I am a professional
Canadian woman aged 33 with a high awareness of issues relating to addiction
and pedophilia, due to an alcoholic mother and father who was convicted of
inappropriately touching his girlfriend’s young boy.
My problem is that I have a
long list of ‘suggested traits’ of a pedophile written down on my notepad that
appear to be present in my current boyfriend. My boyfriend hasn’t shown any
overt signs of being a pedophile or having been abused himself, but he is only
30 and I guess I fear that something will emerge later, as it did with my dad
later in his life.
Could you possibly tell me
whether you feel that someone can technically tick all or most of the
biological or social ticklist boxes of traits and not be a pedophile? The
things that make me nervous about my boyfriend are learning issues/poor grades
in school, poor memory, short in stature, left-handed, and a strong view that
men should be able to interact with children and not be called pedophiles. He
is constantly injuring himself and funnily enough he sometimes reminds me of a
brain injured person—I worked with acute brain injury patients for four years.
Thank you so much in
advance for taking the time to read my email.
Kind regards,
T. C.
I cannot make any clinical
judgment, but I can say that none of the clues we have so far uncovered should
be interpreted as substantial risk factors. The differences that
have been identified between pedophiles and nonpedophiles—handedness, physical
height, and so on—help lead us to how pedophilia might develop, but they tell
us only very little about any individual person. Pedophilia is rare,
statistically; even if some effect were very large, telling us that someone had
double the chance of being pedophilic, a small chance doubled is still only a
small chance. The effects we have discovered so far are large enough to tell us
something important about pedophilia as a phenomenon, but not large enough to
predict anything meaningful about pedophilia in any individual person. Even
though left-handedness is statistically more common among pedophiles, the great
majority of left-handed people are not at all pedophilic.
It is also important to
note that the clues we have discovered so far are only very general ones. That
pedophiles—as a group—are physically shorter on average than nonpedophiles is
an important sign scientifically; it tells us that, whatever link there is
between pedophilia and biology, that link must have existed during the growth
periods of life. We still have no idea what that link might be,
however. Very many things influence growth, and it is probable that
only very few or only one of those is at all involved. My personal
guess is that many factors are involved in what makes a person’s brain develop
a sexual interest in children, and having only some of those “ingredients” will
not trigger it.
