Re: Reply

I'll not get into an anti-USA tirade but if you think that what the US has is democracy at the moment then good luck to you.

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.

Perhaps I failed to say her parents were in the car and there was nothing in my mind approaching what you are implying - my attractions are way higher than a 2-year-old. What I meant is that because the child obviously liked me - I had only known her as a 2-year-old for about a week or so - she voluntarily did an action that I had done probably because she liked me rather than anything else - which can be a big issue in "coaching" or "grooming". There was nothing sexual about it. I did something once and then she repeated it.

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.

This is just a single incident that showed to me how easy it is to get children to do what one might want and especially when they are so young. I have had enough children in my life - nieces, nephews and some little friends - to understand how they probably see others, especially adults and how affection towards those adults will play a huge role in how they will behave - and often suffer because of their affection or love. Please do not read more into my posts than I put. Perhaps I did not explain the incident sufficiently.