pedophilia

Pedophilia was once thought to stem from psychological influences in early life, but now psychologists think it’s a deep-rooted sexual orientation as concrete as heterosexuality or homosexuality, limited almost entirely to men. It becomes clearer during puberty and does not change. It may even be genetic.

The best estimates are that between 1% and 5% of men are pedophiles, meaning that they have a dominant attraction to prepubescent children. Not all pedophiles molest children, and not all child molesters are pedophiles. About half of all molesters are not sexually attracted to their victims.
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When we read about pedophiles and learn that few of them can ever change, we despair because almost all sexual abusers were abused as children themselves. It seems like there’s a continuous, unending cycle of abuse being passed on. Now a new study finds that most men who were sexually abused as boys do not go on to abuse children themselves. Researchers at the Institute of Child Health in London say that only one in eight abusers continues the cycle.

David Skuse and his team studied 224 men who had been sexually abused as children and found that only 26 of them went on to commit sexual offences. In almost all cases, the abuse involved children outside their family, and the average age at which they began to abuse others was 14.
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