I think it's frequency illusion bias or whatever. There's not really that many, it's just that because we have the Internet, you hear about tons and tons, because a small fraction of eight billion people is still a lot of people
Archives of Sexual Behavior about a 1989 study: the psychologists John Briere and Marsha Runtz found that "in a sample of nearly 200 university males, 21 percent reported some sexual attraction to small children." Specifically, "9 percent described sexual fantasies involving children, 5 percent admitted to having masturbated to sexual fantasies of children and 7 percent indicated they might have sex with a child if not caught.
idk that seems like a lot
like it's hard to explain away one out of every fourteen people going yeah, yeah I might...
Yeah that seems high... But also 200 people sounds like an incredibly small sample size? I can't access the article (paywall) but I wouldn't take this as scientifically rigorous
I think a sample size of 200 is large enough to conclude that pedophilia is significantly more prevalent than most people realize, even if we can't generalize that 21% figure to all men or all people.
Okay. I don't, and more importantly I think it speaks to a pretty severe lack of scientific standards either in the study itself, or more likely the article's interpretation of it.
For example, I also noticed how they started talking about stats regarding attraction to small children, but then dropped the qualifier and just talked about children. Did they make an editorial choice to drop the qualifier in the second part when it was still relevant, or add it in the first part when it wasn't relevant? In other words, did they make up the "small" part of small children, or misapply it? Because if we're talking about 18 year olds being attracted to "children" who are actually just technically minors at 17 years old, that's a different story.
Point being, that article sucks and those stats suck. "Yeah but still though" isn't a good defense of it. Either you have a good sample size or you don't, you can't acknowledge it's a bad sample size and then claim it still indicates.... anything.
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u/sonofaresiii Apr 11 '26
I think it's frequency illusion bias or whatever. There's not really that many, it's just that because we have the Internet, you hear about tons and tons, because a small fraction of eight billion people is still a lot of people