I think you may have read that wrong. I think he's saying that full 25% (the ones who offended as juveniles) are unlikely to be repeat offenders. The remaining 75%, convicted as adults, are presumably a much bigger concern.
Exactly right. In fact adult pedophiles have extremely high recidivism rates.
It appears that pedophile is as much a sexual orientation as homosexual, and is as hard to change. But where gay people do no particular harm except to the sensibilities of conservatives, pedophiles do a lot of damage.
However a 12 year old who sends a naked picture of themselves to a friend is treated by the law in the same way as a pedophile. Ditto an 18 year old whose 17 year old girlfriend's mother gets unhappy. As a father whose children are hitting puberty now, this fact is very scary.
I warn my children, but one mistake could destroy their lives, and there is no shortage of people who it has happened to.
1. The measured recidivism rate will depend on time frame. The longer the frame, the higher it is. Most studies use a shorter time frame.
2. Most sex crimes do not get reported. Most studies rely on reported crimes because it is obviously easier to get data for them.
3. Most re-arrests are for non-sexual offenses. But a non-sexual crime when carried out by a pedophile may have a sexual motivation.
That said, in the largest available long term study, the 10 year rearrest for another sex crime is 20%. The actual re-offense rate is certainly much higher.
Making it personal, I was abused as a child. I know two other people who that person abused, and I have strong evidence that there were many more before that. However looking at his legal history, you'd only see a single arrest and conviction for public indecency in the 1960s.
I have seen surveys indicating that the most unusual thing about this example is that he was arrested and convicted at all. That perfectly fits with what I've heard from other people who were abused. Most of the abusers were serial offenders, few were convicted.
Moving on, visit http://virped.org/ to get an idea of how hard it is to be a pedophile who is attempting to never offend. I fully respect their attempts to be better people, but won't be letting my children be around anyone who I suspect is in that group...my reasons should be obvious...
I'm sorry for your experience and I won't dive into your response to it, but as to your points they're all incredibly hand-wavey and #2 & #3 are especially magical thinking. This isn't to say that they aren't so, but unless it's possible to prove them they're pretty tenuous reasons with which to shape policy.
Think of it what you will. But to #2, googling randomly, http://www.nsvrc.org/sites/default/files/publications_nsvrc_... claims that only 12% of child sexual abuse is reported to the
authorities, and cites a study on the topic. The majority of such studies that I've seen are based on surveys.
On #3, anyone with experience in how the legal system works will agree that while how often it happens may be hard to quantify, but it certainly does happen. And probably not very rarely.
