Reddit mentions of Understanding and Addressing Adult sexual Attraction to Children: A Study of Paedophiles in Contemporary society

It's not just the entertainment industry. Research suggests that the proportion of males with pedophilic interest ranges from 5% having some degree of interest to 1% having exclusive interest. Figures for females are about 10 times lower. Here's a source for those figures, from the book Understanding and Addressing Adult Sexual Attraction to Children by Sarah D. Goode.

The entertainment industry is however inherently in the news/of public interest so those cases tend to get more prominence.

From this book.

There are eight studies in total which have been conducted to date, which begin to help us answer the question of how many paedophiles there are, by looking at the responses of ‘normal’ men in the general adult male population (and one of the studies also included women in their study). The studies relied on three basic methods: direct self-report (what the research subjects themselves said about their sexual arousal to children); more general questionnaire responses (which included measurements such as ‘sexual impulsivity’ and self-esteem); and physical responses.

In this research, ‘physical responses’ meant fitting a ‘strain gauge’ to the man’s penis and using a machine called a ‘penile plethysmograph’ to measure how much his penis reacted, for example when images were shown or tapes narrating a sexual story were played. The results (especially when we compare them with the conviction/caution rate for child sexual offences) are pretty unexpected. If we take the clinical studies first, there have been five studies in this area (discussed in Green 2002). The earliest (Freund and Costell 1970) studied forty-eight young Czech soldiers who were shown slides of young children, adolescents and adults, both male and female. All the soldiers showed penile response to adult women, forty of them (83 per cent) showed penile response to adolescent girls, and twenty-eight of the soldiers (58 per cent) showed penile response to the slides of little girls aged four to ten years old. Next, in a study five years later (Quinsey et al. 1975), ‘normal’ men’s erections to pictures of pubescent and younger girls averaged 70 and 50 per cent, respectively, of their responses to adult women. Freund and Watson (1991), studying community male volunteers in a plethysmography classification study, found that 19 per cent were ‘misclassified’ as having an erotic preference for minors. In a control group of sixty-six males recruited from hospital staff and the community, 17 per cent showed a penile response that was pedophilic (Fedora et al. 1992). Finally, in the most recent study of this kind (Nagayama Hall et al. 1995), a sample of eighty volunteers was recruited from the general population. To explore their responses, the researchers showed the volunteers images and also used audiotapes with sexual narratives. The images and tapes referred to adult women and to girls under the age of twelve years. Sexual arousal was measured using self-report and physical measurements of penile arousal. In this presumably ‘normal’ community sample 20 per cent selfreported paedophilic interest and 26.25 per cent exhibited a penile response to paedophilic stimuli that equalled or exceeded their arousal to adult stimuli. The clinical studies therefore indicate that somewhere between 17 and 58 per cent of a ‘normal’ sample of men (who do not describe themselves as ‘paedophile’) seem to be capable of being sexually aroused by young children, under the age of twelve years old. In other words, roughly one in six to more than one in every two adult men may be capable of being sexually attracted to children.

Besides these laboratory studies there have also, to date, been three surveys which used questionnaires to explore adult sexual arousal to children. The first of these (Briere and Runtz 1989) looked at a sample of nearly 200 university males, in which 21 per cent reported some sexual attraction to small children, 9 per cent described sexual fantasies involving children, 5 per cent admitted to having masturbated to sexual fantasies of children, and 7 per cent indicated they might have sex with a child if not caught. This study was followed up a few years later (Smiljanich and Briere 1996), with a questionnaire study on 279 undergraduates which included ninety-nine men and 188 women. This found 22 per cent of the male sample (and 3 per cent of the female sample) admitted ‘some attraction to little children’, with 14 per cent of the men using child pornography, 4 per cent masturbating to sexual fantasies involving children and 3 per cent admitting to the ‘possibility of sex with child if undetected’ (figures for the female sample were respectively 4 per cent, 0 per cent and 0 per cent). Both these studies made the point that any self-report of socially unacceptable phenomena is likely to underestimate it, so these figures may be conservative. The most recent study in this area used similar questions to the two previous surveys (Becker-Blease et al. 2006) in a self-completion questionnaire study of 531 undergraduate men. This study found only 7 per cent admitted sexual attraction to ‘little children’, but 18 per cent had sexual fantasies of children, with 8 per cent masturbating to those fantasies, and 4 per cent admitting that they would have sex with a child ‘if no one found out’.

There's almost no information out there whatsoever. When I first realized I was a pedophile I looked online for something, anything, that could give me some answers or offer some support, but there was nothing. The best I got was that support group, but that took years to find. Getting therapy is very dangerous because you might have a bad reaction like Adam did, and given the fact that I volunteered with kids I was doubly afraid of disclosing that information, even to a therapist. Even if they were open to working with me, they'd probably have no training or experience working with a non-offending pedophile. All the research and methods for working with pedophiles are designed for people who've already committed a crime, not those striving not to. Its a mess.

Aside from the Moore Center and Virped mentioned in the medium article, I have found a few books by Sarah Goode, who, according to what I just looked up, is the CEO of StopSO, which trains therapists in the UK to work with non-offending pedophiles. (I've never heard of them, but they sound cool) I've read Understanding and Addressing Adult sexual Attraction to Children and thought it was very well done. If you do choose to read it, I would be very interested in getting your take on it as a mental health professional.

From this book.

Section III: How many paedophiles are there?
Another form of evidence is to use data on brain structure and neuroendocrinology. This has some fascinating implications both for understanding how many paedophiles there may be in a population and also what the biochemical basis of paedophilia (or at least some aspects of it) might be. Studies have looked at how the male human brain is ‘masculinised’ and ‘defeminised’ by hormones circulating in the mother’s body while the baby is still in the womb.

At the embryo stage, all babies are ‘female’ in that, unless acted upon by specific hormones, babies develop the internal reproductive organs, external genitalia and forms of brain structure which are ‘feminine’ or ‘female-typical’. Only in the relative presence of certain hormones and the relative absence of others will embryos develop into males. In order to become male, therefore, an embryo needs both to be actively ‘masculinised’ and also actively ‘defeminised’.

The process of masculinisation occurs first, then defeminisation. According to biologists studying animal models (Feierman 1990; Hutchison and Hutchison 1990), the neurochemical process of masculinisation links sexuality with ‘social dominance’ behaviours, that is, competitive aggressiveness, active ‘courtship’ and ‘mounting’ or ‘insertion’ behaviours. This linking of sexuality with social dominance makes males sexually attracted to ‘small’, ‘weak’, ‘young’ and ‘helpless’ individuals (Feierman 1990: 46).

Feierman suggests that the brains of paedophiles are ‘extremely masculinised’ (1990: 46; later Feierman adjusts this to ‘slightly more masculinised than occurs in adult heterosexual males’, 1990: 53), making them more likely to find extremely submissive (that is, very small, weak, young and helpless) individuals the most sexually attractive.

The neurochemical process of defeminisation removes the ‘female-typical’ behaviour patterns (such as mammals sticking out their bottoms to encourage males to mate with them – think Marilyn Monroe, if you will) and at the same time increases the likelihood that males will find such ‘feminised’ behaviour sexually alluring (think of the typical heterosexual male response to Monroe).

Feierman claims that paedophiles are ‘slightly less defeminised’ than heterosexual men (1990: 53), thus they would be less likely to be aroused by typical ‘feminine’ behaviours.

Sociobiological explanations for human behaviour do have a rather conservative tendency to look at what is, and then search for explanations in unlikely places (mice, reptiles, birds and so forth) to explain and justify the social status quo; however, the two-dimensional model of embryonic brain masculinisation and brain defeminisation can both suggest why some men might find children sexually attractive and also predict, given a normal distribution curve for this biochemical process, what order of magnitude we might expect for paedophiles in a population.

Feierman (1990: 51), looking only at men, suggests that ‘the central tendency in evolution is to produce heterosexual males by producing an optimal amount of masculinisation and defeminisation of the male brain in utero.’ When the levels of masculinisation and defeminisation are slightly skewed, homosexuality, paedophilia (to either males or females) or transsexualism will result. From this model, Feierman predicts that, in any given population of men, paedophiles will be more common than homosexuals who will in turn be more common than transsexuals. He also predicts that:

If the distribution of the points in the model reflects differing degrees of masculinisation and defeminisation of the male brain, then there is every reason to believe that the distributions would actually be continuous across all males rather than being discontinuous around arbitrary and nonmutually exclusive categories such as ‘heterosexual’ and ‘androphilic ephebophile’ [a man attracted to adolescent boys]. (Feirerman 1990: 52)

Feierman later describes this rather technically but memorably in the following way:

[Paedophiles] are the ‘by-products’ of the inevitable biological variation around a selected central tendency. So that most males will ‘love’ children and adolescents just the right amount…some males will unfortunately love them too little and some too much. Such males, who love children and adolescents to a degree more than average or less than average, will be carried along in a population in the tails of frequency distributions. …It is most likely, therefore, that pedo- and ephebophilia are individual, facultative proclivities that are bent out of the tails of hormonal frequency distributions around the optimum brain masculinisation and brain feminisation of the ‘average male’. (Feierman 1990: 559, 563)

In other words, Feierman seems to be implicitly proposing four important hypotheses in this model:

1. Paedophilia is caused by brain chemistry arising before birth: that is, paedophiles are born, not made.
   
2. Paedophiles fall within a normal distribution curve for human males.
   
3. Paedophiles are more common than homosexuals.
   
4. Sexual attraction to individuals smaller and more ‘feminine’ than oneself (including boys and young adolescents) is part of a continuum occurring in all males, not just paedophiles, and thus there is no clear cut-off point between a ‘paedophile’ and a ‘non-paedophile’.
   
   Feierman is also, of course, conflating ‘love’ with sexual attraction, but, leaving that on one side, these are still some pretty hefty claims and would clearly need a great deal of substantiating evidence. Hutchison and Hutchison, for example, working for the British Medical Research Council Neuroendocrine Development and Behaviour Group and writing on ‘Sexual development at the neurohormonal level: the role of androgens’, are more cautious, commenting that most work so far has been carried out on animal models such as rodents and birds, as well as in-vitro experiments and that postnatal social experience ‘appears to be more influential in human development than it is in the development of nonhuman species’ (1990: 538). Feierman would also need to explain why, if this is an evolutionary biological process, we do not find paedophile behaviour in animals, including in primates (for evidence that we do not, see chapters in Feierman’s own edited volume, 1990).
   
   Following on from Feierman’s implication that sexual attraction to children may represent a continuum within human male sexuality, a further way to approach the question of the prevalence of paedophilia is to look at what ‘normal’ adults – who are not defined in any way as ‘paedophile’ – may reveal about their sexual attraction to children.
   
   There are eight studies in total which have been conducted to date, which begin to help us answer the question of how many paedophiles there are, by looking at the responses of ‘normal’ men in the general adult male population (and one of the studies also included women in their study). The studies relied on three basic methods: direct self-report (what the research subjects themselves said about their sexual arousal to children); more general questionnaire responses (which included measurements such as ‘sexual impulsivity’ and self-esteem); and physical responses.