Is a pedophile the same thing as a child molestor or abuser?

[SummerVacation]

There seems to be so many terms used in the media, especially recently with all the high profile stories getting splashed about the tabloids. It's the media, hardly the best place to get educated so I took some time to look up these terms so I could understand where the real dangers exist. My reasoning was that to protect my own children I should understand these terms and therefore understand who's a risk and be better equipped to spot warning signs early.

I wouldn't say I'm still entirely clear but what I've learned is that pedophile and child abuser or molestor are not the same thing. Sorry if this is old news but the distinction wasn't obvious to me at least.

What I've learned or think I've learned is the following.
Pedophiles are people primarily attracted to children. It isn't illegal to be a pedophile, in fact it's estimated that 5% of males are pedophiles and 1 in 10 males are attracted to children. 1 in 10 is the same as the estimated number of people that are homosexual. So if you know 10 people you likely know someone who's attracted to children. It might be your colleague at work, your brother, the guy at the supermarket, your teacher, a nurse, a fireman, a policeman, a soldier, it could be anyone. Now it isn't illegal because it's just an attraction. Most pedophiles express their attraction by being friendly to children, talking to them and trying to protect them, all quite normal since they live on the right side of the law. They aren't the danger from what I can see.

Child molestors however are different. Child molestors are people who get satisfaction from dominating other people, abusing their positions of authority to get gratification. They may or may not be pedophiles, straight people, homosexual people or any other sexuality. They are people with little self control who are a danger to children. For them it's more likely gratification from abusing people around them and children being weaker and trusting adults are natural targets to many of these control obsesses people.

The reason I think it's important to know that is I believe it helps to guard against potential abuse. Previously I had assumed a pedophile was someone who went around lusting after children, a lust monster in a mac. So if someone was married or dating adult men and women then they're clearly not a danger. But the reality appears to be very different. We're surrounded by pedophiles, people attracted to children but they're not the danger. I shouldn't be categorising people into risk categories based on whether they're married, single, attracted to supermodels, mature women or younger women/girls but I should start with everyone in a single risk category and consider everyone a risk and adjust my view based on their personality. Is someone aggressive, considerate, how do they treat people around them etc.

Spotting a pedophile is very different to spotting a child molestor. with that surprising 1 in 10 statistic I suppose it means in any profession from school teacher to doctor it's likely every school and organisation employs people attracted to children but since they're not the danger then it isn't a problem. Spotting abusers is the problem.

What do people think? Have I missed something? Does this make sense or are there connections and distinctions I've missed?

Are you from the UK Summer? In which case NO, colour is NEVER spelt color! (pedophile and color are both non-British English spellings).

If you are interested in protecting your children then something to keep in mind is that abusers can be male or female.

Comments like "And if you're going to educate yourself about this, please spell paedophile properly!" isn't very constructive, I found it quite personal and not constructive in any way. You could have said "it's also spelt this way" rather than imply that the American spelling means the information is worthless.

How do you research protecting your children?

I search on Google for journals and reports.
I look on forums such as mumsnet and ask for opinion.
I ask other parents.
I basically pull together a broad set of information, read it and attempt to draw some kind of conclusion.

The intention here was to advise parents to protect their children by not assuming dangers come only from the traditional image of a pedophile but from all sections of society. But somehow even though this is the advice of professionals in the field it's turned into some strange argument about whether pedophiles are a danger. Obviously as already stated a pedophile can be a danger but so can people you might consider to be safe. As long as people refuse to recognise the wider risk these forums will continue to have horrowing stories of abusive husbands and people who were trusted in society. I'm no expert in the field which is why I asked for opinion and information I'd missed but what followed was more a tirade of why I shouldn't even be asking.

I couldn't remember where I got the 10% figure from by the way so I had to Google it again but found it in research published here.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24215791

I wish I hadn't even posted this warning, the whole point was to raise awareness of the risks around us and get constructive advice, I should have known better.

That's a very good point BitterAndOnlySlightlyTwisted which I hadn't considered. I think I've heard that before that most abusers are family members.

I suppose the using the P word might have contributed to the thread going the way it did. The point isn't whether P's are dangerous, the point is that abusers are dangerous and they may or not be P's.

I hadn't appreciated the difference until very recently, I had assumed they were one and the same. Realising the distinction has made me more cautious about everyone. My intention was to raise this point rather than whether P's are dangerous. The reason I put the statistics in was to explain why there are many P's around us which might explain why we're focussed on them as being the one and only danger but in reality the danger is much broader.

And yes, the best protection I would say includes...

Talking to your child. Having a trust based relationship where they are able to talk to you freely.

Education. Explaining to them what isn't appropriate, how to avoid dangerous situations.

Being aware of relationships that develop, regardless of who the person is.

Something like 98% of sexual violence is perpetrated by men. It is overwhelmingly a male problem. Another reason (as well as the others given above) why I'd say paedophilia is not equatable with sexual orientation. Otherwise you'd have much more even numbers.

Oh it's not an orientation I'm pretty sure. It's a fetish or fixation.

Are you new to mumsnet? Only I would say from reading many threads here over the years, that not only are mumsnetters quite familiar with the idea that a child abuser might not "fit the profile" of a paedophile, but also that there IS no "profile" of a paedophile or child abuser. It's not just the slightly creepy old lonely man, it could be anyone. A teacher, a friend, a relative. As Bitter says, overwhelmingly a relative.

It just comes across a bit like you've done this research and now decided, oh look, I'll post on a random parenting forum. Which is, you know, nice and all, but comes across slightly oddly. This is a discussion forum, so it's inevitable that you're going to get discussion, if you wanted to share information you found, I would suggest writing a blog or something similar. Even if it's just one post, that's then something you can share on twitter, facebook, alert people to etc.

The spelling comments were unnecessary. I'm not sure why you're being attacked there.

In regards to the actual post. I'm wary of those sources. The latest study for example that you posted/referenced was tiny, only 262 females and 173 males, and it was online meaning a high level of self selection, little idea of whether respondents are answering accurately. For example it would only take 17 people trolling from a forum to say "I'm male and have interest in XXX" to gain the result of 10% of men.

I would recommend to you to look through older posts on here about this topic - there's one in In The News at the moment, there have been several on Feminism/Women's Rights Chat, several on Am I Being Unreasonable. Probably a few on Parenting. Just as a starting point, to gain an idea about the kinds of debates which have been had in the past. Of course there's no problem with starting a new one, there are new posters all the time. But to come on and post such a detailed level of information and not expect it to be questioned is naive, I think.

Does it matter if people think of an abuser as a paedophile or a predator?

In your OP you say that 'pedophiles are primarily attracted to children...'. The word you missed out is 'sexually'. It's a sexual attraction, which means it can never be normal and whether someone acts on it or not, they still need help. I agree that help is unlikely to happen, though.

Anyone who mistreats children is a problem -whether they are in fact sexually attracted to them is irrelevant.

Every parent needs to be aware of the factors that put a child at risk. They also need to be aware that, statistically, stranger abuse is rare.

Thanks BertieBotts, I don't mind discussion, I was hoping for honest opinion, that's all.

I'm sure all the information is already in this forum in past discussions, the problem is a successful forum such as this has so many threads it can be difficult to find the relevant threads.

I can't say I feel it makes more sense now than before but I'm not an expert so why would it. I couldn't run a blog, I don't pretend to be an expert, I suspect it would take a professional psychologist many years to even getting close to understanding the condition. I'm not looking for that level of expertise, just enough to know where the dangers sit.

So I dumped what I thought I understood and asked for help piecing it together. Many comments were helpful, others were just grammatical corrections. Maybe I took it badly, I just don't like having a request for help thrown back and being spoken to like an idiot although perhaps I took it too personally.

Thanks lougle, I agree, my children are taught about stranger danger and that helps to ensure that they have the confidence to speak out and take care.

My frustration and reason for looking up information over recent weeks (yes, it's only something I've looked into recently, hardly a research expert) is that I got dragged into a debate about why as a parent I need to keep an eye open for those single loners since they could be weirdo's and a danger. At the time it seemed a bit comical but when I voiced that there's a lot of celebs getting done for abuse it doesn't seem like it's lone weirdo's. So to educate myself I looked up online to see what the profile is of a typical attacker and I found that in reality it could be anyone. I also discovered something new to me and that is that a pedophile isn't a child molestor, they're different things. I'm sure everyone on here knows that already but it was news to me, to me they were different terms for the same thing. So I started this thread, dumped out all this information and asked for opinion and expertise. Some great responses, some not so.

I guess that's the danger of forums in general, they're impersonal and easy to misconstrued. I guess forums aren't the best way to learn this kind of information, better to ask a health professional.

SummerVacation you say your children are taught about stranger danger but what some posters on this thread have said is that the big risk isnt from strangers but from people who arent strangers.

The biggest risk is the risk posed by the people we consider safe: especially the people who may be part of our own wider households. This can cover parents, partners, siblings, extended family, family friends.

A few years ago I was a school governor and did a safer recruiting course. One of the interesting statistics from that course was that the majority of abusers in primary schools are female. The course was about looking beyond the obvious. The obvious ones are already in prison. Now you have the ones who hide in plain sight. These are far harder to spot. They dont look like abusers because abusers can be anyone. So that is who they look like, anyone.

Anyone who mistreats children is a problem -whether they are in fact sexually attracted to them is irrelevant.

I think the point the OP was making is that not all paedophiles are abusers.

My point, I think, was both.
Not all pedophiles are abusers and not all abusers are pedophiles.

The reason this seemed important is that potential abusers come from all parts of society but some people, perhaps not people on this forum but people I've met away from mumsnet, don't fully appreciate this. So my friend painted a caricature image in our discussion of an abuser being a freaky social outcast, easy to spot as a result. I don't think that reflects reality, if abusers are easy to spot then why with the whole world watching did these TV celebrities go undetected for decades.

What I felt I discovered with some limited digging was that there's a difference between an abuser and pedophile which means protecting our children means looking at people as a risk regardless of whether they fit the pedophile profile.

On a lesser note, I read today on a news site was that John Grisham apologised for his ridiculous statement. So he should. But his apology was that “I have no sympathy for real paedophiles,” “God, please lock those people up." Now what he means is he has no sympathy for child abusers but that's why I started by explaining what the difference seems to be because it may be that without understanding the difference then we introduce a blind spot and miss all those potential abusers who don't fit this common caricature image.

It's not that important though. The only important point is that danger exists from people of all kinds so stay safe and don't take risks. I'll leave it at that, I don't think there's anything more to gain from discussing where risks exist. Thanks everyone for your comments and input, I think on balance it's reassuring that most people already understand the dangers and don't fall fowl of this narrow image of who's likely to be a danger. It must be my friends who to be fair are not parents so perhaps have less interest in taking the subject seriously. Thanks everyone.

"Don't take risks"

What risks do you think people are taking?!

The thing is I don't think that the TV personalities WERE undetected. Lots of people knew/had suspicions/said something but it's just that the authorities never did anything (until now.) It wasn't a secret, by many accounts.

I think that your argument is moot, anyway. You're arguing semantics between the words "paedophile" and "child abuser", the argument being that paedophiles look or act a certain way. They don't, of course they don't. And you're right that it is common to think that child abusers/paedophiles (frankly I don't much care about their motivation or the distinction between these two) are the creepy old man in a mac but that has never been true. All of the news about TV personalities, pop stars, politicians etc is bringing this right out into the open - that it can be anybody, even somebody you thought was kind, normal, "cool". That's good, we need to be able to understand this. It's true that a lot of people cling onto this - for the same reason that lots of people believe rape myths. If they think that the danger looks like X, then all they have to do to keep safe is to avoid X. If they acknowledge the possibility that the danger could be anyone, anywhere, then that's scary and too hard to deal with so people in general don't want to know.

This is exactly where John Grisham is coming from. He's talking about a boogeyman who doesn't exist, because it's more palatable to have a boogeyman who is easily recognisable and avoidable.

"What risks do you think people are taking?!"
I'd say trusting someone to babysit without doing proper checks, having a false sense of security because he's married with children or because he's a nice guy who dates adults and so clearly not into children. Being a parent is very demanding and time consuming, sometimes we want to have a date with our husband, maybe an anniversary or birthday treat and we might not have family we can call on so we might trust someone more than we aught because they don't the fit profile we have in our head of who might be a risk. I know I've felt under pressure to find a sitter before but knowing that an abuser might not be a pedophile allows me to better judge that I should be as cautious about any sitter, even if they're married with 6 kids. I am personally surprised that there's animosity to wanting to highlight this. We're not all "professional mums", many are new and learning, many are holding down jobs and difficult family situations.

And John Grisham is a bit of an idiot if you ask me. I find it hard to believe that anyone would truly think that it's somehow more acceptable to look at abusive images if its just a white guy enjoying a drink and getting some kicks. I therefore can't help thinking that his intention was to highlight that treatment is more effective than prison, a common argument which may or may not be valid. But then maybe he really is that shallow and does think that.

Yes we should be cautious about any sitter. However, you can get a false sense of security from checks, too. Checks don't mean someone definitely isn't an abuser, they just mean they've never been convicted. As it's very difficult to get a conviction for something like this without extensive evidence I would take checks with a pinch of salt.

Thanks, I guess I would perhaps put too much confidence into checks. It's very difficult because on the one hand it's very important to be cautious but on the other hand the only way to be 100% safe is never trust anyone with your children which isn't really healthy or practical.

I guess it comes down to gut instinct, getting to know someone first, perhaps recommendations from people you trust and having a good communicative relationship with your children so they can voice concerns.

This is what it boils down to. You can never be 100% sure. People don't like to hear that because it means that you can't protect your children - which is true. We can no easier protect them from child abuse than we can protect them from cancer, or from a one-in-a-million freak accident.

We have a lot of control over a lot of things these days and it makes us feel uneasy when we come across something we can't control. I think that the most important thing to protect children is about communication as you say, teaching them correct anatomical names for body parts rather than flowery euphemisms, and giving them actual clear boundaries which are basically, these parts of your body are private and it's not okay for anybody to look at them or touch them except for you, mummy or daddy or a doctor (Which would only happen if mum/dad was there) and practice respect e.g. asking permission, encouraging them to wash their own privates as soon as they can etc rather than doing it for them. We had to have a talk with DS because of an incident which happened with a family member a few years older than him, about what to do if somebody sees your privates by accident or tries to ask you to do something you don't want to do or you feel funny about.

And it goes down to silly-seeming things as well like teaching them respect by not playing games which override consent like tickling when they're saying stop, I always had rules for rough play which are centred around enthusiastic consent as well. (Big one - no restraining anybody in a way they really can't get out of, ever), not making them kiss the scary old aunt, getting them to ask other DC if it's OK to hug/kiss them before they launch into it as toddlers, etc.