Comment by btilly

Yes, those self-reports are very highly questionable.

First of all, we all rework our childhood memories to better fit our adult personas. Depressed people talk about all of the terrible things that happened to them as kids which make them depressed now. Happy people, all of the happy things that happened that make them happy now. A gay man might talk about wearing dresses and playing with dolls that made him gay.

But attempts to corroborate current stories with past events (the gold standard being longitudinal studies) find that none of that is true. Happy and depressed people have the usual mix of happy and sad childhood events, they just remember them selectively. The gay man's twin brother says maybe he wore a dress once, and has made a mountain out of a molehill. And so on.

Pedophiles are even worse. Pedophiles have the problem that they fall in love with children, and have to gaslight themselves into believing that they do no harm by having sex with the child. Under this pressure, pedophiles make up memories out of whole cloth.

However in general, we have not found any correlation between what actually happened to you before puberty, and who you wind up sexually attracted to after. We can't predict whether you'll be straight. Whether you'll be gay. Or whether you'll be a pedophile. Which means that if you were the unfortunate target of a pedophile, there is no particular reason to believe that have anything other than the 1% risk that every boy does of growing up into one.