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Introduction to a series of posts looking at popular myths about pedophiles/MAPs Anyone who has looked into the question of pedophilia or minor attraction more generally, knows that this is not a topic that the general public understands accurately. I don't think there's ever been a time or place when it was generally understood.
Certain minority sexual interests—such as adult homosexuality or bisexuality—have now been accepted in various parts of the world, but are little understood, and this is partly because we don't really even understand much about heterosexuality—even though attraction and sex between male and female is is a core mechanism underpinning all human societies. The knowledge gap is much bigger than you would think. People talk about the nature of sexual desires with much more confidence than the established facts allow. Of all the words ever spilled about sexual and romantic desire, far more have been about provoking or evoking the desire itself than igniting curiosity about why it is what it is or actually explaining its workings.
Staying upright in a maelstrom of ignorance
To this day, we don't actually know what makes a straight person straight nor what makes a gay person gay and we can't even really be sure if members of the groups "straight", "gay" and "bi" do in fact belong to groups with more than superficial thing in common. I was going to start the next sentence with "We accept attractions are biologically determined, but..." but in fact I can't even say that since huge numbers of people don't accept this as a basis for their thinking. Many act and talk as if sexual desires are chosen or taught or inculcated or implanted by some other process or belong to one or another god. There is hardly a shared basis for a factual discussion.
In the middle of this maelstrom of ignorance we have the twin topics of pedophilia and child sexual abuse, where people's understandable emotions make them afraid to look closely and soberly at all the facts unless they are personally confronted with some of them. Child sexual abuse happened in the past and continues to happen in settings where people prefer to deny or look away from its existence. It took until the mid twentieth century to acknowledge this in largely Western countries and it remains largely unacknowledged elsewhere. Western acknowledgement led to the first general public defining of the p word, and a new set of claims about us have followed from that. These claims are based on pedophiles who abuse.
This series of blog posts is going to look at some of the most prominent of these claims about pedophiles (or the wider category, minor attracted people) in our shared culture now. Fallacies are hard things to discuss because when many people say something is true, and you say it's false, the pressure is on you to somehow "demonstrate" it's false, beyond a reasonable doubt. But most of these fallacies exist in the context a lack of evidence, rather than different interpretations of a mountain of evidence. You can't prove a negative, and once people have an belief, especially one with emotions attached, it is more difficult for them to look critically at that belief.
Shifting a mountain with a spoon
Still, we can point out when the most popular perception is not, in fact, based on compelling evidence or is based only on a part of the picture we can so far see.
It's hard to do this when you can't access a platform to have people see your arguments simply because contradicting these fallacies is seen—in itself—as harmful, unacceptable, impossible to hear. Not just by zealots who relish and lean into their false beliefs, but by ordinary people who are otherwise open-minded, by many professionals and by those who have encountered or learned about pedophilia in a traumatising, abusive context. People are anxious that explaining pedophilia as "something that happens" should not undo the still fragile acknowledgement that child sexual abuse is something that happens.
I agree. These posts are not going to claim that no pedophiles commit child sexual abuse, or that abuse isn't real. I'm one of the generation of pedophiles that has grown up amidst plentiful evidence that those things are real.
However, while my generation of pedophiles is condemned to receive blanket blame for all child sexual abuse, whether we personally commit it or not, we have to try to make our case and hope that some day it might be heard. I will die before it is, but I want to carry the candle of the invisible, virtuous pedophile through the current dark.
The fallacies I am going to look at (I will add links to the posts as they appear) are:
The Molester Fallacy: "All MAPs are child molesters"
The Porn Fallacy: "All MAPs use CSAM"
The Time Bomb Fallacy: "All MAPs have obsessive urges that mean they will eventually offend"
The Power Fallacy: "MAP attractions are about power over children. It isn't about sex or love."
The Fantasy Fallacy: "MAPs only fantasise about raping kids" / "Fantasy is a gateway to contact abuse"
The Masculine Fallacy: "All MAPs are creepy white middle-aged males"
The Inculcation Fallacy: "MAPs choose to be MAPs or are abused into it or get into it via porn"
The Exclusivity Fallacy: "MAPs are only into children" / "they're lonely and have no relationships"
The Hivemind Fallacy: "MAPs all share one agenda, and get together to conspire and normalise abuse."
The Blind Gatekeeper Fallacy: "There are no MAPs in my community, and we won't be letting any into our schools!"
The Help Resistance Fallacy: "MAPs know they could get help to stop having these attractions and avoid doing so."
I don't promise a total scotching of these fallacies. I am just going to try to dig a little earth out around their foundations and then point to what better tools might come about for this purpose in the future.
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