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In Reply to: Re: Some laws on child sexual abuse enacted by the end of the Middle Ages posted by Peter Frouman on January 31, 2008 at 02:55:24:
You wrote: "I must take exception to your statements that 'pederasty was widely accepted even up until the early 1900s' and 'pedophilia although regarded as unpleasant, until a few decades ago, wasn't the big deal it is now.'"
I stand by my statements, but perhaps I should have been more careful and worded them more precisely.
Pederasty: According to The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early–Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society by Walter Andrews and Mehmet Kalpakli, pederastic relationships were prominent and pervasive features of Islamic culture from Moorish Spain to Northern India, up to the 1800s. I also read somewhere (can't recall the source now) about accounts of such activity in the Ottoman Empire, right up until its fall in the beginning of the 1900s. Perhaps it would be safest to say it was happening, less and less openly, but still with significant public knowledge up until the 1800s in some cultures. And in some obscure places it is still accepted today.
Pedophilia: It wasn't as big a deal as it is now, back when I was a child. As somebody here said, and I say it too, I saw things happening around me, everybody saw too, but nobody alerted the police or formed a lynch mob. I was abused myself, and nobody did a damn thing about it. So I'm going by personal experience. I know that if what happened to me happened to a child in today's world, people would be up in arms about it.
Anti-pedophile activism had not taken a foothold on society until recently years, with high-profile media attention to such abuses. For a long time, news about this kind of crime was never published openly in newspapers, for example. Now we have an awareness about it like never before.
