How many viewers know what a paedophile is? How many care?
A paedophile is a person who finds prepubescent boys or girls sexually attractive, but you wouldn't know it if you watched this film or listened to a news reporter or even the Prime Minister of Great Britain. The word is widely misused to mean child molester or just generally sex offender who targets under 18s and in a film that's centred around a person's torture and eventual suicide, it's pretty important that we're clear on what we mean when we say "he's a pedophile".
This is actually is very serious problem that few people, it seems, have given thought to. Because most people don't differentiate between a child molester and a person who simply has the attraction, many people are misdirecting their hatred towards anybody with the condition rather than those who have actually abused children. This is passionate hatred of any adult who finds a child attractive is obviously not rightly earned because nobody has any choice in what looks attractive to them - it was no more anybody here's decision not to find children attractive than it was another's decision to be a paedophile.
Something few people are aware of is the suffering of teenagers who are discovering their sexual orientation like everybody else and find they are attracted to children. Many young people in that situation struggle with immense guilt, shame, and conflict because of the seething hatred of paedophiles - hatred of the condition rather than hatred of the act of child abuse. The situation gets even worse when you take a look at what just about every person's advice would be to somebody who discovers that they find children attractive, "Get help!".
If you were a paedophile, how comfortable and safe would you feel telling another person about it? And that's just it - most will never open up and tell anybody about it and that includes doctors or therapists. There are people who have actually abused children who might not have done had they sought and received help - the environment we have created is *terrible* when it comes to preventing sexual abuse! We need to see the madness we've been perpetuating and treat it as we do every other psychological condition - we *help* people with the condition, we don't hate them and strike fear into them!
The reality is that most paedophiles do not sexually offend, not all are even in need of therapy as a person's sexuality (set of attractions) cannot be changed, all that can be treated is a person's urges to solicit sex and many paedophiles do not struggle with any such urges.
We are currently in the stage the Victorians were in when they feared, hated, and punished schizophrenics. Now we understand that it's senseless to hate a person for having an illness and we treat it humanely and intelligently. There is no such thing as a "defence of paedophilia" just as there is no "defence of schizophrenia" - it's an unchosen condition, it can't be morally judged.
If we insist on satisfying torture fantasies and relishing thoughts of violence and murder then at least we should be clear that we're directing these at people who have raped or murdered children (murdering a child is far more the act of a rapist than a child molester acting out of attraction - the Jeff character in real life would likely not be a paedophile at all, not that the creators seemed to care) - I find such vengeance to be barbaric and beneath us as human beings, I understand the emotions but to wish for it is a very ugly, dark and disturbing thing, I find.
The Jeff character was worthy of hatred but not because "he'd a pedophile" - because he was a rapist and a murderer. If we don't bother to differentiate between the two then more and more people will continue to suffer - innocent adults and innocent children.