.. and that is that some people will suspect you are going to grow up to be a paedophile because you’re a guy. It’s a horrible and unjust stigma and I have known several male friends who were victims of abuse and who struggled with this additional shame in identifying themselves as victims.
This is superb writing from Martin McKenzie-Murray in The Saturday Paper with “Inside the mind of a paedophile”.
I lied about not being angry. There was something that stung me. In the messy and confusing aftermath, some blamed me for what happened – specifically, I was asked if I had encouraged it. That hurt and, after a stunned pause, I bitterly expressed my incredulity.
This wasn’t the most disturbing consequence. Not long afterwards, a family member mused thoughtlessly in my company that abuse engenders abuse. I instantly felt sick. The comment shredded me, and I carried it for some time. I thought, naively, that I was doomed to be an abuser myself – conscripted by fate to play out what happened to me. I was cursed.
As a young man I moved to South Korea to teach English to young children. One day, while supervising the kids in the playground, I began brutally thinking about my curse. I broke out in a sweat. Was the curse real? Should I be here? Was I doomed to offend, to play out some cyclical indecency? I wasn’t and I’m not, but that loose comment years earlier took a while to leave my system.
I admit when I started reading his article I thought nice work here but if this is another one of those pieces asking me to empathise with paedophiles (and I try my very hardest to empathise with anyone relating their perspective to me), without ever reconciling with the terrible damage these people can do then I will be infuriated. Because, I understand that everyone has a story and in everyone’s life there is some pain and tragedy, including in the lives of abusers, and sometimes people do awful things without necessarily being awful people.. but there is a bit of a thing going on lately with edgy journalism examining the stigma around paedophilia and crossing right on over to victim blaming.
So, I very much like this piece by McKenzie-Murray because it is written in such a way that yes, you may see a paedophile’s point of view and that’s important, but you will not be leaving the show without damn well seeing the point of view of a victim, too.
blue milk 
I couldn’t read past this:
“‘Deviant’ is a social definition, and the definition of paedophilia that’s used seeks to avoid the grey area of sexual attraction to teenagers because most non-deviant adults will have some sexual attraction to sexually mature teenagers, who even below the age of consent demonstrate secondary sexual characteristics, such as breasts.”
It IS deviant to have sexual attraction to “sexually mature teenagers,” by which the quoted source means, “teenage girls” (hence the reference to “breasts.”). This paragraph normalises the sexualization of girls, which is nothing new – but, moreover, it places “breasts” in the category of fair game for sexual attraction. Whereas teen boys, with their non-breasted sexual development, are implied to be to be a far less acceptable target of “non-deviant adults.”
Tits – we just can’t help ourselves, right! I mean, come ON – they may be teen gorls, but it’s TITS!!!