What is the psychological reasoning behind pedophiles?
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To greatly generalise and oversimplify, people who may have, for some reason felt powerless or weak seek a feeling of control and power by dominating (in this case sexualy) other people. Children are an easy target and/or may relate to to age that the person felt powerless (maybe due to abuse).
Ok basically pedophiles brains are physically different from normal people. I won’t go into detail about what exactly is different, but it’s similar to people with compulsive disorders or ptsd. Some people are predisposed to it from birth, other people have lasting untreated mental issues that cause them to seek these things out, sometimes doing it in order to cope. Obviously that doesn’t justify their action if they did act upon their urges, but it’s still a fact sometimes. People sometimes do bad things to cope with bad things in their life.
Pedophilia is classified as a paraphalia and a mental disorder. Paraphalia is a sexual attraction to usually non-consenting things like inanimate objects, animals, children etc. And Paraphalias are developed through habit and normalization. Basically if anyone at any time engages in paraphalia, and continues to do it habitually, they will physically change their minds as described earlier and fall into a sexual addiction basically, and when those things involve prepubescent people or animals, you get more serious diagnoses and convictions such as pedophilia sexual offenses or beastiality and animal abuse offenses etc etc.
Half of the time, people with these paraphalia developed it through puberty, and its difficult to reverse the effects when they become an adult, but it is possible to undo those habits, just like most habits, if you reach it at an early enough stage, and thankfully if you start developing any paraphalia and actively seek help as it starts, your chances of changing that path improves
Now this is a little bit off topic, but this also means that especially in a place like the usa, the way we handle these issues is really kind of awful. I need it to be known that I do not advocate pedophilia and will not justify any of their actions, because its actually awful to commit those crimes, but we do criminalize those people for being mentally ill, and once they serve their time, they still receive no mental health care to improve their lives, they are simply released back into society and labeled as a sex offender and somehow are expected to not commit another offense. And this goes for most criminals. Like why wouldnt we get these people rehabilitation and therapy during their time in jail? We dont want to give someone who did a bad thing a chance to reverse what they’ve done? But we’ll give a pedophile like 2 years in jail and then just let him go right back to what he did prior to jail. That’s literally insane and makes no sense, and I dint support it, it would honestly be more effective to execute them at that point, but that’s just my 2 cents. Not that I support execution either, but it’s better than just letting pedos roam freely after major offenses without mental care
Unfortunately it’s not entirely understood. There is a lot of evidence that suggests that there are actual physical and chemical differences in their brains, so it’s not exclusively psychological.
Others here are saying that it stems from childhood abuse, but that’s not really true. At the moment they are considered to be co-morbid, which basically means they often happen together.
To clarify something, “paedophile” means someone who is sexually attracted to young kids. It does not mean a child abuser. Obviously there is an overlap, but there are paedophiles who will never act on any fantasies, and there are many (disturbing) examples of child abusers who were motivated by things other than sexual attraction. A lot of what people are writing is to do with child abuse, not paedophilia.
Hey there!
These days there is a fair amount of research put into the possible origins of pedophilic preferences. You can see a list of relevant academic papers in the [research section](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskVirPed/wiki/science) of the [r/AskVirPed](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskVirPed/) subreddit.
What’s still missing from the list is one of my favorite and most neuropsychologically comprehensive papers on the subject: [The Neurobiology and Psychology of Pedophilia: Recent Advances and Challenges (Tenbergen et al., 2015)](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4478390/).
Modern clinical understanding of pedophilia has taken a step away from seeing it as purely something you could “acquire” through life events and conditioning, and towards something that is inborn to some degree due to changes in the brain during fetal development or otherwise difficult to distinguish functionally from attractions towards adult body schemes.
Please bear in mind that none of this means that it would be okay to choose to abuse a child. Adult-child sexual acts are inherently abusive towards the child and can easily cause tremendous long-term harm and suffering for anyone forced to endure such crimes.
Can you say more? I’m a non offending pedophile. I have an unchosen unwanted attraction to children that I will never act on. Are you wanting to know what the experience of having that attraction is like, how people become pedophiles, what we find attractive, etc?
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