Sex in Pedophiliac Relationships:

An Empirical Investigation Among a Non-representative Group of Boys

Theodorus G. M. Sandfort
The Journal of Sex Research Vol. 20, No.2, pp. 123-142 May, 1984

Abstract

Little research has been done on children involved in pedophiliac relationships. Although there are many preconceptions about the nature of the "sexual abuse" occurring in these relationships, little is known about how the children involved actually feel about these sexual contacts. In this research the question of whether sexual relations with an adult can be a positive experience for a child is addressed.

The subjects of the study were 25 boys (10 to 16 years of age) who were then involved in pedophiliac relationships with adult males. These boys were located through their adult partners, who in turn were approached through pedophile workgroups.

Although the boys were able to point to some negative aspects of their sexual contacts, most of them reported experiencing these contacts as predominantly positive. The sexual contacts were found to have had no negative influence upon the boys' sense of general well-being, nor did the boys perceive in these contacts a misuse of authority by the adult.

Although there are some limitations to the general applicability of these results, they have relevance for further research, therapy, and legislation concerning pedophiliac activities. These implications are briefly discussed.

Theodorus G. M. Sandfort, MA, is an Assistant Lecturer at the Department of Clinical Psychology, Psychotherapy and Prevention, State University of Utrecht, The Netherlands.
This article is based on the report Het Seksuele Aspekt van Pedofiele Relaties, Ervaringen van Jongens (The Sexual Aspect of Pedophiliac Relationships:
Experiences of Boys), by the author, 1981.
The author wishes to thank H. Hermans, B. Schraven, and R. Tielman for their comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript, and Francis D. Sheldon for his assistance in translating.

The term pedophilia denotes feelings of adult attraction to children.  Although pedophiliac feelings can be experienced by individuals to a greater or lesser degree, a person who experiences these feelings in a very strong, or exclusive, way can be considered a pedophile (Sandfort, 1979b).

Some authors stress the sexual aspect of the attraction  (Finkelhor, 1979a; Money, 1977), but for others these feelings also include an interest in how children feel and think (Brongersma, 1975; Eglinton, 1971; Howells, 1979; O'Carroll, 1980). Here, the term "pedophiliac relationship" will be used when the older and the younger partner both feel attracted towards each other, are involved with each other, and meet each other regularly.

Pedophiliac relationships can be very diverse. They have their own dynamics, are not always monogamous, and, although the duration can be quite lengthy, are by definition limited to the youth of the younger partner (Sandfort, 1979b). There are pedophiliac relationships without sexual contact, and there can also be single pedosexual contacts without a relationship. Furthermore, pedophilic feelings do not necessarily playa part in every case of sexual contact with a child. In father-daughter incest, for example, pedophilia, as defined above, has seldom been found to be the motivating factor (Meiselman, 1979).

Although sexuality mayor may not be a part of these relationships, most discussions about pedophilia are centered on its sexual aspect. For some people, laymen as well as scientists, sexual contact with children always involves sexual abuse, but others claim that such experiences can be pleasurable and positive to children (e.g., Eglinton, 1971; O'Carroll, 1980; Rossman, 1976).

However, empirical data on the children's experiences seldom enter into such discussions. Most of the scanty data available are rather biased. For one thing, examples of sex between children and adults are mostly selected from cases involving sexual abuse. For another, these contacts, irrespective of the experience of the child, are a priori thought to involve abuse, and the child considered to be a victim

(e.g., Brant & Tisza, 1977; Burgess & Holmstrom, 1975; Peters, 1976).

However, Finkelhor (1970a) reports in a more representative, retrospective investigation that some of both the boys and girls in his sample reacted with pleasure and interest to the contact. As indicated by Finkelhor's "mean trauma scores," some of his respondents, especially the boys, said in retrospect that the experience was "neutral" or "mostly positive."

Nevertheless, Finkelhor still speaks of "victimization." Here, as elsewhere, he does so on ethical grounds (Finkelhor, 1979b). Landis (1956) reports that in an unrepresentative, retrospective survey, boys in 39% of the cases and girls in 17% of the cases reacted with interest, or were surprised but not frightened.

To add to this small store of data, an investigation was conducted on a small group of young people to gain broader insight into the way they experience sexual contacts in pedophiliac relationships.

The central question was whether sex with an adult can ever be a positive experience for a child, but the research was designed also to explore both the positive and negative components of this sexual experience. Because this sexual contact is but one aspect of the young person's experience world, it should be studied in the context of other things in his experience world which he finds important. By doing so, the relationships between the sexual contact and the young person's general sense of well-being can be established. Because of the widespread preconception that sexuality between children and adults always involves abuse or misuse, the study also investigated the interaction between both partners in the sexual contact.

The Self Confrontation Method (SCM) (Hermans, 1976, 1978) was found to be well suited to answering these questions. It can be used to gain an overview of what is important for a particular person at a certain moment of his or her life, and can also give some insight into the meaning of each of these aspects within that person's experience world.

Although there are apparent similarities ,among the SCM, Kelly's Role Construct Repertory Test (Kelly, 1955), and Osgood's Semantic Differential (Osgood, 1952), because they all explore personal meaning, these methods have some basic differences.

Kelly's test aims to collect the basic constructs with which a person intellectually interprets his world. The Semantic Differential, on the other hand, looks for the affective meaning that certain predetermined concepts have for a person. The SCM, however, leads a person to identify the basic aspects within his experience world around which he organizes his experiences (Hermans, 1976). The SCM is administered through an interview, and the subject has a substantial share in determining the course of the "self-investigation."

A person's experience world is not considered to be static. The basic aspects or so-called "value areas," as well as their affective and behavioral meanings, change over time. This change is termed the "experience process." Therefore, the method is usually employed more than once. By using the SCM, investigator and subject gain a deeper understanding of the subject's experience world, enlarging their comprehension of his or her entire life process. This makes the SCM useful in therapeutic as well as research settings. To the researcher, the SCM offers a richness of qualitative as well as quantitative data, and has proved to be a workable instrument in a variety of research and treatment applications (Hermans & Verstraeten, 1980).

With regard to the reliability of the different scales, Van Assen (1982) reports that the scales have "sufficient" internal consistency. Other research shows that some underlying concepts of the SCM have construct as well as discriminative validity (Hermans & Tak-Van De Ven, 1973, Ramzy-Saleh Guirguis & Hermans, 1973).

Method

The Research Group

Twenty-five boys participated in this investigation. At the time all were involved in a pedophiliac relationship with an adult male in which sexual contacts occurred. It was not possible to find any boys who had relationships with adult females or girls involved in pedophiliac relationships.

The boys were approached through their adult partners, who in turn were approached through the Pedophile Workgroups of the Netherlands Society for Sexual Reform. [*]

[* There exist about 12 such local groups in the major cities of The Netherlands. The members are mainly pedophiles. These groups have internal as well as external functions. Internally they help people who have difficulties because of their pedophiliac desires and assist others in the process of "coming out" as pedophiles. They also organize meetings in which pictures are shown or lectures given, to confront a broader group of people with pedophilia, child sexuality, youth liberation, and related topics. A national group also undertakes action for legal reform and edits a monthly magazine.]

This was found to be the only practical way to locate these children. Because the confidence of both the older partner and the child had to be gained, assembling the subjects was a time-consuming task.

Not all the pedophiles who were approached actually participated in the research. Some did not do so because they did not have a relationship at that moment or because they had a relationship without sexual contact. In some cases the child was too young or too old (see below). Some people feared negative effects upon their young partners through their participation, whereas others were opposed to the research as such. The final decision as to whether or not to cooperate in the research was always made by the child.

As far as the researcher was able to judge, none of the adults exerted any pressure on the children to cooperate. The older partner often stressed that, if the child did not want to participate, they were not going to persuade him. No specific selection process was used in composing the research group.

The boys varied in age from 10 to 16 years, the mean age being 13 years, 4 months. Physiologically, there were both sexually mature and immature boys among them. Ten years was taken as a minimum age because of the methodological demands of the SCM; the upper limit was taken as 16 years, because the Dutch Penal Code penalizes sex with a person up to that age. Within these limits, younger children were sought because sex with them is commonly seen to be more problematic.

The majority of the boys (16/25) lived at home with their parents; most of the others lived with divorced, sometimes remarried, mothers. The boys came from both small and large families, where they had different ordinal positions. According to their older partners, 15 boys came from the lower social classes, 8 from the middle class, and 2 from the upper-middle class. With one exception, none of the boys' parents were actively religious.

At the time of the investigation, the various relationships had been going on for from 2 months to 6 years, although it was not always possible to establish the duration exactly. The frequency with which the partners saw one another varied from once a week to almost every day. One of the boys lived with the pedophile in the pedophile's home.

Some of the adult partners had simultaneous 'relationships with more than one boy; five of them brought us into contact with two boys each. The ages of the older partners varied between 26 and 66 years, with the mean age being 39. Most of the men had had a great deal of pedophiliac experience, in monogamous or polygamous relationships, or as isolated sexual contacts. Of the 20 pedophiles, 12 had been in conflict with the law on one or more occasions.

Collection and Processing of the Data

The most important part of the research data was collected by means of the SCM (Hermans, 1976). In accordance with a procedure adapted for young people (Bonke, 1977; Sandfort, 1979a, 1981), certain so-called value areas were sought which at that moment were experienced as being important within the boys' experience worlds. These value areas refer to things the boy does frequently, things he enjoys very much, people with whom he gets on well, etc. If a boy did not spontaneously include the sexual contact as a value area in his self-investigation, he was invited by the researcher to do so.

Next, the affective and behavioral meaning of each value area was established. To do this, the frequency with which 14 specific positive and negative feelings were experienced with respect to each value area were indicated on a 6-point scale (0 = never; 5 = very often) (Bonke, -1977; Sandfort, 1981; see Table 2).

On the same scale were measured how often the young person actually experienced each of these different feelings in general (General Experience) and how often he would like to experience these feelings (Ideal Experience).

Some value areas in which individual people were central were selected to be scored on their behavioral aspect also, using the same 6-point scale. The boys were asked to indicate how often a person implicated in that value area showed certain positive and negative behaviors toward them. Likewise, each boy was asked to report on his own behavior toward the same person.

This procedure was used to gain insight into the interaction between the partners in their sexual contact. Use was made of a list of behaviors for adults, adapted and previously tried out for boys (Hermans, 1981; see Table 2).

After the first research session with each boy, standard indices were computed from the feeling and behavior scores of each value area (Hermans, 1976; see Table 1). These indices provide information about the affective and behavioral meaning value areas have within the experience world of a person. By establishing hierarchies for each index, the value areas can be compared.

Table 1
Self Confrontation Method Indices, as Computed on the Feeling Scores

Note. 
P, N, C, and Q indices were also computed on the behavior scores. The meaning of these indices is more or less analogous to those of the feelings indices, although for each value area there is both an index for the behavior of the young person toward the other person involved in that value area and an index for the other way around.

In a second talk some insights about the boys' experience worlds already gained from the data were further discussed with the boys. At the same time, additional information was collected without using the SCM, particularly about the sexual aspect of the pedophiliac relationship. 

Questions asked included 

Then the boys were asked about the place of the sexual contacts in their social environment: what people important to the boys thought about the relationships and the sexual contacts or what they would have thought had they known about them, and what that meant to the boys themselves. Finally the boys were asked their own opinions about having sex with their adult partners. 

I conducted all of the interviews with the boys between July and December 1980. The average lengths of the first and second interviews were 90 minutes and 30 minutes, respectively. The interviews were conducted privately with only the interviewer and interviewee present and, with only one exception, took place in the home of the adult partner or in another environment familiar to the boy. 

The planned procedure worked out well in practice, although difficulties were sometimes encountered in the supplementary interviews because the younger partner was not used to talking about his own sexuality or lacked a broad enough vocabulary (in one case the boy had only a vague idea of sexuality as a concept), or because for many boys the sexual contact was still an experience upon which they had reflected but little. 

The ability of the researcher to talk about sexuality may possibly be significant here (cf. Lief & Berman, 1976). Everything was done to create a nonjudgmental atmosphere in the interviews, so that the boys could speak out freely. In addition the boys knew from their older partners that the interviewer did not have preconceived opinions about sexuality between adults and children. 

It is possible that in the interviews the boys told certain things in order to please their adult partners or left things out to protect them. However, pedophiles assured me that they had not influenced the boys to say certain things or to leave other things out, and it was my impression that, as far as content was concerned, the boys participated unprepared in the interviews and were very spontaneous. Some boys actually told some unpleasant things about their partners. Furthermore, the boys were assured that nothing would happen with their data without their consent. A few boys did not want their data to be shown to their older partners. 

The physical side of the pedosexual contact was discussed with the adult partners. Taking this up directly with the children could have caused difficulties and inhibited their communication. The topics discussed were 

The backgrounds of both the older and the younger partners were also discussed to get a clear picture of the people who participated in the research and to be able to compare the older and the younger partners. Efforts were made to create a nonjudgmental atmosphere for the pedophiles. 

The interviews with the adult partners were held either before or after the first session with the boy or after the second session. In those cases where data had already been obtained from the boy about himself, the information was discussed with the older partner, if the boy gave permission to do so. Sometimes this helped the pedophile to provide further insights. 

Results

The Nature of the Sexual Contacts 

The sexual contacts began at different times in different relationships; the younger and older partners' statements about this differed somewhat on two occasions. This might be due to a different understanding of what "sexual contact" meant to each partner. 

Four boys could not remember the first contact. According to the older partners, in 8 of the 25 cases the first sexual contact occurred within the first encounter, in 9 cases after the partners had met several times, and in the remaining 8 cases after they had known each other a month or longer. The idea that the sexual aspect is introduced gradually into pedophiliac relationships (Bernard, 1975; Schuijer, 1978) seems not to have been the case here. 

Only in a few cases did the younger person take the initiative to make the first sexual contact; more often the older partner took it. In 3 cases, according to both partners in each, a third person who was present at the first sexual contact took the initiative. In 12 of the other 22 cases, the answers of both partners agreed. Five of the other boys could not remember. In the remaining 5 cases both partners made different claims about who had taken the initiative; these differences were not systematic. 

These findings do not correspond to the image of children usually taking the initiative in sexual contacts (De Groot, 1979; Rossman, 1976). However, it appears that a number of the boys took nonsexual initiatives to establish personal bonds with the adult men. 

If, during the course of a pedophiliac relationship, sexual contacts became more frequent, sexual initiative began to be shared more and more by both partners. According to both the younger and the older partners in 19 cases, the initiative then came either from both at once or varyingly from one or the other. 

According to the older partners, masturbation occurred in all of the relationships, although in different forms. When the younger partner masturbated the older to orgasm, the older partner always did this to the boy as well, whereas the reverse was not always the case, and in these instances the older partner saw to his own orgasm. 

Fellatio also occurred very regularly, although not within every relationship. The older partners did this more often to the younger partners than vice versa. Whereas the boys regularly ejaculated into the mouths of the older partners, the reverse never happened. 

Oral-anal contact occurred in almost a third of the relationships but always by the older partner to the younger partner, never the reverse. Anal penetration occurred in six of the relationships, and here it was mostly the boys who penetrated their older partners. 

What the boys did sexually for their older partners was always equal to or less than what the men did for the boys, suggesting that the sexual feelings of the boy may have taken a central place in the sexual contact. 

The younger person appeared to have some freedom to decide for himself how far he wished to go, with the older partner allowing this freedom without placing demands upon him. 

The physical intimacy of the sexual contacts described in this investigation seemed higher than that which has usually been reported in research into sex between children and adults (Landis, 1956; Peters, 1976). This also suggests that the adults' answers are valid since they would be unlikely to exaggerate the sexual intimacy. This pattern of sexual contacts is in agreement with what 18- to 20-year-old boys report retrospectively about former pedophiliac sexual contacts (Sandfort, 1983). 

The Sexual Contact as Value Area 

Of the 25 boys, 9 spontaneously defined sexual contact with their older partners as a value area. In six cases this occurred when the younger partner was asked what he liked a lot. In the other 15 cases sexual contact was included as a value area at the request of the researcher. 

The wording most commonly used by the boys was "Sex with [the older partner]" and "Making love with [the older partner]." Less frequent was "Sexual contact with [the older partner]," and (once) "Going to bed with [the older partner]." 

Most of the boys spontaneously formulated other nonsexual value areas which referred to the pedophiliac relationship. These value areas mostly concerned the older partner, one of his qualities or the way he behaved, being with the older partner, or activities undertaken together. Occasionally the relationship itself was included as a value area. 

Examples of these value areas are: 

[* To protect the respondents' privacy, the original names have been changed.]

A final example concerns an external influence on the relationship: 

Three boys at first formulated value areas only connected with the pedophiliac relationship. Not until this was pointed out to them did they relate my questions to their total experience world. Value areas formulated by the boys which did not concern the pedophiliac relationship referred, among other things, to 

In addition to these rather concrete value areas, some more abstract ones were also formulated: 

Value. areas which do not refer in any way to the sexual contact are not discussed here except as they can be compared with those value areas related to the sexual contact. 

The Behavioral Aspect of the Sexual Contact 

In the opinions of the older partners, all of the boys behaved in a cooperative rather than a resisting manner in the sexual contacts. In addition, the adults experienced 14 of the boys as predominantly active in the sexual contact, 5 as both active and passive, and 6 as predominantly passive. 

Sometimes reasons were given for the boys being more or less passive, for example, that the boy was still strongly directed toward himself or that his sexual preference was predominantly heterosexual (the heterosexual interests of some boys also appeared in the interviews). [*]

[* The boys were not explicitly asked about their other sexual interests or sexual contacts. Some raised this point themselves or formulated value areas about girlfriends or sexual contacts with other people.]

Although not unequivocal, there is a positive correlation between the boy being sexually mature and the amount of sexual activity in the relationship. The younger person's objective for participating in the sexual contact was not investigated. The idea that all younger partners always undergo the contact passively finds no support in the older partner's descriptions. 

A crucial point in any discussion about pedophilia is the behavior of the adult in his sexual contacts as perceived by the younger persons. In this investigation the boys said that, in their sexual contacts, they experienced the behavior of their older partners as predominantly positive and found hardly any negative behavior. 

This resulted in a high P index and a low N index. In 21 of the 25 cases the boys said they experienced exclusively positive behavior on the part of their partners, whereas in the remaining four cases the highest frequency (2 cases) with which negative behavior occurred was "sometimes." 

The mean Q index for the behavior of the older partner toward the younger partner in the sexual contact was 98, which is exceedingly high. This composite index indicates that the sexual behavior was experienced as predominantly positive. 

The kinds of behavior and feelings which the boys associated with the sexual contact and which resulted in the high P, low N, and high Q indices are shown in Table 2. 

Tabel 2
The Behavior Scores of the Adults and the Young People's  Feeling Scores  

Note. n = 25; the range of each scale was 0-5 (never - very often).  

* The positive and the negative quality of the behaviors and the feelings is indicated with (+) and (-). respectively.  

Concerning the sexual contacts, the boys reported that the adult paid attention to them, considered their feelings, and cooperated with them. The mean frequency with which these kinds of positive behavior occurred lies between "often" and "very often" (4.64, 4.44, and 4.28, respectively). These kinds of positive behavior and the strength with which they were experienced almost excluded the negative kinds of behavior. 

Negative behaviors occurred with a mean frequency between "never" and "hardly ever" (.00 to .16). The mean correlation between the way the boys experienced the behavior of the older partner in the sexual contact and the way they experienced his behavior towards them in general was positive and high (.90). This indicates that the boys experienced a certain continuity in the adult's behavior and that the sexual contact was not an isolated aspect within the total relationship. 

These data on the partners' behaviors are open to different interpretations, as is always the case in self-reporting. For example, the boys might have been unconsciously guided by the positive and negative qualities of the terminology used rather than the actual behavior of the adult partners. Elsewhere (Sandfort, 1981) I have shown that these and other possible explanations are unable in themselves to account sufficiently for the recorded scores. 

These results conflict with the widespread idea of the adult misusing his authority in a sex contact with a child. They do not disprove the existence of differences in power between the boy and the older partner, which probably exist whenever children and adults interact, but do tell us something about how the older partner handled his relatively greater power. 

The boys never mentioned misuse of power in the sexual contacts. This is consistent with the description of the sexual behavior in which the boys appeared as subjects rather than objects, and that suggests that the boys' wishes and desires played a fundamental part in the contacts.

The Affective Aspect of the Sexual Contact

To determine how the sexual contact was affectively experienced by the boys, the 14 specific feelings listed in Table 2 were scored in the relevant value areas. Positive feelings predominated in the affective experience of the boys' sexual contacts. "Happy" and "nice" probably refer directly to the sexual contact. 

Another feeling which frequently occurred was "free," corroborating the older partners' reports about the behavior. Feelings such as "proud" and "strong," apparently of less importance, received low scores, but on the average they occurred more often than any of the negative feelings. 

"Pride" had the highest standard deviation and was seemingly the most ambiguous feeling in the experience of the sexual contact: For some boys the sexual contact was associated with strong feelings of pride, but for other boys it was not at all. 

Negative feelings such as "distaste," "fear," and "guilt," some of which might be expected to have played apart here, occurred on the average from "almost never" to "never." Where negative feelings did occur they were not always directly associated with factors within the sexual contact, but sometimes with factors outside the contact (see below). 

The indices computed from the feeling scores give a coherent picture of the affective meaning of the sexual contact. Here the boys experienced a great deal of positive feeling and very little negative feeling (a relatively high P index and low N index in comparison with other value areas). 

For some boys, however, there were other aspects of their experience worlds in which they experienced even more positive and even less negative feelings: These were value areas which concerned, for example, hobbies, parents, the older partner (apart from the sexual contact), or other persons. 

Moreover, the feelings the boys experienced in the sexual contacts were similar to the feelings they liked to experience in general (the mean I index of the sexual contact, .79, was high and positive). Thus positive feelings predominated over negative feelings in the sexual contacts. 

The mean Q index was 84 and five boys had the maximum value, 100. For one boy the Q index was only 50; as is explained at length elsewhere (Sandfort, 1981) this boy interpreted "sexual contact" in a rather broad way. While he liked the physical contact, he found the actual sexual contact less pleasurable and that is why he experienced positive and negative emotions equally. 

The Q index of the sexual contact for all the boys was high in comparison with that of their other value areas. In 17 cases sexual contact stood in the upper half of the Q hierarchies. In most of the Q hierarchies where this was not the case, there were a great many value areas which were experienced as predominantly positive. 

The boys were affectively involved in the sexual contact to varying degrees (i.e., the C index differed from boy to boy). For some boys sexual contact belonged with those value areas in which they experienced the greatest feelings, but for the majority there were other aspects within their experience world which they affectively experienced as being more important. 

For not one of the boys did the sexual contact stand at the bottom of the C hierarchy, which would have indicated that this area had only small meaning for him. For two boys the sexual contact was more affectively important than was the older partner; the C index differed 3 points and 10 points, respectively, for those two boys. These findings all indicate that the majority of the boys experienced the sexual contact as an important part of the relationship. 

The correlation between the way a particular value area is experienced and the boy's general experience (G index) indicates how much that value area "colors" the way in which he feels in general (Hermans, 1976). Thus value areas can be delimited which have a negative influence on his sense of well-being. Though for each boy the G index of the sexual contact has a different value, for none of them did this contact seem to have had a negative influence upon their general well-being. In addition, where it was found to influence their well-being, it did so in a positive way. 

In summary, for practically all of the boys their sexual contact with their older partners emerged as a predominantly positive experience. These indices also show that within the experience worlds of the boys the sexual contacts could have different meanings for each individual.

Positive and Negative Aspects of the Sexual Contact 

For most of the boys, the pleasurable aspects of the sexual contact appeared to be self-evident and inherent in the contact. After extensive questioning, 23 of the boys formulated at least one positive aspect. Of the total of 29 value areas related to the sexual contact, most referred to pleasurable sensations experienced. Feelings of "friendship" or "love" were also mentioned. 

In most of the other value areas, this aspect of intimacy was formulated separately. Examples of the formulated areas were 

For one boy sexual contact was decidedly not a matter of personal intimacy but rather one of physical pleasure; he formulated as a value area 

The positive aspects mentioned by the boys correspond with answers the older partners gave as to what the boys sought in the sexual contact. According to the pedophiles, the boys were seeking such sexual pleasures as 

The older partners also mentioned