So, here it goes: We sat down with several self-professed (but non-offending) pedophiles, as well as David Prescott (a therapist who specializes in sex offenders) and Dr. James Cantor (a scientist who studies their brains). They said ...

And we are ignorant; pedophilia is almost a total mystery to modern science. We don't know what causes it, or how to prevent it, or how to cure it (short of a form of castration ), because the moment a test subject admits they're a pedophile, they're ruined for life. Why would anyone ever come forward? Thus, society's insistence on taking the harshest possible position winds up exacerbating the problem.

Before we get started, can we all agree that there's a difference between trying to understand something and condoning it? There's nothing on Earth so awful that we should avoid talking about it completely. If anything, the more scared you are of a thing, the more you should try to understand it. Talking about a subject like pedophilia isn't going to make it worse. But refusing to talk about it -- or accusing those who do of glorifying it or normalizing it -- definitely will. No problem has ever been solved with ignorance.

5 Not All Pedophiles Molest Children

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This is going to be the most controversial statement in the article, so let's rip the Band-Aid off right now: There are pedophiles in the world who don't molest children, and never will. No one disputes that fact. So what portion of pedophiles actually victimize kids? We have no fucking idea. That is, in fact, the point.

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"Ehhhhh?" really isn't the kind of answer you want for a question like this.

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Hell, we don't even know what percentage of the population are pedophiles -- estimates range from one percent to an astounding 20 percent. Most people aren't going to freaking admit they're a pedophile on a survey, and we haven't yet developed magical scanners that can reads people's sexual desires from afar (note: society will profoundly change the day such a device is invented). So let's lay out some numbers that are going to blow your fucking mind:

In surveys, 18 percent of males admitted to having sexual fantasies about children, eight percent said they'd masturbated to those fantasies, and four percent said they'd have sex with a child if they could get away with it. "But that's just a survey!" you say, "They could be lying in either direction!" True. So the researchers took a bunch of subjects and hooked them up to boner detectors. Depending on the experiment, the percentage of subjects who got turned on by naked children (under age 12) ranged from 17 percent to 50 percent.

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Not factoring in the number of men turned on by boner detectors.

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"But those results are all over the place! Surely it can't be that high!"

All right, how about this: there are enough pedophiles to keep four million child porn websites in business, and enough paying customers to build an international industry worth as much as $20 billion. Ten years ago, the feds shut down a single site that was getting a million hits a month. Throw in the fact that not every pedophile is looking at kiddie porn, and it starts to look like there are way more adults with sexual urges toward children than you'd think.

And we don't know shit about them, because they can't admit it openly.

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Yet we have rigorous statistical analysis on almost a thousand Pokemon.

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What data we do have is skewed, because pedophiles can't come forward to be studied for fear of being burned at the stake. So the only studies have been done on prisoners -- meaning our subjects are limited to those who A) acted on their desires and B) got caught.