Are LGB People More Likely to Be Sex Offenders?

In the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's National Incident-Based Reporting System records a known offender's age, sex, race and ethnicity, and not the offender's orientation. The Bureau of Justice Statistics' nine-year follow-up of released sex offenders describes them by sex, race, Hispanic origin and age. Under the federal standard for sex offender registries, a registry must hold 20 kinds of information, from DNA to internet identifiers; orientation is not one of them.

England and Wales are no different. The Ministry of Justice's statistics break defendants down by sex, age and ethnicity.

One official source there does record orientation. His Majesty's Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) publishes, once a year, what prisoners in England and Wales say about their own orientation.

These figures cover the whole prison population and are not split by offence, so they cannot show whether men convicted of sexual offences against children differ from other prisoners.

HMPPS says the quality of these data is assumed to be low. Orientation is self-reported, it says, and likely to be under-reported and prone to bias towards heterosexuality.

Both sides of this argument quote small studies of convicted men, clinic charts and volunteers. Three of those studies, from 1978 to 1994, turn up on both sides.

A Denver team went through the charts of 352 children seen at the child sexual abuse clinic of a children's hospital. They noted whether the alleged offender was reported to be gay, lesbian or bisexual. In the 269 cases with an identified adult offender, two were identified as gay or lesbian. In 222 of those cases, the alleged offender was a heterosexual partner of a close relative of the child. The authors concluded that these children were unlikely to have been molested by identifiably gay or lesbian people.

That conclusion is a finding about what the charts recorded, since the researchers did not interview the offenders. Two cases are also too few for a precise figure. The authors put the likely share of cases with a recognizably homosexual adult as the abuser at 0 to 3.1%.

A random sample of 175 men convicted in Massachusetts of sexual assault against children was assessed for adult sexual orientation and the sex of their victims. All were examined from 1970 to 1975 at a state centre that evaluates whether sex offenders are dangerous. The authors reported that every man who had turned to children from adult relationships was heterosexual in adult orientation, whether his victims were boys or girls.

The psychologist Gregory Herek's account of the paper's counts splits the 92 men who had turned to children from adult relationships into 70 heterosexual and 22 bisexual. The 22 had sex with men on occasion but never preferred men to women. The remaining 83 of the 175 men were fixated on children.

No man was primarily attracted to adult men. The authors raised the possibility that the adult heterosexual male is a greater risk to children than the adult homosexual male.

Paul Cameron has argued that those who practise homosexual acts molest children more often. In 1985 he cited the paper, as Herek quotes him, as showing that 54% of its molestations were by bisexual or homosexual practitioners. Herek found the figure nowhere in the paper.

At the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry in Toronto, researchers measured penile volume while men viewed nude figures of different ages and sexes. Men attracted to adult men, recruited through a gay bookstore, responded no more to boys than men attracted to adult women responded to girls. The groups were small (28 to 78 men), and arousal in a laboratory is not offending.

The authors, citing Cameron, still treated offenders against boys as a substantially larger share of homosexual men than offenders against girls are of heterosexual men. They suggested, as a speculation, that the development of pedophilia is more closely linked with homosexuality than with heterosexuality.

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The argument turns on a word doing two jobs. Sex researchers describe a man's erotic interest by both the age and the sex of the people he is drawn to. A pedophile is a man whose erotic interest in children exceeds his interest in adults. Men drawn mainly to adult men are called androphilic, and men drawn mainly to adult women gynephilic.

A gay man, in ordinary speech, is androphilic. A homosexual pedophile, in the clinical literature, is a pedophile whose interest is in boys. The sex researcher James Cantor calls it "mere sophistry" to name the sex an offender is drawn to and not the age.

A National Research Council panel made the same point in 1993, in a passage the psychologist Gregory Herek quotes. Sorting child molesters into homosexual and heterosexual, it wrote, "relies on the premise that male molesters of male victims are homosexual in orientation". In the same passage, the panel wrote that most men who molest boys do not report sexual interest in adult men.

In laboratory tests of arousal, pedophiles distinguish less between females and males than men attracted to adults do. So, Cantor argues, pedophiles are likelier to abuse children of their less preferred sex than men attracted to adults are to have sex with adults of their less preferred sex. He argues, too, that the share of homosexuality among pedophiles "cannot be meaningfully compared" with the share among men attracted to adults.

Paul Cameron's figures are set aside first, since the serious version of this argument is not his. His 1985 review concluded that people who practised homosexual acts were at least 12 times more apt to molest a child. After a correction for bisexuals, it concluded, the figure was probably at least 16 times.

Cameron counted same-sex molestations as homosexual acts and put them at a third or more of reported cases. He set that against an estimate that about 4% of people are bisexual or homosexual. That step is the premise the National Research Council panel described in 1993.

According to the psychologist Gregory Herek:

• the American Psychological Association dropped Cameron in 1983 for an ethics violation (Cameron says he had resigned first);
• the American Sociological Association condemned "his consistent misrepresentation of sociological research" in 1986;
• the federal judge in Baker v. Wade found in 1985 that he had "made misrepresentations to this Court".

These judgements bear on his numbers but do not settle the question.

In 2002 the sex researcher James Cantor put men who offend against boys at roughly 20 to 30% of all offenders against children. He put gay men at about 2 to 4% of men, the range he said nearly every large probability survey had found. Such a survey gives everyone in the population a known chance of being chosen. Cantor accepts that gap between the two figures.

Cantor gives three forensic series, from the Kinsey Institute, a Toronto clinic and Canada's federal corrections service. In those series, the share of offenders with a male victim comes to about a third.

Kurt Freund and Robin Watson turned the gap into a number. Men who had offended only against a daughter or stepdaughter were no longer seen at their Toronto laboratory. So Freund and Watson added an imaginary 98 of them. That step gave 1.93 offenders against girls for each one against boys.

They then estimated from their laboratory's arousal test how many were true pedophiles. That estimate brought the ratio to 1.35 or 1.44 pedophiles preferring girls for each one preferring boys.

Abel and colleagues had found in 1987, Freund and Watson note, that men who offended against boys outside the family reported a mean of about 150 victims each. In the same study, men who offended against girls outside the family reported a mean of about 20. Assuming, tentatively, that the chance of being caught rises in step with the number of victims, Freund and Watson scaled the ratio up by that difference, to about 11:1.

They took the ratio among men attracted to adults to be about 20:1, so on this calculation pedophilia is proportionally more common where erotic development runs toward males. Their abstract says this "would not indicate that androphilic males have a greater propensity to offend against children".

The Australian Institute of Criminology reports Abel's medians as about 4.4 victims for offenders against boys and 1.3 for offenders against girls. It also reports that Abel's team said the medians better reflect the usual offender. With the medians, the same step gives about 5:1.

In 2000 Ray Blanchard and colleagues found homosexuality in 25% of the pedophiles they studied, and called that prevalence high.

Erickson, Walbek and Seely drew on the records of 229 convicted child molesters admitted to the Minnesota Security Hospital between 1975 and 1984, as Herek describes the study. Their 1988 paper is quoted as finding that 86% of offenders against males "described themselves as homosexual or bisexual"; Cantor reports it as 86% homosexual.

The 86% is not in the abstract, and it rests on what the men said about themselves; offenders, Cantor notes, are "highly motivated to claim any self-descriptor other than pedophile". As quoted, it pools two labels, so it cannot be assigned to gay men or to bisexual men.

In prisons in England and Wales in 2024 to 2025, gay and lesbian offenders made 5% of starts on accredited treatment programmes for sexual offending (44 starts). Bisexual offenders made 4% (42). Across all programme types, by contrast, each group made about 1% of starts. Among prisoners who declared an orientation from January to March 2025, 1.3% were gay or lesbian and 1.4% bisexual. So both groups appear on those programmes at three to four times their share of the prison population.

The counts are small, a start is not a conviction, orientation is self-declared, and His Majesty's Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) assumes its orientation data are of low quality.

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Each route into the data lets in different people.

As the psychologist Gregory Herek points out, none of this research comes from a probability sample, one that can be assumed to represent all abusers. Most comes from convicted men or men who sought treatment. Most people sexually abused as children told no one at the time, England and Wales's crime survey finds.

A population claim needs a defined population, a defined outcome, one orientation measure for offenders and everyone else, and a correction for how differently offenders get caught. No study here has all four.

Sex between consenting men was a crime in England and Wales until 1967 and in 13 American states until 2003.

The Supreme Court struck down Texas's version in Lawrence v. Texas in 2003, but earlier convictions stood. Mississippi, Idaho and South Carolina went on making people convicted of sodomy before 2003 register as sex offenders.

A federal judge wrote in 2018 that Mississippi's sodomy law could not be squared with Lawrence, yet some men were still listed in 2024, Mississippi Today reported. Idaho was ordered to take two men off its registry in 2021 and settled in 2022.

South Carolina agreed in a court order of 22 April 2022 to remove everyone registered solely for sodomy between consenting adults. The suit had been brought by a man convicted of buggery in 2001 for consensual sex with another man. It said at least 18 other people were registered for buggery or an out-of-state equivalent.

In England and Wales a 1967 Act allowed sex between two men only in private and from 21. At the time, a man and a woman could consent at 16. The men's age fell to 18 in 1994 and to 16 on 8 January 2001.

Lord Sharkey proposed pardons for men convicted under those laws. In 2016 he said that about 65,000 men had been convicted under them and 15,000 were still alive, as the BBC reported. The dead were pardoned automatically; a living man keeps his conviction unless he applies and it qualifies for deletion.

Long conviction series and registries therefore count some men for sex that is now legal, most heavily on the same-sex side, by an amount nobody has published. The nearest figure is a 2020 Williams Institute survey of 964 people on US registries, answered anonymously online. In it, 9% of lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer or transgender respondents said they had been charged with sodomy, against 3% of the rest. It is a survey of volunteers, not an audit of a registry.

Nobody knows the orientation of abusers who are never caught. No published audit says how many registry entries rest on conduct legal today.

No study has measured whether lesbian or bisexual women offend at a different rate. Women do sexually abuse children; a 2019 review by Tozdan, Briken and Dekker says the taboo around it may leave it under-reported and hard to research.

Groth and Gary wrote in 1982 that there appeared to be "practically no reportage" of lesbian adults molesting girls, as the psychologist Gregory Herek quotes them. Of the 219 abused girls in the Denver study, the abuse of one was attributed to a lesbian, the American Psychological Association's 2000 Supreme Court brief reports. Two studies of registered women labelled some of them homosexual offenders from records that note the sex of victims, not the orientation of offenders.

An American Psychological Association official told the fact-checking site Lead Stories in 2023 that researchers do not consider gay or lesbian people likelier to abuse. The official pointed to the association's 2000 Supreme Court brief, which says gay adults do not present a heightened danger of sexual abuse. That position accurately describes an absence of evidence. No study has measured equal rates either.

No. In the United States and in England and Wales, no official statistics give a rate of sexual offending by orientation. So there is no measured rate behind the claim, and none behind the reply that gay men offend at the same rate.

What circulates instead comes from small studies. Paul Cameron's multiplier, quoted as 10 to 20 times more likely than heterosexuals, counted every same-sex molestation as a homosexual act. Most men who molest boys, though, report no sexual interest in adult men, and in one sample of 175 convicted men none was primarily attracted to adult men.

Two findings lean toward the claim, but neither measures how often gay men offend. In 1992 Freund and Watson estimated that men attracted to children prefer boys more often, in proportion, than men attracted to adults prefer men. Their abstract says this does not show that gay men are more likely to offend. In England and Wales, gay, lesbian and bisexual prisoners start treatment programmes for sexual offending at three to four times their share of the prison population. But that rests on only 86 programme starts, and prisoners report their own orientation.

For lesbian and bisexual women, no rate has been measured at all.

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