Health care professionals’ view on pedophilic disorder: a qualitative study

Abstract

In the last few years there has been a shift in the view on pedophilia and its treatment in international diagnostic manuals and expert consensus documents. This study seeks to investigate the approach of health care professionals’ on some of the topics that are mostly debated: whether pedophilia without distress or acting out should be considered a mental disorder, whether there can be a changeability of pedophilic sexual interest over life and what the main aim of treatment should be. Qualitative content analysis was used to analyze the responses in semi-structured interviews of eight Swedish health care professionals with significant clinical experience from this patient category. These results suggest that there is a lack of consensus regarding all three topics, and that the opinions of the experienced health care professionals did not fully comply with the international experts agreements. This might lead to differences in clinical practice depending on who meets the patient, it can make the patients unsure about how they will be treated if they seek help, and it demonstrates a gap between published international research and clinical practice.