User:Lysander/Medical pedophilia

This is an essay. The views expressed are not necessarily those of BoyWiki.

The cannabis reform movement in the U.S. might be considered to have had three phases. The first was the wave of decriminalizations in the 1970s, in which several states removed criminal penalties for simple possession. Then there was a dormant period in the 1980s and early 1990s, when basically no further progress was made. Then there was another active period beginning in the mid-1990s with California Proposition 215 (1996) in which successful medical cannabis laws led eventually to the first relegalization of recreational cannabis in 2012 with Colorado Amendment 64. The campaigners for legalized medical cannabis were usually the same people who wanted to legalize recreational use of cannabis. But their campaign materials said they simply wanted to remove the sick and dying from the battlefield of the war on drugs.

The opponents of medical cannabis said that it would lead to legalization of recreational use. Recreational cannabis legalizers, on the other hand, were skeptical; even at their own conventions, they sometimes said that medical cannabis wouldn't take them as far as they wanted to go, because "we're really not all that sick." As it turned out, the prohibitionists were correct. Cannabis had so many medical uses that almost anyone could get a doctor's recommendation.

One wonders if pedophilia law reform will follow a similar trajectory. Currently, there are a few people saying that we need to provide treatment to pedophiles who want to cope with their attractions and find ways to control them. Will making such treatment available lead to legalization of adult-child sex? As more people seek treatment and perhaps even talk openly about their desires, will there be increased public awareness of how common pedophilia is? Will it become more and more socially acceptable to discuss ideas that are closer and closer to what might be considered pedophile advocacy?

It's theoretically possible that, for example, that Wikipedia's child protection policy might be revised to allow known pedophiles to edit, if eventually pedophiles were to be viewed as a group deserving reasonable accommodations and protection from discrimination, like other groups with a medical diagnosis.

What about using child pornography to reduce the rate of sexual offenses against children, as some studies have suggested might be effective? This option could initially be made available to pedophiles, but the availability might later be broadened, since there could be many non-pedophiles whose likelihood of committing such offenses could be reduced by making child porn available.

The final step is that non-pedophiles will realize that legalizing pedophilia benefits them too because, for example, men will be able to associate with other people's kids without being feared as a possible pedophile. This will be similar to how heterosexual men benefit from homosexuality being accepted because now they don't have to go out of their way to try to prove their heterosexuality, since it wouldn't matter much even if they were mistaken for, or suspected of being, a homosexual.