Quote - for legal purposes a child is a child until reaching the age of 18 (most common age of "maturity").

puberty occurs prior to age 18.

Just to point out a rather large flaw in what you just said..... the legal age of consent, ie the age at which an individual is legally responsible for their own actions,  is NOT 18. Not even in the dear ole US of A!!
18 years of age is the legal age of consent in only 15 of the States in the USA. Most of the remaining states stipulate either 17 or 16, and in 3 cases (Iowa, Missouri and South Carolina) the age is actually 14.
The rest of the world varies a lot, with the age ranging from 12 to 20 (or sometimes none at all) with the average being about 16. then i shall revise my statment here to read

for legal purposes a child is a minor until reaching the age of 18

a minor cannot sign a release form for use or distrabution of their photo.

Quote - Also, just on a side note your comment about paedophile's preferences seems to be ignoring the fact that quite a large proportion of said paedophiles are homosexual.

Please excuse me if this goes in a direction you did not intend.

I find the association of homosexuality and paedophiles to be misleading. the vast majority of male perpitrators with male victums do not identify themselves as "homosexual". There is no evadence that men who identify themselves as "homosexual" are more likely to be peaedophiles.

I do understand (and have heard before) the statement that a man who violates a boy "is a homosexual" (by definition) but "protecting" yourself/your children from people who identify themselves as homosexual is only giving a false sense of security.

 

from the prevous link. i did find this statement interesting... (again emphasis added)

A perpetrator of child sexual abuse is, despite all medical definitions, commonly assumed to be a pedophile, and referred to as such; however, there may be other motivations for the crime[19] (such as stress, marital problems, or the unavailability of an adult partner[32]), much as adult rape can have non-sexual reasons. Thus, child sexual abuse alone may or may not be an indicator that its perpetrator is a pedophile; most perpetrators of it are in fact not primarily interested in children.[33]

Those who have committed sexual crimes against children, but do not meet the normal diagnosis criteria for pedophilia, are referred to as situational, opportunistic, or regressed offenders, whereas offenders primarily attracted toward children are called structured, preferential, or fixated pedophiles, as their orientation is fixed by the structure of their personality. It is estimated that only 2 to 10 percent of child sexual abuse perpetrators meet the regular criteria for pedophilia. (Kinsey-Report, Lautmann, Brongersma, Groth).

 

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