Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Born This Way: Sympathy and Science for Those Who Want to Have Sex with Children


 *WARNING*   The Article you are about to read contains disturbing content, and may be offensive to some.


It’s not easy to listen to Terry talk about the time he had sex with a seven-year-old girl. But after his psychotherapist put us in touch, he agreed to lay it all out for me during a phone call and email, and I was enthralled the way one might stare at a man falling from a bridge. Terry is 38, a small-business owner, and deeply religious—he ends all our correspondence by saying, “Blessings to you, Cord”—but back then when it happened Terry was 20 and a meth head. He was living with his then-wife, his marriage to whom had made him the co-guardian of her two nieces and a nephew. The one niece was a baby, but the other was seven, and it wasn’t long before Terry, addicted and in a marriage he calls “abusive,” fell for his niece and began a sexual relationship with her.
It started with him walking around the house naked with an erection, making sure to amble past the little girl and inspire her curiosity. After doing that a couple times, Terry began to masturbate with the door open. When his niece would come to watch, Terry would tell her that what they were doing was a secret that she couldn’t tell anyone. “In my mind, I had the thought that I would never hurt her and that she would grow up trusting me,” Terry said. He says he wanted her to look up to him.
The third time Terry masturbated in front of his niece, he did it while she was in the room, and he played a pornographic movie on the TV. “Do you want to try what they’re doing?” he asked her, motioning to the woman riding the man onscreen. His niece said yes, and she took off her shorts before straddling him. To avoid getting too graphic, Terry said he knew almost immediately that he was going to injure the girl if he went any further—”she was so small,” is how he puts it. “That’s when the reality clicked in and I grabbed her and lifted her off of me and sat her next to me on the couch,” he says. “I got up and walked out of the room saying, ‘Lord, what am I doing! Lord, forgive me for what I have done!’”
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When Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky was arrested last year and charged with 52 counts of molesting young boys, America’s universal hatred for pedophiles was once again put on prominent display. A society is defined by what it despises as much as what it loves, and though the United States has a history of a great many scorned communities, none is as broadly reviled as men who have sex with children. When Sandusky was finally convicted earlier this year, Twitter exploded with people wishing for him to be raped or killed while incarcerated, both of which are good possibilities in our country’s prison system. Outside of jail, it’s not uncommon for average citizens to harass and assault pedophiles, crimes which courts have been known to ignore.
Then there’s the problem of finding homes for pedophiles who are arrested and eventually put back into communities. In Florida, where Miami-Dade County has grown increasingly restrictive about where people who commit sexual crimes can live, the department of corrections once housed a small group of pedophiles under a bridge, like real-life trolls. Elsewhere in America, with neighborhoods both informed and alarmed by a growing number of sex-offender tracking sites, it’s now become easier than ever to harass and intimidate a pedophile in your neighborhood until he moves away. But to where? Nobody seems to care as long as it’s not near them.
In an ABC News article from 2003, a corrections officer from Los Angeles told reporter Michael S. James that imprisoned pedophiles “usually don’t make it” without protective custody. Leslie Walker, a prisoner’s rights activist, told James, “[Child sex offenders] are at risk of being murdered, having their food taken, having their cells defecated and urinated in. Their life is truly a living hell.” Good, most people will say. But there is a growing number of researchers, many of them out of Canada, whose work suggests that pedophilia is an illness deserving of the public’s sympathy the way any brain disorder is. Some of the scientists say pedophilia is a sexual orientation, meaning that it’s unchangeable, regardless of how much jail time or beatings or therapy someone is dealt. Others have reason to believe that pedophiles are born that way, and that some of them will suffer through entire lives without hurting a single child. If this research proves to be correct, it should help shape both our public policy and our public attitude, so that we’re protecting kids while also protecting pedophiles from angry mobs, cellmates, and themselves.          >>>MORE AT SOURCE<<<
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Thank You JAM


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