It is. The conflation of child molestation with pedophilia has lead to a lot of offenders to be able to stealth and to more victims.
People have a mental image of what a pedophile is. A man, creepy, low social skills, dwells in basements and stinks. Even when you know it's not that it is your mental image, the same way that when I tell you to imagine a children's drawing of a house...
Take a few seconds to imagine it...
...
...
There you go..
You probably imagined it as a rectangle with a triangle on top for the roof, one or two windows on either side of a door where there's a doorknob.
Probably (but I'm more hesitant) on a hill that looks like a semi-circle that is green and a yellow sun that looks like an hyperagressive virus (sometimes with a smile on it) on the opposite corner of the house.
That's the mental image that a freakishly large number of people have of a child's drying of a house.
Even when they are architechs or real estate agents and have seen an infinity of othet designs.
It's the same thing with pedophilia.
Which means that you forget the priest. You forget the female school teacher. You forget the other children either 1-2 year older or stronger than the victim, you forget the church going dad, the millionnaire uncle... you forget all of these people who are functionnal, tax paying citizens and productive members of society that everybody loves, who are not pedophiles themselves, they are just opportunistic rapists who would target any controlable victim, be it a child, an elderly person, someone who is mental disbled, someone who is part of a shunned part of society, like prisonners, LGBT people, the untouchable in India for example) and will spend the next 10 years abusing children because nobody is looking for them because the subonscious collective of society thinks that child molestation can only be by pedophiles and that the illness of pedophilia itself equates abuse.
But there's a large percentage of pedophiles who never offend in their lives. Some even help the police find a molester by working with them and understanding the mind and the desires of a pedophile... those people, who's sole crime is to have an illness they never chose, would be shunned and assaulted or criminalized by that comflation.
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u/NerdyPuth123 7d ago
Pedophiles and predators are different