Buddhist meditation and pedophilia

One third of American women, and one tenth of American men, have been victims of incest or pedophilia. Like many others I want to see such practices brought to an end. I also know that any real solution will have to be workable, rational and consistent with Constitution.

Most of the proposals made have not shown to be workable. Behavioral therapy has not worked, and proposals for chemical castration would not pass court muster and would go under "cruel and unusual punishment." Long-term or lifelong imprisonment would overfill the American prisons far beyond even their present outrageous size and expense. And rounding up and shooting all perpetrators is against the Constitution.

As someone who does not have pedophilic urges, I cannot make proposals from experience. I can however make proposals from what I know to have worked for similar situations in other places. Buddhist monks meditate on decomposing corpses whenever they feel the sexual urge. They do that to get rid of sexuality altogether. If someone can decondition his entire sexuality through meditative practice, then it should be possible to use the same techniques to decondition errant sexual urges such as ones that pedophiles feel.

If I were a counselor treating a pedophile, this is exactly what I would propose. Whenever he feels anything for a child, let him meditate on decomposing corpses; better yet, let him meditate upon spending 25 years in prison and being gang-raped and beaten, or about having his penis cut off. That way he would take responsibility for his problem and solve it himself without committing a crime and without burdening prison or psychiatric systems.

Pavlovian conditioning does not have to be limited to overt stimuli. It can also be used by the mind in relation to itself. The person does not have to experience overt pain to decondition errant impulses. Instead he can train his mind to associate these errant impulses with things that are very ugly or very hurtful to oneself. This would result in Pavlovian conditioning being applied, at mental level, against errant urges and be used to retrain one's feelings or urges away from these errant directions.

If meditation can be used to get rid of sexual urge altogether then should be useable in getting rid of an errant subset of sexuality. The problem would be getting solved, and the pedophile would be solving the problem by himself. Buddhist practices such as the meditation on decomposing corpses should be workable in helping people to do away with pedophilic urge. One could make it even more immediate by meditating on things more immediately injurious than decomposing corpses. In either case, the errant urge would be deconditioned without involvement of taxpayer money, and the person would be taking responsibility for his behavior and getting rid of wrongful impulses by himself.