quote: On one wall is a "Star Trek" poster with investigators' faces substituted for the Starship Enterprise crew. But even that alludes to a dark fact of their work: All but one of the offenders they have arrested in the last four years was a hard-core Trekkie.
Mind you, "offender" in this quote refers to pedophiles.
posted
This is (a) not a statistic, but a personal memory and impression, and (b) potentially slanderous of a large and varied group of people.
Science fiction fandom, including trekmark, is a society that is extraordinarily accepting of people with very low social skills. People with asperger's syndrome, for instance, are coped with, as are people with various unfortunate aspect to their appearance, or people who are too brusk or insensitive to be tolerated by a lot of other groups. Somehow, Fandom manages to fit them all in and tolerate them, making it about the most inclusive society ever.
Pedophiles tend to be people with very low social skills (at least with adults); they are usually filled with shame, and many of them are struggling to focus on something other than their sexual obsession. It's no surprise that such people would find more of a welcome in fandom than anywhere else.
The sad thing about this factoid is that people will take it as if it means that Trekkies are more likely to be pedophiles, instead of the other way around, that pedophiles who are not KNOWN to be pedophiles are more likely to be accepted by the inclusive world of sci-fi fandom than most other groups.
While there are some children at conventions, it's not a pedophile paradise, at least not that I've observed. So I suspect that pedophiles go to trekkie events, not as predators, but as an alternative to predation. If I'm right, then maybe their involvement in trekland has actually helped them be less active as predators.
Or maybe not. i'm just speculating, to counter the nasty speculation that this "statistic" is bound to cause as it spreads.
Posts: 2005 | Registered: Jul 1999
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My dad has an answer when I ask, "Wow, what are the odds of that?" He usually points out that the odds are actually better than you would think, but since what sets us apart is our ability to recognize, learn from, and create patterns in our world, we tend to seize on anything that resembles a pattern and forget irrelevant information, rather than really researching the actual facts. Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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posted
Okay, so on a Venn diagram of the world's Star Trek fans and the world's pedophiles, there is some overlap. I'm sorry, but I just don't see how that's noteworthy. Posts: 1814 | Registered: Jul 2004
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posted
If the investigative team was so into Star Trek, it doesn't surprise me that they have connections in the fandom world that would allow them to uncover pedophiles in that world.
When you get deep into any sort of group, you are likely to find some of the bad apples in it.
Posts: 1592 | Registered: Jan 2001
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