It’s impossible to talk about any kind of numbers or statistics regarding sexually attraction to minors. It all gets muddled up really fast. A lot of men normalize underage attraction to teenagers, but don’t consider it pedophilia (legally it is). Which brings up the question of classifying attraction, but in public speech this of course brings in the knee jerks reaction of questioning and attacking the person for knowing or addressing that there’s a qualitative different between attraction to a 5 year old and a 17 year old. But it does make statistics really hard to define.
Plus most of the information we have comes from felons and convicted criminals which are the worst or most extreme examples. Non-molesters pedophiles have absolutely no incentive to tell anyone, not even their psychologists, which means we don’t know anything from them. A few researchers try to get into their world and derive some understanding, but it is always a hard sell for grants. But a friend researcher once told me, if we could only interview felons, we would be convinced that most people will murder someone before turning 30. The truth is we don’t know, and we currently have no way of knowing the real numbers regarding pedophilia.
‘Pedophilia’ has no legal definition.
And the psychiatric definition is attraction to pre-pubescent children.
And the statistics aren’t actually as hard to define as you might think, though the amount of research this topic gets is woefully underrepresented relative to the social impact.
For example, on the topic of violent offenders in prison you bought up:
Of the 100 male inmates who participated in this study, 59% reported experiencing some form of sexual abuse before puberty, and all such instances occurred before or at the age of 13 years.
This issue has a much bigger and broader impact on society than most people realize.
Read your sources again. I’m not sure the are saying what you think they are saying. It says they were the victims (emphasis not dismissal) of sexual abuse before puberty. Not the perpetrators. Again, it’s scientifically disingenuous to extrapolate an observation of a extreme bias population like incarcerated inmates to the whole population. This is why academic research is full of disclaimers and qualifiers.
