This is a problem for the pedophile. He loves the child and wants to prevent such harm from him. There are different possible reactions:
If somebody from outside, especially from the persecution system, blames the pedophile for this harm, the only answer is that this is hypocrisy. But, for many pedophiles this is a main reason for not to have sex with children.
Not to make any sex with children is a highly moral, altruistic decision, very harmful for the pedophile himself. We have to express high respect for people making this decision.
But I disagree with the point of view that this is the only moral decision, and all other decisions are amoral. Moreover, there are reasonable arguments for considering other decisions as better.
When I had sex with some boys, we were discovered, which led to the boy experiencing the full fury of our culture's sanctions on this behavior. In one case, the boy saw his parents react hysterically and end their friendship with me and my family as they rushed him into psychotherapy. (How could he not have thought he had been stained with emotional and spiritual sickness!)
In another case, the boy saw me nearly go to jail. He also found himself forced to go to psychotherapy when he really didn't want to, forced to submit to a blood test for AIDS, contacted by a number of social services workers treated him as if he had been dirtied, and humiliated by rumors of his "situation" spreading around his school--all of this at an age when he so desparately wanted to be "normal" and fit in with his crowd.
That boy was my son! He also saw me and his mother separate. We have since reconciled, but at the time, he had to deal with thinking on some level that in some way he had caused his family to break up. To this day he still feels tainted by the stain of my perversion.
Even if a sexual relationship between an adult and a child is truly consensual, and the child can experience it at his own level, he still carries the memory of that relationship into adulthood. He will wonder if he is "okay," or if there is some flaw in him that attracted the adult in the first place.
At 35, I had the experience of visiting a man with whom I had been sexual when he was 11 and I was 20. I asked him if he had ever been harmed or bothered about what we did. He said he thought it was "probably just a couple of kids who didn't know what they were doing." I replied that while that was probably true of him, I was sure I knew what I was doing then, and I hoped that he had not been harmed. He said that he didn't think so, but had often wondered about what we did, wondered if he was okay. He said that as he got older, he jacked off with his friends some; and when he went to college, he got into weed in a big way. In fact, he and his wife still smoked up twice a day.
I can't lay my values about his use of marijuana on him. And, I realize that he could have wound up involved with it even if he had never known me. But I can't escape the fear that my behavior had caused him to question his worth and masculinity even more than most teenage boys.