How pedophilic men think about adult-child sex

Abstract: To date, very little research has tackled whether pedophilic men's attitude towards adult-child sex depends on characteristics of the adult or the child involved in such acts. This study examines the effect of the child's gender (male vs. female) and physical maturity (pre-pubescent vs. early pubescent) on the moral evaluation of apparently noncoercive adult-child sex in a 2 × 2 factorial online vignette experiment. One hundred eighty-three English-speaking pedophilic men rated their agreement with moral arguments on the Immoral Sex Scale, as well as whether they believed this behavior to be typical for a child. The results revealed considerable inter-individual differences, with about one third showing restrictive moral attitudes. Contrary to our expectations, gender and physical maturity neither affected the perceived morality of the sexual act, nor beliefs about the representativeness of the child's behavior. However, when controlling for confounds, pedophilic men believed that boys were more likely to willingly engage in adult-child sex. Furthermore, participants with stronger liberal attitudes were found to be more likely to defend the sexual act, as were participants with a preferential interest in pre-pubescents. [...]

Ratings on the immoral sex and the representativeness beliefs scale

Means and standard deviations of the dependent variables are displayed in Table 1. Most pedophilic men (67%) in this sample generally disagreed that adult-child sex is immoral (e.g. scored below the midpoint of the Immoral Sex scale), while about one third (31%) generally agreed with arguments against adult-child sex (note that 2% achieved scores of 4, indicating indifference). With only 9% scoring lower than the midpoint of the Indirect Harm scale, there was general agreement (88%) that the child would have to fear stigmatization from society due to his or her sexual activities. Likewise, 55% and 37% gave responses above or below the midpoint of the Representativeness Beliefs scale, respectively. Hence, slightly more than half of our participants agreed that the vignette described a typical child, which indicates that most participants believed that children in general would act in the described sexual manner. [...]

[Informations about the "Immoral sex scale":] Participants rated the 20 items of the Moral Attitudes towards Adult-Child Sex Scale with respect to the vignette from 1 (do not agree) to 7 (fully agree, original scale from Jahnke et al., 2017). In the present study, we used the English version of the scale and modified it slightly by exchanging the word 'child' with 'boy' or 'girl,' depending on the vignette preceding it, and setting all pronouns to correspond with the gender of the vignette (i.e. 'her' or 'his,' 'he or she,' 'himself or herself'). Subscales of the Moral Attitudes scale included Direct Harmfulness (e.g. 'It is likely that the (girl/boy) will suffer psychological harm as a result of the sexual contact'), Indirect Harmfulness ('The sexual contact was problematic for the (girl/boy) because society rejects sex with children'), Non-consent ('The (girl/boy) was probably as competent as the adult to make decisions about participating in sexual contacts.'), Exploitation ('Consciously or subconsciously, the adult used the (girl/boy) for his own pleasure and interests'), and Incompatibility of Adults' and Children's Sexualities ('The psychological needs of the (girl/boy) and the adult were too different to make a healthy sexual relationship possible.'). As in Jahnke et al. (2017), all subscales (with the exception of Indirect Harm) showed high intercorrelations (between r = .85 and .89). The combined score of the subscales Direct Harmfulness, Non-consent, Exploitation, and Incompatibility of Adults' and Children's Sexualities (from here on referred to as Immoral Sex score) proved to be highly internally consistent. The Immoral Sex score assesses the moral attitude that adult-child sex is inherently bad based on agreement with the four aforementioned moral arguments. As the Indirect Harmfulness subscale did not reach the proposed threshold of α = .70 (see Table 1), it will be used for descriptive purposes only.

source: Research 'How pedophilic men think about adult-child sex: effects of child gender and physical maturity' by Sara Jahnke & Agustín Malón; www.boychat.org/messages/1521793.htm; www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/1068316X.2018.1503665; Psychology, Crime & Law, 25:1, 90-107; Received 19 January 2018; Accepted 12 July 2018; Accepted author version posted online: 20 July 2018; Published online: 25 July 2018