Paedophile subtext?

I have read that as a general rule when boys and/or young men were together and isolated from outside contacts some of them tended to get sexually frustrated and interested in some of their comrades.

It is also true that when people of the same age and gender are put together they find anyone who is exceptional or outside their group to be more interesting that most members of their group.

I remember that when I was in college surrounded by young men and women my own age and by a relatively few older persons, I once saw a family with children visiting the campus and thought how refreshing it was to see the first children I had seen in months.

I expect that one or a few boys among many men would tend to be considered somewhat special members of the group. And some of the men might come to consider them the next best thing to women or girls and start to lust for them.

Some people speculate whether one of the main purposes of cabin boys was to be sex slaves.

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=5f8c2b4273534627a 44cb43983608c6a&t=469448

And I have read somewhere that the "custom of the sea" was when the crew was starving to death to kill and eat the youngest and "tenderest" crew members first. Thus hiring young cabin boys could be considered to be providing weaker and more defenseless potential food items in case of famine. Yuck!

So it seems possible that Robert Louis Stevenson might have imagined that Sliver's relationship with Jim might have had a component of sexual desire, or that some movie and tv versions of the story might imply that Silver had some degree of sexual desire for Jim.

On one of these boards I read that Jackie Cooper's long hair style in the 1934 version might be intended to suggest that Silver was sexually attracted to Jim. I have also read that in those days child actors grew their hair long between roles so that it could be cut to the desired length for their next roles. So I believe that Cooper's hairstyle in that film was what the producer, director, etc. desired. But I don't know if that was supposed to be an 18th century boy's hairstyle or to suggest that Sliver felt any lust for Jim.

(most tough and macho American Indian warriors wore their hair so long that they would probably consider even the longest haired actor we have seen in any movie to be short haired.)

The rules on some pirate ships forbid having any boys aboard, allegedly for the same reason that women were forbidden to be aboard.

That's because most people are, unfortunately, very easily led by what they read in the papers and hear and see on the news. For the past 30 years, the media have been busily convincing a gullible public that all men are out to do kids harm and the hysteria has now reached such a stage that no man is given the benefit of the doubt. A far cry from what it was like in my childhood over sixty years ago, when us children mixed freely with men and no harm came to us.