information:classification, structural:expansion, linguistic:translation, information:highlighting
History

Pedophilia is believed to have occurred in humans throughout history. The term paedophilie (in German) has been used since the late 1830s by researchers of pederasty in ancient Greece. The term "paedophilia erotica" was coined in an 1896 article by the Viennese psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing but does not enter the author's Psychopathia Sexualis until the 10th German edition. A number of authors anticipated Krafft-Ebing's diagnostic gesture. In Psychopathia Sexualis, the term appears in a section titled "Violation of Individuals Under the Age of Fourteen", which focuses on the forensic psychiatry aspect of child sexual offenders in general. Krafft-Ebing describes several typologies of offender, dividing them into psychopathological and non-psychopathological origins, and hypothesizes several apparent causal factors that may lead to the sexual abuse of children.

Krafft-Ebing mentioned paedophilia erotica in a typology of "psycho-sexual perversion". He wrote that he had only encountered it four times in his career and gave brief descriptions of each case, listing three common traits:

He mentions several cases of pedophilia among adult women (provided by another physician), and also considered the abuse of boys by homosexual men to be extremely rare. Further clarifying this point, he indicated that cases of adult men who have some medical or neurological disorder and abuse a male child are not true pedophilia and that, in his observation, victims of such men tended to be older and pubescent. He also lists pseudopaedophilia as a related condition wherein "individuals who have lost libido for the adult through masturbation and subsequently turn to children for the gratification of their sexual appetite" and claimed this is much more common.

Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud briefly wrote about the topic in his 1905 book Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in a section titled The Sexually immature and Animals as Sexual objects. He wrote that exclusive pedophilia was rare and only occasionally were prepubescent children exclusive objects. He wrote that they usually were the subject of desire when a weak person "makes use of such substitutes" or when an uncontrollable instinct which will not allow delay seeks immediate gratification and cannot find a more appropriate object.

In 1908, Swiss neuroanatomist and psychiatrist Auguste Forel wrote of the phenomenon, proposing that it be referred to it as "Pederosis", the "Sexual Appetite for Children". Similar to Krafft-Ebing's work, Forel made the distinction between incidental sexual abuse by persons with dementia and other organic brain conditions, and the truly preferential and sometimes exclusive sexual desire for children. However, he disagreed with Krafft-Ebing in that he felt the condition of the latter was largely ingrained and unchangeable.

The term pedophilia became the generally accepted term for the condition and saw widespread adoption in the early 20th century, appearing in many popular medical dictionaries such as the 5th Edition of Stedman's in 1918. In 1952, it was included in the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. This edition and the subsequent DSM-II listed the disorder as one subtype of the classification "Sexual Deviation", but no diagnostic criteria were provided. The DSM-III, published in 1980, contained a full description of the disorder and provided a set of guidelines for diagnosis. The revision in 1987, the DSM-III-R, kept the description largely the same, but updated and expanded the diagnostic criteria.