Politics, Pedophilia, and Religion

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Which is why I wasn't implicating all politicians and religious heads.

In searching my memory for politicians that are pedophiles, I can't come up with many. Are there examples, and if not, why would we hypothesize that people in these positions of power would choose children over adults in their sexual conquests when there are adults whom they have access to that are willing to participate? And moreover, the power and influence, a politician has, in itself is intoxicating, with or without sexual exploitation.

Politicians seek to influence those that are powerful like they are. The weak are often exploited by their policies, but I don't see any significant advantage they have over anyone else in molesting children.

I don't think there are too many teachers, Little league coaches, etc. that get that kind of intoxication, alone, from their positions of trust.

Priests are a different story. Not, generally a healthy thing, not to be able to express your sexuality, whatever it is. I don't think priests set out to become priests for the purpose of pedophilia; but a requirement is abstinence, an unusual ability for a male to maintain throughout their life.

The key difference, is if they have an underlying propensity towards pedophilia, they have access to children, historically have had complete trust, and have the same human weaknesses seen throughout the population.

Without access to children and temptation with an underlying propensity they would be less likely to engage in the behavior. It is evidence of how difficult it is for people to control this problem; a position in the priesthood, is obviously not a deterrent, quite the opposite for some because of access to children.

That's not true. Although some of the people can choose children as the easiest target or to feel power, but those aren't usually paedophiles. Paedophiles usually consider the children as partners, rather being in position of older friend than being something like parent or mentor. That doesn't seem like attraction to power.



I didn't find anything there supporting your statement.



I don't think it's true. Can you explain the mechanism how pornography should rise cases of paedophilia?

Being in position of trust can be dangerous for paedophile, but the risk is overestimated. People thinks that paedophiles a) wants to hurt children b) can't control themselves. A is false, it's like saying that heterosexual men wants to hurt women. B can be true, but it can be true for non-paedophiles too and it's not common. The situation is, that if the paedophile have access to child in position of trust and can't control himself or doesn't know that he can hurt child even with consensual sexual activity, then it's risk for both of them. The problem is, that people hate paedophiles, so if there is a paedophile who knows that he has problems controlling himself, he rather doesn't seek help.

I think a more complex picture emerges if you look at pedophile offenders compared to other sexual offenders. In Porter et al (2000) Profiles of psychopathy in incarcerated sexual offenders, the authors reach the conclusion that those who solely molested children on average had much fewer psychopathic traits than those convicted of raping adult victims and the general prison population - measured by the Hare Psychopathic Checklist - Revised (PCL-R).

Of those offenders who raped both adults and children, however, almost two thirds met the criteria for psychopathy (well in line with the generally observed feature of criminal versatility among psychopaths). The prevalence of psychopathy among pedophile offenders was, however, still higher than then population estimate of approx. 1 percent.

The paper is available for free here (see page 225, figure 1 - the difference is quite striking):
http://cjb.sagepub.com/content/27/2/216.full.pdf+html

Summary: One cannot draw a direct influence between "attraction to power and exertion of power over others" and "psychopathic traits" (although positive correlations have been found between narcissistic personality disorder and psychopathy - surprised?), but there does not seem to be a clear-cut pattern of pedophile offenders of having (other) vicious traits. The Handbook of Psychopathy (2006) lists other studies reaching similar conclusions.