The Loli Debate.
This article was sparked by an interesting live stream by Manic the Manic Mechanic.
He has some interest topics of debate and is worth a watch.
In this stream, Grimsy @grimsyneverdies takes the position that because people who enjoy Lolicon they are projecting their wish to commit a contact offence against actual children. The logic is straightforward enough and I can see no reason against that type of view. He follows on by claiming that Lolicon is simply “glorified child pornography”. Again, logically, not an unreasonable position.
MisterAnime343 @revys_husband does a poor job in countering the base position by quoting a specific anime (I am not familiar with any of this so, if I get wrong anything wrong, I apologise) then making an attack on Grimsy’s character right out of the blocks which does not in any way challenge the logic.
The debate then descends because it does not appear that MisterAnime343 is in any way acting in good faith and trying to follow the logic, so there are very few points after this that help in the wider debate of Lolicon.
I put my own position in a tweet on Manic’s thread.
The options in his poll are quite interesting. They reflect the current societal zeitgeist in relation to those who have an interest, either in children directly or those that have an interest more abstracted out such as the depiction of children in cartoon form.
I understand the reaction, and in a lot of ways agree, but a lot of the vitriol is borne of the perception of the person attacking rather than the actual situation. I remember a tv sketch where a father is upset because a paedophile does not find his child attractive. The father is bewildered how even a paedophile can have specific sexual preferences, but this is very much the case. If you consider all sexual preferences, not everyone has the same. There may be groups you can lump together because they share similar proclivities but that is about it.
This being the case, I find it difficult to agree that because people who masturbate to Lolicon are by extension paedophiles.
For some it may be an avenue to actually NOT offending. If you look at the work of Michael Seto of the University of Toronto, he found there appears to be two distinct populations of paedophiles. One that are able to satisfy their urges with alternatives such as child-like dolls or artificial child pornography (i.e. Lolicon or other depictions in art). There are obvious problems in terms of the measuring the size of each group due to data collection issues (if you are an offender are you really going to put any potential court case in jeopardy) but it does highlight there are certain groups of people that could be helped by further research and the potential of these as therapies.
The other population that will continue to offend no matter what, need to be treated like any other offender and put in prison then monitored. The major problem here is resources, we only have so many social workers for monitoring or so much prison space, that the best method is research to see how they too can be treated in the future and helped from the offending path.
Unfortunately, no politician is going to hang their hat on helping this demographic of people but in the long term, the cost of research pales in comparison to the amount spent on prison and the wider criminal justice system.
When checking https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Does+lolicon+reduce+rates+of+contact+offence
It is clear that like all criminals, those engaged in paraphilia have their own unique sets of psychological and structural issues. Leftie types will tell you that people offend because of homelessness and being failed by society, which is true. Conservative types will tell you people offend because of lack of responsibility, self-discipline, and personal choice. This is also true.
Researchers will use a combined approach in order to establish the extent these impact on specific populations. Unfortunately, those more politically inclined believe they are right and neither the twain shall meet. Conservatives want to lock all these people up or execute them, Lefites want to say there should be no societal rules and that MAP’s should be embraced as a specific sexual interest. Both have supporting positions, but neither are right. NO, in a civilised society we do not murder our fellow citizens just because it is convenient. NO, we do not let everyone have an anarchic free for all. Neither of this helps anyone live their best lives.
Another question I have is more a logistic problem. Think to yourselves, what is the legal age of consent in your home country? Now look around the world, do all countries have the same age of consent? Was it the same in the history of all human societies? No. People, nations, societies all differ in how children should be reared, what role they should play, and how adults should engage with children? In ancient societies, like Greek or Roman societies, pederasty was accepted. In my view, this is likely the case because in the ancient world the age at which people died was much, much lower than it is today. As life expectancy has grown, so have many differing concepts. People forget that childhood is a very recent development. In the works of French Historian Phillipe Aries [1]. “Childhood” did not exist until the 17th Century, before which children were treated as “mini adults.”
My point here is that whilst we all agree that NO adult should be engaging in sexual relations with any child. The problem we have as a population is “how do we define what a child is?”.
When Robert Thompson and Jon Venables murdered Jamie Bulger in the UK, people were smashing the prison van trying to get to people society considered “children”, but now it was ok to remove that protection because they had committed such a heinous crime. It is very much a where do we draw the line question.
The reason I found this such an interesting topic was because of my own offending. Years ago I was convicted of possession of indecent images of children. During the trial, I was surprised to find the level of indifference to the accused in general. If you have read “The Stranger” by Albert Camus or “The Trial” by Franz Kafka, you will understand what I mean. The case prior to mine was a woman who had been found guilty of dealing drugs outside a school. To most in the court this was so regular as to be of little interest. When my case came up, for right or wrong, I was subject to heckling from the crowd. Criminals berating other criminals for having broken the law was laughable.
Prior to the trial, I was subject to an assessment by the social work department. Even before the trial, I was a branded a criminal and it seemed they wanted to find anyway they could, to make me out to be the devil. They had no interest in anything remotely related to “how do we stop this person from committing offences in the future?”. In fact, one black mark they raised against me was that I had not been to kindergarten, they were especially offended when I informed them that by not going and my first day at school, I was already ahead of the other children in reading, writing, and arithmetic. This was because my mother stayed in the home and my dad helped teach me every chance he could get.
It was not until my solicitor got me to attend a Forensic Psychologist who specialised in this type of offending. One session with her and everything made sense. “I am and have always been an unhappy person, who has never fitted in with his surroundings. I have many symptoms of an Avoidant Personality Disorder (it is impossible to confirm this diagnosis without further investigation) with Generalised Anxiety (thus making a contact offence extremely unlikely now or in the future). I have used legal pornography as a method of coping with these problems and when I became numb to the physical and psychological effect, I required more extreme (and illegal) material resulting in accessing Child Abuse Material (CAM, it is WRONG to call it child pornography – children cannot consent).”
Subsequently, I was convicted and went through a program to deal with my issues. I put my success to not offending down to a promise I made to my parents that I would not. I can only hope this continues in the future.
“The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky
[1] Ariès, P. (1962) Centuries of childhood. New York: Random House. (1962).
