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The term pedophilia, or paedophilia is a medical term referring to sexual attraction of an adult to prepubescent children. It has been adopted into current usage, but popular usage sometimes uses the term more broadly to refer to sexual attraction towards older adolescents. Popular usage also often mistakenly conflates sexual attraction to children with sexual acts involving children -- some pedophiles never act on their urges, and pedophilia per se (i.e. sexual attraction in itself) is not criminal offence.

Clinically, pedophilia is defined, to give one definition (from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition, American Psychiatric Association):

Diagnostic criteria for 302.2 Pedophilia 
 A.  Over a period of at least 6 months, recurrent, intense
     sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors
     involving sexual activity with a prepubescent child or
     children (generally age 13 years or younger).
 B.  The fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors cause clinically
     significant distress or impairment in social, occupational,
     or other important areas of functioning. 
 C.  The person is at least age 16 years and at least 5 years
     older than the child or children in Criterion A.
 Note: Do not include an individual in late adolescence involved
 in an ongoing sexual relationship with a 12- or 13-year-old.

As noted above, clinical pedophilia can be diagnosed solely in the presence of "fantasies" or "sexual urges" on the subject's part -- it need not involve criminal sexual acts with children.

The popular use of the word "pedophilia" to describe sexual activity with underage adolescents does not fall under this definition. While such activity may be illegal in a particular jurisdiction, it frequently exemplifies only borderline pedophilia or no pedophilia at all. The terms hebephilia and ephebophilia are sometimes used to describe attraction to youths or adolescents, distinct from attraction to children.

Pedophilia is not a legal category or term, and although the acts pedophiles desire to carry out are crimes, these crimes are not legally referred to as "pedophilia". Pedophilia in itself is not a crime -- only acting upon such urges is.

Sometimes a clinical distinction is made between pedophiles and "situational offenders" -- a distinction, however, which is not reflected in the APA's definition above. A pedophile, according to this distinction, is a person whose primary sexual attraction is to children, while a situational offender is someone who engages in sexual activity with children not as their primary sexual preference but due to a particular situation they are faced with, and would not otherwise engage in such activity except for that situation.

Most cases of father-daughter incest, for example, are believed to involve fathers who are situational offenders, rather than pedophiles. Some have argued that these cases are caused by the withdrawal of the mother (often due to mental illness) from the family -- this withdrawal is more than purely sexual.

Modern western cultures in general strongly condemn pedophilic urges and sexual acts with children, regarding the later as very serious crimes, based on the idea that children are not sufficiently mature to be able to consent to sex and that sex with children are therefore rape.

A related term to pedophilia is pederasty, which refers to sexual relations, especially anal intercourse, with male adolescents or children.

See also NAMBLA, Child pornography, Edward Brongersma