1 Understanding paedophiles (p. 1-2)

Introduction

This book is unusual. It presents a view from a world which has never previously been discussed or written about in any depth, either at an academic or popular level, yet which paradoxically is almost instantly available to anyone with access to the Internet. The fundamental aim of this book is child protection, to understand and address adult sexual attraction to children in order to make the world a safer place for children, but I believe this book will also be of value and benefit in other ways as well. My intention is to assist in bridging the gulf in understanding between those who want to protect children and those who feel sexual attraction to children – and recognising that they are sometimes the same people. I take as a given the unspoken and painful truth that many men who access child pornography or who have sexual desire for or sexual contact with children are also likely, in their daily lives, to be working with or caring for children, maybe as professionals, maybe as parents. This book explores this issue and seeks to answer why and how they might be the same men – and what we can do about it. The aim of the book is to counter the emotionality surrounding the topic of paedophilia in the popular media by careful presentation of research data and interview material.

This book draws on original research with paedophiles living ordinary lives in the community and has been written as a direct response to the portrayals of paedophilia and child sexual abuse which one finds being presented every day in the media, in fund-raising charity campaigns, in educational and training materials for professionals, and in textbooks. Such portrayals often appear simplistic and psychologically naive. They ask us to believe in what amounts to almost two-dimensional cardboard cut-outs, evil monsters utterly unrelated to everyday life. And yet what we all know is that, whenever the subject is researched and whenever statistics are gathered, over and over again we find that shockingly high numbers of children aged under sixteen are sexually abused. The figure for boys is approximately 10 to 11 per cent (Cawson et al. 2000, Itzin 2006). For girls it is somewhere around 21 to 25 per cent (Itzin 2006, Cawson et al. 2000). Globally, the World Health Organisation has found that 150 million girls and 73 million boys have experienced forced sexual intercourse and other forms of sexual violence involving physical contact before the age of eighteen (WHO 2002). Common sense tells us that if that many children are being sexually abused, then we must know the perpetrators – we must be living with them. They are not rare and horrific monsters out there lurking in the undergrowth, ready to pounce on our unwary children. They are living with us. And we must learn to understand them.

There are already many studies on the subject of adult sexual attraction to children, covering the topics of child sexual abuse, child pornography, sexology, sexual disorders and sexual deviance, children’s sexuality and sexual politics, among others. However, the approach taken by this book differs significantly from previous publications with regard to its attitude towards paedophiles (adults who find themselves sexually attracted to children). There is no assumption in this book that paedophiles are pathological, deviant, criminal or evil. There is not even an assumption that they are different from us or that we have to account specifically either for their sexual attraction to children or for their choice to act on their sexual desires. Indeed, one of the aspects I am most interested in exploring is rather the choice not to act on one’s sexual desires towards children – a hitherto-unexamined dynamic.

The aim throughout this book is to distinguish carefully between involuntary desires and voluntary actions and thus between being sexually attracted to children and acting on that attraction. This is a distinction often lost. Many writers working in this area seem either to dismiss entirely any attempt at empathy with those adults who are sexually attracted to children, or else, where empathy is expressed, to empathise to such a degree that it overrides any concern for children. To date, most books specifically addressing the experiences of paedophiles have been written by male authors (Rossman 1976, O’Carroll 1980, Wilson and Cox 1983, Sandfort 1987, Li et al. 1990, Feierman 1990, Plummer 1995, although see Yates 1978 and Levine 2002 for largely sympathetic texts written by women) and in such books it is often noticeable how very little understanding is expressed of what children – both boys and girls – need at various stages of their development: the focus of empathy tends to be exclusively on the adult male. In my work, the primary focus of my concern is children but this does not exclude the rest of us – we all were children once, and we look forward to all our children one day becoming mature and loving adults.

This book is therefore different from previous texts in this field because, it is hoped, it steers a path between the Scylla of demonising paedophiles and the Charybdis of trivialising and exonerating criminal and abusive behaviour. Paedophiles exist and we must learn to live with them in full awareness. This book aims to assist us in moving towards a realistic acceptance of that situation. Each chapter contributes to the goal of demystifying the whole field of adult sexual attraction to children, so that as a society we can all take a greater level of responsibility for protecting children from sexual abuse.