Abstract
Child sexual abuse (CSA) occurs at alarming rates within the United States, and much of our current CSA research is oriented toward developing reactive treatments to mitigate the devastating consequences of this sexual paraphilia. Improving our ability to proactively advance primary prevention is still nascent given the pervasive ambiguity surrounding our understanding of pedophilia. Previous conjecture about pedophilia was marred with methodological insufficiency and misinterpreted results. Over the last several decades, empirical results have supported pedophilia as a taxonically distributed latent construct. However, the boundaries of this theorized pedophilia taxon have yet to be identified, which is the aim of this study. Recent research has hypothesized several core constructs of pedophilia: emotional congruence with children, fixation, and neurodevelopmental perturbations. The effort to identify the core factors of pedophilia will enhance our ability to determine the underlying psychological processes and physiological mechanisms that contribute to the etiology of this sexual preference and will facilitate the search for early indicators that will maximize primary prevention efforts.