From the above article -
"I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild paedophilia, and can’t find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today.”
and
"The mention of paedophilia inevitably brings us to the recent run of arrests of old white men accused of child sex abuse, starting with Jimmy Savile. Has the moral zeitgeist been shifting at their expense? “I think we should acknowledge it. That’s one point… But the other point is that because the most notorious cases of paedophilia involve rape and even murder, and because we attach the label ‘paedophilia’ to the same things when they’re just mild touching up, we must beware of lumping all paedophiles into the same bracket.”
So is there a risk of a metaphorical lynching of well-known people as soon as they’re accused? “I think there is a risk of that.”
What about the child sex abuse scandals that have led to anguished soul-searching and multibillion-dollar payouts in various outposts of Christianity? “Same thing,” he says. “Although I’m no friend of the Church, I think they have become victims of our shifting standards and we do need to apply the conventions of the good historian in dealing with cases which are many decades old.”
In the book, Dawkins mentions one occasion when a teacher put a hand down his trousers at a prep school in Salisbury, and four others at Oundle, when he “had to fend off nocturnal visits to my bed from senior boys much larger and stronger than I was”. The Oundle incidents don’t seem to have bothered him"
Now, forgive my ignorance, but what exactly is "mild" paedophilia?
Surely paedophilia is paedophilia, full stop, no?
Of course, there are paedophiles who go the "whole hog", and rape children. There are also paedophiles who don't necessarily physically rape, but abuse in other ways. Similarly there are ones who go online, and download and/or share indecent images of children for their own gratification, and the gratification of other paedophiles. The courts deal with all these crimes as paedophile crimes - as they should - any abuse against children should be taken with equal importance.
So why the differentiation - why the word "mild" - why the comparison between crimes committed today, and ones committed decades ago? Are any other crimes described as "mild"? "Mild robbery, Mild murder? Mild arson? Should such crimes as Dawkins describes - paedophile teachers putting their disgusting mitts down boys pants - be dismissed like this? Should they be taken less seriously purely on the fact that full on rape had not been committed? What do other victims of abuse ("mild paedophilia" in Dawkins words) think - should they shrug this off as only an insignificant crime? What do other victims of child abuse in the past think - should they just forget about it due to the fact it may have occurred 2, 3, 5 decades ago?
Is Dawkins just making excuses for paedophiles? Does he not think that paedophiles, who may engage in "mild paedophilia" could not progress to more full on abuse and rape, if they are seen to get away with their "mild" abuse? What would he feel, if supposing, the teacher had "graduated" from stuffing his grubby fingers down boys pants, to rape? Would there be any regret in not informing TPTB? There is no excuse for paedophilia, either "mild", full on rape, or online IIOC. There is, in the same way, no excuse for it occurring either today, yesterday, or 50 years ago. Period.
