Attraction Versus Action in Pedophilic Desire: The Role of Personality Traits and Childhood Experience

Abstract

Objective: Comparison of pedophilic individuals who do and do not refrain from sexually engaging with children may offer critically important information regarding the differential contributors to pedophilic attraction versus behavior. This study compared 5 traits that are potentially contributory to pedophilic attraction or behavior in both minor-attracted persons (MAPs) who refrain from sexually engaging with minors (nonacting MAPs) and those who have acted on pedophilic attractions and subsequently entered the criminal justice system (forensic MAPs). Methods: Subjects included 195 nonacting MAPs, 50 forensic MAPs, and 60 healthy controls. Data on nonacting MAPs were drawn from an online survey, and data on the other 2 groups were based on prior in-person evaluations. Measures included the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory-II (MCMI-II), Barratt Impulsiveness Scale (BIS-11), the MAP Questionnaire, and the Sexual History Questionnaire (SHQ). Results: Both MAP groups scored higher than healthy controls on the domains of socially inhibited personality traits, propensity toward cognitive distortions, and subjects’ own childhood sexual abuse (CSA). Forensic MAPs scored higher than nonacting MAPs on the CSA domain, but the 2 MAP groups differed little on the other 2 domains. Forensic MAPs also scored higher than the other 2 groups on the antisocial domain, whereas nonacting MAPs did not differ from controls on this measure. Nonacting MAPs scored higher than controls on impulsivity. Conclusions: Antisocial personality traits may be a primary driver of pedophilic behavior that is unrelated to pedophilic attraction. Socially inhibited personality traits and propensity toward cognitive distortions are associated with pedophilic attraction, although the direction of causation is not clear. CSA seems to increase the risk of both attraction and behavior.

Risk Factors for Sexual Offending in Self-Referred Men With Pedophilic Disorder: A Swedish Case-Control Study

“…The large difference in Antisocial Personality Disorder symptoms should be vetted toward mixed results in prior research. Cohen et al (2018) studied individuals convicted of child sexual offending (n = 50), non-convicted, non-clinical individuals with pedophilic attraction (n = 195) and non-PD controls (n = 60). Their findings suggested more antisocial traits among convicted offenders, but not among non-convicted PD individuals, compared to controls.…”

Online Communities for Child-Attracted Persons as Informal Mental Health Care: Exploring Self-Reported Wellbeing Outcomes

“…Most of what is known about CAPs are derived from offender samples, though there is likely an extensive and thus greatly understudied group of CAPs residing outside clinical- and forensic settings and who are committed to live an offense-free life (Cantor & McPhail, 2016; Cohen et al, 2018a, 2018b; Dombert et al, 2016; Levenson & Grady, 2019; Seto, 2018). For example, in an online survey among a community sample of 8718 German males, around 4% reported sexual fantasies involving prepubescent children (Dombert et al, 2016).…”

Mandatory minimum sentencing and its effect on sentencing distributions: Evidence from Canada

“…Pedophilia is a psychiatric disorder (Seto 2008), and there is evidence of brain abnormalities in those who suffer from it (Schiltz et al 2007). Impulsiveness is seen as a factor to commit sexual crimes against children, though some have argued against the idea that it has a central role; however, it is a robust finding in the literature that those who engage in sexual crimes against children suffer from grossly distorted thinking (Cohen and Galynker 2009). Moreover, research has determined that those who commit sexual crimes against children are significantly more likely to have been abused as children: a meta‐analysis by Jespersen et al (2009) has found that being a child sexual abuse victim more than triples the probability of becoming an abuser in adulthood.…”