Understanding the use of child-related sexual fantasy and fictional sexual materials by people who are attracted to children

Sexual frustration is a potentially important treatment need for people who are attracted to children, but little is known about how such individuals seek to address this. In this paper, we report two studies with large community-based samples (Study 1 N = 265; Study 2 N = 733) providing insights into the scale and correlates of the use of these fictional sexual materials (FSM) in this community. Our data show that sexual fantasising and FSM use are relatively common among people with attractions to children, with more than half of our samples engaging in fantasy thinking about children on a daily or almost-daily basis. In descriptive terms, engagement with FSM depicting children was correlated with self-reported willingness to engage in sexual offending against children. However, this correlation did not hold in multivariate Bayesian analyses controlling for other relevant constructs. Instead, there was evidence that sexual satisfaction was associated with lower levels of self-reported willingness to offend, and permissive attitudes about sexual interactions between adults and children were associated with higher self-reported willingness to offend. These data contribute to ongoing social debates about the legal and moral status of sexual outlet use among people who are attracted to children.