this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2026
79 points (70.9% liked)

No Stupid Questions

45251 readers
670 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

For awhile it was single downvotes, but it seems that moved up to 2-3 on each comment. Even the most benign stuff gets hit, the pattern is clear.

Can I find this person and block them from seeing my posts? Never really delved into how lemmy works.

Probably doesn't matter much because after awhile the forget and leave me alone for a bit.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Apytele@sh.itjust.works 25 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Most offenders I've interacted with have no specific attraction to children at all. They want to rape someone and children just happen to make ideal victims by being smaller and weaker and depending on age and upbringing may not even realize a crime had occurred or be able to advocate for themselves. Most of the offenders would have / often had also raped the elderly or disabled if given the chance. They would even attempt to prey on the smaller or weaker staff members or other patients if given the opportunity.

There were a few edge cases of profoundly psychotic / ID patients who genuinely just didn't know any better but again it was rarely a specific attraction and more of an overall disinhibition, they would generally also have trespassing, petty theft, and property damage charges and were showing their genitals to just about anyone. Violent and sexual intrusive thoughts can be a part of some OCD presentations but the thoughts usually go away when the underlying anxiety is treated with medication and behavioral therapy. Pts with violent and sexual intrusive thoughts also pretty much never offend, to the extent that I never really interacted with that population until after leaving forensics. They're a super high suicide risk though due to not understanding the actual psychological mechanism of the thoughts (self-reinforcing through anxiety, not attraction).

I'm not saying attraction to children doesn't exist, but when we're taking about the actual issue of child sexual assault it's just an unproductive line of discussion that relates very little to the actual core issues. The "can't help being attracted" is mostly pop-psychology TV shows use to tell a more emotionally charged story.

Now that said, we do have a huge issue as a society with allowing the high of righteous fury to interfere with victims actually receiving justice. Those accused have just as much of a right to due process as anyone accused of any other crime. Interfering with that right either creates massive overreach by the legal system or in individual cases damages evidence that would be used to fairly prosecute an offender. It also creates a social environment where people protect their offending loved ones out of fear for them, when they should feel secure in the knowledge that while they will probably always love the offender, they can and will be safely separated from the rest of society (or at least be forced to live under monitoring and away from possible victims) for the rest of their natural life.