In today's day and age pedophilia is becoming a more and more widespread problem. With the new revelations of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, the ongoing activity of "The North American Man Boy Love Association" (NAMBLA), and the discovery of pedophilia in "Hollywood", such as Michael Jackson and R. Kelly, pedophilia has been but in the spotlight like never before. Pedophilia, by definition, is reoccurring sexual arousal and desires or fantasies involving sexual impulses toward a pre-adolescent child or children. The pedophile must be above age 16, and the sexual attraction must involve a child of age 13 or younger who is at least 5 years younger than the adult. To be considered a pedophile, one has to have either acted on these sexual impulses, or the fantasies and/or sexual arousal and impulses disturb the individual. Additionally a pedophile is sexually aroused because the child is a child, regardless of the pedophile's sexual orientation, or the child's gender (umkc.edu/sites/hsw/issues/pedophil.html). Although many people are outraged by these various accounts, which they have every right to be, it seems that they fail to realize that pedophilia isn't only a sick fetish and sexual preference but is also in fact a mental illness (described in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV)). Additionally people seem to just bundle the sexual preference of pedophilia into one big group, but there are in fact actually many different types of pedophilia. .
The first type of pedophilia is "Fixated (or exclusive type) pedophilia". A fixated pedophile considers himself to be trapped in childhood. He usually has a very minimum amount of contact with adults, and relates very well with children. These types of pedophiles are mainly, but not exclusively, male and are primarily interested in boys, with whom they develop boy to boy relationships.