Toxic Cultures

Toxic Pedophile and Rape Culture

Written by TJ Hyland - November 21, 2020

Pedophilia and rape culture go hand-in-hand because "pedo-sexualism" is a disorder and a superiority complex, not a sexual orientation. Rape is not a sexual orientation.

Normalization of trauma and abuse is a problem because it not only leaves us numb to the behavior, it makes us feel justified in perpetuating it. We need to identify these problems before we can fix them, so let's get started. Many people who are victimized don’t realize that they are because in their world it's normal. If they don't know what abuse is, how can they seek treatment and heal from it? For so many of us, abuse is part of our daily life. We just live with it. The more normalized the abuse is, the more it blends into our day by day activities and the more we excuse ourselves for doing it to others. It becomes background noise. 

In today's topic of discussion, we're going to talk about pedophilia and rape culture. I chose to talk about these two together because they go hand in hand and are part of the same culture of abuse and exploitation. First, let's define it. What is pedophilia or pedosexual?

Pedophilia or Pedophilic disorder is characterized by recurring, intense sexually arousing fantasies, urges, or behavior involving prepubescent children.

Pedosexualism is a concept attempting to normalize sexual attraction to prepubescent children and reintroduce the practice into our legal system–as if rape is okay because it's the preditor's desire.

Many younger kids may be confused about pedophilia and think they are pedophiles because they're attracted to kids in their age group. We should be educating our kids about their bodies and hormones so they can 1. point out when their rights and bodies have been violated by someone, and 2. understand that their feelings are related to biological changes that will surge and subside as they grow. They need to understand what's legal and what's not, and they need to learn how to be responsible online. These are the challenges that face the modern parent.

In the US Federal law prohibits the production, distribution, reception, and possession of an image of child pornography using or affecting any means or facility of interstate or foreign commerce. What does that mean? It means you can't make it, you can't buy it, you can't sell or trade it, and it's illegal to possess it under any circumstance. Child pornography is any image or recording of a child in a compromising position, sexually alluring pose, or depicting any sexually exploitative behavior involving a person under 18.

Just being in possession of child pornography is a criminal offense, and if you don't know, I'm a systems administrator. I've handled back end support for one of the largest global tech giants. If you search for anything online, it remains in your search history forever. Any server you connect to will always have a history of everything you do online while connected to their server. Every website visited, and cached data of your system's online footprint. The only privacy we have online is in the privacy policies of the servers we use. However, if you recall all the privacy policy updates recently, they clearly say that they have the right to preemptively turn over all your information to the police if they are suspicious of your behavior. Also, if the police ever have any reason in the future to request your search history, there it will be, printed out and public for the whole world to see as part of your public criminal record. Any photos or videos are always associated with the search history on your account. Using incognito mode only hides your cached results from other users of the same device. It does not hide the search history from your ISP or your browser service.

The government also has carte blanche to send along a subpoena to your internet service provider for a complete history of your entire household's search results and get all the email addresses you use so they can ask your email service provider for a complete search history with them too. If they have any suspicion at all of the illicit behavior they can get that subpoena very easily. They also have teams of detectives that join chat rooms pretending to be children to lure in predators. These are the things that children need to know. Aside from the fact that it's exploitative, of course, and we'll get into that in just a moment, but it's also a learned behavior. It's not a genetic thing or something anyone must accept as part of who they are, it's a Pavlovian response to external stimulus.

The more we think about something in a particular way, the more it becomes a trained behavior. Pavlov was a Russian physiologist who discovered that neural conditioning using an external stimulus can precondition someone to a particular behavior. Pedophiles are people who were sexually exploited by adults as children so that behavior was ingrained in them as a child. They were preconditioned by an adult to accept abuse, and that allows them to justify perpetuating that behavior. It is not healthy and it harms people, even if they don't understand the harm it has caused. Pavlov's study was discovered when he realized that the dogs who were part of his study began to salivate whenever they heard the footsteps of his research assistant bringing the dogs their meal. He introduced a metronome just before feeding time that preconditioned the dog to salivate on command. Overtime the salivation would occur without food. He also discovered that conditioning is reversible. The action of the metronome used regularly without the food, gradually deconditioned the salivary behavior.

Typically, if we've had a healthy upbringing, our tendency toward sexual arousal by younger people happens less and less, and for the vast majority of us, by the time we're 25, we see teens as little baby children. They are essentially desexualized for us. As the adults in the situation, we must allow kids to finish growing up, so it's our responsibility to abstain from any actions that would encourage a child or teen to engage in any sexually associated behaviors including flirting with any adults, even if we are only an 18-year-old.

Any adult that is flirting or making sexual advances toward a person under 18 is grooming.

What is Grooming?

Grooming is defined as the action by a pedophile of preparing a child for a meeting, especially via internet chat rooms, where they often pretend to be someone they're not with the intention of luring in a child or teen for the purpose of committing a sexual offense.

That known behavior of predators is why police have to preemptively lure in those predators with undercover detectives pretending to be kids. There are no mutually beneficial sexual relationships between children and adults. There are only exploitative relationships where one individual exerts their power over another. It is ultimately a dominance addiction. Anyone saying they don't recognize grooming as a thing that happens because they were in a relationship with an adult when they were a child, and they feel like it was consensual, doesn't mean grooming didn't happen. The imbalance of power prevents consent. There is also another phenomenon that our minds use to help us cope with abuse, and that is Stockholm's Syndrome.

Stockholm syndrome is a psychological response. It occurs when hostages or abuse victims bond with their captors or abusers. This psychological connection develops over the course of the days, weeks, months, or even years of captivity or abuse.

"Or abuse" is the key phrasing here. Any kind of abuse including the abuse of power is something that triggers our minds to seek survival. This effect forces us to align our feelings of an abusive relationship in a manner that best meets the needs of our survival. Humans are social creatures. History has engrained a survival-of-the-pack mentality that's still highly active as children. Intrinsically, as children, we know we can't thrive without a family unit. We may be able to survive, but we are unlikely to thrive. So what does our brain do? It makes us as agreeable as possible to the situation we're dealt. Adults also do it, so it's understandable that it's something we carried with us from childhood. When a child is faced with feelings of inadequacy, an adult coming along with all the right words can make them feel like they want that relationship when in reality, they're hypnotized by the smooth-talking predator who knows all the psychological games to play that make that child feel special, most often because someone did it to them.

So what's the relation of pedophilia to rape culture? Rape Culture is an environment in which rape is prevalent and in which sexual violence is normalized in society.

Rape is the act of unlawful sexual intercourse or any other sexual penetration of a person's body without the individual's consent. So why bring this up? What does rape have to do with pedophilia?

Let's take a moment to define consent.

Consent is giving permission for something to happen or agreeing to do something as in a verbal or written contract. Consent in regards to sexual interactions are always voidable at any time without prior notice, and even during the act of intercourse.

We need to define consent because consent only applies to adults. The concept of consent does not apply to children so any act with a child is considered non-consensual and unlawful. Non-consensual is rape.

So why is it that we don't consider children capable of consent?

The reason we don't recognize child consent is that a child does not know what they are consenting to. The general rule regarding contracting or obtaining legal consent with minors or infants is that such a contract is voidable by the minor. This rule has been established to protect younger individuals who may not fully grasp the consequences of certain contracts and therefore their interests must be represented by their legal guardian.

Minors are believed to lack the capacity to enter into any contract. Since a child cannot enter a contract for any reason because they are incapable of understanding the full weight of what they're signing. All requests to a minor to consent to something is invalid and must be directed to their guardian. It's our responsibility as adults to respect their ability to develop without being pressured to engage in any physical activity with any adult–period.

If it's a hug or a kiss, kids don't have any obligation to comply and they should never be asked for such things from anyone. Hugs and kisses including from their parents and family are 100% optional, and we as adults have to respect their right to say no. We as adults also have no business attempting to influence someone else's child to engage in hugs, kisses, or intimate behaviors with us, ever.  

All child pornography is rape. All sexual conduct involving a minor is non-consensual and therefore is molestation or rape.

This is why rape and pedophilia are derived from the same culture, they have the same origin. It's an exploitative behavior exhibited by people who are unwilling to acknowledge the other person's humanity, dignity, and right to consent. It's a power trip, an authoritarian ideology, and it's toxic. How did our culture get this way? The answer is something you may not want to hear, but the answer is, it has always been this way.

Until recently, we've always had pedophilia as a normal part of society and in many places around the world, it's still perfectly legal and encouraged. In an article I've linked below, titled, Calling Prophet Muhammad a pedophile does not fall within freedom of speech, the article explains how the ECHR European Court of Human Rights ruled that an Austrian woman's comments denigrating the prophet Muhammad as a pedophile was not protected by freedom of speech. Paraphrasing, the article explains that while the prophet Muhammad did marry and impregnate a child bride, he was born in the year of the Christian calendar approximately 570 AD but the term pedophile is only a new development since 1912.

By today's standards, the prophet may technically classify as a "pedophile", if the definition is strictly referring to a child under 18-years-old, but if we stick to the original definition of a pedophile which being with a prepubescent child, many girls enter puberty early. Sahih al-Bukhari's hadith says "the Prophet married her when she was 6-years-old and he consummated his marriage when she was 9-years-old." (Sahih Bukhari Volume 5, Book 58, Number 234) In the days of the prophet, marrying a 6-year-old girl may have been perfectly acceptable, but it was never acceptable to consummate a marriage before puberty, which the timeline seems to indicate the prophet respected. Back then, they considered puberty to be the distinction of adulthood. Most teenage girls enter puberty between the ages of 10 to 13 years, but some may take longer. I entered puberty around 16 but I have friends who started puberty at 8 or 9. These variations are a good indicator as to why we decided as a society that childhood needs to encompass the first 18 years of life.

I would also point out that several other religious communities globally also practiced pedophilia by today's standards, so it's not fair to denigrate the prophet as a pedophile given the era and cultural expectations when much more recently according to John Jay College of Criminal Justice for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in a 2004 research article linked below, 4,392 Catholic priests and deacons in active ministry between 1950 and 2002 were plausibly accused of under-age sexual abuse by 10,667 individuals. By plausible they mean the accusations were neither withdrawn nor disproven.

So the truth is that historically, and globally, in every ancient religion to exist in this world, in every aspect of society high and low, and in every culture, race, demographic there exists a history of rape and pedophilia that has been perfectly normal until recently. Welcome to the history of the patriarchy.

It's not all doom and gloom though. There is a paradigm shift.

The changes we see now are created by all individuals who reject chauvinism, misogyny, misandry, toxic masculinity, and toxic femininity–reject racism, and toxic religious traditions and we instead embrace humanism. Humanists recognize that all humans in this world are deserving of equal consideration, value, and dignity under the law. Living our lives by these tenants, and not how we've been dictated to in the past, is what's leading us to strive for the elimination of exploitation.

References:

https://www.abusewatch.net/pedophiles.pdf

https://www.dw.com/en/calling-prophet-muhammad-a-pedophile-does-not-fall-within-freedom-of-speech-european-court/a-46050749

https://youtu.be/hhqumfpxuzI

https://www.bishop-accountability.org/reports/2004_02_27_JohnJay_revised/2004_02_27_John_Jay_Main_Report_Optimized.pdf

https://www.usccb.org/sites/default/files/issues-and-action/child-and-youth-protection/upload/The-Causes-and-Context-of-Sexual-Abuse-of-Minors-by-Catholic-Priests-in-the-United-States-1950-2010.pdf

https://www.healthline.com/health/mental-health/stockholm-syndrome

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