Poll Is pedophilia an illness?

[Sideways]

It's not actually addressing any problems outside of how a victim might individually feel in the moment.

I’d still consider rehabilitation to be a form of punishment, because there’s a massive loss of freedom when a person is ordered into medical treatment. You only need a bad experience with the medical profession to conceptualise that pretty easily I think.

If the police refuse to keep our community safe, and actively contribute to making it unsafe, then what else are we expected to do?

Your perspective on vigilantism seems to be at odds with your view about punishment, though…as though it’s not ethical for the criminal justice system to be punitive, but if that system is ineffective, then it would be okay for vigilantes to take punitive action…

 

[Weemie]

I’d still consider rehabilitation to be a form of punishment

That is very much not the definition of punishment. If it were, we would say things like "restorative justice works by punishing offenders." Which we don't. We have a different name for justice that involves punishment - retributive justice.

as though it’s not ethical for the criminal justice system to be punitive, but if that system is ineffective, then it would be okay for vigilantes to take punitive action…

Again, no - my stance is that it is acceptable for vigilantism to act within the best interests of the community, and to take action that makes their community safer - if the community's system of justice is ineffectual and does not take those actions.

My actions were not punitive, though I suspect he perceived that they were. But they weren't - I had no interest in making him experience pain because he was an offender, or in attempting to deter him from offending by making him experience pain. They were in effort to remove an actively offending pedophile from teaching at a school where he had access to hundreds of victims in his real life. However, as I have also repeatedly stated, these actions were not OK.

1) I didn't even try to actually to get the police involved (which means that despite everything, it is almost guaranteed that he continued to offend because he was physically able to do so, since he wasn't in prison - at least as a direct result of my actions) and 2) it is within the realm of possibility at the time I took those actions, that he wasn't even a pedophile. (There is precedent for this - for example, the case I stated where someone's spouse wanted revenge and framed them.)

This is where vigilantism can fail, when people take action against a person that they are not completely certain is causing harm. The only consolation I can take from this series of events is that his employer found my proof credible enough to fire him (his name and face were associated with his CSEM account, so to me it was fairly rock-solid) and the police were likely involved at that time.

Getting people's families involved seems like a "low blow" intended purely as an act of vengeance, but it isn't. It's one of the only actions I could take as a private citizen that had a real chance to impact the wellbeing of the people around him. I was very young at the time I was doing this and if I came across something like this now, I would attempt to contact the police first. But certainly, if the police did nothing, it would be justified to inform the people around him of what I had discovered.

That is just common sense. Nothing to do with punishment.

 

[Sideways]

That is very much not the definition of punishment. If it were

Ah, there it is. That’s likely a cultural difference. Punishment for quite a lot of crimes here is rehabilitation, and it’s very definitely seen as a punishment, insofar as the offender has no choice but to participate (loss of freedom, obligatory participation in treatment, etc as the punitive element).

 

[Weemie]

Punishment for quite a lot of crimes here is rehabilitation, and it’s very definitely seen as a punishment, insofar as the offender has no choice but to participate (loss of freedom, obligatory participation in treatment, etc as the punitive element).

I see, then it would make sense that my initial statements could be interpreted as not desiring offenders to experience any action that they perceive as painful. No, that's definitely not the case. I'm not particularly interested in how offenders perceive the actions taken against them to ensure the wellbeing and safety of their community. In fact I suspect quite a lot of them do perceive it as punitive, because many of these people have a serious victim complex.

The whole "look at what they've done to me," la la la. It's not every person, but I'm sure it's a lot of them. The fact that an offender may require a loss of their personal freedoms to keep other people safe does not cause me to lose sleep at night. That's simply what happens when you cannot coexist with other humans correctly. We do, as they say, live in a society.

But I do believe that causing them pain deliberately, for only the purpose of them experiencing pain - or as an attempt to deter them from offending again - by saying "if you offend, we will cause you pain" - is not assistive. In North America, but particularly the United States, the model of justice is definitively retributive. Much of our culture here (in North America) is "if you do something wrong, you'll get yours" - and that's seen as honorable. Here, the popular conception of the whole purpose of jail and prisons is to cause suffering as a deterrent to commit crime.

Especially in the USA, where people go to prison for almost minor infractions (or infractions that are not violent against others, like drug possession/use). Unfortunately, as the science indicates, it just doesn't work. I'm in Canada, where we do try to put forth the idea that justice should be restorative, but our justice system is incredibly broken in the other direction - most of the time, nothing really happens to these people (and in prison, the environment is quite punitive and traumatic) and they get out and continue to cause harm to others.

I don't think that is right - if we want to claim we are rehabilitative, then we need to actually rehabilitate people.

And if we can't, then we need to make sure that they stop having the ability to hurt others in their community.