Rebecca Joynes is currently serving a six and a half year prison sentence
A teacher who was convicted for having sex with two boys, becoming pregnant by one, has been banned from the profession.
Maths teacher Rebecca Joynes, 31, was jailed for six and a half years in July last year after being found guilty of six counts of sexual activity with a child, after sleeping with one pupil before falling pregnant by a second while on police bail.
The Teaching Regulation Agency (TRA) convened earlier this month via a virtual hearing, which Joynes did not attend, to consider her professional conduct. A panel recommended she be banned from teaching.
No one’s disagreeing that it’s wrong and needs to be addressed. The disagreement is on whether pedophiles get to choose who they’re attracted to. This is an important distinction because firstly, the origin of their thoughts/actions determines the course of action necessary to keep it in check. Second, shaming someone for something they can’t control is one of the most effective ways of discouraging treatment. Third, that wasn’t a preface. It was the answer to the question they responded to.
Regarding suicidality: I believe that the approach of stigmatizing and criminalizing was often taken in the past and found to be ineffective. I’ve been seeing a big movement towards more open dialogue and encouraging treatment in the past decades.
And I’m disagreeing that pedophiles can’t help their feelings. This dialogue only occurs because of the recent conflation between sexuality and pedophilia. I’ve always been of the opinion that they need to see a professional, and that needs to be a non-negotiable. I reject any conversation on their feelings being a choice because as evidenced in this thread, people conflate ideas that apply to sexuality to pedophiles. I just responded to someone who accused me of arguing for conversion therapy. It’s pedophilia, it needs to stay stigmatised because of how huge the consequences are if they act on it.
I think you and shalafi might be using different definitions of “gets to choose”. Using a depressed person as an analogy since I think this is better understood: You don’t get to choose to be happy, but you can choose to take steps towards getting help so that you can better manage it. It sounds like they’re talking about the former while you’re talking about the latter.
Similarly with stigmatization. It’s one thing to stigmatize acting on your suicidal ideation. It’s another to stigmatize having suicidal ideation in the first place.