Most pedophiles are men. Why?

[Soapy Sam]

Perhaps a good place to start would be to look at contemporary and historical societies where it was known such activities rarely, if ever, occurred.

Margaret Mead did some interesting studies of human sexuality in "primitive" societies.

M.

Moochie- You are aware that Mead's studies in Samoa have been utterly discredited?

Here's the only article I could find that gives some numbers in the time I have.
10 myths about Priestly PedophiliaBased on the last part, there may be a misperception as to how many pedophiles are women, but it's hard to know with only the given 3 to 1 ratio.

That's an interesting link, Reflex.

 

[Roboramma]

Why are a vast majority of pedophiles men?

Good question. I think that as many have suggested the answer is likely to be complex. But I'll tell you my own impression.

Men are more driven by sex. There are sound evolutionary reasons for this. A man doesn't have to invest as much in his offspring as does a woman, and so is less selective of his sexual partners (though perhaps as selective of his long-term mate).
If a man can impregnate someone else's mate without that someone else knowing about it, he's managed to do what the kukoo bird does - his child is likely to be given resources, but at no cost to him. We see this sort of thing happening in birds all the time, and I find it likely that there are similar forces at play in human biology and evolution.
Because of all this there tends to be more competition amoung men for mates than amoung women. The guy who has more sex with more women will tend to leave more offspring.
Of course there are other factors at play. Being a good father, careing for your children, educating them to the necessities of life, etc. all pay off. The problem amoung men is that they are less certain than women that the child who they are devoting resources to is their own. (also, because the woman has already devoted resources to her offspring at birth, the man can get away with letting her continue to devote more than he does, while he goes off and woos the girl down the street).
And this, I suggest, leads to men

Even if you don't like my above argument, it seems hard to attack the idea that men are more driven by sex (that doesn't mean they like it more, gain more pleasure from it, or anything, just that searching for new and more sexual partners is the driving force of more of their behaviors) than women.

When for whatever reason, sexual attraction and arrousal moves toward young children, it seems that this is again more likely to drive male behavior than female behavior.
Women may be as likely to be sexually attracted to young children as men, but less likely to act upon that attraction.

Similarly, men tend to be more violent than women. As such, violent pedophilia should also be more common amoung men than women.

One more factor to add to my list of speculations:
Men are fertile for longer than women. While both men and women decline in fertility as they age, only women go through menopause. Older women are much less likely to become pregnant, carry the child to term, and survive childbirth. If she dies, she can't support her (and the man's) offspring, and the child will likely die (at least in the environment in which we evolved). If a man has sex with such a woman, he has much less to gain (reproductively speaking) than he does with a younger, but fertile, women. Thus, it pays older men to be attracted to younger women more than it pays older women to pay attention to younger men.
Particularly because women go through the dangers of childbirth, when they get older, sex is dangerous. There comes a point where the chance of having one more child (who may not survive anyway) is not worth the risk of dying and no longer being able to help support her surviving offspring (including grandchildren).

This suggests that men should be attracted to young but fertile women (which I think is true), but it's possible that this sometimes gets perverted to drive the attaction simply to younger and younger girls.

As I said, mostly idle speculation. Take from the above what you will.

 

[JamesDillon]

Good question. I think that as many have suggested the answer is likely to be complex. But I'll tell you my own impression....As I said, mostly idle speculation. Take from the above what you will.

Sounds about right to me, or at least, what I would guess in my own idle speculation.

 

[Ryokan]

Remember also that child offenders are not neccesarily pedophiles.

In fact, most of them are not.

A perpetrator of child sexual abuse is, despite all medical definitions, commonly assumed to be a pedophile, and referred to as such; however, there may be other motivations for the crime (such as stress, marital problems, or the unavailability of an adult partner), much as adult rape can have non-sexual reasons. Thus, child sexual abuse alone may or may not be an indicator that its perpetrator is a pedophile; most perpetrators of it are in fact not primarily interested in children.

The Wikipeda source.

You might as well ask why most rapists are men.

 

[Cuddles]

Of course there are other factors at play. Being a good father, careing for your children, educating them to the necessities of life, etc. all pay off. The problem amoung men is that they are less certain than women that the child who they are devoting resources to is their own. (also, because the woman has already devoted resources to her offspring at birth, the man can get away with letting her continue to devote more than he does, while he goes off and woos the girl down the street).

And in one of Dawkins' books (probably The Selfish Gene) he gives example of animals where the male cares for the children, and in some cases even incubates the eggs (fish are strange). In these cases the females are much more likely to be promiscuous, which supports your post pretty well.

 

[Soapy Sam]

Men are more driven by sex. There are sound evolutionary reasons for this. A man doesn't have to invest as much in his offspring as does a woman, and so is less selective of his sexual partners (though perhaps as selective of his long-term mate).
If a man can impregnate someone else's mate without that someone else knowing about it, he's managed to do what the kukoo bird does - his child is likely to be given resources, but at no cost to him. We see this sort of thing happening in birds all the time, and I find it likely that there are similar forces at play in human biology and evolution.

I do too. But-

One of the easiest ways for a modern man to have lots of kids at no cost to himself has (for two decades) been by acting as a sperm donor to an assisted fertility clinic. In the UK, sperm from one donor may be used up to ten times. As the system was run by individual clinics it would be simple to donate at several under assumed names, increasing potential fatherhood enormously.

It's easy- (About two minutes once a week for 4-6 weeks, typically.
It's free- in fact they may even pay you.
It's fun- If you agree that masturbation is fun , as the majority of people do. (I except Claus , who no doubt wants to see some numbers).

Yet such clinics have historically struggled to get donors.

In some cases, this may be fear that eventually the cuckoo will come home to roost, but anonymity was guaranteed in Britain for many years, yet still there were never enough donors.

This on it's own hardly disproves the argument you summarise in your post, but it bothers me just the same.

 

[Dave1001]

I do too. But-

One of the easiest ways for a modern man to have lots of kids at no cost to himself has (for two decades) been by acting as a sperm donor to an assisted fertility clinic. In the UK, sperm from one donor may be used up to ten times. As the system was run by individual clinics it would be simple to donate at several under assumed names, increasing potential fatherhood enormously.

It's easy- (About two minutes once a week for 4-6 weeks, typically.
It's free- in fact they may even pay you.
It's fun- If you agree that masturbation is fun , as the majority of people do. (I except Claus , who no doubt wants to see some numbers).

Yet such clinics have historically struggled to get donors.

In some cases, this may be fear that eventually the cuckoo will come home to roost, but anonymity was guaranteed in Britain for many years, yet still there were never enough donors.

This on it's own hardly disproves the argument you summarise in your post, but it bothers me just the same.

Excellent point. There are many such points one can make. Human behavior regarding reproduction isn't as easily reducible as is often described.

 

[JamesDillon]

I do too. But-

One of the easiest ways for a modern man to have lots of kids at no cost to himself has (for two decades) been by acting as a sperm donor to an assisted fertility clinic. In the UK, sperm from one donor may be used up to ten times. As the system was run by individual clinics it would be simple to donate at several under assumed names, increasing potential fatherhood enormously.

It's easy- (About two minutes once a week for 4-6 weeks, typically.
It's free- in fact they may even pay you.
It's fun- If you agree that masturbation is fun , as the majority of people do. (I except Claus , who no doubt wants to see some numbers).

Yet such clinics have historically struggled to get donors.

In some cases, this may be fear that eventually the cuckoo will come home to roost, but anonymity was guaranteed in Britain for many years, yet still there were never enough donors.

This on it's own hardly disproves the argument you summarise in your post, but it bothers me just the same.

True, but it's not as if the genes are capable of thinking rationally about these things. The urge for sex (arguably) exists so strongly because it has worked very well in facilitating successful reproduction for many millennia. If social conditions were to remain the same for several thousand years, perhaps we'd start seeing men with a powerful lust toward clear plastic cups. The fact that we haven't seen that after a generation or two doesn't really undermine Roboramma's evolutionary argument, though.

 

[Cuddles]

I do too. But-

One of the easiest ways for a modern man to have lots of kids at no cost to himself has (for two decades) been by acting as a sperm donor to an assisted fertility clinic. In the UK, sperm from one donor may be used up to ten times. As the system was run by individual clinics it would be simple to donate at several under assumed names, increasing potential fatherhood enormously.

It's easy- (About two minutes once a week for 4-6 weeks, typically.
It's free- in fact they may even pay you.
It's fun- If you agree that masturbation is fun , as the majority of people do. (I except Claus , who no doubt wants to see some numbers).

Yet such clinics have historically struggled to get donors.

In some cases, this may be fear that eventually the cuckoo will come home to roost, but anonymity was guaranteed in Britain for many years, yet still there were never enough donors.

This on it's own hardly disproves the argument you summarise in your post, but it bothers me just the same.

But what drives humans now is what was needed to drive them millions of years ago. Sex. Maybe if we wait a few hundred thousand years, sperm banks will be the normal method of reproduction and all men will feel the urge to donate, but at the moment there is nothing in our genetic programming that would recognise sperm donation as father children.

 

[Roboramma]

This on it's own hardly disproves the argument you summarise in your post, but it bothers me just the same.

I see your point, and I don't want to come off as suggesting that the issue is really simple, obviously it isn't, but...

I'm not trying to suggest that evolution selected for individuals that wanted to maximize their reproduction. Obviously it didn't. I, for instance, have no intention of ever having children, and while it's not that common, there are plenty of other people like me.
What I think was selected for was brains that tend to do things that tend to increase reproduction.
For instance, brains that experience pleasure during sex. Or brains that experience attraction to certain stimuli.
It doesn't even have to go that far. What might have been selected for is brains that pick up on certain cues in the environment and become attracted to that, which in this case doesn't necessarily have to be young, fertile, women, but would have tended to be in the environment in which we evolved, which for evolution is the same thing.
Similarly young children may develop incest aversion to their siblings by developing an aversion toward any young child that they live in close association with during a particular time period of their early life (don't remember exactly when that is). This will tend to be their siblings, and we could even have shorthand that says that we evolved to have an aversion towards sex with our siblings. But alter the environment in certain ways and no such aversion would develop, or one could develop towards competely unrelated individuals. (there may still be a cultural taboo and an aversion because of it, but the "biological" component would disappear.)

That actually makes me wonder (very tentatively) if pedophilia is something that comes about from picking up the wrong cues. This would still allow pedophilia to have existed throughout human prehistory so long as it would infrequent enough.

(of course the above might be better read as "genes that tend to build brains that tend to..." but those sentences would have been unreadable).

Which leads me to one more thing I should point out - I'm speculating mostly about biological reasons for this suggested sex difference. That doesn't mean that I don't think environmental differences might be important, or that some environmental differences that we created couldn't affect the problem in possitive ways.

I'm not saying that any of this is exactly true. I'm only saying that our individual "goals" are completely separate from the "goals" of evolution.

(We can only really talk about such goals in hindsight, and if we want to be accurate, we shouldn't use that word at all. I only use it here in the same way that we often say, "such and such a trait evolved for X". Clearly it didn't evolve for X, but simply because those individuals that tended toward X tended to have more offspring).

Edit: Ah. I see others made the same point far more concisely and just as informatively as I did. Confound you!

 

[Dragonrock]

Pedophilia refers to being sexualy attracted to prepubesent children. I have no proof, but I get the idea that with some pedophiles it is due to simple emotional confusion.

People generally feel some attraction for children. This attraction is normally just the intention to protect from harm. It is in the best interest of social animals to do something to insure the safety of all tribal offspring, not just those they are directly related to.

Pedophiles might not have the emotional maturity to understand the ingrained emotional pull they feel towards children. Because of this confusion they revert to simple instincts and attach a sexual feeling to what is normally a protective urge.

There may be more male pedophiles because men have stronger sex drives and when they are confused they are more likely to attach sexual urges to something that is not normally sexual.

 

[Soapy Sam]

But what drives humans now is what was needed to drive them millions of years ago. Sex. Maybe if we wait a few hundred thousand years, sperm banks will be the normal method of reproduction and all men will feel the urge to donate, but at the moment there is nothing in our genetic programming that would recognise sperm donation as father children.

Granted.
Or masturbation. I doubt it was critical on the Pliocene savannah either, yet there it is, the most common human sexual behavior .

My point is really what Dave1001 highlighted. Human sexual behaviour cannot be simplistically rationalised. Women's sexual behaviour may or may not be about reproduction; men's is about pleasure, whatever their genes might "want".
Look at the gay community. Young gay men in open gay tolerant society(at least pre AIDS) have far higher rates of sexual activity than heterosexuals of the same age. Why?
Because they don't have to talk a woman into sex. They only had to talk another man into it -which in an actual homosexual club or bar is likely to be a damn sight easier .
It has been well said that young gay men behave sexually like all young men , but more so! Reproduction does not enter the equation.

If heterosexual men knew that having sex with women would not result in having kids, would they quit?

Sex and having kids have very little to do with each other in human minds.

ETA- Roboramma I agree with much of your post above. The trouble with reading Dawkins is the bastard takes over your mind.

 

[Bikewer]

Back when I was reading a lot about paraphilia and forensic sexology, the late researcher John Money was rather the preeminent fellow in the field.
He noted that males are fare more prone to paraphila than females; of the 40+ catalogued varieties of paraphila, women only are subject to 7 or 8; males all the rest. Some, such as Transvestism, are exclusively male.

Money's hypothesis had to do with the fact that all human embryos start out female, and those with the male chromosomal set are "masculinized" during development. This process is complex, and involves not only genetic transcription but also hormonal levels in the mother's bloodstream and other factors as well.
As a result, Money said, males are much more prone to transcription errors and other sexual anomalies than are females.
Money also said that one's sexual orientation or "lovemap" (as he called it) was pretty much set by age three in most cases. The "lovemap" is psychological construct of an idealized mating partner.

 

[Roboramma]

The trouble with reading Dawkins is the bastard takes over your mind.

No kidding!

PS I think I agree with everything I just snipped.

 

[Almo]

You might as well ask why most rapists are men.

Except there's a very good physical reason why... Sex at least functions regardless of whether or not the woman is aroused. Hard to rape an unaroused male. At least that's what I think.

 

[CFLarsen]

Except there's a very good physical reason why... Sex at least functions regardless of whether or not the woman is aroused. Hard to rape an unaroused male. At least that's what I think.

Don't bend over.

 

[calebprime]

Pedophilia refers to being sexualy attracted to prepubesent children. I have no proof, but I get the idea that with some pedophiles it is due to simple emotional confusion.

People generally feel some attraction for children. This attraction is normally just the intention to protect from harm. It is in the best interest of social animals to do something to insure the safety of all tribal offspring, not just those they are directly related to.

Pedophiles might not have the emotional maturity to understand the ingrained emotional pull they feel towards children. Because of this confusion they revert to simple instincts and attach a sexual feeling to what is normally a protective urge.

There may be more male pedophiles because men have stronger sex drives and when they are confused they are more likely to attach sexual urges to something that is not normally sexual.

I'm going with this, as well as a one-word response. Testosterone. At the risk of the savants at the JREF giving me a choice between death or ru-ru.

www.mp3car.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=6858 - 109k

(many funny variations on this joke)

 

[rustypouch]

Because of sexist double standards.

When women rape teenaged boys, many people make comments about 'lucky guy' or 'I wish I and teachers like that when I was a kid.'

Women are not held as accountable as men in this regard. Think of the recent trend of female teachers raping thier students. Debra Favre comes to mind.

If these women do get convicted, they will face much shorter sentences than men convicted of the same crimes. I have bookmarks on my home computer if anyone wants evidences.

 

[Crossbow]

Nonsense. A "vast majority" works just fine.

Why are a vast majority of pedophiles men?

Sorry, but I do not think that is true.

I would say that crimes pertaining to female pedophiles are simply not reported as often as are crimes pertaining to male pedophiles, hence the skewed statistics.

 

[ReFLeX]

Sorry, but I do not think that is true.

I would say that crimes pertaining to female pedophiles are simply not reported as often as are crimes pertaining to male pedophiles, hence the skewed statistics.

Victim surveys provide data that disprove this. It's not "simple," like many amateur psychologists here seem to think.