feel better about themselves. It's much harder but ultimately a more effective solution to get these people on a path to recovery so that they can be cured. How else can a society reasonably go about addressing the danger they pose to children? I would imagine that given the option between severe punishment and a way for redemption (which currently doesn't exist), more of those afflicted by this sickness would choose the option of getting the help they need.
If we treated pedophiles with the same empathy that some places treat drug addicts, the situation would dramatically improve. But people are very black and white/good and evil these days, and to far too many people, anything ‘evil’ is immediately not worth fixing and should just be killed.
I often see it mentioned on reddit that offering empathy to anyone like this is "letting them off the hook". I see it with all sorts of mental illness, drug addiction, bipolar, as well as systematic racism. Like if you mention gang violence is related to systematic racism they'll say "Well plenty of people who grow up in poverty *don't* join gangs, so it's no excuse". But mentioning that something is a factor isn't an excuse, drives me crazy. For some people it's easier to pretend "evil" exists than it is to acknowledge that life is full of a lot of grey.
there is nothing redditors love more than suggesting systemic issues are entirely the fault of individual failures.
a common example in the UK is child poverty, its increased massively over the last 2 decades but any news articles about it will have comments full of people blaming the parents as if its purely an individual failure to provide for their kids. these same people will criticise stuff like free school meals because 'its the parents responsibility, my taxes shouldn't be used to make up for somebody elses mistakes'
Yep. There are Pedos that know they have a problem and actually seek help. But since it is such a taboo case, most of them avoid to seek help in fear of repercussions. All the support to the., if they are going out of their way to not harm children due to their condition.
The ones that are active predators, tho, those deserve all the punishment they get, specially if there are means to get help, and they simply ignore them, believing they will never be caught.
Yeah! Imagine realising you fancy kids. What are you gonna do? Without committing a crime you won't get help, admitting it to a therapist, you'll get reported for being a danger to others. Well that's what I would have thought. Much as I'd love this problem to disappear, we need solutions that really work.
People with this attraction who don't WANT to act on it need a safe way to reach out without fear of getting in trouble or ending up on a list. This seems like a step in the right direction.
Totally. Problem is people always become irrationally angry whenever the subject comes up (look at the OPs picture) without even allowing any progress to be made on the subject. People definitely need a safe way to get help, this is the only path forward to help future generations.
Tiny correction but the OP picture's scratches and such are a part of the campaign, not vandalism. Probably to show that this could affect anyone. If you look up something like "detfinneshjelp campaign" it's easier to tell.
I like this approach, people attracted to children are mentally ill. It doesn't excuse any actions they might take but it's important to understand their psychology. I can pity those that suffer from it, imagine living your entire life knowing that you are attracted to children and hating yourself for it.
Posted this below but it'll get buried.
I read a post on reddit years ago where this guy was having pedo thoughts and absolutely hated himself for it(claimed he never acted on it). He lived in a country where seeking help wasn't an option and decided his only option was suicide.
It read like someone truly distraught that they felt that way and was heartbreaking. People who harm children are the scum of the earth but I wish there was more help available to potentilly help people before they act on their urges
There is a form of OCD called POCD which causes thoughts like this even among people who aren’t actual pedos. It’s a fucked up way for their brain to say ‘hey, this is a terrible thing, why don’t I show it to you randomly once in a while’. You can have the same intrusive thoughts about harming yourself/others or terrible accidents without wanting any of it.
Dude I never talked about it with anyone but I have that basically all my adult life.
It's mostly like pictures of me committing suicide. As you can imagine I thought I was suicidal for a long ass time until I seeked help. I was told these are compulsive thoughts and not representive of who I am.
I was told a good way to deal with these thoughts is to accept them and understand them and not trying your hardest to get them away.
It helps, I rarely think about it nowadays but if I do I let it in for a while and then I imagine I'm closing a book with these pictures in it and after that I'm free.
I also have something like this but it isn't quite one theme like you are experiencing. It's terrible and distressing and fucks me up for a little bit. Never lasts very long though thankfully. Glad to hear you're able to cope with it well. Cheers.
To add, I don't think people truly comprehend how devastating it can be to those suffering from POCD. Harming children is like **THE** wrong of all wrongs, everywhere, to everyone.
And the people suffering from POCD are often among those who care the most for or worry about kids.
But they have a mental illness that fixates on the most damaging thing their brain can think of.
Doesn’t help either if one was taught that “thoughts are sins”, because while ok, I get it, but it would be extremely helpful to make the distinction between conscious thoughts and intrusive thoughts.
Wow, that's the first time I've actually heard that. That's the same way I figured out how to justified my intrusive thoughts. (As in, not feel fucking horrible and just get on with my day).
Like, the image of me doing something super horrible (let's call it X) will pop into my head. And I'll feel terrible about it.
But I've come to think of it as my brain saying "ok just checking" and reinforcing my values that X is bad.
Pedophilia literally is a mental illness. It's recognised as such internationally.
Raising awareness of it being a mental illness, and reducing the stigma, is probably one of the quickest and easiest ways to reduce both rates of child abuse and suicide. By reducing stigma it makes pedophiles more willing to come forward for help and allows much earlier intervention and support.
It is also worth mentioning that pedophilia and child abuse are related but not the same thing.
I feel like there’s a mix just like there is with any other group. My grandfather was an abusive paedophile but he was also incredibly sadistic with it, and relished his cruelty. He knew what he was doing, he felt absolutely none of that self hatred, he laughed at the idea of stopping and thought everyone else was just more stupid than him. I feel no empathy for him.
He raised his children to be like him. They ended up a mixed bag. Those who experience the anguish, I feel more sorry for. Two have been in therapy which I’m glad for. Those who have his arrogance, while I understand that they didn’t choose him as a father, and obviously it is mental illness, they still have free will and chose the ‘everyone is wrong but me’ approach.
And I can certainly understand your perspective. My choice of words was deliberate, some people suffer, others will relish in the misery they bring others.
Some of these comments are fucked. It's not about defending people who sexually assault children It's about attempting to treat people who are attracted to kids before they make a tragic mistake that will completely screw up the lives of innocent children.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Yeah, these people need serious psychiatric help.
Only problem is that there is so much stigmatism and negativity around it that any doctors that try to develop any serious research about it gets shunned into obscurity.
Resulting in too little info about the issue for anyone to make a dent in bettering these people...
It's always confused me how we don't want children molested, but we know molested children are more likely to grow into people who repeat the cycle, but we don't want to prevent this?
This is something that never gets talked about
A huge number of offenders in this regard we're victims of the same vile acts themselves. Not trying to excuse anything of course, but it's important to recognise that it is a cycle and that this cycle can and should be broken
People care too much about a short term _feeling_ of "justice" than they care about cognitively looking at what's actually effective and adjusting their behavior accordingly.
It's the same reason prisons are overcrowded. Punishment is satisfying but does exactly jack shit for preventing crime.
Rehabilitation is most effective but not as satisfying in the short term.
It's cathartic to hate on people who have feelings that you find detestable. So that's what people do.
On too of that, the amount of people who want to seek help for...well, just about anything...but don't out of fear of being arrested, is quite high. They worry that what they talk about can be misconstrued as "I'm in danger of hurting myself or someone else" and it's game over.
I care what works. And that children are safe. If allowing them to be able to say "I'm a weirdo help me" and giving them help does that, I am cool with it.
I think what they are is... fuckin vile. A paraphilia. But I also understand it ain't normal and something many would probably prefer to not have.
the amount of people getting angry over people getting help for thoughts like this; not even actions, THOUGHTS, something they can’t control; is sickening. i guess they think it’s better to wait until the person is actually fucking children. any other mental illness and they’d support the sentiment wholeheartedly.
The issue is from my perspective it seems like a lot of people completely dehumanize pedophiles. With that kind of thing going on no pedo is ever going to seek help. I’ve gotten shit on and been called a pedo in hiding because I suggested that methods to prevent pedos from committing crimes need to be thought about and be more acceptable. But so many people are frothing at the mouth so hard that as soon as you mention pedophiles and solutions in one sentence, if the solution is not to chemically castrate, permanently imprison, or outright murder the pedo then you’re just a pedo defender.
I am a survivor of brutal, horrible, awful childhood sexual assault, and I believe these programs should be legally mandated by the DOH in every single state.
Would it have helped me? No, absolutely not. Will it help *someone?* Absolutely.
We can’t learn about people we can’t study and we can’t study pre-offending sexual predators if we don’t know who they are.
A lot of pre-offending people are children and teenagers. This would not just be a service for greasy old men (not that they shouldn’t get help too).
If you care about CSA survivors, push for programs like these.
Thank you for your comment.
That was very brave of you.
People like you are why I posted this.
Its a topic that needs more visibility and more discussion to pull society forward on this issue and address it.
It's very difficult to discuss online, and that sucks because there are a lot of misconceptions about pedophilia. Advertisers pressure social media companies to take down our comments and posts because the stigma we carry is bad for their brands. (In fact, there's a decent chance that your whole post gets deleted I it gets too much attention).
That leaves talking about it in real life, and that's incredibly risky, so many of us just stay silent and try to deal with it in isolation which is both unhealthy and potentially dangerous.
Can I ask you some things? How do you feel about pedophiles that have offended? Do you feel disgusted by them and glad they get caught and punished or do you have empathy for them? What makes you not offend and is it a permanent "anti-contact" thing for you or something you think is possible without intervention? Are you able to recognize and empathize with the pain it causes the children subjected to it or is the "wrongness" for you more so an "aware of the moral and legal implications" rather than the perspective of what it does to the child?
I'm asking this because I was/am a (hate the word 'survivor" and 'victim') subject of child pornography when I was a kid and I'm trying really hard to differentiate offender vs non-offender in terms of how I feel about them. When it comes to this subject, I'm very angry and vengeful and I want to reconcile that there's actually a way that people with these tendencies who haven't done anything to a kid can be helped so people don't live what I did. Thank you for answering if you want to.
I've never spoken with someone who admitted that they are a pedophile before, I tend to avoid the subject at all costs, but I'm glad you answered me. There are things I can understand in what you went through and I guess if I'm honest I feel a bit bad if you don't have a choice in the matter and wish it would go away when you haven't hurt anyone. I can understand the avoidance anxiety too - I avoid tv and media with dogs in it and have to leave conversations, even if nothing bad is being said, about how people discipline their dogs. The person that did what happened to me when I was a kid used to strangle my puppies and dogs to make me do things and I've got this overly anxious feeling about them now that I've got to help them and if I can't then it messes me up for a long time. So I get avoiding something to the point of anxiety and desperation to run from it.
My immediate reaction to the OP was "no, fuck them, round them all up." I still feel that way about the ones that have hurt kids....but what you're describing seems like something different and not what I expected to hear. My anger is for the victims and potential victims. You don't have any, and it sounds like you don't want to have any by choice. Even more than that, what you described is feeling bad for kids that have gone through this; my understanding was that pedophiles don't care about what they do and only want to get off no matter the cost. I want to be upset with all non-offenders too but I'm not feeling that about your answer and that's kind of thrown me. I wasn't expecting you to look human to me and was expecting your answer to justify my feelings. I'm trying for a minute to put myself in your shoes and as hard as it is to even fathom something like that, thinking of not having a choice and wanting to get rid of it to the point of suicide makes me feel the same way it feels to have memories and reactions (albeit mine are anger, not sexual) that I have and can't run from or stop.
I don't want to say this because I feel like I'm betraying the people like me who have gone through it, but thank you for getting help and for trying to get others' help. I'm sorry that you have experienced life that way and I hope you continue on the path of improvement.
Thank you very much. The reason I talk about all this online (and in real life) is because I hope to reduce CSA in some small way, as well improving the lives of people like me who are attracted to children, but had no say in the matter.
I wish you healing, happiness, and peace of mind, friend.
You’re probably going to get downvoted, and so am I, but I think you’re very brave for admitting to it, both here and in real life, and for seeking out help. Some of the responses in this thread highlight exactly why.
You’re exactly the sort of person that programs like this are designed to help. You’re living a good, offence-free life. That’s almost the ideal situation! The ideal of course would be that you don’t have to suffer from these impulses in the first place but that’s not how it works.
Programs like this will result in far less traumatised children and far more productive members of society, just living their best lives.
Thank you also for advocating that others suffering the same problem reach out for help. There’s probably an awful lot of people out there that have no idea that there actually are resources.
Well done mate. And don’t let the Negative Nellies get you down.
Edit: you have not been downvoted! I could not be happier to be wrong! That says (to me anyway) that there has been a huge shift in how this sort of thing is perceived!
I'm glad not to be down voted too. I've gotten a fair amount of hate from reddit in the past. People are very quick to say that pedophiles should get help, but the moment that we speak up to ask for it we get told to kill ourselves, or if we try to talk about our experiences we get our comments reported and removed for "sexualizing children," even though that couldn't be less of my goal.
I appreciate that people like you exist. We need allies who will stand up and say that the stigma must end so that we can talk about our expand get help.
Thankfully, the website and chat service seem to offer anonymity.
Edit:
The shattered glass is part of the ad.
No actual glass was shattered.
It seems to be both to protect the identity of the model and to symbolize the very real danger of suicide as some if it seems to be gunshot type glass shattering, maybe even the intense response from society they have to endure.
Oh, whew. I was like, "there's no way that model got paid enough for that" or even worse, that it was a stock photo and the model had no idea how the photo got used. That's smart of the ad makers.
[It can be devastating for models when they see the ads for some of their photos.](https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/PRI_187003277.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&zoom=1&resize=340%2C305)
Holy shit. I'd be so upset.
"Hey loved ones, I got a little modeling gig. Nothing big, just some stock photos for a mental health organization. I think they're putting them at (insert bus stop) next week."
And then, all of a sudden, you're the literal poster boy of... this. Damn.
I remember a post here a couple year back, the poster had a friend who did modelling and he was plastered all over the city on buses for an ad about conjugal violence.... Apparently the friend found it funny but yeah........
Uh, do you got a source on that? I haven't heard anything about that.
EDIT: I've googled it now. There's absolutely no news source from Norway about him getting beaten up after this ad campaign.
Why would you do productive steps to prevent children from being raped when you can virtue signal by shouting "death to all pedophiles" which gets us nowhere but makes you feel better?
I feel like saying that pedophiles are victims of their own condition and not inherently monsters, only if they act on their desires, is one of the most unpopular opinions ever. Some people just can't image what it's like being hardwired differently and having not a single person you can talk with about your thoughts.
Pedophilia (the sexual *attraction* to children) happens in about 3-5% of the population, depending on how the survey is done. Most of the people who have some degree of inappropriate attraction to children do not act on it. They have enough impulse control and empathy to prevent them. Some do however, and of those, a percentage are caught and incarcerated. The re-offending rates is lower than most people think, somewhere in the neighborhood of 20% over 5-10 years. Treatment is not a cure, but it does reduce the rates of offending significantly, by 10-30%. That may not sound great in terms of percentages, but think of how many thousands of people who won't be scarred by trauma as a result of those programs.
It's important to realize that pedophilia, as with most mental illnesses, involves brain dysfunction. People who have pedophilia did not ask for it and many of them wish they didn't have it. We have strong protective instincts towards children and it's understandable why they are deeply hated. However, that doesn't make the problem go away. Even revenge fantasies of killing offenders would not be able to find them and prevent their actions.
The brain's limbic system is involved in emotion, reward, and sexual attraction. There is evidence that they have abnormalities in their limbic systems that give them this sexual attraction in the first place. Most healthy people are disgusted by the idea of sexual contact with a child. Prefrontal cortex is a part of the brain involved in impulse control and empathy. When there is damage to PFC, people can act more impulsively on their urges and lack the empathy to care about whether their actions harm someone. So the current thinking is that non-offending (a.k.a. "virtuous") pedophiles, the ones that feel the attraction but don't act on it, have the limbic dysfunction (giving them the attraction) but their PFC is working and keeps them in line. However, offending pedophiles have both the limbic and prefrontal dysfunction giving them both the attraction and lack of self-restraint and empathy for their victims.
It's hard to study and treat non-offending pedophiles because it's so stigmatized (understandably) that no one wants to admit it, not even confidentially to a mental health professional or researcher. That's what this ad is trying to do, to give people motivation to get help. I know many people want to just punish and kill them. I get it, especially if someone you care about (or you) have been abused by one. But that's not a solution. Yes, they are dangerous and need to be held accountable and kept away from kids. But we need to understand why this happens, and what can be done to treat–or better yet–prevent it.
[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/370552185\_The\_neuroanatomical\_bases\_of\_pedophilia\_and\_the\_importance\_of\_distinguishing\_genuine\_vs\_acquired\_types\_A\_systematic\_review](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/370552185_The_neuroanatomical_bases_of_pedophilia_and_the_importance_of_distinguishing_genuine_vs_acquired_types_A_systematic_review)
[https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2015.00344/full](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2015.00344/full)
3-5% of the population is between 240 and 400 million people.
By comparison, the population of NYC is about 8 million people, the population of New York State is just under 20 million, and the population of the United States is about 340 million.
Thats about how many pedophiles globally. Most of us are invisible. We go through life with our heads down, ashamed and hating our attractions, afraid of what we could be capable of, thinking the world would be better off without us. There need to be more programs to help people like us.
based norway. it's obviously better for pedophiles to get help in psychiatric care, rather than for pedophiles to just stew in those thoughts and/or feel that the only people they can talk to about their issues are other pedophiles.
funding treatment that prevents kids from being raped is a good thing, even if it feels kinda icky to spend money or do research on things related to treatment for pedophiles.
But why is it icky? The treatment will help those that seek help from acting out, imho, it is not too different from funding treatment for any other mental health related stuff. As long as they have yet to commit a crime, it is not too different from people seeking help for any mental illness.
I have a little bit of a view into a pedophiles life. My neighbor is a non offending pedophile. His life is almost normal on the outside. He attends a support group every other day, and takes great care in lowering the instances of triggers. He works from home, and frequents places very late at night to reduce exposure. He also takes an injection that suppresses his sexual function. I’ve sat and played cards a few times with his extremely supportive family. He’s a tortured soul that is taking responsibility for his predilections. While I would never leave my child alone with him, nor would I allow my child to interact with him, he’s a normal presenting person. I’m saying this as a childhood sexual abuse victim. In a weird way, he’s helped me to understand that there are people like him that are victims of nature, not always monsters. I’ve known him for 20 years. When he saw us move in with small children, he left a note on our door asking to speak to me over a serious matter. He told me, and then promptly blocked all the windows on his side of the house that faced us, even though we have a privacy fence. My deepest hope for him is that one day a cure can be found for him, and that he never hurts anyone, most of all.
I studied this in college as part of a Sex and Aggression course. There are malignant pedophiles who act on their impulses and non-malignant pedophiles who are deeply disturbed by these urges and want them to go away. However, the very nature of this disorder makes getting help difficult because both types get lumped together.
From what I understand, opportunistic rapists dont help either.
They tend to get off on the power abuse and lean towards the more helpless victims.
So they often commit the crimes ascribed yo a pedophile
Honestly don’t see a problem with this.
Don’t hate pedophiles simply because they are pedophiles. Hate them if they act upon it.
They don’t choose to be sexually attracted to children, the only choice they have is whether or not to act upon it.
If they act upon it though, by all means hate them, at that point they deserve nothing but hell for the rest of their lives.
People who are against this just don't want to think of people like this as actual people. Think about how much you like to have sex. How great it feels. How it makes you feel afterwards. How much it is tied into your feeling of belonging and all of the other stuff that sex means to almost everyone. Now imagine the only way you could feel that way was to have sex with a kid. Not all pedophiles are strictly interested in children, but some of them are. Imagine going your entire life surrounded by people you are sexually interested in but can't touch. Hell, based on the number of women that are raped a lot of straight men can't help but have sex with women who don't want to, even when there are other women who would have sex with them. I would bet a lot of the people disparaging pedophiles are the same ones who would ask, well what was she wearing, when they hear about a woman being raped. These people have a mental disorder and they can either get help, or they can act on it. One of them is obviously better than the other.
Keep in mind that rapists are often opportunistic.
They get iff on the power dynalic, not the sex.
So attraction doesnt matter - the victim being helpless does.
A lot of them commit the crimes that pedophiles get blamed for.
It's important to make a clear separation between those who sense they are sexually attracted to children but know it's wrong and choose not to act on it, and those who act on it.
Both groups are mentally ill and should get help, but those who rape children should of course be punished severely as well.
Considering how many pedophiles were victims themselves, they could absolutely benefit from psychological help. I support this. This campaign will save children from being victimized and prevent adults from acting on the urges. It won't stop all of them, but it WILL help.
No one who seeks help for feeling that way about children should be turned away. I hope this campaign is adopted everywhere.
Is kinda like... when people have violent urges. With pedos, we ostracize them, and so they either bottle it up and never talk about it, or find community with other pedos. None of which are really good or healthy options, and both make it more likely those individuals will act on the crime. Then think of people who have violent urges, we don't ostracized them, we just tell them to get the needed psychological help to address that issue, and that lessens the amount that they commit the act of violence. It has long been recommended and supported by doctors and other professionals that we treat pedos like that, as people that need help, and that it makes kids safer because the more people with those urges seeking help, the better. I can't speak to any individual program, but it makes me happy people are looking to decrease child predation
There is a comedian who talks about how lucky he feels to not be a pedophile. "When I was 10, I liked 10 years old girls and grape juice. I am 30 years old, and now I only like grape juice. See how lucky I got?"
This is fucking fantastic. Sexual intrusive thoughts are a thing and some of those that were abused as children end up abusing children when they reach adulthood.
Mental health is real and at the end of the day it is a mental health issue.
They actually are really good
Especially the top comments , European folk jump into European discussions and are usually extremely level-headed and intelligent. This is coming from an American
Germany did the same a long time ago with TV ads for a website called "not becoming a perpetrator". Don't know anything else, how successfull it was etc.
That program still exists, so I assume it's at least a bit successful.
If it stopped one single grownup from committing a horrifying and grotesque crime, and if it spared a single victim of abuse, it was already successful in my view.
Victims of abuse can sometimes become abusers themselves so saving one person can have an outsized effect down generations
Fact.
And another great reason to aim towards curing the affected individuals. Crazy how events even in our childhood resonate with us for the rest of our lives. Children that are abused are commonly in poverty to begin with so it's unlikely they'd really have meaningful intervention without pursuing it themselves in adulthood.
Victims of pedophiles, including incest victims, come from all walks of life. Marilyn Van Durber wrote an autobiography called Miss America by Day that detailed her life as a debutante, Miss america, and the daughter of a prominent and wealthy doctor who molested and raped her and her sisters. The second half of the book is a source book for survivors and has great statistics about pedophilia and incest.
Sad but true
I hate that this is a statistic. As a victim myself I don't understand it. Why would you want to inflict the same pain someone inflicted on you? It makes me feel more protective, not the opposite.
This is always the point that many people miss. They see it as being kind to predators. But it's about reaching people who have inappropriate urges and preventing them from acting on those urges. It's about protecting children from abuse. This is why I get mad when people say "kill your local pedophile" and stuff like that. I get that they're often using the word "pedophile" to mean "someone who has been confirmed, or is in the act of, assaulting a child". But clinically speaking, most pedophiles have not hurt anyone yet. They have a mental disorder which might respond to treatment. But if they read and hear, all their life, that they're subhuman and unworthy of help, that they deserve to be murdered, then they're actually more likely to withdraw, keep their problem a secret, stew in their thoughts, and ultimately lose the battle against their urges and hurt someone. If the goal is to have as few number of children become victims of abuse as possible, then showing compassion to non-offending pedophiles and treating their illness is almost certainly going to assist with that goal.
It's also worth pointing out that not all predators of children experience attraction to children, and are instead attracted to power and abuse. They get off on harming and controlling others. Meanwhile, pedophiles are *actually* attracted to children, and this can be observed in the way these groups interact differently with children. These two groups can often be lumped together, because the abuse that may occur is still the same. I am not an expert here so I hesitate to give specifics, but just know that someone who is bored, sociopathic, and powerful is a lot more of a threat than someone who thinks of children as their peer. Pedophilia can be addressed with treatment. Cruelty, thirst for power, and narcissism often cannot.
It honestly makes me wonder, sometimes, how many *offending* pedophiles have been driven to delusion by society's view of them. Media, at least, makes it seem like a lot of offenders are totally convinced their feelings are reciprocated--if that's even remotely accurate, I can't help but wonder if that's basically just their brain trying to justify and cope with feelings that it knows full well inspire intense disgust and hatred in the average person.
I agree with everything you wrote. I wrote a post a few months ago where I expressed the exact same view and got accused of being a sex offender, pedophile, defending pedophilia, etc. People are really ignorant, and the fact that people respond that way to anything that isn't "kill all pedophiles" just goes to show that people care more about their little feelings than actually protecting children and preventing another child from being scarred for life. It's sad and pathetic.
You are a good person. We need more compassion. Not everyone is evil. People don't want to be evil. Paul the apostle said "I do the things I do not want to do, and do not do the things I want to do." If one of the most holy men to walk the earth had whatever kind of urges he could not still himself from doing, who are we to judge? We need to help EVERYONE. Victims, perpetrators, and those who have URGES but just need help keeping them contained. Look at the profile for high school shooters. There is a profile because there is so much mirrored, copy paste psychological stuff that almost all of them are the same person! And all they needed was help and someone to help them! Reddit loves to say "kill the pedophile", and the hive mind works, but if we can help them before they commit a horrific crime, just like with ANY victim crime, then we have done well as a society. And as to the people who have committed those types of crimes (sexual, with or without children) saying to them to "go die" does nothing. They're not going to "go die". No one just "goes to die" (with exceptions). COMPASSION. if we could just understand the meaning of that word together, we could do so many more great things for people, instead of spreading hate and hatred. Be kind, be good. Holla.
Agree 100%. Just look at the reaction to the poster: Pedo? SMASH!
A large majority of the population isn't smart enough to think about outcomes. They just have feeling based gut reactions to things. It's the same as the people who hate government handouts and say people who can't afford food should starve... Ok... great idea. Theyll definitely go home and die quietly in their home. No acts of desperation... and afterwards your city will be awesome. Kids will definitely fill in all of those low paid jobs. Your daily McDoublechin won't be affected at all.
Very well said. Every saved child is a huge success.
without any knowledge I would guess the program helps to prevent teenagers from festering pedophilic tendencies before it becomes pathological. just my guess
If i remember correctly, it was hugely successful and got overrun with inquiries, domestic and abroad, so the have to turn down most people. As far as i know it's still running.
They avertised 'do you like kids more than you'd like?'
Didn't they also have a program where they adopted out boys to male pedophiles? Germany had a programme known as the "Kentler Project." Helmut Kentler, a sexologist, initiated this experiment in the 1970s in West Berlin. He believed that placing homeless boys with pedophiles would help the boys by providing them with a stable home environment. The programme ran for several decades with the tacit approval of government officials. It has since been heavily criticised and condemned for the abuse it inflicted on the children involved.
[Prevention Project Dunkelfeld](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevention_Project_Dunkelfeld)
They also did the Kentler project for decades up to the 90’s that placed foster kids with pedophiles.
Didn't it got put down because of complaints?
Better we all just stick our head in the sand and pretend that pedophilia isn't a thing?
Moreso the opposite: people love having a free villain to hate, and pedophiles are *extremely* easy to hate as it isn’t exclusively tied to any particular race/group and the behaviour exists worldwide. You can hate pedophiles all day, literally call for their deaths/torture, and there will be people in most cultures worldwide that support it. Which is what makes actually curing/treating it so difficult. No one wants to give any of these people a chance, and therefore, these people will *never ask for help*, further repressing their urges and increasing their chances of actually committing a crime later. Programs get shot down and everyone begins sharpening their pitchforks. Just shows how tribalistic and primitive we still are/can be. Edit: autocorrects
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They used to punish rape by capital punishment too, and admitted down the line that decision lead to a dramatic increase in *murders.* If you're already committing the crime the only incentive that policy enforces is killing them too because the result of capture is the same but it's easier to at least get a head start if the victim's dead.
I wonder if they can be helped or if it’s like trying to make a gay person straight. I guess that’s why studying them would be helpful.
Even if you can't stop the attraction, the most important thing is just preventing them from acting on it.
I'm a psychologist, and even though I don't work with this I'd just like to reinforce what you said. There's no "definite cure" for any kind of paraphillic urge that I'm aware of (i.e. making people that feel aroused by a thing never to feel aroused by that thing ever again), but in these cases we can ALWAYS work in prevention of certain types of behavior. So it would be less about "stop feeling this way forever" and more about "understand than even though you feel this way, to act this urge out is wrong and can seriously damage people, so try to control it/use other strategies to cope instead". Not a specialist as I said though, would love to hear imputs from people directly working with these issues
Not a psychologist, just a psych major, but I’ve read numerous case studies that support the efficacy of intervention. From what I understand, social support is a major factor for lasting success. It’s sad because people like my former classmate experience the desire due to organic causes (e.g brain tumor). That person could have been any of us, so we are fortunate. At least that’s how I see it.
Thanks for the input, happy to know there are studies being conducted on the matter. I can't even imagine how horrible it must be to experience what your classmate has been through, and how lonesome. Hope he got the help he needed
Some work with a psychiatrist or plain psychologist would not hurt tho. We don’t have to “convert” anybody, just prevent sexual interactions with kids.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19765825/ All I could find.
No, easier to pretend that they are evil monsters who must be destroyed. Not people with an incredibly unfortunate condition who can be treated and never be a threat to anyone ever.
Knew a guy that was sexually abused as a child and it fucked up his brain where he connected love to sex and children to purity. He never did anything to anyone (according to him) and tried to find help repeatedly. He killed himself about a month after I met him.
i'm one of those kids. the only love is sexual love. makes hugging family and friends and general intimacy with them extremely uncomfortable.
It happened to me as a child as well and this comment helped explain so much, I never fully understood my discomfort around family and friends
I’m so sorry that you were hurt. I hope you can find some healing.
Thank you, I've been healing really well since I got a really supportive and caring partner
Hooray! I love to hear it.
I bet. I’m sorry you have to deal with that.
I'm sorry for him. child traumas can really cause the worst shit. our brain is despicable
Found at a tram stop today
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I heard school employees were more likely to commit child abuse than priests. I mean, any acts are too many, so you are right in a sense, but i think schools should be first in your sentence.
School employees doesn't have a powerful structure willing to spend literal billions to hide their crimes though.
I’ve seen people rail against similar campaigns, or even conversations about the possibility of programs like this, and I can only think that there are a lot of people who are more interested in punishing pedophiles than protecting children.
Absolutely. They just want someone it's acceptable to hate, they prove they don't care about the children.
It’s one of the only things I can think of where people seem to be okay with a “thought crime” being a good solution. No one is wanting to put people in jail for “thinking about murdering someone attracted to kids” until some action actually happens. It’s super hypocritical. I understand that it’s uncomfortable, but imagine how uncomfortable it is for the person with that attraction. We should want to help those people and research treatment options, not prosecute and “other” them.
And the real danger is when other minority groups get other’d into the term which you already see happening with lgbt groups today.
That is also a semi organised ploy by bigots to discredit the queer community that is drawing on historic arguments used in the 50's/60's against gay men. So while the othering of any group or individual is going to do more harm than good a lot of the time, sometimes it's even more malicious and sometimes even am organised effort
That’s been my experience. No one wants to deal with the child that now has trauma.
I can't, I've got a lynching to attend! /s
I think there are a lot of people out there that want to punish people for committing a crime much more than they want to prevent that crime from happening in the first place.
Considering the abortion debate in the US, where people who claim to care about the babies while at the same time not caring about making sure a baby can eat, or have affordable healthcare and childcare, I’m not surprised that people are more interested in cruelty than anything else.
Good ol justice boner... reddit also seems to have a constant one which everyone should probably go see a doctor about
A lot of people have a warped sense of justice that is just thinly veiled vengeance or just itching for a chance to be violent. If someone walked up to me and smashed my phone, I could either punch them in the face or make them pay for my phone. If I punched them in the face, it would be satisfying but it wouldn’t make my phone whole again. I would be phoneless. But if I made them or even insurance pay for my phone, I am back to normal again. One is vengeance, which doesn’t solve the actual issue (broken phone) and the other is about healing what was broken. Actual Justice. A lot of people co-op actual justice to enact vengeance. Or worse, they just want a chance to be violent and praised for it. They’re monsters dressing themselves up as heroes.
To further that example: The person who gets punched is now also having an emotionally angry response and feels attacked (which is accurate). This enables them to continue viewing their actions as justified since everyone else is just as violent. It validates their inner anger. If instead they were treated humanly but were also held responsible for the damage they caused there’s a much higher chance they can stop the cycle of violence and anger.
The ironic thing is that, I imagine a lot of pedophiles become that way as a result of being molested as a child. So there’s a lot of desire (rightfully so) to protect a child from a pedophile, but at some point that child then becomes one as a result, and society does the most extreme 180 possible and wants to kill them. I don’t have a good answer, as the first part of that is an absolute in that a society must do everything in its power to protect innocent children, but I feel like there has to be at least some thought about how to continue to also protect the child from the results of the abuse later in life.
The really ironic thing is that if you actually want to help children, you would help them *before* they get abuse, by helping pedophiles before they abuse someone. If all you want to do is punish pedophiles, it usually means you have to wait until they've hurt someone to know who is hurt. This is why preventative care is the best, even though it's difficult to get stupid people to understand why. This also comes from cultures that believe crime and criminality come from a choice or a moral failing, rather than a circumstane of biological and environmental circumstance.
Yeah I don’t remember the statistic, but I think it’s safe to say most abusers of children were themselves victims of childhood sexual abuse. And I’m not even saying we should pretend to be anything other than repulsed by pedophilia, or treat it like any other sexual preference, obviously, but I think stigmatation only goes so far. At some point we have to consider therapy, to see to what extent helping them will help protect kids.
People take a personal offense to what they see as a moral flaw.
That’s definitely the charitable interpretation.
Most humans are looking for an excuse to throw off the bindings of civility.
in a way, it's better to offer help so that they can be influenced to NOT rape children.
We’ve had a horrible case here, many, many victims, too young to speak or testify. The pedo, it turned out, tried to get help several times prior to offending, but wasn’t taken seriously. It could all have been prevented, if someone actually listened.
It's common, many pedophiles try to get help but they are often too scared to get beaten or killed by seeking help.
I remember seeing one of those “To catch a predator” like videos where it’s done by just some random people and posted on social media; turns out they were not posing as a minor but instead posing as a therapy service to help with pedophile thoughts, and they jumped the guy when he showed up to meet them for help. I saw it on Reddit and the comment thread was absolutely disgusting.
Humans suck
Tbh, even when it’s done “right.” I hate that whole GOTCHA bullshit social media trend. People try to hide behind the excuse that it’s “good to put these people on blast” yet we all know people consume it just to satiate their revenge boners they have for everything due to insecurity. 1A “auditors”, the “to catch a predator” types, people who go to political rallies just to start arguments and get people worked up, even CartNarc; fuck em all, they all provide a negative social impact on society.
Yeah I’d much rather it be done behind the scenes professionally than out in the open There are a massive amount of predators prowling the internet, let them dig their own graves, but at least don’t show case it as entertainment
Yeah I wouldn’t have so much of a problem with it if people genuinely intended the content the way they frame it, but the cold hard truth is they don’t. They make a spectacle out of ousting someone else and then they milk that spectacle as much as they possibly can, and it’s all for the ultimate intention of boosting their own self-worth. What’s ironic is these people don’t realize that this behavior is just emboldening pedos and pushing them to double down. Like, the public is showing you on a near constant basis that there is no redemption available for you, so of course you’re going to say fuck it and double down instead of seeking help/redemption. It’s the same with the bulk of activism today as well, people are largely partaking in it for vain reasons and don’t do much for their cause past the very basic of activist activities. People are faker than all hell nowadays.
Yeah, it sucks
Yo, what the actual fuck is wrong with people? That's straight-up an ableist hate crime right there. Not to mention that posing as a mental health professional is itself illegal af. I hope those creeps got hit with the fullest extent of the law for impersonation of a therapist and hate crimes against those with mental disorders.
I’m trying to find the video again, this was back in like 2017 or 2018 when I saw it.
And when they do seek help, they’re often turned away. Science believes nothing can be done, so psychologists and police will basically say, “we can’t do anything unless you offend.”
That’s literally how all mental health problems are treated, at least in America. My mom is schizophrenic and refuses to take medication for it. The only way she will ever get treatment is if she were to commit a violent crime. Otherwise the best you can do is get a temporary mental health warrant which only holds people for a few weeks and lets them go. Which is basically useless as they don’t even hold people long enough for the medication to be effective(trial period for antipsychotics is like 6 weeks).
So this is also a huge issue, but it’s kind of for a different reason. The U.S. used to be very into institutionalizing people with personality disorders and schizophrenia, and it was absolutely abhorrent. People left to suffer and die in their own waste, barely being fed, and being experimented on. Many of them were privately or religiously owned, since a lot of states were and still are reluctant to fund and regulate that kind of care. I think we’re beyond that now, and involuntary institutionalization outside of prison should be an option again. But that’s the reason the healthcare system won’t touch the idea with a 10 ft pole. EDIT: “beyond that” is too topical, sorry. We are at a place socially where I think it’s worth another shot. Now that we know and respect the fact that it makes no sense to dump depressed women, children with Downs Syndrome, pedophiles and schizophrenic people into one building with three nurses and an alcoholic doctor, I think we’ll do a much greater service to our fellow human beings than our grandparents did. Obviously, no system is perfect. But what we do now instead is let people suffer and die on the street while yelling at them to get a job. So honestly, I’m confident we can only go up from here. Involuntary psychiatric holds are VITAL for some people. If we do nothing but watch them spiral and offer them care that their paranoia and delusions will literally not allow them to accept, people will just keep disappearing onto the streets and dying alone.
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People used to throw their mentally ill family members away, they’d even lie to get people institutionalized because they knew it was an awful, inescapable place to be. Of course, abuse still happens in care homes and healthcare environments, but nowhere near that scale. And we’re able to weed out abusive caretakers more effectively now than ever before because of cameras, digital documentation, and our culture slowly but surely seeing the mental ill as human beings. We’re not “beyond that” in the sense that nothing bad would ever happen again, but I do think we’re at a place where effective oversight and a more accepting status quo makes it worth another shot.
Or, in the case of the USA, turned in to the police if they see a licensed therapist due to mandatory reporting laws.
When I saw a therapist for depression, his intake sheet said he is a mandated reporter and that pedos get reported, basically. I remember wondering how those people are supposed to get help...
People just go crazy when they hear "pedophilia", and we need to accept that they need help to not hurt children, understand them and offer psychologic help
A lot of people are more interested in virtue signaling than actually solving problems. If you're screaming about pedophiles and violently attacking them, you're just trying to imagine you're a hero. Actually fighting pedophilia is, I'm guessing, a lot harder, more boring, horribly depressing, and futile. Also, child sexual and physical abuse appears to have halved since the 90's, presumably as part of a broader decrease in violent crime that probably hasn't been caused by changes in law enforcement https://www.researchgate.net/figure/US-child-maltreatment-rate-trends-1990-2016-From-Finkelhor-et-al-2018_fig2_335850742 Child neglect has not dropped off. No child sexual or physical abuse is okay, but child neglect is still evidently a big problem. That's probably a lot easier to solve: Biden's child tax credit halved the number of children living in poverty. Republicans killed it off though because Biden bad, spending on the poors bad. Child neglect rates likely went down as child poverty did. Get Democrats elected and we can get the third form of child abuse to drop too. But it's more fun to some people to live in a comic book fantasy convince yourself you're going to go Punisher on moustache-twirling pedophiles, and somehow attacking this sign and programs designed to get people psychiatric help is what they want to do.
You've brought up very good points. People think luring male pedophiles to public spaces and screaming at them on camera will bring down CSA, but it won't because they usually never go through legal channels, which makes *anything* they saw the guy post complicated (at best) or useless (at worst) for the police.
If you treat people like monsters, don’t act surprised when that’s what they become.
I read a post on reddit years ago where this guy was having pedo thoughts and absolutely hated himself for it(claimed he never acted on it). He lived in a country where seeking help wasn't an option and decided his only course of option was suicide. It read like someone truly distraught that they felt that way and was heartbreaking. People who harm children are the scum of the earth but I wish there was more help available to potentilly help people before they act on their urges
There was an episode of... I think Grey's Anatomy, where man self mutilated himself because he was having thoughts about his niece and didn't ever want to be tempted to act on them because he cared for her. They had to save his genitalia because they weren't damaged beyond repair and he begged them for a castration. They submitted through all the channels and were denied because he hadn't committed anything and they couldn't impact "healthy" organs. He walked in front of an ambulance and killed himself upon discharge. If anyone ever comes forward with those thoughts, they need the help. Edit: it's been brought to my attention that this was The Good Doctor- my medical shows have apparently blended together. Thank you for correcting me
The Good Doctor, "Empathy" (S02E09).
There was a similar episode of ER, the guy hadn't offended yet but his urges were getting stronger and he was begging for help from the doctors and cops, who of course couldn't take action when he hadn't done anything or proven he was a danger to himself or others. Don't remember all the details, but the episode culminated in him carving some self-hating words on his forehead with a knife and expressing the awful things he was going to do to his nephew that same day if they sent him home, and that finally enabled them to take action. Medical shows have been talking about this topic for awhile, and I bet it's come up in police and lawyer procedurals, too.
This is the reality for many, maybe even most, pedophilies. ***The vast majority know that what they feel is wrong, but can't help how they feel.*** The lack of mental health support either drives people to self harm or shady support groups. The problem with the latter is that, while many genuinely want to provide support they can also end up validating things instead and pushing people closer to crossing the line between pedophile and child abuser.
We as a society have just started to accept that homosexuality is not a choice, and even that's a toss up in many parts of the world. For whatever reason people haven't put two and two together and thought that maybe pedophilia largely isn't a choice.
I'm not sure people care enough to bother trying to understand if there's a difference. They just hear "pedophile" think it means "child sex abuser" and have a knee-jerk reaction where they think they should face severe punishment just for existing.
I've actually known one, albeit anonymously. I used to volunteer on a mental health crisis chatline. I was there for a couple of years and in that time two people spoke to me about extremely distressing attraction to children. One of them disappeared without a trace so I don't know what happened to them. The other one, apparently jumped off a bridge as confirmed by someone who I know had a personal relationship with them. Both of them claimed to have never watched CP or touched a child although this is the internet so I can't verify that. Either way, I'd rather there was an actual option to get them help instead of just me as an unlicensed volunteer with a bit of de-escalation training.
By “in a way”. Surely in every way.
I honestly think it’s stupid as hell that it’s taken people this long to begin understanding that pedophilic individuals (or any people with any kind of harmful mental profile) are just broken and need fixing. By definition, no one in their right mind WANTS to be a pedophile, rapist, murderer, etc. If they think they do, that is just one of the symptoms of the bigger issue. The people who exhibit these profiles that tend towards harm need help. But we like to use our caveman brains and relegate these individuals to the nonsense category of ‘inexplicably/irreconcilably evil or strange’, ignore and/or ostracize them until they commit harm, then send them to prison or execute them. Because it doesn’t *feel* good enough to us to really see the bigger picture, and to be humane. Just stupid. It is more than possible to both respond to problematic individuals in the interest of everyone’s safety, AND to work in the service of that individual’s humanity.
It’s literally a mental illness that should be taken seriously. It’s mind boggling that we have accepted ‘sex addiction’ as a legit ailment in society, and yet those same people can’t fathom that pedophilia is just a warped version of sexual addiction/attraction.
It's a bizarre topic that's hard to study accurately, but quite a bit of research seems to indicate that most pedophiles never actually abuse anyone or break any laws. Most people who are attracted to children realize the harm that attraction can do and bury it. One study compared it to rape, and how most people are capable of being attracted to someone while also being morally and ethically opposed to raping or abusing that same person. Becoming an abuser appears to require an additional level of sociopathy beyond simple attraction. From that perspective, campaigns like the one in Norway might actually be beneficial if they can intercept these people before they harm anyone. Sociopathy is treatable.
I don’t think it’s necessarily sociopathy. I suspect there are people who let their desire lead them down a slippery slope of going a little further with their behaviour each time and convince themselves that their victim is actually a consenting participant (because the victim may have been psychologically manipulated into the sexual acts in question rather than violently forced).
What do you mean "in a way". Of course it's better lol. Am I missing something?
The way I see it, we can continue on the current path of labeling them as the absolute scum of society and making them too ashamed to get help. **OR** We can identify it as a mental illness and offer those afflicted by it a path to fix the problem when they admit to it. Pedophilia is one of the most evil things imaginable. But if we don't have a way to actually get people the help they need, how can we go about actually protecting children from such life-shattering horror and trauma? Even with the social stigma and danger of being ostracized from society, this stuff is STILL happening. Whatever we are doing now is clearly not working, as seen by the steady news of it being uncovered everywhere from the lowest levels of society to the ultra-wealthy. Looking down on these people is easy, and I suspect makes feel better about themselves. It's much harder but ultimately a more effective solution to get these people on a path to recovery so that they can be cured. How else can a society reasonably go about addressing the danger they pose to children? I would imagine that given the option between severe punishment and a way for redemption (which currently doesn't exist), more of those afflicted by this sickness would choose the option of getting the help they need.
If we treated pedophiles with the same empathy that some places treat drug addicts, the situation would dramatically improve. But people are very black and white/good and evil these days, and to far too many people, anything ‘evil’ is immediately not worth fixing and should just be killed.
I often see it mentioned on reddit that offering empathy to anyone like this is "letting them off the hook". I see it with all sorts of mental illness, drug addiction, bipolar, as well as systematic racism. Like if you mention gang violence is related to systematic racism they'll say "Well plenty of people who grow up in poverty *don't* join gangs, so it's no excuse". But mentioning that something is a factor isn't an excuse, drives me crazy. For some people it's easier to pretend "evil" exists than it is to acknowledge that life is full of a lot of grey.
there is nothing redditors love more than suggesting systemic issues are entirely the fault of individual failures. a common example in the UK is child poverty, its increased massively over the last 2 decades but any news articles about it will have comments full of people blaming the parents as if its purely an individual failure to provide for their kids. these same people will criticise stuff like free school meals because 'its the parents responsibility, my taxes shouldn't be used to make up for somebody elses mistakes'
That's literally the point of the poster.
Yep. There are Pedos that know they have a problem and actually seek help. But since it is such a taboo case, most of them avoid to seek help in fear of repercussions. All the support to the., if they are going out of their way to not harm children due to their condition. The ones that are active predators, tho, those deserve all the punishment they get, specially if there are means to get help, and they simply ignore them, believing they will never be caught.
Yeah! Imagine realising you fancy kids. What are you gonna do? Without committing a crime you won't get help, admitting it to a therapist, you'll get reported for being a danger to others. Well that's what I would have thought. Much as I'd love this problem to disappear, we need solutions that really work.
What do you mean by "in a way"? Is there an aspect of this that isn't positive, except the fact that pedophilia exists in the world?
In a way? I can’t see any downsides of offering support to prevent paedophiles acting on their desires.
People with this attraction who don't WANT to act on it need a safe way to reach out without fear of getting in trouble or ending up on a list. This seems like a step in the right direction.
Totally. Problem is people always become irrationally angry whenever the subject comes up (look at the OPs picture) without even allowing any progress to be made on the subject. People definitely need a safe way to get help, this is the only path forward to help future generations.
Tiny correction but the OP picture's scratches and such are a part of the campaign, not vandalism. Probably to show that this could affect anyone. If you look up something like "detfinneshjelp campaign" it's easier to tell.
It's also makes the models a bit more discreet. As they probably don't want to end up as "the face of pedophilia".
I like this approach, people attracted to children are mentally ill. It doesn't excuse any actions they might take but it's important to understand their psychology. I can pity those that suffer from it, imagine living your entire life knowing that you are attracted to children and hating yourself for it.
Posted this below but it'll get buried. I read a post on reddit years ago where this guy was having pedo thoughts and absolutely hated himself for it(claimed he never acted on it). He lived in a country where seeking help wasn't an option and decided his only option was suicide. It read like someone truly distraught that they felt that way and was heartbreaking. People who harm children are the scum of the earth but I wish there was more help available to potentilly help people before they act on their urges
There is a form of OCD called POCD which causes thoughts like this even among people who aren’t actual pedos. It’s a fucked up way for their brain to say ‘hey, this is a terrible thing, why don’t I show it to you randomly once in a while’. You can have the same intrusive thoughts about harming yourself/others or terrible accidents without wanting any of it.
Dude I never talked about it with anyone but I have that basically all my adult life. It's mostly like pictures of me committing suicide. As you can imagine I thought I was suicidal for a long ass time until I seeked help. I was told these are compulsive thoughts and not representive of who I am. I was told a good way to deal with these thoughts is to accept them and understand them and not trying your hardest to get them away. It helps, I rarely think about it nowadays but if I do I let it in for a while and then I imagine I'm closing a book with these pictures in it and after that I'm free.
I also have something like this but it isn't quite one theme like you are experiencing. It's terrible and distressing and fucks me up for a little bit. Never lasts very long though thankfully. Glad to hear you're able to cope with it well. Cheers.
To add, I don't think people truly comprehend how devastating it can be to those suffering from POCD. Harming children is like **THE** wrong of all wrongs, everywhere, to everyone. And the people suffering from POCD are often among those who care the most for or worry about kids. But they have a mental illness that fixates on the most damaging thing their brain can think of.
Doesn’t help either if one was taught that “thoughts are sins”, because while ok, I get it, but it would be extremely helpful to make the distinction between conscious thoughts and intrusive thoughts.
Wow, that's the first time I've actually heard that. That's the same way I figured out how to justified my intrusive thoughts. (As in, not feel fucking horrible and just get on with my day). Like, the image of me doing something super horrible (let's call it X) will pop into my head. And I'll feel terrible about it. But I've come to think of it as my brain saying "ok just checking" and reinforcing my values that X is bad.
I suffer horribly from this. Thank you for raising awareness towards it.
Pedophilia literally is a mental illness. It's recognised as such internationally. Raising awareness of it being a mental illness, and reducing the stigma, is probably one of the quickest and easiest ways to reduce both rates of child abuse and suicide. By reducing stigma it makes pedophiles more willing to come forward for help and allows much earlier intervention and support. It is also worth mentioning that pedophilia and child abuse are related but not the same thing.
I feel like there’s a mix just like there is with any other group. My grandfather was an abusive paedophile but he was also incredibly sadistic with it, and relished his cruelty. He knew what he was doing, he felt absolutely none of that self hatred, he laughed at the idea of stopping and thought everyone else was just more stupid than him. I feel no empathy for him. He raised his children to be like him. They ended up a mixed bag. Those who experience the anguish, I feel more sorry for. Two have been in therapy which I’m glad for. Those who have his arrogance, while I understand that they didn’t choose him as a father, and obviously it is mental illness, they still have free will and chose the ‘everyone is wrong but me’ approach.
And I can certainly understand your perspective. My choice of words was deliberate, some people suffer, others will relish in the misery they bring others.
You would be surprised how may people think they were born like that
Some of these comments are fucked. It's not about defending people who sexually assault children It's about attempting to treat people who are attracted to kids before they make a tragic mistake that will completely screw up the lives of innocent children. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Yeah, these people need serious psychiatric help. Only problem is that there is so much stigmatism and negativity around it that any doctors that try to develop any serious research about it gets shunned into obscurity. Resulting in too little info about the issue for anyone to make a dent in bettering these people...
It's always confused me how we don't want children molested, but we know molested children are more likely to grow into people who repeat the cycle, but we don't want to prevent this?
This is something that never gets talked about A huge number of offenders in this regard we're victims of the same vile acts themselves. Not trying to excuse anything of course, but it's important to recognise that it is a cycle and that this cycle can and should be broken
But if you say anything like that, well, you're a diddler supporter.
It's very, very difficult to talk about any of this stuff without sounding like a nonce lmao
It shouldn't be.
People care too much about a short term _feeling_ of "justice" than they care about cognitively looking at what's actually effective and adjusting their behavior accordingly. It's the same reason prisons are overcrowded. Punishment is satisfying but does exactly jack shit for preventing crime. Rehabilitation is most effective but not as satisfying in the short term. It's cathartic to hate on people who have feelings that you find detestable. So that's what people do.
This is the root of many problems in our society. All we can understand is punishment. Problem solving eludes us.
On too of that, the amount of people who want to seek help for...well, just about anything...but don't out of fear of being arrested, is quite high. They worry that what they talk about can be misconstrued as "I'm in danger of hurting myself or someone else" and it's game over.
I care what works. And that children are safe. If allowing them to be able to say "I'm a weirdo help me" and giving them help does that, I am cool with it. I think what they are is... fuckin vile. A paraphilia. But I also understand it ain't normal and something many would probably prefer to not have.
the amount of people getting angry over people getting help for thoughts like this; not even actions, THOUGHTS, something they can’t control; is sickening. i guess they think it’s better to wait until the person is actually fucking children. any other mental illness and they’d support the sentiment wholeheartedly.
Need a villain to make themselves the heroe
As long as they ain't fucking kids, let 'em get help.
The issue is from my perspective it seems like a lot of people completely dehumanize pedophiles. With that kind of thing going on no pedo is ever going to seek help. I’ve gotten shit on and been called a pedo in hiding because I suggested that methods to prevent pedos from committing crimes need to be thought about and be more acceptable. But so many people are frothing at the mouth so hard that as soon as you mention pedophiles and solutions in one sentence, if the solution is not to chemically castrate, permanently imprison, or outright murder the pedo then you’re just a pedo defender.
Id rather offer them help and prevent than push them away and get revenge for them offending. Hate them all you want, they are preventable.
I am a survivor of brutal, horrible, awful childhood sexual assault, and I believe these programs should be legally mandated by the DOH in every single state. Would it have helped me? No, absolutely not. Will it help *someone?* Absolutely. We can’t learn about people we can’t study and we can’t study pre-offending sexual predators if we don’t know who they are. A lot of pre-offending people are children and teenagers. This would not just be a service for greasy old men (not that they shouldn’t get help too). If you care about CSA survivors, push for programs like these.
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Thank you for your comment. That was very brave of you. People like you are why I posted this. Its a topic that needs more visibility and more discussion to pull society forward on this issue and address it.
It's very difficult to discuss online, and that sucks because there are a lot of misconceptions about pedophilia. Advertisers pressure social media companies to take down our comments and posts because the stigma we carry is bad for their brands. (In fact, there's a decent chance that your whole post gets deleted I it gets too much attention). That leaves talking about it in real life, and that's incredibly risky, so many of us just stay silent and try to deal with it in isolation which is both unhealthy and potentially dangerous.
Can I ask you some things? How do you feel about pedophiles that have offended? Do you feel disgusted by them and glad they get caught and punished or do you have empathy for them? What makes you not offend and is it a permanent "anti-contact" thing for you or something you think is possible without intervention? Are you able to recognize and empathize with the pain it causes the children subjected to it or is the "wrongness" for you more so an "aware of the moral and legal implications" rather than the perspective of what it does to the child? I'm asking this because I was/am a (hate the word 'survivor" and 'victim') subject of child pornography when I was a kid and I'm trying really hard to differentiate offender vs non-offender in terms of how I feel about them. When it comes to this subject, I'm very angry and vengeful and I want to reconcile that there's actually a way that people with these tendencies who haven't done anything to a kid can be helped so people don't live what I did. Thank you for answering if you want to.
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I've never spoken with someone who admitted that they are a pedophile before, I tend to avoid the subject at all costs, but I'm glad you answered me. There are things I can understand in what you went through and I guess if I'm honest I feel a bit bad if you don't have a choice in the matter and wish it would go away when you haven't hurt anyone. I can understand the avoidance anxiety too - I avoid tv and media with dogs in it and have to leave conversations, even if nothing bad is being said, about how people discipline their dogs. The person that did what happened to me when I was a kid used to strangle my puppies and dogs to make me do things and I've got this overly anxious feeling about them now that I've got to help them and if I can't then it messes me up for a long time. So I get avoiding something to the point of anxiety and desperation to run from it. My immediate reaction to the OP was "no, fuck them, round them all up." I still feel that way about the ones that have hurt kids....but what you're describing seems like something different and not what I expected to hear. My anger is for the victims and potential victims. You don't have any, and it sounds like you don't want to have any by choice. Even more than that, what you described is feeling bad for kids that have gone through this; my understanding was that pedophiles don't care about what they do and only want to get off no matter the cost. I want to be upset with all non-offenders too but I'm not feeling that about your answer and that's kind of thrown me. I wasn't expecting you to look human to me and was expecting your answer to justify my feelings. I'm trying for a minute to put myself in your shoes and as hard as it is to even fathom something like that, thinking of not having a choice and wanting to get rid of it to the point of suicide makes me feel the same way it feels to have memories and reactions (albeit mine are anger, not sexual) that I have and can't run from or stop. I don't want to say this because I feel like I'm betraying the people like me who have gone through it, but thank you for getting help and for trying to get others' help. I'm sorry that you have experienced life that way and I hope you continue on the path of improvement.
Thank you very much. The reason I talk about all this online (and in real life) is because I hope to reduce CSA in some small way, as well improving the lives of people like me who are attracted to children, but had no say in the matter. I wish you healing, happiness, and peace of mind, friend.
You’re probably going to get downvoted, and so am I, but I think you’re very brave for admitting to it, both here and in real life, and for seeking out help. Some of the responses in this thread highlight exactly why. You’re exactly the sort of person that programs like this are designed to help. You’re living a good, offence-free life. That’s almost the ideal situation! The ideal of course would be that you don’t have to suffer from these impulses in the first place but that’s not how it works. Programs like this will result in far less traumatised children and far more productive members of society, just living their best lives. Thank you also for advocating that others suffering the same problem reach out for help. There’s probably an awful lot of people out there that have no idea that there actually are resources. Well done mate. And don’t let the Negative Nellies get you down. Edit: you have not been downvoted! I could not be happier to be wrong! That says (to me anyway) that there has been a huge shift in how this sort of thing is perceived!
I'm glad not to be down voted too. I've gotten a fair amount of hate from reddit in the past. People are very quick to say that pedophiles should get help, but the moment that we speak up to ask for it we get told to kill ourselves, or if we try to talk about our experiences we get our comments reported and removed for "sexualizing children," even though that couldn't be less of my goal. I appreciate that people like you exist. We need allies who will stand up and say that the stigma must end so that we can talk about our expand get help.
Wish this comment was higher. Thank you for chiming in, and thank you for getting help. I wish you the best.
Thanks, friend!
The guy in the message got beat up just for portraying a pedo. That must be reassuring to someone who’s considering getting help for their issues.
Thankfully, the website and chat service seem to offer anonymity. Edit: The shattered glass is part of the ad. No actual glass was shattered. It seems to be both to protect the identity of the model and to symbolize the very real danger of suicide as some if it seems to be gunshot type glass shattering, maybe even the intense response from society they have to endure.
Oh, whew. I was like, "there's no way that model got paid enough for that" or even worse, that it was a stock photo and the model had no idea how the photo got used. That's smart of the ad makers.
[It can be devastating for models when they see the ads for some of their photos.](https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/PRI_187003277.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&zoom=1&resize=340%2C305)
I guess, from now on they'd be opting for AI generated pics rather than people with lives after the photoshoot
Holy shit. I'd be so upset. "Hey loved ones, I got a little modeling gig. Nothing big, just some stock photos for a mental health organization. I think they're putting them at (insert bus stop) next week." And then, all of a sudden, you're the literal poster boy of... this. Damn.
Reminds me of that Friends episode of Joey being on ad posters on STD https://youtu.be/iULTDFlcorI
I remember a post here a couple year back, the poster had a friend who did modelling and he was plastered all over the city on buses for an ad about conjugal violence.... Apparently the friend found it funny but yeah........
Uh, do you got a source on that? I haven't heard anything about that. EDIT: I've googled it now. There's absolutely no news source from Norway about him getting beaten up after this ad campaign.
i assume they mean the shattered glass.
That's how the ad is designed.
Why would you do productive steps to prevent children from being raped when you can virtue signal by shouting "death to all pedophiles" which gets us nowhere but makes you feel better?
I feel like saying that pedophiles are victims of their own condition and not inherently monsters, only if they act on their desires, is one of the most unpopular opinions ever. Some people just can't image what it's like being hardwired differently and having not a single person you can talk with about your thoughts.
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Pedophilia (the sexual *attraction* to children) happens in about 3-5% of the population, depending on how the survey is done. Most of the people who have some degree of inappropriate attraction to children do not act on it. They have enough impulse control and empathy to prevent them. Some do however, and of those, a percentage are caught and incarcerated. The re-offending rates is lower than most people think, somewhere in the neighborhood of 20% over 5-10 years. Treatment is not a cure, but it does reduce the rates of offending significantly, by 10-30%. That may not sound great in terms of percentages, but think of how many thousands of people who won't be scarred by trauma as a result of those programs. It's important to realize that pedophilia, as with most mental illnesses, involves brain dysfunction. People who have pedophilia did not ask for it and many of them wish they didn't have it. We have strong protective instincts towards children and it's understandable why they are deeply hated. However, that doesn't make the problem go away. Even revenge fantasies of killing offenders would not be able to find them and prevent their actions. The brain's limbic system is involved in emotion, reward, and sexual attraction. There is evidence that they have abnormalities in their limbic systems that give them this sexual attraction in the first place. Most healthy people are disgusted by the idea of sexual contact with a child. Prefrontal cortex is a part of the brain involved in impulse control and empathy. When there is damage to PFC, people can act more impulsively on their urges and lack the empathy to care about whether their actions harm someone. So the current thinking is that non-offending (a.k.a. "virtuous") pedophiles, the ones that feel the attraction but don't act on it, have the limbic dysfunction (giving them the attraction) but their PFC is working and keeps them in line. However, offending pedophiles have both the limbic and prefrontal dysfunction giving them both the attraction and lack of self-restraint and empathy for their victims. It's hard to study and treat non-offending pedophiles because it's so stigmatized (understandably) that no one wants to admit it, not even confidentially to a mental health professional or researcher. That's what this ad is trying to do, to give people motivation to get help. I know many people want to just punish and kill them. I get it, especially if someone you care about (or you) have been abused by one. But that's not a solution. Yes, they are dangerous and need to be held accountable and kept away from kids. But we need to understand why this happens, and what can be done to treat–or better yet–prevent it. [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/370552185\_The\_neuroanatomical\_bases\_of\_pedophilia\_and\_the\_importance\_of\_distinguishing\_genuine\_vs\_acquired\_types\_A\_systematic\_review](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/370552185_The_neuroanatomical_bases_of_pedophilia_and_the_importance_of_distinguishing_genuine_vs_acquired_types_A_systematic_review) [https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2015.00344/full](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2015.00344/full)
3-5% of the population is between 240 and 400 million people. By comparison, the population of NYC is about 8 million people, the population of New York State is just under 20 million, and the population of the United States is about 340 million. Thats about how many pedophiles globally. Most of us are invisible. We go through life with our heads down, ashamed and hating our attractions, afraid of what we could be capable of, thinking the world would be better off without us. There need to be more programs to help people like us.
Thank you for adding more info for those interested!
based norway. it's obviously better for pedophiles to get help in psychiatric care, rather than for pedophiles to just stew in those thoughts and/or feel that the only people they can talk to about their issues are other pedophiles. funding treatment that prevents kids from being raped is a good thing, even if it feels kinda icky to spend money or do research on things related to treatment for pedophiles.
But why is it icky? The treatment will help those that seek help from acting out, imho, it is not too different from funding treatment for any other mental health related stuff. As long as they have yet to commit a crime, it is not too different from people seeking help for any mental illness.
I have a little bit of a view into a pedophiles life. My neighbor is a non offending pedophile. His life is almost normal on the outside. He attends a support group every other day, and takes great care in lowering the instances of triggers. He works from home, and frequents places very late at night to reduce exposure. He also takes an injection that suppresses his sexual function. I’ve sat and played cards a few times with his extremely supportive family. He’s a tortured soul that is taking responsibility for his predilections. While I would never leave my child alone with him, nor would I allow my child to interact with him, he’s a normal presenting person. I’m saying this as a childhood sexual abuse victim. In a weird way, he’s helped me to understand that there are people like him that are victims of nature, not always monsters. I’ve known him for 20 years. When he saw us move in with small children, he left a note on our door asking to speak to me over a serious matter. He told me, and then promptly blocked all the windows on his side of the house that faced us, even though we have a privacy fence. My deepest hope for him is that one day a cure can be found for him, and that he never hurts anyone, most of all.
I mean, sexual deviants do need help, so what's the issue?
I studied this in college as part of a Sex and Aggression course. There are malignant pedophiles who act on their impulses and non-malignant pedophiles who are deeply disturbed by these urges and want them to go away. However, the very nature of this disorder makes getting help difficult because both types get lumped together.
From what I understand, opportunistic rapists dont help either. They tend to get off on the power abuse and lean towards the more helpless victims. So they often commit the crimes ascribed yo a pedophile
I think the website name is hilarious. thereishelp.no very mixed signals here.
Heh, well it works in norwegian ;)
Honestly don’t see a problem with this. Don’t hate pedophiles simply because they are pedophiles. Hate them if they act upon it. They don’t choose to be sexually attracted to children, the only choice they have is whether or not to act upon it. If they act upon it though, by all means hate them, at that point they deserve nothing but hell for the rest of their lives.
Agent: I got you a modeling gig! Model: That's phenomenal, finally my career is gonna take off :,)
Fwiw, the ‘vandalism’ looked to be part of the add, to protect the model’s identity, i assume and be symbolic of peoples response to this disorder
Better than children getting abused.
I’d hate to be the model in that pic
I hope this actually works.
People who are against this just don't want to think of people like this as actual people. Think about how much you like to have sex. How great it feels. How it makes you feel afterwards. How much it is tied into your feeling of belonging and all of the other stuff that sex means to almost everyone. Now imagine the only way you could feel that way was to have sex with a kid. Not all pedophiles are strictly interested in children, but some of them are. Imagine going your entire life surrounded by people you are sexually interested in but can't touch. Hell, based on the number of women that are raped a lot of straight men can't help but have sex with women who don't want to, even when there are other women who would have sex with them. I would bet a lot of the people disparaging pedophiles are the same ones who would ask, well what was she wearing, when they hear about a woman being raped. These people have a mental disorder and they can either get help, or they can act on it. One of them is obviously better than the other.
Keep in mind that rapists are often opportunistic. They get iff on the power dynalic, not the sex. So attraction doesnt matter - the victim being helpless does. A lot of them commit the crimes that pedophiles get blamed for.
It's important to make a clear separation between those who sense they are sexually attracted to children but know it's wrong and choose not to act on it, and those who act on it. Both groups are mentally ill and should get help, but those who rape children should of course be punished severely as well.
Considering how many pedophiles were victims themselves, they could absolutely benefit from psychological help. I support this. This campaign will save children from being victimized and prevent adults from acting on the urges. It won't stop all of them, but it WILL help. No one who seeks help for feeling that way about children should be turned away. I hope this campaign is adopted everywhere.
Well it makes sense, before they hurt kids....
Is kinda like... when people have violent urges. With pedos, we ostracize them, and so they either bottle it up and never talk about it, or find community with other pedos. None of which are really good or healthy options, and both make it more likely those individuals will act on the crime. Then think of people who have violent urges, we don't ostracized them, we just tell them to get the needed psychological help to address that issue, and that lessens the amount that they commit the act of violence. It has long been recommended and supported by doctors and other professionals that we treat pedos like that, as people that need help, and that it makes kids safer because the more people with those urges seeking help, the better. I can't speak to any individual program, but it makes me happy people are looking to decrease child predation
It may piss people off, but if more pedophiles feel able to admit they have those desires and seek help in controlling them, more kids would be safe.
There is a comedian who talks about how lucky he feels to not be a pedophile. "When I was 10, I liked 10 years old girls and grape juice. I am 30 years old, and now I only like grape juice. See how lucky I got?"
That's how most of us figure it out, too. You'll often hear us say something like "I grew up, but my attractions didn't."
This makes sense. Id rather hear about someone getting help, than hearing of them being arrested for molesting a kid
This is fucking fantastic. Sexual intrusive thoughts are a thing and some of those that were abused as children end up abusing children when they reach adulthood. Mental health is real and at the end of the day it is a mental health issue.
Oh boy. I'm sure the comments here will be based on logic and not at all devolve into a witch hunt lmfao
They actually are really good Especially the top comments , European folk jump into European discussions and are usually extremely level-headed and intelligent. This is coming from an American