PREFACE

It is a pleasure to be writing a preface for the second edition of this book. I never thought I would be writing a second edition when I signed the contract to write the first book on pedophilia and sexual offending against children and started researching at the Kinsey Institute Library in the summer of 2003. That book was published in 2008, and the work presented in that first edition reflected my research and interests in the first decade as an independent scholar, after receiving my PhD in clinical and forensic psychology in 1997. I have since written a book on Internet sexual offending, an offshoot of my interest in pedophilia, given more questions (and few answers) about online child pornography offending and sexual solicitation of minors. That book was published in 2013 and described the second decade of my work on sexual offending.

This second edition would not be possible without the many colleagues and collaborators I have been lucky enough to have for the past 25 years. These people include A. G. Ahmed, Kelly Babchishin, Howard Barbaree, Ray Blanchard, John Bradford, Brad Booth, Stephen Butler, James Cantor, Caoilte Ó Ciardha, Meredith Chivers, Susan Curry, Angela Eke, Paul Fedoroff, Naomi Freeman, Kurt Freund, Grant Harris, Ainslie Heasman, Maaike Helmus, Drew Kingston, Michael Kuban, Martin Lalumière, Niklas Långström, Calvin Langton, Elisabeth Leroux, Ed Peacock, Lesleigh Pullman, Vern Quinsey, Marnie Rice, Jeff Sandler, Tracey Skilling, Skye Stephens, and Scott Woodside. I apologize for omissions from this (fortunately) growing list of research partners.

I want to particularly mention Vern Quinsey, for his mentorship; Howard Barbaree, for helping me get my first research job at the then Clarke Institute of Psychiatry; Martin Lalumière and Grant Harris, for our rich history of collaboration and friendship; and Kurt Freund, who I had the privilege of collaborating with for several years before his death in 1997. Kurt was one of the great pioneers in the scientific study of pedophilia and was an important role model for me, as he was both a serious scientist and a compassionate clinician. I am also extremely grateful to have become friends and worked with Grant Harris, who died in 2014, and Marnie Rice, who died in 2015; both were tremendous scholars and role models, and I learned so much about professional and personal life from them (Seto, 2015).

I greatly benefited from conversations with many different people in the course of preparing this book. I do not have the space to thank all of them here, but I hope they know they are appreciated. I specifically acknowledge Ray Blanchard, James Cantor, Meredith Chivers, Karl Hanson, Maaike Helmus, Martin Lalumière, and Vern Quinsey for their very helpful comments on draft chapters. Kelly Babchishin and Skye Stephens took it to the next level by reading the entire manuscript.

I thank Susan Reynolds, senior acquisitions editor with the American Psychological Association, for supporting this second edition. I very much appreciate David Becker for his support and guidance as my development editor, and my two peer reviewers for their insightful and extremely helpful feedback. Locally, I have benefited from the always quick and friendly assistance of Cathy Maclean and Susan Bottiglia from the library at the Royal Ottawa Health Care Group. I also thank the many talented research assistants who have helped me in my program of research on pedophilia and sexual offending against children: Michelle Adams, Lina Barkas, Teresa Grimbos, Madalyn Marcus, Alexandra Maric, Jennifer McCormick, Lesleigh Pullman, Tara Watson, Hatty Wong, and Jennette Williams.

In the spirit of greater transparency in science and science writing, I disclose here that I work as a pro bono scientific advisor to the Thorn Foundation, serve on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Moore Center for the Prevention of Sexual Abuse and on the editorial boards of the Archives of Sexual Behavior, Law and Human Behavior , and the Journal of Sex Research . I am currently serving as editor in chief of the official journal of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, Sexual Abuse .

I purposefully have no financial interests in measures that I have helped develop: the Screening Scale for Pedophilic Interests (Seto & Lalumière, 2001), its revised version (Seto, Stephens, Lalumière, & Cantor, 2017), and the Child Pornography Offender Risk Tool (Seto & Eke, 2015). These measures are publicly available and free to use, with attribution. I very occasionally provide paid trainings or consultations on topics covered in this book. I have purposefully declined opportunities to testify in the United States on topics covered in this book, with the aim of showing that I have no a priori pony in the races between prosecution and defense arguments.

I regret omitting in the first edition that Michael Kuban shared the photographs of the volumetric and circumferential gauges used in phallometric testing (reprinted again here). Chapter 2 presents ideas from an article I published in The Journal of Forensic Psychology Practice in 2001; a chapter I published in the proceedings of a 2003 sexual psychophysiology conference at the Kinsey Institute of Research on Sex, Gender, and Reproduction; and a review article in the Psychiatric Clinics of North America (Seto, Kingston, & Bourget, 2014). Chapter 4 draws from ideas in a chapter I wrote with Lesleigh Pullman and Skye Stephens (Pullman, Stephens, & Seto, 2016) and from Seto (2017b). Chapter 6 builds on two recent meta-analyses comparing incest and extrafamilial offenders and then biological with sociolegal father offenders (Pullman, Sawatsky, Babchishin, McPhail, & Seto, 2017; Seto, Babchishin, Pullman, & McPhail, 2015), as well as my new line of research on incest offending. Chapter 8 draws on content from a chapter published in the proceedings of a 2002 sex offender treatment conference at Cambridge University’s Institute of Criminology and a chapter published in Treatment of DSM–IV–TR Psychiatric Disorders . The entire book builds on broad overviews of the literature on pedophilia and sexual offending that I prepared for the Annual Review of Sex Research (Seto, 2004) and the Annual Review of Clinical Psychology (Seto, 2009).

Last, and foremost, I want to thank my wife, Meredith, for all of her love and encouragement, both in writing this book and in the rest of my academic and personal life: She continues to be wonderful, and I will always be full of wonder. This book is dedicated to our son and our shared hope he will grow up in a world free of sexual exploitation and abuse.