Greek has several words for love
eros is sexual love - pederasty is derived from this word
philos is brotherly love - whence pedophilia but of course it is a euphemism.
agape is Godly love
butterdezillion - I have come across a 4th distinction - that the pederast acts on his desires while the pedophile has the desires but may not act? I wasn’t quite sure what you meant by “sexualizes/objectifies a non-sexual child.”
To have sexual feelings for a person who is not sexual is a bit like having sexual feelings for a table. Whatever it is that they are attracted to in the child, it isn’t the child’s sexuality but they make it all about sex.
I actually suspect that what they are attracted to is the child’s innocence but I don’t know if they want to take part in the innocence and the only way they know to take part in anything is sexual, or if they want to somehow make sex innocent by involving somebody innocent, or whether they subconsciously want to destroy somebody else’s innocence the way theirs was destroyed...
I don’t know the pathology of it. But whereas it is understandable that a person could be turned on by a young person with sexual features and capabilities, erotic thoughts about a child with no sexual features seems about like having erotic thoughts about a pet bunny. To get sexual thoughts from a pet bunny you’d have to view that bunny as the means to the end of some kind of sexual pleasure. And anything can be the means for getting sexual pleasure, if you don’t worry about what it is.
That’s what I mean by sexualizing or objectifying - viewing the child as a sexual object rather than a real human being that happens to be sexually appealing.