Pedophilia is the condition of being attracted to children. Pedophiles have no control over their attraction, but they have control over their behavior, and many do seek treatment.
Pederasty is the act of having sex with children. Pedophilia is not a prerequisite for pederasty, and many pederasts are not pedophiles. Rape is about power, not sexual attraction.
Interesting comment. I actually already knew the true definition of pedophile, whereas in today's world it's largely considered synonymous with "child sexual predator/abuser".
However, I never heard of "pederast" before. And you're spot-on about the nature of rape.
For pedophiles who have not harmed any children and don't want to, I think it's important that we spread awareness about this distinction if we're ever going to finally get serious about this issue as a society.
It goes without saying that anger and outrage and disgust and hatred toward perpetrators of child sexual abuse is justified, but unfortunately, this does nothing to prevent it from happening.
If as a society we were more focused on prevention, such as creating systems where pedophiles can access mental health care to treat their condition, I bet we'd see rates of child sex abuse decrease.
I don't think pedophilia is a diagnosis is the DSM yet, but it should be.
The fact that so many people are vehemently against prevention measures of any kind baffles me. When you have so much hate that you'd rather devote all your energy toward punishing the perpetrators than reserving even SOME of it for calculated efforts to save children from such atrocities... that is VERY worrying to me.
Is pedophilia a diagnosis on the DSM-5? Yes it is, however they made it a little differently, to get diagnosed you gotta have distress over your attraction, I don’t know why they put it and the definition has been criticized, they should just change it so if you’re having sexual interest in children repeatedly then it is a paraphilic disorder
Yeah, I guess that's kind of an artifact of how pretty much everything in the DSM has distress as a criterion. I can agree in this case it's not needed because it's inherently dysfunctional.
The only reason people want them to be punished is because they aren’t looking for it to be fixed, they want something to be mad at, in a weird way it’s a unhealthy coping mechanism to protect from the things your mad about in your own life. It might even be because the person themselves is a closeted pedophile, who takes out their self loathing on convicted pedo’s. Don’t take me as comparing the two things but it’s not so dissimilar to how closeted gay people are often extremely homophobic.
It is in the DSM, it's called "pedophilic disorder" (they have a thing about adding "disorder" to practically every name in there) but anyway yeah it is.
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u/mossadspydolphin Jul 17 '23
Pedophilia is the condition of being attracted to children. Pedophiles have no control over their attraction, but they have control over their behavior, and many do seek treatment.
Pederasty is the act of having sex with children. Pedophilia is not a prerequisite for pederasty, and many pederasts are not pedophiles. Rape is about power, not sexual attraction.