Empiricising and Substantiating Alfred Adler’s Theory of Child Molestation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Alfred Adler diagnosed and treated offenders who committed sex crimes against persons and objects. Although he formulated clinical judgments about the causes of sexual deviance and paraphilia (e.g., lack of social interest), he did not elaborate on the variations that exist within the class of adult child molesters and their behavioral characteristics. In this article, we build on the initial observations that Adler made about the personality characteristics of sex offenders by analyzing the offense behaviors of male-on-male child molesters using the archival accounts of the “perversion files” released by The Boy Scouts of America between 1960s and 1990s. We link the offenders’ offense characteristics—how adult child molesters go about committing their sex crimes against boy victims—to their personality characteristics, thereby providing an empirical bite to the claims that Adler made from his examination of numerous patients. We demonstrate how the conclusions that Adler inferred about adult child molesters—that they possess a distorted private logic, enact a false sense of courage and heroism, and act cowardly—are embodied in their offense characteristics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".