I have some first hand experience to relate here.
My spouse (a do-gooder of the first water) has been functioning for the last ~5 years as the guardian ad litem for a man tagged a paedophile in a halfway house nearby. I have had opportunity to meet 'Bob' (not his real name) and have formed some durable opinions. He is an unfortunate, not a monster. We don't know how far back Bob's transgressions extend. His mental capacity is at perhaps the equivalent of an eight year old. He really doesn't understand sex or the interpersonal relations which revolve around it. The strategy for handling his behaviour is to keep him away from anything which might stimulate/remind him. He was fed into the corporate/industrial criminal penal system with predictable results. He was isolated and abused in prison. A child, though 67 years old, not able to defend himself.
I expect each case is unique, but we are ill equipped to form our laws with leeway to treat each uniquely.
My personal take on the taboo against paedophilia is that it is the result of countless generations of natural selection for reproduction by both the individual human and the society in which they embed. There is a reproductive advantage to monopolizing nubile mates for the longest time starting at the youngest age. But there is a grey zone as the risks to immature mates at some point overcome the benefit of their possession. Society and its customs constitute a system whose persistence operates on a larger scale. I don't believe society is self aware, so the decisions it makes can only be subjectively judged by its components (people) who are. I find it endlessly astounding that a few pounds of impure water can be shaped into a pattern by inheritance and environment which so consistently results in heterosexual behaviour appropriate to mammalian sexual reproduction. Really, given the complexity of the system, the fact that it usually falls into the predictable patterns of male and female is pretty amazing. I do not find it surprising that errors (from the standpoint of maximizing reproductive fitness), or simply non-productive variations around the edges, such as homosexuality or paedophilia, should arise as spandrels to the more common and reproductively fit heterosexuality. Nor is it surprising that attitudes of individuals which sum to the dictates of morality and society should tend toward suppression of those behaviours which are less reproductively productive.
My spouse (a do-gooder of the first water) has been functioning for the last ~5 years as the guardian ad litem for a man tagged a paedophile in a halfway house nearby. I have had opportunity to meet 'Bob' (not his real name) and have formed some durable opinions. He is an unfortunate, not a monster. We don't know how far back Bob's transgressions extend. His mental capacity is at perhaps the equivalent of an eight year old. He really doesn't understand sex or the interpersonal relations which revolve around it. The strategy for handling his behaviour is to keep him away from anything which might stimulate/remind him. He was fed into the corporate/industrial criminal penal system with predictable results. He was isolated and abused in prison. A child, though 67 years old, not able to defend himself.
I expect each case is unique, but we are ill equipped to form our laws with leeway to treat each uniquely.
My personal take on the taboo against paedophilia is that it is the result of countless generations of natural selection for reproduction by both the individual human and the society in which they embed. There is a reproductive advantage to monopolizing nubile mates for the longest time starting at the youngest age. But there is a grey zone as the risks to immature mates at some point overcome the benefit of their possession. Society and its customs constitute a system whose persistence operates on a larger scale. I don't believe society is self aware, so the decisions it makes can only be subjectively judged by its components (people) who are. I find it endlessly astounding that a few pounds of impure water can be shaped into a pattern by inheritance and environment which so consistently results in heterosexual behaviour appropriate to mammalian sexual reproduction. Really, given the complexity of the system, the fact that it usually falls into the predictable patterns of male and female is pretty amazing. I do not find it surprising that errors (from the standpoint of maximizing reproductive fitness), or simply non-productive variations around the edges, such as homosexuality or paedophilia, should arise as spandrels to the more common and reproductively fit heterosexuality. Nor is it surprising that attitudes of individuals which sum to the dictates of morality and society should tend toward suppression of those behaviours which are less reproductively productive.
So how, exactly, does God know that She's NOT a brain in a vat? 
