2014 article on Abel's statistical abuse re "100-300 victims per pedophile"

[Jim Burton]

This might be a useful article for us, as it is free to reproduce/modify. It addresses a common trope that is so absurd as to have gone out of fashion:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170630142 ... f250b5cd61

[Fragment]

It's like if a high schooler wrote a research paper on the topic. Yet this bastard's research, despite being an urban legend, is considered "common sense" by vast numbers of people. Even the way the number of acts and the number of victims is conflated so that many victims are double counted...

It definitely seems to be distorted by a high number of outliers and part of me wonders if those outliers were even honest about their number of victims or if people making grandiose claims of 10,000s were included. I was watched a video of a psychologist in the 80s interviewing a sex offender a little while ago, and he claimed an extremely high number of victims but it felt off.

Ottis Toole, who was implicated in the Adam Walsh case, had a history of false confessions along with his partner Henry Lee Lucas. Some convicted sex offenders, for whatever reason, exaggerate their crimes.

It was calculated that Lucas would have had to use his 13-year-old Ford station wagon to cover 11,000 miles (18,000 kilometers) in one month i.e., around 370 miles (600 km) per day, to have committed the crimes police attributed to him. Lucas became widely regarded as a compliant interviewee who was used by police to clear up unsolved murders that he had not been involved in, aided by Toole giving false statements in collaboration.

As for how many sexual partners MAPs would have, in a world where AMSC was legal. I imagine that MAPs would likely have more sexual partners than adult-attracted heterosexuals. Some minors would grow up and move past the relationship as they mature. In other cases the relationship might be harder to sustain as the minor "ages out" of the MAP's AoA. Most MAPs I talk to say they'd be interested in keeping a platonic friendship with partners who had moved on past a sexual relationship.

Another interesting data point for comparison is the number of sexual partners of adult-attracted homosexual (and heterosexual) men.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articl ... po=44.5652

You're looking at about a lifetime median of 50 sexual partners for gay men over 30. This compared with about 10 for straight men.

How much sex is "deviant"? How many partners is "too many"? If it's non-consensual sex, obviously even one victim is too many. But in cases without force, violent, coercion or deception even if someone had 300 partners why would that be problematic?

[Fragment]

Was trying to find some stats and came across this- interesting that in 2017 the following reference was being cited.

https://www.d2l.org/wp-content/uploads/ ... 150619.pdf

CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE STATISTICS
FACT: Not everyone who sexually abuses children is a pedophile.
Child sexual abuse is perpetrated by a wide range of individuals with diverse motivations. It is impossible to identify specific characteristics that are common to all those who molest children.
• Situational offenders tend to offend at times of stress and begin offending later than pedophilic offenders.
• They also have fewer victims (often family), and have a general preference for adult partners. 16
• Pedophilic offenders often start offending at an early age, and often have a large number of victims (frequently not family members). 16

16
Abel, G. G., Mittleman, M. S., & Becker, J. V. (1985). "Sex offenders: Results of assessment and recommendations for treatment." In M. H. Ben-Aron, S. J. Hucker, & C. D. Webster (Eds.),Clinical Criminology: The assessment and treatment of criminal behavior (pp. 207–220)


How much of the (incorrect) information about minor attraction and sex offences comes from this one guy?

[Fragment]

So many "CSA" websites seem to peddle the same kind of data:
https://www.indianaprevention.org/child ... statistics (uncited)

• Nearly 70% of child sex offenders have between 1 and 9 victims…at least 20% have 10 to 40 victims.
• An average serial child molester may have as many as 400 victims in his lifetime.

They really seem to be unbelievable numbers. Especially considering that most CSA with children (<12) is incest and that incest offenders have a low rate of recidivism.

Even in non-incest cases where the rate of recividism is higher, it's still roughly only 7%.

Even if the number of victims is high it seems largely due to actions prior to coming to the attention of law enforcement. In which case a societal, rather than judicial, response would be better suited to solving the problem.

[Fragment]

I was reading this paper on cognitive distortions and came across this quote:

Abel and colleagues are widely accepted as the first researchers to use the term cognitive distortions in the context of sexual offending

Apparently it was in the following paper in 1984 that Abel first started talking about cognitive distortions.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 2784900086

Interesting line near the start of the paper, though

Part of this emotional reaction to child-adult sexual activities stems from the polarization of opinion as to the quality and quantity of harmful effects that such activities may have on the child. Some expert witnesses refer to severe complications while others suggest that complications to the child are infrequent and usually result from the responses of those around the child (parents, the criminal justice system, etc.).

In the 1980s, it seems, there was still room for discussion on the role sociogenic and iatrogenic harm had to play.