Overview

Pedophilia is the sexual attraction to prepubescent children.

Taboo

In many countries outside of Asia, Pedophilia is one of the most controversial paraphilias, and the term "pedophile" carries an extreme negative connotation. Despite this, locales with a strong cultural stigma against pedophilic attraction, such as the United States, still have generally high incidence of child abuse.

While child abuse is still considered a very serious issue in many places, incidence of child abuse have declined greatly in recent years. Sexual abuse of children in the United States has declined by roughly 62% since the 1990s, according to data compiled by the New Hampshire Crime Against Children Research Center. As of this writing, there is still no strong hypothesis as to why this is, although its coincidence with the rise of the World Wide Web and the further proliferation of lolicon and shotacon material has been pointed to as evidence that lolicon itself does not cause a significant increase in child abuse.

Terminology

Discussions relating to pedophilia can be confusing due to widespread ambiguity in commonly used terms. For example, the term "pedophile" has a different connotation from the point of view of medical diagnostics than it might from a legal standpoint. The word "pedophile" is often used interchangeably with the word "child molester", creating further confusion.

In addition, the term "minor" is often used in relation to pedophilia. This may be a misnomer as the legal age of majority and the legal age of sexual consent are not always the same in a given jurisdiction. Worse, the legal age of sexual consent is not always tied to the age at which a sexual depiction of one is legal, which is considered to be the age of 18 in most jurisdictions.

Comparison with lolicon/shotacon

There are some thematic commonalities between pedophilia and lolicon and shotacon conceptually, but despite this, they are usually considered to be distinct, if related. Whereas pedophilia mainly regards sexual attraction alone, lolicon and shotacon are usually a bit more complex, touching on themes of idealization and innocence, and sometimes intertwine with the emotions carried in the type of relationships that children have (e.g.: maternal, paternal, sibling, etc.)

Furthermore, the degree of overlap between people who have pedophilic attractions in the real world versus those who mostly only enjoy comics and cartoons depicting pedophilia is unknown. Like with other sexual attractions, people cite different reasons for why they particularly enjoy lolicon and shotacon works, and have differing preferences too. Many claim they only enjoy the idealized form of loli or shota characters portrayed in anime, with some going as far as to claim they find children in the real world detestable; however, not all lolicons and shotacons agree with this distinction.

Proponents for treating lolicon and shotacon separately often point to the disparity between fictionalized violence in video games such as Grand Theft Auto and real world gun violence, or other taboo fantasy fetishes such as incest or rape fetish. Some also point to the idea of "sexual imprinting", with the idea being that feelings of sexual attraction towards loli and shota characters can become "imprinted" in one before adulthood, leading to the persistence of these attractions despite having otherwise typical sexual orientation.