Is paedophillia a mental illness?

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Pedophilia is a sexual preference for the very young. A preference alone is not a justification for institutionalizing or incarcerating someone. You incarcerate or force treatment on people who have actually actualized destructive behavior.

Pedophiles will only act on those preferences if they feel they can, or given the opportunity. If you happen to be a pedophile, the best thing you can do for yourself is keep close company with adults as often as possible and never allow yourself to be alone with children. That’s a best practice for any adult, pedo or not. Pedophiles are likely ok with and even good with groups of children. The trouble starts when a pedophile grooms and isolates individual kids.

But until the first time a pedo lays a hand on a child and begins isolating them, there’s nothing to punish a pedophile for. The problem for pedophiles is with there being such a stigma, they cannot ask for treatment or help before they do something to children. As soon as you come out and say you have an unwanted sexual preference for children, you are treated worse than convicted offenders.

It's a sexual preference like any other, so that alone isn't the issue. However, if something comes of it, that's rape because children are not only physically weaker, but are not at an age where they can make an informed decision. The objection to people being into children stems from a desire to protect children, as they are a vulnerable population. For that reason, such an objection is more than warranted, and is why the very idea triggers a strong emotional response in most people.

As for having and/or distributing explicit images or video of children, well, that's also something children are not deemed capable of consenting to, so there's a blanket ban on that stuff in many countries. Once again, there's merit to such a ban. Also, while stimulating a desire isn't necessarily a bad thing, having access to material that stimulates the desire of individuals with a certain preference can serve as an antecedent to the behaviour everyone here seems to agree is undesired. Limiting access to certain material is also an antecedent strategy, or in other words, a strategy to prevent certain actions.

Darwinian evolution is thrifty, and innovative as well in that quite often if a primary mode fails it has backup modes.

The scary part about sexuality is how much what I'd call, for lack of better terms, 'vital energy' is wrapped up in it. At a biological level it's a core reason for survival and if one's completely knocked off of it they can either fall into deep depression or fall into one of their deeper secondary reserves.

The second scary thing, really at the first round, sexuality is a bit like a scratch off ticket where most people will come up straight but all kinds of people will discover other things about themselves independent of their own morality or what would be convenient to them (it's like being a car with an unknown engine type and finding out that you have an inline 4, V6, boxer, etc. and getting a mechanic to swap that engine out for another isn't an option, or at least at this point we have little or no idea how this stuff works other than having the most crude effects up or down on it).

I'd agree with the posts so far along the lines that actions or setting up entrapment if clear intent is shown is something that can be done to stop people who are going dark or have them separated from the rest of society to the degree that they need to be for the safety of others. The other thing to note - it seems to take stupidity, psychopathy, and even more often significant amounts of wealth for pedophiles to do much with their urges. Lacking at least two of those three seems to keep most people from falling into that mess.

It's a difficult conundrum because we think about the march of rights in things like sexual liberation. In most cases it isn't zero-sum, in this case it is and I think that's what makes pedophilia permanently unapproachable for anything like legalization. I'm actually going to take this one a step further even - if it were ever legalized it would profoundly sever classes, to the degree that you ask the question 'Ok, that's done, now whose kids and for what?' - other than money they aren't many levers where people would give their kids up to that sort of thing unless they were giving their kids up as plebeians to patricians in the long shot that they'd be raised patrician even if handled a bit roughly. That's where I think liberal democracy relies on class cannibalism of this sort not being a thing.

It's also a good reminder of how well we need to sort our moral lenses in terms of dealing with others. The better someone's life is, for example, the less likely that something really dark is going to shake out of them. Pile tons and tons of trauma on people where they start feeling like their dark side is the only way they can keep themselves going through the day, week, or month (particularly when survival and health are really central fiduciary obligations that one has to themselves) - that's a horrible situation and particularly awful when people can rain down calamity on people below them, those people go to jail when they break, and somehow quite often whoever was inflicting that damage did so indirectly, and our legal system has no way of measuring or dealing with that sort of thing.

Lots to think about on the ethical level with respect to the last paragraph but yeah - pedophilia does, if anything, help underscore that the universe's morality is quite different from our own and not always necessarily oriented to human thriving.

Might it represent multiple things?

A person in a society that normalizes relations with minors acting within their social norms (like Muhammad) is likely different from someone who isn't primarily minor attracted but opportunistically acts out due to lack of other options (like some sad sacks that make the news) both of whom are likely different from someone who's primarily minor attracted to the point of refusing more age-appropriate partners (like R. Kelly).

Ghandi?

Quick scan said it was an arranged marriage when he was 13 and she was 14, I did not think this was uncommon for that time. They had the first child when she was 17 and he was 16. I remember when I was 16. Where is the pedophilia?

Absolutely. Young people below the present age of consent used to marry quite frequently up to about the mid twentieth century.

Now…..if someone is 18 and abused a 9 year old—different story.

Yeah, the sleeping with the 18 yo grandniece also makes him a deviant in my book.

Is paedophillia something that can be cured by psychotherapy, or is it something like say heterosexuality or homosexuality, where you are attracted to what you are attracted to, and no therapy will change that?