Posted on 01/07/2013 10:06:13 AM PST by Clint N. Suhks
The Jimmy Savile scandal caused public revulsion, but experts disagree about what causes paedophilia - and even how much harm it causes
In 1976 the National Council for Civil Liberties, the respectable (and responsible) pressure group now known as Liberty, made a submission to parliament's criminal law revision committee. It caused barely a ripple. "Childhood sexual experiences, willingly engaged in with an adult," it read, "result in no identifiable damage The real need is a change in the attitude which assumes that all cases of paedophilia result in lasting damage."
It is difficult today, after the public firestorm unleashed by revelations about Jimmy Savile and the host of child abuse allegations they have triggered, to imagine any mainstream group making anything like such a claim. But if it is shocking to realise how dramatically attitudes to paedophilia have changed in just three decades, it is even more surprising to discover how little agreement there is even now among those who are considered experts on the subject.
A liberal professor of psychology who studied in the late 1970s will see things very differently from someone working in child protection, or with convicted sex offenders. There is, astonishingly, not even a full academic consensus on whether consensual paedophilic relations necessarily cause harm.
So what, then, do we know? A paedophile is someone who has a primary or exclusive sexual interest in prepubescent children. Savile appears to have been primarily an ephebophile, defined as someone who has a similar preferential attraction to adolescents, though there have been claims one of his victims was aged eight.
But not all paedophiles are child molesters, and vice versa: by no means every paedophile acts on his impulses, and many people who sexually abuse children are not exclusively or primarily sexually attracted to them.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
So sick and unholy, I can’t read the entire article.
It’s full of crap.
This issue will divide libertarians.
Actually, just the opposite is true, and even *more* insidious. That is, in one way or another, children are assigned as property to one or more adults. Children without a “legal guardian” are in effect, runaway slaves.
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