Public Perceptions of Individuals Attracted to Children: The Impact of the Person’s Gender, Child Gender, and Preferentiality on Stigma and Perceived Risk to Offend
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Stigma-related stress may contribute to increased risk in individuals who are sexually attracted to children. Further, certain subgroups of people attracted to children may be more stigmatized than others; this has important implications for prevention programs. We conducted a vignette study to examine whether public stigma toward people attracted to children differed based on the person’s gender (man/woman), the gender of the child to whom the person is attracted (boy/girl), and preferentiality (non-preferentially/preferentially attracted to children). A sample of 385 participants ( M age = 41; 66% White; 52% male; 57% US residents) were recruited through Prolific. Participants were randomly assigned to one of eight vignettes presenting a non-offending individual attracted to children. Vignettes varied on the person’s gender, the gender of the child to whom they were attracted, and whether they were preferentially or non-preferentially attracted to children. Participants were asked to rate their perception of risk for the person to commit a child sexual offense (and give their reasoning) as well as fill out a measure of stigma regarding the person in the vignette. The only characteristic associated with perception of risk and stigma was preferentiality; participants rated preferentially attracted persons as being a higher risk to offend and endorsed higher stigma regarding that individual. Open-ended responses indicated that in rating risk to offend, participants were concerned with the role of attraction to children, characteristics of the attraction, loss of control and opportunism, lack of offense history, and lifestyle factors.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".