Abstract
The current body of the literature studying minor-attracted persons (MAPs) predominantly focuses on the experiences of men who experience sexual attractions to children. To shed more light on the experiences of women within this population, we conducted anonymous semi-structured interviews with six self-identified female MAPs, who were recruited through online support forums for individuals with sexual attractions to children. Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) was used to analyze the interview transcripts. Two superordinate themes were identified from the dataset that highlighted the uniqueness of the experience of being a woman within the MAP community (“A minority within a minority”) and themes of social isolation and the effects of this on identity (“A lonely secret existence”). The findings reported here highlight how the experiences of female MAPs both converge with and diverge from their male counterparts in important ways. We discuss the implications of these experiences in relation to more effective service provision for women who are sexually attracted to children.
Highlights
Interest in the area of sexual attractions to children or minors is increasing in academic and social contexts
It is argued that interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) is the most effective of the qualitative methods when researching topics that are novel, emotionally laden, nuanced, and vague (Smith & Osborne, 2003; 2015), which is relevant to the present study as it offers the first exploration of the experiences of female minor-attracted persons (MAPs)
The themes emerging from participant narratives highlight a number of important consistencies between the experiences of our participants and the male MAPs recruited in previous work
Summary
Interest in the area of sexual attractions to children or minors (referred to in this paper as “minor attraction”) is increasing in academic and social contexts. This is largely due to the theoretical link between minor attraction and sexual offending against children (Finkelhor, 1984; Seto, 2018a, 2019; Ward & Beech, 2006), but more recently has been driven by an acknowledgment that many minor-attracted persons (MAPs) live offensefree within the community (Cantor & McPhail, 2016; Dombert et al, 2016) These individuals commonly report difficulties in coping with their sexual attractions within a social context that stigmatizes them (Jahnke et al, 2015a), which leads to difficulties (e.g., perceived barriers and a lower level of willingness) in seeking professional support when this is needed (Grady et al, 2018; Levenson & Grady, 2019; Lievesley et al, 2020). In this paper we report what we believe to be the first qualitative analysis of the lived experiences of a sample of minor-attracted women
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