My name is Sam Vaknin, I am the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited.
Pedophiles are attracted to pre-cuberscent children, and they act on their sexual fantasies.
It is a startling fact that the etiology of this paraphilia is unknown. We don't know the reasons.
Pedophiles come from all walks of life. They have no common socioeconomic background. Contrary to media-propagated myths, most of the pedophiles had not been sexually abused in childhood.
The vast majority of pedophiles are also drawn to adults of the opposite sex. They are actually heterosexuals. Only a few pedophiles belong to the exclusive type, the ones who are attempted solely by kids.
Nine-tenth of all pedophiles are male. They are fascinated by pre-teen females, teenage males, or more rarely, both.
Moreover, at least one-fifth and probably more of the population have pedophiliac tendencies. The prevalence of child pornography and child prostitution prove it.
Pedophiles start out as normal people, and they are profoundly shocked and distressed to discover their illicit sexual preference for the pre-pubertal.
The process and mechanisms of transition from socially acceptable sexuality to much-condemned and criminal pedophilia are still largely mysterious.
Pedophiles seem to have narcissistic and antisocial psychopathic traits. They lack empathy for their victims. They express no remorse for their actions. They are in denial, and being pathological confabulators, they rationalize their transgressions, claiming that the children were merely being educated for their own good and, anyhow, derived great pleasure from the sexual act.
The pedophile's egosyntony, his ability to live with himself, rests on his anaplastic defenses.
The pedophile generally tends to blame others or the world or the system for his misfortunes, failures, and deficiencies.
Pedophiles frequently accuse their victims of acting promiscuously, of coming onto them, of actively tempting, provoking and seducing, or luring them, or even trapping them.
The pedophile, similar to the autistic patient, misinterprets the child's body language and interpersonal cues. The pedophile's social communication skills are impaired, and he fails to adjust information gained to the surrounding circumstances, for instance, to the key's age and maturity.
Coupled with the pedophile's lack of empathy, this recurrent inability to truly comprehend others caused the pedophile to objectify the targets of his lasciviousness.
Pedophilia is in essence autoerotic. The pedophile uses children's bodies to masturbate with.
Hence the success of the internet among pedophiles. It offers disembodied, anonymous, masturbatory sex. Children in cyberspace are mere representations, symbols, often nothing more than erotic photos and screenings.
It is crucial to realize that pedophiles are not enticed by the children themselves, by their bodies, or by their budding and nubile sexuality.
Remember Nobuko Tsukita?
It's wrong.
Pedophiles are actually drawn to what children symbolize, to what pre-adolescents stand for and represent.
With the advent of feminism and gender equality, women have lost their traditional role as socially acceptable, impermissible, sexual child substitutes, except perhaps in Japan.
This social upheaval may account for the rise in pedophilia across the world.
The pedophile views his relationships with children in a very peculiar light.
First of all, sex with children to the pedophile is free and dairy. Sex with sub-teens implies freedom of action with impunity. It enhances the pedophile's magical sense of omnipotence and immunity.
By defying the authority of a state and the edicts of his culture and society, the pedophile experiences an adrenaline rush to which he gradually becomes addicted. Illicit sex becomes the outlet for his urgent need to live dangerously and recklessly.
The pedophile is on a quest to reassert control of his life.
Studies have consistently demonstrated that pedophilia is associated with anomic states, war, famine, epidemics, and with major life crises. Failure, relocation, infidelity of a spouse, separation, divorce, unemployment, bankruptcy, illness, death of your fender's nearest and dearest and so on and so forth.
When everything else crumbles, pedophilia is an outlet.
Itoutlet. It is likely, though unsubstantiated by research, that the typical pedophile is depressive and with a borderline personality, low organization, and fuzzy personal boundaries.
Pedophiles are reckless and emotionally labile. The pedophile's sense of self-worth is volatile and dysregulated. He is likely to suffer from abandonment anxiety and to be codependent or counterdependent at heart.
Paradoxically, it is by seemingly losing control in one aspect of his lifethat the pedophile re-acquires a sense of mastery.
The same mechanism is at work in the development of eating disorders. An inhibitory deficit is somehow magically perceived as self-control and omnipotence.
There is another type of pedophile thinking.
Progress with children is corrupt and decadent and therefore hot. The pedophile makes frequent, though unconscious, use projection and projective identification in his relationships with children.
He makes his victims treat him the way he views himself or attributes to them traits and behaviors that are truly his.
The pedophile is aware of society's view of his actions as vile, corrupt, forbidden, even and decadent, especially if the pedophiliac act involves incest.
The pedophile derives pleasure from the sleazy nature of his pursuits because he tends to sustain his view of himself as bad, a failure, deserving of punishment, worthless and guilty.
In extreme, mercifully uncommon cases, the pedophile projects these torturous feelings and perceptions onto his victims. The children, defiled and abused by the pedophile's sexual attentions, become rotten, bad objects, guilty and punishable. This leads to sexual sadism, lustery and, in extreme cases, snuff murders.
Sex with children is a reenactment of a painful past.
Many pedophiles truly bond with their prey. To them, children are the reification of innocence, genuineness, trust, gullibility and faithfulness. The pedophile associates these qualities with a nostalgic past. He wishes to recapture this past via his relationships with children.
The relationship with the child provides the pedophile with a safe passage to his own repressed and fearful inner child. Through his victim, the pedophile gains access to his suppressed and thwarted emotions. In a way, to his true self.
It is a fantasy-like second chance to reenact the pedophile's childhood, and this time, benignly and under the pedophile's control.
The pedophile's dream to make peace with his past becomes true, transforming the interaction with the child to an exercise in wish-fulfillment.
But sex with the child is also a shared psychosis. The pedophile treats his chosen child as an object, an extension of himself, devoid of separate existence and denuded of distinct needs. He finds the child's submissiveness and gullibility gratifying, as we said. He frowns on any sign of personal autonomy and regards it as a threat.
By intimidating, controlling, and making false promises, the abuser isolates his prey from his family, school, peers, and from the rest of society. This way, he makes the child's dependence on him, total.
To the pedophile, the child is a kind of transitional object, a training ground on which to exercise his adult relationship skills. The pedophile erroneously feels that the child will never betray and abandon him, therefore guaranteeing object constancy.
The pedophile, stealthily but unfailingly, exploits the vulnerabilities in the psychological make-up of his victim.
The child may have low self-esteem, a low self-esteem, a fluctuating sense of self-worth, primitive defense mechanisms, phobias, mental health problems, a disability, a history of failure, bad relations with parents, siblings, teachers, peers, or a tendency to blame herself for to feel inadequate, autoplastic neurosis, as it is known.
The kid may come from an abusive family or environment, which condition her or him to expect abuse, as inevitable and normal.
In extreme and rare cases, the victim is a masterpiece, possessed of an urge to seek ill-treatment and pain. Therefore, the pedophile is a perfect touch.
The pedophile is the guru, at the center of a cult. Like other gurus, he demands complete obedience from his partner. He feels entitled to adulation and special treatment by his child-mate. He punishes the wereword and the straying lamps. He enforces discipline in his mouthful.
If the child finds himself in a twilight zone, the pedophile imposes on the child a shared psychosis, replete with persecutory delusions, enemies, mythical narratives and apocalyptic scenarios if he is flouted. The child is rendered the joint guardian of a horrible secret.
The pedophile's control is based on ambiguity, unpredictability, fuzziness and ambient abuse. His ever-shifting whims exclusively define right versus wrong, desirable versus unwanted, what is to be pursued and what is to be avoided. The pedophile alone determines rights and obligations, and he alters them at will.
The typical pedophile is a micro-manager, even obsessive-compulsive. He exerts control over the minutest details and behaviors. He punishes severely and abuses with holders of information and those who fail to conform to his wishes and goals.
The pedophile does not respect the boundaries and privacy of the often reluctant and terrified child. He ignores his or her wishes and treats children as objects or instruments of gratification. He seeks to control both situations and people, compulsively.
The pedophile acts in a patronizing and condescending manner and criticizes often. He alternates between emphasizing the minutest faults, devaluation, and exaggerating the looks, talents, traits and skills of the child, idealization.
The pedophile is wildly unrealistic in his expectations, which legitimizes his subsequent abusive conduct in the guise of punishment.
Narcissistic pedophiles claim to be infallible, superior, talented, skillful, omnipotent and omniscient. They often lie and confabulate, to support the unfounded claims and to justify their actions.
Most pedophiles suffer from cognitive deficits and reinterpret reality to fit their fantasies.
In extreme cases, the pedophile feels above the law, any kind of law. This grandiose and haughty conviction leads to criminal acts, incestuous or polygamous relationships and recurrent friction with the authorities. These are the antisocial, psychopathic pedophiles.
Pedophiles therefore regard relationship with children as an ego-booster. Some teen children are by definition inferior to the pedophile. They are physically weaker, dependent on others for the fulfillment of many of their needs, cognitively and emotionally immature and easily manipulable. Their fault of knowledge is limited and their skills are restricted.
The pedophile's relationships with children buttress the pedophile's twin grandiose delusions of omnipotence and omniscience. Compared to his victims, the pedophile is always the strongest, the wisest, the most skillful and the most well-informed.
Incestuous children, of course, guarantee his companionship. Inevitably, the pedophile considers his child victims to be his best friends and companions.
Pedophiles are lonely erotomaniac people. The pedophile believes that he is in love with or simply loves the child. Sex is really a way to communicate his affection and caring, but of course there are other values.
To show his keen interest, the common pedophile keeps calling the child, dropping by, writing emails, giving gifts, providing services, doing unsolicited errands on the kid's behalf, getting into relationships with the pre-teen's parents, friends, teachers and peers and in general making himself available at all times.
Less charitably, this may be construed as stalking.
The pedophile feels free to make legal, financial and emotional decisions for the child.
The pedophile therefore intrudes on the victim's privacy, disrespects the child's express wishes and personal boundaries, and ignores his or her emotions, needs and preferences.
To the pedophile, love means enmeshment and clinging, coupled with an overpowering separation anxiety, fear of being abandoned.
No amount of demands, chastising, threats and even outright hostile actions convince the erotomania pedophile that the child is not in love with him. The pedophile knows better and he will make the world see the light as well.
The child and his guardians are simply unaware of what is good for the child and what the child really feels.
The pedophile determinately sees it as his or her task to bring life and happiness into the child's dreary and unhappy existence.
Thus, regardless of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the pedophile is convinced that his feelings are reciprocated, in other words that the child is equally infatuated with him.
The pedophile interprets everything the child does, or refrains from doing, as coded messages, confessing to or in conveying the child's interests in the pedophile and eternal devotion to the pedophile and to the relationship.
Some, although by no means all, pedophiles are socially inept, awkward, schizoid, suffer from a host of mood and anxiety disorders.
They may also be legitimately involved with the child. It could be a stepmother, a stepfather, former spouse, teacher, gym instructor, sibling. They could be involved with the child's parents, for instance, a former boyfriend, a one-night stand, colleagues, co-workers.
Pedophiles are driven by their all-consuming loneliness and their all-pervasive fantasies, compensatory fantasies.
Consequently, pedophiles react badly to any perceived rejection by their victims. They turn on a dime, they become dangerously vindictive, out to destroy the source of their malting frustration.
When their relationship looks doomed and hopeless, some pedophiles violently embark on a spree of self-destruction and other destruction.
Pedophilia is to some extent a culture-bound syndrome, defined as it is by the chronological age of a child involved.
Ephebophilia is the exclusive sexual infatuation with teenagers and is not considered to be a form of pedophilia or even paraphilia.
The very idea of impermissible and later illegal sex with children has emerged in the West hand-in-hand with the novel concept of childhood, as Western dominance and value is spread globally, so did Western mores and ethics.
In some cultures, societies and countries – Afghanistan, for instance – the age of consent is as low as 12. The marriageable age in Britain until the end of the 19th century was 10. Sex and genital foreplay with children was common, encouraged and even medically prescribed, literally all over the world until 150 years ago. Incest and pedophilia were often linked and sanctioned.
Various religious texts, including the Jewish Talmud surprisingly and other progressive texts, permit sexual relations, including incest as early as age 3 for a girl or 8 for a boy.
Pedophilia was an easy common and socially-controlled practice in certain tribal societies and isolated communities, such as the island of Pica.
It would therefore be wise to redefine pedophilia as an attraction to or sexual acts with prepubescent children or with people of the equivalent mental age, the retarded, in contravention of social, legal and cultural accepted practices.
Pedophilia is culture-bound, it depends on the cultural cortex.
The committee that is writing the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is considering to render hebephilia, when adults are sexually attracted to teenagers around the time of puberty, as a subtype of pedophilia, and to rename it pedohebephilia.
And here is a quote from the New Scientist.
The roles of a hebephilia and paraphilic coercive disorder aren't academic, because 20 US states have passed laws that allow sex offenders who have served as sentences to be detained indefinitely in a secure hospital if they are deemed sexual predators.
This can only be done if the offenders have a psychiatric disorder that increases their risk of reoffending, which few do, according to the DSM.
A critic says that if hebephilia and paraphilic coercive disorder make it into the DSM-5, they will be seized upon to consign men to a lifetime of incarceration.
Perhaps there's no other solution.