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No Stupid Questions @lemmy.world
SnausagesinaBlanket @lemmy.world

What is the attraction to kids?

There has been a ton of CSAM and CP arrests in the US lately, especially from cops and teachers, along with at least one female teacher seducing boys as young as 12. I cannot understand the attraction to kids. Even teens. Do these people think they are having a relationship, or it is somehow okay to take away another human beings' innocence? Is it about sex, power, or WTH is it? Should AI generated CSAM and CP be treated the same as a real person since it promotes the same issues? I am a grandfather, and I am worried about how far this will go with the new AI being able to put anyone's face into a Porno movie too.

It seems to me that a whole new set of worldwide guidelines and laws need to be put into effect asap.

How difficult would it be for AI photo apps to filter out words, so someone cannot make anyone naked?

96 comments

  • I see people here attempting to equate it with a natural attraction and or a fetish. We all have internet access and can look it up. It is in the DSM-5 and ICD-10 both pedophilia and pedophilic disorder. Especially, in this more advanced age of medicine, science and society. If it was natural I believe the corrections would’ve been made and or strongly advocated for, it’s not. What is advocated is using terminology correctly, encouraging those that experience this to feel comfortable to tell their truth and seek help. I believe some of you guys comments are very dangerous and some of the upvotes and downvotes are concerning and makes it difficult to distinguish if you are in support of protecting children. The point is please don’t just blanket label it and compare it to things that aren’t harmful, illegal and consensual.

  • Edit: also don't be sexist, call it what it is rape, not seduction. Just because it was a woman doesn't make it not rape. Calling it anything else is doing a disservice to all of the male victims of female on male rape.

    If the AI porn is depicting real life underage people then it should be and is(in some places) illegal. Now I don't like it and find it reprehensible but if it's not depicting real-life people then it should be legal.

    I think if you are into that then you should be able to seek professional help without a fear of it ruining your professional and personal life, but if you are attracted to kids then it is your moral responsibility and obligation to not work with or be around kids.

    This is a mental issue and it should be treated like one and we should be trying to understand it and find ways to prevent and treat it.

    • I was reading this, and it made me remember how a dude in Australia I believe bought an underage sex doll. It ended up being flagged somehow, and the government arrested the guy when it arrived. I have no idea what happened to the guy.

      Was this guy trying to control his urges by using this hunk of rubber, or is that a crime too? This is very edgy, and I am thinking some countries won't bother with them, while others might incur the death penalty.

  • There are multiple parts to your question. I'm going to try to break it down.

    First, there's a difference between a pedophile and a child molester. Pedophilia is a sexual attraction to children, but it does not, by itself, require the person to take action. A child molester is a person that sexually assaults children. It's the difference between being heterosexual, and being a rapist; you can be straight and still be entirely celibate.

    Child molesters may not be sexually attracted to children at all; some might be, but people that commit rape aren't usually doing it solely for sexual gratification, although sex is definitely part of it.

    We don't know how common pedophilia is because of how heavily stigmatized it is.

    You don't understand how a person could be sexually attracted to children; the simplest way to explain it is to ask if you can understand how a man can be sexually attracted to another man. IIRC, most research indicates that pedophilia probably is a sexual orientation, much like being straight, gay, or bisexual is (except that there is no moral or ethical way for a pedophile to have a sexual or romantic relationship with a child; that is always both predatory and criminal). Do pedophile child molesters believe that they're having a relationship? Some of them, yes. They're able to delude themselves into believing that the child wants the attention and sex (really sexual assault), when they're--probably--the one that has groomed the child in the first place.

    I cannot understand the attraction to kids. Even teens.

    I can. When I was a child, I was sexually attracted to my peers. 14yo kids are having sex with each other, so clearly they're attracted to each other. As an adult, I can see women in their 20s as being sexually attractive, while still having zero interest in them (y'all seem really young, and not in a good way, if y'know what I mean). Sexual maturity isn't a magical thing that happens when you hit 18 (or whatever the age of consent is where you live); it's a sliding scale.

    Should AI generated CSAM and CP be treated the same as a real person since it promotes the same issues?

    I don't think that you can make a person into a pedophile, any more than you can make a person gay. A person either is, or isn't, a pedophile, and CG CSAM isn't going to change that. So the question is, does CG CSAM make it more likely that a pedophile will end up sexually abusing a child? My intuition says that it will not, in the same way that the proliferation of pornography has not made sexual assault of adults more common. (Some research indicates that the availability of pornography has decreased rates of sexual assault.) Child pornography is illegal--in part--because it cannot be produced without causing real harm to children. CG CSAM doesn't cause real harm to any person though; unless there's evidence that it increases the rates of child sexual abuse, I don't think that the squick factor is a reasonable basis for banning it. OTOH, adult pornography has generally led to a relaxation of sexual mores and norms--which I believe is a generally positive thing--and it's possible that CG CSAM would normalize child sexual abuse sufficiently that libertarians would be able to severely weaken age of consent and statutory rape laws. I don't really know, TBH; I'd want to see more research rather than reflexively banning it.

    • Articulate and concise. I like it.

      I don't really have anything more to add, except that we as a society need to make up our collective minds on cg and AI csam/CP soon.

      I definitely think that cg/AI content is less bad (still bad, but less so) because there's no harm being done to real children from it; but those AI image engines needed to be trained on some form of content to be able to generate the images that they do, so I'm not sure how the training images factor in, or what would even be used for training that AI... I know rather little about how AI is trained at the moment, so I'm not sure if it can be done without source csam material or not... IMO, that factors into the morality of the output.

      I definitely agree that sexual preference toward minors (aka paedophilia) is just that, a sexual preference; and that, in and of itself does not make someone a sex offender in the same way that being heterosexual doesn't make you a rapist or other form of sexual "deviant" (or however you want to say that. It's interesting to me to think that paedophiles may have a semi-legal way of getting porn for themselves (which causes no harm to children). I feel a bit bad for paedophiles in that they're basically forced to have relationships with persons that they don't find very sexually attractive, else they break the law. Not bad enough that I think that laws should change our anything, it's just a crap situation. It would be like having a preference towards men, as a man, in a world of heteros. The men are there and you're interested in them, but none of them are interested in you. Almost always that's not the case, there's other homosexual men that exist, no matter how rarely... in the case with pedos, there are exactly zero underage people who they can interact with at all sexually. I still don't think that should change, but at least with the internet, a gay man can go and find porn that interests them. With pedos is literally a crime to even look at, possess, or make any porn that appeals to them.

      I can sympathize with the impossibility of their situation, that's all. For the record, I'm just done cis male with no interest in anyone too young to date. I can recognise their attractive qualities without being attracted to them (speaking mostly about those that have reached their sexual maturity here, who are still not 18 or whatever)... I can understand it, I'm not so hateful to want anyone who feels attraction to young people to die or anything, but young people don't have the experience to understand the situation they're getting into, when they're being mislead or gas lit, etc (though to be fair, a lot of "mature people seem to not know either, but that's another discussion)... Fact is, they're shit out of luck.

      I'm sure many are forced into celibacy just to be lawful. I don't think any grown adult wants to be forced to be celibate; so I can understand the plight. AI/cg porn, tailored to that specific preference may give pedos an outlet that they can utilize to temper their urges and keep them on the right side of the law here. Of course it won't solve the problem entirely, the same way that rapists are still a thing, but it may severely reduce illegal activity and harm to children.

      But I agree, it's a slippery slope (so to speak) because it can easily evolve into lowering the age of consent, and bringing back child marriages and such. Which IMO, isn't a desired outcome. I also don't think that content should intermingle with either social networks or existing porn sites, since it's so specific, it should be relegated to specific sites and not left flapping around the internet. It's also a vast minority of people that are afflicted, so segregation may be a minimum measure to keep things somewhat clean. I know I don't want AI generated CP content mixed in with my usual porn browsing... I'm sure there's plenty of people in the same boat, so IMO that's a minimum. But I'm only one voice in the society, so I don't make the decision; I'm interested to see what decision is finally made and implemented, whenever we get there.

      As a disclaimer: I'm not attracted to underage people. I'm also not a doctor or scientist, or psychologist or anything else. I'm not in favor of anything here, besides society making a decision, and I'm just positing that it could be beneficial to society as a whole. I welcome other opinions, except those by people whom are heavily religious. Good day.

      • I feel a bit bad for paedophiles in that they’re basically forced to have relationships with persons that they don’t find very sexually attractive, else they break the law.

        I've seen a paper--which I unfortunately did not bookmark--that seemed to indicate that most pedophiles were not exclusively pedophiles; many are able to have romantic and sexual relationships with age-appropriate partners. They also tend to have a distinct gender preference for minors (e.g., a person that is a heterosexual and a pedophile will prefer minors that are in-line with their sexual orientation). The ones that are 'pure' pedophiles--not sexually attracted to any adults at all--do not seem to have a gender preference, which kinda makes sense when you consider secondary sex characteristics as markers of physical maturity, e.g., young boys and girls look physically very similar aside from the genitals themselves. Again - I don't have the reference on this saved, so I might be misremembering, or misrepresenting it, but this is what I recall.

        there are exactly zero underage people who they can interact with at all sexually.

        There's a genetic disorder--I believe exclusively in women--where they don't 'grow up'; they don't get very tall, they're largely lacking in secondary sexual characteristics, and I believe that they're infertile. I ran into a woman like that--who was with her partner--at a fetish event. It really gave me whiplash, because at first, second, and third glances she looked like she was 12, at an event that had explicit sexual activity in the open. It took a closer look at her face to realize that she was in her 30s. God bless her, she found someone that was attracted to her, and into the same shit she was into. So, y'know, there's that.

    • I don’t think that you can make a person into a pedophile, any more than you can make a person gay.

      If you really think about it, we've seen arguments like that before. That pornography creates rapists. That violent video games creates murderers. And that's just strictly on the consumption of media.

  • There are two parts to this problem.

    For kids who haven't hit puberty, there is a diagnosable pedophilia disorder. This is mostly genetics. (I'm pretty sure I've met an alpaca that was a pedophile once.) The molester's brain is wired wrong. Nothing to do about that. IMHO, they deserve pity as long as they keep their hands off the children.

    For teenagers, the attraction is the power dynamic. Teens have a rather distorted view on what is attractive, and they tend to be naive and easily manipulated. On top of this, almost all teenagers have next to no impulse control, and many will make very very bad decisions (even knowing that the decision is bad) if doing so might result in some form of dopamine hit via sex/adrenaline rush/video games/peer approval/etc. Adults that seek out teenagers for sexual relationships are bad people who chose to be a groomer. There is no genetic component to being a groomer, and they don't deserve pity.

    Btw, I can flesh out my claim about the alpaca if you want, but it will have to have a tw for adorable fluffy animals suffering a horrifically slow and painful death.

    • Info link: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18686026/

      The DSM-V specifies 2 types of pedophilia, Pedophilic (victim age <11) and Hebophilic (victim ages 11-14). What you are describing for the grooming is generally not pedophilia because "children" older than 15 are generally considered post-pubescent and thus anatomically adults. Their frontal lobes still have a LOT of time needed to cook to completion, but they have the impulse control issues for a reason, from an evolutionary standpoint. Yes, in modern society, "adults" who take advantage of the still-developing prefrontal cortex of a post-pubescent adolescent is a shit human being who doesn't deserve to be a member of society, but they are technically not pedophiles, at least not clinically. Legally is a different story, but that is not a pertinent area of discussion right now.

      Pedophilic and Hebophilic individuals generally do not ever take their impulses to the realm of reality. Most of them actually end up feeling so much shame and remorse over even having the thoughts that they commit suicide. They definitely deserve pity and treatment, not stigmatization and ostracization.

      As to the OP asking about AI art that depicts underage individuals in states of undress or sexual situations, ALL depictions of underage individuals in those contexts are illegal. By the letter of the law, if you draw stick figures on a piece of paper having sex, then label them as children, you have created child pornography. No depiction is legal, no matter the medium. AI-generated, hand drawn, sculpted, watercolors, photos, under the law in (I believe) every state, they are all identical. Personally, I believe that this is asinine and 100% indicates that the purpose of these laws are to adjudicate morality, not "protect the children" as all of the people who push on them claim, but that is just my opinion. Hand-drawn artwork that has no photographic source material and does not depict real people has virtually 0 chance of having caused harm to any children, and AI just knows what the keywords mean in the context of reversing the vaporization of an image. They weren't trained on kiddy porn, the we're trained on pictures of children, and pictures of adults doing their porny thing, so they are able to synthesize the two concepts together.

  • Should AI generated CSAM and CP be treated the same as a real person since it promotes the same issues?

    That's where things get difficult. An episode of Law & Order: SVU tried to tackle this question a long time ago (but with Photoshopped fake CSAM) and the answer was a resounding "I dunno."

    On the one hand, it's disgusting, deplorable, etc. On the other, a fake image means no one was victimized for it.

    Does the content further radicalize these people, creating further risk of them victimizing a child, or does it sate their desires, helping to prevent them from victimizing a child? These questions are incredibly difficult to actually answer, and no answer can ever really be definitive, as you can't really predict how any one person might react.

96 comments