A few days ago The Atlantic published Roc Morin’s Can Child Sex Dolls Keep Pedophiles from Offending? And VICE’s Broadly published Cecilia D’Anastasio’s article Can Virtual Sex Prevent Pedophiles from Harming Children in Real Life? The second article is quite long, but both of these pieces are well worth reading.
Interesting articles. A couple of points about the Vice article-
1- It says between 1 to 5 percent of men are attracted to children. If the median of that is taken at 2.5%, and men make up approximately 50% of the population, in a city of 50,000 this would equal 625 abused children if the majority of those men attracted to children acted on their desires (and if they just offended with one each). Since it’s obviously not anywhere close to that number, statistics prove the majority of men attracted to children do not offend.
2- It states that 50% of pedophiles were abused themselves as children. I’m wondering where they got that number, since most “pedophile” statistics are taken from those that have been incarcerated. So do they really mean 50% of child abusers were abused themselves, or literally 50% of people attracted to children were abused?
If MAPs make up 5% of the population and half of them are getting abused, the number makes it seem highly unlikely, or so prevalent it’s almost a norm.
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Very good questions! I think a lot of this is just them putting 2 and 2 together and getting 5, you know?
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I know, and it’s amazing how that math/logic works for so many.
I used to know a guy that had a wood shop in his garage. To have the garage he had to have a house, which he bought so his kids would have a yard, which meant he was married to a female that could give him a child, which meant he was heterosexual.
His conclusion- If you don’t do carpentry, you’re gay.
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Ha! Yeah, the things people come up with sometimes. I’m doing a whole series on dealing with cognitive biases. In fact, I just published the second part addressing the backfire effect.
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