One poster:

Yep. As I just said I was just commenting on the statement that “same sex attraction isn’t a sin” as I felt that “same sex attraction” was a little broad and it could be argued that it could include paedophilia. I wasn’t comparing homosexuality and paedophilia.

Another:

Ok. It seemed as if you were doing that. Incidentally there is some evidence that paedophiles often don’t care about the sex of the child. They’re attracted to the innocence of the child and the power they exert over the child. They’ll abuse any child who happens to be available for such abuse.

And another (from England)[2]:

It’s useful, perhaps, to distinguish between paedophilia and ephebephilia here; the paedophile’s attraction is, as you say, to children, and more specifically, pre-pubescent children. The *lack* of physical, overt, evidence of gender is part of the attraction; once the child develops and becomes, physically, a “small adult”, either male or female, the attraction wanes, since a sexual relationship with an adult is not what the paedophile wants.

A third, from S Africa [3]

Indeed.

[2]:

Ephebephilia is more complex; there are plenty of social cultures, both past and present, where the matching of a very young, sexually mature female with an adult male is considered perfectly acceptable. This is not paedophilia per se, since the girl is considered “of age”; where it falls down is in societies where the relationship is not within a formal structure which protects the younger person. Most men looking for “barely-legals” are not interested in either sexual activities with five-year-olds *or* long-term relationships, they want a society where, as “Pastor” Dave termed it, “young firm flesh” is always – sequentially – freely available to them.

[3]:

We have a problem in South Africa. We are told that many young children (average age of 11, we’re told, but certainly less than 16 which is our official age of consent) are “voluntarily” becoming sexually active. Our parliament has recently passed a law allowing health services to give condoms and other contraceptive measures (presumably together with all forms of sexual health services) to twelve year olds. While the statutes and laws don’t actually reflect this, they’ve actually reduced the age of consent to twelve. This is disturbing at many levels.

[2]:

We were talking, elsethread, about Muslim girls: yes, some of my students were married at sixteen, that being the legal age in the UK.

[3]:

Fifteen in South Africa for girls. Yes, our age of consent for sex is sixteen. No, I don’t understand it.

[2]:

(Although they balked at it, I didn’t officially know of any who *didn’t* wait, although I’m pretty sure – it was one of those Great Unsaids – that some of the girls who left school at 14 to marry did so because an English education, in a school run by the most militant and unpleasant xtain women I’ve ever encountered, was fairly irrelevant to their lives.)

Point being, those who went into monogamous marriages at an early age did so because they, themselves, were adults and their culture worked by maturity, not chronology. And, more importantly, young wives were not expected to cope alone; there was a pretty strong female network which dealt with men who overstepped boundaries. I suspect that the polygamous families worked on a similar principle, but that was another Great Unsaid, since polygamy is illegal here.

[3]:

Polygamy is legal in South Africa for “traditional” marriages. Also very complex.

[2]:

Incidentally, I was reading a rant the other day, on another forum, about honour killings in Islam, and how disgusting it was that young women should be murdered for rejecting “older men” and choosing their own boyfriends.

It came from someone who had sent death threats to a teenager he’d stalked, who’d dared to back off from a fifty-year-old man seeking “teen pussy”.

I’m afraid the irony meter went off the scale.

[3]:

Yes, there is much irony in the world. Sexual hypocrisy is an interesting issue.