Why does there seem to be a high proportion of paedophiles with autism or aspergers?

So as a therapist talking to someone about this, how would you say you approach a session professionally, because it feels like such a taboo subject and with such a complex-web of legality and health-care and morality, I can’t imagine the dynamic in a situation like that? Is it like any other CBT or counselling dynamic? Do you just stick to the a script or do you dive-in as it were..? 

When I worked in debt-recovery, I was talking a neighbour of a debtor over the phone, to gather any data I could for investigation.  
When the man admitted to me that he had no problem telling me what he knew, as the mother of the household had discovered that he had been convicted of such an offence and had told the whole street, I was stunned at the conundrum of the admission versus my goals.  
I was snapped back to reality, when he started telling me too-much and offered to scope the property, at which I took a hard back-step. To this day I’m in disbelief at the pendulum of that situation. I can’t imagine the tight-rope one would have to walk over 8 to 10 sessions.. 

On the one side you have to consider who the client is, but on the other you have to consider the damage done and to who, you also have to consider your own stance and health, you also have to consider the cultural stance.. very very tough complex stuff..

What's yer appendix got to do with child molesting?

Is peritonitis a typo?

i can tell you why. it’s because people who are autistic often get fixated on something and also have much lower social/emotional levels than the rest of the others in society and thus develop much slower vis-a-vis their developmental delay.

Persons with pedophilia often get fixated on a particular age and often with themselves in an idealized state. I have worked as a therapist with people who had commuter such sex offenses, both juveniles and adults, and while of course not everyone who is autistic has pedophilia amd not everyone with the sexual origination toward children/pedophilia is autistic, there is a very strong correlation between autism and peritonitis 

Peter said:

propensity of paraphilias among autistic people which is slightly less controversial than paedophilia

Welcome to the weeds..

I had a tangent of specialty in matters like these, from the criminology-aspect of my academia, specifically on the policing and legal aspects.  
What I understood was that this subject will likely never be worked on, policing has a hard-enough time dealing with autism from a practical stand-point, a self-incriminating suspect is an ideal-suspect in the police-officer’s handbook even if they did understand.  

The best-thing for an active-citizen to do, is to know their rights, and to learn to be assertive where it counts. 
I believe also that it is professional-suicide to earnestly-defend someone who had admitted to that kind of deviance, I think that for the doubtless-multitudes of impaired with that orientation out there, it is best to bolster them against what will only ever be a most-malicious  enemy.
If anything they should look for mental-health services that are adjacent to the issues that they have so that they can seek non-declarative/indirect psychological-development.. Penal-institutions are full of people who have showcased their lack of development to an indifferent world..

With regards to autistic people being more likely to be victims of sexual abuse there has definitely been research on it. There’s also some research on propensity of paraphilias among autistic people which is slightly less controversial than paedophilia specifically.

it’s just incredibly hard to do any real research on paedophilia because it’s associated with criminal activity and so most of the research involves conduct of offenders who are compelled to be part of some sort of rehabilitation program.

in short almost all of the research is on people who

1. acted on their urges
2. got caught
3. are in contact with professionals because they have to be
4. are motivated to lie about their recovery

my understanding is there is some evidence to suggest a lot of paedophiles never act on their urges. To make it even harder for psychologists most of the material created by or consumed by paedophiles in relation to their paraphilia is illegal for researchers to possess for the purpose of study since that’s not an exemption under the law.

in short the way society handles paedophiles who haven’t harmed children makes it incredibly difficult for researchers  to learn anything in a systematic and scientific way about paedophilia. Because the reality is if a paedophile who hasn’t harmed a child would  volunteer for some sort of study and anyone were to find out about that the paedophile will have a lynch mob outside their house the next day and probably get raided by the police on the off chance that they’ve got something they shouldn’t have or they can find evidence for something.

as I said there are lots of confounding factors when it comes to autistic people and criminal matters in general. arguably autistic people are easier to trick into self-incrimination we certainly stand out more which means we are more likely to be targeted for investigation even when there is no rational basis for it.

I have a feeling that researchers like to evade that subject for fear aggravating-encouraging stereotyping of a minority..

I remember reading that that was true. I also remember reading somewhere that victims were statistically more likely to grow up into offenders.

I have no idea about autistic people as predators but I would expect there to be proportionately more autistic people who are victims - more vulnerable due to social difficulties 

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I think first of all, addiction is such a strong label it stops us looking at what it means to be addicted. Because technically everyone is addicted at every moment of interest, and when you are not consciously interested in everything, when you don;t really think about interests, your brain begins to put more time into running the body and relaxing. (Unless the body is full of stress hormones and needs food and/or heavy sleep before trying to relax and remain awake)  The focus of attention/concentration is a rainbow wheel, but someone has to be in the horrible sections, but horrible is questionable depending on who you are. [removed by moderator]

You have stated (or relayed) an opinion without any evidence to back this up. Indeed Martyn has stated evidence that would appear to contradict your theory. Surely one of the core traits of Autistic minds are a lack of prejudice and our need to really investigate a subject before coming to a conclusion. 

Is there any statistical evidence or us this just an opinion borne out of prejudice. It is logical to suppose that since a propotion of the population are paedophiles and a proportion are Autistic then some will be both. Indeed some NTs will also be paedophile. This does not mean that NTs tend to be paedophile. I doubt if the media will mention that a certain paedophile is not Autistic though. Journalists tend to do stories about particular cases and seek to generalise from one example. It just shows their ignorance. 

Many of the points I was about to bring up have already been mentioned here.  They are:

• NTs have the social skills to lie and cover up their interests in the said subject.  Autistics don't, we are fundamentally more honest so we get caught.
• NTs lie and claim to be autistic as an excuse to try to lessen their punishment.
• Autistics are more innocent and don't realise they may be breaking the law so they don't hide their interest.

Yeah.. There are some books and studies that have been done, but it’s not really hit on very much in core literature, because a link between autists and that subject is only ever going to misused by those who already know the answer they are looking for, before they’ve done the research.  
Essentially where developmental issues are concerned, there is always an amount of individuals who don’t develop in that way, and like any other shortcoming it’s a complicated problem.  
The answer is out there, it’s just better left in the restricted-section, because of the mob. Again it’s not really a fit topic for the masses, it’s for the real-professionals, the science isn’t in and witch-hunts tend to go hand-I’m-hand with ignorance.

Could be that those are the ones most likely to get caught. NTs might be able to use their social skills and understanding of people to hide it better.

Depends where you are on the autism spectrum some people also have learning difficulties with their autism such as slow on their school leading and having get referred to a special school that would out that person with autism with learning difficulties as well.

Authorities failures around autism petition setup 6 days ago- [removed by mod]

might be because the people they catch try to fake and use that as a excuse and a get out of trouble card.

conflating autism with 'learning difficulty' is putting the cause back 40 years. i think a lot of non-autists with 'learning difficulty' get thrown in the autistic box out of lack of concern / laziness / ignorance.  this is a general point and applies here i think. would be good to look at actual data on convictions and not just gut feelings from facebook / youtube experts.

May I see the research and studies conducted as I would like to know the sample size, how samples were chosen, and any variables. 

Let's say the sample size is 10, how good will the evaluation be if 8 were autistic? Is the sample size big enough that only 2% of participants are autistic? 

Then may we acknowledge situational variables, paedophiles wait until the moment they can abuse without being caught which brings us a variable, how many are caught? 

If there is more autistic people on the register that just means more autistic ones have been caught, it does not indicate autistic people are any more likely to be paedophiles.