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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   25317 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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you actually have to make an argument about the tradeoff between potential pedophile's freedom and the rights of children to not be abused, and I do not see anyone in modern western society being willing to touch that with a 100 ft barge pole.

Oh, you're just clinging on to some scraps of believing in general sanity. They're already working on that trade-off:

Results from these broader healthcare practitioner studies revealed that MAPs’ abovementioned skepticism concerning therapists’ willingness to treat them and MAPs’ fear of being stigmatized or (unnecessarily) reported to legal authorities may not be unfounded. Mental health professionals and students in training indicated to being willing to report MAPs to legal authorities due to explicit stigmatization and/or a lack of knowledge about the administrative framework concerning reporting standards (e.g., Beggs Christofferson, 2019; Stephens et al., 2021; Walker et al., 2022). For example, clinicians’ decisions to officially report a client who disclosed sexual interest in children were a function of the number of client risk factors (i.e., child sexual exploitation material use, access to children), although, even in the absence of any risk factor, 12% of the clinicians indicated that they would report their client (Stephens et al., 2021). In a study by Beggs Christofferson (2019), 14% of the surveyed therapists considered reporting a client who disclosed sexual interest in children, even if this meant to break the relevant confidentiality law. Among social service students, 54% agreed to report “a pedophile” client (no sexual offense was mentioned) to the police (strikingly, this rate was reduced to 7% when the case in question was labeled as someone with sexual interest in children but who never has committed any offense against children; Walker et al., 2022).

You see? Minor Attracted Persons (please do not say 'paedophile', that is incorrect terminology) are reluctant to go to therapists because of fears around mandatory reporting. And the therapists we surveyed said they'd be willing to report clients they deemed dangerous. So the conclusion is... therapists have to learn to be more understanding and accepting, stop stigmatising, and drop the threat of reporting people to the cops.

In terms of therapist competency, only between roughly a quarter and 43% of practitioners answered correctly that pedophilia is a sexual attraction to children below the age of 11 and such general knowledge deficiencies about aspects related to minor attraction were associated with stigmatizing attitudes (Lievesley et al., 2022).

Even among the more enlightened Swiss, there are still those bad old stigmatising attitudes:

In terms of non-offending MAPs’ perceived dangerousness to children, the majority of Swiss therapists (58.8%) affirmed that a strong link exists between sexual interest in children and child sexual abuse and roughly one in five agreed that sexual interest in children will sooner or later lead to child sexual abuse (20.1%) or that many who have sexual interests in children will also have sex with children (19.4%; Table 2). Concerning punitive attitudes the large majority (84.7%) agreed that non-offending MAPs should not be allowed to work with children, and 40.3% believed that they should undergo mandatory psychotherapy. Roughly a quarter (26%) affirmed that citizens should be informed in case sexual offenders against children move into their neighborhood. However, only a minority opted for psychopharmacological “castration” (8.7%), preventive detention (6.8%), or openly accessible sexual offender registries (4.7%). Finally, aspects that related to deviancy were strongly affirmed by Swiss outpatient therapists: 80.3% believed that non-offending MAPs needed treatment, 57.1% agreed that these patients were sick, and 48.9% ruled out that they were normal with just rare sexual inclinations.

Therapists should be trained that MAPs are the No True Scotsman:

Rather than pondering the yet dominating question in MAP treatment of whether someone with pedohebephilic sexual interests will victimize children, therapists should focus on the question under which specific boundary conditions their clients might (or, importantly, might not) pose a risk to children and how these specific dynamic risk factors can be therapeutically dealt with – if necessary at all in an individual case. Given the fact that child sexual abuse is prevalently committed also by non-pedohebephilic individuals (e.g., Schmidt et al., 2013), this implies adequate knowledge about relevant risk factors. Such basic criminal psychological facts, however, are not part of current general clinical training curriculae in psychology or medicine and should help to keep the prevailing risk focus in check. This may be conducive to setting the stage for recognizing other concerns that lead MAPs to seek therapeutic help.

See? If someone abuses a child, then he was never a real MAP to begin with, and no MAP is likely to go on to abuse children (or at least, very unlikely except under specific circumstances which you should recognise and help them manage). So don't think about "are children at risk here?" when dealing with a client, or else you're just a big ol' meanie!

Definitely someone struggling with this, who hasn't done anything yet, and who is seeking therapy to change or at least sublimate their attraction should be able to get help and shouldn't be scared off by "They'll tell the cops and I'll be labelled a sex offender and my life will be ruined and a mob will try and beat me up or even kill me". But "shift to thinking about dynamic risk factors" will lead to the same attitudes that resulted in "violent rapist who assaulted two women and still has all functional genitals of course should go into a woman's prison as she was a real woman all along, even while raping cis women with her feminine penis and even though she didn't come out as trans until being prosecuted for those crimes". Yeah, no.

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