I am not sure that democracy is actually what will be the norm in the future anyway.

So are you making a semi-veiled suggestion that perhaps a draconian police state may be the way of the future, and if so, why not embrace it, because maybe it will work better than a system that endangers certain groups of people with those pesky civil rights? If I am wrong, please do correct me.

At the moment we are largely cowed by the large Industrial-Commercial complexes so that "democracy" plays second fiddle to them, particularly it seems in our most advanced society - the USA. I wouldn't bother going in this direction Diss since I don't really have much interest here and I am not really willing to do research in this area.

True, and this is all the more reason to oppose this trend. Siding with any type of draconian law or policy only hastens the arrival of such a system, and makes it more difficult to fight against its encroachment.

We can agree here since perhaps education at the moment is mainly geared towards the economy rather then towards critical thinking and expansion of abilities but this might change.

Yes. And if that can change...

That isn't the issue is it really. It is quite easy to get children to like one and when that happens then they are more likely to do what is asked of them or to not make it known they in some discomfort perhaps.

Children usually always love their parents and are conditioned to always respect their teachers, both of whom have the greatest degree of power and influence over children, and children and younger adolescents alike have no choice whatsoever about interacting with these people who are nearly all-powerful in their lives. Yet they routinely defy both of them whenever asked to do something they dislike. Children are not known to fully ignore discomforting activity without complaint. Friends they value do indeed sometimes exert peer pressure on kids for them to do things they don't want to do, but this most often occurs with the influence of a crowd, and there is no reason to believe that an adult friend would deliberately try to cajole a young friend to do something they made it known they didn't want to do anymore than a peer would.

I once did an experiment with the two-year-old child of a friend of mine. I hadn't known the girl long - we were on holiday together abroad - and sat in the back of their car I was reading to her and placed her leg on mine. I placed it back and shortly after she repeated it on her own. Now don't tell me that kids can't be "coached".

And don't tell me that you know for a fact this girl didn't want to do what you "convinced" her to do. Did you actually ask her how she felt about it? Is there any good reason to assume that any large number of pedophiles would deliberately try to "coach" a child to do something they knew she didn't want to do? The point is, if a girl shows no obvious signs of discomfort about something, and you fail to ask her to clarify, it's not justified to make an assumption about how she "really" felt about it; if you do make an assumption in either direction, then you are simply projecting your own sensibilities onto her. If she doesn't show passive resistance by being ominously silent and unresponsive under such conditions, or active resistance by pushing you away when you do something, then you have no basis to actually assume she totally didn't want to participate.

Also, I can argue that what your experiment was not exactly the best form of ethics, because there are a large number of pro-choice pedophiles who believe that an adult should never initiate intimate physical contact between themselves and a girl they are close to. I'm not calling you an unethical person, as you certainly didn't do something horrible, but I'm simply saying there are many, many pro-choice MAPs who seem to have greater standards of behavior than anti-choice MAPs, and frankly I don't find this surprising since pro-choicers tend to value both affirmative and negative choices that a girl might make, whereas anti-choicers only place value on a negative choice when it comes to this topic, which is not respecting her feelings unless they go in a certain direction.

The girl obviously liked me and when we came back from a short trip away the girl ran up to me and hugged me. Even at that age kids can be so affected by relationships and hence so vulnerable when the intentions of the adult are not for the good of the child.

And shouldn't she decide what was for the "good" of her or not? Maybe judge the merits of the situation based on how she felt about it, rather than on how the culture at large felt about it? If you take choice and empowerment away from her, she is left more vulnerable, because that leaves her at mercy of her "protectors." With such attitudes, is it any wonder why so many unscrupulous parents, stepparents, and other older relatives with the greatest degree of power over a child find themselves in the perfect position to abuse them? The lack of civil rights and empowerment, and the education that would enable a child from an early age to use this effectively, is precisely what leaves them the most vulnerable in the first place! Yet we make no argument about leaving children in this situation, instead focusing almost all of our concern on their interactions with adults who do not share a household with them and therefore do not possess the most direct degree of power over them. This is because our culture does not dare question the sacred nuclear family unit, since keeping the status quo intact is the main concern, not some generic claim to look after the "safety" of children. Note how taking steps to ameliorate the perceived vulnerability of children is never on the issue? It's as if this perceived state of vulnerability itself is what we want to preserve more than anything, because that will guarantee their continued dependence on their designated "protectors," while freezing out the possible influence of "unauthorized" adults who may be in a position to treat them as real human beings rather than as glorified property.

Everything you described about this situation with the girl seems to indicate that she went along with the contact you described because she liked and trusted you, and never felt any discomfort, otherwise she would not have hugged you goodbye afterwards, but would have fled your company as soon as she was able. You seem to be operating under the caveat that it doesn't matter how she may have felt about certain activity, since some things are just intrinsically "bad" in some universal sense because society says so. If we truly worried about how children felt, then we wouldn't project our own squeamishness and anxieties about sexuality onto them, and we would show equal or greater concern for the many serious things that regularly hurt them and cause them discomfort that do not have a sexual component to them. Focusing so disproportionately on matters that involve a sexual component with children, no matter how innocuous and against much evidence that consent does matter how they feel about it and other forms of actually demonstrable but non-sexual forms of harm that are much more pervasive and damaging, tells us a lot more about our culture and its collective phobias than it does about anything to do with kids and their particular issues.