Army of Light
Cappy
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I was talking to people in a comment section about a prison inmate who murdered two fellow inmates who were serving time for sex crimes. Naturally so many people in the section were talking about how he's a hero and that pedophiles have no rights and that they deserve to be extra judicially killed. I was one of the few people that piped in saying maybe that's not a great attitude which of course led to people calling me a pedophile.
The "pedophiles have no rights rhetoric" is very dangerous. It's a slippery slope. Vigilanteism is an act of hubris, because violence is fun and it doesn't stop being fun when the person receiving the violence doesn't actually deserve the violence.
In particular what's dangerous about this rhetoric, is that while you and I might define a pedophile with a sensible fixed definition, it can lead to the far right blanket branding all marginalized people as pedophiles to justify take away all rights from them.
Right now we're seeing LGBT people, and trans people in particular, being branded with the label of 'pedophile" and "groomer" irrespective of any behavior they have actually engaged in in order to justify taking away their rights which could lead to genocide.
One of the hallmarks of a moral panic is that a label such as "pedophile" or "Satan worshiper" or "critical race theory" loses its fixed definition and becomes a proxy for every social conflict. If pedophiles have no rights at all, then people branded as pedophiles have no rights.
So then some bad faith actors will have an incentive to blanket brand everyone they don't like irrespective of behavior, as pedophiles because then they can bypass things like due process and encourage terrorism and vigilantism
Oh and before anyone does this, when you respond to things like this saying "you are defending them therefore, you must be a pedophile then." You are illustrating the exact point I am calling out. Not only am I not defending them, using accusations of pedophilia as a proxy for other social conflicts or disagreements is the exact thing that I am calling out.
That leads me to talking about some of my abusers in the past. This is personal for me. As some of you know, I'm a survivor of an abusive relationship, the person that I used to date has a history of accusing not only me but every other ex of hers of doing things either she did, or of accusing them of sex crimes. It was also a frequent libelous accusation level against me by kiwi farms based off of nonsense evidence. They actually started from the core premise that I'm at pedo because they didn't like me and looked for anything out of decades of posting history that might look a little iffy. I'm not the only one she's targeted this way and I have lots of stories about people she has blackmailed with nonsense. In the time that I was with her I've seen her scam people out of money, including me and when she can't scam people anymore with her son stories she starts making libulous accusations.
Here's another problem too, in reality we can't do anything at all about a pedophile to stop them until we catch them, until we know that they did what they did. The people that get away with this sort of thing are in positions of trust, they often know their victims. They've built fortresses of social protection like Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, Josh Duggar, or Jimmy Saville. There's a whole cottage industry, even after the me too movement, of publicists, libel lawyers, crooked tabloids who buy up stories and kill them. These institutional abilities silence victims.
Counterintuitively these stigma and claiming that these pedophiles are inhuman monsters with no rights at all makes it harder to catch them. If a pedophile is inhuman then it makes it harder for you to believe that someone close to you or someone in a position of trust that you like may have that kind of dark secret.
Josh Duggar was a member of a cult that was being groomed for Republican politics. It was in the interest of the cult to cover up his crimes. They sent him to therapy but they sent him to therapy with the same cult that gave him the distorted values in the first place. Once his crimes became as extensive as they were, because shit rolls uphill, they had an incentive to continue covering up his crimes, rather than turning him into the police immediately. The same dynamic was involved with Jimmy Savile and Jerry Sandusky. These people's crimes stained the institutions that they were associated with and those institutions had an incentive to cover up the crimes rather than hitting the brakes.
It goes back to that stigma of making them out to be inhuman. The sad truth is that they are not inhuman. Their crimes are all too human, they are evil. Non-humans don't do evil. Because there's no middle ground between innocent and pure evil, there's no compromise, no gradient and so the cover-ups happen. And so victims are doubted and so these problems are allowed to fester.
This issue also fuels things like Qanon. Qanon is silly sauce. It's also a dangerous lie that nearly caused a coup and an overthrow of the United States government. People's ability to sort nonsense from sense gets clouded when their natural sympathy towards child victims of sexual abuse comes into conflict with alleged pedophiles. When you point out the holes in their baloney worldview, they think you are with the pedophiles or some kind of sympathizer.
So yes, in my view pedophiles are humans and they do have a right not to be killed in prison. I don't know what the solution is for their particular deviance or their hungers. I don't know what exactly is wrong with them but letting prison inmates just wantonly kill them is not a good answer. Nobody should be getting killed in jail. Everyone has rights. If we start saying that some people don't have any rights it's a slippery slope. Vigilantism is an act of hubris that doesn't stop at the worst of the worst. The notion that these people are inhuman actually makes it harder to catch them and causes institutions to protect them. We also had to consider how this attitude fuels things like qanon and how many reactionaries who own guns consider all LGBT people and trans people in particular to be groomers and pedos by default.
The "pedophiles have no rights rhetoric" is very dangerous. It's a slippery slope. Vigilanteism is an act of hubris, because violence is fun and it doesn't stop being fun when the person receiving the violence doesn't actually deserve the violence.
In particular what's dangerous about this rhetoric, is that while you and I might define a pedophile with a sensible fixed definition, it can lead to the far right blanket branding all marginalized people as pedophiles to justify take away all rights from them.
Right now we're seeing LGBT people, and trans people in particular, being branded with the label of 'pedophile" and "groomer" irrespective of any behavior they have actually engaged in in order to justify taking away their rights which could lead to genocide.
One of the hallmarks of a moral panic is that a label such as "pedophile" or "Satan worshiper" or "critical race theory" loses its fixed definition and becomes a proxy for every social conflict. If pedophiles have no rights at all, then people branded as pedophiles have no rights.
So then some bad faith actors will have an incentive to blanket brand everyone they don't like irrespective of behavior, as pedophiles because then they can bypass things like due process and encourage terrorism and vigilantism
Oh and before anyone does this, when you respond to things like this saying "you are defending them therefore, you must be a pedophile then." You are illustrating the exact point I am calling out. Not only am I not defending them, using accusations of pedophilia as a proxy for other social conflicts or disagreements is the exact thing that I am calling out.
That leads me to talking about some of my abusers in the past. This is personal for me. As some of you know, I'm a survivor of an abusive relationship, the person that I used to date has a history of accusing not only me but every other ex of hers of doing things either she did, or of accusing them of sex crimes. It was also a frequent libelous accusation level against me by kiwi farms based off of nonsense evidence. They actually started from the core premise that I'm at pedo because they didn't like me and looked for anything out of decades of posting history that might look a little iffy. I'm not the only one she's targeted this way and I have lots of stories about people she has blackmailed with nonsense. In the time that I was with her I've seen her scam people out of money, including me and when she can't scam people anymore with her son stories she starts making libulous accusations.
Here's another problem too, in reality we can't do anything at all about a pedophile to stop them until we catch them, until we know that they did what they did. The people that get away with this sort of thing are in positions of trust, they often know their victims. They've built fortresses of social protection like Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, Josh Duggar, or Jimmy Saville. There's a whole cottage industry, even after the me too movement, of publicists, libel lawyers, crooked tabloids who buy up stories and kill them. These institutional abilities silence victims.
Counterintuitively these stigma and claiming that these pedophiles are inhuman monsters with no rights at all makes it harder to catch them. If a pedophile is inhuman then it makes it harder for you to believe that someone close to you or someone in a position of trust that you like may have that kind of dark secret.
Josh Duggar was a member of a cult that was being groomed for Republican politics. It was in the interest of the cult to cover up his crimes. They sent him to therapy but they sent him to therapy with the same cult that gave him the distorted values in the first place. Once his crimes became as extensive as they were, because shit rolls uphill, they had an incentive to continue covering up his crimes, rather than turning him into the police immediately. The same dynamic was involved with Jimmy Savile and Jerry Sandusky. These people's crimes stained the institutions that they were associated with and those institutions had an incentive to cover up the crimes rather than hitting the brakes.
It goes back to that stigma of making them out to be inhuman. The sad truth is that they are not inhuman. Their crimes are all too human, they are evil. Non-humans don't do evil. Because there's no middle ground between innocent and pure evil, there's no compromise, no gradient and so the cover-ups happen. And so victims are doubted and so these problems are allowed to fester.
This issue also fuels things like Qanon. Qanon is silly sauce. It's also a dangerous lie that nearly caused a coup and an overthrow of the United States government. People's ability to sort nonsense from sense gets clouded when their natural sympathy towards child victims of sexual abuse comes into conflict with alleged pedophiles. When you point out the holes in their baloney worldview, they think you are with the pedophiles or some kind of sympathizer.
So yes, in my view pedophiles are humans and they do have a right not to be killed in prison. I don't know what the solution is for their particular deviance or their hungers. I don't know what exactly is wrong with them but letting prison inmates just wantonly kill them is not a good answer. Nobody should be getting killed in jail. Everyone has rights. If we start saying that some people don't have any rights it's a slippery slope. Vigilantism is an act of hubris that doesn't stop at the worst of the worst. The notion that these people are inhuman actually makes it harder to catch them and causes institutions to protect them. We also had to consider how this attitude fuels things like qanon and how many reactionaries who own guns consider all LGBT people and trans people in particular to be groomers and pedos by default.
