[Blarg]

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I don't agree with you when it comes to child molestation. I don't think people can be cured or reformed of a basic sexual orientation.

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I do think being a child molestor is almost certainly an agony for many of them.

Blarg, I'm curious - when put that way, you make it sound like child molestors are born with an uncurable affliction that forces them to either live their lives in mild agony from not being able to act on their urges, or go to prison. Is that what you believe?

I'm not accusing or making judgements on what you said or anything, it just sounds like a crappy deal for child molestors if that's indeed the case.

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Actually I've read a ton about serial killers and a bit about child molesters and profiling, and I don't think sexual orientation is necessarily set at birth. There is a great deal of political and societal pressure these days to say that, for instance, gay sexual orientation and heterosexual orientation are set at birth or even in the womb, but that's a different story, and at any rate not yet firmly established. More importantly, the idea of sexual orientation being set at birth deals with orientations that I wouldn't classify as dangerous or criminal at all.

Note I'm not claiming to be jack sh*t of an authority on this. But I have read people who have a great deal of knowledge on the development of sexual fixations of people with abnormal psychologies, which is the type of sexuality I would classify people who have sex with children with.

Like a serial killer, this sort of thing is not a sudden switch, but has a long build-up. Young serial killers are very rare, because serial killing is the type of illness that takes a long time to build up, and there are certain things that need to be played out in the development of that pathology. A serial killer is almost "groomed." In the same way, someone who molests children is very rarely a mere opportunist, nor someone who makes a mistake of judgment.

Finding children a suitable object of sexual pursuit is so far from the norm, and requires such a reordering of sexual thoughts, that it simply isn't an option for normal people. Even people with the most bizarre thoughts don't necessarily act them out. Child molesters have a sexual preference for children that is not a matter of accident or weakness, but the result of a sexual orientation that almost without exception takes time to grow. They are typically sexually inadequate and highly disturbed as a result of nurture, not nature. I don't believe child molestors are born at all, though perhaps one might argue that the relative lack of ability to control one's sexual urges has a hormonal and thus likely genetic component. But from my reading, child molestors are almost always created slowly over time, as the result of unfortunate and not terribly likely(thank goodness) processes, and child molesting is not to them exceptional, but the result of a sexuality that is fully developed, but in a misguided direction.

In other words, I don't think just anyone can be a child molestor, or that anyone is born into it. It's a complex process involving mental disease and sexual dysfunction that we couldn't access if we wanted to. Our sexuality is central to the definition of who we are and how we relate to people, and a child molestor can no more change his desire to have sex with children than he can cut off his own head.

Whether he pursues it or not, is another story. However, very few people do not pursue their sexual urges. Even priests, monks, and nuns can find the sexual urge unstoppable. How much more so, then, would a person without nearly such strict moral constraints.

Life is unfair, and I pity child molestors tremendously, myself, because I wouldn't want to be burdened with their sexuality, and I think it's part of a process of mental disease. Life is unbearably cruel sometimes, and there are probably some otherwise quite decent people it burdens with sexual attraction toward children.

Perhaps many will not act it out, as unlikely as people not acting out their sexual orientation may be. But those who do, are people who not only have a sexual orientation but find themselves unable to prevent the natural expression of it. We can imprison them, chastise them, humiliate them, and do whatever we want to them, if we catch them. But we will never change them from being, in their hearts, child molestors. It's beyond their power to change, and beyond our power to change them. You can't repress, or steal from someone, who they are.

Life sucks sometimes.


consider a fixation on children as an appropriate sexual object to be