Minor attraction

Minor attraction is a stable, persistent pattern of attraction towards significantly younger, not fully developed people, where “not fully developed” means coming across in such a way that most would identify them as children and young adolescents.

Minor attraction is a term with over two decades of registered history of use. It includes subcategories: nepiophilia, pedophilia, hebephilia, and, sometimes, ephebophilia. Its main purpose is to distinguish pedophilia from other forms of attraction to younger people and give a better umbrella term.

Meaning
Minor attraction is an attraction of an adult towards a child or a young teenager, or of a child or a teenager towards a much younger child. This attraction can be romantic, sexual, or present any different type of feelings that the attracted person processes as something other than friendly or familial.

Categories
From the point of inner division, minor attraction can be classified in several ways.

By presence of other attractions

 * Exclusive, an attraction to children and young teenagers only;
 * Non-exclusive, an attraction to children and teens alongside an attraction to peers/adults.

By gender preference

 * Boy love, an attraction prioritizing boys;
 * Girl love, an attraction prioritizing girls;
 * Enby kid love, an attraction prioritizing nonbinary children;
 * Child love, an attraction with no gender preference.

By age preference

 * Nepiophilia, an attraction to babies and toddlers, typically under the age of 5;
 * Pedophilia, an attraction to prepubescent children, typically aged between 5 and 10;
 * Hebephilia, an attraction to pubescent teenagers, 11-14;
 * Ephebophilia, an attraction to postpubescent young people, 15-19 (this attraction may not be a map attraction inherently, but ephebophiles can identify as maps).

By type of attraction

 * Sexual;
 * Romantic;
 * Queer spectrum non-allo attractions.

History of the term
The first mention of this term is attributed to a journalist Heather Elizabeth Peterson, who used a construction “minor-attracted adults” in an article called Not An Oxymoron, published in Greenbelt Interfaith News in December 1998 The concept of minor attraction gained popularity and has led to the term “minor attracted person” to appear. The official Twitter page of B4U-ACT, a map mental health organization, states: “We started using the term MAP around 2007. The late Michael Melsheimer, our co-founder, introduced "minor-attracted person" as an alternative to "minor-attracted adult," to reflect that most MAPs realize these attractions before they are adults themselves.” The first registered instance of the usage of the term “minor attracted person” dates June 22, 2007.

Development
The existence of minor attraction has been a topic of speculation for a long time, and several theories of its development exist. Some of them have no scientific basis, some have limited credibility. There is no single solid theory yet.

Theory of choice
According to this theory, minor attraction is voluntarily chosen. This theory is propelled by people who want to attribute sexual and romantic feelings a moral value and it does not have any scientific data to back it up.

CSA theory
This theory links development of minor attraction to sexual trauma in childhood. The fact that many maps are child sexual abuse victims is used as supporting evidence. However, maps share high rates of CSA with other marginalized minorities, and there are many CSA survivors who are not maps.

Non-sexual trauma theory
This theory belongs to Dr James Cantor, who studied maps, convicted after a sex offense, and published a study Intelligence, Memory, and Handedness in Pedophilia in 2004, where he drew a correlation between mapness and such features as poor memory and low performance on intelligence tests. He developed the topic in later works and connected being a map to smaller height, low brain matter amount, and history of head injuries in childhood. Further research disproved his conclusions, as the findings were not repeated in studies working with maps who had no history of offenses .

Nurturing impulse theory
According to this theory, minor attraction develops as a result of wrongly applied nurturing signals that get interpreted as sexual desire. This theory, although popular with some maps who like defining their identity as “attraction to cuteness”, has several limitations. First, it starts with an assumption that the impulse must be either nurturing or sexual, overlooking romantic feelings. Second, it presents minor attraction as a feature exclusive to men.

Genetic theory
A study of twins found higher numbers of instances of minor attraction in twins with identical genes than in genetically diverse twins. This is the first and the only study of such a kind, and while the findings seem realistic, it cannot be used as a guide till the results are repeated.

It is most likely that minor attraction develops as a result of a combination of events, and choice is not one of them. Maps tend to refer to their attractions as something they discovered unexpectedly, typically in early youth. A large part of maps is aware of their attractions by the time they are 13-15.