This commentary has been published in the journal Child Abuse & Neglect in response to Ante Cuvalo’s and Christine Wekerle’s excellent paper “Child sex doll and sex robot research: Taking a child rights perspective”.
Cuvalo and Wekerle (2025) provide a compelling counterargument to the view that child sexual abuse dolls may have a role to play in abuse prevention and harm reduction. They point to the lack of empirical evidence that paedophiles who masturbate using a child sexual abuse doll pose less of a risk to children than those who do not, contextualised within broader findings that other child sexual abuse material reinforces rather than reduces deviant arousal patterns.
If robust evidence existed that such dolls mitigated risk of contact offending, the debate would take a different trajectory. In practice, child sexual abuse prevention is an applied field in which ethical flexibility is sometimes warranted to protect children from immediate harm. By way of example, the Australian government recently passed legislation to ensure that police officers infiltrating online paedophile communities may (in the context of a controlled operation and with case-by-case approval and oversight) create AI-generated child sexual abuse material without criminal liability (McIlroy, 2025). Such actions can be pivotal in gaining access to abuse networks for the purpose of identifying and rescuing child victims. While the prospect of police officers generating synthetic child sexual abuse material is fraught and controversial, to put it mildly, such actions are driven by the overriding imperative to protect children from sexual violence.
In contrast, advocacy for the therapeutic use of child sexual abuse dolls lacks any comparable evidentiary or ethical foundation. In the absence of data demonstrating a preventive effect (and in the face of significant evidence to the contrary), it is important to interrogate why some clinicians and researchers continue to advance this argument. Notably, the rationale is not novel, nor did it originate in the scientific literature. Since their emergence on the market, online pro-paedophile groups have lobbied for lawful access to child sexual abuse dolls, presenting them as a form of harm reduction. Today, internet forums for so-called “minor attracted people” are replete with posts defending the right to purchase such dolls and condemning criminalisation. These spaces are not concerned with preventing child sexual abuse. They are communities where men share sexual fantasies about children and contest the illegality of child sex offences (Gannon et al., 2023; Holt et al., 2010; Salter et al., 2025).
How, then, do the arguments of such online subcultures come to be mirrored in sections of the academic literature? In a recent review of research on “minor attracted people,” my colleagues and I identified a cluster of studies whose authors recruit participants primarily from online pro-paedophile forums (Farmer et al., 2024). Through surveys and interviews with these communities, the political aspirations of research participants have been reframed in scholarly publications as neutral empirical findings relevant to prevention. Strikingly, much of this work is devoid of the child protection orientation one would expect from literature claiming to contribute to abuse prevention. Instead, its conclusions echo the rhetoric of the pro-paedophile movement that has, for decades, sought social recognition of paedophilia as an oppressed sexual identity deserving of de-stigmatisation (DeYoung, 1989; Farmer et al., 2024; Goode, 2009).
The normative framework underpinning this scholarship might best be described as one of “paedophile rights”. Once paedophilia is reclassified as an oppressed sexual minority, its expression becomes situated within a discourse of sexual diversity and social tolerance. It is within this moral and political context that masturbation with child-like dolls can be reframed as an expression of “sexual fulfilment” or “wellbeing.” Such language brings with it a certain moral force. After all, who could object to someone else’s “fulfillment” or “wellbeing”? Who would deny the enriching role that sexuality plays in human flourishing?
At this point, it is clarifying to dispense with polite euphemisms and philosophical abstractions, and ask whether a man ejaculating into the silicon orifice of a doll shaped like a five-year-old girl constitutes a moment of sexual “fulfillment” or “wellbeing” by any reasonable definition of these terms. The fields of sex research and forensic psychology have long included a strain of thought that sexual release is, in and of itself, healthy and positive, and sexual denial is inherently harmful and cruel (Goode, 2011). However, sexual pleasure is only one dimension of sexual wellbeing. The category of sexual wellbeing includes the domains of sexual health and sexual justice, and these operate at the social as well as individual level (Mitchell et al., 2021). Is it healthy to eroticise the rape of a child? Is a society that licenses penetrable silicon dolls of children a just society?
Empirically, the profile of those purchasing child sexual abuse dolls belies any claim to therapeutic or preventive intent. Most buyers are men already in possession of other forms of child sexual abuse material, including the most extreme categories (Richards et al., 2025). Sexual interest in children is not a discrete orientation divorced from pathology. It is frequently associated with elevated levels of adverse childhood experiences (Wurtele et al., 2014), sexual preoccupation (Wurtele et al., 2018), and arousal to sadism and bestiality (Salter et al., 2023). This overlap is evident in child sexual abuse material, the most highly traded of which depicts acts of sadism and bestiality against pre-pubescent girls (Salter et al., 2025; Seto et al., 2018).
A central strength of Cuvalo and Wekerle’s (2025) intervention is their insistence on situating the debate over child sexual abuse dolls within the global legal and moral framework established by the Convention on the Rights of the Child and related human rights instruments. This framing is a crucial corrective. At its core, the debate over child sexual abuse dolls is not about therapeutic innovation, but about competing claims to rights: the rights of children, as established in international law, versus the purported rights of paedophiles to express their sexual arousal to children in some form. The former recognises the special status of children in human society, defined by their dependency and vulnerability, while the latter seeks social and legal accommodation for those who sexualise that vulnerability. Paedophiles, of course, are entitled to the same human rights as all people, but not to special sexual rights by virtue of their disorder. Their responsibilities to prevent harm to children are not lessened by their sexual interests; arguably, they are magnified by them.
Public health approaches to child sexual abuse prevention rightly emphasise early intervention and engagement with those at risk of offending (Austin & Salter, 2024). Yet these programs must operate within strict ethical and evidentiary boundaries, given the elevated risk profiles of the populations they target. Evaluations of these programs are mixed, and some models have paradoxically increased offending rates (Beier et al., 2015). This underscores the need for innovation grounded in caution, not ideology.
Ultimately, the debate over child sexual abuse dolls exposes a fault line in contemporary sexological and prevention discourse: between approaches that centre the rights and safety of children, and those that prioritise the sexual self-expression of adults with a sexual interest in children. Framed as a contest between “harm reduction” and “moral panic,” this debate risks obscuring the structural asymmetry at its heart - the power of adults to sexualise and commodify children and childhood. When research traditions draw their legitimacy from communities of sexual offenders and replicate their rhetorical framings, they do not advance prevention. They erode it. The language of “minor attraction,” “wellbeing,” and “sexual fulfilment” functions here as a form of moral laundering, sanitising a pattern of predation that international child rights frameworks were explicitly designed to prevent. If the field of sexual abuse prevention is to maintain public trust and moral coherence, it must anchor itself unequivocally in the rights of the child, not in the normalisation or accommodation of those who would sexualise them. The prevention of child sexual abuse is not advanced by legitimising the fantasies of paedophiles, but instead by the reaffirmation that children’s bodies are beyond the realm of sexual accessibility.
References
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