The same can be said in reverse. Most people with child sex dolls do not pray on children.
But your assumption, based on nothing than your own personal uninformed bias, instead of any empirical data is that you don’t trust people who want such dolls, and you are worried that they might go a step above, and hurt a real child.
Which is a reasonable worry, although hypothetically speaking, I think buying such a doll by a person who already has predatory intentions is a waste of money and effort. If anything, buying such a doll instead of investing the money into CSEM or gifts they can use to gain the trust of a child as a step in the process of grooming seems like a good indicator of the person is unwilling to go after real kids, but still wanting to satisfy their sick fantasy. Regardless of the rhetoric, such compromise is a staple of decency, even if it’s disgusting.
A murderer is a person that already displayed an extremely non-normative behaviour. Being angry at someone, desiring revenge, creating power fantasies in which you kill and torture those you hate - all of those things are sick by normal standards, we consider murdering people for disagreement as an immoral and horrible act, but such fantasies occur in every person’s mind and are a part of human nature, and despite being “sick” and “disgusting” are crucial for emotional regulation. Everyone does that, and while immoral, it’s completely fine as long as it doesn’t go step further to hurting real people.
This is the definition of decency. You don’t get to pick and choose which things become a thought crime and which don’t.
A murdered is such a person that crossed a line. Who broke the law, who displayed a disregard for other humans lives, who didn’t restrain themselves, who didn’t care about morality, who didn’t care about the risk of them getting into prison, who had no empathy - of course talking about murderers that intentionally killed someone. And there is a huge amount of people murdering children, even little toddlers as well, like psychopathic and narcissistic mothers who don’t find any pleasure from taking care of a child, and want to party like they used to with no restraints - like the famous case of Casey Anthony.
How do you know that convicted murderer that you so strongly trust wasn’t convicted for child murder? Or that the murderer you will pick as a babysitter is really incapable of hurting those kids? Or what if he kills the parents of your nieces and nephews, and hurt them this way indirectly? I’m sorry, but logically speaking, my worry that a convicted murderer is more likely to hurt a child than a person who displayed consciousness and awareness of his position in society and the risks abuse of minors carries by buying an alternative way of satisfying his urges with the artificial victimless product instead of spending this money on actually hurting a real being is more reasonable.
But then again, you missed my point. Having suspicions and worries is a good thing, and that what I was advocating you should do, have a suspicion and worry to both kinds of people. But you seem to apply this standard to one type of criminal, while completely clearing another type of criminal of any worry and suspicion, in a blind ideological belief that murderers are good because people with sex toys are bad. Where is the link between those two groups? There is none, and yet you assume that for some reason, one group affects the other in such a way.
If you are a responsible human being, and you are given the responsibility to take care of some children, you do it yourself. You don’t give that responsibility to any other person, because guess what. There are way more child abusers that don’t sexually exploit minors, than the ones that do. DSM-5 approximates that 5% of the world population are pedophiles. And less than that do commit sexual crimes. And the rest of 95% might have all sorts of other disorders that make them a danger to children: antisocial personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, alcohol use disorder - I could enumerate without an end, and many of people which such disorders, sometimes, albeit rarely do sexually abuse minors as well, without being attracted to them. But you ignore that fact since in your mind, only pedophiles are capable of doing that, which makes you even less effective in protecting children from possible dangerous individuals. In your blind rage towards your imaginative idea of what an average pedophile is, instead of what we actually know about this type of person, you completely ignore all other types of child abusers. You didn’t even consider, that the murderer you would hire as a babysitter, could be a child murderer, you just assumed, again, with no actual data about your assumption, simply because you felt like it’s the case, that murderers “mostly” don’t murder children, yet you are still willing to take that risk, rather than don’t trust both kinds of people as a reasonable human being, to own the pedos. This is the danger of your attitude, you would expose children to danger, to prove an ideological point. And to explain it better to you, speaking in your language: kind of like the parents who hire drag queens to their children’s birthdays, and dress their children in sexually explicit costumes. You are exactly the same type of person, as you think of such parents.
Of course, they despise those who prey on children, even pedophiles despise those who prey on children. Everyone despise those who prey on children. Only those who prey on children don’t despise those who prey on children, albeit they will create a public image of hating on those who despise on children, something even more strongly than an average person.
You say you don’t advocate for torture and rape of anyone within prisons, but you still justify it if it happens, by claiming it’s understandable. It’s understandable to want to kill such a person, there is no denying of that, but it’s not justifiable, reasonable and acceptable to actually do it. You are aware of the reason why we abolished the death penalty, despite the idea of killing serious criminals who have no chance of redemption being logical? Because mistakes happen. Wrong convictions do happen. False allegations do happen. And the legal system isn’t some sort of perfect never wrong entity that is controlled by goldy powers who are omniscience. Here, look for yourself:
And yes, it’s in the US, Australia doesn’t disclose how many innocent people did they wrongfully convicted, perhaps because your government think such information is immoral and would hurt Australian’s minds. But such wrong convictions do happen everywhere, in any country. The difference is that totalitarian regimes will simply not tell you about it, because they want to keep the illusion of having standards and being guided by morality to manipulate their citizens into being obedient and following every single of their orders.
Which is exactly why only hypothetically you might make the case that it’s okay to murder and despise those who molest and kill children. Because hypothetically, you can assume that such people exist, and hypothetically, you don’t deal with a real being, and because of that, hypothetically, such attitude is reasonable, since you orient it onto a hypothetical person who is objectively guilty. But in practice, in the real world, you never know if the person you accuse of doing something wrong to a child really did something, wrong or not, to any child. Even if they admit to it, there have been many cases where a person who was innocent admitted to committing a serious crime and was killed for it by the government, while the real criminal went free, with everyone thinking that there is no longer any danger, hurting more people for many years, with the only witness of his crimes being dead. Here you have another list of such cases:
https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/innocence/description-of-innocence-cases
And if you accuse an innocent person of being a horrible human being, punishing them for crimes they didn’t committed. Guess what that makes you, a horrible human being that hurts innocent people. Which is the reason why we all hate child abusers in the first place.
This is why we have rules like “innocent until proven guilty”. And this is why the justice system, should focus on protecting and helping victims, instead of punishing criminals. Locking people in jail shouldn’t be a form of revenge, it should be a method of separating a dangerous individual from society, so they can’t hurt anybody else. There is a thin line between justice and vengeance, and you clearly don’t distinguish those concepts at all.
We despise people who molest and kill children because those actions harm the children, not because it’s a “norm”. Just because something is normal, doesn’t make it good. There used to be a time when it was a universal human norm to despise those who have interracial relationships, there used to be a time when it was a universal human norm to despise people who wanted to marry people of the same sex, there used to be a time when it was a universal human norm to despise people who were stripping themselves naked on the street in front of people, there used to be a time when it was a universal human norm to despise people who have sex with animals.
And guess what, some of those things, are still valid, while others are not. Because norms and normality in general have nothing to do with whenever something is good or wrong. It never was and never be a good descriptor of morality.
And no one makes a case that those who molest and kill children shouldn’t be despised. But the difference between you and me, between you that is outraged on my behalf for things that happened to me and not you, and me, who actually suffered from child abuse, is that you care more about bashing and destroying pedophiles, just because they are pedophiles, which you later rationalize in various ways, while I care about being effective in protecting children.
While you indulge yourself in power fantasies, creating a boogeyman in your mind, of an ugly middle-aged man who rides in vans kidnaping kindergarteners in order to rape them and hide their body in the forest, that you feel vindicated in relieving all your sadistic desires on, which is not a bad thing as long as you understand the difference between the reality and such fantasies.
I actually think about ways that could improve the safety of minors in general, not only from sexual abuse, from all abuse. And I want to figure out solutions that wouldn’t result in them being thrown into another hell once they grow up, where they are locked in prison for reading a comic book that was deemed “immoral and obscene” or for buying themselves a piece of silicone that “looked too young”, and without having their privacy constantly eliminated by the government, who just must monitor every step of their life, “to protect the children”.
Ask yourself the question, what is your long term plan? Let’s assume you spend your life killing every single pedophile on this planet. It would take you more than a lifetime, but let’s assume you killed them all. New people were born, and among them, new pedophiles. What then? You are in grave, and you expect that some random person will take the mantle of responsibility? How many people you think would be willing to sacrifice their entire lives hunting down all pedophiles on this planet? So far, there aren’t much of such people. Rarely some individuals play vigilantes, but even they are far from eliminating all pedophiles on the planet. And sometimes, such vigilantes are child predators themselves:
Sure. If having opposition to pedo hunters who are hunting pedophiles as a ploy to disguise their efforts in praying on children, and attacking innocent people falsely accusing them of being pedophiles, to create a distraction from themselves is a proof of having a questionable moral compass in your opinion, then I suspect your magnetic north is really on the south.
Protasia to my knowledge tries to develop additional solutions to the problem, solutions whose result is to increase the number of safe children, in a way that doesn’t involve putting those children into jail once they grow up. And of course, those methods might be unconventional but are not extremist, and while being sceptical about them is a good thing, you need reasons to be sceptical about them, instead of blind fixed and baseless assumptions that are simply nonsense for anyone who spends at least a day gaining knowledge about the topic. You literally try to make a case that we shouldn’t try new solutions that can save more real children lives because they might make you think about your childhood less rosy, or make you feel disgusted for a while, and you twist this horrible logic that prioritizes personal comfort above children’s lives by stating, that it’s somehow a moral stance.
We had no improvement in the child protection sector for years in most countries. Japan has been seeing a constant betterment, with less and fewer rates of child abuse each year. They allow child sex dolls, they allow virtual CP, because they know, it won’t cause more harm and focus on more effective solutions. While your country and mine, truly believes that all they have to do, is to ban things they find disgusting and call it a day, sometimes reacting once someone tells them that some kid was tortured their whole life, which rarely does happen. Well, guess what, banning stuff didn’t help me. And Australia, during pursuit based on the approach that you display, has a 3000% bigger rate of rapes in general than Japan. It’s of course not conclusive evidence of anything, there are many reasons why this is the case, but that fact is disturbing nontheless:
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/rape-statistics-by-country
You can set up as many laws as you want, it won’t change anything. Because fundamentally, the law is only as strong as it’s enforcement. And you can’t enforce anything without knowledge about the person you want the law to be enforced against. And truth is, you will never know anything about persons sexual intentions unless they decide to tell you about it, or after it’s too late and they committed a crime. But a lot of laws can be used if someone has a mere suspicion, so such laws will be used against innocent people, on a mere probability. Which considering, that the approximation of pedophiles is that they constitute 5% of society, means that per 100 of people against whom such laws will be used, statistically speaking 95 will be unjustly punished by those laws.
What we need are global passive systems that sustain themselves and reduce the amounts of sexual abuse of minors. If realistic sexbots turn out to result in the reduction of sexual offences, they will be one of such systems. I don’t care about whenever they will be “moral” or “disgusting”. All I care about is being effective in protecting children.
Because by prosecuting people who own dolls you ultimately fill the prison spaces with prisoners that are not a danger to society. You assume that they are based on your own suspicion, but the same can be said about drug users, making a claim that they are a danger to society under the influence of drugs, since it might have an effect on their inhibitory functions. With that logic, you will never release any prisoners, because all prisoners will be a danger to society. This is why people make an argument, about legalizing victimless crimes. And owning such doll or fictional images is exactly that, a victimless crime. That is exactly the point, those two things shouldn’t be criminalized because fundamentally such decision wastes important resources: money, time, people, tools and more, on people who don’t harm anybody, instead of on people who actually pray on children, and you don’t have any confirmation, that by banning such things, you will catch all predators since predators might have no interest in it, which is why it’s better to focus on catching predators, since then, even if we assume that such victimless alternatives somehow magically invite such people to commit sexual crimes, it won’t matter because if they try to pray on children, this is where our law enforcement has 100% of focus, they will be caught more effectively, instead of situations in which the attention of law enforcement is split between various groups, especially if you consider, that the number of people interested in such things, will be significantly bigger, than the number of child predators, since ultimatelly, what classifies as virtual child pornography is strongly subjective, and you will have a lot of nonpedophiles who are interested in young looking anime and cartoon characters, that for some will appear underage, while for others, might not. If you make laws against sex dolls and drawings, you will have to monitor, let’s imagine, due to lack of any data on the topic, about 15% of the society, instead of just 5%. That would be 3 times more resources needed and ultimately wasted, while the same amount of resources could be spent to monitor those 5% 3 times as effectively.
And once again, you justify one horrible crime, because some other horrible crime exists. You want to protect children from being sexually abused so they can be later killed by some psychopath that derives sexual pleasure from taking peoples lives. Sexual sadism disorder is a thing, you know?
This is where I will agree with you, which is why I don’t want to imprison people for possessing sex toys and erotic comic books, and instead, prefer to focus on for example: developing methods that help us detect attempts of online grooming. Because child predators don’t necessarily have to be interested in victimless alternatives, after all, they want to go after real kids, not artificial ones, so banning them wouldn’t allow us to catch them before they make any attempts of hurting a minor, and just a mere fact of being attracted to someone, regardless of who that person is, doesn’t eliminate persons ability to feel empathy, fear of imprisonment, fear of social exclusion, of losing family ties, of losing friends and coworkers, of having their reputation ruined, of having later problems finding a job and place to live, and many more reasons, that would make a person not willing to break a law and sexually exploit a minor. And such people could use the alternative, as a way to reduce their sexual frustration on a regular basis, making them more emotionally stable in the long run, which would work as basically a natural way of reducing libido, kind of like chemical castration, but without any side effects, and allowing the person to have a substitute of sexual life, assuming they are primarily or exclusively attracted to minors.
Seriously, you are most likely attracted to some demographic of people, ask yourself how many sex toys and pornography would you need to decide to rape someone? In my case, it wouldn’t change anything. I would prefer to be celibate my whole life and die a virgin than to rape anyone in my entire life. And I think I can safely assume the same about you. Because those things ultimately don’t matter, and whenever someone decides to sexually exploit anyone else, be it a child or an adult, in both cases it’s never justifiable, depends on the person alone, and not bans of anything erotic will change the person, who is already willing to hurt other human beings for their own pleasure. Such people don’t care about laws, societal norms, morality or what you think, they do what they want to do, and in case of such individuals, I will completely agree with you about the necessity of the imprisonment, disregard for such individuals and that feelings of hatred towards them are justified, simply because no alternative will work on them. But you will find such people among those interested in children as well as among those who are interested in adults, and I think you would agree that you and I shouldn’t be treated worse on a mere fact that there are rapists who have the same sexual interests in adults as us. That it would be illogical to ban regular pornography and sex toys, and adult sex dolls (even though most of them look creepy) in fears that they might somehow make you or me more willing to rape someone.