Exploring the ownership of child-like sex dolls

Harper, CA ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3172-0129 and Lievesley, R ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4957-258X, 2022. Exploring the ownership of child-like sex dolls. Archives of Sexual Behavior. ISSN 0004-0002

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Abstract

There is a fervent social debate ongoing that relates to the ownership of child-like sex dolls. On the one hand, some proponents of dolls suggest that they offer a safe sexual outlet for minor-attracted people (MAPs) and could be used in efforts to prevent the sexual abuse of children. On the other side of the debate, child-like dolls are seen as articles that sexualize children, encourage deviant fantasies, and increase offending risk. To date, no empirical analyses have been undertaken with people who own such dolls. In this paper, we present data from child-like sex doll owners (n = 85) and MAPs who do not own dolls (n = 120) recruited from online forums visited by people who own sex dolls or forums for people with sexual attractions to children. Specifically, we compared their psychological characteristics and proclivities for sexual aggression. Among non-owners, 79.2% of participants declared an interest in owning a sex doll, which is higher than the 20–40% rate reported in adult-attracted samples of non-owners. We found few differences between the groups on most personality variables, with doll owners being less antisocial and anxiously attached than non-owners, but exhibiting more schizotypal traits. Related to offending proclivities, doll ownership was associated with lower levels of sexual preoccupation and self-reported arousal to hypothetical abuse scenarios, but higher levels of sexually objectifying behaviors and anticipated enjoyment of sexual encounters with children. We discuss these data in relation to a functional model of child-like sex doll ownership among MAPs.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Archives of Sexual Behavior
Creators:	Harper, C.A. and Lievesley, R.
Publisher:	Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date:	19 September 2022
ISSN:	0004-0002
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1007/s10508-022-02422-4 DOI 1604840 Other
Rights:	© The Author(s) 2022. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Divisions:	Schools > School of Social Sciences
Record created by:	Linda Sullivan
Date Added:	04 Oct 2022 11:21
Last Modified:	04 Oct 2022 11:21
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/47199

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