Characteristics of paraphilics in Turkey: A retrospective study-20 years

ObjectiveThis study is carried out to research the frequency of occurrence and the characteristics of paraphilic cases in Turkey and forensic aspects of them and to explain forensic psychiatric studies of people show paraphilic actions and assess them from legal aspects.MethodThis research is done by studying a total of 101,208 cases who were sent to Istanbul Forensic Medicine Institute (FMI) by the judicial organs of 4th Specialization Board between 1984 and 2004 to decide whether they show paraphilic actions or not. When choosing the cases of pedophilic actions, incest incidents were excluded and 307 incidents were taken into assessment.ResultsThe male subjects are 97.4%, 39.7% of them are 19-29 years old, 10% of them are over age 60, 59% of the subjects are single, 36.5% of them are unemployed, 71.7% of the incidents have no physical disorder. The subjects who were imprisoned before were 20.2% and 22.1% of them had undergone psychiatric treatment before the incident.Twenty separate diagnosis are determined by the FMI for the subjects. There were mental retardation, schizophrenia and various personality disorders on the top the diagnosis list. The paraphilia type of the incidents are pedophilia (60.3%), exhibitionism (8.1%), pedophilia and exhibitionism (7.5%) and fetishism (5.9%). It was determined that there were more than one paraphilia type in 40 incidents (13%).FMI decided that 54.7% of them have criminal responsibility, 25.1% of them have no criminal responsibility, and 20.2% of them have reduced criminal responsibility.ConclusionThere were 20 separate type of diagnosis for the incidents. It is understood that paraphilic incidents do not seek for help although they have the symptoms of disorder and they are exposed to psychiatric assessment only when they face a criminal inquiry. This suggests that there are more paraphilic incidents in the society than what we encounter.