Reply to S/O why is sexual molestation of children so common?

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[quote=Anonymous]The overwhelming majority of people on sexual offender registries did not abuse children at all. They are there for crimes against other adults, public urination, or something they did 20 years ago that may well fall under the "Romeo and Juliet laws" today.

Of the rest, most abused teenagers, not young children. Very few people are sexually attracted to prepubescent children. But by the time a child is 12, he or she is sexually attractive to the majority of the population. That is a biological fact. This means that sexual abuse of an older child is not the sign of a psychiatric disorder, but simply a violation of moral norms, norms that are a fairly recent invention and not even standard in most parts of the world today.

It is right and proper that these norms should exist in today's society. Personally I support an age of consent of at least 17 (with "Romeo and Juliet" exceptions.) But because teenagers develop at different rates, not just physically but mentally, and because these norms are recent and non-universal, there is a lot of grey area there. The law does not draw any distinctions between forcible and consensual, but most people on the street are hesitant to state that every time an adult engages in sexual behavior with someone under 18, it is rape. Movies and TV shows grapple with this all the time.

So even though, in an absolute majority of cases, a sexual relationship between a teenager and an adult is unhealthy and damaging to the teenager, and in some cases, it is every bit as abhorrent as the rape of a small child, I think the fact that gray areas do exist, and the fact that the media often treats this in a kind of "wink wink nudge nudge" fashion, might make it easier for abusers to justify their actions to themselves.  [/quote]

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