Evil: The Science Behind Humanity's Dark Side by Julia Shaw

Author:Julia Shaw [Shaw, Julia]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
Published: 2019-02-25T16:00:00+00:00

‘When we have to change our mind about a person, we hold the inconvenience he causes us very much against him.’

Friedrich Nietzsche,

Beyond Good and Evil

6

TO CATCH A PREDATOR:

UNDERSTANDING PAEDOPHILES

On understanding, preventing and humanising

Consider this a more serious part of this book, on an issue that many of us refuse to ever fully engage with, a topic that is often discussed in the same breath as evil, and something that is so complicated and visceral that it warrants its own chapter. Even among criminals it is considered so nasty that it deserves additional punishment.

We are going to talk about people who are sexually attracted to children.

Note that this chapter will focus on understanding why sexual attraction to children exists and how we can prevent acting on urges, rather than on the important issue of the impact of child sexual abuse on victims. If you are interested in understanding those impacts I recommend reading a 2016 review article called ‘I Still Feel Like I Am Not Normal’ by Angie Kennedy and Kristen Prock, describing the self-blame, shame and internalised stigma that female victims of child sexual abuse often experience.1 In 2017, Tamara Blakemore and colleagues also provided an excellent review of the impacts of child sexual abuse in religious, educational, sporting, residential and out-of-home care settings.2

BETTER DEAD?

There is a veritable panic in relation to paedophilia in contemporary society.3 We villainise, stigmatise and ostracise those who we perceive to be paedophiles. It is not abnormal for people to openly wish upon paedophiles horrible fates – lock them away for ever, castrate them, kill them. A study on this perception was conducted by Sara Jahnke and colleagues on German- and English-speaking participants, and published in 2015.4 They asked participants a number of questions to tap into the stigma of certain antisocial groups. They compared answers to questions about paedophiles with ‘identical items referring to either people who abuse alcohol, sexual sadists or people with antisocial tendencies’. They found that ‘nearly all reactions to people with paedophilia were more negative than those to the other groups’.

Disconcertingly, of the participants they surveyed, 14 per cent of the German-speakers and 28 per cent of the English-speakers agreed that ‘people with paedophilia should better be dead, even if they never had committed criminal acts’. The researchers concluded that these results ‘strongly indicate that people with paedophilia are a stigmatised group who risk being the target of fierce discrimination’ and that this has indirect negative consequences for preventing child abuse.

When we write off rather than treat, stigmatise rather than understand, we are putting children at risk. To wish death upon paedophiles is to dehumanise them, and to fundamentally fail to engage in critical discussion regarding the treatment of child sexual abusers and the prevention of this type of sexual predation. This is particularly problematic if it is true, as a survey from 2014 found, that 6 per cent of men and 2 per cent of women ‘indicated some likelihood of having sex with a child if they were guaranteed they would not be caught or punished’.

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