Watching a Great Paper [Los Angeles Times] Dive Into Pedophilia Chic

When I was a news editor at the Los Angeles Times during the ’80s, I thought I had seen the outer limits of liberal moral meltdown. On issue after issue, most staff members took the politically correct line, from abortion to welfare, gun control, tax increases, porn “censorship” and “gay” rights.

But the paper has now outdone itself, even by its own liberal standards. By awarding a Los Angeles Times Book Prize to the odious Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex, by Judith Levine, the Times has embraced pedophilia chic as its latest cause. I know some good Times staffers who must be mortified.

It seems those men who hang around the L.A. parks in raincoats stuffed with candy and porn tapes may be having a curious and undue influence in the inner sanctums of Times decision making.

Lest Times editors aver that this is an overstatement, consider that Harmful to Minors, published by the University of Minnesota Press, calls for lowering the age of sexual consent to 12, and teaching children about sex with other children and with adults, in all varieties. Levine praises a child-care center where “children of all ages may engage in masturbation without shame and consensual child-with-child sexual touching without adult interference” (p. 183). She promotes “outercourse,” which “returns lovers to what Freud called polymorphous perversity—the infantile state of full-body sensuality, in which various body parts don’t enjoy greater or lesser respect or greater or lesser capacity for pleasure. Male, female, or transgendered, we all have mouths, necks, toes, anuses, brains, and nerve endings” (p.196).

The book depends heavily on pedophile sources, including works touted by the North American Man-Boy Love Association.

Levine cites uncritically such academics as Theo Sandfort (p. 58 and note on p. 247), a member of the editorial board of Paidika: the Journal of Paedophilia, which once ran a notice that told readers the journal is edited by self-admitted pedophiles. Levine identifies Sandfort only as a “psychologist.” One of Sandfort’s articles is “The argument for adult-child sexual contact: A critical appraisal and new data.” Another is “Pedophile relationships in the Netherlands: Alternative lifestyle for children?”

How about Edward Brongersma, another Paidika board member, whose book Male Intergenerational Intimacy is cited on page 247 in note 47? He was convicted for having sex with a 16-year-old boy, and was the editor of Loving Boys: A Multidisciplinary Study of Sexual Relations Between Adult and Minor Males.

Levine finds numerous ways to cite Lawrence A. Stanley, who was arrested last year on child porn charges in South America. One of the references is to an article he wrote for Playboy magazine titled “The Child-Porn Myth.”

Then there is Johns Hopkins Professor Emeritus John Money, who told Paidika that he saw nothing pathological about a 12-year-old boy having a sexual relationship with an older man, and presided over the sexual mutilation of a boy whom he then tried to insist could be raised as a girl. Money wrote that the transformation was successful, even though the boy rebelled, wore boys’ clothing and eventually had a surgical reversal. The account is recorded in the book As Nature Made Him, by John Colapinto. Levine calls Money “one of the foremost authorities on sexual abnormalities.”

The Times’ judges call the book “a cogent and passionate critique of the war against young people’s sexuality.” Now that’s a nice turn of phrase. Protecting children’s innocence from premature exposure to sex is a “war against young people’s sexuality.”

Alfred C. Kinsey, the late, sex-obsessed fraud who is the godfather of the clique that is trying to mainstream pedophilia, would have been proud. Kinsey used slipshod “science” to mainstream sexual deviancy, including the notion that children are “sexual beings” from birth. Likewise, Levine gives an academic gloss to the campaign to strip children of protection from adults who take sexual advantage of them.

The Times judges also praise Levine’s savaging of “abstinence-only” sex education, which she severely misrepresents, and they laud Levine for insisting on “adults’ responsibility to give affirmative support to children’s and teenagers’ sexual development.”

Given the well-publicized Internet stings of pedophile rings in the last couple of years, there is apparently no shortage of adults who would like to help children with their “sexual development.”

It’s one thing for the pedophile lobby to push its peculiar and dangerous notions. It is quite another for respected institutions like the University of Minnesota and the Los Angeles Times to hand them a megaphone.

Robert Knight is director of the Culture and Family Institute, an affiliate of Concerned Women for America and a former news editor for the Los Angeles Times.

Concerned Women for America
1015 Fifteenth St. N.W., Suite 1100
Washington, D.C. 20005
Phone: (202) 488-7000
Fax: (202) 488-0806
E-mail: mail@cwfa.org

The Pedophilia Debate Continues
--And DSM Is Changed Again
by Linda Ames Nicolosi
The very fact that APA admits to holding a moral viewpoint on a psychological issue ought to have opened up a broad new challenge to psychology's authority as our culture's secular priesthood.

For many years now, psychology has been locked into a philosophical quandary. Exactly what is a "psychiatric disorder"? Many critics despair of ever devising a catalogue of mental illnesses which can be considered to represent science.

Exactly how puzzling this quandary actually is, will be illustrated in an upcoming issue of the Archives of Sexual Behavior.

The Archives is the official publication of the International Academy of Sex Research. That journal will feature a symposium with at least one prominent psychiatrist arguing that pedophilia is in fact (at least in some contexts) a disorder--while another prominent clinician says that it is not.

But if pedophilia isn't a mental disorder, then just what is? If any man who violates the innocence and integrity of a child can be judged to "have nothing psychologically wrong with him"...then has the public in fact broadly misunderstood psychology's scope and explanatory power?

APA Reverses Diagnostic Change on Pedophilia
Although pedophilia remains illegal, and our culture still considers it morally wrong, recent changes in the APA's own diagnostic and statistical manual (DSM) have reopened the discussion of the psychological dimension of pedophilia.
History of the Diagnosis. In the DSM-III, the American Psychiatric Association contended that merely acting upon one's urges toward children was considered sufficient to generate a diagnosis of pedophilia. But then a few years later, in the DSM-IV, the APA changed its criteria so that a person who molested children was considered to have a psychiatric disorder only if his actions "caused clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational or other important areas of functioning." In other words, a man who molested children without remorse, and without experiencing significant impairment in his social and work relationships, could be diagnosed by a clinician as a "psychologically normal" type of pedophile.

Challenged by NARTH to defend the change, the APAstated categorically that it had, in fact, no intention of normalizing pedophilia. However, "man-boy love" advocates cheered that DSM shift as good news.

Pedophile-Friendly Study Soon Follows
And a door indeed appeared to have been opened by the DSM change, because soon afterward, a journal of the American Psychological Association published the infamous Rind, et al. article--a study which downplayed the effects of, in particular, man-boy sex. Rind supported his argument with the finding that quite a few of the boys remembered their childhood sexual experiences positively.
As a result of the provocative Rind study's appearance in an APA journal, the American Psychological Association was struck with an embarrassing wave of criticism--what it called "the political storm of the century." That public-relations nightmare hit "with gale-force winds raging from the media, congressional leaders, state legislatures, and conservative grassroots organizations," according to the Association's journal, The American Psychologist.

The APA apologized for the study --- following later with another statement which sounded like backpedaling (with the Association insisting that researchers have a right to scientific freedom). Then it issued a new and quite surprising official statement.

APA said that no matter what the research showed about the psychological effects of pedophile relationships-- pedophilia remained, in its opinion, "morally" wrong.

Moral Philosophy and the Pedophilia Problem
Morally wrong? This was an odd statement indeed from a scientific organization. What, then, was the APA's moral position on, say...adultery or abortion? What about the morality of sexually open relationships? Would APA follow up with an official position on, say, the morality of polygamy?
The very fact that APA admitted to holding a moral viewpoint on a psychological issue ought to have opened up a broad new challenge to psychology's authority and its presumptions as our culture's arbiter of practically every social and moral issue now under debate.

Indeed, the time was then ripe for layman to issue a fruitful challenge to the entire concept of psychological health--its inherent limitations, its value-laden nature, and its meaninglessness without dependence on an underlying social-moral philosophy.

Most of all, the discussion could have addressed psychology's inability to scientifically answer the essential, basic questions upon which any meaningful psychology must be based...foundational questions such as, "What is good?" And, "What is the meaning and purpose of sexuality?" Or, "How does one define 'self-actualization'?" "What exactly is our distinctively human nature? How does our nature require that we live?"

In an age when even our culture's moral leaders feel obligated to look to science to defend their positions, such a discussion could clarify to the public what psychologists already know but tend to be loathe to publicly admit--that science alone has a limited capacity to either define or resolve our social-moral problems.

APA Recognizes the Threat to its Authority
The Psychological Association must have been aware of the implications of its own pronouncement that pedophilia was immoral, because the March 2002 issue of the American Psychologist carried an official article stating that the association had learned something from the Rind fiasco. Two of those lessons learned were that, first, the APA must build bridges to conservative groups, and second, in the future, psychology must be prepared to defend its validity as a branch of science.

The DSM Quietly Changes Again
Soon afterward, public outrage from the Psychological Association's fiasco may have moved on to touch the Psychiatric Association as well.
In fact, the Association has just quietly instituted a change in its most recent diagnostic manual--the Text Revision of the DSM-IV--regarding the definition of pedophilia. In a return to its previous standard, now, merely acting upon one's pedophilic urges is sufficient for a diagnosis of disorder.

NARTH Scientific Advisory Board member Russell Hilliard, along with psychiatrist Robert Spitzer, have just published a letter in the American Journal of Psychiatry which points out that in contrast to the DSM's statement that "no substantive changes" had been made in the latest DSM-IV Text Revision, "in fact, DSM-IV-TR has made a substantive change" in its criteria for pedophilia.

"Would it not have been better," Hilliard and Spitzer note about the APA's obvious silence, "for the DSM-IV-TR editors to have acknowledged that there were a few substantive changes in the criteria, and that for the Paraphilias they were correcting a mistake made in DSM-IV?"

The Missing Moral Dimension
But still, one thorny foundational question remains. How do we define the "harm" in pedophilia? Is that harm psychological, characterological, or both? How can psychology recognize harm resulting to the integrity of one's character? And what can psychology know about character, anyway?
Many religious traditions recognize pedophilia as an inherent affront to the integrity of the person--but such a characterological and spiritual concept may be difficult to conceptualize, and even more difficult to assess, in narrowly psychological terms.

Perhaps the harm done by pedophilia will be difficult to measure because it is subtle and values-laden. Maybe the molested boy will grow up to routinely sexualize his samesex relationships. Maybe he'll have difficulty with marriage and mature intimacy. Maybe he'll not only have a distorted concept of gender differences, but a distorted understanding of generational distinctions as well--which could lead to the sexualizing of his own mentoring relationships with children.

How Social Science Studies Mislead
In fact, the molested child who has been hurt the most, in a moral and characterological sense, may actually be the boy or girl who grows up as an adult who truly believes--and who reports to researchers (as many of those cited by the Rind study did, in fact, state) that they "remember the sexual relationship positively."
The man whom these psychological studies trumpet as being "unharmed" by their childhood molestation may, therefore, have been the most harmed by the experience--and he may be the person most likely to reenact it on another child.

Perhaps, indeed, many of the deepest harms to the child, and to the perpetrator, are largely outside of scientific psychology's understanding. So, in a curious twist, maybe the APA--in throwing up its hands and saying pedophilia was "morally wrong"--was right.

Psychologist Gerard van den Aardweg has observed that the Rind study didn't find significant harm to all molested children because Rind was " looking through the wrong glasses." Perhaps the pedophilia debate will challenge psychology to begin to openly incorporate the missing moral dimension-- recognizing our human nature in all its intertwined psychological, moral and spiritual complexity.

Copyright © NARTH. All Rights Reserved.

Updated: 30 September 2002

On the Pedophilia Issue:
What the APA Should Have Known
By Joseph Nicolosi, Ph.D. and Dale O'Leary
Deconstructionists argue that distinctions between the genders are arbitrary and political. Now, the same argument is being advanced by man-boy love advocates about the distinction between the generations.

An article published last summer in the American Psychological Association's Psychological Bulletin has drawn a recent firestorm of criticism. Talk show hosts and congressmen are calling for investigations. The outrage has focused on the authors' conclusion, based on their analysis of child-molestation studies, that "the negative effects [of sexual abuse] were neither pervasive nor typically intense."

The article was entitled "A Meta-analytic Examination of Assumed Properties of Child Sexual Abuse Using College Samples."

APA spokeswoman Rhea Faberman defended publication of the article as part of the scientific work of the organization, saying, "We try to create a lot of dialogue." She labeled "ridiculous" the claim of radio talk-show host Dr. Laura Schlessinger that publication of the article and the attempt to normalize pedophilia were in any way related.

Contrary to Ms. Faberman's assertion, however:

There is a real and growing movement to legitimize and also legalize sexual relations between boys aged 10 to 16 and adult males;
Robert Bauserman, one of the authors of the article, has associated himself with the pedophilia movement through a previous article;
The movement's strategy is to promote the "objective" study of child/adult sex, free of moral considerations;
The APA should have known this before they published the article.
Those who are interested in legalizing sexual relations between adults and children want to change the parameters of the discussion from the "absolutist" moral position, to the "relative" position that it can sometimes be beneficial. The A.P.A. article furthered exactly this position.
Deconstructionists have argued--with some success--that distinctions between the genders are arbitrary and politically motivated. Now, the same argument is being advanced about the distinction between the generations.

In a recent lead article of the Journal of Homosexuality (1), for example, Harris Mirkin says the "sexually privileged" have disadvantaged the pedophile through sheer political force in the same way that blacks were disadvantaged by whites before the civil-rights movement.

The Movement to Legitimize Pedophilia
In 1981, Dr. Theo Sandfort, co-director of the research program of the Department of Gay and Lesbian Studies at the University of Utrecht, Netherlands, interviewed 25 boys aged 10 to 16 who were currently involved in sexual relationships with adult men. The interviews took place in the homes of the men.

According to Sandfort, "For virtually all the boys ... the sexual contact itself was experienced positively..." Could an adult-child sexual contact, then, truly be called positive for the child? Based on the research presented, Sandfort answered that question in the affirmative.

The study was severely criticized by experts in the field of child sexual abuse. Dr. David Mrazek, co-editor of Sexually Abused Children and Their Families, attacked the Sandfort research as unethical, saying:

"In this study, the researchers joined with members of the National Pedophile Workshop to 'study' the boys who were the sexual 'partners' of its members ... there is no evidence that human subject safeguards were a paramount concern. However, there is ample evidence that the study was politically motivated to 'reform' legislation.
"These researchers knowingly colluded with the perpetuation of secret illegal activity ... In the majority of cases, these boys' parents were unaware of these sexual activities with adult men, and the researchers contributed to this deception by their action."

Child sexual-abuse expert Dr. David Finkelhor also criticized the Sandfort research, pointing to the numerous studies which show adult-child sexual contact as a predictor of later depression, suicidal behavior, dissociative disorders, alcohol and drug abuse, and sexual problems.

Dr. Finkelhor strongly defended laws against child/adult sex, saying that many of those now-grown children are very active in lobbying for such protection.

In 1990, the campaign to legalize man-boy sex was furthered by the publication of a two-issue special of the Journal on Homosexuality, reissued as Male Intergenerational Intimacy: Historical, Socio-Psychological, and Legal Perspectives.

This volume provided devastating information on the way psychologically immature pedophile men use vulnerable boys who are starved for adult nurturance and protection.

In the forward, Gunter Schmidt decries discrimination against and persecution of pedophiles, and describes

"successful pedophile relationships which help and encourage the child, even though the child often agrees to sex while really seeking comfort and affection. These are often emotionally deprived, deeply lonely, socially isolated children who seek, as it were, a refuge in an adult's love and for whom, because of their misery, see it as a stroke of luck to have found such an 'enormously nurturant relationship'."
There is another deeply disturbing article in the volume, revealingly titled, "The Main Thing is Being Wanted: Some Case Studies on Adult Sexual Experiences with Children." In it, pedophiles reveal their need to find a child who will satisfy their desire for uncritical affirmation and a lost youth. One of the men justifies his activity as a search for love, and complains that: "Although I've had physical relationships with probably, I don't know, maybe a hundred or more boys over the years, I can only point to four or five true relationships over that time."

The volume also contains an introductory article which decries society's anti-pedophile sentiment. The authors complain about the difficulty studying man-boy relationships in "an objective way," and they hope the social sciences will adopt a broader approach which could lead to understanding of the "diversity and possible benefits of intergenerational intimacy."

Bauserman Defends Sandfort's Research
The same volume contains an article by Robert Bauserman-co-author of the A.P.A. study--which complains that objective research is impossible in a social climate that condemns man-boy sexual relationships. Bauserman decries the prevailing ideology that labels all boys as "victims" and all adult pedophiles as "perpetrators." He attacks researchers Mzarek and Finkelhor as being driven by a "particular set of beliefs about adult-juvenile sex." Bauserman looks for a new "scientific objectivity," with the explicit call for research that will challenge the social-moral taboo against adult/child sex. The meta-analysis which he co-authored, and which the American Psychological Association published, can be seen as Bauserman's follow-up to his Journal of Homosexuality article.

More Recent Defenses of Pedophilia
Harris Mirkin recently wrote a lead article in the Journal of Homosexuality entitled "The Pattern of Sexual Politics: Feminism, Homosexuality and Pedophilia." Using social-constructionist theory, he argues that the concept of child molestation is a "culture- and class-specific creation" which can and should be changed.

He likens the battle for the legalization of pedophilia to the battles for women's rights, homosexual rights, and even the civil rights of blacks.

He sees the hoped-for shift as taking place in two stages. During the first stage, the opponents of pedophilia control the debate by insisting that the issue is non-negotiable--while using psychological and moral categories to silence all discussion.

But in the second stage, Mirkin says, the discussion must move on to such issues as the "right" of children to have and enjoy sex.

If this paradigm shift could be accomplished, the issue would move from the moral to the political arena, and therefore become open to negotiation. For example, rather than decrying sexual abuse, lawmakers would be forced to argue about when and under what conditions adult/child sex could be accepted. Once the issues becomes "discussible," it would only be a matter of time before the public would begin to view pedophilia as another sexual orientation, and not a choice for the pedophile.

The response to the APA article shows that for the present, social opposition to pedophilia continues to be strong. Finkelhor's response to Bauserman, which was included in Male Intergenerational Intimacy, explains why:

"Some types of social relationships violate deeply held values and principles in our culture about equality and self-determination. Sex between adults and children is one of them. Evidence that certain children have positive experiences does not challenge these values, which have deep roots in our worldview."
To pedophile advocates, any discussion of the benefits of child-adult sex is a victory. The APA should have understood this, should have known about Bauserman's connections, and should have been well aware of--and vocally resistent to--the growing movement to legalize pedophilia.

Endnote

Mirkin, Harris, "The Pattern of Sexual Politics: Feminism, Homosexuality and Pedophilia," Journal of Homosexuality vol. 37(2), 1999, p. 1-24.

Copyright © NARTH. All Rights Reserved.

Updated: 30 September 2002

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.