(October 24, 2016 at 1:24 am)Thena323 Wrote: I do understand the difference between a pedophile and a child molester, technically. In my view, however, the difference is more a matter of semantics/legal necessity, than it is a realistic difference that has any practical application. Most people wouldn't dare leave their children in the care of a law-abiding pedophile, who's sworn off diddling kids: Even in the most dire of emergencies.
There's a reason for that, I believe.
A fair point, to an extent. But how many people do we hear saying IRL (not anonymous online polls) "Well, yeah, I'm turned on by kids but I'd never do anything"? We don't. And I think that both leads to your view that this is a semantical issue, and also to the error I made upthread in conflating the two; because the only pedophiles I've heard of -- the only pedophiles any of us know of, really -- are those who've been caught acting out the impulse. Such a dark secret is probably best-protected, right?
In short -- we don't know who the pedophile is until the conviction rolls in, usually, and that makes the entire discussion more fraught with both semantical issues and the conflation issue I exemplified earlier.
