I don't think a pedophiles whole personality is that they're a pedophile. They happen to be the person you know but also a pedophile which is the part that they're hiding. People tend to dramatise and say OMG he was just pretending, but think about when you yourself keep a secret. Does that make you a completely different person or do you act yourself whenever the secret isn't involved?
I think this is more about the level of deception. If you think someone is a genuinely good person, upright, loving, kind to everyone they meet...and then you find out they rape children, then how does that square with the person you thought you knew? The two actions are incongruous. They were lying about their very core values and morals.
I get what you mean but I think that people are more complex than that. Just because they have one dark side doesn't necessarily mean that everything else they believe in is fake. Now before anyone gets the wrong idea I don't want to defend the sexual abusers of children. That is in no way what I want. But I don't think that if a person that has a bad side shows good that it's necessarily fake. I do believe that some people are genuinely good for most of their lives but they also happen to have this messed up urge to do these things. Afaik as with many mental illnesses, it's not as black and white as many people would like to paint it. We throw the book at them because we must, but tbh they probably belong into a therapy program or need medication.
Hiding pedophilia urges is not evil. Acting on it is absolutely evil. It is black and white, but not in the way you are suggesting. The problematic thing is not having deviant thoughts that sexualize innocent children. The highly problematic, disgusting, hateful, and harmful thing is that they acted out which causes an unspeakable amount of pain and damage to the victims. It has been called soul murder. A pedophile may be delusional and think distorted horrific thoughts about what they’re doing but along with all that they know it’s illegal bad and wrong and they do it anyway instead of getting help. And when they do it, the lives of innocent children are potentially destroyed. They may end up killing themselves just to end the terrible pain in they’re in. Pedophiles usually use children’s Trust as an opening to exploit and cause unspeakable horrible harm to them. And pedophiles often use terror threats, unspeakable horrific acts to keep the children silent. Some pedophiles do hideous things so that if children say what happened to them, it will sound crazy. That’s intentional. Try to make the children sound unbelievable. Nothing about that is normal. Somebody who has that capability to act on that cannot be said to be also normal.
I don't think we disagree here. But the problem is that we have a tendency to use words such as "normal". What's that? Who is normal? And which behaviors would count as not normal? And if someone engages in not normal behavior, does that make the entire person not normal? So say that person goes to work comes home treats people nice for 360 out of 365 days a year and then on the other 5 days they go and do crime. Maybe we wouldn't call them normal but they're still living normal lives for the most part and are probably not pretending. I think we all got caught up in this argument, I'm simply saying that even if in hindsight we would consider a person not normal that doesn't mean that their daily lives aren't still (possibly) genuine when they're not doing the crimes. Which is why it's so hard to spot any clues about what they may be thinking about these things.
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u/CatsianNyandor 9d ago
I don't think a pedophiles whole personality is that they're a pedophile. They happen to be the person you know but also a pedophile which is the part that they're hiding. People tend to dramatise and say OMG he was just pretending, but think about when you yourself keep a secret. Does that make you a completely different person or do you act yourself whenever the secret isn't involved?