User:Lysander/Assumption of bad faith

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

I notice that sex offender treatment programs, and the general public, tend to regard pedophiles as making arguments in bad faith. In fact, if you're someone who expresses sympathy with pedophiles and supportive of sexual freedom, they'll assume you're a pedophile selfishly seeking excuses to molest kids, because what else could explain support for such views? However, it's assumed that people who make contrary arguments act selflessly.

Isn't it normally assumed that all interest groups act selfishly, and that there's nothing wrong with this? It's assumed that in a democracy, everything will be okay because the majority will keep in check any minority factions that want to promote their own selfish views at the expense of society. But the majority, too, will do this out of selfishness.

What it comes down to is that people treat this issue differently than other issues because they have a hatred of pedophiles, regardless of whether or not they commit any crimes. They hate age-of-consent activists, not so much because they worry that they will succeed in lowering the age of consent, but because they believe "only a pedophile would make that argument" and because they hate pedophiles, they hate anyone who would make that argument.

It's not that they believe that making pro-pedophilia arguments will convince more people to commit offenses. Because after all, they believe "only a pedophile would make that argument"; therefore, it's impossible that a propensity to commit sex offenses would spread through argumentation, since only people who are already pedophiles are susceptible to believing those arguments. (They also don't believe in pedophiles' ability to refrain from committing sex offenses, even though they say that it's a choice to commit those offenses.)

The clinicians have a different attitude than the general public; they believe that through treatment, the risk of offending can be reduced. But they still believe that the risk will always be high enough that these patients will need to be intrusively monitored, and their liberty restricted. In the end, they pretty much hate pedophiles too, but they work within the framework of a system that usually releases sex offenders back into the population eventually.