[shasarak]

Originally Posted by Fifi Here is the thing about why having thoughts of pedophilia, rape, or beastiality etc, are repugnant - antisocial behavior escalates. Before someone goes out and rapes children, they fantasize about raping children. Eventually, the fantasies become compelling. Many child rapists feel very bad after.

I've no doubt that murderers have violent thoughts before they actually commit murder too. The problem is, if you lock up everyone who has ever had violent thoughts, you'd have to lock up the entire population. The vast majority of people who have violent thoughts do not go on to commit murder, and to treat everyone who has ever had violent thoughts as a future murderer is not only stupid, it is profoundly wrong and unfair.

It also makes an absolute nonsense of the whole concept of individual responsibility. Have you ever looked at something in a shop that you couldn't afford and wished you had it? Would it make sense to lock you up for shop-lifting just because you've had those thoughts? Clearly not; wanting something and actually taking it are two completely different things. If you treat wanting something and stealing something as equally morally reprehensible, that means that actually stealing it is no worse than wanting it. Surely you don't believe that?

Similarly, virtually every human male on the planet has, at one time or another, had sexual thoughts about a person who is not, and could not ever be, attracted to them, and would therefore be upset if the male in question actually made sexual advances towards them. Most of those males have not gone on to actually commit rape. Again, it would simply be daft to lock up every single person who has ever had a sexual thought about someone who would be harmed if they acted on those thoughts; the difference between fantasising about someone and actually trying to rape them is rather an important one.

My suspicion is that an equally tiny minority of those who have sexual feelings towards children ever actually act on those feelings, and it is wrong to condemn someone as a future rapist, either of adults or of children, simply because they have fantasies. If they ever try to act on those fantasies and rape someone, fine: lock them up and throw away the key. But you're on a very slippery slope indeed if you start to lock up people because of their thoughts.

A person's thoughts are his own and no one else's; and should remain so.

[scandum]

Originally Posted by Ilkidarios So if the universe is such a logical place, why has logic failed to explain morality clearly?

Most likely for the same reason few people truly understand the theory of relativity, especially the math that is involved.

If theoretical morality is as complicated to grasp as theoretical physics you'll find very few people capable to formulate moral laws. They could pass their practical moral knowledge on to the masses, but the masses wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the real deal and bullocks.

Not to mention that if someone came forward with a solid logical foundation for morality he'd be ridiculed as much as Darwin was when he first published his theories, especially when the conclusions are completely different from main stream religious and political believes.

[Fifi]

Originally Posted by shasarak My suspicion is that an equally tiny minority of those who have sexual feelings towards children ever actually act on those feelings, and it is wrong to condemn someone as a future rapist, either of adults or of children, simply because they have fantasies. If they ever try to act on those fantasies and rape someone, fine: lock them up and throw away the key. But you're on a very slippery slope indeed if you start to lock up people because of their thoughts. .

Statistics, Prevalence and Consequences of Child Sexual Abuse

1 in four girls are sexually molested , and 1 in six boys. So, if those who are abusing children are only tiny minority of those fantasizing about, almost everyone must be fantasizing about it.

Additionally, some of those fantasizing about it are supplementing those fantasies with pornography, so while they may not be personally molesting anyone, but they are monetarily supporting the abuse.

I agree, that thought should not be legislated. But to say that people are entitled to think what they like, and there's no harm in thought is disingenuous. People should censor their own thoughts. Then maybe they'll stop touching their little nieces in nephews in inappropriate places. (30-40% of abused children are abused by family members.)

Thought leads to deed. We're responsible for our deeds and our thoughts. The correlation is direct.

[Fifi]

statistics on sexual abuse - Google Search

The link above was the first on the page when I did a google search for statistics on sexual abuse. Lest you think I hunted to find the figures, take a look at the other 2,150,000, links. The numbers above are not out of line with the sites I checked - actually lower than I expected. I remembered the figure 1 in three. Though, granted, I only checked ten of the links. not all two and one eighth million.

[shadowfyr]

Originally Posted by Fifi Here is the thing about why having thoughts of pedophilia, rape, or beastiality etc, are repugnant - antisocial behavior escalates. Before someone goes out and rapes children, they fantasize about raping children. Eventually, the fantasies become compelling. Many child rapists feel very bad after.

Yeah. Its a cycle. I once heard someone that was not that far gone (they would have never had thoughts of those three things, but where into a range of things that are fringe). They described it like this - If you have problems having normal relationships, then you start imagining abnormal ones. Once you are finally able to have a normal one, for most people, the stranger and less accepted fantasies get replaced with normal ones. Now, obviously for some people, who have impulse control issues, or other problems, this can escalate out of control, but no more so than any other such behavior, nor in stable people. Just as some people can hunt all their lives and never go wacko, but some people start with pulling legs off insects, escalate to killing the neighbors cat, and *eventually* end up killing people. Its only a fraction of the populace that does that, and usually there are either issues of abuse in their childhood background, or literal physical defects in their brain, which result in them mis-processing the behavior in the first place. You don't generally hear of someone with a normal childhood, unless they later suffer certain types of head injuries, one day deciding that they like the sound people make when being killed, and starting a murder spree, for example.

While you are correct in how things tend to escalate, its more complex than that, and not any where close to as black and white.

Oh, and just to be clear, the one reason that I don't think Beastiality "fits" in the category you put them in is that, quite frankly, there are quite a lot of people that engage in it, and the number of people that get caught humping the neighbors poodle isn't that huge. Most engage in the behavior in closed environments, with their own animals, etc. One might compare them with people that go to S&M clubs, more than with the other types of behaviors. And yeah, I know that some people consider S&M anti-social too, but that's beside the point.

[Fifi]

I don't know if s&m counts as anti-social. I mean whatever adults want to consentually do with one another, is pretty much their own business. What they do with their pets, their children, their family's children, theier neighbor's children, that's a legitimate concern for society.

[scandum]

Originally Posted by Fifi Statistics, Prevalence and Consequences of Child Sexual Abuse 1 in four girls are sexually molested , and 1 in six boys. So, if those who are abusing children are only tiny minority of those fantasizing about, almost everyone must be fantasizing about it.

From a biological perspective a human female becomes an adult at age 12-15 when the periods start. So sexual attraction can be expected and while you could call it child molestation you don't need to be a pedophile to rape a 15 years old.

As should also be obvious humans have many neonatal features. A baby chimp and a baby human look a lot alike, but when the chimp matures it loses neonatal features while humans retain them. This indicates that pedophilia plays a role in human sexual selection, and given that infants have a large head to body ratio that makes sense since selecting for neonatal features would result in larger brains upon adulthood. So humans are pedophilic by nature since men like women who look like babies.

Regarding the statistics, they seem biased. They claim that somewhere around 90% of the molestations aren't reported and that hence 1 in 4 girls are molested. Next there's a rather large age grouping of age 1 to 17, and little information whatsoever about known factors that correlate with sexual abuse.

[shadowfyr]

Originally Posted by Fifi statistics on sexual abuse - Google Search The link above was the first on the page when I did a google search for statistics on sexual abuse. Lest you think I hunted to find the figures, take a look at the other 2,150,000, links. The numbers above are not out of line with the sites I checked - actually lower than I expected. I remembered the figure 1 in three. Though, granted, I only checked ten of the links. not all two and one eighth million.

Some notes on this, specifically about "Reported cases of child sexual abuse reached epidemic proportions, with a reported 322 percent increase from 1980 to 1990." It was in the 80s that they started to get *a lot* of cases of claimed abuse by uncles, grandparents, etc., and in which the methods used, since no physical evidence existed in most cases, was precisely the sort of, "Here is a dolly, what did uncle Buck do to the dolly? Did he do this?", type stuff. Much of the 322 percent increase was false positives and innocent people being sent to jail, based on questionable testimony from psychologists that where 10-20 years *behind* the curve with respect to cognitive development models and what that said about the viability of *asking* a small child, especially one you just told to "pretend" as part of the interrogation, what if anything someone did to them. There are not *huge* waves running through the system now, as the validity of those tests, the court cases and even the statistics derived from them are called into universal question.

Then you get things like the 1 in 3. Sure, everyone knows they heard it or read it some place, but the fact that you can't has to make you seriously question what the source was. It sounds **very** similar to the statistic used in the TV commercials, referring to child solicitation online. The problem with such statistics is that they are usually traceable to one of those "family values" groups that like to fudge numbers. In the case of the TV commercial, the real statistics where not bad enough when *limited* to solicitation from adults, so they hacked up the study, in order to present a number that, more truthfully, should have said, "One in five children are solicited by other children, or asked if they have had sex yet with their boy friend, or talked to about if they are still virgins, by other kids, while a much smaller number where *actually* approached by an adult playing an being their age." But you know, that just wouldn't create the necessary unrealistic panic they where looking for. lol

I Speak of Dreams: Debunking Internet Predator Statistics

"(A "sexual solicitation" is defined as a "request to engage in sexual activities or sexual talk or give personal sexual information that were unwanted or, whether wanted or not, made by an adult."

Using this definition, one teen asking another teen if her or she is a virgin—or got lucky with a recent date—could be considered "sexual solicitation.") Not a single one of the reported solicitations led to any actual sexual contact or assault. Furthermore, almost half of the "sexual solicitations" came not from "predators" or adults but from other teens."

However, given who is currently in charge of "policy" about the sort of information (you know, the guy that ordered the national health organizations to *remove* info on condoms and safe sex, and instead push abstinence on their online websites...), false or not, that we get, its not surprising that finding the real data is far harder than finding an endless run of pages that insist that the made up, exaggerated, out of context or just plain intentionally misinterpreted claims are all accurate. And the news media... When in the last 50 years have they ***ever*** checked their facts beyond determining "if" someone said it, rather than, you know, if the people saying it are telling the truth or not.

Yeah. We have a serious problem, but instead of dealing with the "real" predators, and using all our resources to deal with them, we are wasting time and money going after everyone from uncle Fred, whose niece just got ****ed off at him that week because he forgot to buy her a birthday gift, to some harmless guy doing physical studies for art, who had the bad taste of picking someone under 18 to take pictures of, to people *gasp* drawing pictures that, if these people where right, would make 99% of the anime artist and buyers of manga in Japan and the US pedophiles (which would probably be 80% of the entire population of Japan and 50-60% of the nerds in the US). Mean while, the nice guy down the street, who doesn't let his kids go to normal school, and never seems to date much, despite being single, and what ever other warning signs no one is paying attention to, because they are more worried that some 30 year old might put "panties" in the same sentence with "13 year old" on a web page some place, while writing a story or designing a mud, etc.

Yeah, we are going to get *real* far in reversing the trend, when all the real predators need to do is keep their heads down and go unnoticed, while the "family values" people are dunking the rest of us in the local river, to see if we will float like a duck, or sink and drown like an innocent.

[shadowfyr]

Originally Posted by Fifi I don't know if s&m counts as anti-social. I mean whatever adults want to consentually do with one another, is pretty much their own business. What they do with their pets, their children, their family's children, theier neighbor's children, that's a legitimate concern for society.

Was in a discussion a while back about the issue and I still don't see a rational explanation for why pets *do* fall into a category of "society needs to care about it". Seriously, the only arguments that hold water at all are a) harm to the pet, b) harm to the person doing it and c) lack of consent. A is absurd, as is C, in the case of any animal of sufficient size to survive an attempt. Why? Because animals are, in general, less likely to allow something they don't like and far more well equipped to point this out to you, in a very painful and possible lethal way, than people are. IF your doing it to an animal too small to survive, you are way sicker than just being into animals. As for B... Any damn fool that wants to try to force themselves on something that can bite, scratch, kick or even strangle them to death, when it gets ****ed off at what is going on, deserves what happens to them imho. I suppose one could call it, "protection of idiots from endangering themselves", but there are about a billion other far stupider things that people legally do all the time, and we don't stop them from doing those things. The animal rights people know that B isn't a valid argument at all, which is why they never use it. Their argument is always that the "poor helpless animal that usually outweighs the person, is naturally armed, and lacks the self control to not lash out when they don't like what is being done to them, is going to be hurt in some fashion, because they can't 'consent' to it." Well, I don't know about you, but being able to refuse violently *sounds like* lack of consent to me. lol

Any other argument just amounts to "Ewe yuck! Well of course people *should* have some say in if you do *that*in your home." Same argument once used, and still used in some parts of the country, to declare certain sexual positions and/or toys illegal to use, or in the later case, buy or own (if you do something dumb, like having a house fire, so the *authorities* stumble across the collection you snuck in from the store in the next state).

"Ewe yuck!", is not a valid qualification for something to be, "important for society to stop people doing.", if it was, (and there are those that would have such be the case), damn near everything from what paintings you where allowed to have on your walls to how many feet from the shower you walked before you had to be dressed would be on the list of, "Ewe yuck!", stuff you where not allowed to do. All you have to do is look at existing and defunct state laws to see the kind of insane BS you get when that becomes the criteria.

[shasarak]

Originally Posted by Fifi 1 in four girls are sexually molested , and 1 in six boys.

You'll note the absence of small-print at your link. If you find figures like that on sites where there is small-print, you'll find that the figure is calculated by including things like boys at school trying to look up your skirt in class or (particularly) your parents obliging you to kiss an elderly relative when you don't want to as part of the family gathering at Christmas. Of course the latter is not exactly a joyous experience, but it isn't exactly life-destroying either.

There is some debate on this point, naturally. From wikipedia (link: Child sexual abuse - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia):

Based on a literature review of 23 studies, Goldman & Padayachi found that the prevalence of child sexual abuse varied between 7-62% for girls and 4-30% for boys.[108] A meta-analytic study by Rind, Tromovitch, and Bauserman found that reported prevalence of abuse for males ranged from 3% to 37%, and for females from 8% to 71% with mean rates of 17% and 28% respectively.[62] Berl Kutchinsky argues that most prevalence rates are overexaggerated and claim that the real prevalence of child sexual abuse may be as low as 1-2%.[109] A study on incest in Finland between fathers and daughters found prevalence rates of 0.2% for biological fathers and 0.5% for step-fathers.[110] Others argue that prevalence rates are much higher, and that many cases of child abuse are never reported.

(emphasis added)

You also need to remember that, even in cases of genuine sexual abuse, this is including a large number of cases where the abuser is roughly the same age as the child at the time - or at any rate well below adult age. I'm not sure to what extent it makes sense to lump cases like that into the same classification as cases where the abuser is an adult. An abusive 11-year-old boy may grow up to be an abusive adult, but that doesn't mean that the victims of his abuse will still be 10-year-old girls; they're more likely to be adults.

On top of that, as shadowfyr has explained at some length, certain investigative techniques result in a vast number of false positives being reported when it comes to child abuse. There was a famous case in England in 1987 (in Cleveland, specifically) where a doctor named Marietta Higgs decided that Reflex Anal Dilatation (i.e. the spontaneous opening of the anal sphincter in response to gentle spreading of the buttocks) was a completely reliable indicator of anal abuse. She, a fellow doctor, and social services managed to get over 100 children taken into care as a consequence, without ever stopping to ask how many of them might simply be constipated.

Children Webmag - Cleveland Child Sexual Abuse Scandal - Charles Pragnell

In 1991 there was an even more absurd scandal in Orkney where a large group of children were supposed to have been subjected to "ritual satanic abuse". It was subsequently demonstrated that there was not a single shred of evidence to back the claims. A supposed hoodd rope, for example, turned out to be someone's graduation gown. One memorably "non-leading" question asked by a social worker of a child in that case was "when were you given the orange drink that made you sleepy?" - this despite the fact that the only thing the child had said about the drink was that it was "orange".

Orkney: 10 years after; A decade after shocking claims of ritual Sunday Herald, The - Find Articles

Originally Posted by Fifi Additionally, some of those fantasizing about it are supplementing those fantasies with pornography, so while they may not be personally molesting anyone, but they are monetarily supporting the abuse.

What if they don't pay for it? More importantly, what if the pornography doesn't actually involve any real children?

Another thing to question is the rather curious notion of child sexual abuse being performed on an industrial scale purely in response to financial demand - i.e. the idea that people who have no sexual interest in children suddenly decide to abuse to children solely because there is money to be made from doing it. I find this idea rather questionable. I think it's much more likely that when children are abused on film they are children who would have been abused anyway; the fact that there might be money to made might encourage someone to capture the act on camera rather than keeping it secret, but I doubt that it results in more children being abused. The only difference is that it makes it easier to catch the abusers.

Originally Posted by Fifi (30-40% of abused children are abused by family members.)

It's a lot more than 40%.

[shasarak]

Originally Posted by shadowfyr Was in a discussion a while back about the issue and I still don't see a rational explanation for why pets *do* fall into a category of "society needs to care about it". Seriously, the only arguments that hold water at all are a) harm to the pet, b) harm to the person doing it and c) lack of consent. A is absurd, as is C, in the case of any animal of sufficient size to survive an attempt. Why? Because animals are, in general, less likely to allow something they don't like and far more well equipped to point this out to you, in a very painful and possible lethal way, than people are.

Come off it, Shadowfyr, by that argument it's impossible to physically abuse any reasonable-sized animal in any way. You're surely not claiming that? It's very easy to abuse even a large animal if you hit it repeatedly with a very heavy club, or a whip, or a stun-gun. And if you do that often enough it will be sufficiently frightened of you that it will submit to more or less anything.

[Fifi]

I don't understand your investment in trying to claim that child abuse is largely a myth,

[scandum]

Originally Posted by Fifi I don't understand your investment in trying to claim that child abuse is largely a myth,

Hey now, it's common knowledge that one out of every two males in the US has been sexually abused through genital mutilation. Imagine the massive psychological damage inflicted by the evil snip snip. Hence it's no small surprise some males are getting back at the opposite sex by whatever means possible, which includes marginalizing rape statistics.

[shadowfyr]

Originally Posted by shasarak Come off it, Shadowfyr, by that argument it's impossible to physically abuse any reasonable-sized animal in any way. You're surely not claiming that? It's very easy to abuse even a large animal if you hit it repeatedly with a very heavy club, or a whip, or a stun-gun. And if you do that often enough it will be sufficiently frightened of you that it will submit to more or less anything.

I never said it wasn't possible to abuse such an animal, but I think you would agree that "most" types of abuse involve either a) keeping a safe distance from the animal, while clothed, possibly with the use of a weapon of your own, or b) it involved, more accurately, neglect. Now, lets consider what happens in the former case when the person is completely naked and in *intimate* close contact with something that has teeth with a high bite strength and probably claws... Seriously, I find the idea that someone could "force" themselves on an animal while in both an emotional and physically vulnerable state, where they are not expecting to get attacked, just completely absurd. As for the idea that exposure to it may make it easier, sure, if it actually qualifies as an abuse, which sex isn't. Its not like animals haven't been caught on film engaging in what should be impossible or useless cross species mating, without humans being involved in making the choice for them. Rare yeah, but not unheard of. So, you still have to explain how/why it constitutes any more abuse than some idiot that insists on shaving their poodle or making their bulldog wear a sweater, both of which are *way* less natural, but which, oddly, no one questions as possibly somehow mentally or physically hurting the animal.

Also, frightened animals will try to hide in a corner, but even the most frightened, if trapped, will attack. I don't care how much abuse you direct at them, their natural instincts, if they can't run away or hide from you, is to fight. Repeated abuse isn't going to change that instinct. It just doesn't make any sense to claim that, just because they don't generally engage in sex between seasons, that they couldn't, or that they wouldn't derive anything from it if they did. Though, I will say that the odds are that the males would be more likely to engage than females, precisely because of that seasonal limitation in female libido.

Point is, the claims being presented on the subject are exaggerated projections, not facts, and there are indications, where animals, usually males (though you can't do that without some sort of female of a different species), *have* engaged in such cross species sex, which contradict the assertion that they can't, wouldn't or might be negatively effected by such from a human. Its all about the "Ick!" factor, not any objective considerations. Well, that and *traditionally* most cultures, like the romans, found it objectionable for the purity of humanity, believing that monsters and half breeds where possible, despite often using the practice as a form of punishment for specific crimes (like a temple virgin daring to not stay a virgin). It was most definitely in those cases not a mutual choice, and usually was with something that, if it didn't kill the criminal "while" doing it, would after they where done. Likely the general aversion is a mix of the silly superstitions (including one from the early 1900s, which said that physical appearance or deformities could be caused by close contact with an animal "resembling" the physical trait), and some hold overs from what it was used for in punishments, not on actually facts or dangers. Its just mutated more towards animal rights issues, which presume that some humans, who never engaged in any such thing to know, in fact do know better than the animal if humping someone feels good, instead of the other more traditional aversions.

Its pertinent to the idea of nudity being bad, as well as sex in general, since its based not on factual evidence of harm, but the presumption that harm *must* be the logical outcome. Still, ironically, some on the right, even if they have an entirely religious aversion to it, would probably agree with the assessment that its not harmful. After all, one of them made himself rather famous a year or so ago by stating, "Well, when you live on a farm and your hormones are racing, anything thats warm, wet or vibrates starts to look good to you." lol

[shadowfyr]