Pedophilia and Its (Non-) Association with Physical Height among Sex Offenders

Pedophilia, Height, and the Magnitude of the Association: A Research Note

“…Jung, Klaver, and Pham (2014), however, report findings that fail to support an association between pedophilia and height. In the present note, we examine the methodology and findings of Jung et al To estimate the magnitude of the pedophilia-height association, we conducted a meta-analysis of the published literature and found a significant effect size.…”

“…Given there are four published studies comparing pedophiles with non-pedophiles in terms of their physical height (Cantor et al 2007;Jung et al 2014;Mellan, Nedoma, and Pondělıckova 1969;Taylor et al 1993), we are able to provide a meta-analytic summary of this small body of literature. The aggregate effect size we present summarizes the magnitude of the Downloaded by [Chulalongkorn University] at 07:51 27 December 2014 difference between pedophilic individuals and non-pedophilic individuals.…”

“…Our findings suggest pedophiles may experience conditions during in utero and childhood development that are capable of influencing their physical development. Jung, Klaver, and Pham (2014) tested for the presence of an association between pedophilia and physical height in a sample of sexual offenders. Based on their null finding, Jung et al suggest that there is insufficient evidence to conclude that height is a reliable marker of pedophilic individuals being exposed to suboptimal conditions during prenatal and childhood development.…”

“…The SSPI was developed on a sample of, and was intended to be used with, sexual offenders with child victims (age 14 or younger). Extrapolating from the degrees of freedom value for the correlation between SSPI total scores and physical height provided by Jung et al (2014), it appears that the SSPI was scored on almost the entire sample, which included sexual offenders against adults. The reason for scoring the SSPI with the sexual offenders with adult victims is unclear and may feasibly have skewed the distribution of scores (i.e., many of the 154 sexual offenders with SSPI scores would have received a score of "0" or "1").…”

“…In our analyses, we combined the weighted mean height and the associated standard deviations for both non-pedophilic groups, resulting in a single effect size being produced by this study that represents the comparison between the pedophilic sexual offenders and these two non-pedophilic groups. ForJung et al (2014), we extracted statistics from the two analyses that we considered the most valid method of identifying pedophilic offenders used in this study. In the presented analyses, the statistics used came from the grouping using the age of victims in the index offences and from the correlation between height and SSPI scores.Downloaded by [Chulalongkorn University] at 07:51 27 December 2014…”