Pedophilia, or: How not to love a child

in #psychology8 years ago

Imagine the following: You fall in love with someone. They’re the most beautiful being you have ever met, both inside and out; full of curiosity, warmth, and joy. You love and adore them and want to spend your every second with them. You would do everything to make sure they are happy. And now imagine that the only way you can do that is never to let them know what you’re feeling and strongly limit the contact you have with them. Sounds torturous, doesn’t it? Well, welcome to the world of a pedophile.

This description of how a pedophile sees a child might be repulsive to many, disgusting even. They are often portrayed as monsters, incapable of any form of sexual self-control. And to a certain degree, that’s true. Pedophiles do have problems with controlling their impulses and sometimes extreme urges.

Those problems come from a cerebral dysfunction that is quite similar to that of someone with an obsessive-compulsive disorder, or that of someone who is more susceptible to an addiction than the average person. While the causes of pedophilia officially remain unsure, said cerebral dysfunction is likely to stem from childhood trauma.
Most common in pedophiles is having been the child of a dominant or neglectful mother and a father that is either tyrannical or mostly absent. Additionally, many of them have suffered sexual abuse themselves. Being traumatized so profoundly, often pedophiles never quite make it out of their own childhood. They feel insecure or out of place with adults but connect very effortlessly with children.

However, the dysfunction present usually does not hugely impact a pedophile’s moral compass. That means that the average pedophile knows full well that molesting a child is an extremely evil thing to do. Because of this, pedophiles are only responsible for less than half of all cases of sexual abuse of children (estimations range from about 10-35% according to different sources.) In all other cases, the perpetrator is not, or at least not exclusively, sexually interested in children.

And even in the instances where a pedophile violates a child often he has a basic moral compass, but is removed from reality due to his antisocial tendencies and sometimes, cognitive dissonance: The perpetrator tells himself he is helping the child and has a loving relationship with it.

An example for this is Jonas, a 50-year-old man exclusively attracted to boys of the ages of 6 to about 12. As a child, he and his three brothers were frequently hit by their violent mother - sometimes until they bled. Jonas was also sexually abused by his mother and his older brother Georg, who even performed oral sex on him. Because the reality he had to live in was so terrifying, Jonas began to detach himself from it and instead constructed a dream-world for him to take refuge in.

At less than 20 years of age, Jonas began to suspect that he might be a pedophile. The feelings he had scared and saddened him; he knew they were abnormal. But because he was scared of the judgement he would face, he never told anyone about his feelings, thereby depriving himself of the help he would have needed. When he was 33 years old, already having a criminal record due to his pedophilia but never having dared to come out and seek help, he moved into a new flat opposite from a family of four. The youngest of them was Patrick, a 10-year-old boy, who - due to problems at his birth and with his development - had a mental age of only 7-8 years.

Jonas quickly became friends with the family and noticed that the father, Sören, was really rough and short-tempered towards Patrick. After the boy stayed with Jonas for a few hours one day instead of joining his family for a trip (he hated to spend time with Sören), he frequently visited Jonas, sometimes even staying overnight. Jonas viewed himself as Patrick’s friend and guardian. When he witnessed how Sören repeatedly hit Patrick on the naked butt that perspective was confirmed for him; Sören and his wife were bad, but he himself was the good guy who’d never do anything like that.

The child preferred to spend time with him rather than his father. In Jonas’s mind, that was because he gave Patrick so much love and affection and was able to see eye-to-eye with him. Of course at the beginning that’s probably how it seemed to Patrick as well, but even then Jonas had other motives in mind: He wanted to catch up on the unburdened childhood he had never had by sharing experiences with Patrick; staying up late talking, fooling around on the playground, sleeping in and having breakfast still in pajamas.
But that was just a small part of it, overshadowed by something much more important to Jonas: The sexual gratification he got from the times he saw Patrick nearly naked when he changed, or when he slept next to him in his bed, wearing nothing but briefs. Soon, this aspect became ever more prevalent as Patrick spent more and more time at Jonas’s place, often even taking baths there and afterwards walking around naked. Though Patrick’s mother knew about all of this, she did not become suspicious.

And as time passed, the sexual abuse began. In Jonas’s mind, it was all just fun and games. He’d “accidentally” touch Patrick while rough-housing, or soap him (and especially his genitals) when they took a bath together. Even when Jonas started to regularly perform oral sex on Patrick, he told himself that Sören was the bad guy and all he himself was doing was protecting Patrick and giving him the loving father-figure he needed. Seeing how the kid still always came to him and behaved normally around him confirmed his view.

Finally, after two years, when Patrick was 12 years old, the police followed a hint they got from someone of the online pedophile-community to Jonas and he was convicted and sentenced to 4 years in prison. Alternatively, he had the option to start therapy in a psychiatric hospital. Jonas decided for therapy and finally started to get the help he needed so badly to correct his views to align with reality.

It took him many years to understand that he had not in fact been helping the boy and protecting him from his parents, but instead created a situation of complete dependency which he then shamelessly exploited. But because Jonas had retracted from reality almost completely when he was a child, he was unable to see what was really going on.
Nobody had ever given him love and positive attention as a child, so he wanted to save other children from experiencing the same horror - while at the same time exposing them to a different kind of horror that Jonas told himself was “just a game”, much as it had only been a "game" or a "sign of affection" when he was fondled by his mother or his brother.

Jonas was in desperate need of help and a therapy, or during his younger years maybe even just someone to look up to. But the one friend he confessed his sexual orientation to didn’t do anything to help. In fact, he pretty much pretended nothing had happened and continued to place his toddler son on Jonas’s lap, not knowing if the reaction would be genuine affection or hidden arousal.
Jonas’s community of pedophiles he had met online was full of enablers cheering him on for the photos he snapped of Patrick naked. Instead of offering genuine support in staying away from children, they supported him to act out his desires.

Had he known someone confronting him with the sick and horrific reality of his deeds, and offered support to him - for example in the form of getting him to start therapy - at least two and possibly more children would have been spared the terrible experience of being abused and molested. But everyone looked away. Not only Jonas’s family, but also his friends and his victim’s families. No one ever came to him with curiosity and an open heart - and so he found and exploited those very same things in children.

Of course, my emphasis on the burden of being a pedophile is not to say that offenders should not be shamed and ostracized. That absolutely is a valid choice. What I want to convey is this: When you see a child that is suffering, don’t look away. Don’t let it grow up to be part of the next generation of perpetrators. And when you encounter a grown-up child that is an offender (and I use that phrase on purpose because deep down, usually those grown-ups are still children) try to help them if possible, but first and foremost make sure to protect your and other children from them. Because, though that is mostly for the sake of the children’s well-being, it might just make them realize that they can’t be close to children as is, and need to change to have people trust them again.

Sources:
https://neuroanthropology.net/2010/05/10/inside-the-mind-of-a-pedophile/
http://www.schicksal-und-herausforderung.de/pdf/jonas.pdf [text in German, reader discretion advised; contains explicit descriptions of sexual abuse]

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You wrote an interesting article. However, I believe that the operative word that you're really looking for is "pederast" inasmuch as this 50-year-old man was attracted to a kid of the same gender. In any event, it is also important for society to be educated on what is NOT a pedophile. The problem I have been having with YouTube and a lot of platforms is that they have a lot of self-appointed pedo-experts, for a lack of a better term, and it is obvious that most of these idiots have never read the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition) or even the ICD-10 (International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, Tenth Edition) to find out what the real definition of a pedophile is. They've gone as far as accusing young men who are in Loretta-Lynn-style marriages of being serial baby rapists, which is both defamatory and mendacious at best. I think this school of thought does more harm than good to society as a whole.

Fascinating insight into the mind of the pedophile. Thanks for helping me to better understand.