Child sexual abuse in the UK is soaring, police have said, with 1,000 paedophile suspects being arrested each month and the number of children being rescued from harm rising by 50% in the last five years.
The National Crime Agency said the growth in offending across the UK was driven by technology and linked to the radicalisation of offenders in online forums, encouraging people to view images of child sexual abuse by reassuring them it was normal.
Most contact with children happened on mainstream social media platforms, with algorithms pushing paedophilic material to people who have shown a previous interest in it.
The significant increase in every measure “really worries us”, said Rob Jones, the NCA’s director general of operations.
Leads about people interested in sexually abusing children had risen tenfold in a decade, he said, with 1,200 children a month being safeguarded.
What’s been shocking me is just how rampant pedophilia actually is. What the fuck is it that draws so many people (primarily powerful cis men) to it? It’s fucking disgusting
The perception that it’s primarily powerful men is a distortion from the Epstein files. Those are the ones that can traffic victims maybe, but more often sexual assaults on children are by people known to the victim, like family or friends of family.
If you want a real answer it’s likely mostly because humans only recently became “civilised” as far as our evolutionary past is concerned.
For our entire history before that, it has been evolutionarily advantageous to breed as early as biologically possible.
These genetics still exist and having attraction to minors still haunts humanity. Some studies show very large numbers of adults, in the realm of 10-25% of the population, are attracted to minors. Usually the definition is below the age of consent in the country of the study.
Almost all of these people understand it’s wrong and do not pursue these unwanted feelings. When people have overlaps between psychopathy, trauma or other conditions and the attraction to minors they often become offenders.
Having children early is a different demographic, teenagers with teenagers or young adults. Pedos are older people targeting teenagers, which I’m not sure has any significant evolutionary advantage. If anything, young women would be better off looking for young men, and vice versa. I’d argue pedos is a socially constructed phenomenon, powered mainly by power disbalance, not an evolutionary one.
Evolutionary pressures and positive selection does not care for these constructs, getting older isn’t likely to decrease attraction to minors in these people
While they can be attracted, without social pressures the teenagers would simply tell them to go away. An image of an older entrepreneur or a star seeking very young companions is recognized as success. Older people have more autonomy and resources than young adults and teenagers. Being an equal in a company of other teenagers is seen as boring, less cool than a teenager in a company of adults. Socially constructed hierarchies of adults over children like these add up, leading to predators not being prevented as much as they should. In case of Epstein, he was considered normal as long as he was perceived as targeting young women in their late teens as a 40 year-old man, which I think should be much more frowned upon; instead, it’s being celebrated, not by evolution but by adults making conscious decisions.
These are very new concepts over the duration of evolution. Grooming has probably existed since the dawn of social structures
Lack of self-control or empathy, paired with a fucked up mind. Same as serial killers, I’d guess.
Many sociopaths are not limited by their lack of empathy and are able to navigate the systems of society with ease in ways that people with morals simply can’t or won’t. As a result, it seems likely that a very high proportion of the people historically and currently in powerful positions are in fact sociopaths. Our systems were never designed to defeat sociopathic tendencies, in fact they tend to reward them. And now that the sociopaths are in power, they begin to realize that nobody can stop them, and they become even more brazen as they make sure the systems reward them even more, and make systems that will never stop rewarding them.
I wonder how many of the Trump-Epstein Class are serial killers. We already know for sure many of them have blood on their hands
Think tek knight from the boys.