Evolutionary Perspectives on Sexual Offending

Evolutionary psychology has been successful in explaining diverse phenomena, such as the relative rarity with which people commit crimes against their biological relatives and the observed differences between males and females in romantic and sexual interest. According to an evolutionary view, the current sexual motivations of males and females were created in ancestral environments through their relationship with reproductive success. Sexual offending may arise in the context of a male sexual psychology that has been designed to maximize reproductive success by varying the proportion of mating effort and parental investment expended according to circumstances. Various kinds of sexual offending appear to be particular manifestations of this male sexual psychology either as modified by the offender's ontogenetic history or as pathology caused by some aspect of the normal sexual preference mechanism gone awry.