The Development of the Interest in Child Molestation Scale

Abstract

Although numerous research studies have been conducted to investigate apprehended child molesters’ sexual interest in children and associated concepts, very little research has been conducted to investigate community males’ sexual interest in children. In this article, the authors describe the development and preliminary validation of a new measure—the Interest in Child Molestation Scale—to assess community male’s sexual arousal, behavioral propensity toward, and enjoyment of child sexual abuse. Preliminary results show that the Interest in Child Molestation Scale holds some promising psychometric properties, representing a reasonably reliable measure of community males’ sexual interest in children. Using this scale, the authors find that a good proportion of community males (57%) did not emphatically reject an interest in child sexual abuse. The authors also find that self-reported sexual arousal to child sexual abuse that is relatively low in forcefulness was significantly related to implicit child sexualization as measured via a pen-and-paper implicit association test. The authors discuss these results with reference to possible future uses of the measure for theory and research development.