A 'good' example of a bad text

Here below, in the blue boxes, are quotes and summaries from an article found on < http://www.viewzone.com/pedocrime.html  >. In the yellow [yellow] boxes are my comments.

Frans Gieles, PhD

Crimes Against Children

Why do some people want to hurt children?

By Dan Eden

[...] In late March of 2009 a beautiful little 8 year old girl was missing from her home in Tracy, California. Reports stated that she left her home to play at a friends home, then was returning home -- but never arrived. [...] 

True to the profiles of abduction, little Sandra's body was found in a suitcase, thrown in to a nearby farm aquaduct, on April 6th. Autopsy reports indicated that she had been "raped" with a foreign object. Eventually, to everyone's surprise, the alleged perpetrator was not a man but a 28 year old woman -- a Sunday school teacher -- who lived just doors away from Sandra's home. 
 

The murder was a shock to everyone but it reminded me that we need to know more about the kind of person or persons that can commit such an act of pure evil.

Who could do this?

Criminal profilers tell us that the people who harm and kill children are suffering from what psychologists call pedophilia. 

The primary motive of these attackers is sexual and the subsequent murder usually results from fear of being "revealed" by the victim. One might think that the attacker would know that molesting or raping a child will result in severe criminal penalties before they commit the crime, but often the attackers claim that murder was an "after-thought" which they did not initially intend to do. 

Psychologists explain that the sexual urges of pedophiles are so strong that the consequences of their actions are not thought out until their urges are gratified -- when it is unfortunately too late.
 

Comments

Why ....

By Frans Gieles PhD

Nearly all children who are harmed and killed are harmed and killed by traffic, thus by car drivers, by their parents, or by illness, possibly caused by lack of medical care, poverty, lack of food and care, or by war activities. 

Pedophilia is just the opposite of a desire to harm and kill children, it is the desire to love them, to cuddle them including in an erotic or sexual way of cuddling. The primary motives are love and attraction, not sex. 

If such a person eventually has had sexual contact with a child, fear for prosecution comes up. Only in some extremely seldom cases this fear (as the primary motive) can sadly enough lead to murder. 

So this brings us to ask, what is a pedophile?

According to Wikipedia:

The term pedophilia or paedophilia has a range of definitions as found in psychology, law enforcement, and the vernacular. 

What makes a person a pedophile?

Most human adults have a psychological preference for the opposite sex of child-bearing age. This would appear to be "hard wired" in the brain for the continuation of the species. Any deviation from this norm is viewed as "unnatural," since sexual intercourse between a man and pre-pubescent child results in no offspring.

Most psychologists had, until the last decade, traditionally grouped homosexuality with pedophilia as a form of pathology. Both are still considered "evil" by many church goers and moralist and who believe these sexual orientations to be matters of "choice." 

[...] 

[The author explains that homosexuality may be seen as an abnormality of the brain, caused by hormones during pregnancy. He concludes:]

So it's not a choice.

I wrote about this a few years ago and I was tempted to describe this as a "birth defect." I received hundreds of e-mails from homosexual men and women who resented this label. I understand this and so I have been resigned call it "natural." 

But what can one say about pedophilia?

What causes pedophilia?

In a Dutch book about treatment, written by Bernard ten Hag, a psychologist, he argues that pedophilia is a matter of choice:

"Pedophilia: A word that better may replaced by pedosexuality, because what offenders do with children is contrary to what most people understand as love. Pedophilia is not on the same level as homophilia or heterophilia, because pedophilia is not a preference but a choice." (Hag 2004).   

We neither see the title of the book - actually it is an article within a reader - nor a list of literature references. 

Ten Hag rejects the crucial difference between pedophilia (desire, thoughts) and pedosexuality (deeds, acts). This is "because" he rejects the notion of love within the word -philia. Implicitly, he says that heterophilia and homophilia is always love. 

Anyone with a bit of life-experience knows that this is not true. This is a giving moral judgment instead of a logically correct definition of both terms and the difference between the three concepts. The -philia in the three concepts can be real love, but also only lust; usually it is a mix of both. 

Is pedophilia a choice?

There is remarkably little that is known about this condition. Most of what psychologists know is based on statistics and family histories obtained during therapy of criminal offenders. 
While this is helpful, it really only profiles those who act on their impulses and does not describe covert pedophiles who harbor these feelings but never allow them to be expressed -- except in fantasies.
 

Here, our writer Dan Eden is more correct by pointing to the one-sidedness of much research and the existence of pedophiles who are not pedosexuals - a crucial difference refused by Ten Hag.

It is the crucial difference between desiring money and robbing a bank to get it. 

Here's what we know

Having a powerful or controlling mother has been shown to be a dominant factor. In theory, the male pedophile develops an aversion to adult women and their perceived power and focuses on younger, more passive females as the object of sexual preference.

Some regard pedophilia as the result of a distorted need to dominate a sexual partner. Since children are smaller and usually weaker than adults, they may be regarded as no threatening potential partners. 

This drive for domination is sometimes thought to explain why most pedophiles are males.

This may be true for some people, but not for others. 
Attraction to children is not the same as aversion of women. 
If there is aversion, it also might be against the emotionality and the body - maybe their scent- of women. 
The attraction can also be for active girls and boys. 

Lots of adult sexual partners are dominant to one another. 
This may be projected onto 'pedophiles' as having a "drive for domination". 

[...] 

Statistically, one third of pedophiles say that they were abused growing up (Cloud, April 2002). 

Some researchers attribute pedophilia to arrested emotional development from the trauma of abuse; that is, the pedophile is attracted to children because he or she has never matured psychologically.

The most frequently assessed neuropsychological characteristic has been general intelligence or IQ. 

Some investigators have compared sex offenders against children with non-criminal community control groups, finding the sex offenders to score lower in intelligence (Langevin et al., 1985). 

Other investigators have compared sex offenders against children with men convicted of nonsexual crimes, thus controlling for their status in the legal system and any antisociality. The offenders against children again scored lower (Hambridge, 1994)

Most experts regard pedophilia as resulting from psychosocial factors rather than biological characteristics. But this assumption has some flaws. 
 

Traumas and blocking of maturation can be incited by illness, war, changing home, divorce of the parents, and especially also by neglect and too severe upbringing - and more. 

Who have a lower IQ: those who act pedosexuality,  or those who only desire pedophilia without acting it out? Ah, "the sex offenders." 
But who says and proves that the correlation is also a causal connection? Again we see "sex offenders", thus not the usual pedophile who does not act out in pedosexuality. Our author heads and starts with "pedophilia", but now he only writes about pedosexuality. 

Again, we miss a list of references. 

Both assumptions might have some flaws. There could be much more than one factor. 

Is stress a cause or a result? 

Pedophilia is more common among males than among females (about 10%). In addition, the rate of recidivism for persons with a pedophilic preference for males is approximately twice that of pedophiles who prefer females.

Little is known about the incidence of pedophilia in different racial or ethnic groups.
 

[The author reports that specific hormones release by sexual arousing, and that 'pedophiles' have a  pattern of being aroused that differs from people attracted to adults. He than continues:]

*See Biol Psychiatry. 2007 Sep 15;62(6):698-701. Epub 2007 Apr 2. Pedophilia is linked to reduced activation in hypothalamus and lateral prefrontal cortex during visual erotic stimulation.
[...]

[The author continues by saying that 'pedophiles' are more left-handed than the general population. 

He suggests a correlation between left-handedness and the dominance of the right hemisphere in which among others feelings, art and care are processed. 

He continues with research showing that ...] 

The pedophiles had significantly less of a substance called "white matter" which is responsible for wiring the different parts of the brain together.

One interesting theory suggests that right-brained individuals are more child-like and so tend to be adolescent or even pre-adolescent in their thinking. 

While these traits are considered positive in creative writing, the arts and tasks involving fantasy, they might also lead one to have an affinity for children who utilize these same traits. 

In combination with the hormones, less testosterone, thus less masculinity, this might result in a more or less 'female' character.

Thus, in that case, more sensitive to the child's feelings and expressions, and more inclined to care, cuddle and love them. Thus less inclined to dominate, harm and murder them. 

Next important question: if these characteristics are biologically based, thus natural, 
why are such characters not seen as a natural variance but as a distortion or illness? 

Moreover, if those characters are pre-disposed to be quite sensitive, how can one prove that they all should have too little self-control to inhibit their sexual desires, to cuddle a child whilst avoiding sexual acts, to keep being on the pedophile level and to avoid the pedosexual level? 

How common is pedophilia?

Pedophilia is running rampant, not only in the US but all over the world. Children are being sexually exploited by a pedophile at the rate of 1 out of 6 boys before the age of 16 and 1 out of 3 girls before the age of 18 (1 out of 4 before the age of 14). 

Exploited? In that case by a pedosexual, not by a pedophile. 

As a result, some psychologists are attempting to describe pedophilia as a valid sexual orientation.

Dr. Fred S. Berlin asserts that, 

"It is likely that no one would choose voluntarily to develop a pedophilic sexual orientation. Those with such an orientation have no more decided to have it than have any of us decided as children to be either heterosexual or homosexual." 

Berlin also defends the classification of pedophilia as a mental disorder, stating, 

"In our society, to have a pedophilic sexual orientation can create both psychological burdens and impairments." 

Richard Green was involved in the removal of homosexuality from the DSM list of mental disorders and is now actively trying to have pedophilia removed as well (Gieles, 2002). Green believes that pedophilic feelings are normal.

One quarter of "normal" people are said to feel attracted towards children and more than twenty five percent react with penile erection to pedophilic stimuli. Green also states that one can not reasonably argue that one quarter of the population is mentally ill (Gieles, 2002). 

Considering these statistics it seems sensical to conclude that pedophilia is not a mental disorder. 

However, the one quarter of the population that react to pedophilic stimuli do not necessarily act on their urges.

My article, mentioned here, must be "Is pedophilia a mental disorder? Discussion in Archives of Sexual Behavior", written in 2003 about the issue of Archives ... mentioned here above. Note, that I am only the reporter in that article; I report what Green and others have written. 

This must be from: Hall, Hirschman & Oliver: Sexual Arousal and Arousability to Pedophilic Stimuli in a Community Sample of Normal Men . Behavior Therapy 26 (1995), pp. 681-694.

Child pornography

[I summarize: 

The author shows examples of what he describes as 'soft-porn', pictures from model agencies, pre-teen girls in underwear and quite erotic postures. He advises the reader to send a complaint to certain agencies. 

He than mentions a trend that young girls want to remove their body hairs and even reduce their vaginal labia in order to look as a pre-teen girl. Sellers of hair removers pick up this trends by their advertisements. He writes ]

"Apparently the whole world is harboring pedophilic fantasies!" 

[... Than the author returns to his original question:]

So why do some pedophiles hurt children?

After all, this is the reason for writing this article. But the answer is still illusive for me.

[He than quotes the Greek philosopher Plotinus, who spoke about the human soul that, summarized, forgets its high nature and follows the lower desires. "The soul forgets its value and learns to despise itself." The soul should be reminded to her original high-valued nature. 
 -- Enneads VI -- Chain of Realities, Book 2 Plotinus.
He than continues: ]

The internal war of morality and ideology becomes expressed as action.

In the lots of cases I could follow, there was only one - say 1 percent or less - in which this might have been true. 

[...] 

Indeed, as was the case of Sandra's murderer, subsequent acts often allow the perpetrator to be caught, as if they wanted to finally rid themselves of the guilt.

The more our culture sexualizes children with things like Barbie and Bratz dolls, inappropriate "Lolita" web sites, fashions hyping sexuality, and allows such things as "sexting" (sending pornographic images of teens and pre-teens over cell phones) the more we feed this apparently innate sexual fantasy of children in a large chunk of the human population. 

We set a double standard. While the fantasy of children as sexual objects is being encouraged and the expression of the resulting desires is simultaneously being repressed we may unfortunately expect to see more cases such as little Sandra Cantu in the news.

What do you think about this?

Dan Eden

What I think is ...

Frans Gieles

Dan Eden describes a fact, the murder of a child. He sees this as caused by pedophilia. This is not true; there is another factor active: fear for prosecution. Feeling attracted to children can lead to sexual contact with a child, but not to murder. It is the fear that can lead to murder. 

Dan Eden sees pedophilia as a mental distortion and he searches for the causes of that distortion. He finds them in the brains of convicted pedosexuals. The differences he finds are interpreted as the causes. Starting from the concept mental distortion, he cannot see this as a natural variance. 

He also does not see the most simple explanation of pedophilic feelings: children are attractive for each human and an erotic or sexual aspect of those feelings may be present, if not as a normal aspect of it, than as a natural variance. Any variance asks for self-control. 

Than he doubts. Having read my article, Berlin and Green, he doubts if it is correct and rational to label the (more than) 25% of the population who reacted with lust to 'pedophilic' stimuli as 'distorted'. He acknowledges that the far majority of those 25⁺% does not act out their feelings, thus are able to control themselves. 

He than mentions another factor, the (pedo)sexualization of society and the double standard 'pedosex is everywhere, but may not exist'. 

In the course of his writing here above, he sometimes acknowledges the crucial difference between pedophilia (desire, feelings)  and pedosexuality (acts, deeds), but in other passages he forgets or neglects this crucial difference. In those passages, pedophilia changes from a natural variance into a demonic evil. 

Almost anyone with some grade of attraction to children is able to transform the lust-aspect of it into good care: parents, grandparents, house-parents, teachers, coaches, counselors, and lots of others. Feeling attracted to children, even with an erotic flow, is not the problem. Only sometimes a lack of self-control is the problem.