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

The most audacious sting was of an 18 year old "man", who had been planning to meet s 9 year old sex...initially the decoy said they were 14 and then changed to nine which seems dodgy. The guy was in training school to be a cop. The judge spared him from prison because of his autism and intelligence. It resonated with me because I was into the same thing as he was (police roleplay servers on GTA not nine year old boys) etc. 

Perhaps these staged scenarios merely tend to trap naïve people, and autistic people tend towards naïveté more than allistic people. Any potential savvy sexual predator would tend not to fall for this sort of trap.

From my own experience, I knew one convicted paedophile. We were at school together and he later went on to become a secondary school teacher. He was convicted and jailed. He was definitely not autistic, he was one of the cool, popular boys at school. He was confident, an extrovert, was good at sports and was successful with the opposite sex.

I don't know about the US but in the UK entrapment isn't a great defence to these sorts of crimes. Yes juries don't like it but saying 'I was entrapped' isn't really a defence in the uk even if it's true. (entrapment can be abuse of process but only if the entrapment was conducted by the state)

Most of them seem to be charged and go on the register. They're aware that if they do entrap there's no chance of conviction. There's some good ish groups which are relatively professional and then some unprofessional ones which just insult the person, makes them say they're nonces etc 

Do they not? Or do they just not edit their videos to look like entrapment? They're not regulated by anybody and a lot of them seem to be in it for the clout / fame. What if they start by saying 'hey I'm 18' then later they after they've turned the conversation sexual they say 'hey I'm actually 15' to see if the conversation continues. Would you know if they cut the earlier part out? Might still be a crime but would look a lot like entrapment.

Especially since some one might think, 'well if I'm guilty I've probably already committed the crime so why stop now.' That looks a lot like entrapment to me.

In the paper I cited it said that sexual abuse and sexual violence were less likely for autistics to commit. The inference being that sexual abuse included, or was limited to, non-violent sexual abuse - i.e. not rape or other forms of sexual violence.

Exactly

That's true , the definition of paedophile seems to be change..some hunter groups now call themselves "hebophile" groups. 

A lot of the "victims" (aka the hunters pretending to be children) are around the age of 12-14, so yes underage but for s girl most are well into puberty by then. Certainly a lot of the younger "peadophiles" seem to be on the spectrum. 

Sexual abuse need not be violent.

Anonymous surveys for autistic people, and doing studies on the prison population. I read the other day that around one in four the British prison population. Have ADHD. Maybe that's more likely for violent crimes , as an ADHD and ASD person whilst I am mostly shy I do have an agressive streak , but certainly doing studies on sex offenders. 

Like I said, watch the pedophile hunter videos. By the hunters own admissions very few seem to be "fully with it". Most seem to be in low paid, low skilled work and are reliant on parents and other family members and either have asd, ADHD or both. 

As you say it's problematic to define it that way. If you ask a psychologist what a pedophile is they'll refer to attraction to prepubescent children only. So it's not a question of some form of aberrant attraction. Neurotypicals find physically matured teenagers under 16 attractive. They'd just never say so because of the huge social taboo. That might also be part of the issue. Because if an autistic person is honest about finding some under age teenagers attractive (even though most neurotypicals do) people may tend to assume they are pedophiles and more likely to commit crimes.

A proportion of autistic and allistic people have paraphilias, there is no hard information that I know of that compares the rates between these two groups, so anything said about this is just guesswork. I would expect that the noted respect shown by autistics for rules and laws, added to the also recognised propensity for autistics to show rather rigidly traditional morals, would mean that they probably have less propensity to act out any paedophilic feelings, if they had them at all.

Oh I'm not endorsing paedophile hunters especially as 90% of the time they seem to engineer the situations. 

But the person would still have to message the underage girl or whatever , whether the "underage" person was real or fake. The hunter groups don't do entrapment 

So having raised this unpleasant question, do you have any idea how we can get a definitive answer?

This isn't about sexual violence or rape or anything like that, this is purely about whether ASD people are more inclined to find pubescent and prepubescent children active despite being older 

Admittedly the latter is a little more difficult as a 14 year old may have all the features of an adult female but be legally a child etc and autistic people do have some issues relating to peolle their own age..in my experience i usually get on with older people better though than younger 

Statistics show that the rate of convictions for adult autists is the same as for the general population and the incidence of violent offences is very low. (Ghaziuddin et al., 1991 and Isager et al., 2005). Problems of autistic people with sexual expression tend towards sexually inappropriate behaviour - i.e. through being naïve - and away from sexually abusive or sexually violent behaviour (Ray, Marks and Bray-Garretson, 2004).

I'm not convinced they are. Maybe they're just the easier ones to catch. Also the police are not big fans of these so called pedophile hunters. They've been known to almost push people into breaking the law, in the sense that a jury looking at the evidence would conclude that if the 'hunter' hadn't almost engineered the illegal behaviour a crime would never have happened. That makes it hard to get convictions.

Also autistic people may be more vulnerable to having their behaviour engineered by others. Which is a fair description of the way many so called pedophile hunters operate.

I do feel that most of the people caught by these hunters are naiive and probably aren't "dangerous" like they claim 

You've probably heard of the "bald nonce" meme. The guy clearly isn't with it, I don't think he has autism or not aspergers , but he definitely has disabilities from what I've seen on his FB Page and was employed by sainsburys as part of a disability scheme. 

I think for certain ADHD might increase the risk factor. 

I would say asd might also do that because so many of us are lonely and looking for connections

It's a minefield. The cases I have seen seem to involve some level of "grooming", but in many ways it seems almost innocent? Like there is talk about sex but also talk about marrying and things like that. To me the most prolific abusers - yes - are not autistic . 

I have spoken annecdottally to police officers who have siad most of the sex offenders do have some kind of neurological disability. This is a really controversial post as noted, I got banned from the reddit autism forum for even raising. 

But it's worth discussing because there's do much stigma associated with this. I also see a HUGE number of autistic indiviudals convicted in the UK for far right terror offences. Who are then also charged with child porn 

Controversial post. I've seen simiilar posts elsewhere that claim that sexual preference is also a statistical anomaly.

I know as an Autistic male that navigating the sexual desert of my twenties was only made possible by having a moral compass...

I'd like to see some stats before I come to see Autism as a danger factor for child predation.

I'd also like to see "Bratz" dolls banned and a complete re-think about how society interfaces with our children.

They are NOT there to be used as levers for advertisers to squeeze more money out of parents with massively advertised "toys". They are not there fr teachers to indoctrinate with the latest fad politics.

Teachers are not there to befriend the children and replace the parents because both of them HAVE to go to work to pay crippling costs of living.

Adulthood comes with extra powers and choices, children should be allowed to simply be children and not given to wonder of they have the right genitalia, and if they do, they can quiet easily work it out themselves even if it takes a bit longer without adult "help"..

Conspiracy theory is infested with graphic descriptions (which may or may not be founded on truth) about industrial scale child molesting activities and organisations, and to be honest if there is any truth to "Call me Skippy" then ultimately the sanctions society has in store for child abusers, does indeed need to include a death penalty... 

I have a family law judge in my extended family who once told me how many adults are on the child sex offenders register. Assuming as anecdotal evidence suggests, that the majority of such offenders do NOT face the law fro one reason or another including simply being good at not being caught, then this problem does reveal itself to be a serious issue that needs to be dealt with.

There is a MORAL dimension to life that we currently have decided not to tech our children since the seventies. This makes their education just as complete as if we missed one of the other more obvious dimensions off the curriculum..