The Personality and Childhoods Of Pedophiles

And a lot more

How do the childhoods of pedophiles differ from those who aren’t?

For this post, I’m using the term ‘pedophile’ to refer to anybody who experiences pedophilic urges, regardless of whether they offend.

My general About The Survey description (demographic and survey design info): As of writing this, sample size (after cleaning inconsistent/suspicious responses) is 609,000, 421k females and 186k males. It came from a survey I made that went viral, primarily on tiktok, but is at this point spread out across the internet widely enough that the demographic is mostly just “generic internet people who like taking personality tests and are interested in learning their kink score”. This turns out to be skewed towards young women, with a slight liberal tilt.

Also reminder, I haven’t had anybody doublecheck my work yet, and I occasionally make small errors. I will update this post if I find any.

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In the survey, if people clicked a check box saying they were into ‘age stuff’, I gave them this:

*question: "I find older children who have not yet reached sexual maturity (e.g., age 8) to be:" [0-5, ‘not arousing’ to ‘extremely arousing’ scale]

*tip: Reminder: Experiencing sexual arousal to a fantasy does /not/ mean you would act in a way that harms others in real life, this question is not asking if you would act in a way that harms others.

I also included a second question:

*question: "I find toddlers or babies to be:" [0-5, ‘not arousing’ to ‘extremely arousing’ scale]

*tip: Reminder: Experiencing sexual arousal to a fantasy does /not/ mean you would act in a way that harms others in real life, this question is not asking if you would act in a way that harms others.

For this post I’m gonna just use the term ‘children’ for people responding to the first question, and ‘toddlers’ for the second.

Base Rates

To start, what were the rates of people reporting interest at all?

Most didn’t - 99.4% of females and 96.5% of males reported no arousal response to children. The following graph includes people who reported any arousal response.

y axis is “% of people selecting each option)

Most of the distribution here looks like it’s slightly bimodal - for example out all of the males reporting any interest in children, 47.2% were either in the ‘slightly’ or ‘extremely’ categories.
Female pedophilia seems to be a linear decrease, where most of them express a proportionately milder interest.

For this post I’m going to look at children only.

I also asked:

In general, consuming erotic content about children feels like it would [significantly increase to significantly reduce scale] my likelihood of acting on this in real life.

Before you look at the results, I want you to predict what the answers will be. Do you think people reporting they’re pedophiles will insist that no, porn is good for me? Do you think they’re sufficiently guilted by society and struggling with their urges that they’ll say no, porn is bad for me? Do you think they’ll be honest or lying? In which direction? Be prepared to update your models here if you’re wrong.

It looks like the vast majority of people reporting pedophilic inclinations say that consuming child porn would either reduce their urges to act on it, or have no effect.

I’m not sure how much we can conclude from this, but it’s interesting.

Age as a confounder

I understand controlling for things is good, but I’m not yet confident enough to just go around controlling for things (linear?? spline??) without worrying I’m accidentally obfuscating something important.

But ‘age’ is probably a confounding factor for a lot of things - childhood upbringing norms change over time, so older people probably had different childhoods than younger ones. And also pedophilia is a very age-based kink, and it seems plausible it’s impacted by how old you are.

In my data, males who reported being pedophiles were older.

I honestly have no idea how to interpret this.

But it seems like there’s… some correlation, kind of?

So for the rest of this post, I’m going to look only at people between the ages of 19 and 26, a span small enough that hopefully we’ll reduce the chance of age confounders secretly messing up any of our data. This reduces our sample size to 92,884 males and 231,310 females, which includes 3,037 male and 1,148 female pedophiles.

And glancing, it doesn’t appear people’s geographical location or race had interesting correlation with pedophilia.

Uh, general reminder

I didn’t ask if people had actually offended against children, I only asked if they found kids arousing. Probably a bunch of the people responding have never offended.

Correlations

In my data, everything weird correlates with each other. Trans, poly, queer, mental health, bmi - all abnormality correlates with greater fetishism across the board.

So yeah, all these things also correlate with increased interest in pedophilia.

full y axis

In males this translates to 2.3% of full-monog, 4.4% of halfway, and 8.1% of very poly people.

Mental Illnesses

I also asked the question: “In your fantasies involving children, the children typically [totally enjoy to totally don’t enjoy] the experience”

Since pedophilia seems disproportionately higher among sociopaths for females than males, I wonder if female pedophiles are more likely than males to have fantasies of children who don’t enjoy it? Let’s check:

Yep, looks like this holds! While most people reporting pedophilic interest seem to fantasize that the experience is enjoyable, it seems that females are more likely to prefer presumably more sadistic experiences.

Transgender Stuff

Remember to pay attention to all the y axis! I’m zooming so we can more easily see change across category, but the overall rates are still very tiny.

The pedophilia score (again, reminder, this is the average response to the question “How arousing do you find pre-puberty children, on a 0 (not) to 5 (extremely) scale)

And here’s the percentage that indicated any interest at all:

Homosexuality

I asked “are you attracted to people who appear more masculine or feminine”?

Bi men are more pedophilic than gay men, but gay women are more pedophilic than bi women?? Weird.

For another look, this is the % of males reporting any interest in pedophilia, by their genitalia preference:

Bodycount

Doesn’t look like a huge impact her, though the mild bimodality is a bit interesting.

Sexual Assault

Uh, this one is big. I don’t know if you’ve been following along with the y-axis, but this is by far the largest effect. On average, males who say “yes, extremely” to the question about sexually assaulting people, have a ~1.25/5 pedophilia interest rating. This is massive - the average pedophilia rating of males in general is 0.096.

Here’s the absolute % of people who indicated interest in pedophilia from each category:

Politics

Politics didn’t seem to correlate much at all.

There’s a small uptick for the super-conservative males, but it’s minor and the sample size was lower so ?? Might be worth investigating more in depth in the future, but I’d be surprised if it ended up meaningful.

Height

didn’t correlate at all.

Weight

barely correlated - r = 0.03 - but is a bit more interesting in the graph.

Again, note the y axis

Males who report no pedophilic inclinations reported weighing, on average, 182 pounds. Males who reported ‘moderate’ or greater interest in children weighed ~190 pounds!

Onto the childhood!

Age of masturbation onset

This looks pretty meaningful. People who report extreme interest in pedophilia also reported beginning to masturbate a full ~2 years earlier. And the highest pedophilia rating came from the masturbation-onset age group of 4 years old! Crazy.

Is this a confounder from sexual assault? Do people who get sexually assaulted, masturbate earlier?

Here’s the same graphs, but only from people who said they weren’t sexually assaulted at all in childhood:

!!! Even among people who said they weren’t sexually assaulted as kids, people interested in pedophilia seem to report masturbating way earlier. I don’t know exactly what this means but it seems like an important clue.

Again, let’s see what happens when we only include people who weren’t sexually assaulted in childhood:

Childhood Sexual Assault

Still though - people who report being sexually assaulted in childhood, also report higher pedophilic interest.

Or, for concrete percentages:

3% of males who weren’t sexually assaulted in childhood, report pedophilic interest.
7% of males who were sexually assaulted (severely) in childhood, report pedophilic interest.

0.4% of females who weren’t sexually assaulted in childhood, report pedophilic interest
1.2% of females who were sexually assaulted (severely) in childhood, report pedophilic interest.

This is just over a 2x increase for males and a 3x increase for females.

(Also this isn’t strictly related to pedophilia, but still mildly interesting:)

When did people first experienced pedophilic urges?

The way I constructed the survey was that people marked yes to various fetish categories, and then got more specific questions for those categories.

I asked one what age did this start question for each general category. This means that this age question might not be specifically for pedophilia - I also included age gaps, CGL, older people, age regression/progression, etc.. The possible error here is that maybe we have a pedophile who first realized they were a pedophile at 15 years old, but are also into age progression, which they first realized they were into at 7 years old, which might impact the data.

But still, there’s probably some signal in here.

X and y axis switched:

Note the big difference in the ‘extreme’ category. This is an effect I’ve seen in a few other fetishes so far, where people who say they’re extremely into a thing have a meaningfully earlier onset of the fetish than everybody else.

I think this is some evidence of a different subcategory of fetish - the one that hits much earlier, and results in a much more intense version of that fetish.

Sibling number

Doesn’t seem important.

Birth order seems to have no effect either, though with a little bounce at the extremes which might still be noise:

I also asked “are your siblings mostly male, female, or a mix”, but this didn’t correlate at all.

No Relationship

Other things that didn’t seem to correlate was “how important was adherence to religion in your upbringing”, social class of upbringing, cleanliness of childhood house, was responsibility placed on you or the world, how frequently were you spanked, how much were you verbally abused, how much were you neglected, and parental presence.

Personality

I don’t want to bore you with a bunch of charts of straight lines and r=0.0001 or whatever.

Questions that didn’t seem to have any interesting connection with pedophilia, based on my eyeballing:
"I am relaxed most of the time"
“I deserve more respect than I get”
"I don't have very much power over those around me"
"I have excellent ideas"
"I am high powered, driven, successful"
"I am quiet around strangers"
"I like order"
"I have difficulty understanding abstract ideas"
"I find the existence of the supernatural to be plausible"
”Compared to other people of your same gender and age range, you are [less or more attractive”

Ones that did, a little bit:

This question was inserted later, so lower sample size. Also note the full y axis

Relationship style seems to mostly not matter, with maybe just “secure males are a bit less likely to be into pedophilia”.

Erotic Emotions

I’m not planning on getting too much into ‘what sexual things does pedophilia correlate with’ in this blog post, but I’ll touch on it a bit.

I asked people what emotions/moods they found erotic in sexual scenarios, both “when I myself am feeling it” and “when the other person feels it.”

Looks like people in the grief-despair-disgust cluster get meaningfully higher pedophilia scores.

(again, to reiterate, this isn’t huge - it’s a 0.45/5 rating out of like the normal 0.1/5 rating.

But this also goes for the self - people who found situations erotic where they themselves were experiencing disgust-grief-despair, were also more likely to express interest in pedophilia.

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In summary:

Self reported pedophilia rates are pretty low in general; my 3.5% male response rate seems to be within the range of Wikipedia’s shrug-and-guess “less than 5%” rate.

Interestingly, pedophilia rates seem higher for bi and enby males compared to transwomen and gay males.

People very interested in pedophilia report that they first experienced interest in this at an earlier age (11-12 years old) than people with milder pedophilic urges (around 13 years old).

Pedophiles also report masturbating earlier in life, even if you only look at pedophiles who report never being sexually assaulted as children.

It seems like pedophilia is more closely associated with sociopathy and sadism in women than men.

Pedophiles report overwhelmingly that consuming erotic content about children either reduces or has no effect on their likelihood of offending in real life.

Males who report being ‘very poly’ are a lot more pedophilic, at nearly 3x the rate of the rest of the population.

People who report severe sexual assault in their childhood show report 2-3x the rates of pedophilia compared to those who weren’t assaulted at all.

Reminder that in general, weird correlates with weird, and typically all deviations from standard cis-straight-monog-neurotypical categories are associated with higher fetishism in all things, across the board. Expect this to become a trend.

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I usually release raw data in batches, but this is a bit of a “measured lots of stuff” deal. I’m going to release the entire set of data once I’m done writing about all of it, but that might take a while, so if you have specific data requests please let me know at aellasinbox@gmail.com!