Why do it seems that pedophilia is, nowadays, percieved as the most vicious crime, along with terrorism? Why not, for example, sexual assault?
I mean it as an actual question, but first I should clarify my intent :
-I’m not advocating for normalizing pedophilia
-I have been a victim of it myself. Luckily, I’ve mostly recovered from it and live a happy life.
-Because of my political commitments, which are totally unrelated to this question, I’ve met some old people from the 70s who advocated for the depenalization of consensual sex between minors and adults (if such a thing exist, which can legitimately be doubted).
-I’m friend with one of them but I could never understand how that idea came to their minds. She knows I oppose the very idea. But it got me curious.
What I want to ask is, what, in contemporary history, contributed to make pedophilia the #1 vicious crime, surpassing rape in most consciences (if I’m not mistaken), in your opinion?
Feel free to delete this if that’s not acceptable. Also, I didn’t include the word “pedophilia” in the title to avoid triggering people who may have such experiences.
From an objective standpoint, I think the turning point for these opinions was far more recent, and if I had to point to a specific year, I would say 2004 with the debut of Chris Hanson’s ‘To Catch a Predator’ on Dateline NBC.
Prior to this, I don’t even remember being exposed to the idea or concept of this. I never heard people talk about it, but in a way this show changed or I guess really even created opinions on this subject.
From a non objectivist perspective, just because I never heard of it prior, it seems to have been an epidemic and maybe I was lucky enough to not have thought about it.
I lost my virginity at 15 to someone many years older than me, but I didn’t have a second thought about it, it was like anything else - drinking, smoking, staying out late, this idea that maybe I was too young, but also that everyone else did it, and that’s as far as I ever considered it.
I grew up in a different time though, before the Internet, small town, and low income and people I came into contact with didn’t even put these things into ideas with words if that makes sense.
I think at best I understood that older men could be untoward with younger folks, but it was treated more as a joke, or something to keep in mind around older relatives and strangers, but not an imminent threat, more like an annoyance to be put up with.
I think it’s okay to talk about this, and I’m sorry for your trauma. Protecting children is super important, and so the increased talk of this subject I think helps and protects more, but there is an undeniable generational difference in how people even think about this.
I grew up thinking of this as not even an idea, so I wouldn’t have thought about it being worse than anything else. I would have been more scared of drug addicts, and the homeless.