There are a few very interesting surveys and articles by the blogger Aella that touch on the topic of pedophilia. While the surveys are more informal and not rigorously scientific, they are still for the most part well executed and gain some merit by the sheer size of her datasets that most researchers can only dream of.

Fetish Tabooness and Popularity

In this survey, she collected 30k responses on how erotic people found something, and 1300 responses on how taboo their culture views the interest. A clear correlation emerges: the less people report having a specific sexual interest, the more taboo this interest is. Perhaps unsurprisingly pedophilia is by far the most taboo sexual interest, and also one of the rarest.

The Personality and Childhoods Of Pedophiles

This is an evaluation of a massive survey with over 600k responses, blowing the sample size of any scientific study in that area that I know of out of the water by several orders of magnitude. Some results I found noteworthy:

• 0.6% of women and 3.5% of men reported having at least some sexual interest in prepubescent children
• The vast majority of pedophiles in that survey say that consuming erotic content about children would either decrease or not affect their likelihood to commit CSA
• Probably unsurprisingly, in most pedophiles’ fantasies children enjoy sexual encounters
• Men who have been victims of CSA are more likely to report sexual attraction to children
• Pedophilia seems to correlate meaningfully with the age of masurbation onset. Meaning, the earlier in their life someone started to masturbate, the more likely they are to be attracted to children later

Now for the unpleasant results:

• Sexual perpetrators, especially when they are men, are much more likely to report sexual attraction to children
• In total, around half of all sexual perpetrators (not just limited to CSA offenders) report at least a slight sexual attraction to children

Of course this could potentially be overreported: maybe people who freely admit that they sexually assaulted someone also have less inhibitions to disclose a sexual attraction to children, compared to non-offenders.

AI Child Porn Will Probably Save Real Children

Finally an interesting article where she argues that AI-generated child pornography can be helpful to protect children, dispelling some common myths surrounding that topic. As expected this has become very controversial, and you have to commend her for taking a stand on such an unpopular opinion.

@Sirius sagte in Aellas articles about pedophilia:

Sexual perpetrators, especially when they are men, are much more likely to report sexual attraction to children
In total, around half of all sexual perpetrators (not just limited to CSA offenders) report at least a slight sexual attraction to children

Point one is to be expected it is why pedophilia is considered a risk factor for abuse after all. Uncomfortable sure but still not surprising.

Point two is a bit worse. through one has to note that “at least a slight sexual attraction to children” is a long way from actually being a pedo. I am pretty sure if you would ask gay men many of them would report “at least a slight sexual attraction to woman” In fact when one asks gemini the question “gay men sexual attraction to woman” it straight up says “yup that is a thing” and gives you a lot of reasons why it could be for a specific men. And no one would say that a men who, once in a decade might have some feelings for a specific woman, is hetero. So why should we claim the same about pedophilia?

Quite frankly I would argue that point makes the difference between pedos and sexual offenders more clear then other studies. Because it says that 50% of perpetrators engage in the act with out any sexual attraction at all. Meaning sexual Gratifikation can not be the reason to engage in it.

The thing is, the question was “Have you ever had a sexual experience with someone else who did not want the experience?” So it is not just limited to CSA. In fact, a lot of CSA might not be included here if the offender believes that the child wanted the experience. Maybe a lot of sex offenders are attracted to power, so they report an attraction to children not because they are specifically attracted to childlike features, but to the power differential?

I found a website where you can explore the dataset (which has by now grown to over 1M replies): https://bigkinksurvey.com/. Interestingly, here the numbers are much lower: around 1/5 people who report that they are slightly - very and 1/3 of those who are “extremly” attracted to children have committed sexual assault, compared to 6% of people who have reported no such attraction at all.

The numbers are slightly higher for nepiophiles:

Around half the people who report an attraction to children say that they have had sexual contact with a child. That does not mean they are all CSA offenders though, as that contact may have happened when they themselves were a child, so this may just be a consequence of pedophiles in this dataset reporting being sexually active at an earlier age.

Finally, also roughly 1/3 to 1/2 of the people who report an attraction to children have consumed erotic child content, which does not necessarily mean CSAM, but explicitely also includes fictional content and stories.

In fact, there seems to be a correlation that people attracted to children generally prefer animated over live-action pornography:

What I find very odd though is that people who report an attraction to children are more likely to also report that they have acted on all their attractions. This seems weird, as even if we assume that no-one has any moral issues around sex with children, acting on pedophilia is just plain harder then probably any other sexuality. But maybe people include masturbation to fictional content or fantasies in this as well. Though, even then I would expect that many would be too ashamed to engage even just in that, but those people might not have admitted an attraction to children in the first place perhaps.

Also, people who report that they are “extremly” attracted to children seem to form outliers in almost every graph, being much more likely to have sexually assaulted someone, less likely (compared to other attraction levels) to prefer animated porn, and much more likely to have acted on their attractions. I wonder if this captures a specific group of pedophiles, maybe pedophilia combined with hypersexuality?

… or maybe that group just includes highly sexual people who are kind of attracted to everything? For instance, sexual assault seems to be correlated to having a very high number of sexual interests, and the more sexual interests a person has, the more likely it is that an attraction to children is among them.

I could spent all week on this website …

The last sentence in the article about AI generated child pornography summed it up amazingly well. Not just when it comes to AI-generated CP, but for attitudes towards pedophilia overall.

Blinded by our disgust we are failing to figure out effective strategies for actually protecting children.

I wish we could drill this into every single person’s head.

If you read the comments on the article you see why people with this opinion do not speak up. She gets dogpiled on with “normalizing” arguments. These individuals do not protest or boycott major porn platforms for labeling content with tags like “teen”.

Their disgust, hatred and the stigma prevent these people from being reasonable. They do not even demand research, but just an immediate resignation of this position. Tells you all you need to know. Biased.

One commenter in particular demonstrates a huge part of the issue, by pretending that it’s primarily an issue of morality rather than actually protecting children. Luckily, that person seems get a fair bit of backlash for his position, but unfortunately, it’s still a widespread attitude in society.
And I tend to get the impression that a lot of people hold similar views without being aware of this distinction. For example, a very common argument against AI-generated CP is: “Children should not be sexualized!” But that raises two questions that really need to be asked:

1. What exactly do they mean by “being sexualized”?
2. Are they actually trying to protect children, or are they really just trying to protect their morals and ideals of what a child is?

@Sirius sagte in Aellas articles about pedophilia:

“Pedophilia seems to correlate meaningfully with the age of masurbation onset. Meaning, the earlier in their life someone started to masturbate, the more likely they are to be attracted to children later”

Presumably, prudish parents won’t tell their kids anymore that masturbation causes blindness…