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beandelphikiHeterosexuals are not pedophiles.
When I see homophobes claiming that gays are all pedophiles out to "recruit" children, I sigh and shake my head. They're speaking from a place of ignorance though, so I hardly expect better. I DO expect better from the GLBT community than to link a sexuality and pedophilia without substantial proof. I'm tired of seeing gays respond to the "homos are pedophiles!" claim with, "no, breeders are!"
And it seems to me there's something very flawed about that argument.
If you claim that a pedophile who molests little girls is "straight," by that logic a pedo that molests boys is "gay." So even IF you want to claim that the vast majority of molestations happen to girls, that still means that there ARE homosexual pedophiles. You have implicitly admitted to that. The disparities between "orientations" of child molesters could easily be blamed on the the ratio of heterosexuals to homosexuals.
In fact, since statistics suggest that at least a third as many boys as girls are molested each year, we can then determine that gays are more likely than straights to be pedophiles.
Too bad for gays and their moral high ground on that one, then, eh?
Really, this is silly. Let's all wrap our minds around another one: pedophiles are not gay, or straight, or bisexual - at least, not when we're talking about how they respond to children. They're pedophiles, in a category all their own, and their desire to molest children is both a learned behaviour and totally separate from sexual desire for adults. (Unless someone can prove that some people are born with the desire to have sex with children - which would have some interesting moral implications for our society.)
The pedophiles who have adult sexual relationships (many seem simply entirely incapable of it) - yes, they tend to be heterosexual. This, I assume, is their natural "orientation," what they were born with. It might possibly decide what gender they abuse, but not always. There have certainly been plenty of pedophiles in adult relationships with women (since most are men) who have abused boys. Their choice of gender in their victim usually stems from the way they reacted to their own abuse - some abuse the same gender that abused them, some do not. The psychology varies.
What it comes down to is that the majority of pedophiles who HAVE adult relationships are heterosexual, and that would be obvious enough a guess, since more people are heterosexual. In the first link below, it states that straight men are more likely than bisexual men to become abusers (and no gay men at all seem to have become abusers) - in which case, I think that would be an interesting avenue of investigation as far as abuse prevention is concerned. But what it comes down to is that any heterosexual-pedophilia connection is correlation, not causation.
And I'm done.
A related link.
Child abuse stats - gender is mentioned farther down the page.
When I see homophobes claiming that gays are all pedophiles out to "recruit" children, I sigh and shake my head. They're speaking from a place of ignorance though, so I hardly expect better. I DO expect better from the GLBT community than to link a sexuality and pedophilia without substantial proof. I'm tired of seeing gays respond to the "homos are pedophiles!" claim with, "no, breeders are!"
And it seems to me there's something very flawed about that argument.
If you claim that a pedophile who molests little girls is "straight," by that logic a pedo that molests boys is "gay." So even IF you want to claim that the vast majority of molestations happen to girls, that still means that there ARE homosexual pedophiles. You have implicitly admitted to that. The disparities between "orientations" of child molesters could easily be blamed on the the ratio of heterosexuals to homosexuals.
In fact, since statistics suggest that at least a third as many boys as girls are molested each year, we can then determine that gays are more likely than straights to be pedophiles.
Too bad for gays and their moral high ground on that one, then, eh?
Really, this is silly. Let's all wrap our minds around another one: pedophiles are not gay, or straight, or bisexual - at least, not when we're talking about how they respond to children. They're pedophiles, in a category all their own, and their desire to molest children is both a learned behaviour and totally separate from sexual desire for adults. (Unless someone can prove that some people are born with the desire to have sex with children - which would have some interesting moral implications for our society.)
The pedophiles who have adult sexual relationships (many seem simply entirely incapable of it) - yes, they tend to be heterosexual. This, I assume, is their natural "orientation," what they were born with. It might possibly decide what gender they abuse, but not always. There have certainly been plenty of pedophiles in adult relationships with women (since most are men) who have abused boys. Their choice of gender in their victim usually stems from the way they reacted to their own abuse - some abuse the same gender that abused them, some do not. The psychology varies.
What it comes down to is that the majority of pedophiles who HAVE adult relationships are heterosexual, and that would be obvious enough a guess, since more people are heterosexual. In the first link below, it states that straight men are more likely than bisexual men to become abusers (and no gay men at all seem to have become abusers) - in which case, I think that would be an interesting avenue of investigation as far as abuse prevention is concerned. But what it comes down to is that any heterosexual-pedophilia connection is correlation, not causation.
And I'm done.
A related link.
Child abuse stats - gender is mentioned farther down the page.
