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The problem with this arguement is that you can't explain ephebophelia without sounding like a fucking pedophile
It is a distinction, but without a difference to anyone not using the DSM-5 regularly.
Always pops up on these threads though, same way any thread with a pickup truck leads to 900 people showing up to explain why they NEED that pavement princess F-450
Check this guy's hard drive
Check the hard drives of those who downvoted that post about the need to protect children.
o_O You're saying I'm a sicko for wanting to protect children? ...?
I guess someone should check mojofrododojo's hard drive too.
Check my hard drives all you want. A teenager is not exactly the same thing as a child.
Pretending otherwise is counterproductive, and just reads as trying to prove you're not a pedo very hard.
I'm glad you want to protect children, and that you're rightly outraged upon perceiving a threat to them, but, there's a lot to unpick there.
This is a strawman argument, and a rather extreme one, built in part on cherry-picking [(not to mention ad-hominem, red-herring, false equivalence, appeal to emotion, slippery slope fallacy, self contradiction)], and on larger part, non-sequitur, apparently. Wanting to have more nuanced terminology for this is not justifying the rape of anyone. Quite the contrary. Facilitating better communication will help reduce harms.
And speaking of reducing harms, do you have any suggestion for the crux of the dilemma I posed? Given that our current system is increasing the child abuse: How are we to better protect children?
Or maybe you still insist on equivalence under law of a 15 year old having sex, and an under 10...? I'd like to hear your reasoning for that, if you're willing to offer it. You may have a good point I had not thought of... You might be right, and convince me to your way of thinking, ~ though it escapes me how from here, I remain open minded.
Or, if it's just emotional catharsis you need, you could continue to spit unfounded hate at me, misunderstanding and misrepresenting what I say, while the abuse carries on in the background unabated.
You must be fun to be around.
You're a mesophile?
A mesophile is an organism, often a microorganism, that thrives in moderate temperatures, typically between 20°C and 45°C (68°F to 113°F), with an optimum growth temperature around 37°C (98.6°F). These organisms are commonly found in environments like cheese, yogurt, and during the fermentation processes in beer and wine making.
Or are you trying to say your just a pedophile who is in the middle.
Fun homonym.
Mesophilia, loving the middle, in this context, as wikipedia says:
Sorry, I thought that term was better known, and that context would have averted any confusion.
The difference is mostly useful for psychiatry it is useless here.
In every case they had sexual relations with a minor in their care. that is still rape. no matter if they are 8 or 10 or 12 or 16, still rape.
I see where you are coming from, but I disagree that there is no difference. Apart from ages of consent being different among different countries (greetings from a place where you can have sexual relations from 14 years onwards), which already points at a grey zone for an age of maturity, I would ague that the physical and mental damage is different. A 15 or 16 year old might already have had some sexual experiences, or will have at least heard of what sex is, and (more or less) understand what is happening. The younger the child, the greater the damage to the body, and a child that doesn't even know what sex is yet will carry a different kind of mental trauma from the assault.
I'll also include the mandatory paragraph about a philia not being a felony in itself. Why it's important is not just out of respect and support for non offending minor attracted persons who will be less likely to come out and seek help with a witch hunt for people with their orientation, but also to raise the absolutely necessary awareness that a great chunk of minor sexual assault cases are committed not by people with a -philia, but by people with regular (i.e. adult) sexual orientations. So you are not safe just because the person in question is proven not to have an attraction towards minors.
It's funny how we spent the whole last decade stating that language matters, but somehow when it comes to pedophilia, everyone stops caring about correct language.
Glad someone gets it.
Boggles my mind that my post about needing to protect children got downvoted.
Glad yours is getting upvoted.
I'm glad you feel a bit supported, I was also very sad to see how your comment got so many downvotes. But unfortunately that is common on lemmy, I got tons of downvotes last time I argued that round.
the crime is still the same. rape.
you can tell me it's a red car or a yellow car, and maybe the difference is relevant in some contexts, but not if we're talking about someone running over minors with that car.
the difference makes sense in psychiatry, not legally. that difference makes no difference to the victim.
is it different raping a toddler than a 16 year old student? yes, is it still rape? yes.
I agree. It is still rape.
And yet we differentiate rapes in the legal system, or don't we? We look at the circumstances. The whole debate here ensured because we brought the term pedophile into it. Even if you take the word in its wrong sense - as someone who is having [illegal] sex with a minor - you now specified the rape.
As in this case, it was statutory rape. As someone else pointed out, the second boy the teacher had sex with was 16, which is the age of consent in the UK. So if he was a student at another school, and she had had sex with him, she would be legally in the clear - no crime and no pedo. So now her being a pedophile or not depends on the school the boy is going to? Had she been a teacher at a school in Germany she could have legally had sex with both boys, provided they weren't in her class. Yet what she did was illegal and statutory rape. You're unnecessarily bringing pathological attraction into a rape case.
I'd also argue that motive matters. Is she attracted to younger boys only? Or does she get off on the fact that they are her subordinates? This matters for prevention.
I don't know about the way sentencing in the UK works, but I sincerely hope that a person who rapes a 10 year old gets a harsher sentence than someone who committed statutory rape with a 16 year old.
In your car metaphor - she drove the car into people. Does this make every car driver a murderer in the making? And are motorcyclists in the clear because they cannot drive a car into people?
you lost me there, the point of the metaphor is that while some attributes are relevant in some context, it is irrelevant here. That teacher had sex with minors. that is rape and a big no no, if it was his teacher then the age of consent is 18.
and honestly, the walls of text defending the difference between tiers of being a nonce is quite sus. No one spends that much energy defending pedos unless they are one or you are their lawyer,.
Every goddamn one of these threads someone tries to discuss what it means to rape or to be a paedophile, and someone calls them a paedophile. We have criminal law because we, as a society, decided that some things are bad. We have different words for different crimes because, as it turns out, not every crime is the same. Manslaughter isn't first degree murder. Theft under $5000 isn't theft over $5000 because one is worse. Rape at knifepoint is not only arguably worse, it's definitively worse than statutory rape. No one said any of these crimes aren't "A big no no."
Yep. And most unfortunately, as my (now mod-removed) original reply alluded to, prohibition does not prevent, making the good things bad and the bad things worse. Worsened further yet by the conflation and false equivocation.
As the key line from my original reply explicitly concludes:
Not if 16. UK.
Why's that getting downvoted?
Age of consent is 16 in the UK.
Is just a plain simple factual correction.
Doubt they read it, probably just downvoted all your shit because some people make up their minds by the end of the first sentence. Everything else is just a bingo card to find what lines up with what they already believe.
The power differential makes it rape.
The article doesn't mention ages, but another article says she groomed them from age 15.
However, I have to remind you that language is under constant development, and "paedophile" has long lost its original meaning. It now covers a much wider age range, although counting adolescents is a stretch.
In that case we need a new word for people who have the urge to have romantic and/or sexual relations with prepubescent children. Hopefully one with less of a stigma, so these people have an easier time to come out and seek mental treatment to prevent them from acting on their urges.
You know what, that's probably the best suggestion I've heard on this topic in a while. You're right, "pedophile" as a word is just completely ruined. You can probably go about and raise awareness as much as you want and demand a correct use of the word, but at the end of the day, the societal connotation is there and you won't get it off the word anymore. Maybe a new word would really be the easiest way to go.
It is like, people, in their stunted vocabularies, have reached for pederast, but not knowing it, just used paedophile instead.
Even though I know the word pederast, from hearing paedophile so much in context of sexual abuse of children, when I hear paedophile, I think of it more like pederast.
To be honest, I think this is the first time I have even heard the term pederast. I'll keep that in mind for future discussions, thanks.
Ok weird guy.
A mesophile is an organism, often a microorganism, that thrives in moderate temperatures, typically between 20°C and 45°C (68°F to 113°F), with an optimum growth temperature around 37°C (98.6°F). These organisms are commonly found in environments like cheese, yogurt, and during the fermentation processes in beer and wine making.
I agree with part of your comment, but I think adding a bunch of over nuanced terms that people aren't likely to know, look up, or care to remember isn't going to further anything.
Your example makes little sense though. You're talking about a subsection of microorganisms with specific needs. You won't talk about an extremophile using the word mesophile and then get annoyed that people are confused or assume that they know what you are talking about.
I am like 30% sure that especially this one was thrown in to underline the ridiculousnes of it all. Like, doesn't MAGA folk go to these lengths lately?
But I needed both context and to notice over the board approach and I am still not even sure, dammit xD
This wasn't paedophile apologia and it's fucking ridiculous it was taken down.
The age of consent where I live is 16, with 14-15 year olds able to have sexual relationships with people up to five years older. The teacher is a predator, an abuser, an asshole, and a statutory rapist, but not a paedophile. She may also be a paedophile, but nothing in the article indicates she was. We should reserve that word for people who deserve it.
In order to understand why paedophilia is terrible we need to be able to discuss what it means. Defining a crime isn't apologia, it's how we figure out what is a crime in the first place. I don't want to see "Paedophile" go the way of "Fascist."
The Independent has no place on a site or community opposed to misinformation unless it's clearly labelled a tabloid. It's part owned by a fucking sultan, not independent, and failed multiple fact checks over the last few years. It's blatant misinformation to call the teacher a paedophile when that word doesn't even have a legal definition in the UK with regard to criminal law.
Yep. Blows my mind. Would love to know what the hell triggered people to downvote, and what triggered a moderator to delete it [1].
Clearly, either some kind of misunderstanding, [and/]or, they're complicit in the crime and favouring the conflation that serves children and underage teenagers to them, and wanting to challenge the threat to their Lolita express embedded in this conflationary cultural trope of hate [because this practice is worse than it is in law and statutes ~ which even that needs mending].
Otherwise, what's the thinking behind downvoting and deleting a post that calls for human rights and protecting children?
I failed to get any cogent argument that appeared outside these two options, misunderstanding and/or plausible complicity.
Which would not surprise, since such deviancy would be attracted to such articles, and therein no surprise that the reply tackling the issue in a manner that may actually lead to protecting children gets attacked.
Or maybe it was just a misunderstanding born of hot heads.
*shrug*
I remain open to other possibilities, and very much welcome suggestions or explanations of what else it could be. Would love to know what, if anything, was really wrong with what I said [in substance or style], or even just what was perceived as wrong, beyond all the completely inverting the point of it, like happened in most replies.
Was it removed because it was perceived as prejudice against paedophiles, and that was perceived, by the mod, as in breach of Rule 4?
I thought the point of my post was to protect children.
Curious how some of the replies to my reply blatantly and repeatedly break Rule 5
, yet they remain.
But then, beneath the rules here, it does also say:
Would be good if mods offered reasons why. Otherwise, how are we to know? Without reason offered, to those who don't know why, it appears arbitrary, and that has several negative effects on the communication atmosphere.
I do hope I figure out what it was. I do hope it's not the vilest of answers to the situation (~ as hypothesised as a possibility: the complicity gang, attacking a threat to their supply (~ unfortunately, as it would most appear to be, in absence of reason). I'm going to be thinking about this for a while. ... How rife is the problem? Is that why it's not being mended? The entire system captured by the complicit? Or just too daunting a conceptual leap, to face the horror, that we're all complicit, by our hate, by our love, in handing our children over to the worst, increasing the value of our children to them... it's not pleasant. Don't kill the messenger ffs, or it'll keep happening. This is no time for head-in-the-sand.
[1:(annoyingly disallowing subsequent readers to make up their own mind, lending spurious weight behind all the replies that completely misunderstood/misrepresented it, cherry-picking, quoting out of context, strawmanning, etc)]
::: spoiler was it how it was worded? too challenging?
Too many words. People aren't reading it and just assume you're defending paedophiles. The same reason people are downvoting me as soon as they see "age of consent" and not reading the rest.
I have three news communities. Almost every active comment section has someone who argues based on the headline and nothing else. Some folks don't like to read.
Oh fuck off mate, a pedo is a pedo
This is not the time to split hairs