Little known about causes of sexual deviance

PEOPLE with fetishes for the brutal sexual assault of babies suffer from a severe form of paraphilia.

That’s according to the experts who deal with patients with sexual deviations, and who counsel victims of sexual crime.

Paraphilia is a psychosexual disorder in which those affected getting sexual gratification by either fantasising about or taking part in deviant acts, sometimes with objects.

Paraphilia, one among hundreds of recorded perversions, includes infantilism, which made headlines over the past week when a Plettenberg Bay computer engineer was arrested for alleged involvement in distributing horrific images of babies being brutally sexually abused. This form of paraphilia usually overlaps with another fetish – children in nappies.

Clinical psychologist Chris Breedt, who has been an expert witness in paedophilia court cases, explained that this was far removed from normal pornography addiction, which was usually age-directed.

“You would usually find that if a person is, for example, 30 years old, he or she will be attracted to pornography involving people of the same age group,” he said.

Those who are aroused by sexual acts involving people much younger than them are also usually sexually immature, and unable to form relationships with someone in their own age group.

While some believe paraphilia is most likely triggered by childhood trauma, very little is known about what leads to the disorder. – Garden Route Media