Public Stigmatizing Reactions Toward Nonoffending Pedophilic Individuals Seeking to Relieve Sexual Arousal

ABSTRACT

People with pedophilia (PWP) can deal with their sexual desires by relieving sexual arousal without sexually exploiting children. Study 1 investigated whether public reactions toward nonoffending pedophilic men are affected by their strategies to relieve sexual arousal (nonsexual pictures vs. child sex dolls) or to reduce their sex drive via testosterone lowering medication in legally nonproblematic ways. A sample of German-speaking participants (N = 143) read three vignettes describing PWP using either of these strategies. Participants’ (59.4% females) mean age was 39.7 (SD = 15.6). Although no significant difference was detected between the nonsexual pictures and sex dolls conditions on cognitive (except for dangerousness), affective, and behavioral levels, both consistently elicited more stigmatizing reactions than the testosterone-lowering medication condition. To investigate if this effect was driven by disapproving any relief of sexual arousal or the use of actual child stimuli in particular, Study 2 (N = 151) added two conditions with PWP using adult child-like stimuli to relieve sexual arousal: adult-as-schoolgirl porn and adult partner with childlike appearance. Here, Participants’ (57.6% females) mean age was 28.0 (SD = 13.3). Results indicate that stigmatization was driven by disapproving the use of child stimuli rather than the relief of sexual arousal in general. Individuals with a sexual interest in children face strong stigmatizing reactions, which are only alleviated when they are described as undergoing treatment lowering sex drive or – to a lesser extent – being able to mate with an adult partner or using porn with adult actors posing as schoolgirls.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2023.2198512.

Notes

¹ The current paper is focused on pedophilia as the sexual attraction to prepubescent children, not to pubescent children (hebephilia). Nevertheless, items 1 and 2 correlate to such a high degree that we must assume that the public is not perceiving a difference between dangerousness to children vs. adolescents, even though the age of consent is 14 in Germany.

² Mauchly’s test of sphericity indicated that the assumption of sphericity was violated (p < .05), so we applied the Greenhouse-Geisser correction.