Research: Prevalence

Evidence concerning the prevalence of pedophilia in the general population of adult males is limited, methodologically disparate (and flawed) and inconclusive. Evidence concerning females and minors is for all practical purposes, absent.

• Edward Brongersma in Loving Boys.

"As early as 95 years ago psychoanalyst Wilhelm Stekel in his work Psychosexually Infantilismus (1922) wrote of the sexual attraction to children, "My experience has taught me that this is very nearly a normal component of the sexual impulse. Almost everybody will, at one time or another, discover himself thinking such thoughts, rejecting them and condemning them, with all the emotion of moral indignation. Many people of high and cultural standards have confessed to me that such sinfull thoughts have been inspired in them by children, We hardly realise how constantly present paedophillia is in men and women."

Sixty years later the well-known German sexologist, Professor Sigusch found it much less difficult to deal with these "sinful thoughts". According to him Adults have problems if they don't desire tenderly sexual relations with a child. In France, Gabriel Matneff in his book Les Passion Ascimatique (1977) calls the absence of child love a "bad symptom" and in England our own Rosemary Gordon, a psychoanylist of Jung, wote in The Normal and Abnormal love of Children (1976) "Paedophilia, the love and sensuous experience of child and youth, is a normal and universal phenomenon.

[...] For some time now it has been technically possible to make laboratory tests of what excites a man sexually. The penis of the subject is introduced into an apparatus which measures sexual arousal and records it with with an instrument called a Penile Plethysmograph. The Clark Institute Of Psychiatry in Canada wished to so examine 'paedophiles' in order to distinguish their responses from 'normal males'. Pictures of of naked children children were shown to subjects of both groups, the so-called 'normals' reacting with a penile swelling equal to that of the paedophiles. It appeared that that one simply could not distinguish between them and the men who had had sexual contact with children. I'm happy to say that this test has been scrapped in the UK."