WS MoreOrLess: The prevalence of paedophilia?
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This is the short edition of More or Less, first broadcast on the BBC World Service.
Hello, welcome to another edition of More or Less on the BBC World Service. I'm Wesley Stevenson. Now this week, some comments made by the Pope got us thinking.
What did the Pope reportedly say about 2% of Catholic clergy being paedophiles?
He was reported to say that the number of paedophiles among the Catholic clergy was around 2%, and unsurprisingly, this has caused a bit of a storm. The revelation was made in a somewhat disputed interview with an Italian newspaper, but was reported worldwide with a sense of shock. But the thing that we were wondering was, is 2% a big number? I mean, obviously life would be better if none of the Catholic clergy were paedophiles, but how does the 2% figure compare to the population at large? One man who studies this kind of thing is Dr James Cantor. He's a psychologist and sexual behaviour scientist at the University of Toronto. But he says it's a difficult question to answer.
2% is a probably reasonable guess for the number of pedophiles in society in general. Because pedophilia is so secretive and that so few people are willing to admit it, there really is no meaningful way to get a reliable estimate. There's no way to conduct a survey. There's no meaningfully ethical way of taking, pick a number, 200 men, hooking them up to detectors, showing them pictures of adults and children and seeing how many respond most to children. There's just simply no way to do that.
Why is estimating the prevalence of paedophilia in the general population so difficult?
The other problem is exactly what cutoff one uses in trying to define pedophilia. It's very common, for example, for regular men to be attracted to 18-year-olds and 20-year-olds. Nobody would bat an eyelash. It's not unusual for a typical 16-year-old to be attractive to many men. And the younger we go, the fewer and fewer men are attracted to that age group. So if we say that a pedophile is somebody attracted to 14 and under, either early puberty or pre-puberty, then we're going to get a larger estimate than if we use a very strict definition and say pedophilia refers only to the attraction to pre-pubescent children, which is probably much lower than a percent.
Now another figure that I've seen quoted in some of the reporting surrounding the Pope's comments is 5%, and this comes from a book written by a guy called Dr Michael Seto, who's a clinical and forensic psychologist at the Royal Ottawa Healthcare Group. He told me how he came to this figure.
There were a number of surveys that had been completed of men in the general population asking questions about their sexual interest in children. For example, whether they'd had sexual fantasies about children, whether they'd had sexual thoughts about children, whether they'd engage in sexual behavior involving children. And typically those surveys were finding estimates such as 3, 4, 5% of men admitted to having those kinds of thoughts, fantasies, or behavior. Now what I said in my book was that 5% was probably the upper limit estimate for pedophilic sexual interests because What those surveys don't include are questions about the intensity of those thoughts or fantasies, whether they were repeated or not.
So someone might say yes, because they once had a fantasy. But our understanding of pedophilia would be that that person recurringly has sexual thoughts and fantasies about children. And so I suggested in the book that that was an upper limit. The better estimate of the prevalence of pedophilia would be lower than that. In my more recent book, published in 2013, focusing on online offending, particularly individuals using internet technologies to access child pornography or to sexually approach minors online, there have been some more recent studies, and I refined that upper limit estimate to about 3%. What I've said in my presentations on the topic is that if we pull together the different studies using different methodologies and different samples from North America and Europe, that a 1% prevalence seems reasonable.
It's obviously a guess, not a precise estimate from epidemiological research, but it seems like a reasonable estimate based on those converging data.
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