Contributors
Author Index
Subject Index
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[...] However, most of the lay and professional literature although voluminous, reflect a narrow anthropo-, ethno-, and chronocentrism that precludes any real understanding of the topic with anything more than the preconceptions of our times. [...]
[...] This volume adds to this data base by including new, biosocial contribution from the perspectives of history, political science, sexology, biology, primatology, anthropology, experimental and developmental psychology, and psychiatry. What results is a transspecies, transcultural, and transhistorical perspective that gives new biosocial insights into the roots of pedophilia as the phenomenon is found in contemporary industrialized societies.
Human behavior, like human anatomy, has evolved. The major mechanisms that account for this evolutionary process are natural, sexual, and kin selection [...]. Selected behavior that leads to an increased chance for the individual to survive abd reproduce is called "adaptive behavior," or simply, "an adaption." [...] Because of our current understanding of the evolutionary process, the biosocial perspective systematically asks the question, Is or was a particular behavior adaptive? It is legitimate to ask the question regarding any human behavior, including some aspects of adult human sexual behavior with children and adolescents. [...]
Many social scientists would argue that the determinants of adult human sexual behavior with children and adolescents simply are culturally transmitted across generations by social learning. [...] This volume will expand upon this view by developing the thesis that aspects of the behavior resultfrom an interaction of genetic and nongenetic determinants and that in many instances, there is strong support that some of the genetic determinants were subjected to positive selective pressures or were the by-products of selective pressures in our evolutionary past. This realizationis perhaps the single most important contribution of this volume and is of more than academic interest, inasmuch as it not only suggests why there is a proclivity towards the behavior in some individuals but it also suggests a rational strategy by which heuristic questions and future hypotheses can be formulated.
[...]The perspective of most of the child sexual abuse literature is that of cultural transmission through social learning, a perspective that is strongly influenced by the emerging but still nascent discipline of victimology. One of the central theoretical tenets of victimology is the perpetuation of the behavior, perpetuation that occurs, it is said, because the primary determinant of one's being a child sexual abuser as an adult is that one was sexually abused as a child. This volume [...] comes to the conclusion that, contrary to the popular belief that is based on victimology theory, being involved with an adult as a child is neither a necessary nor a sufficient cause of engaging in sexual behavior with a child as an adult. [...]
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The tendency in the clinical literature has been not to consider most adults who engage in sexual behavior with children and adolescents as being pedo- or ephebophiles, inasmuch as pedo- and ephebophilia previously have been assumed to be the result of either previous childhood victimizaion or mental derangement. This volume will question both of these assumoption, inasmuch as the major "roots" of pedo- and ephebophilia are found neither in the previous childhood exposure to sexual behavior with an adult nor in the minds of the seriously mentally ill. Rather, the bulk of the determinants of pedo- and ephebophilia are embedded in the phylogenetic, i.e., the evolutionary, past of all humans.
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