Sexual Arousal to Female Children in Gynephilic Men

Title
Sexual Arousal to Female Children in Gynephilic Men
Publication Date
2010
Author(s)
Lykins, Amy
( author )
OrcID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2930-3964
Email: alykins@une.edu.au
UNE Id une-id:alykins
Cantor, James M
Kuban, Michael E
Blak, Thomas
Dickey, Robert
Klassen, Philip E
Blanchard, Ray
Type of document
Journal Article
Language
en
Entity Type
Publication
Publisher
Sage Publications, Inc
Place of publication
United States of America
DOI
10.1177/1079063210372141
UNE publication id
une:7442
Abstract
Phallometric assessments of single-victim sexual offenders against children have suggested that only about 50% of these men are more attracted to children than they are to adults. This has raised the question of what motivates the other 50% of men to approach young girls for sex. Freund et al. showed that gynephilic men (i.e., men preferentially attracted to adult women) evidenced greater arousal to images of prepubescent girls than to images of males of any age or to nonerotic images, arguing that gynephilic men may approach prepubescent girls as a "surrogate" for their preferred erotic targets (i.e., adult women). One might argue that these phallometric results are artifactual, given that they were obtained in a time period during which images of nudity were far less common than they are today (thus any female nudity might have elicited arousal). To address this issue, the authors examined the sexual arousal patterns of 214 contemporary men who, based on self-report, offense history, and phallometric responses, were purely gynephilic. Results showed the "classical control profile": the greatest arousal to adult women, systematically decreasing arousal as the female stimuli became younger, and essentially no arousal to any age categories of males or to neutral (nonerotic) stimuli. Arousal to both pubescent and prepubescent girls was significantly greater than to neutral stimuli (p < .001 for both). Thus, Freund et al.'s results still appear to be valid, and the explanation for child molesting that they suggest still seems to be feasible.
Link
Citation
Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment, 22(3), p. 279-289
ISSN
1573-286X
1079-0632
Start page
279
End page
289

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