I’m interested in professional/expert opinions if they can be had, but felt I had to post here rather than GQ, since there isn’t likely to be one agreed-upon answer. [I hope this thread can stay civil and on-topic (and open) and not devolve as others have.]
Currently there are many threads here inspired by the Jackson, Couey, and even Letorneau (et al) cases which concern the nature of sexual attraction to minors. And although I’ve sometimes written about sexual predators and deviants IRL, the assignments never allowed me opportunities to explore in depth the question of where the line is crossed – psychologically – between the common sexual attraction to people who appear young and healthy, and an aberrant attraction to the very young.
I’m hoping that some Dopers who work and research in relevant fields (psychiatry, sociology, human sexuality) will provide some insight into these questions:
Is there any consensus on where the lower end of “normal” age of attraction lies? Is there an age or stage of development (eg puberty) below which sexual attraction is considered a mental illness by most professionals?
It’s known that adolescence has expanded greatly (starting sooner with earlier puberty, and lasting later) – not just by months, but by a factor of years when compared even to a century ago. What effect, if any, has this phenomenon had on the incidence of pedophilia, cultural norms, and pedophiles’/ephebophiles’ self-perception?
What, if any, effect does child pornography (and its supposed increasing availability through mass media) have on pedophiles, specifically the tendency to cross the line into action (child molestation)? Do non-pornographic images of children (eg in advertising) have a stimulatory effect for fantasy or action?
Do changing cultural norms seem to affect the self-perception of pedophiles/ephebophiles as “deviants”? If so, does this affect their actions as well?
How valid are theories of “imprinting” and “critical periods” – ie, that sexual encounters with adults at certain stages of psychological development may trigger a lifelong tendency to be aroused sexually by children?
What light can evolutionary psychology shed on the issue of how to deal with pedophilia in our culture?
I am not an expert, but I think I’ve watched enough Law and Order to answer this one:
*** Is there any consensus on where the lower end of “normal” age of attraction lies? Is there an age or stage of development (eg puberty) below which sexual attraction is considered a mental illness by most professionals?**
It’s 16. On L&O, when the girl is under 16 the perp is a “sick bastard”, “kiddie rapist”, et al. But over 16 he’s just “someone who gets his kicks from teenagers.”
Depends on the culture. 100 years ago, it was normal for Indians to get married at 13/14. Mental illness is too strong a term for such deviancy. It just seems an attempt to solidify a cultural rule as some sort of objective condition of the human species in general.
Not a professional, but a person who’s addressed the question a few times: The law is hardly the best guide to certitude on issues like this, but based on legal stipulations, I would hazard a guess that the answer would be: for most adults, the age at which the person for whom desire is felt achieves reasonable approximation of adult development, in the 16-18 range; for adolescents, who can hardly be considered perverse for desiring someone within a year or so of their own age, a range within four years, with the outer edges of that pretty hazy: a 14-year-old desiring an 18-year-old would be considered normal, but a 15-year-old desiring a 12-year-old would be borderline perverse, even though the age disparity is less. So Justin is not far from the mark. But I would love to see the answers of professionals.
I know you were kidding, but FYI, L&O takes place in New York, where the age of consent (as I recall) is 16. The dialog is likely a function of that more than anything else.
Yes, due to better diets. Not due to something freaky with hormones in the water.
Also, you need to stop lumping together questions about ebephiles and pedophiles. Must scientist agree that ebephelia is socially forbidden, but evolutionarily normal, while most would say that pedophilia is neither.
Well, except for Intermediate types among primitive folk : a study in social evolution / by Edward Carpenter. which I vaguely seemed to remember had a theory that homosexuality evolved to have men who would ally themselves with other men exclusively, and pedophile were there in order to have men who would guard children zealously. Or maybe it was some other book from the seventies about homosexuality and evolution. In any case, I recall seeing it when I was trying to study the difference between how sexuality was perceived in the 70s and now. I can’t really tell, since I am not at UMBC right now.
OK. Let’s ignore there are places called Africa and Asia. I just happen to know in real life people from these places. They just think American attitiudes about sex are just silly.
You need to get over the idea of 14-year-olds getting married in other countries as “sick” and “perverse”. It may be sad in our perspective - because it means that these young girls/women don’t get opportunities in education, etc (not that those opportunities are there for them anyway).
But it is not sick. Men in those countries aren’t poring over magazines of pubescent girls. They’re not marrying 14-year-olds because they like “young girls” - it is just tradition. Men/boys also marry young. In terms of wank material they are probably far more likely to drool over a very curvy, womanly Bollywood-style actress or singer, not a Lolita type.
The mindset of marrying a 14-year-old post-pubescent girl to a 16-year-old boy in a village society is far more healthy and appropriate, in my opinion, than a 40-year-old American man beating himself off over pictures of “barely legal” cheerleaders and “sexy schoolgirls” in “white panties”. That’s deviant - he is specifically after childlikeness.
“If there’s grass on the pitch, let the games commence”
i.e. once an individual shows the physical signs of sexual maturity (and pubic hair is the most instantly obvious sign) then breeding with them becomes an acceptable option from an evolutionary point-of-view.
To attempt to mate with someone before they are physically sexually mature makes little sense evolutionarily speaking - lots of effort expended for zero gain.
Modern society has muddied the waters somewhat by separating sexual maturity into physical and emotional / social factors - we’re in the position now in the developed world where young people are sexually mature in a physical sense without being viewed as mature in the emotional / social sense.
If you were referring to me, you’re mistaken. I don’t think of it as either “sick” or “perverse”. Probably my 3rd sentence & onwards confused you. They referred to Western culture’s attitudes, not mine.
Umm, exquise me, but I believe the last post was either refering to the OPer, or just general advice, not to you, but to anyone laboring under taht idea.
In Albania, Austria, Canada, China, Colombia, Croatia, Estonia, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Peru, Puerto Rico, Romania, and Slovenia the age of consent for heterosexual relations is 14.
Not to speak for the OP, but it seems that the question is not, “what is the age of consent,” which is what folks seem to be answering, but, “at what point is <i>attraction</i> to someone of a young age considered psychologically deviant?,” which is a pretty different kettle of fish.
I think there are many who might agree on an age of consent of 17 who would not consider attraction to a 17 year old ‘abnormal’.
I posted a link to a chart of age of consent laws because I think that the legal age of consent reflects a sense of that culture’s idea of the point below which sexual attraction and relationships are considered abnormal.
I absolutely get you Walloon, and I didn’t mean for my post to be pointing at you specifically.
It just seems that the legal/illegal question about actual sexual acts with people has been done, but the normalcy of attraction not so much.
Also, I’d tend to disagree a bit. It seems that we have age of consent laws not because it’s abnormal for someone to be sexually attractive below that age, but because we believe that people below the age of consent don’t have the faculties to enter into mature relationships in an equal way. Whether or not that’s always true, it certainly is not connected in any but a most general way to sexuality and physical attraction.
In the past month I found myself in this situation at the local mall: I was walking behind two women, one a bit taller maybe, but both of them, from the back, look to me like "How you doin’ material. From what I can see of them as they turned to look at things or walk into a store, they looked good to me; the taller one, I thought, might be an older sister or something because I noticed a strong resemblance…and then the kicker came as the taller one said something to the shorter one and the shorter one responded, “Oh come on, Mom…” Wow. I’m guessing that the taller woman might have been a youthful-looking mid to late thirties woman, her daughter a young but well-developed teen.
I’m 32; I don’t even want to date anyone who hasn’t at least completed college at this point, but like most hetero males I suffer Lust-Induced Brain Freeze* when confronted with a shapely female body, regardless of age. For all I know, that girl might have even been an unusually well-developed 12 or 13 year-old. But even if she was 16 or 17 I know that I would never want to pursue a relationship with someone that young no matter how hot they looked. But there’s no denying that she looked hot. Her Mom looked hot, too. I almost wanted to ask her if she had a single sister in my age range.
IANAPsychologist nor otherwise in a related field to the topic. However, I agree with eonwe that this thread seems to have gotten quite distracted from the topic.
Personally, I would say that, just as a rapist is more concerned with fulfilling his own desires than having a mutually pleasing experience–a pedophile wouldn’t be any different, simply using the victims innocence to get his way rather than force.
So by this standard, the age of the victim is tangental to the fact of the actual rape.* However, as a child is still developing on a mental level as well as physical, getting raped is more probable to cause severe distress and psychological damage for the rest of her life. To some extent maturity of the individual and awareness of evilnesses in the world might lessen the level of damage, but it probably best not to assume such a thing.
Scientifically, if you could come up with a reliable measurement of psychological distress–for instance, number of suicides–you could probably compare the rate of people who were raped that eventually commit suicide, and comparing that to the age they were at the time see if there is a dropoff as the age increases. It would then be the point of that dropoff which you could consider to be the general age at which rape could be considered to have gained another level of hideousness.
Kindly note that I mean “rape” not in the sense of forced sex, but rather sex where specifically one of the party is taking advantage of the other solely to feed his own desire, and where the level of being “used” is enough to cause psychological harm and have the person sense that they have lost the ability to control their own existence.
