Empathy has been the object of intensive inquiry among psychologists, philosophers, and psychoanalytic theorists, often with little agreement about exactly what it is or how best to measure it. Sex offenders have long been assumed to be deficient in empathy and insensitive to discomfort or trauma exhibited by their victims. As a result, sex offender treatment programs in both the US and UK place a heavy emphasis on development of empathic capacity, although without clear positive results in improving empathy or deterring recidivism. The many studies of empathy in sex offenders, utilizing the most common survey instruments, yield results that are largely inconclusive or contradictory according to multiple meta-analyses and systematic literature reviews.
Empathy is considered to have at least two different aspects, known as “affective empathy” (one’s ability to detect and be moved by the emotions of another in the moment) and “cognitive empathy” (a higher order imaginative skill of placing oneself into the position of the other person and reasoning how someone in that position might feel in a more holistic perspective). Previous studies suggest that child sex offenders have little or no deficit in affective empathy, but some do suggest deficient cognitive empathy, although other studies suggest little correlation between cognitive empathy and aggression generally, instead positing affective empathy as the key factor. Moreover, the available measures of cognitive empathy are either biased in the direction of assessing ideological compliance with therapeutic dogmas or oriented toward seeing the other side in complex arguments; they have little relevance to interactions with children.
Under the direction of the Percy Foundation’s Director of Criminological Research Shawn Rolfe and President Thomas Hubbard, we administered the best available scale for measuring affective empathy, the 33-item Questionnaire Measure of Emotional Empathy (QMEE), originally developed in 1972, to prisoners enrolled in The Insiders’ Bookstore project, as well as to a control group of over 600 men recruited through the platform Survey Monkey. 185 of the prisoners were serving time for child-related sex offenses. Our original goal was to assess whether those whose dominant attraction was to underage boys were more empathetic than those whose attraction was to underage girls, based on the generally higher empathy scores of gay males, coupled with the hypothesis that men’s recollection of their own boyhood engenders a greater degree of emotional congruence with boys than girls. We found that this was indeed the case, and moreover that extra-familial child molesters scored higher in empathy than intra-familial molesters. More surprising to us, however, was that offending pedohebephiles scored much higher in affective empathy than both our general population control group and historical average QMEE scores among male students. Moreover, administration of the QMEE to non-incarcerated and non-offending pedohebephiles revealed that they also were more empathetic than most men in the general public.
Our conclusion is therefore that pedohebephiles, whether offending or non-offending, are not only not deficient in their ability to recognize and respond to the emotions of others, but may actually have superior sensitivity in this regard, especially when dealing with children of the same sex as themselves. This may allow them to gain the trust and affection of children with whom they interact. Their attraction to young children may reflect a heightened receptivity to the kind of unrepressed emotional expression one sees in children; men low in affective empathy tend not to enjoy interacting with young children. Rather than being predators indifferent to children’s pain, they may instead suffer an excess of identification with children’s emotions compared to most men, perhaps reflecting a child-like Gestalt in their own personality.
This study is currently being prepared for formal publication in a scholarly journal.
I suspect that what’s wanted here is a distinction between boydar, and empathy.
The creepiness of pedophilia arises from the unexamined nature of the two processes: pedophile emotional projection and pedophile emotional reclamation. To the extent that those processes remain unexamined, they are expressed in proprietary “MY BOY!” talk. Having freely projected, the pedophile wants to reclaim with equal freedom. The family naturally expresses concern, when a strange man starts talking about their son as “his boy.” What he means is, “The boy onto whom I have projected my own boyish emotionality, which I can not endure in the first person; but, since my highly developed “boydar” allows me to identify boys which I can use as surrogates for my own trauma, I feel comfortable calling your son “my boy!” as the carrier of “my boyish feelings.”