View source for Conference paper: paedophilia

For instance, for many years the COC emphasized the difference between homosexuality and paedophilia, two things that had nothing whatsoever to do with each other. In an era in which the gay movement still had to fight for "respectability" and "acceptability", this was not a strange strategy. Now, after waves of gay and lesbian activism, growing self-consciousness, and gay pride, the situation is different. Not only because homosexual men and women are ware that they can contribute to the discussion in their own exclusive way, out of their own specific experience with, and analysis of, repression and oppression. They have a specific interest of their own in the discussion. The oppression of paedosexuality and homosexuality springs from the same roots, the same reasons and the same causes. It is the same interest that is served by it. It is the same interest that provided from the consolidation and preservation of the position of marriage and the family, the traditional role-division between men and women, a complex of cooperating factors which we will deal in this paper enforced heterosexuality.<br>
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Extensive research in The Netherlands has shown that penalizing sexual relations under a certain age is only harmful. Harmful to the elder person involved, who will go to prison and who will be stigmatised as a "childmolester" for the rest of his/her life, and harmful to the younger person involved, who only realises that something that he/she found nice, exciting, valuable, nasty, boring, valueless, actually was a very severe crime when he/she is confronted with the overreaction of his/her surroundings (parents, police, courts) and when he/she is subject to the most humiliating and incomprehensible procedures. It is this confrontation and experience that can have traumatic consequences to the child. [...]<br>
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In this society sex is limited to heterosexuality. Between one man and one woman. For life. And with it a closely determined and partially legally fired role for both partners. And then, within that pattern, male superiority is ensured. Furthermore, sex is something for persons above the age of consent. This is the myth concerning what sex should be on which our society is based.<br>
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<i>source: 'Paedophilia' by Janherman Veenker & Rob Pistor (N.V.I.H.-COC); www.ehgam.org/liburutegia/ archivos/00850-001.pdf; Taken from the discussion paper 'Paedophilia'; Paper to the second annual conference of the International Gay Association; Barcelona: 5-7 April 1980</i>

[[Category:Janherman Veenker]]
[[Category:Rob Pistor]]
[[Category:COC]]
[[Category:IGA]]
[[Category:Repression]]
[[Category:Onderdrukking]]
[[Category:Harmful]]
[[Category:Schadelijkheid]]
[[Category:Age of consent]]
[[Category:Leeftijdsgrens]]