To be honest, I think this is the first time I have even heard the term pederast. I’ll keep that in mind for future discussions, thanks.

I agree. It is still rape.

And yet we differentiate rapes in the legal system, or don’t we? We look at the circumstances. The whole debate here ensured because we brought the term pedophile into it. Even if you take the word in its wrong sense - as someone who is having [illegal] sex with a minor - you now specified the rape.

As in this case, it was statutory rape. As someone else pointed out, the second boy the teacher had sex with was 16, which is the age of consent in the UK. So if he was a student at another school, and she had had sex with him, she would be legally in the clear - no crime and no pedo. So now her being a pedophile or not depends on the school the boy is going to? Had she been a teacher at a school in Germany she could have legally had sex with both boys, provided they weren’t in her class. Yet what she did was illegal and statutory rape. You’re unnecessarily bringing pathological attraction into a rape case.

I’d also argue that motive matters. Is she attracted to younger boys only? Or does she get off on the fact that they are her subordinates? This matters for prevention.

I don’t know about the way sentencing in the UK works, but I sincerely hope that a person who rapes a 10 year old gets a harsher sentence than someone who committed statutory rape with a 16 year old.

In your car metaphor - she drove the car into people. Does this make every car driver a murderer in the making? And are motorcyclists in the clear because they cannot drive a car into people?

I’m glad you feel a bit supported, I was also very sad to see how your comment got so many downvotes. But unfortunately that is common on lemmy, I got tons of downvotes last time I argued that round.

Your example makes little sense though. You’re talking about a subsection of microorganisms with specific needs. You won’t talk about an extremophile using the word mesophile and then get annoyed that people are confused or assume that they know what you are talking about.

You know what, that’s probably the best suggestion I’ve heard on this topic in a while. You’re right, “pedophile” as a word is just completely ruined. You can probably go about and raise awareness as much as you want and demand a correct use of the word, but at the end of the day, the societal connotation is there and you won’t get it off the word anymore. Maybe a new word would really be the easiest way to go.

I see where you are coming from, but I disagree that there is no difference. Apart from ages of consent being different among different countries (greetings from a place where you can have sexual relations from 14 years onwards), which already points at a grey zone for an age of maturity, I would ague that the physical and mental damage is different. A 15 or 16 year old might already have had some sexual experiences, or will have at least heard of what sex is, and (more or less) understand what is happening. The younger the child, the greater the damage to the body, and a child that doesn’t even know what sex is yet will carry a different kind of mental trauma from the assault.

I’ll also include the mandatory paragraph about a philia not being a felony in itself. Why it’s important is not just out of respect and support for non offending minor attracted persons who will be less likely to come out and seek help with a witch hunt for people with their orientation, but also to raise the absolutely necessary awareness that a great chunk of minor sexual assault cases are committed not by people with a -philia, but by people with regular (i.e. adult) sexual orientations. So you are not safe just because the person in question is proven not to have an attraction towards minors.

It’s funny how we spent the whole last decade stating that language matters, but somehow when it comes to pedophilia, everyone stops caring about correct language.