[NSFW] In your opinion, could a pedophile manage to work against his dangerous tendencies?

~Shock therapy might help. All those congressmen so many interns.~
Seriously you can reprogram a man to go for people his own age with positive and negative renforcements.

Maybe, but on the same grounds as an alcoholic, cold turkey forever and they might be able to steer clear of it.
But the impulse in my mind would always be there for these people one little thing could trigger them back at it.
Also I think sex though a big part of it isn’t the main reason they do it ,like a Raper it is the power the control they have and experience is the biggest turn on for these nut jobs not just the sexual release, because if it was just the sex thing as in the case of a raper why not just pay for a hooker or a high priced call girl and you wouldn’t be facing jail time, but Mrs Squeaky told me the power issue and that made sense to me.

Anyone can have bouts of compulsive behavior, the difference is that eating a bag of chips in a weak moment does not cause lifelong damage to another unlike a Pedophile giving into their cravings.

The way your presenting this is with the supposition that a pedophile can only obtain an orgasm by sex with a child. And if he could be retrained to experience orgasms with an appropriate adult woman, that would somehow change him.

What’s conveniently being overlooked here is that many pedophile are married and regularly experiencing sex with an adult while SIMULTANEOUSLY abusing a child (or multiple children) in his own household.

As a matter of fact, the greatest number of pedophiles are married heterosexual men, not gay men or priests, as is frequently publicized.

So, I think that “cure” theory is flawed. I have no idea upon what it is based but it’s clear from experience that it doesn’t work.

GQ. I now know a lot more about pedophilia.

Pedophilia is a complex disorder with many underlying factors. These range from dysfunctions in the development of the brain to particular traumatic experiences, such as sexual abuse or rape as a child. Despite no cure for pedophilia, measures can be taken to help people with this disorder control their urges and behavior.

Some pedophiles are only attracted sexually to children, so I don’t see your friend is going to ‘re-train’ such a person.
The article I cited is worthwhile, easy to understand, and only takes a few minutes to read.

Do some reading on Aversion Therapy. Lots of articles about it.

It was popularized in the movie A Clockwork Orange (Ludovico technique), but it can, in some circumstances, be effective. (Alcoholism, for one example, and the Antabuse tablet).

Would it work for pedophilia? Don’t know – I think that would take a hell of a lot of research to prove.

But the concept of Aversion Therapy, under proper control, can be effective.

I doubt it.
I have heard of pedophiles who were castrated who then continued their behavior.

My wife was a probation officer for ten years. She specialized in pedophiles and domestic violence. They attempted many different ways to rehabilitate and retrain the offenders.

Worked occasionally on the wife beaters. Never once on a pedophile.

Pedophilia is such a repulsive topic that I wonder how much attention, meaning study, is given to it. Of the studies conducted thus far, at least in the US, the assessments seem non-conclusive.

Sexual abuse at a young age is sometimes used as an excuse for an adult’s behavior. It could very well be true. I doubt that is true for all cases. The reasoning for questioning it is that a person’s sexual desires form at different ages for a variety of reasons.

The bottom line is that pedophilia is a concern. It can be violent, manipulative, or at minimal, aroused by child pornography. The children do not deserve any of this. The people attracted to it need therapy/counseling. Tossing them in jail and tagging them as offenders in which the information is posted publicly isn’t going to solve the problem.

I would expect that the repulsiveness of pedophilia would attract the attention of researchers, @Pied_Pfeffer. There’s bound to be a headline cure there somewhere. Well, that and the involvement of the Catholic church.

Is there a method other than segregation that prevents/reduces a pedophiles recidivism?

@ibstubro If there is a cure out there, what is it and why hasn’t it been recognized yet?

Yes, I think so. There are certainly plenty of people who self-report being non-offending pedophiles. Dan Savage calls them ”gold-star pedophiles,” and there is an entire website dedicated to helping such people (note: that link goes to an article about the site, not the site itself). Ultimately, the idea that pedophiles cannot control themselves seems to be a result of two things: (1) a tendency to confuse the act of raping a child with the impulse to do have sex with a child, and (2) the pernicious (and sexist!) notion that men are animals when it comes to sex.

With regard to (1), the reasoning often goes something like this: anyone who would rape a child is evil (true), therefore anyone with any desire at all to have sex with a child is evil (probably false), but evil people have no restraint (debatable), therefore anyone who wants to have sex with a child will not restrain themselves from doing so.

With regard to (2), people are just falling back on old gender stereotypes. Most pedophiles are men, and most discussions of pedophilia implicitly assume that male pedophiles are being discussed. And the Victorian age gave us the idea that men cannot be expected not to rape if given half a chance (an idea that has historically—and disturbingly—given rapists of all stripes a pass on their actions). This is the same justification used to allow everything from sexual harassment on the playground to marital rape. Because “boys will be boys.”

@filmfann You’re probably thinking of chemical castration, which is reversible, doesn’t always work in the first place, and may not work very well at all (the whole thing is up for scientific debate, especially since it’s hard to conduct clinical trials that are both ethical and statistically significant).

Well, I lurked this thread because I wanted to see if it was going to go the way of previous threads that breeched this subject in the past or if it was going to have some real dialog with an attempt to learn something.

Overall, it means nothing; it is a waste of time because no one really knows how the mind is wired 100% so one doesn’t really know if those who have pedophilia have it because it was concocted in them, some genetic misfiring, or something else. Shrinks will never find out because it is not anything they can find out. Even if they thought they could, there is no heart to do it. Just look at some of what has been said here in this thread and it seems weedy compared to other threads. If it was created by sexual trauma or in the genes society at large doesn’t care, as someone said, it is repugnant to most people. In another thread someone linked a short movie about what if homosexuality was the norm and straight people were the ”odd man out”. It was interesting, thank God nature done it the way it did, what if the system of pederasty used by the ancient Greeks was commonplace, we would not even have a shocking, ”ewwwww, that is so icky” conversation. But as it is now, you can joke about curing them with cyanide, basically a pedophile genocide, and not raise an eyebrow. If you were to say the same about limiting the number of Jewish shopkeepers in town there would be a shitstorm. And if you can say ”Well, Jewish people did nothing wrong, but ’those people’ are this” then you have demonstrated why very little will ever get done in that area. It is good business to have them as social pariahs no matter what; gives politicians a solid platform to campaign on, gives John Q a boogey man to blame social ills on justify more cops, owning a gun, and make home security companies more wealthy, not to mention prisons and those business that keep them running, the truth of the matter is that most people who commit sex crimes have a lower rate of recidivism than those who do so-called ”regular crimes”. Even though carjackers, drug dealers, your garden variety thief, etc. has a higher likelihood to terrorize US neighborhoods again and again, people I guess, can see them being closer than those with sex crimes so they don’t want to throw the book at them because it maybe a snare they will get caught in one day.

Not everyone with pedophilia has the same appetite, but most do not know or do not care, they want to use a broad brush and paint them all the same way. The friend I had who was by all measure a gay pedophile, he did not start out that way, or not that way in detectable ways. He told me of his very first sexual experience, he has a female cousin who lived with them who was much older than he, she being 14 years old and he being five. He remembers she somehow talked him into performing cunnilingus on her. He felt strange doing it but he said he did remember liking to do it. One day his father discovered them in the act, he beat her, then him, and she went away and he never saw her again. How he got from enjoying eating pussy even at a tender age to enjoying sucking penis I don’t know. I am sure someone could run with it and make all sorts of conclusions out of it; his eating out his cousin at age five did it, His father’s reaction turned him gay, if was because it was incest that turned him gay, and on and on. His appetite was preteen boys, he told me once why then and not girls, or younger boys, or even men, but it was so long ago I will not try to fathom what he said, but he, in his mind, had a reason. If one ever studied it, from what is out there, some prefer only females, others only male, and some don’t care so long as they fit a particular age bracket. Psychologist can look until they are blue in the face, they won’t find any answers, and I can be sure there will not be a one-size-fits-all cure.

Thanks, everyone, for the discussion and the links.

This thread has made things clearer for me. It seems that while curing a pedophile may not be possible, there is a lot which could be done to keep children safe and potential criminals on the right track. From the links, the line “no-one chooses to be attracted to children” stuck with me. That’s such an obvious point – and yet, pedophiles are hated with a passion and cheerfully discussing their execution is quite a normal think to do.

I especially liked the info on Gold-Star-Pedophiles. I wonder how large a number of acting pedophiles belonged to that group at first, but eventually lost the will or strength to keep fighting themselves.

No-one chooses to be a serial killer, but that doesn’t give me a lot of compassion, @longgone.

Potentially all criminals can work against their past. We have to weigh current treatment levels against potential recidivism.

@ibstubro It does make me compassionate. Most of us are capable of compassion when it’s our loved ones who are convicted of a crime. Everyone is someones’s loved one, and I feel for them even while I, obviously, fear them.

@ibstubro Of course people choose to be serial killers. They don’t choose to be sociopathic, but they do make the decision to start killing. Similarly, no one chooses to be a pedophile, but they do choose to start acting on their attractions and abusing children. And that’s an important distinction to make. Pedophilia is defined in terms of the attraction, not the criminal behaviors that are associated with it.

You need to respond to @longgone, @JeSuisRickSpringfield.
I already did.

@ibstubro As far as I can tell, @longgone and I are in agreement. Sociopathy and pedophilia are not choices, and the people suffering from them may deserve at least some compassion (especially if they are actively struggling against acting on their urges). Serial murder and child molestation are choices, however, and the people who engage in such actions need to be dealt with. That’s why I responded to this answer where you compared an urge to an action instead of keeping things the same (comparing urges to urges and actions to actions).

^ While different backgrounds and genetic make-up make me reluctant to label anything a “choice”, I agree with everything you said about pedophilia and sociopathy. I also agree that pedophilia is not to be confused with child abuse, because either one can exist without the other.

@longgone Fair enough. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that serial murder and child molestation are more voluntary than sociopathy and pedophilia, even if there may be good reasons to say that they are not wholly voluntary in some “free of any external influences” way. But I’ve never really thought that “free of any external influences” was a good way to think about choices or free will at all. Unless we are embracing a very strict form of determinism where nothing is under our control in any meaningful way, then we have to accept that we make choices. And I don’t see how any choice could be completely free from external influences. I guess there might be “free will purists” who believe this sort of thing is possible, but I don’t know how they could ever explain any single decision with no appeal whatsoever to external conditions.