Article #6 - Blanchard et al. and Measuring Pedophilia

Blanchard, R., Kuban, M., Blak, T., Cantor, J., Klassen, P., & Dickey, R. (2006). Phallometric Comparison of Pedophilic Interest in Nonadmitting Sexual Offenders Against Stepdaughters, Biological Daughters, Other Biologically Related Girls, and Unrelated Girls Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment, 18 (1), 1-14 DOI: 10.1007/s11194-006-9000-9

So now we're delving into the mind of the pedophile. It's a disturbing, uncomfortable place to be, but it can also be quite fascinating and revealing of human nature in general. To me, at least, it's much more interesting to study the fixated, or "classical," pedophile, versus the opportunistic molester. They are generally much more deliberate and provide much more elaborate reasons for their behavior, which can be traced to the fact that they have a genuine attraction to children. While the opportunistic offender generally operates under a mixture of drugs, rage, and hormones, the fixated offender often truly appears to believe that they are doing something that should be okay, if only society loosened up.

Of course, there are differences among fixated pedophiles, as well. The paper for this week provides a good look at not only what these differences are, but also the techniques used to study this kind of behavior. The researchers got their subject pool from community and legal referrals for "illegal or disturbing sexual behavior" (except for the controls, who were referred by physicians), and they were grouped by their relation to the victim: biological fathers, stepfathers, nonpaternal incest, unrelated molesters, offenders against women, and the control group, who had no illegal activities but reported sexual complaints.

In order to gauge the degree of pedophilic orientation in each of these groups, the researchers employed a phallometric device - basically, a pressure gauge that fits over the penis. The subjects then heard descriptions of sexual acts with various subjects, male and female, ranging from prepubescents to adults, accompanied by slides. To get the "pedophilia factor approximation score" the results for the adult descriptions were subtracted from those of the prepubescent and pubescent descriptions.

As you can see in Fig. 1, there was a clear trend between relation to victim and pedophilic score. As the authors broke it down, the less of a social relation a perpetrator had to his victim, the more his pedophilic orientation. It appears that the more effort a person exerts to get to a victim, the more pedophilic he is likely to be. Interestingly, the biological fathers and stepfathers scored equivalently, while nonpaternal but related perpetrators scored on par with unrelated molesters. However, if you'll remember from class, stepfathers are more likely to offend than biological fathers (i.e. the percentage of stepfathers who are molesters is higher than the percentage of biological fathers who are molesters), which Dr. Geiselman attributed to some planning or manipulations by stepfathers who only marry for access to children. This would imply that stepfathers should display more of a pedophilic orientation, driving them to go through this effort to get what they want. But the results show that the ones who are more pedophilic are already related to the victim by chance!

There appears to be a complicated interaction between pre-existing motivation and access to victims that determines whether a person will offend or not. So are stepfathers scheming to get their hands on little kids, or are they slightly abnormal guys who just happen to end up in situations where their weaknesses are laid bare? Is there something special about raising an unrelated child that makes a stepfather more likely to offend? Many mammals rely on pheromone signaling to differentiate related and unrelated potential mates, i.e. those who are safe and those who might lead to genetic defects. It could be that similar systems operate in humans, and when a stepfather who would otherwise not display and pedophilic tendencies comes into regular, close contact with a young, unrelated child, this pheromonal system doesn't send the inhibitory signals that it would if the child were related.