Lady, I completely understand. Hang them all! How dare they put their hands on children. I guess the adults put up too much of a struggle. Bastards! I wish I could do more protect children.

preponderance-sorry! And I probably should have used "proclivity" anyways.

It's amazing how grown men and even women can think to put their hands on an innocent child in such a sick, twisted and demented fashion. I love children and the thought of anyone deliberately hurting them for their own sick amusemnet and pleasure sickens me to my stomach. Like my grandpa always says..there is a special place for people like that and it isn't a place you want to go to.

I'm not even going to click the link in order to chyme in here. I just don't want to start in on it. If anybody who did view that documentary has some stated action that can actually help save a child from sexual abuse, let me know. But, I am going to pre-emptively wuss out on this one.

That said, I will respond to Olga. Olga, the more I know about Psychology, the more I know that some people really are born monsters.

Psychopathy, pedophilia, sexual sadism, all seem to be inborn conditions. Psychopaths, for instance, are sometimes identified at ages as young as five. Now, some of these are just kids that don't know better in one instance, but some just don't have the capacity for empathy or for anticipating the consequences of actions.

The same seems to be true of pedophilia. Somewhere in that brain, certain instincts were mixed up. Where most people will standardly respond with the cute response "I want this being happy and protected from all harm" a pedophile, right from the beginning in the brain chemistry just has the most wrong freaking response.

I'm at my best on any topic when I can maintain an emotional distance. That's why I can have any discussion on this topic. Beyond that, I'd appreciate a documentary on what's being done to help victims of abuse recover and lead healthy lives. This documentary, though, like I said, I am pre-emptively wussing out.

Olga, there's truth to the nature vs. nuture principle. And you also have those who do it for kicks.

I don't understand the thrill one gets from reading incest or pedo based erotica. I wanted to get into better understand why/what turned them on. After two weeks of research, I could'nt given two shiny shits about these people.

One of the people I sat down with said the element of 'I'm not supposed to be doing this' got him off. Fuck no you're not suppose to fiddle little kids!

Chica, you'd be hard pressed not to find a pedo in Fairfield Country. Actually I met him through a gal pal and fellow author. He chatted openly about it...stating that he'd never do it in real life.

I'm doing this one seperately in the hopes of not writing a whole book in one post.

The whole incest and pedo-based erotica I think has a major influence from some idea that devient equals sexy. From very early on, at least in the US, we're often trained to think of sex for pleasure as, itself, deviant and immoral. Some people have this idea that the more deviant it is the sexier it is.

Though I've never read the books, I'm told that the 4th Twilight novel involves depictions of sex that literally break bones. Not as in "back breaking orgasm" as in the back is broken by the force involved. Taken figuratively "back breaking" means "energetic, forceful". Taken literally, it means "fuck you, everything sexy ended the instant you paralized me, you sparkly asshole!" But, some people just think "it's more, it's extreme, it's the double-helix-reverse-sal- cal-ginger-frankle-with-a -twist-of-lime!"

Hopefully, that much is just a phase.

The other side of it is that many people who are sexually attracted to children do romanticize their sexuality. It's seriously creepy, but in the interest of having some sympathy for the devil's gross cousin, they grow up never feeling the standard healthy sexual attraction for adults. That thing that makes your mind lock target and not let you take your thoughts away from your lover makes them lock target on a child. What are they expected to do from the moment where everybody else is noticing peers and they're noticing... others?

Daddy Does Little Debbie would be, to me, a long romance involving sentient twinkies... and still not as disturbing as the topic at hand.

My smartypants-ness here mainly comes from discussions on the whole preist scandal. During that conversation, I learned a little that helped me put some perspective on things. In general, I find that having empathy for someone is a better tool than just outright hatered. Though, there are topics that put the strength of that tool to the test and this is one of them.

One of the things I found out is that there is so much evidence saying that sexual attraction to children is inborn. That gave me a bit of perspective on how so many sexual predators can find their way into the church. Honestly, if you knew, for a fact, that your sexuality was harmful to the object of your affection, wouldn't you throw in with a group promising that God could answer your prayers to take that sexuality away?

And, hey, I'm here in the first place because I'm not exactly shy about my enjoyment of literary erotica. So, going on alt.sex.stories for a fix in college gave me a crash course in their warning system. "Ped? There's a feet thing?... Oh... not feet."

There I got a good look at how some people view "sexy". And, in some cases, it had nothing to do with any real desire for sex with the unwilling or with any real desire to be the unwilling. Some people just had this "it's more deviant, therefor it's more sexy"

As for Twilight, what I've found out from reviews and other people (but not for reading that myself) is that it's very much a Mormon Teen Girl Fantasy. So, sex is okay after marriage.

I don't think that there's that much nurture to it. Don't get me wrong. In the difference between average law-abiding person who tries to do the right thing and your standard career criminal, my answer is nurture all the way.

But, the more I learn about these extreme cases, the more I know that a human mind can go severely wrong. For instance, cat scans done on verified psychopaths in prison were so drastically different from non-psychopathic prisoners that, when submitted for peer review, the journals all thought it a prank. They literally could not identify the psychopath brain patterns as human.

(By the way, The Psychopath Test is at once funny, edifying, and terrifying.)

Looking at another sexuality that, while I'm betting noone here believes its immoral, is different from the norm, there is no parenting technique that has ever shown to have any statistical impact on the number of children so raised growing into homosexual adults. Morally, these are farther distant than the sun and Pluto, but that asside, this is still useful information. Sexual orientation seems to be set by the time you're born.

One place where abusors may become abused is that most childhood victims of sexual abuse play out that abuse with other children. I'd have to get a look at the statistics to see how many grow up to be healthy adults, how many become abusors of children (versus the general population), and how many become abusors of other adults.

How you respond to sexual attraction is certainly a response to training and rolemodeling. So, yeah, I'd like to see the statistics.

But, when it comes to some things cannot be trained. And, all the evidence I see says that orientation is set in biological stone.

I'm not saying that pedophiles are psychopaths, the two are very different. Now, someone can be both, but they aren't one in the same. Psychopathy is defined as a lack of compassion and conscience and is marked by a lack of appreciation of the consequences for actions. (The Psychopath Test, I'm telling you, it's a good read.)

I'm using that as an example because, like pedophilia, people often respond with the idea that psychopathy is the result of past victimization that, with therapy, one can get better from. The evidence all says that psychopothy, pedophilia, and sexual sadism are all biological characteristics.

As for brainscans of psychopaths throughout youth, that would be difficult. Nearly all teenagers, for instance, come very close to being psychopaths. There are tests. For instance, children asked the question "If your teacher says it's okay to hit another child, is it alright?" will, for the most part, answer no. There's an instinct in play that says that causing injury to another person is bad. There's also an instinct that says "I WANT I WANT I WANT" so they often get into conflict. But, a child at risk for psychopothy will answer "yes, it's okay if the teacher says so".

I would be interested in the results of a long term study that makes regular brainscans throughout life and continues them on verified psychopaths. My hypothesis would be that the results would be subtlely different for very young children and become more pronounced as they age, but even at the very young stage of 3-5, those differences would be unmistakeably there to someone who knows what they're looking for.

By the way, having a complete conversation on such an emotionally charged topic where nobody devolves into accusations and profanity, that is truly a delight. Thank you.

Read it, I won't be nearly so knowledgeable after you've read that. :)

I can't say I blame you for turning it off. It left me feeling helpless also.

Ha! That's why I stamped a warning label on this post.

The whole experience still gives me nightmares. I can’t get that kid’s screams out of my mind. Words fail to describe his pain and fear. Those sick fucks used that poor baby twice a week – they didn’t even bother to let him heal before ripping into him again. He was so afraid.

I don’t think my nightmares will ever go away. Maybe they’ll lessen once I’m able to devote time to a child abuse cause or something. I can’t sit back and pretend I didn’t hear that’s for sure!

There is some good news. Child Molesters tend to have a short shelf-life in prison. Mr. Bradley seems to have garnered some news attention and now he's going to spend the rest of his life in prison with people who have nothing to do all day but watch the news, work out, and come up with inventive ways to turn everyday objects into sharp pointy objects. "The rest of his life" might not be long enough to cause any additional stress.