NEW YORK, NY Oct. 6 (DPI) – A Rutgers law professor offered up a controversial op-ed on NYTimes.com today, suggesting that society is too tough on people who sexually molest and assault children. The reader response was predictably tough as well: Many comments suggested the matter was nearly unworthy of intellectual discussion.

The professor, Margo Kaplan of Rutgers Law School in Camden NJ, acknowledged the risks of taking such a position, which basically held that sledgehammer criminal prosecutions and paltry mental health options did little to reduce recidivism of pedophiles:

Arguing for the rights of scorned and misunderstood groups is never popular, particularly when they are associated with real harm. But the fact that pedophilia is so despised is precisely why our responses to it, in criminal justice and mental health, have been so inconsistent and counterproductive. Acknowledging that pedophiles have a mental disorder, and removing the obstacles to their coming forward and seeking help, is not only the right thing to do, but it would also advance efforts to protect children from harm.

www.nytimes.com/2014/10/06/opinion/pedophilia-a-disorder-not-a-crime.html

Of course, more than 900 readers comments suggested that the law professor should stick to the classroom. Many readers rightly pointed out that there is no alternative but to incarcerate convicted pedophiles, and engaging in relativism opens the door to greater risks to children, endless potential litigation and slippery slope of condoning heinous and morally indefensible behavior.

The Five Most Recommended Reader Comments:

I’m beginning to wonder if there is a quiet but persistent movement to normalize adult sexual contact with children. NAMBLA (North American Man-Boy Love Association) was probably the leading edge, but it seems to me that lately I’ve read more than a few of these gentle urges to “accept” pedophilia as part of the range of human sexual experience.

Pedophilia is no more “normal” than violent sociopathy. The low recidivism rate of “expressive” pedophiles could be just as easily explained by our failure to catch them as by their supposed learned self-control. Pedophiles are often enormously cunning; their attacks can be preceded by years of careful access strategizing, grooming, and emotional manipulation to hide their crimes. It is not surprising that there now appears to be a low-key PR campaign utilizing websites, press releases, and editorials by various sympathizers.

Trying to turn the basest of predators into victims, as Professor Kaplan does here, is repugnant to anyone with even the slightest exposure to the damage done to the victims of this toxicity. She provides no genuine evidence demonstrating that “treatment” works at all, or how such “treatment” would protect children from sexual predation once the direct-threat analysis is removed, as she wishes.

Ask yourself what you would do if your child’s kindergarten teacher, or bus driver, or sports coach, was a self-declared “Virtuous Pedophile.”

I thought so.

 

Pedophilia is a crime. Period. When you start to say it is not a crime, when you start to sympathize with people because they can’t control perverse desires, you give them an excuse to justify their behavior. They need to be shamed and need to be made to fear prison time. Many of them are manipulative and will undergo therapy just to please those who try and help them even as they know they will continue to abuse children at some later date.

I think zero tolerance, tough love, and long prison terms serve to protect children and when you begin to remove, compromise or weaken those attitudes it will only serve to endanger more children.

I sympathize with people who suffer from compulsive disorders, but I’m not going to soften my stand against them when they exploit and brutalize children.

 

Whether acting on pedophilia is a choice or not, someone who poses a danger to children needs to be appropriately restricted, curtailed, ….

 

This is why common sense is more useful than the viewpoints of scholarly academics.

Many human behaviors are entirely “normal,” and that’s why society has evolved laws, deterrents and punishments to try to control them. Humanity being what it is, it’s a never-ending struggle. Note that long after the myth of Cain and Abel was first written down, we’re still murdering one another, often by state sanction i.e. war.

Many particularly culturally male-dominant societies have made the sexual exploitation of barely-pubescent girls legal by declaring them of marriageable age.

Let’s not play legal and psychobabble games here. All of us, I think, spend our lives fending off very dark thoughts indeed. Part of becoming a mature human being is to understand that thought does not need to translate into action. Pedophiles, I think, are aroused not just by children, but by the pleasure and game of thinking about being aroused by children. One is a physiological condition and the other part is a refusal to self-enforce mental boundaries and to move past obsessive thinking.

We’ve already lived through more than a century of the damage Freud caused by refusing to believe that all those middle- and upper-class fathers and brothers and uncles could possibly have been molesting all those young women. The need for greatly-enhanced mental health services and treatment in this country is one issue, but don’t weaken laws and repercussions for what is criminal behavior.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedophilia