[aljgz]

Are there statistics backing up the "VAST" majority claim?

While on statistics, I wonder, are there reliable statistics about child abuse of different types? Studying correlations with other social metrics, like sex education, liberal/conservative, policies regarding prostitution, and others can provide support for/against decisions.

Not that I hope these will impact people's and governments' choices, but I want to challenge my intuitions.

[IshKebab]

It's probably impossible to get reliable statistics about that given how both groups are trying to keep everything secret. But you can consider how many paedophiles there are vs how many horny teenagers there are. Based on that it would be extremely surprising if he was wrong.

The real question is what happens when a horny teenager sends another a nude. There definitely have been insane cases where they get stitched up for creating child porn. I don't know if that's the normal outcome today though.

[mrkeen]

That's the fun of it. Try to find out? Straight to prison.

[aljgz]

Really sad. I read a lot of psychology. But I've never encountered psychology of child sexual abuse (I know there is if I look it up, but that's my point, it should be shared around, discussed, challenged).

Why would some adults find kids sexually attractive? Is it abusive/aggressive behavior manifesting itself in sexuality? Or is it sexuality channeled in the wrong direction? If it's the second, is it out of desperation, and would happen less if the culture makes it easier for them to satisfy their needs with adults, or would it happen regardless? On the victim's side, are the shy and less social ones more in danger, or the socially active ones? From my social scientist friends I hear a lot that most child sexual abuse is domestic. What are measures that a society can take to prevent these, without turning the society into a surveillance state, which will ultimately harm everyone more, including the children? What can be done to make sure children speak up, so that such behavior is dealt with at the beginning (and maybe while the more terrible things have not happened yet), and not turn into a multi-year childhood trauma?

What are signs (and early signs) on the abuser's side and the child's side? How to deal with these signs?

[ebbi]

I can't reply with stats, but I sometimes get in a bit of a loop watching the 'pred vs catcher' videos on social media.

After having watched what would probably be hundreds (across the US and UK), you start to see some patterns on offenders:

- The ones that are obviously mentally ill/brain development issues - they're adults but act and talk like a child. With some of the interactions with this cohort, some/many don't even realise what they're doing is wrong.

- The ones that seem ok from a developmental perspective, but are physically undesirable from societal norms and don't have a legal outlet - whether that's because of looks/weight/age/disabilities etc. This is where you see many old married men - probably not being fulfilled at home.

- The ones that have a fetish for a type and will go to any lengths after not being able to fulfil this legally (this is where, I think, immigrants over-index: they have a fetish for 'white' women, and can't fulfil their desires legally, so try with the most vulnerable)

- The ones that seem mentally and physically ok, but you can glean from their interactions that they are cold-blooded, ruthless, know what they're doing is wrong. These are the ones that take many calculated steps to cover their trails. When caught, they show barely any regret, and when they do, it's only regret because they were caught.

Then obviously I think there's a class of them that don't come up on these sites, but we can get a glimpse of it from the likes of the Epstein files. The rich. The famous. The ones that think they can do whatever they want. How pervasive this is in society is anyone's guess, but it seems like there is a dark underworld for this class. A Netflix documentary comes to mind about two boys who were trafficked by their parents to wealthy elites in the UK.

Obviously what differentiates all of these to people that may sit in one of those cohorts but don't resort to this despicable behavior is some underlying predisposition to predatory behavior.

[aljgz]

Thanks, as a software engineer, always a problem solver, who just follows an dreams of solutions to social problems (I've once led a software project for one of these, but not more), breaking down the mega category of abusers into subcategories with mechanics of their actions changes my mindset from useless anger into a problem solving one.

[ebbi]

Yeah, I started watching those videos with uncontrollable rage to thinking about how can society change things to avoid/minimize this.