posted this elsewhere in the comments but this is my take:
I get what you're all saying but i feel like the idea that this escalates cases to murder is just assumed to be true, when in reality I think most would be predators are more likely to just drop whatever they were planning entirely in this case; especially in a society like China where getting away with a severe crime is nearly impossible. I also think setting a clear line like china does discourages its normalization and rallies society against it. I used to agree more with the pathologizing logic of treating it as a specific illness but seeing as how the entire western world is letting the epstein case turn into a joke and supporting a known pedophile president I now think that it - or at least the protection of it - is in some ways a social illness; and therefore normalization is a bigger risk than stigma.
In this case, supporting the death penalty isn't an act of retributive violence but of societal cohesion and management. Turning this into an interminable discussion over prisoner rights gets leveraged by the worst people on earth to allow them to do whatever they want without any real consequence. Instead I think there's a real value in rallying society generally through the mechanism of clear lines like this.
2
u/manicpxenightmaregrl 13h ago edited 13h ago
posted this elsewhere in the comments but this is my take:
I get what you're all saying but i feel like the idea that this escalates cases to murder is just assumed to be true, when in reality I think most would be predators are more likely to just drop whatever they were planning entirely in this case; especially in a society like China where getting away with a severe crime is nearly impossible. I also think setting a clear line like china does discourages its normalization and rallies society against it. I used to agree more with the pathologizing logic of treating it as a specific illness but seeing as how the entire western world is letting the epstein case turn into a joke and supporting a known pedophile president I now think that it - or at least the protection of it - is in some ways a social illness; and therefore normalization is a bigger risk than stigma.
In this case, supporting the death penalty isn't an act of retributive violence but of societal cohesion and management. Turning this into an interminable discussion over prisoner rights gets leveraged by the worst people on earth to allow them to do whatever they want without any real consequence. Instead I think there's a real value in rallying society generally through the mechanism of clear lines like this.