Dylan Stefanich

Religiosity is a main predictor of attitudes toward pedophilia (ATP). The strength of one’s overall religious beliefs is a significant predictor in negative ATP, but no study thus far has isolated the five facets of religiosity (i.e., ideology, intellect, public/private practice, experience) to examine independent predictability. This study adapted the Attitudes About Sadomasochism Scale (ASMS) to create the Attitudes Toward Pedophilia Scale (ATPS) and modified the Centrality of Religiosity Scale (CRS) to measure the ideological facet only and its relationship with ATP. Adults were surveyed via Reddit.com and a university survey pool. Bivariate analyses did not reveal a statistically significant correlation between strength of religious ideology and negative ATP. Limitations to this study include small sample size, lacking diversity, and a low-item scale to measure religious ideological strength, which might explain the main finding’s lack of statistical significance. Future researchers should work to account for these limitations to receive more comprehensive results, which could better implicate how to properly deal with pedophilia within religious groups.
Keywords: religiosity, pedophilia, attitudes toward pedophilia