Understanding romantic attraction to children through exploration of its patterns, components, and correlates
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Emerging research suggests that most adults who are sexually attracted to children also experience romantic attraction to children. This anonymous online survey study investigated patterns, components, and correlates of romantic attraction to children in 317 self-identified child-attracted men. All respondents reported sexual attraction to children, and nearly all (95%) reported romantic attraction to children. Both forms of attraction were rated as highly intense, although sexual attraction was slightly more intense. The two forms of attraction were generally aligned in terms of age, gender, and exclusivity of attraction. Respondents reported experiencing all three components of Sternberg’s Triangular Love Scale—intimacy, passion, and commitment—toward a child, with intimacy being the strongest. Upon examining correlates of intensity of romantic attraction to children, strength of sexual attraction to children relative to adults (i.e., exclusivity) was the strongest unique correlate, followed by emotional congruence with children and the personality factor of openness. Age- and gender-of-attraction did not play a role. Additionally, the intensity of romantic attraction to children was not associated with psychological difficulties or history of arrest or conviction for a child sexual offence. The results of this study support a broadened understanding of attraction to children, involving sexual and romantic forms that are similarly widespread and largely aligned. Future research directions elucidating implications for child-attracted people’s well-being and offence risk are proposed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".