Can Pedophilia Ever Be "Mild"?

Richard Dawkins isn't concerned about having been groped as a boy. Should we be?

Richard Dawkins at home in Oxford. Photograph: Graeme Robertson

(Trigger warning. If the title isn’t clear enough, this article discusses sexual encounters between minors and adults.)

World-famous scientist Richard Dawkins attracted a lot negative attention a few years back when he suggested that the “mild pedophilia” he experienced as a boy wasn't really a big deal. He recalled how one of his teachers “pulled me on his knee and put his hand inside my shorts.” Dawkins went on to say, “I don’t think he did any of us lasting harm.”

Dawkins' point was that such situations must be seen in context, and that the cultural backdrop of his youth six decades ago was sufficiently different from now as to make judgment more complicated and outrage less warranted than it may seem.

“I am very conscious that you can’t condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours," Dawkins said. "Just as we don’t look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism, I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can’t find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today,” he said.

This seems to create an unacknowledged logical conundrum for Dawkins, who appears to be arguing both that his experience wasn’t significantly harmful so as to warrant condemnation, but that he would condemn such a situation today. Why? Is the immediate harmfulness of the encounter determined by the cultural context in which it occurs — or is context only significant in retrospect?