THINK back to your first childhood crush. Maybe it was a classmate or a friend next door. Most likely, through school and into adulthood, your affections continued to focus on others in your approximate age group. But imagine if they did not.
By some estimates, 1 percent of the male population continues, long after puberty, to find themselves attracted to prepubescent children. These people are living with pedophilia, a sexual attraction to prepubescents that often constitutes a mental illness. Unfortunately, our laws are failing them and, consequently, ignoring opportunities to prevent child abuse. Full Article
Okay then. I would not even call pedophilia a disorder, at least not any more than being attracted to the elderly exclusively or almost exclusively. The spectrum for human sexual attraction begins at birth or perhaps for some with fetuses and on the other side ends with individuals who are attracted to the old, dying, and dead. Let me make this really clear; I am only referring to attraction and not acting upon an attraction anywhere along the spectrum even if acting is completely acceptable by societal standards. Here we arrive at the primary problem with understanding something like pedophilia in that the entire spectrum is not analyzed to discover why “normal attraction is normal” and when “normal attractive qualities” are actually noticeable for the first time in life.
Saying someone is sick for finding a three year old attractive is not a valid explanation. Nor is it valid to ostracize someone for having a preference toward individuals who are much older than they are. Find out what could make an older person or a three year old the object of desire for another person. Leave no stone unturned and don’t be afraid to ask the most personal, private, seemingly insignificant, and outlandish questions to find the answers. Though in doing so don’t just search within the extremes of human attraction. Define what is normal, how normal develops, where the lines are, why the lines are where they are, who has done similar research before and what their purpose was for conducting it.