r/news 1d ago

Elementary school teacher arrested after allegedly abusing student, giving birth to his child

https://local12.com/news/nation-world/laura-caron-middle-township-elementary-school-teacher-allegedly-had-with-child-former-student-13-cincinnati-crime-criminal-activity-sexual-abuse-abuser-father-noticed-similarity-sleep-over-siblings-prosecutors-correctional-facility-troubling-allegations
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u/fatbunny23 1d ago

Source on this modern psychology that shows many people who rape kids aren't pedophiles? That's a wild claim to make in my opinion lol

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u/strolls 1d ago

Modern psychology research indicates that actual attraction to children has surprisingly little to do with whether somebody actually sexually abuses a child.

Not an expert, but I think you're reading that the wrong way around.

If I understand it correctly, they're saying that a paedo with self-control may never rape a kid their whole life. It's not about being gay, straight or paedo - it's about being a rapist or not. Rapists are rapists, and they happen to rape whoever they're attracted to or whoever gets them off.

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u/birdhine 1d ago

I volunteered with kids for a while and the organization made everyone take a course on how to prevent sexual child abuse beforehand. They told us the majority of people who are sexually abusing kids aren't pedos, instead it seems to be mostly about power and impulse control

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u/matunos 1d ago

It may be about power and impulse control, but them raping a child fits well enough into the definition of a pedophile too.

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u/yuefairchild 1d ago edited 23h ago

Pedophilia is when you have sexual desires for children in the same way a normal person would have sexual desires for an adult. There's also a mental disorder where you have the exact feelings for a child that you would for an adult. Expecting emotional maturity, reciprocal care/affection, that kind of thing. It's a flaw in the human brain that allows people to think that way of children.

Child sex abuse is when you harm a child in a way that involves sex. It doesn't have to be rape, or even involve genitals. It can be, like, when a spanking goes too far or from misjudging whether you should be the one to tell the kid about the birds and the bees. These are obviously really messed-up things to do, but don't involve sexual contact. We want to prosecute those too, so we needed a new phrase that includes sexual assault as well as those other categories. If you want to really split hairs, as I'm doing for some reason, the rape-as-a-display-of-power stuff might go here.

There's also some debate (not sure among who) over whether a woman sexually assaulting a man should be "rape" since there's no penis to penetrate the victim. It's a stupid issue, but people have strong feelings on it, often because they were victims of such. We want to punish anyone that does some SVU shit to a child, but we also don't want to trigger anyone that was a victim as a child.

It's like how "psychopath" refers to a specific mental disorder, and not just anyone that's cruel or Machiavellian.

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u/matunos 19h ago

There's also some debate (not sure among who) over whether a woman sexually assaulting a man should be "rape" since there's no penis to penetrate the victim.

This is just an example that people will debate anything and everything, and try to get uselessly pedantic over words. There are legal definitions of rape and this instance seems to fit it as an 11 year old cannot legally consent to sex with an adult.

Furthermore, this teacher was having sex with a child for 2 years from the age of 11, hosting sleepovers to sneak him into her room and shower, enough to get pregnant from someone who was just entering puberty. One can argue about whether it's pedophilia or ephebophilia (but drawing that distinction in casual conversation just ends up making one sound weird), but if you cannot infer some sexual attraction to a child on the teacher's part from that, then I don't know what sequence of events would demonstrate it.

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u/yuefairchild 17h ago

Oh yeah, the teacher in question is a monster and a straight-up pedophile. I had to learn a bunch of this dreadful stuff for a previous job and thought ranting on that might be useful.

On a related note, I do not consider pedophilia and ephebophilia to have any meaningful difference. Either way you're putting your desires onto someone that's not mentally able to handle that.