Just how extensive is the problem of pedophiles and child abuse and what does it say?

[Lark]

I've been thinking about this recently, with the revelations that child abuse, which was thought to be abherrent behaviour limited to small populations of pedophilies or situational pedophiles, has been much more widespread and even quasi-institutionalised (in recent UK history at least).

There were first the scandals eminating from the RCC which people attributed to a combination of clericalism/abuse of clerical power, both political/institutional and cultural/communitarian, and attempts to honour vows of sexual abstinence and celibacy. I personally think the former mattered more than the later, I know lots of people who live abstinent and virtually celibate lives without having taken formal vows about the matter and they dont suddenly develop proclivities for sex crimes. Still this was clearly identifiable as a minority within the larger population, I think there was a hell of a lot of secular and secularist self-flattery in the special sort of revulsion which was shown and stil is shown in relation to crimes perpetuated by the clergy of this kind.

Then there's be further revelations about celebrities exploiting their status in order to exploit and abuse children, patients, adults and children and now revelations about childrens homes being the site of abuse by staff, professionals and visiting diplomats, politicians, "dignitaries", establishment figures etc. in a systematic, organised and covered up fashion for years in childrens homes in Rochdale and northern ireland, in northern ireland there's been discussion of a cover up which involved the security services, intelligence community and organisations like the orange order and masonic lodges. Although that itself concerns me because the minute it can be theorised as all part of some crazy satanic/illuminati/dark forces conspiracy, instead of a human, all to human organised crime, it is and that serves to simultaneously sensationalise and rob of credibility.

My question is in light of revelations like this how endemic a problem does this seem? Is it something which is intractible, like some kinds of poverty, and attempts at creating structural responses or using bureaucracy (in the positive sense or even the realistic sense) will only chip away at the margins of it? What ways do news stories like this impress upon you? Do they make you more or less pessimistic about people, institutions etc.?

 

[Flavus Aquila]

I suspect that the majority of paedophilia is actually ephebophilia (attraction to teenagers) - but aside from semantics, many cultures still endorse the marriage of quite young teens (eg. 13 year old girls) to much older adults (usually men). Such arrangements are kind of cringe-worthy in my mind, but they are apparently not uncommon in some of the less developed parts of the world. Shifting this kind of situation into Western cultures, one can only imagine a rape/molestation scenario, where the older preys on the younger.
All that's kind of background to what I'm thinking in response to the OP.

I think that paedophilia is probably as common as certain eating disorders. Why do I say this? My theory about paedophilia is that it involves a mis-association between certain sensory stimuli and a basic appetitive impulse. Such mis-associations, when it comes to the impulse to eat can have some people craving the eating of strange non-nutritional items like glass, foam, beads, dirt, piss, even shite; or non-appropriate items which leads to things like desires for canibalism, vampirism, etc.

Shifting to the sexual impulse the mis-association with certain sensory stimuli can lead people to feel attraction to things like cars (litterally having sex with a vehicle), animals, computers, minors, and (very politically incorrectly) people of the same sex. I think that sexual weirdness of attraction is probably far more common than actual instances of it. For instances of true sexual perversion to occur I think it takes three things: a mis-associated sexual impulse, a person with low impulse control (or true malice), and opportunity.

That perversions occur I think points to the frailty of the human psyche.

In the example of eating disorders, which leads to a desire to eat non-food items (a disorder called 'pica') there is surprising prevalence (pasted from wikipedia):
Epidemiology

The prevalence of pica is difficult to establish because of differences in definition and the reluctance of patients to admit to abnormal cravings and ingestion.[SUP][3][/SUP] Thusly leading to the prevalence recordings of pica being in the range of 8% and 65% depending on the study.[SUP][1][/SUP] A study published in 1994 found that 8.1% of pregnant African-American women in the United States self-reported pagophagia, the ingestion of large quantities of ice and freezer frost.[SUP][21][/SUP] A study conducted in 1991 found a prevalence of pica in 8.8% of pregnant women in Saudi Arabia.[SUP][22][/SUP] Rates of pica among pregnant women in developing countries, however, can be much higher, with estimates of 63.7%[SUP][23][/SUP] and 74.0%[SUP][24][/SUP] reported for two different African populations. This is due to different cultural norms as well as greater levels of malnutrition. Two studies of intellectual disability adults living in institutions found that 21.8%[SUP][25][/SUP] and 25.8%[SUP][26][/SUP] of these groups suffered from pica. Prevalence rates for children with and without developmental disabilities are unknown.

As for the prevalence of paedophilia - some estimates put it at just under 5% of the adult male population (or less than 1 in 20 men). Seto MC. (2009) "Pedophilia". Annual Review of Clinical Psychology 5:391–407.

That means that if there are 7,000,000,000 people on the planet - and say that 49% of them are male - and say that of those males - and say that 60% of those males are adults - and say that 4.5% of adult males are paedophiles... that means that there are about 92,610,000 male paedophiles in the world right now (if the reported figures are in any way accurate). Guessing that women also can be paedophiles - and that just guessing that there are 20 times more male paedophiles than female - there could be roughly 4.5 million adult female paedophiles as well.

 

[muir]

The problem is that our society is structured in a pyramidal hierarchy

The government is structured that way and the roman catholic church is structured that way

So these pyramids are pyramids of POWER

Power is weilded from the top of the pyramid down with fewer but increasingly more powerful people at the top of the pyramid

So which people like these kind of structures?

Which people get a real hard on for power?

Well PSYCHOPATHS and ENTJ's

Psychopaths and ENTJ's (described as the 'executive' type, with ESTJ's described as the 'manager' type) crave POWER because they love to weild influence over people so they make a beeline for pyramidal structures which they then try to climb to gain more and more power

All the main organisations in our society whether corporations, military intelligence, religious etc are all pyramidal hierarchies and will ALL ATTRACT PSYCHOPATHS like moths to a flame

Psychopaths are often deviant people because they have a low resting heart rate and need to do increasingly insane things to feel a buzz. This can involve perverse behaviours and will often eventually lead to murder if they are not stopped in time

So part of the problem is that people are too naive about the way things in our society are currently structured. People have a habit of blindly following what they are told by authority figures in uniforms but what they need to realise is that it is very likely that the person in that position of influence is in that position because they are POWER HUNGRY and if they are POWER HUNGRY then they are not likely to be a very nice person and might even be a psychopath

People NEED TO STOP LISTENING TO AUTHORITY FIGURES because they are probably lying, cheating, rapists or murderers!

The higher up a hierarchical pyramid you go the MORE PSYCHOPATHS there will be and the higher up the psychopathy spectrum the people will be

If you think that the abuse is bad in the lower ranks of the Roman Catholic Church just imagine what its like at the top!!!!!!!!

If you think there are plenty of deviants in politics imagine how many deviants there are higher up the pyramid in the banking industry which owns the politicians...or the royal families or the secret society network which all these groups are linked together by...because the quality that the people in that network are looking for in their recruits is: A LACK OF EMPATHY

However...there is more to the equation....

Peadophiles are easy to BLACKMAIL so the secret society network likes to promote them into positions of power because then they can always blackmail them into doing what they want them to do

if people are wondering why all these stories are suddenly coming out now in the mainstream news (while people like myself have been saying this has been going on for years and have been branded 'conspiracy theorists' for saying so) they should understand that the medium term plan of the secret society network known as the 'New World Order' is to DESTROY NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY so that they can achieve their long term plan of creating a one world government which they will control) one giant centrally controlled hierarchical pyramid controlled by the worst psychopaths on the planet)

At the moment in the US the US/Mexico border is being eroded as a move to create a North American Union between the US, Canada and Mexico

In the UK the Royal family and the politicians and the establishment in general must be destroyed by public scandal so that the British people will more willingly accept overlordship by the fascist European Union

They want to destroy British sovereignty by destroying the faith of the british public in the british establishment

But remember the dynamic within the pyramidal hierarchies! The EU is an even more centralised power pyramid than the british government is so IMAGINE HOW MANY PSYCHOPATHS and generally power hungry people ARE IN THE EU!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[Skarekrow]

I suspect that the majority of paedophilia is actually ephebophilia (attraction to teenagers) - but aside from semantics, many cultures still endorse the marriage of quite young teens (eg. 13 year old girls) to much older adults (usually men). Such arrangements are kind of cringe-worthy in my mind, but they are apparently not uncommon in some of the less developed parts of the world. Shifting this kind of situation into Western cultures, one can only imagine a rape/molestation scenario, where the older preys on the younger.
All that's kind of background to what I'm thinking in response to the OP.

I think that paedophilia is probably as common as certain eating disorders. Why do I say this? My theory about paedophilia is that it involves a mis-association between certain sensory stimuli and a basic appetitive impulse. Such mis-associations, when it comes to the impulse to eat can have some people craving the eating of strange non-nutritional items like glass, foam, beads, dirt, piss, even shite; or non-appropriate items which leads to things like desires for canibalism, vampirism, etc.

Shifting to the sexual impulse the mis-association with certain sensory stimuli can lead people to feel attraction to things like cars (litterally having sex with a vehicle), animals, computers, minors, and (very politically incorrectly) people of the same sex. I think that sexual weirdness of attraction is probably far more common than actual instances of it. For instances of true sexual perversion to occur I think it takes three things: a mis-associated sexual impulse, a person with low impulse control (or true malice), and opportunity.

That perversions occur I think points to the frailty of the human psyche.

In the example of eating disorders, which leads to a desire to eat non-food items (a disorder called 'pica') there is surprising prevalence (pasted from wikipedia):
Epidemiology

The prevalence of pica is difficult to establish because of differences in definition and the reluctance of patients to admit to abnormal cravings and ingestion.[SUP][3][/SUP] Thusly leading to the prevalence recordings of pica being in the range of 8% and 65% depending on the study.[SUP][1][/SUP] A study published in 1994 found that 8.1% of pregnant African-American women in the United States self-reported pagophagia, the ingestion of large quantities of ice and freezer frost.[SUP][21][/SUP] A study conducted in 1991 found a prevalence of pica in 8.8% of pregnant women in Saudi Arabia.[SUP][22][/SUP] Rates of pica among pregnant women in developing countries, however, can be much higher, with estimates of 63.7%[SUP][23][/SUP] and 74.0%[SUP][24][/SUP] reported for two different African populations. This is due to different cultural norms as well as greater levels of malnutrition. Two studies of intellectual disability adults living in institutions found that 21.8%[SUP][25][/SUP] and 25.8%[SUP][26][/SUP] of these groups suffered from pica. Prevalence rates for children with and without developmental disabilities are unknown.

As for the prevalence of paedophilia - some estimates put it at just under 5% of the adult male population (or less than 1 in 20 men). Seto MC. (2009) "Pedophilia". Annual Review of Clinical Psychology 5:391–407.

That means that if there are 7,000,000,000 people on the planet - and say that 49% of them are male - and say that of those males - and say that 60% of those males are adults - and say that 4.5% of adult males are paedophiles... that means that there are about 92,610,000 male paedophiles in the world right now (if the reported figures are in any way accurate). Guessing that women also can be paedophiles - and that just guessing that there are 20 times more male paedophiles than female - there could be roughly 4.5 million adult female paedophiles as well.

It isn’t very politically correct as you said…but it also doesn’t contradict that homosexuality isn't a choice…where it differs is when it is then referred to as a mental illness through miss-association. I just wanted to object…that is all…lol.