Debate Guide: Pedophilia is unnatural

"Pedophilia is sick and unnatural and WRONG!"

You seem to believe that something is wrong because it is unnatural (which is not the case anyway). This is not necessarily so. Some of the most useful ideas would appear to have no grounding in nature. Richard Green rightly asks us to problematise homosexuality if indeed unnatural equals wrong.

Evidence suggests that humans and close relatives have a historical tendency towards relationships between mature and developing individuals. See Intergenerational Sexual Behaviors in Animals, Nonwestern Intergenerational Relationships and Intergenerational Relationships in History.

"Assuming that the average child begins puberty at fourteen years, the vast majority of preteens would be prepubescent. Sexual attraction also requires either masculine or feminine secondary sexual characteristics and therefore, a preteen child would be as sexually attractive as a broom or pot plant." (actual argument from Condraz23 on IIDB)

To the above, a participant argued that a child - in representing a less developed version of a fully developed adult, will always be to some extent sexually attractive. Pot plants or utensils do not have the physical and genetic make-up of small humans who are soon to reach optimum sexual attractiveness. It is also simplistic to suggest that the only purpose of erotic interest in another would be reproductive, therefore negating the evolution of attraction towards prepubescents.

Considering that most adults admire, in a "nonsexual" the unique beauty of prepubescent children (as exemplified by the child nude's history as an object of artistic study), where do we draw the line between this and "pedophilia"? This question cuts to the very heart of sexuality as discourse - that is - sexuality as a human-constructed and culturally-variable cluster of feelings and behaviours which share a unique, human-given significance. It is simply not good enough to say that ones interest is "not sexual". We must find the pedophile in the parent and the parent in the pedophile, because these complex feelings must at some place have a meeting point.