Humanizing pedophilia as stigma reduction: A large-scale intervention study

Abstract

The stigmatization of people with pedophilic sexual interests is the topic of growing academic and professional consideration, owing to its potential role in moderating pedophiles’ emotional wellbeing, and motivation and engagement in child abuse prevention schemes. Thus, improving attitudes and reducing stigmatization toward this group is of paramount importance. Prior research has suggested that narrative humanization – presenting personal stories of self-identified non-offending pedophiles – could be one route to doing this. However, this work has only been conducted with students or trainee psychotherapists, meaning the public generalizability of this method is still unknown. In this study, we tested whether narratives reduce stigma toward people with pedophilic interests more effectively than an informative alternative (scientific information about pedophilia). Using a longitudinal experimental design (initial N = 950; final N = 539), we found that narratives had consistently positive effects on all measured aspects of stigmatization (dangerousness, intentionality), whereas an informative alternative had mixed results, and actually increased perceptions of pedophiles’ levels of deviance. These effects were also still present four months after the initial presentation. We discuss these data in relation to ongoing debates about treating pedophilia as a public health issue requiring a broad societal approach to wellbeing and child abuse prevention.

Primary Health Professionals’ Beliefs, Experiences, and Willingness to Treat Minor-Attracted Persons

“…To explore the presence of stigmatized attitudes toward MAPs among healthcare professionals, we compared SPS scores within the current sample to those obtained from a large-scale public investigation whereby data were made available (Harper et al, 2021). This analysis was conducted to estimate the levels of stigma among professional groups.…”

“…That is, previous work has highlighted that anticipated stigma is a barrier to MAPs seeking professional support (Grady et al, 2019;Levenson & Grady, 2019b), but there has been scant empirical attention paid to the actual levels of stigmatization among professional groups; nor has this stigma been broken down into its component domains of dangerousness, choice, and deviance attributions, alongside punitive attitudes. There has been a substantial amount of research published into public stigmatization of MAPs (e.g., Harper et al, 2018Harper et al, , 2021Jahnke et al, 2015a, b) with high levels of stigma being reported. As such, we selected the public as a baseline level of stigma to compare the scores of professionals against, as MAPs are likely using societal stigma as a basis for their concerns.…”

“…We sampled a random selection of 110 participants from the public Harper et al (2021) dataset to ensure approximately equivalent sample samples across each cell of our analysis before conducting a series of one-way analyses of variance (ANOVAs) to explore between-groups differences on each stigma domain. For reference, group-level statistics are presented in Table 3.…”

“…As such, traditional education practices (e.g., considerations of treatment philosophies and critical engagement with the mental health and abuse prevention literatures) might be supplemented with exposure to MAPs (either directly within the training room or indirectly via documentary films). Some researchers using this approach to stigma reduction have speculated about whether such educational approaches contribute to changes in behavior toward MAPs (Harper et al, 2021) and have advocated for studies to incorporate more measures of behavioral change (e.g., support for MAP wellbeing schemes, contact with MAPs) as an outcome in future research. We see clinician behavior as another potential outcome in this search for an answer about whether changes in self-reported stigma also contribute to changes in real-world behavior toward MAPs.…”

Primary health professionals’ beliefs, experiences, and willingness to treat minor attracted persons

“…To explore the prevalence of stigmatized attitudes towards MAPs among healthcare professionals we compared SPS scores within the current sample to those obtained from a large-scale public investigation whereby data were made available (Harper et al, 2021). We sampled a random selection of 110 participants from the public dataset to ensure approximately equivalent sample samples across each cell of our analysis before conducting a series of one-way analyses of variance (ANOVAs) to explore between-groups differences on each stigma domain.…”