Pedophilia - The Leipziger study of the social and psychical situation of pedophilic men

"In this study, pedophilia is regarded not as a sexual preference disorder, but rather an a priori sexual orientation [...].

The underlying psychological and sexual-science perspective on the concept of pedophilia follows the property paradigm. [...]

It is virtually incompatible with the criminological viewpoint and sexual abuse paradigm, and therefore needs to be distinguished from them. [...] The fundamental problem with these paradigms lies in the fact that the pedophilia concept becomes understood, almost exclusively, as a behavioral category. [...] The essential components of human sexuality are not merely observable sexual activities, but also erotic-sexual fantasies, feelings, and emotional connections. [...] These are not criminally prosecutable, and are correspondingly not a primary focus. [...]

Pedosexual relationships, however, usually cannot be reduced to sexual practices, but instead are quite often far more complex phenomena. [...] [T]he sexual aspect of these normally friendship-based relationships is, from a scientific and non-scientific perspective, usually very strongly over-emphasized, at the expense of their socio-emotional features. A portion of pedophilic relationships end up being asexual. [...] The abuse paradigm is the source of many difficulties in the scientific as well in non-scientific spheres. [...] In the future, Griesemer's integrative causal theory could represent a potential alternative/complement to the widely-diffused simplistic analytical and feminist models, in which a solid empirical basis for the pedophile population is totally absent." [...]

Of the participants,
85.9% "often" or "always" experienced their sexuality as being healthy;
14.1% of respondents "sometimes" or "rarely" experienced their sexuality as healthy.

Of the participants,
84.1 % (N=69) "never" or "rarely" regarded their sexuality as an illness;
15.9% "sometimes" or "often" experienced it as such. [...]

The average age of
the desired boy was found to be 11.5 years;
the desired girl, 8.4 years. [...]

Seventeen participants (23.6%) made the statement that they had been approached sexually by women or men during their own childhoods. For 55 participants (76.4%) there were no pedosexual contacts, as children, with adults.

The sexual contacts with adults were mostly evaluated
as pleasant (52.9%), and sometimes
as neutral (23.5%) or
unpleasant (23.5%). [...]

Approximately 25% of the research participants had slight health-related impairments, and strongly pronounced clinical symptomatology was detectable in a further 25%. The clinical symptomatology existed essentially of serious depressive feelings, anxiety disorders, and traumatizations. One may proceed based on the assumption that there exists a clearly heightened suicide rate among the total 'dark number' population, given that one out of every four research participants was at risk of suicide at the time of the data collection. There was a trend towards younger pedophilic men -- i.e., those between 25 and 38 years of age -- being more likely to be affected.

source: 'Pedophilia - The Leipziger Study of the Social and Psychical Situation of Pedophilic Men' by Horst Vogt; www.ipce.info/host/vogt/vogt_content.htm; With a foreword by Rüdiger Lautmann; Translation of 'Pädophilie; Leipzicher Studie zur gesellschaftlichen und psychischen Situation pädophiler Männer'; Pabst Science Publishers, Lengerich; 2006