[fiso64]

>Is there any actual research on this? Surely psychologists must have studied this.

That's not an easy thing to study, not many pedophiles would be willing to participate in studies. Existing research mostly examines just the ones who have offended. There's some research about non-contact offenders though: https://sci-hub.se/https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

TLDR

> while some have argued that exposure to child pornography may promote contact sexual offending by validating and reinforcing attitudes surrounding the sexualization of children (Bourke & Hernandez, 2009), others have argued that child pornography acts as a substitute for contact offending, thereby preventing the direct sexual victimization of children (Riegel, 2004). Although plausible, such causative positions are yet to be directly examined or established within the existing empirical literature base, limiting the strength of these arguments.

> Nonetheless, the available evidence does not appear to support the idea of a direct causal relationship between child pornography and contact sexual offending, at least in the short-term. This is consistent with the findings of McCarthy (2010), who reported that the majority of dual offenders in her sample (84%) had committed contact sexual offenses prior to, rather than following, their involvement with child pornography. Furthermore, if child pornography directly promoted contact sexual offending, one would reasonably expect rates of contact sexual offending to have similarly increased over the last two decades (Glasgow, 2010). Fortunately, official crime statistics indicate that this has not been the case (Brennan, 2012; Motivans & Kyckelhahn, 2007; Victoria Police, 2014).

> Taken together, these findings suggest that although some CPOs do go on to commit sexual offenses against children, engaging in child pornography offending does not inevitably lead to the direct sexual victimization of children.