Being Attracted to Kids Is Not a Choice, but It Can Be Helped

One could hope that people in the future will be able to publicly say, “I suffer from pedophilia,” just like they can say, “I suffer from severe depression.”

Few sexual taboos are as universally reviled as pedophilia, and it is one of the most heavily punished sexual crimes in the criminal justice system, with sentences upward of five years. Copulation and molestation often lead to grave problems in victims, such as PTSD, anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts. This is not to mention all of the children whose lives are uprooted for the sake of making child pornography.

With the heinous consequences of their sexual preferences in mind, it is very easy to harshly indict pedophiles as deserving of castration or even, as Trump has suggested, the death penalty. While pedophilia has devastating effects on its victims, the majority of the populace ignores an inconvenient truth—that pedophilia is compulsory, and thus deserves to be categorized as a mental disorder.

Pedophiles are too often seen as depraved fiends who target children using verbal and emotional manipulation, and find pleasure in doing so. But the reality is that the vast majority of pedophiles are terrified by their own urges and the thought of turning them into reality appalls them. In fact, the World Health Organization’s definition of “disorders of sexual preference” includes the phrase “acts on the urges or is markedly distressed by them.” Though the exact causes of pedophilic tendencies are unknown, they are heavily linked to experiences such as being molested as a child or conditions such as brain damage.

Consider for a moment how homosexuals (who also technically have an involuntary alternate sexual preference) have been treated throughout most of the course of human history. Sodomy was, and still is in some places, a crime punishable by stoning, flogging, or death. One could find many parallels between the now-outdated views toward gays and the still-relevant ones toward pedophiles, from the calls for castration to those for execution. If only they looked to Paul’s words in Timothy 1:8-10, which state, “We also know that the law is made not for the righteous but for lawbreakers and rebels, the ungodly and sinful…the sexually immoral,” the harsh view of those considered “sexually immoral” in those times reflects the way many people today see pedophiles.

Of course, there is a crucial difference between these two types of sexual differences, which is that pedophilia, unfortunately, has a victim. There just isn’t a way for it to be tolerated when it can be so damaging to the child. There is no way to fully resolve the problem, so pedophiles must instead look to treatment for salvation.

Currently, no person who has pedophilic tendencies would even consider sharing his or her problems or trying to get help for the condition—the societal backlash and ostracization could ruin the person’s social prospects and career. Instead, one of two things happens: either their attraction is suppressed with no one to talk to about it (a prospect that seems torturous for a person of any sexual orientation), or, even worse, their pedophilia is acted upon in secrecy.

It’s unimaginable that we would, as a society, allow schizophrenics to have their mental state remain untreated and potentially have it degraded to the point where they would turn to violence. Schizophrenia, in its acute forms, can cause people to have psychotic breakouts that in some cases lead to aggression. That raises a question: why is it that society accepts the diagnosing and treating of schizophrenia, but not of pedophilia?

Going forward, there are two options: the first is to offer the pedophile no helpful resources to deal with his or her sexual urges and then proceed to castigate and ostracize them if they offend, effectively ruining their lives. The second is to offer confidential, easily accessible treatment to anyone who feels he or she could offend and prevent this. For instance, the Charité hospital in Germany offers anonymous therapy sessions, and patients’ privacy is protected by Germany’s strict confidentiality laws unless there are criminal charges currently pending against them.

Ultimately, instead of launching witch hunts against groups of people, which society is prone to do, we should attempt to see what makes them likely to offend, recognize that it’s not their choice to be attracted to children, and try to find a method of prevention. Recent decades have seen a push to reduce the stigma attached to mental disorders such as depression in Western culture. It would be a more onerous task for the same shift to occur with pedophilia, but one could hope that people in the future will be able to publicly say, “I suffer from pedophilia,” just like they can say, “I suffer from severe depression.”