https://www.jsm.jsexmed.org/article/S1743-6095(19)30411-4/fulltext
Dr. Craig Harper led me down this rabbit-hole. I might update this thread as interesting research comes up.
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Some comments on the last paper:
On top of that, hiding pedophilic interests decreases opportunities to talk openly about beliefs
regarding sexual involvement with children that they might endorse, especially if these
beliefs legitimize such behavior.
In practice, most people don’t walk around with stacks on stacks of scientific papers to push one view or another, so it quickly devolves into “my view is obviously right. no mine is” type mud-slinging. They would first have to collect said research.
Many men who have sexually offended against children report cognitive distortions
concerning their crimes, such as, for instance, that children desire sex with adults and are “able to make informed decisions about sexual activities with adults” (T. Ward & Keenan,
1999, p. 827).
The only cognitive distortions here are from how the researchers think people think. The obvious answer is they think it is harmless, or even beneficial, and requires a low bar to enter into. Would a poor self-esteem / stigma exacerbate that? Probably. Feeling it might be harmless (absent of self-correcting knowledge) is not unusual, someone with a disordered thought pattern might tell a researcher what they want to hear, but can they more effectively manage it?
Beliefs could be an offense factor, but it is important to remember other far stronger offense factors, researchers can sometimes over focus on one thing to the exclusion of what the real problem is in any one given case. For instance, they may focus heavily on changing someone’s opinion, over trying to improve their desperation, self-esteem, or lot in life. One of Harper’s papers says this may be a flaw of Prevention Project Dunkelfeld.
Momentum might be a factor. Once someone is over the hurdle, they might be at the point they’re already doomed, and might dig themselves deeper into a hole? It is morbid to think about, even. The best hope is to stop people from becoming so disillusioned with an uncaring world they end up getting to that point, and to meet their needs. Someone who is trans may want to see a therapist, because the wrong hormones might cause their brain to behave in unexpected ways. It is not always strictly “prevention”. Good luck getting the conservatives to care about trans kids.
If I had some level of security, I might think of ways to deal with these sorts of problems, but I have to worry about myself. Redirecting someone to another outlet sounds like a good start, and developing technologies to make these outlets indistinguishable from reality. All crimes require a motive, or drugs, in the case of non-pedophiles committing these crimes.
P.S. In terms of feelings, which I am quite inadequate at elaborating on. I’d imagine it is difficult, and perhaps, impossible? to build an automatic implicit association between cause and effect. Someone might think something to the effect of, something as small as that causes something big like that? I believe there are multiple modes and levels of thinking. A lower level would be closer to the lizard brain and higher would be more abstract? A distortion implies a rest state of a different value, but I don’t believe it is such and some modes of thinking may be counter-productive to attempt to influence? In any case, knowledge and expectations could be a factor.
Our initial assumptions regarding the links between stigma-related stress and the
motivation to pursue therapy were not confirmed empirically. Although about half of the
participants appeared to be hesitant about talking to mental health practitioners (and doubted
that practitioners were capable to understand their problems), their willingness to confide in a
physician or psychotherapist does not seem to depend on fear of discovery or perceived social
distance.
It takes a very specific sort of person to respond to a survey without proper privacy or security safeguards. Onion site + Collecting little personally identifying information (this can be correlated and deanonymized by statistical means, consider reducing entropy like giving a range rather than asking for a concrete age) + Procedures to anonymize data further + Discard access time metadata and other metadata collected by the server (this can be correlated with times collected by the Five Eyes Alliance) + Relative immunity from subpoena.