What Do You Do With A Pedophile?

Right now, we're doing nothing.

Photo by Jonathan Borba

Lionel B. taught music at a public high school in New York. He packed his own lunches, wore plaid button-downs, and played showtunes on the piano. Well-intentioned friends tried fixing him up with single women, but his scant handful of dates resulted in Lionel wrinkling his nose and complaining, “She’s too old.”

Despite, or perhaps because of, Lionel’s physical unattractiveness (in looks, he most closely resembled “Pat,” an androgynous fictional character created by Julia Sweeney and performed on Saturday Night Live), he preferred casting his nets in more exotic waters. The Internet provided him with ample opportunity to interact with young Russian girls. At the age of forty-three, Lionel felt himself ready to “settle down” with a teen bride, and here was an array of them, willing to meet him if he made the long trip overseas. He’d tried it before with less than satisfactory results and a net loss of tens of thousands of dollars, but hope springs eternal, and one girl in particular had recently caught his interest.

Having been warned not to show up empty-handed, Lionel, an inveterate penny-pincher, purchased off-brand cigarettes and alcohol, which he then presented to the girl’s parents. The girl herself, a young-looking seventeen-year-old, didn’t make eye contact, preferring to sit demurely on the couch next to her parents. Lionel was nonetheless smitten. He bought her a plane ticket and invited her to live with him in the U.S.

Anxiously, he awaited her arrival at the airport, hoping she’d appreciate the pains he’d taken to decorate her bedroom. Instead of plain white walls, the bedroom now sported Britney Spears’ posters, pink pillow shams, and teddy bears in tutus. In his mind, he was a distinguished older gentleman, and she was a doe-eyed young girl. It never occurred to Lionel that what he was doing was gross and morally indefensible. He wasn’t a predator, just a benefactor. He was saving her from a lifetime of poverty and borscht.

The girl barely spoke to him when she arrived. At the apartment, she sped into the bedroom and locked the door. Nothing he said could coax her out again. Lionel slept disconsolately in a second bedroom. He figured she just needed time. What a shock it must have been for her, he reasoned, going from the arid, wind-whipped hinterlands of Russia to the blaring car horns, Broadway lights, and and sophisticated glitter of New York City.

This went on for several weeks, Lionel pleading with her to come out of the bedroom, and her mulish refusals. Then he came home from work one day, and she was gone. The window ledge was littered with cigarette butts. Empty vodka bottles lay under the bed. A few days later, the phone bill arrived, all $5,000 of it in long-distance calls to Russia.

Instead of blaming himself, Lionel blamed her. He was the victim in all this. She’d fleeced him and split. And while this is a true story, is it hardly representative of the most heinous of sexual abuse cases. I chose it to illustrate the ways in which men like Lionel rationalize and justify morally opprobrious behavior. There may not have been explicit sexual abuse, but the intent was clear. A young Russian girl was the closest Lionel thought he could get to the kind of cowed immigrant submission he was looking for in a sexual partner. As a male, Lionel felt entitled to a girl’s body. He was trying to help her, right? He was a hero.

Photo by Horacio Olavarria

Technically, Lionel is an ephebophile, a condition referring to an attraction to older adolescents around the ages of 15-18. A hebephile is a sexual preference for children in early adolescence, usually between the ages of 11-14. A pedophile is marked by a preference for prepubescent children. A person can be one, none, or all three.

These predilections are inborn, sometimes associated with left-handedness and minor facial deformities, such as having an abnormally high palate or non-detached earlobes (oddly). A possibility exists that prenatal exposure to viruses, alcohol or drugs, obstetric complications, or nutritional deficiencies might be contributing factors to the biological underpinnings of pedophilia. In other words, sexual preference, like orientation, is not a choice. Some people are simply wired differently.

Not all pedophiles act on their impulses. Many go their whole lives without downloading pedophilic images or touching a child in a sexual way. They know the urges are there; they just don’t act on them. Some lead seemingly normal lives, get married, raise families. But others are driven to prey on children, regardless of the consequences to themselves or others.

When a non-pedophile sees a child, there’s usually an urge to protect, to nurture. But true pedophiles aren’t like that. For them, a child is a sexual lure, much in the same way that a shoe fetishist sees women’s high heels erotically. The difference is a shoe fetish hurts no one, whereas pedophilia devastates its victims and ruins lives.

For the record, I have no empathy for pedophiles. I was the victim of one. Between the ages of 2 and 6, I was regularly abused by a family “friend.” I didn’t have the vocabulary to describe what was happening to me, so it wasn’t until a few weeks before my seventh birthday that I finally figured out how to tell my mother what was going on. Until then, I just didn’t know how to put my revulsion into words. A child knows nothing of the adult world until she is prematurely and unnaturally forced into it. But for those of us who experience this kind of victimization, life is never the same again. The problems it creates last well into adulthood, sometimes forever.

Perhaps my lack of empathy for pedophiles is wrong. After all, they didn’t choose to be this way. But I want to be completely upfront about my personal biases and limitations in this article.

The reason I’m addressing the issue now is because the advent of #MeToo and #TimesUp has released a floodgate of long-kept secrets. The shame, and most importantly, the silence of sexual abuse victims is abating. Powerful, inspiring public figures like American gymnasts Simone Biles, Rachael Denhollander, Jeanette Antolin, Jessica Howard, Jamie Dantzscher, McKayla Maroney, and others came forward about the excoriating sexual abuse they suffered at the hands of team doctor Larry Nassar, who is now in prison for sexually assaulting at least 265 young women and girls under the guise of medical treatment. The true extent of financier Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual predations is still being uncovered. On September 27th, 2021, a jury found R&B mogul Robert Kelly guilty on nine counts, including racketeering, sexual exploitation of a child, kidnapping, bribery, and sex trafficking. The fact that it took so many years to get a conviction has its roots not only in a deeply flawed judicial system, but systemic racism and sexism. Read Kelly’s wiki. It will make you sick.

We scan the headlines, we know the problem of pederasty is global, horrific, and all too often religiously sanctified, but we never discuss what drives the urge to molest children. The offender is “other,” a monster, and I’m certainly not here to argue about that, but it doesn’t get us any closer to finding a solution.

We need one.

Chemical and Surgical Castration. While I quake before the enormity of letting the State determine one’s fate in this arena, repeat offenders must be rendered incapable of reoffending. Are we to lock them up for 20, 40, 60 years? Eventually, a recidivist will be released into society, and they will offend again because prison corrects nothing. How do we prevent that?

In 2011, Korea introduced using chemical castration on sexual offenders. But there is no clear cause-and-effect relationship between hormone levels and sexual offending, and chemical castration does little to mitigate the psycho-sexual factors that drive pedophilia. It also costs nearly $5000 per person annually for medication and monitoring for a treatment that may be more punitive than corrective.

Chemical castration is also no longer effective once it’s been discontinued, and it comes with considerable long-term side effects, such as cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, and anemia, among others. Incapacitating a recidivist is one thing; slowly killing him is another.

Surgical castration, on the other hand, reportedly produces definitive results, even in repeat pedophilic offenders, by reducing recidivism rates to 2% to 5% compared with expected rates of 50%. But again, is the State capable of making the correct determinations here? 4.1% of people currently on death row are likely to be innocent according to the National Academy of Sciences. Do we like those odds? At least with informed consent, surgically castrating a man could, perhaps, be used as an alternative to life in prison.

One of many reasons pedophiles don’t ask for help managing their urges is because by law in the U.S., health professionals are required to notify authorities if they suspect one of their patients is a danger to children. As logical as this law sounds on the face of it, sickness thrives in secrecy. With nowhere to turn, American pederasts are left alone to monitor their own behavior—usually with disastrous results.

Germany, however, is taking a different approach. Project Dunkenfeld is an organization that provides confidential, free therapy to people who struggle with pedophilia to try to ensure that they never act on their impulses. The program revolves around one guiding principle: that child molestation and pedophilia are not synonymous. Such efforts are new, and the effectiveness of these types of programs have yet to be determined, but merely incarcerating offenders after the fact is doing nothing to protect future victims.

German ad campaign that roughly translates to: Do you like children more than you want to?

And yet, what lawmaker is brave (or foolhardy) enough to lob that political hot potato at an electorate which fears and despises pedophiles? The only way that’s going to happen is if there’s a grassroots effort organized by people whose consciousness was raised by articles like this one, people who want to protect children, even if that means helping pedophiles.

Yes, I hate the sin. And yes, I hate the sinner. But my hatred of and desire to punish pedophiles, hebephiles, and ephebophiles who act on their impulses isn’t solving any problems. We must get past our own revulsion, change our nation’s short-sighted disclosure laws, and try to help these people before they offend or reoffend.

To do nothing is to be complicit in their perversion.

Do you have some thoughts you’d like to share on this subject? If so, please leave your comments below.