While i believe that Jaxians underestimates the level of destruction sexual abuse can cause in a victim's mind, i also do agree to a certain extent that vengeful cruelty to perpetrators does not do anything to solve the problem.

OD you say that anger is an essential part of the healing process. You re absolutely right about that, but anger is not the same as venegance.

Jaxian's question about whether public punishment was "justice" or just pure venegance is quite valid.

See the fact is that it is social circumstance that creates sexual deviance ( people are not born freaks ). Easing the collective conscience of society by engaging in state sanctioned violence is not tackling the circumstances that creates perpetrators in the first place.

I have no doubt that the boy who assaulted me was abused himself as a child. I feel extremely fortunate that i have loving parents who did everything to support me. But i also happen to know that this is not the case for most sexual abuse victims. As a result they often justify the abuse they suffered themselves by denying the destructive nature of sexual relations between child and adult.

I am extremely fortunate that i was prevented from going down that road by the care and love of supportive parents. But what about the kids who do NOT have that safety net. What type of society do we live in where a child cannot tell people he was abused? What type of soceity do we live in that often condemns the victim? What type of society do we live in where very often there are such strong taboos, that children cannot speak of anything of a sexual nature? What type of society do we have that prevents rehabilitation of victim AND perpetrator.

I know that sexual crime has the highest rate of recivitism. However does it occur to people, that this may be because jail time or therapy does nothing to address the root cause of sex crimes?

While castration seems a logical step to take ( i myself was very much in favor of this at one point in my life.. but that was before i truly understood the importance of forgiveness and the destructive nature of venegance) i don't think it does ANYTHING other than creating a class of Eunuchs who probably got raped as children and then later got their goolies cut off. Talk about a shitty life.

Again this is not to demean the plight of the victim. The victims needs are THE MOST IMPORTANT THING in situations like this. I'm just saying that venegance is not a necessary part of the healing process, and castration does not fix the errors in society that cause such behavior.

Don't you think that such a violent punishment would make the whole topic MORE taboo? And would that not make it EVEN HARDER to dissuade people from acting on deviant sexual impulses. I mean do you really think anybody would ADMIT to such emotions if the taboo is so great? And if you can't get a human to ADMIT to such emotions, how can you ever hope to prevent him from acting upon these urges?

A child molester already risks punishment. Increasing the degree of punishment will do nothing other than cause him to repress these skewed emotions even MORE.. With the end result being that the pressure keeps building until it explodes into action. And who knows what lengths a severely repressed sexual deviance will drive a human to?