A/HRC/31/58
satisfy personal sexually abusive drives, desires and fantasies. Their reward is direct sexual
gratification with the child and the sexual services of various types that they seek to obtain
from their victim. They generate demand.
26.
Individual offenders can be broadly distinguished between those who have a
preference for children and those who are considered to be situational offenders. The first
group of offenders is generally equated with paedophilia, a psychiatric disorder
characterized by a primary or exclusive sexual interest in prepubescent children.
Nonetheless, there are other preferential offenders who cannot be classified as paedophiles.
They include, for example, offenders who seek to have sexual intercourse with pubescent
virgins, for a variety of motivations.8
27.
The notion of paedophilia is complex and there are several varying definitions. The
definition used by the World Health Organization is slightly broader than others; it is “a
sexual preference for children, boys or girls or both, usually of prepubertal or early pubertal
age”.9 The medical condition is often widely used to characterize any adult who has sexual
intercourse with a minor, yet the definitions above indicate that the general consensus is
that a paedophile has a preference for young children. Furthermore, offenders are
considered to be paedophiles if they are at least 16 years old and 5 years older than their
victims.10 Different subgroups have been identified among paedophiles, ranging from
fixated to regressed and aggressive. 11 A fixated offender will go to great lengths to reach a
child and is often associated with such methods as grooming. Regressed offenders, on the
other hand, often require facilitators before acting and will target unknown victims.
Aggressive offenders also derive their sexual gratification from the sense of power and
control they feel by inflicting pain on the child.
28.
As indicated above, certain preferential offenders cannot be described as
paedophiles as they are interested solely in pubescent children. The specific sexual interest
in teenagers is called hebephilia12 and derives from a range of factors linked to the
underlying level of demand. A strong motivation for committing such sexual exploitation of
children is, for instance, linked to the context of sexually transmitted diseases with
offenders believing that virgins or young children pose less of a health risk. 13 There are also
other practices, such as adults becoming sexually involved with teenagers in exchange for
money or goods. This phenomenon is present across the world and those adults are often
referred to as “sugar daddies”,14 and the practice is often referred to as “compensated
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
Information provided by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Regional Office
for South-East Asia and the Pacific.
World Health Organization, International statistical classification of diseases and related health
problems, 10th revision (2010), F65.4.
Ryan Hall and Richard Hall, “A Profile of Pedophilia: Definition, Characteristics of Offenders,
Recidivism, Treatment Outcomes, and Forensic Issues”, Mayo Clinic Proceedings, vol. 82, No. 4
(April 2007), p. 457.
K.F. McCartan, “Current understandings of paedophilia and the resulting crisis in modern society”,
in Psychological Sexual Dysfunctions, Jayson M. Caroll and Marta K. Alena, eds. (New York, Nova
Publishers, 2008), p. 58.
Ryan Hall and Richard Hall, “A Profile of Pedophilia”, p. 458.
Adele Jones, “‘Pimping Your Child’: Commercial Sexual Exploitation and Transactional Child
Sexual Abuse”, in Understanding Child Sexual Abuse: Perspectives from the Carribean, Adele Jones,
ed. (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 121-122.
Nancy Luke, “Confronting the ‘Sugar Daddy’ Stereotype: Age and Economic Asymmetries and
Risky Sexual Behavior in Urban Kenya”, International Family Planning Perspectives, vol. 31, No. 1
(March 2005), p. 6.
7
Select target paragraph3
Connect to a paragraph
Connect to an entity
Disable highlights
Add to table of contents