New study: Millions of men ‘would xesually abuse children if secrecy was assured’ — The Times

[ElatedShark]

New study: Millions of men ‘would xesually abuse children if secrecy was assured’ — The Times.

A new study has revealed a shocking proportion of Australian men would abuse children “if no one found out”.

The research, conducted by the University of New South Wales, found “concerning” patterns, including that one in six Australian men said they had feelings for children under the age of 18, with 48 per cent of those answering being aged over 54.

One in 15 men questioned admitted they would have xesual contact with a child under the age of 14 if “no one found out”, while one in 25 said the same about children under 10.

The odds of a respondent saying they would have had xes with someone under the age of 18 was 10 times higher if they were aged over 65.

The survey, which questioned over 1900 men aged between 18 and 65 years old, is the world’s largest child sexual abuse perpetration prevention survey of its kind.

The study was welcomed by those who say that the common nature of xesual violence against women needs to be studied at the perpetrator level as well as with victims.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/millions-of-men-would-sexually-abuse-children-if-secrecy-was-sure-ncf9lx5v7

AIBU to be find it disturbing that these were the men only willing to admit it and its probably alot higher??

Reminds me of that red*it thread about men getting aroused changing their daughters diapers or that other study that showed men would happily commit rape if they were assured to never be revealed/caught.

What can we as women/parents/men that don't fall into the above statistics do to combat this ? How can we ensure our sons are not thinking these thoughts are ok?

Another thread to hid.

As I said in a previous post, I worked in the CJS. For me the big problem is that offending against women and girls is not punished enough. We all know the depressing stats about rape convictions. Men who view child abuse online don't get prison. They get a community sentence, some get a programme (I don't know how effective it is) some just get unpaid work. What kind of punishment is that? To me it doesn't reflect the crime. Every one of those men has contributed to that child being abused because they are the "market" for it.

You can argue that prison doesn't really "rehabilitate" but neither does unpaid work! Or spending half an hour with a probation officer once a month (if that, because the probation service is in crisis too). Every crime has been downgraded due to prison overcrowding. But that shouldn't have included crimes against women and children in my opinion. What message does that send?

This.

Are you sure we all know? If we're talking prison slang, a nonce is any sexual offender.

I agree with this but I think when you look at the punishment of crime specific to women and children it does not reflect the harm done. It never has. Men who view Chile abuse are sex offenders. They should go to prison and the standard sentence should be a minimum of custody. These men may present as pathetic in court but they are dangerous to children. I hear a lot of excuses made for it; what it tells you is depressing.

I agree and I think in the past these men were more likely to go to prison for viewing the worst kinds of child sexual abuse images, I had a neighbour once who got 18 months for viewing photos only. Anecdotally speaking there have been some absolutely shocking cases where men have got away with it recently.

I seems sad if this is true .Surely these men have sisters ,friends and so on .Its horrible to think they just think of young girls as sexual fodder

I don't think academics are looking to make pedophilia mainstream.

What quite a lot of academics are interested in is examining the brains of pedophiles and also give them safe spaces like therapy where they can speak without shame and learn strategies, so that they won't become an offender.

I agree it has changed. Just as s matter of anecdote, a man with a pornography habit used to be considered worth much more scrutiny in the CJS than now: porn use was often considered to be an indicator of an exploitative character. That was 30 years ago.

“Safe spaces” and “no shame” for paedophiles. This is the problem.

The problem with shame is that is often misfires. Victims being shamed for reporting, for bringing things on the family. It makes victims less able to say that something so terrible has happened to them.

No, we should never get rid of the stigma of those who abuse children. But we need to be very careful with our language. We need to destigmatise being victimised by one of these creeps.

It’s already shameful though. I’m not sure how we can ramp up the shame any more. It’s not working though, is it? So there needs to be ann attempt to find other ways of dealing with this.

There's such a desperate shortage of (male) prison spaces at the moment that custodial sentences are imposed FAR less frequently, in all categories. One of the potential strategies that were seriously considered was to stop new sentences for - and release current inmates convicted of - "less serious crimes, such as sexual offences" 😡

I followed the argument for a bit, but have no idea if it was fully shot down. I hope so.

No, we should never get rid of the stigma of those who abuse children. But we need to be very careful with our language. We need to destigmatise being victimised by one of these creeps.

I absolutely agree that children shouldn't be stigmatised, but we don't need to water down the seriousness of it.

If you make it impossible for paedophiles to access help, how are you ever going to reduce offending rates?

We can't throw people in prison preemptively. We know shame doesn't work to eradicate this behaviour; if it did then it would never have existed. What we can do is to either study it so we can identify men at risk of this behaviour and treat them so they don't pose a risk, or we carry on doing what we do now and wait for children to be harmed before we can identify them by their crimes, by which point it's too late since a child has already been harmed.

I'd rather have effective treatments and fewer children being abused personally.

I don’t believe you make paedophiles less dangerous by being nicer to them.

We’re talking about the attempts to destigmatise child abuse by reclassifying paedophiles as Minor Attracted Persons etc. I think there are people with good intentions who want to understand how their brains work with a view to preventing offending but I think this approach can be naive about the objectives of the more nefarious elements who wish to push paedophilia as just another item on the menu of sexualities and something we shouldn’t be judgmental about.

No. We should increase the seriousness in terms of consequences. We should also create spaces for those attracted to minors to access help before they offend.

Just dreadful.

I agree though and this is why I won’t even put a photo of my baby on my WhatsApp, especially with deep faking now. Remember the post from the woman who discovered her husband had deep faked porn of his younger colleague using her face photo? My setting is that only my contacts can see my WhatsApp photo but we hear “I can’t believe he would ever do such a thing” so often I really don’t think we can be too vigilant.

Depressing, I know…

So I guess the fact that I do this means I’m not that surprised by this study. Sickened to the stomach yes but perhaps not that surprised.

In the UK we have the Lucy Faithfull foundation, anyone can access their support. They work with men who have sexual thoughts about children, among other things. Men who view child abuse images etc. They also have support for families affected by it. There is help out there. There may well be other forms of support.

If a man can go looking online for child abuse, then he can look for support to not go down that road. It's a choice that's made.

Wasn't there a documentary about a decade ago where a man came forward and did a whole interview about being a pedo. IIRC he wanted testosterone reduction therapy to dull his arousal... Is that not an option any more for some reason?

I think there are people with good intentions who want to understand how their brains work with a view to preventing offending but I think this approach can be naive about the objectives of the more nefarious elements who wish to push paedophilia as just another item on the menu of sexualities and something we shouldn’t be judgmental about.

Fully agree.

I’m so sorry to all the people on this thread who genuinely believe men have so much evil in them, believe that the everyday man would force a woman to have sex, or even consider looking at a young girl in that way, obviously you’ve known some shit men. I hope you get to know some nice ones at some stage in your life x

I don't think that's what we're talking about at all. It's certainly not what I'm talking about. You seem to be conflating several issues.

Also, a 'phile' is somebody who has a fondness for something, so the word paedophile is no less reductive than 'minor attracted person'.

What is this guff? We are discussing paedophiles.