ABSTRACT
Pedophilia (from Greek, philia, “love,” pedeiktos, “child”), in a most general sense, is a paraphilia involving sexual attraction of an adult toward children that may lead to adult-child sex. Different workers have offered different denitions. Freund et al.1 use a number of Latinized words to classify sexual attraction along a wide spectrum of ages. The following terms are most relevant:
Gynephilia Sexual interest in adult women Androphilia Sexual interest in adult males Nepiophilia Sexual arousal by infants of the opposite sex; also known as
infantophilia Pedophilia Long-term sexual interest in children with the typical body shape of
an under 11 year old Hebephilia A preference for pubescent children between 11 and 14 years for
females and 11-16 years for males. Hebephilia is also known as ephebo-philia, hebophilia, phebophilia, or Lolita Syndrome (After Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel Lolita, in which the protagonist Humbert Hum-bert becomes sexually obsessed with a twelve year old girl named Dolores Haze). The words hebephilia and its variations come from Greek ephebos, “one arrived at puberty.”
