Today, the Research Group on Child and Adolescent Victimization (GReVIA) of the University of Barcelona presented in Madrid the first nationwide study to quantify in Spain sexual attraction to people aged under 16 and sexual violent behaviour against children and adolescents, based on responses from the general adult male population. The study, conducted with a sample of 6,010 adult men living in Spain, was carried out as part of the international Prevention Global programme, in collaboration with the Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse at Johns Hopkins University.
Prevention Global is a research initiative driven led by this centre and by The Royal's Institute of Mental Health Research (Ottawa, Canada), and represents one of the largest investments to date in research on the prevention of sexual violence against children. The objective is twofold: to determine the true scale of the problem across several countries using the same measurement tool, and to identify which strategies work to prevent harm from occurring. The application of the study in Spain, led by GReVIA, makes it possible for Spanish data to be included in this international comparative framework for the first time. The study was co-led by Pablo Romero, member of the Group for Empirical and Applied Victimology Research (VICRIM) at the Centre for Research in Digital Transformation and Governance (DIGIT) of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.
Sexual violence against children and adolescents is a violation of human rights and a structural public health problem. Until now, the evidence available in Spain has come almost exclusively from judicial and police data and victimization studies, that is, from what happens once the harm has already occurred. This study provides a complementary and little-explored perspective: what proportion of the adult population acknowledges these behaviours and what factors are associated with them? Its objective is explicitly preventive: you cannot prevent what you do not know.
Attraction and behaviour: two related, but distinct realities
One of the study's main contributions is that it examines separately two phenomena that public debate tends to conflate: sexual attraction to people under 16 on the one hand, and the perpetration of sexual violent behaviour against children and adolescents on the other. The study assessed both independently. A total of 22.2% of participants reported having experienced some degree of sexual attraction to people under 16 since reaching adulthood. In most cases, this attraction was infrequent and secondary to attraction towards adults: 12.3% described it occurring "almost never", and only 1.9% said they experienced it most of the time or almost always. Exclusive attraction to minors, without attraction to adults, was reported by just 0.3% of the sample.
The data confirm that the two phenomena are associated: individuals who report sexual attraction to people under 16 are significantly more likely to report engaging in sexually violent behaviour. However, the study also shows that this association is not deterministic: 72.8% of men who report sexual attraction to individuals under the age of 16 do not report any sexually violent behaviour against children or adolescents.
For the research team, this distinction does not minimize the seriousness of the problem: it makes it manageable. It identifies a large group of individuals who experience sexual attraction to children and adolescents and have not engaged in sexually violent behaviour against them, representing an opportunity for early intervention before any harm occurs.
The figures of behaviour
A total of 10.2% of participants admit to having engaged in at least one act of sexual violence involving individuals under the age of 18 at least once in their lives. When the analysis is restricted to children and adolescents under the age of 15, the prevalence is 2.8%, and 1.7% when referring to children under 12. A total of 3.4% of the sample report having engaged in one of these behaviours in the past 12 months.
These figures are not crime or conviction rates. The study collects self-reported behaviours, both with and without physical contact, in both physical and digital environments, and includes cases involving 16- and 17-year-olds only when there is at least a 10-year age difference with the respondent, thereby excluding consensual sexual relationships between people of a similar age, even if one of them is underage. As these are highly stigmatized behaviours, they are likely to be underreported: the estimates should be read as conservative.
"For decades, we have focused prevention on teaching children and adolescents how to protect themselves. It is necessary, but not sufficient. If we want to prevent there from being any victims, we must also understand and act on those who may cause the harm," says Noemí Pereda, professor at the UB's Faculty of Psychology, director of GReVIA and co-director of the study.
