I'm not sure that human history supports the view that pedophilia is a "perversion".   Check out the interesting, albeit godawful and controversial evidence and hypotheses about the universal practice of incest and child abuse here, at Lloyd deMause's Institute for Psychohistory

The articles are long, but they are definitely worth the read. To quote from one of the articles, The History of Child Abuse

"In several hundred studies published by myself and my associates in The Journal of Psychohistory, we have provided extensive evidence that the history of childhood has been a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes--and the further away from the West one gets--the more massive the neglect and cruelty one finds and the more likely children are to have been killed, rejected, beaten, terrorized and sexually abused by their caretakers.

Indeed, my conclusion from a lifetime of psychohistorical study of childhood and society is that the history of humanity is founded upon the abuse of children. Just as family therapists today find that child abuse often functions to hold families together as a way of solving their emotional problems, so, too, the routine assault of children has been society's most effective way of maintaining its collective emotional homeostasis.

Most historical families once practiced infanticide, erotic beating and incest. Most states sacrificed and mutilated their children to relieve the guilt of adults. Even today, we continue to arrange the daily killing, maiming, molestation and starvation of children through our social, military and economic activities...."

And from The Universality of Incest

...It is incest itself - and not the absence of incest - that has been universal for most people in most places at most times. Further-more, the earlier in history one searches, the more evidence there is of universal incest, just as there is more evidence of other forms of child abuse.(14)

Childhood in much of India begins with the young child being regularly masturbated by the mother, "high caste or low caste, the girl 'to make her sleep well,' the boy 'to make him manly..."'

This practice has been said to be widespread by many reliable observers, including Catherine Mayo - whose extensive investigations in India in the 1920s led to the first child marriage laws(90) - a physician,(91) an ethnologist,(92) a religious scholar (93) and a sociologist.(94)

As is the case with virtually all non-Western cultures, the child sleeps in the family bed for several years and regularly observes sexual intercourse between the parents. The extent to which Indian parents go beyond this and overtly have sex with the child cannot be determined. Rampal, the sociologist who recently did interviews modeled on the Kinsey studies about contemporary Indian sexual practices, concludes that "there is a lot of incest...It is hidden along with other secrets of families and rarely gets a chance to come out, like seduction at the hands of trusted friends of the family... To arrive at even a passable estimate of incest cases would be to touch the hornet's nest.. no one will ever confess to such a deed, therefore, any attempt to collect statistics may prove to be futile at present."(95)

Boys as well as girls are reported as being masturbated and raped by the men in the family, including fathers, older brothers, uncles and cousins.(96) By the time children are four or five, they are usually taken to bed at night by others in the extended household ...

So acceptable is sex between close relatives in India that uncle-niece and cross-cousin marriages were preferred among certain Indian groups.(100) As the old Indian proverb has it, "For a girl to be a virgin at ten years old, she must have neither brothers nor cousin nor father.

Historically, all the institutionalized forms of pedophilia that were customary in the Far East are extensively documented for the Middle East during its earlier infanticidal childrearmg mode, including child marriage, child concubinage, temple prostitution of both boys and girls, parent-child marriage (among the Zoroastrians), sibling marriage (among the Egyptians, among both royalty and commoners), sex slavery, ritualized pederasty, eunichism, and widespread child prostitution."


I'd never heard of "pederasty" till I read those articles. So I looked up this Wikipedia article on Pederasty and found out more than I ever wanted to know ...

Pederasty, as idealized by the ancient Greeks, was a relationship and bond between an adolescent boy and an adult man outside of his immediate family. In a wider sense it refers to erotic love between adolescents and adult men. The word derives from the combination of pais (Greek for 'boy') with erastis (Greek for 'lover'; cf. eros). In those societies where pederasty is prevalent, it appears as one form of a widely practiced male bisexuality.

In antiquity, pederasty as a moral and educational institution was practiced in Ancient Greece and Rome. Other forms of it were common, and also found among the Celts (as per Aristotle, Politics, II 6.6. Athen. XIII 603a) and among the Persians (as per Herodotus 1.135).

More recently, it was widespread in Tuscany and northern Italy during the Renaissance. Outside of Europe, it was common in pre-Modern Japan until the Meiji restoration, in Mughal India until the British colonization, amongst the Aztecs prior to the Spanish conquest of Mexico and in China and Central Asia until the early 20th century. The tradition of pederasty persists to the present day in certain areas of Afghanistan, the Middle East, North Africa, and Melanesia....

OK, I think's that's enough for now. It seems to me that Gary Glitter and others of that particular brand of infamy have become the most conveniant scapegoats for one of the most hidden, widespread and unmentionable of human sexual behaviours.