@Bannedontherun you make an excellent point about shame and the function it provides in society, which is backed up by the article:
"Many MAPs scholars evinced a strong opposition to any stigmatization of sexual interest in children, which was described as unfounded, harmful, and discriminatory. However, contrary to claims that “stigma” is the primary driver of child sexual abuse, institutions and environments that have “de-stigmatized” sexual interest in children have been places of rampant sexual abuse and exploitation (e.g., Clegg, 2021)....
...A nationally representative survey of almost 2000 Australian men found that one in six expressed some sexual interest in children and young people under the age of 18 (Salter et al., 2023), which suggests that sexual interest in minors is relatively common among men in the community. This research finds a strong overlap between sexual interest in children and other deviant sexual interests, including bestiality and sadism (Salter et al., 2023), which calls into question characterizations of pedophilia as a normative sexual orientation or identity....Hence, the widely held belief that people with a sexual interest in children are a risk to children is rational. Characterizations of this belief as discriminatory trivializes the threat to children posed by paedophilic sexual interest.
A recurrent implication within MAPs scholarship is that child sexual abuse perpetration by pedophiles is driven, to a significant degree, by the stigmatization of pedophilia. A proportion of child sex offenses were explained in the reviewed papers as the behavior of an oppressed sexual minority denied access to necessary mental health care and driven to abuse children by shame and stigma... However, the framing of child sex offenses as the “acting out” of oppressed pedophiles is not only an extraordinarily sympathetic account of sexual violence against children, but it is a poor fit with the forensic record, which has documented the prevalence of premeditated, manipulative grooming and other deliberative patterns of behavior with a systematic focus on overcoming barriers to abuse and enforcing obedience and silence in children (e.g., Winters & Jeglic, 2017).
... For example, although domestic violence is common, it is a stigmatized behavior. Accordingly, men who experience the impulse to victimize an intimate partner typically keep these feelings secret, and experience significant shame (Gadd, 2002). While efforts to prevent violence against women include efforts to engage early with such men, domestic violence prevention does not promote the “destigmatization” of the impulse to physical or sexual violence. To the contrary, public health and social marketing campaigns have sought to reinforce social norms against the acceptability of domestic violence (Jewkes et al., 2015).