I am attracted to children, not children who appear as adults. Do you find it equally mysterious that someone can be attracted to a person of the same sex? Would you expect a gay guy must only be attracted to feminine looking men?
Post a Craigslist or Backpage ad saying you're a 12 year old who wants to meet a mature older man to have sex, and watch the replies pile in from every direction.
And how many who post such an ad are actual children?
Or, see how many friend requests and direct messages underage girls get from adult strangers on Facebook.
Do you have statistics on this, including how many advances actually get anywhere? I know a few underage girls who are on Facebook (no, my reason for this has nothing to do with sexual interest in case you were wondering) and I haven't heard much about this from them.
I'm not saying nothing on the Internet involving a pedophile and a child ever happens which society would judge to be bad. I'm saying it's pretty damn unusual as compared to such events offline, and the risk is, indeed, overblown.
There are plenty of interviews of convicted pedophiles that help the public understand their point of view
There's no such thing as a convicted pedophile, since being a pedophile is not a crime. There is such a thing as a convicted sex offender, and they are the subject of the interviews you speak of. Good luck finding any law abiding pedophile such as myself willing to talk to you without Tor.
Keep in mind when asking me that question that I probably have a different idea than you of what "children safety" means (for example: we probably believe different reasons for why it's best for all concerned if pedophiles avoid breaking the law). But for nearly all definitions, you'd rather have us acting as we'd like to envision ourselves than acting as society envisions us, and having a community enables the creation of that self image and sense of what it means to be ethical. We're not going to go away, and we're far more numerous than most realize, so you might as well let us figure out how to be good people. That can only happen through dialogue, and for the time being that dialogue is only possible anonymously.
Also, it may sound self serving of me to say this, but the risk of pedophiles on the Internet is waaaay overblown. The behavior most of society considers sexual abuse is far more likely to be from a child's caretakers than some stranger on the Internet. And child pornography, from what I understand (and I really am not stupid enough to download it myself, even with Tor), is mostly the same old images again and again.
I use it not to share pictures nor commit crimes but to do what you say is worse: talk to other pedophiles. Tor permits us a safe support forum.
fatbird says: Whether or not they exist anyway, it seems obvious to me that a supportive peer group is going to increase their effectiveness at predation.
Quite the opposite in fact. Dialogue among pedophiles facilitates two things that you might not have expected:
1. Greater awareness of the draconian consequences which generally result from breaking certain laws, and a corresponding discouragement of doing so in the first place.
2. Most importantly, it gives us role models beyond the ugly stereotypes society has created for us: each other. Since role models are by definition templates for action, this makes it far less likely that we'll act as badly as society would expect.
I can't claim that all pedophile forums are like this. But the ones I frequent -- which are among the most popular -- are, and the less we're driven underground, the more our dialogue will resemble my description and the less it will resemble yours.