People from historically oppressed groups are over-represented in many Western criminal justice systems. Some studies have found, however, that certain paraphilic sexual offences, such as child sexual abuse imagery and exhibitionism, are predominately committed by White men. This meta-analysis compared the ethnoracial distribution of perpetrators of paraphilic offences and of sexual aggression offences against adults in Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand (k = 35; N > 20,000). White men were more likely than Indigenous, Black, and Latino men to commit paraphilic offences, OR = 2.3. Among men who committed sexual offences, White men were more likely to have had adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), OR = 1.6. This pattern indicates that more in-depth analysis may need to be done on how power and privilege influence how people act on their atypical sexual interests. These differences in ACEs may necessitate further research on how intimacy violations may contribute to some paraphilic sexual offences.
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Thompson et al. (2024) studied this question.
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