Pedophilic Relationships

Introduction

Everyday people wake up and turn on their electronic devices, whether it be their phone, tv, computer, to see what is going on in the world. It seemed that it is becoming more common for the most extreme or intense situations are highlighted first and most in depth throughout all of the news. One pattern that I have continued to notice more and more is the appearance of relationships between adults and children or better known as pedophile type relationship. This seemingly never ending coverage of these relationships intrigued my interest into looking deeper into the reasons behind these pedophilic relationships. I wanted to look at the research done that examines and explains different components of why adults are attracted

Hsu and J. Michael Bailey called “Autopedphila: Erotic-Target Identity Inversions in Men Sexually Attracted to Children”. The article is very relevant to the discussion of why or what causes a person to be interested in children in a romantic manner because its research digs into the idea that there is more than one dimension of maturity that is discussed in regards to men, which are sexual orientation and their sexual maturity. Those who ran the study did an online survey that found many of the men who answered the survey said that they had fantasies that had to do with children, or autiopedophillia meaning the sexual arousal by having ideas of a child (HSU). An interesting aspect of this experiment is that it was completely online and anonymous, in hopes that it would comfort the participant to feel that they were able to answer the questions as honestly as they could. This was done hoping that there would be no outside pressures of answering the questions one way or another or untruthfully. The results were shocking to see. There was a 49.1% reporting from participants that they felt mildly sexually aroused when asked about being attracted to children or their bodies (HSU). Half of the pedophilic men in the sample were considered autopedophilic, which means that they are interested in the ideas of being treated or dressing up as a child, which seems to lead to the idea that there is an

Babchishin, which used people that have been labeled as sex offenders already. The overall goal of this research to find differences amongst this group and the different categories that lie within it as well, by using scales such as sexy versus not sexy or erotic versus non-erotic type categories (KELLY). Being that children are commonly victims of sexual abuse, the study stated that they set out to find more answers and predictors of why this happens and how they found early on in their research that a key predictor of potential sexual molestation is the amount of attraction that a person has towards children (KELLY). From the research done, they found that out of this group of men, there was a larger amount of attraction to girls rather than women and that there was not a large difference in results regarding the attraction of boys to men. It is stated that results found were consistent with the relation of sexual attraction and those of which who were categorized as pedophiles, which I think could be used in the future as a type of screening of individuals for a preventative