\nThe New York Times<\/p>\n
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CAMDEN, N.J. \u2014 THINK back to your first childhood crush. Maybe it was a classmate or a friend next door. Most likely, through school and into adulthood, your affections continued to focus on others in your approximate age group. But imagine if they did not.<\/p>\n
By some estimates, 1 percent of the male population continues, long after puberty, to find themselves attracted to prepubescent children. These people are living with pedophilia, a sexual attraction to prepubescents that often constitutes a mental illness. Unfortunately, our laws are failing them and, consequently, ignoring opportunities to prevent child abuse.<\/p>\n
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines pedophilia as an intense and recurrent sexual interest in prepubescent children, and a disorder if it causes a person \u201cmarked distress or interpersonal difficulty\u201d or if the person acts on his interests. Yet our laws ignore pedophilia until after the commission of a sexual offense, emphasizing punishment, not prevention.<\/p>\n
Part of this failure stems from the misconception that pedophilia is the same as child molestation. One can live with pedophilia and not act on it. Sites like Virtuous Pedophiles<\/a> provide support for pedophiles who do not molest children and believe that sex with children is wrong. It is not that these individuals are \u201cinactive\u201d or \u201cnonpracticing\u201d pedophiles, but rather that pedophilia is a status and not an act. In fact, research shows, about half of all child molesters are not sexually attracted to their victims.<\/p>\n A second misconception is that pedophilia is a choice. Recent research, while often limited to sex offenders \u2014 because of the stigma of pedophilia \u2014 suggests that the disorder may have neurological origins. Pedophilia could result from a failure in the brain to identify which environmental stimuli should provoke a sexual response. M.R.I.s of sex offenders with pedophilia show fewer of the neural pathways known as white matter in their brains. Men with pedophilia are three times more likely to be left-handed or ambidextrous, a finding that strongly suggests a neurological cause. Some findings also suggest that disturbances in neurodevelopment in utero or early childhood increase the risk of pedophilia. Studies have also shown that men with pedophilia have, on average, lower scores on tests of visual-spatial ability and verbal memory.<\/p>\n The Virtuous Pedophiles website<\/a> is full of testimonials of people who vow never to touch a child and yet live in terror. They must hide their disorder from everyone they know \u2014 or risk losing educational and job opportunities, and face the prospect of harassment and even violence. Many feel isolated; some contemplate suicide. The psychologist Jesse Bering<\/a>, author of \u201cPerv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us,\u201d writes that people with pedophilia \u201caren\u2019t living their lives in the closet; they\u2019re eternally hunkered down in a panic room.\u201d<\/p>\n While treatment cannot eliminate a pedophile\u2019s sexual interests, a combination of cognitive-behavioral therapy and medication can help him to manage urges and avoid committing crimes.<\/p>\n But the reason we don\u2019t know enough about effective treatment is because research has usually been limited to those who have committed crimes.<\/p>\n