Cairber wrote:I am not quite getting how you can say that its the teaching that this type of touching is wrong (the "indoctrination", as you call it) and not the touching itself
All right. Imagine otherwise kindly and nice Closet Pedophile Uncle A. He realizes one, say a 8 year old Niece B, hadn't quite been indoctrinated yet, so she won't get hurt by an advance (unlike his other nieces). He goes and makes his, uh, pitch. Understand this - there was no coercion involved, no blackmail (not even the usual kind of threats that parents use to get their kids to perform), nothing like that, OK? Just a 'game' invitation, almost as if they were going for baseball or something - "no" does mean "no". Fortunately, Niece B who likes Uncle A (they go way back) says "Yes", which freed him from the dilemma of what exactly to say if she demurred.
The game's name was "Strokeclit". Anyway, the experience was a bit ticklish and funny for Niece B, but nothing uncomfortable or anything like that - it was on the pleasant side of neutral at least. I suppose I don't have to say Uncle A got a release that was all the more valuable for the 15+ years he had wait for it. Uncle A sweetens it more by buying Niece B a nice present afterwards.
Now, so far, where is the harm to the niece. As far as she knew, she played a moderately amusing game with a beloved Uncle and even got a present out of it - and her Uncle is happy. No physical injuries. Tell me where she got traumatized or abused so far.
NOTE: If you could clearly ID a place above where you think real trauma took place, stop reading and write the reply. If you cannot clearly identify any, read on. Thank you.
So she goes to school and describes the wonderful day she had with her Uncle to the class. The teacher is mortified. I've snipped the rest of the awful tale for brevity, but you can imagine the damage that will come when she gets indoctrinated and looks back on the event (now as the worst day of her life) and the psychologists, maybe the psychiatrist and their drugs, the stress of the court in which she will testify against her once-beloved uncle ... etc.
The girl is written up as another victim and will contribute to a future study showing statistically the massive harm pedophiles do to society.
And before you say I best-cased the pedophile part of the scenario ... well ... that's because the pedophile walks down an extremely narrow path before he falls under the Immoralities that limit anybody's actions on another sapient. It'd just all be lumped onto the Pedophile, when all
he did was relieve his sexual tension like everyone else wants to, just
once, in his whole life, and was arguably more careful not to have harmed anyone than an average heterosexual would have. Somehow, this is worse than the society that conspired to make a harmless event a highly harmful one. The touching was worse than the drumming it in, the psychotherapy, drugs and electroshock? Maybe it could all have been avoided had society not been so reflexive in its condemnation?
If the rightness and wrongness of an action is not dependent on societal norms, than on what. Arbitrary deontologism based on so called "self-evident" rights brought us such nice things as racism and homophobia, and these "self-evident" stuff is often based on societal opinion averages anyway. How about utilitarianism? That would have ruled that any pedophilic action tinged with coercion or the like to be unacceptable. It may well even rule that given the high likelihood of coercion (trauma) and the near-zero objective benefit of pedophilia, to completely ban the action would be a positive overall, under Rule Consequentialism. But I don't see how it would, given the current data available, conclude that pure pedophilia (which, by AMA definition refers to the desire, rather than the act) is any worse than any other uncommon urge - or any decisive reason not to allow this group their own form of ventilation through fantasy.
-- Asuka
