Paraphilia Epidemiology

One of the problems with determining the epidemiology is the lack of available statistics. The American Psychiatric association (2000) points out that because cultural and religious differences play such a major role in determining what type of behaviour is considered deviant or not, the diagnosis of paraphilias can be quite difficult. One certainty though, is it seems that the paraphilias are a set of disorders that are almost exclusively diagnosed in males (American Psychiatric Association; Kaplan, 1991; Munroe & Gauvain, 2001). The one exception to this arises in the case of masochism (American Psychiatric Association; Kaplan), which has been reported to have a ratio as high as 20:1 in favor of males: females, as opposed to other paraphilias which typically have a ratio of 99:1 (Kaplan). Another finding is that paraphilias are essentially unheard of in traditional societies (Munroe & Gauvain). Money and colleagues (1970) conducted a landmark study by being the first to explicitly study the paraphilias in a traditional culture. For this study, they used the Aborigines of Australia as their sample and failed to find any existence of paraphilias in this primitive society (Money et al., 1970). A later study by Graburn (1987) looked at child abuse cases among the Inuit of Canada and found that none of the reported cases of abuse involved sexual abuse. Again, one of the problems with this type of research is that different cultures may have different tendencies to report paraphilias, knowing that they will be considered deviant behaviour (Munroe & Gauvain), which could lead to the true prevalence and incidence rates of the paraphilias being very different from the reported statistics. As it stands, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (4th ed. text rev.) does not list any specific numbers on the prevalence or incidence of the paraphilias, other than one half of the individuals seen clinically for the paraphilias are married (American Psychiatric Association). The manual does however; speculate that the true prevalence rate is more likely to be higher than that which is currently accepted, given the large commercial market of pornography focused on paraphilic content (American Psychiatric Association). A study by Kafka and Hennen (2002) claimed that in terms of individual , the most common are exhibitionism, voyeurism, pedophilia, sexual masochism, sexual sadism, fetishism, transvestic fetishism, frotteurism, and telephone scatologia.