Genetic Predisposition To Paedophilia And Child Abuse

LEADING COUNSEL WITH TANYA ROBINSON IN THE CASE OF REGINA V MITCHELL

JM was born on 30/7/1956. In 2012 he was convicted of 26 sex related offences. His victims were 8 family members aged between 7 and 13 years old, including his brother when the brother was aged between 8 and 11 years, two sisters (when aged between 7 and 12 years and aged 9 years), three daughters and son (when aged between 7 and 16 years). His father had been imprisoned for sexual offences committed on him and his sisters. He had been encouraged by his father to commit offences on his sisters. He reported having been abused by his father from the age of 1 to 5 years. He said that it had become part of his everyday life. He had been removed from the family when aged about 7 although he would return home where the abuse continued. There was no psychiatric history and no manifestation of mental illness. The pre sentence psychiatric report stated "Incestuous child sex offending of the kind perpetrated by M always has complex causation. (His) father was convicted of incestuous sex offending against his own children- a daughter and a son. This suggests the presence of a familial (a genetic inheritance) deviant sexual pathology - incestuous paedophilia in male members of the family - which was present in the father and was subsequently inherited by the son..I have noted that one of (M's) victims was his son. The presence of such a (presumably) genetic inheritance would provide a background against which further childhood experiences of abuse would allow the evolution of a deviant sexual constitution as manifested by (M)..Indeed it is likely that (M) was abused by his father too, as indeed he claims he was. This childhood sexual abuse plausibly left a psychological imprint upon him and caused him to physically identify himself with his father and become an abuser like him...I would hypothesise that in his own child sex offending (M) repeated his childhood experiences of abuse, in a sense reversing his own childhood roles, this time becoming the "active" perpetrator of the sexual acts towards his "passive" victims.." This opinion has caused some discussion regarding any genetic make up to this disorder and such criminality. One psychiatrist opined that there could be no genetic component but rather that this was part of the spectrum of deviant behaviour seen in human beings enhanced by a history of familial abuse on the "nurture" principle. A trawl on the internet on the topic provides food for interesting debate. As far back as the 1980s it was being argued that certain behaviours are in part genetically based in that the genes have already been tested in the parents and thus certain sexual behaviours may result from (phylo) genetic pre dispositions (see "The Phylogeny of Male/Female Differences in Sexual Behaviour" Medicus and Hopf.) See also "Potential Implications of research on genetic or Heritable Contributions to Pedophilia for the Objectives of Criminal Law", (Berryessa of the Stanford University Center for Biomedical Ethics) where it is said that "the etiology of pedophilia remains largely unknown but the disorder is thought to be caused by an undetermined distribution of psychological, sociological and biological factors..Most scientists now consider the disorder as a complex deep rooted predisposition and over the last few decades have correspondingly begun to study possible biological associations to the etiology and presence of the disorder, such as...