throwaway78's Hacker News comment

Exactly: how to deal with it? Any research on this subject is taboo, any questioning on the status quo is also frowned upon ("Are you defending a pedophile?! You must be one!"), hating pedophiles is common and widespread, with people wishing they rot in their cells. Understand this: you're expected to want someone with desires he did not choose to be physically harmed, deprived of their right to live a normal life. Pedophiles are second-class citizens, much like people of African origin and homosexuals once were. Note that I'll keep the similarities at this level, which no one can contest.

This post is coming from a pedophile, obviously. I'm trying to show you, the people who have no idea what happens in those scary darknets, a look from the inside. Yes, there are people who rape children. Yes, there are people selling this stuff (as there have been on the clearnet and before the internet). But the sites hosted on FH? You could find none of that. They were collections of images which, unlike government propaganda, rarely contain rape. It's mostly the kind of images you find on nudism sites, but of course not all of it is happiness. The majority of users in those services frown upon that kind of content. Why should we trust pedophiles commenting on pedophile sites? Because you'd have to be pretty wealthy to astroturf pro-pedophile propaganda at the scale it'd be needed for those users to be so convincing over a 1+ year period. In short, the raid of these sites has done little to prevent children from being harmed.

So I've talked about what it is like inside the scary darknets, I hope you believe it (I wish I could say it's there for you to see it for yourself, but it no longer is). I do hope that with time people realize forcibly injecting chemicals on people looking at decoded bits over a computer screen in order to effectively sterilize them will be seen as evil as it is thought today of what was done to homosexuals. No one asks to be a pedophile. It's not cool. It's not fun. It's really not fun to have pretty much the majority of the population talking about how you should rot in a jail, be raped or brutally murdered for something which you can't control (your desires; you can control your actions). You'll question yourself many times "Am I really this monster? I never touched any child, but still should I not be allowed to live?". The effect of criminalization is, in my opinion, the same as the war on drugs or the alcohol ban: you just created a huge market opportunity and now there are going to be even more players at this game, since black markets are usually highly profitable.

And I'll end asking you all how do you want this to end? Eradicating pedophilia? Never gonna happen. Sterilization of the whole pedophile population? Thanks for taking away my human rights based on an image I looked at, because something went funny when mom and dad had sex some decades ago. I'm sorry, but just as someone who was born gay and does not want to change that is completely right to have that position, I do believe I'm not wrong when I say I do not want to kill this part of myself (I'm also not advocating legalization though; I want the end of this demonization. Let it be seen simply as ADHD or whatever else, not as scary monsters and a perfect excuse for surveillance)

I really hope there's discussion on this in the coming decades. It needs to stop being a taboo. Not every pedophile is a rapist (I'll throw my anecdotal knowledge: most never act on their urges).

I hope whoever reads this learns something.