So, Dawkins is taking a lot of flack for comments he made about his experience with/view of what he termed "mild pedophilia". From huffingtonpost (//http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/09/richard-dawkins-pedophilia_n_3895514.html)article
QuoteReferring to his early days at a boarding school in Salisbury, he recalled how one of the (unnamed) masters "pulled me on his knee and put his hand inside my shorts."
He said other children in his school peer group had been molested by the same teacher but concluded: "I don't think he did any of us lasting harm."
"I am very conscious that you can't condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours. Just as we don't look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism, I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can't find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today," he said.
The article where he said this seems to be the world according to Richard Dawkins from Sep 7th's The Times Magazine (//http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/magazine/article3858647.ece). Unfortunately, I don't have access to the full article and am not paying 3 pounds a weeks to get it. If some one does have/find the full thing, I would be very interested to these quotes in full context.
I agree with him that we can't always judge people in the past by current standards. As far as his comment that it did them no harm, he can speak for himself, but unless he asked everyone he went to school with, he can't speak for them.