Treating a pedophile before the fact: First-person insight into the primary prevention of child abuse

 Pedophilia is a mental health disorder defined by preferential sexual attraction to children under age 14. Yes, it IS a mental disorder, and will always be a mental disorder until the end of time. It is a sexuality, but a highly unfortunate one nonetheless. What is it like to treat a pedophile? I give an indirect, mirror account on behalf of my therapist.

The stereotype holds that most trauma survivors do not get along with their therapist. If you do, you are a pedophile, and admit it. I get along great with my therapist on these issues. It is a low-level disorder that colors everything else about my profile, temperament, and personality.

It works a lot like parent coaching. The therapist gives you insight you never heard about children, needed to hear, yet didn't want to hear. So, there were times I stormed out of her office, repeating my insistence that my way of viewing things was the right and only way of viewing things, usually referring to rationalizations.

Therapists are of little use for pedophile, and this is by systematic design. It is simply an umbrella where they find their own answers, with the information given to them, and the parent inertia to change. A pedophile is a willful individual, and so if their will is self-improvement, they will not fail. I will succeed at CONTROLLING. MYSELF. And nothing or nobody can stop me.

Many mental health professionals take the "monitor bracelet" attitude towards pedophiles, assuming legal custody over pedophiles not afforded to ordinary adults by the law. Child sexual abuse is an act of sexual assault and rape. It is motivated with the same graven sexual entitlement towards children as the rape of an adult. You choose to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, with the key word being "choice". Raping a child is a choice, and no adult but the perpetrator alone is responsible for such wicked, despicable act of sexual violence towards a child. I don't want any survivor as a custodian except my mother.

The most appropriate therapy for a non-offending pedophile would be parent coaching. Preferably, it would be here, but the nature of the common religious trauma associated with virtuous pedophiles cannot be accommodated here. It was a miscommunication - most here don't want to help non-offending pedophiles anyway until they come, and thought VirPed was a "feigned child advocate"

Pedophiles can very well be treated before the fact, meaning in a compassionate, kind, caring way that nonetheless prevents them from abusing a child in the first place, by their own will alone, with the assistance of a therapist. Pedophiles usually just know that abusing a child is wrong, but need the reinforcement in terms of facts to back it up.