Informationen und Beratung zum Thema Pädophilie

Aktualisiert im Mai 2008

M. Griesemer

Integrated theory on the causation of pedophilia erotica

Bureau for Forensics, Prognostics, and Developmental
Research (F.P.E.), Frankfurt am Main / Germany
E-Mail: michael_griesemer[at]web.de

A Short Englisch Summary

After 10 years of the author´s involvement in clinically assessing pedophiles and analyzing literature on causation and comorbidity around the phenomenon, I now present a causal theory, integrating findings of the past 120 years and own studies on children´s object orientation development.

1. The General Theory

An automatized and self-reinforcing process within the sexual neural system (prefrontal-limbic circuitry) establishes children´s first sexual reactivity toward (at most: children´s) sex phenotypes. The crucial neural structure for that sexual self-reinforcement automatism is the septal – medial forebrain bundle unit. Since sexual stimulus-response patterns are self-reinforcing within the sexual neural system and therefore don´t extinct, an active overlearning process must take place to overcome them by adult-specific (=”secondary”) sex characteristics to acquire sexual reactivity to adults.
Pedophilia of type I (exclusive type) & type II (non-exclusive type): According to Yerkes-Dodson – Law in brain research and psychology of learning, both factors reducing or enhancing neural activity beyond optimum required result in same effect: They make that crucial process impossible (I) or uncompleted (II): eg. androgene deficieny, childhood depression, ADHD, psychosexual traumata, painful isolation (which, by itself, is neurobiogically a stress condition).
Pedophilia of type III: Since prepubescent stimulus-response - patterns do not extinct within the sexual system (see above), they may get overlearned, but remain stored implicitely throughout adult life. They therefore can any time reactivate in adult life under a number of neurophysiological / psychological conditions, especially those affecting prefrontal brain´s filter selectivity (tumors, drugs, ageing processes and endocrine factors).

But non-pathologic factors, too, can explain pedophilia with the fact of self-reinforcement within the human sexual neurosystem:
Among these are quite intensely perceived child-to-child loves in prepubescents, which do not extinct in sexually related memory pathways. Another one is what my theory terms the „Dulcinea“-Effect. This is the most „human“ or psychodynamic factor: Long term social isolation among peers, traumatic erotic refusal or hopeless loves with respect to same-age playmates will cognitively enhance respectice object´s subjective importance to the boy or girl - getting overcompensated, then, by repeated imagery and by compensating day dreams. Again, it is an automatized learning process withthin the self-reinforcing sexual neurosystem- leading to the point that a circumscribed sexual object phenotype gets imprinted: the respective object class plays, then, the core role in erotic preference after puberty. For the reasons outlined above, such physic „rasters“ of the prepubescent sex phenotype principially never extinct (here: for non-pathological reasons).
Note, in general, that puberty is the restricted critical phase for sexual object conditioning within the sexual neural system, respectless of which factors from above we will have in mind. This is due to the dramatic inshooting of gonadal sexual steroids on central nervous system in that period, which are known from embryology and sex research to initially have an organisatory function within perceptual system, but only having an activational function: That means they still can only acticate what they have organized before.

To summarize a general implication: With my theory, there needs to be no puzzlement anymore around things such as pedophilia: It is quite a banal human thing, that people preserve in adult life objects and emotions from their past - an issue we conventionally term „memory“. With the discovery of implicite (syn: „non-deklarative“) neural memory systems in Neuroscience in the late Eighties, and automatized processes within such memory units, there will be no problem to apply most basic things from memory research and Psychology of learning to a sexual memory which acts the way outlined above. A complicated neuro-theory as is presented here is the scientific base for, in reality, an every day banality: Humans preserve things from their past. May be the long-evity of positive sexual representations in pedophilia within the self-reinforcing neuro-system – mirrors the long-evity of sexual aversions after, say, familial sexual abuse.

2. Current state of validation: Central Positions

There are two central axioms of the theory above:

1) Psychosexual fascination for prepubescent children is the normal case in the beginning of any individual´s psychosexual orientation development (since heterosexual, bisexual and homosexual object perception is congenitally directed, and pedophilia is a degree of its realization).

2) Onset of an additional conditioning process is necessary in boys and girls to acquire reactivity to secondary sex characteristics of pubescents and adults: It must get acquired by learning, that is shifting from a subject´s arousability by prepubescent peer phenotypes to the completely altered postpubescent (adult) peer phenotypes in the course of puberty.

In a first step to prove for that general notions, I carried out a retrospective questionnaire (“Nautilus”) with adults about their respective childhood histories. Recollection biases were controlled for with various measures (age effects and memory detailedness) using respective scales. In addition, hidden assessment of homophobic disposition was applied – a factor which possibly restricts recollections for same-sex object fascinations in childhood object perception.
140 adults from various sources (N=82 non-pedophiles, N=58 pedophiles) had to specify the 5 subsequent persons´ age they remember having first time had sexually related feelings toward. Results:

1) At average onset around age 9 in prepuberty, subjects of both groups started sexually reacting to sex phenotypes. Result fits Herdt & McClintock´s findings (2000) whereafter adrenarche around the age of 19 is a decisive activational step in psychosexual orientation development.

2) Although onset age in both groups was identical, first prepubescent objects of later pedophiles were younger already on average than in later non-pedophile subjects. Object phenotype corresponded their prepubescent object age-group (or phenotype class) as adults. This latter result fit prescribed properties of sexual neural system (early imprinting & long evity -extinction resistance- of physical stimulus conditioning within that system, both due to self-reinforcement).

3) Whereas prepubescent boys in general tended to report erotic feelings or love for children that were younger than themselves (approximately 2 years on average), prepubuscent girls predominantly report such fascination only for same-age prepubescents and older phenotypes (pubescents up to even adults).

4.) A subgroup of prepubescent children (approximately 10 %) spontaneously started with affection for adult phenotypes (abuse cases -or real interactions- were carefully excluded from this analysis). Their object age curve along 4 subsequent love partners layed consequently over that of children who started with children.

Later type-I pedophiles, in contrast, did not display a raising object-age curve after their age 9 at all. So, results do not only underline that reactivity to pubescents´ and adults´ specific (“secondary”) sex phenotype characteristics, indeed, is acquired by learning: they also suggest that children starting with children (which is the normal case in 80 %) have principially a higher “risk” for pedophile puberty outcome. This latter finding contradicts the popular “abused abuser” - paradigm (whereafter children after sexual affairs with olders or adults had that higher risk) - and it even raises the question whether certain educational programs (that hemper peer´s psychosexual dynamics to older phenotypes) may possibly highten that risk. On the base of the presented data as well as with respect to the most conventional learning paradigm, it is at least to say that the overall term “child sexual abuse” will lead to misleading prognostics in Science unless we differ between positively and negatively processed sexual experience stigmatized by such a term. The difference is acquiring adult´s sex characteristics by positive procession according to most common laws of learning - as opposed to avoidance learning toward adult´s or negative imprinting of adult´s specific sex characteristics when aversively perceived experience was present.

Another specification is suggested by my model and impressions from my data: This is negative priming of parental adults in children´s psychosexual activability and physical preference – as well as negative priming effects when extrafamilial adult phenotypes evoke profound physical aversions ( respectless of its root or the kind of abuse or maltreatment). Apart from whether it now depends from positive or negative learning experience in sexual interactions with adults to acquire or to not aquire sexual arousability to adult-specific sex-characteristics for later life (factor 1), the aversively perceived adult key person must, additionally, belong the object class a child is congenitally disposed to (homosexuality or heterosesuality). Only with that precondition in the logical of my theory, it is to expect to have such long term psychosexual effects to possibly result in pedophilia (factor 2). This has to do with the prescribed self-reinforcement in the selective activational learning course in children whose selectivity for either male or female objects and respective key stimuli is congenitally disposed according to all we meanwhile (this disposition includes some sensory ambiguity within the system we term “bisexuality”, present in individualized degree).

3. Two special factors more detailed

There is some more specialized factors designed in the framework of the theory above which is concretely related to psychosexual arousability and arousal-dependend sensory object learning in children of adult´s sex phenotypes´ specific (“secondary”) sex characteristics (which are completely absent in the prepubescent):

One of these factors is based on my general model of sexual orientation development in human (androphilia vs. Gynaephilia, or homosexuality - heterosexuality in older terminology; my pedophilia theory is only a deduction from it).

The basic heterosexuality-homosexuality dimension -as being a perceptual function- I explain that way that prenatal testosterone level decides whether a male or female newborn´s brain (eg., vomeronasal system) will react to either androgene steroids in social environment (male feromones) or to estradiol steroids (female feromones). The basic mediator between prenatal and in part genetic disposition and postnatal sexual learning history is a simple conditioning process to couple sex-specific visual characteristics of objects of a given sex to central nervous sexual arousal. In the beginning (in prepuberty on average), internal spontaneous activation occurs from at a certain step of limbic maturation in the brain, so that spontaneous coupling of prepubescent peers´ male or female sex characteristics with limbic sexual activation can occur in children (visual input processed along the sexual pathway hypothalamus/INAH – medial forebrain bundle (automatized self-reinforcement) - Amygdala corticomedialis - Hippocampus (Long Term Potentiation, LTP !), and prefrontal cortex (polymodal object binding, which mentally and for unconscious search processes results in formation of the individualized sexual object orientation, whereas basic androphile vs. gynaephile course of such preferential conditionability to either boys or girls is genetically predisposed). Vomeronasal contributions, too, pass that neural pathway, but processed in orbitfrontal cortex, which interacts with prefrontal cortex in sexual orientation formation. Sex-steroids in form of feromones via that system serve as associated “unconditioned” cue stimuli that systematically covary with male or female sex phenotypes in environment, but they also allow the limbic system to compare external genomes with the own genome, installing negative priming to objects whose genetic similarity is too close – resulting in reduced limbic arousability.

That first coupling of physical object stimuli in children to spontaneous limbic activations are therefore limited to extrafamilial persons (peers in most cases), because of that “incest barrier” (= reduced likelihood in the neural system to arouse to first degree biological relatives such as parents). Indeed, my Nautilus Data shows negative priming effects as Konrad Lorenz had observed it in his studies on sexual object priming in animals). Therefore not biological parents or sisters, but extrafamilial peers are crucial for positive object priming in prepuberty.
Now note: In puberty, both 1) secondary sex characteristics suddenly occur in the minor´s peer milieu, and 2) beginning gonadal steroid production first time provides a very intense stimulus related neural activation. Completely in parallel, sudden growth of body hair occurs - as one of the first secondary sex characteristics. It is reasonable to regard that being the mediator of that crucial learning process in my theory: to couple secondary visual sex characteristics to the prexisting sexual arousal modus. This is, because feromonergic substances now can be transmitted at the hundredfold amount to social milieu to serve as psychobiological and endocrine “messengers” on the subject´s information processing within the limbic-frontal sexual system. Sex-phenotype related activation in these days is subconsciously mediated by feromone action in the limbic system, and possibly is the crucial base to incorporate occurring secondary sex characteristics in the peer milieu into the subjects´s prexisting (prepubescent) sex phenotype activation raster: to provide sexual activability to the specific sex characteristics of adult males or females.

How could we prove for such an idea ? The answer is investigating the Kallmann´s Syndrome in pedophile persons of exclusice type. In Kallmann´s Syndrome, corruption of the vomeronasal system for feromone processing is present. But also respective functional impairment at higher levels of the feromonergic procession system are oft interest (from, receptor insensitivity in orbitofrontal cortex for its input there, up to dysfunctional overall electric state for that feromonergic system to act). It may be an own condition to lead to pedophilia, especially that of type I (exclusive type).

The second factor here to highlight refers to a popular sujet in sexual child abuse debate:
Above I´ve said that my Nautilus data conflict “abused abuser – paradigm as causal explanation for pedophilia. A more surprising specification on that sujet is suggested by my model and impression from my data: This is negative priming of parental adults in children´s psychosexual activability and physical preference in sexual life. Negative priming effects are also to expect when crucial adult phenotypes in a boys´ or girls´ social milieu lead to learn profound physical aversions against adults´ phenotypes (respectless of its root or the kind of maltreatment). In general, it belongs to automatized and self-reinforcing learning systems that single experiences with individual objects lead to rapid generalization to the whole object class in brain - which by itself will not extinct in sexual neural system (see above). Apart from whether it depends now from positive or negative learning experience in sexual interactions with adults in childhood to acquire or to not aquire sexual arousability to adult-specific sex-characteristics for later life (factor 1): the aversively perceived adult key person must, too, belong the object class a child is congenitally disposed to (factor 2) for such long term psychosexual effects (homosexuality or heterosexuality). We know too much meanwhile about prenatal dispositions for hetero- and homosexuality, and speak to less about its basic implication in child abuse debate - that we could afford to forget the existence of homosexual children (even when they still have no word for it - or clear-cut sexual activations to observe which made us see their truth prior to puberty). Only with that latter precondition it is to expect that “sexual abuse” can (possibly) result in pedophilia (be it in male or in female direction). This has to do with the prescribed self-reinforcement in the selective activational learning course with objects in children - whose selectivity toward either male or female objects is congenitally disposed (including some sensory ambiguity within the system we term “bisexuality” at an individual degree). For example: A boy who congenitally is heterosexual will not acquire sexual arousability toward men along puberty, but may be fall in love or erect with boys sometimes because they share crucial sensory key stimuli with adult women (high voice, hairless skin, and so on). This may be due to an individual degree of bisexuality, but it may be, too, due to the fact that prepubescent male and female phenotypes still lack a n y physical key stimuli that are crucial to sensory differentiate postpubescent men from postpubescent women. That means: not the individual is “bisexual”: Prepubescent sex phenotypes are “bisexual” in terms of physical appearance ( “between sex” for the sexual neural system).

All too long we relied on sexual organs as exclusive “key stimuli” for sexual object perception, because they are so impressionant for us as adults since we use them for dramatic things. Only these we thought to be crucial in Science for children´s psychosexual development, or for male and female phenotype differentiation. But not only a handful of “secondary” sex characteristics we completely ignored in that: There is, too, a large number of “tertiary” sex characteristics between boys and girls -as well as between boys/girls and adults of a given sex- such as body shape, body fat proportions or sceleton shifts (to only sum up a few). Regard that even emotional or characterological age-specific sex differences are known – and even abstracted “emotional” features can elicit sexual arousal when once coupled into sexual stimulus-response patterns. All these are emerging differences between boys and girls in every step of physic maturation from birth onwards up to puberty onset - which this way are even temporally specific for either the five year or for the ten year old boy compared to girls, pubescents, or to the adult sex phenotypes of men. It is therefore not astonishing anymore in the framework of my theory, that some pedophiles get exclusively restricted to five year old phenotypes (in the modus prescribed above), whereas others are exclusively restricted to sex phenotypes from maturational optic state of 10 onwards.

How could we prove, now, whether the model predictions are true, that 1) no long lasting psychosexual effects of sexual abuse such as pedophilia will occur after child sexual abuse, when the abusing person does not “fit” congenitally predisposed sexual orientation of the child ? And that 2) a controversial “incest barrier” is active (as opposed to Freudian Oedipus theorema whereas as family is crucial for later sexual object preference ? We can prove both with conventional child abuse case studies: 1) When we find that, in later homosexual men, no pedophilia is present after former sexual abuse by their mothers, or in heterosexual men after abuse by their fathers. 2) When we find that most cases of “familial child abuse” are, reveal to be pseudo-incest, because the abusing fathers are in reality stepfathers, the new friend of the mothers and so on: where n o biological relatedness exists. There is no incest barrier active in such cases to inhibit intrafamilial sexual arousal. In the few remaining cases of true incest, we possibly will find them a number of extreme conditions to be present that rule out its neural pathway to function (such as alcoholism, drugs, neurocognitive impairment or distortions - up to sociobiological factors reducing neural filter selectivity within the system such as geographic isolation of familial system, sexual anhedonia in parental sexual life - up to long term or repeated sexual refusal by the adult partner that lead to cope sexually with offspring. (Paradoxically, that latter may be true even in the most conventional -conservative- families: Because no divorce, no coping with “side affairs”, no coping with prostitutes “out of house” is possible to end such a long term state of sexual frustration and impossibility for moral reasons.
It must clearly be said, that all that these aspects are not yet investigated here up to now. ant They therefore remain speculative (though many evidence for them in independent international literature). I only present these model predictions here because they belong to the presentation of my causal theory on psychosexual child development – and I show the ways to empirically test for that selected issues, because these are beyond the scope of what´s prevailing here to test for.

4. On the significance of the theory

It is the advantage of my integrated theory that it integrates otherwise unresolvable contradictories in a centurie´s reseach in pedophila - and does so in a testable way. For example: since the days of Hirschfeld, we have evidence for androgene deficiency in subgroups of pedophiles (which provides an underexcitation state, especially in sexual neural system) - whereas other authors find nothing of that like, but phases of traumatic processing or other psychological conditions (whether they refer to long term familial crisis, traumatic processing of isolation among peers, or of child sexual abuse in juvenile biography; any traumatic processing states are overexcitation states.

Others found such contradictory things like juvenile depression or conditions such as ADHD - both have in common to produce dysfunctional over- (depression) and underactivation states (ADHD), and both in the (pre-)frontal brain which is linked to limbic sexual system and respective psychosexual learning processes.

Even puzzling contradictories in research concerning personality characteristics find a solution: for example, whether pedophiles have now extraverted or introverted personality. Since the days of Eysenck, we know extraversion and introversion to be by themselves the result of different central nervous arousal dispositions. Both in extrem degree, they both produce dysfunctional states for learning of all types according to Yerkes-Dodson – Law and the logical above. May be introverts are more present among pedophile persons since extraversion rules out some social problems in the play to hemper psychosexual development in children. One of these factors is, may be, extreme social contact shyness in children accompagnying their psychosexual learning processes. We nowadays know from Kagan´s famous studies on that phenomenon, that this an be a congenital predisposition, present in 20 % of newborns, and only in part, the problem is over after the early years. Note now that, in congenital severe contact shyness, prefrontal activation has been found to be „the“ neural substrate, as well as prefrontal overactivation is „the“ finding in states of depression. Dysfunctional electric in prefrontal cortex is, too, present in ADHD as a consequence of Dopamine sufficiency. Processes. Prefrontal cortex, now -as has been shown above- is by itself a unit of the sexual neural system involved in sexual orientation.

Note further, by the way, that all factors extracted above were not only repeatedly found in my own assessment of pedophiles, but have repeatedly been found in international reseach on pedophilia and clinical reports - but each discussed there as if they were competitive findings or competitive paradigms. In the logical of the theory summarized in section 1, they all have the same effect: That is, affecting neural system´s optimal electric state for effortful sexual object conditioning; especially for automatized visuoconceptual updating processes from one optic phenotype (prepubescent) to another one which has completely altered (adult).

Conclusive remarks

A more hidden perspective of the theory is shifting the misleading "sex-offender-against children" - paradigm about pedophilia (with notions as if one equated the other, and only theories from sexual offender discourse to explain pedophilia) to a more comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon, and, more principially, of psychosexual childhood tragedies. But pedophilia, then, is a childhood tragedy which proceeds in adult life in the most sinister way for the concerned - by an undifferentiated and hateful prosecution with penalty law as long as they live. The sinfall for them and their families in Science and, too, in Politics was to extend our sexual offender definitions up to the point to equate them with pedophilia itself - whether they tenderously love or unempathically rape. We did so with terms of medieval prudery - and saying this were Science" or "child protect". In reality, it often is nothing else as the mask of hate - and seeking an alibi for agressive witch-hunt against "perverts" (conservatives´ theme), "male violence" (feministic version) or a new kind of the exploitation of man by man (political left´s attitude) after the breakdown of communism and the discredition of marxistic principles. There is clear cut pattern of inner contradictories to identify in most child protection attitudes, revealing that children´s enchargement by the penal law should never risk legal prosecution of "pedophiles" - revealing that child protection is an alibi for something different: Hunting patients when done by medicals or psychologists to express in open words. Even in Science we participated in that. We did so by installing definitions for "sexual abuse" - but of complete absence of any specification of what´s meant by it meanwhile. We even committed crime against the most primitive logical principals in equating age differences with abuse of age differences or violence as - to replace more rationale aspects to bring them more sure into prison. Or: we installed defnitorical instruments such as, say, definitions for "manipulation" that, seen at light, do not allow us to even ask a person for a pen in any other area of human interaction - to put "pedophiles" into prison respectless of what they´ ve done exactly, or what a girl or boy may tell us about the truth of their "sexual abuse" in many cases We did so to rule out psychosexual reality of the concerned persons - as well as many children´s psychosexual reality. I don´t even want to refer here to Allie Kilpatricks famous work, or to Rind, Tromovitch & Bauserman´s (and even Finkelhor´s !) big meta-analyses that revealed the central myths behind it. According to my Nautilus results, 10 % of children (see above) shouldn´t exist in reality to make that "Science" come true that did such things. And that ruled out even primitivest legal differentiations. Was it our job to deliver justice and vox populi with the theories for doing that ?

Not to forget: We did all this against patients and against subjects with a defined problem by the WHO - in opposition to the Hippocratian Oath (medicals) or basic ethic standards (as psychologists). Even here, we observe another peculiarity concerning our true motivation: How serious do we take it that we declared pedophilia to be a "mental illness" or psychiatric category - when, in 90 % of all current discussion, medicals and psychologists use psychiatrization, encarceration or therapy issues only as another way for imprisonment and other regimen of the criminal law - but we miss any defense of our patients against state, politics and public hate as patients ? Analysis of current discurse reveals that we d e n y to have a responsibility for patients according to the WHO; we only use that issue against them - because we participate in justice and politics to hunt our patients. Given my theory is accurate: We actively participate in that, say, a 12yo (unlike legasthenia and other life long heirs of a burden childhood, outside the sexual domain) has inevitably a life to live programmed either to life long loneliness and never dare to say what he is - or psychiatrization; to either never have a sexuality whose inner core is partnership - or ending up in prison. If he doesn´t have the misfortune to die in psychiatric encarceration - because we opened this way to the justice Is that our professional ethics to do so ?

It´s time to reorient to ethic standards. May be my theory is a first step to turn back, at least, to rationality. According to what´s happened here in 15 years of feministic child abuse campaign and public witch-hunt in vox populi, in politics, in Science: this alone will be a centurie´s work.

© 2006 Dipl. Psych M. Griesemer

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