I've been bouncing this around in my head for a while, but I'm not really a debater (at least online) so I've somewhat avoided posting this. I get this feeling that we're doing more harm than good by calling for the death of molesters, assuming kids are now traumatized and whatnot. Mostly I'm wondering about the latter.

I mean, is there any real reason to be traumatized? When you really get down to it, what exactly did the molester do? Took advantage of the kid, breached the trust barrier, now that's bad, even worse when it's a loved one, but is it really so much worse than, say, cheating on a spouse or walking out on your family when things get bad? Not if you accept (as people commonly seem to on this bored) that sex isn't particularly sacred and we treat it with too many hush's whispers and dodges.

The kid didn't know what they were doing, as far as Jenny's concerned all she did was make Uncle Ned feel good until he told her to stop, I'm not saying lie to them and say what Uncle Ned told her to do wasn't bad, but when we overreact, coddle them, and tell them how it's SO bad, and how everyone is SO sorry and then later in life seeing all these highly publicized trials and calls for death on molesters... well, it's not a surprise they break down crying and BSOD as far as relationships go, because after seeing all that if they weren't quite convinced they were a victim they're DAMN sure now and will begin to think like a victim. I think we aggravate the issue too much, if we didn't treat child sex crimes as such a be all end all issue I think the children could grow up a lot happier because they'd know they had trust broken and be hurt there, but wouldn't be told they're SUCH a victim all the time and probably wouldn't have issues near as bad as they do when they're convinced they had one of the Ultimate Crimes™ perpetrated against them. Not to mention these paralyzing issues don't really seem to manifest until well after the incident, i.e. once they understand what happened (which is information entirely gleaned from people telling them what happened, like that they were victimized).

Now obviously this would require a major reworking of social mores, so this is more of a thought experiment, but do you think we needlessly aggravate paedophilia (and possibly ephebophilia) issues to the point where it hurts the children more than it deters the offenders (In other words, helps more than it hurts)?