Pedophilia: Causes And Typologies

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dedicated to the social acceptance of sex with children are not
new, yet have had a large upstart in membership since the early 1970's(Charon,
1979).
Because of the extreme sensitivity of the subject, research in this
field is quite underdeveloped. Researchers have even had trouble in agreeing
what to call the phenomenon. Much research on the victims has dubbed the act as
child sexual abuse, most research on the offenders has labeled it as child
molesting or pedophilia. The term pedophilia has some utility since it suggests
a predisposition for the act separate from the act itself. The ambiguity of
this term however, is what causes confusion. Pedophilia can mean child sexual
abuse ranging from an arousal to children with no or little action, to sexual
penetration of the child. For the purposes of this paper the terms pedophilia,
child sexual abuse, and child molestation will be used interchangeably.
This paper will focus on the possible causes of child ...

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give a general profile of some of the origins of child sexual abuse. While
the names of this etiologies vary greatly, the descriptions of each remain
essentially intact.

Conditioned Response Theory
Some researchers have maintained that the pedophile becomes conditioned
to respond to young, sexually under-developed bodies. It has been suggested
that boys begin masturbating to fantasies that involve sexually immature bodies,
and then become so conditioned to these images that they need them to create
sexual gratification(McGuire, Carlisle, & Young, 1965). Garland and
Dougher(1990) theorized two reasons for this behavior leading to the development
of pedophiliac behavior:(1) and ...

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