The main reason I’m pushing for people to stop using the term ‘pedophile’ and instead use the term ‘child sexual abusers’, is because since all discussions of child sexual abuse focus on this idea of an evil person who is just out to get kids because they are sexual attracted to them, it makes it hard for kids who where sexually assaulted by people who don’t fit that description to realize they were sexually assaulted.
It didn’t register for me until recently that my experiences of being forced to strip naked multiple times at the mental hospital to be ‘checked’ when I was 14 was sexual assault, because the people who did it were nurses/doctors who clearly didn’t find me sexually attractive but instead used it as a form of humiliation and control towards children they deemed as ‘unruly’ and ‘uncooperative’ (ie. children who asked to be treated like people). I thought only people who fit into this idea of a child attracted pedo could be child sexual abusers, so I thought my experience didn’t count.
Stepping away from the idea that there is a pedophile boggieman and instead highlighting that anyone can be a child sexual abuser will help more people realize that their experiences are sexual assault.
It's also important for all categories of sexual assault are often not an expression of attraction, but a method of violence coloured by a desire to humiliate and subjugate.
It's not as if Catholicism and Utah cults intrinsically breed pedophiles and rapists; it should be obvious to anyone who cares to investigate abuse that the trigger is actually a hierarchal culture featuring complete isolation and minimization of potential victims and a demand for a certain type of person to be subservient to their betters. Altar boys and nuns were being molested because people in power wanted to enforce their dominion over their inferiors.
Consider soldiers who assault children in the lands they occupy. Consider the countries sex tourists gravitate towards. What is their relationship with power?
Consider the way adults dress their children. Consider the way abuse is brushed over in close-knit families where everyone knows about it. Ask yourself why a straight woman who exclusively seeks out mature men and centres men in her life might also molest her daughter.
Is the world full of ontologically evil-at-birth monsters with deviant attraction to the young, or is it that social structures with extreme hierarchies motivate people who are otherwise just inconsiderate assholes into obscene behaviour because the scope of their violence feels smaller when it's done to someone they deem small enough?
