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Re: Policing and Pride Communities

Posted by EthanEdwards on Monday, August 18 2014 at 7:46:00PM
In reply to Re: Policing and Pride Communities posted by Joey Bishop on Monday, August 18 2014 at 10:22:58AM

Reading the morning post(s), I'd say you folks have a strong desire to discuss VP issues independently of anything I might say. I'll include here some replies to points in other threads, to reduce your indigestion at seeing "EthanEdwards" on too many posts and to reduce endless branching.

Joey, I omitted that word "sexual" in front of abuse in the first sentence. And you are right about other types of abuse.

It's worth drawing a distinction between abuse within a nuclear family and abuse from someone outside inflicted on a child inside.

Yes, the vast majority of abuse occurs within the nuclear family, and perhaps a slight majority of child sex abuse. That is also where the vast majority of child-rearing gets done.

Children are wonderful, but even little girls can be immensely frustrating to a parent. The buck stops with the parent when the kid gets sick, when childcare falls through. Many parents are incredibly stressed. Many don't have great parenting skills and mete out to their kids the same sort of emotional or physical abuse they were raised with. It's hard for an outsider to see and remain calm. Sometimes an outsider can help out by providing an additional relationship. (I don't think sexual activity is ever an important positive part of that help, if it's positive at all.)

This is a very difficult problem, and might be best addressed by addressing poverty and providing subsidized childcare. Taking kids away from parents and putting them in foster care is its own huge disruption and often makes things worse.

But society has a right to focus attention on potential harm to children that comes from outside the family. Saying that lots more kids suffer more within the family or die in auto accidents doesn't cut it. In fact, allocating resources shouldn't be based on the size of the problem, but on how much improvement we can get for any incremental allocation. But that's largely beside the point for my purposes.

I don't raise the issue of sex abuse by pedophiles primarily to focus on child safety. I certainly don't raise it to point fingers at GC members or make celibate pedophiles feel bad! I don't even raise it to make any readers who are engaging in adult-child sex feel bad. I raise it in the context of talking to the public about pedophiles as part of a strategy for getting more acceptance for celibate pedophiles. The evidence is quite good that pedophiles account for a large proportion of child sex abuse (as society defines it), and an even greater proportion if you exclude abuse from within families. The evidence is good that they abuse children sexually at a far higher rate than teleiophiles. Recognizing those facts is part of establishing common ground with the person you are trying to convince -- identifying what you share. See Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind" for the importance of this in changing hearts and minds.

If my GC opponents in these discussions read this blog post of mine
http://celibatepedos.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-benign-desires-of-typical-pedophile.html
I'm sure many will find things to disagree with -- but I'd note that I am painting there a positive portrait of a pedophile to sit alongside the molester -- but not to replace him. You may want me to challenge the idea that those other pedophiles are really abusing the kids, to say that if they are, it's society's fault because of bad attitudes. Even if I believed those things, saying them would be politically highly inept.

As for political judgment, it's hard to cite statistics to back up one view or another. If we went by press coverage, I'd say the VP approach is looking more promising. Common GC positions seem akin to the Socialist Workers Party trying to find the correct political line off in an irrelevant corner.





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