...to the behavior come from? Do they start with a desire to control, manipulate, injure, etc. or does that evolve from the deviance associated with their physical/psychological attraction?
IIRC, in the Virtus training that they sent us to as youth group leaders (to help us understand how serious a problem this issue is), they mentioned that both of the above personality types fell within the subclass of sick pedophiles.
The controlling sadistic type is more likely to pursue kids they don't know; more likely to exhibit the dominance traits associated with rapists, chronic abusers, and even serial killers. Their issue really *is* a pathological need for violence, dominance, and overall, control. OTOH, the ones who have a psychological attraction are a lot more subtle and, IMO, much worse. They devote their efforts toward grooming their victims over time. They isolate them, bit by bit, while deflecting attention/suspicion away from themselves. At the same time, they groom themselves (so to speak), bit by bit peeling away the inhibitions (guilt, fear of getting caught, fear of jail, etc.) until they eventually remove the lines of morality and decency that keeps them from acting on their desires.
The second type of personality is much more dangerous, not only because they're harder (by their very nature) to spot, but also because the abuse can go on unnoticed for a long, long time, with multiple victims. This is also the group of people for which the recidivism rate is staggeringly high. Having eradicated the line and turned their reward/risk filters inside out, they are often unable to turn themselves back to a time when those filters were still in place and operational.
It is also this second type that we understand the least. We can see how they work themselves to the point where the self-justify doing inhuman things, but can't explain how they get that way to begin with...unless the mechanics of orientation are much more diverse than hetero/homo. Which is an extremely unpleasant thought. But the more I read on this subject, the more I'm convinced that, at the very least, we need to do more research along the lines of understanding how orientation, in general, is set so we are able to know for sure whether or not it's a factor in deviance like pedophilia, but also so we can understand association between sexual orientation and pathologically deviant, damaging behavior. |
