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Two Explanations For Pedophilia

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Pedophilia
According to the DSM V ‘Pedophilia’ can be defined as a paraphilia involving sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges and sexual activity with children below the age of 13 years for a period of 6 months, where the individual should be over the age of 16 years and at least 5 years older than the prepubescent child in question. Furthermore, these urges, behavior or fantasies need to have caused interpersonal difficult and distress (DSM V).While, many different theories exist which attempt to explain why individuals would engage in such behavior, the following essay would only focus on two such explanations for pedophilia.
One of the major theories of pedophilic behavior is the Biological processes which focus on neurological impairments, …show more content…

Thus, one such theory that attempts to explain pedophilia is the ‘abused-abuser hypothesis’ which claims that individuals who suffered childhood sexual abuse possesses a predisposition to developing pedophilia (McAnulty and Burnette 2006, Burton, Miller, & Shill, 2002).This hypothesis which is based on the social learning theory claims that children modeling the experiences of sexual abuse they endured ultimately results in pedophilia. Furthermore, research has revealed that this process consists of three features which are firstly the prepubescent victim’s understanding of the abuse where the child may believe that the abuse is normal and that it is not harmful. This interpretation would then cause the child to normalize the experience. The second feature is therefore considered to be the factors related to the relationship between the child and the abuser which would be the age of the child, type of relationship with the abuser, frequency and the severity of the abuse. Whilst the third feature is considered to be the reaction of the child or the reaction of other adults who may come to know of the abuse endured by the child. Thus, it was concluded that an amalgamation of …show more content…

Furthermore, as these studies only examined convicted pedophiles many have enquired whether this can be considered to be ecologically valid as it is a biased sample. Moreover, these individuals are significantly more pathological and come from poor socioeconomic conditions (Finkelhor et al. 1986). Additionally a significant disparity exists with regard to the number of individuals who were sexually abused as children and those individuals who display pedophilic behavior. Furthermore, there also exist many pedophiles with no history of child sexual abuse. Moreover, some pedophiles may profess that they were sexually abused in their childhood in order to reduce their perceived responsibility for their crime (Freund, Watson and Dickey 1990). Thus, it could be claimed that the results of this studies have failed to provide data for a causal relationship (Haapasalo & Kankkonen 1997, Jonson-Reid & Way

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