The larger question is “can paedophiles change?” A criminal psychologist recently addressed the question on a Reddit networking website.
The idea that sexual attraction to children is an “orientation” is highly controversial as it suggests that offenders cannot change.
The psychologist said it was possible to treat child sex abusers on “the understanding that the attraction may always remain”.
He wrote, “I believe Paedophilic Disorder is a sexual orientation with individual that are attracted to child features. In other words, an individual with paedophilia has the same ingrained attraction that a heterosexual female may feel towards a male, or a homosexual feels towards their same gender.
“We know that individuals with paedophilia may engage in sexual behaviour with adults. For some, they may use this as a cognitive distortion to explain away their sexualisation of prepubescent children.”
However the psychologist stressed in a later edit that they had not mean to imply paedophiles could not be treated – to an extent.
“Treatment, to me, isn’t about modifying the orientation per se, but getting the individual to find more appropriate behaviours to engage in,” they wrote.
“An individual can have paedophilic interests without ever acting on these behaviourally. However, as I am working with criminal offenders, my experience is entirely weighted to those who have engaged in this behaviorally.”
The psychiatrist said they focused on three main areas when trying to treat a child sex abuser: “One, do you understand who can and can’t provide consent? How will you go through and identify this? Two, can you identify the risks or situations which would increase when you engage in sexual activity with someone who can’t provide consent? How can you avoid these or limit them? Three, what can you focus on positive in your life which can replace or mitigate when you may be most likely to offend? What are some things you can do which are adaptive and help you in the long run?”
“It is a disease, it is a trait, it is not a choice. They haven’t chosen to change, but they can learn how to live responsibly with their sexual desires,” Petya Schuhmann, who works with a scheme in Germany called Project Dunkelfeld, which allows individuals to anonymously contact therapists who help them control their sexual urges towards children.
Last year, a self-confessed paedophile, Todd Nickerson, a freelance graphic designer from Tennessee, caused uproar after writing an article asking people to be understanding of his “sexual orientation”.
In July 2010, the Harvard Mental Health Letter of July 2010 stated that “paedophilia is a sexual orientation and unlikely to change. Treatment aims to enable someone to resist acting on his sexual urges”.
In 2013, Donald Finklater, of the child protection charity the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, said: “There may be some vulnerabilities that could be genetic, but normally there are some significant events in a person’s life, a sexually abusive event, a bullying environment … I believe it is learned, and can be unlearned.”
The tendency for the left is to not only identify unacceptable behaviors as a disease or a condition, but then to somehow excuse or even accept those behaviors because the person with that condition can’t “help themselves.” It then diminishes the importance of the act against a victim, because the individual with the condition cannot be held accountable for their behavior. In the case of paedophiles, perhaps they cannot be “fixed.”
That does not mean that their behavior can be excused and go unpunished. Society demands that innocents be protected, and that wrongdoing, even if motivated by an inborn impulse or trait, be punished, and we must also demand that future impulses be controlled.
The problem is that the progressive tendency is to say such behavior is uncontrollable and innate, and therefore should not be punished. It may be important to understand this sick orientation, but as a civilized society, we must still maintain and clear and strict line in punishing paedophilia, lest it become acceptable behavior because the perpetrator “just can’t help it.”
Source: independent.co.uk
Pedophilia is not an orientation. It is a disease that has no cure other than death. In my opinion it should be death. The destruction that a Pedophile does to a young child’s life is absolutely horrible and irreversible.