Paedophilia and the Misrecognition of Desire

Abstract

Within the last fifteen years there has been nothing short of an explosion of cultural panic regarding issues of paedophilia. Indeed, according to both the Australian Federal Police and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, paedophiles and paedophile networks are a ‘growing threat’. This paper is not concerned with adjudicating the question of whether the cultural incidence of paedophilia is increasing. Instead, it is aims to interrogate the conceptual ground upon which recent efforts to identify the ‘paedophile’ and paedophilic activity have pivoted. The hegemonic domain for the propagation of paedophilia research has been the field of abnormal psychology. The paper argues that this field has profoundly ‘misrecognised’ paedophilia. It proposes that the field of abnormal psychology must engage psychoanalytic, feminist, and deconstructive theories of sexuality and identity, and that it must resist the temptation to affix an ontological essence to the ‘paedophile’. The paper concludes with the suggestion that only when research methodologies take seriously the question of the prevalence of intergenerational sexual desire in the general population can we even begin to understand paedophilia.