When I read the BBC report on California’s Coalinga sex offender treatment facility I was struck by the assumptions of both the reporter and the California judicial system regarding what kind of people rape children and how we as a society should best treat those criminals. The piece begins with a brief profile of one of the sex offenders remanded by California to the center after his sentence ended that should have elicited more than a passing curiosity in a journalist:

I’d been at Coalinga a couple of days when Mr Rigby showed me his dormitory. He’d been a high school sports coach before being convicted of molesting some of his students.

He told me he was a great appreciator of the male physical form.

Above his bed were photos of classical statues of male nudes. These gave me pause, since I knew some paedophiles like to justify their proclivities by citing the ancient Greeks’ famous enthusiasm for pederasty.

There was also a reproduction of a painting of young male ballet dancers, which had a definite erotic overtone. I asked one of Mr Rigby’s social workers, who was standing by, if it was okay for patients to have mildly sexual imagery on their walls, especially since it seemed to me it was in the area of the patient’s offences. He said it was – “as long as they’re of age”.

Mr Rigby’s room, which he shared with three other men, was airy and spacious. There was a large window with no bars on it. Mr Rigby had told me he was married with two sons, but that he’d also been in a physical relationship with another of the men at Coalinga, who was also a child molester.

This too, apparently, was not in violation of hospital rules. Mr Rigby’s therapists told me he’d been making good progress in his rehabilitation. In theory, if he carried on with counselling and group sessions, he might be back outside in less than a year.

Child molester Rigby was married and able to perform well enough with an adult woman to impregnate her twice, molested underage boys and is in a physical relationship with another adult child molester. This last relationship is seen by the hospital as evidence of his “rehabilitation” taking, but the question is rehabilitation from what? Though child rapists may claim otherwise, it is patently obvious that the Mr. Rigby interviewed is not uncontrollably attracted to children only, but seems to be satisfied with sexual relationships with any and every kind of person.

The article however goes on to give us the standard medicalized definition of pedophilia which relieves child rapists of their moral and perhaps legal responsibility for their crimes:

Though no consensus exists as to whether paedophilia is genetic or environmental in origin, therapists at Coalinga agree that it can’t really be cured. There is evidence to suggest that a sexual attraction to children may be an “orientation” and no easier to reprogramme in a person than, say, heterosexuality.

To make this square with the example of the omnisexual Mr. Rigby in the earlier section of this piece would require Olympic level mental gymnastics. Pedophiles routinely act out sexually in ways that don’t conform to their “orientation” and despite the claims of pedophilia activist groups, most are not simply people romantically attracted to children and unable to control themselves. Child rape is a crime of deviance, but it is a mistake to assume, as the medical and legal community do, that there is a class of mentally ill or “differently oriented” people out there with no control over their desire to rape and defile children.

I would suggest that in most cases, pedophilia is an expression of mental illness or social maladjustment and not the underlying pathology. Most child rapists are as different from one another as they are from decent people, but what all seem to share in common is a sense of entitlement to their own sexual and emotional gratification so exaggerated that they feel they have the right to exploit children.

Mr. Rigby reminds me of Harold Spurling, an active online pedophile who went by the name Aztram. Spurling claimed to have an “age of attraction” or AOA, as online pedophiles call it, of 4- to 9-year-old boys. Yet when Spurling was arrested with his roommate and rumored lover Jeffrey “The Night Raven” Brisson, police found the pair making pornographic videos using a three–month-old girl and a 14-year-old boy. Brisson claimed to have an AOA of 2-6 for boys and 3-8 for girls. Both, however, went outside of their supposed orientation to satisfy their disgusting desires.

Serial killer Joseph Duncan’s first arrest for molestation was when he was a teen and his victim a younger boy. He is thought to have killed several children of various ages and genders before massacring the Groene family and kidnapping 8-year-old Shasta and 9-year-old Dylan Groene. Both were raped during their weeks long ordeal and Dylan murdered; Shasta was only saved by a quick thinking waitress at a Denny’s. Duncan was a sex offender advocate who blogged about how unfair it was that people would put him on a registry and discriminate against him. His actions prove both that such registries are necessary, and that yet again this “pedophile” did not have a set orientation. There is some evidence that Duncan fits the profile of the “mysoped” pedophile but there is also evidence Duncan “bottomed” in prison and while released apparently enjoyed it.

Litigious degenerate Tom Madison is a sex offender advocate who works with pedophiles to change sex offender laws, but his own offense was the sexual abuse of a 16-year-old girl. It should be obvious that a grown man molesting a 16-year-old is not “differently oriented” than a heterosexual, but simply lacking the morals and boundaries that make civilization possible. Madison is not attracted to children, he was simply an amoral opportunist who felt entitled to his sexual gratification and used a teen because she was the most convenient female he could dominate.

All these “pedophiles” are very different from each other except in one important aspect: they all used transgressed societal norms to sate their lusts. Thieves are not steal-o-sexuals who are oriented toward banditry, they are people who think they deserve the wealth of others. Likewise the three people above, and the high-living Mr. Rigby, are simply degenerates who use children for their pleasure for a variety of reasons which are totally under their own control.

That isn’t to say some people who are child rapists aren’t mentally ill, but certainly no one benefits from treating child raping as a hard wired orientation like hetero or homosexuality. Not society, not the criminals who may want to change (though I doubt they do after reading the BBC peice) and certainly not the children they prey upon. In our age of rationalism we have lost sight of the most basic metaphysical truth of existence in our zeal for science to explain the very minutiae of our lives. Some people are simply bad people, they choose to do horrific things out of greed, selfishness, envy and anger. Some people rape children simply because they can’t find an adult to rape, some because they like the feeling of power that comes from dominating someone weaker than themselves. All have the ability to stop themselves unless suffering from legal insanity, which so far no pedophile I know of has ever been diagnosed with.

The BBC and the media have spread this medicalized view of criminality to the detriment of society and especially our children. It is time we reexamine the idea of the hapless pedophile and refocus our sympathy on their victims.

h/t Ann Althouse