Deconstructing “Sexual Deviance”: Identifying and Empirically Examining Assumptions about “Deviant” Sexual Fantasy in the DSM

ABSTRACT

We identify and examine three assumptions underpinning “sexual deviance” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of Mental Disorders: (1) the “sexual deviant” – often, “the male sex offender” – prefers “deviant,” and has limited (if any) “non-deviant,” sexual fantasies; (2) this differentiates them from the non-sexual-/non-offending “norm”; (3) preferred fantasies are “deviant” or “non-deviant.” Adult volunteers (N = 279; equal numbers of sexual offending [SO], non-sexual offending [NSO] and non-offending [NO] men) provided anonymous descriptions of their favorite sexual thought and responses to a revised Wilson Sex Fantasy Questionnaire during a wider computerized survey of 6,289 men from prison and the community. Latent class analysis identified five types of favorite sexual thought; vaginal/oral sex with 1+ woman was commonest for SO men and the WSFQ findings supported this – challenging the first assumption. Both SO and NO men were over-represented for thought types considered “deviant” by the DSM – tempering the second assumption – although SO men were over-represented for thoughts involving children specifically. All thought types were multidimensional; none included solely elements considered “deviant” by the DSM – contesting the third assumption. Notions of the “sexual deviant” as “different”/“other” may underpin these assumptions, potentially negatively impacting research, therapy and understanding sexual crime.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Paul Smith for his input during the early stages of this project, Dave Horton for software development, and Robert West for his assistance with the latent class analysis. This research was supported by a doctoral scholarship from the University of Leeds.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data Availability Statement

Permission was not sought from participants at the time of data collection to share their data publicly, and as the data are anonymous, retrospective permission cannot be sought.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2022.2109568

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a University of Leeds doctoral scholarship