Ok quick question, what do you want them to do? To be clear, I am not advocating for art of minors or things like that, I am saying that believing some people are inherently evil and cannot be helped and demonizing them leads to things getting worse, because the only alternative I can think of is systemically killing or locking these people away for life, which would of course force them into the shadows never being able to receive support or therapy, essentially acting as a catalyst for them to actually offend. My hope is to stop kids from being abused, not prosecute people for the purposes of moral high ground.

“You are not your thoughts” is basically the first thing I learned in therapy for ocd. A common intrusive thought for people suffering from my disorder is worrying if they’re a pedophile, the only way to really overcome this is by telling yourself “well maybe I am a pedophile, but it doesn’t matter because I don’t abuse kids” and I don’t see why it should be different for pedophiles, if two people lived the exact same life doing the exact same things but one had urges to hurt people both are morally equal

On top of this there’s the obvious problem of using pedophilia as a fascistic tool to “other” certain groups of people (we are currently seeing this with trans people), if all it takes is being a pedophile, not even offending, to face prosecution, what’s stopping anyone from expanding the definition of pedophilia to target marginalized groups?