This again

Ephebophilia is not pedophilia.

Whatever these men might have done, it is ridiculous to accuse them of a paraphilia associated with abuse and truly immoral (amoral?) activity. As the adult industry can attest, throw an ill fitting plaid skirt and pigtails on a twenty five year old, and you have "teen".

(Link is safe for work, my ISP over here limits even the hint of adult content)

So, to round this out, here is an excellent piece from the Economist on some of the other silliness we have in defining "sex offenders" and how we deal with them. My favorite line in the article (or at least the most relevant), is this:

Sex-offender registries are popular. Rape and child molestation are terrible crimes that can traumatise their victims for life. All parents want to protect their children from sexual predators, so politicians can nearly always win votes by promising curbs on them. Those who object can be called soft on child-molesters, a label most politicians would rather avoid. This creates a ratchet effect. Every lawmaker who wants to sound tough on sex offenders has to propose a law tougher than the one enacted by the last politician who wanted to sound tough on sex offenders.

As usual, it's "all about the children."

But what we end up with is a purely emotional response rather than looking at the actual scientific examination of many of these activities:

Politicians pushing the get-tough approach sometimes claim that sex offenders are mostly incorrigible: that three-quarters or even nine out of ten of them reoffend. It is not clear where they find such numbers. A study of nearly 10,000 male sex offenders in 15 American states found that 5% were rearrested for a sex crime within three years. A meta-analysis of 29,000 sex offenders in Canada, Britain and America found that 24% had reoffended after 15 years.