While the hateful folk put their fingers in their ears and sing loudly
to ignore any rational discourse, I will do the same thing but from
the reverse side. I wove together the following quilt of data and I
have a lot more data where this came from including critiques of some
of the methods used in psychology in general. While I expect those
that hate to continue to ignore all rational thinking on this
subject, I hope that some people give these things some thought. Oh
and that Rend study that everybody condemned loudly actually did have
sup****t from the psychological community in general, but the outcry
from the politicians and the public was so loud that they had to
'morally' condemn the paedophilia. Morally condemning paedophilia is
equivalent to saying what? It certainly isn't a scientific or medical
statement, that's for sure.
From the book Functional and Dysfunctional ***ual Behavior
Of all the paraphilias, pedophilia is certainly the one causing most
concern to society. This means that research on this disorder is much
more abundant than on exhibitionism or feti****sm. However, there are
serious limitations with regard to the research effort. The most
serious one is that research has been concentrated on
pedophiles who have been the object of criminal prosecution.
Diagnostic criteria, epidemiology and general description
According to the DSM-IV, the criteria that need to be satisfied before
pronouncing the diagnosis of pedophilia are:
A. Over a period of at least 6 months, recurrent, intense ***ually
arousing fantasies, ***ual urges, or behaviors involving ***ual
activity with a prepubescent child or children (generally age 13 or
younger).
B. The fantasies, ***ual urges, or behaviors cause clinically
significant distress or impairment in social, occupational or other
im****tant areas of functioning.
C. The person is at least 16 years of age and at least 5 years older
than the child or children in Criterion A. (Reprinted with permission
from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Copyright 2000. American Psychiatric Association.)
Many elements in these criteria are identical to those found in the
diagnostic criteria for exhibitionism and feti****sm. It is only the
object of ***ual attentions that has changed. The criteria also
contain some specifications that are im****tant. One concerns
the age of the incentive, which must be younger than 13, another
concerns the age of the patient, that must be over 16, and the third
concerns the difference between incentive and patient, that must be a
minimum of 5 years. All these age and time limits are arbitrary,
essentially reflecting dominant social conventions. Nevertheless,
they are unambiguous and as such useful. In addition to the three
criteria mentioned above, pedophiles are also categorized according to
the *** of the partner. There are pedophiles attracted exclusively to
boys, exclusively to girls and those that are nonselective.
More elegant terms have been used, for example hetero***ual
pedophilia, homo***ual pedophilia and undifferentiated pedophilia.
Those belonging to the last group are believed to be a minority of the
pedophiles. Somewhere between 60 and 70% of all cases of pedophilia
are supposed to be hetero***ual (Mohr et al., 1964). Penile vaginal
intercourse is rarely the ***ual behavior of choice for a hetero***ual
pedophile. In fact, it appears to occur essentially with partners
around or above puberty. Most occasions of pedophile penile–vaginal
intercourse have been re****ted to be consensual (Vetter, 1972). The
most common behaviors displayed by a pedophile is a kind of childish
behavior, with looking at the partner’s genitals, or making the
partner look at their own genitals, fondling or being fondled by the
partner being the most common behaviors. Masturbation during this ***
play is not uncommon. The homo***ual pedophile likes to masturbate his
partner and sometimes be masturbated by him. Fellatio is also quite
common, while anal intercourse is rare.
Pedophiles may be of all ages, from adolescence to senescence. The
mean age was estimated to be 37 years in one study (Fisher, 1969).
About half of them were married. Other data suggest a trimodal age
distribution of pedophiles, with the largest peak in early
adolescence, followed by a slightly smaller peak in the mid-
30s, and a still smaller peak in the mid-50s. Of the pedophiles over
20 years, 75% were married (Mohr et al., 1964). Other characteristics
like intelligence, personality traits, occupation, education and
similar do not appear to distinguish pedophiles from the general
population. Although there have been numerous suggestions concerning
all kinds of abnormalities among pedophiles, such as deviant responses
on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, deficiencies in
empathy, signs of psychopathy, or addiction to ***, just to mention a
few of the many disturbances attributed to them, none of these
suggestions resists careful scrutiny (Okami and Goldberg, 1992;
Marshall et al., 1995; Marshall and Hall, 1995). It seems that a
typical pedophile is not substantially different from others except
for the tendency to respond to socially unacceptable ***ual
incentives.
The most frequent partners for pedophilic activities are persons known
to the pedophile, such as own children, friends’ children or a
neighbor’s children. This is particularly the case for hetero***ual
pedophiles. Among the homo***ual pedophiles, it is not unusual to
procure the services of a child prostitute. This means that
the pro****tion of partners unfamiliar to the pedophile is somewhat
higher than is the case for hetero***ual pedophiles. The age of the
partner is usually between 6 and 12. A majority of the partners
consent to ***ual interaction with the pedophile, and some are even
the instigator of such interaction (Virkkunen, 1975).
The role of the pedophile’s partner is not of primary concern in this
chapter. However, there are many myths and misconceptions regarding
the ‘victim’. I have systematically avoided the term victim and
replaced it with the neutral term partner. This was not done by
accident. There are many data showing that the kind of
***ual activities pedophiles normally engage in are quite childish,
similar to the *** play occurring between children. It is not certain
that the participating young child interprets these activities as
***ual at all (Gagnon and Simon, 2002) and it is still more unlikely
that she/he spontaneously assumes the role of victim. Nevertheless,
adults have a tendency to react strongly to discoveries or accounts of
such activities and they immediately consider the child as the victim.
Moreover, it is not uncommon for adults to imagine the most
extravagant consequences of interaction with a pedophile. In view of
the apprehension associated with this, I feel obliged to make
some short mention of the partner, if not for anything else just to be
irritating.
The real consequences of having participated in pedophilic activities
are difficult to evaluate. It has been proposed that at least children
who willingly become partners are in a problematic situation before
the event, making it still more difficult to determine possible
adverse consequences. However, a couple of recent,
extensive studies have shown that the sequels of childhood ***ual
experiences with pedophiles are slight (Bauserman and Rind, 1997; Rind
et al., 1998). In fact, they may even be positive (Rind, 2003; Sbraga
and O’Donohue, 2003). Proposing that the partner in pedophilic
activities does not suffer grave psychic consequences
is contrary to dominant social prejudice. As a reward for daring to
present scientific data offending that prejudice, the congress in a
country proclaiming itself as a leader of the free world issued an
official condemnation (Rind et al., 2000) of the Rind et al. (1998)
article. This nicely illustrates that science is never independent
of or above the society in which it is exercised. However, societies
frequently change with time and the reactions to the pedophile and his
partner may also change. To end this short discussion of the partner
with a proposal for such a change, I want to mention a provocative
point of view on pedophilia that was expressed in an intellectually
most stimulating paper a few years ago (Mirkin, 1999). It was
argued that the current strong social disapproval of pedophilia is
similar to the disapproval of homo***uality expressed a few decades
ago and that the fears and myths once associated with homo***uality
now have been transferred to pedophilia. It was predicted that the
disorder of pedophilia will share the destiny of the disorder
of homo***uality and disappear within a not too distant future.
Etiology and epidemiology
Many factors have been proposed to account for pedophilia. There are
explanations in psychoanalytic terms, in terms of disordered
personality, of emotional immaturity, of hyper***uality and many
others. Although some of these explanations may have considerable
literary value, they do not seem to correspond to any tangible
reality. This minor problem should not be an obstacle for reading some
of these accounts. Personally, I enjoy the psychoanalytic line of
thought, brilliantly illustrated in a classic paper (Cassity, 1927).
For a more recent variant of psychoanalytic thought, an erudite
article of Charles Socarides was published in 1959 (Socarides, 1959).
It is still excellent reading. For those preferring an approach based
on a salad of psychological notions like emotional congruence,
disinhibition, and blockage, there is an exuberant model available
(Finkelhor, 1984). These kinds of explanations will not be considered
here. None of them has a sound empirical base and any suggestion that
they have scientific value would be nothing more than a dramatic
manifestation of a lack of modesty.
I already mentioned that the pedophiles’ personality and intellectual
abilities are found to be no different from non-pedophiles when
appropriately controlled studies are performed. Some maintain that
their childhood experiences may be different from those of
non-pedophiles (e.g. Marshall et al., 1993; Lee et al., 2002),
particularly with regard to having been victim of ***ual abuse (e.g.
Cohen et al., 2002), but this is difficult to judge. I have mentioned
the uncertainties inherent in recollections of childhood events
before. These uncertainties become accentuated in the situation of a
pedophile. Almost all pedophiles included in published studies
have been convicted for a ***ual offense, and many have been given
harsh sentences. In this situation, unconscious transformations of
childhood memories are very likely to occur. The more tragic the
offender makes his childhood, the easier it is to inspire compassion
and pass guilt on to unhappy events, like an unloving father, a
violent mother, an alcoholic sister, or a perverted landlord. Those
claiming that pedophiles have suffered all this and much more have a
substantial burden of evidence before they can convince us that the
pedophiles’ recollections coincide with actual childhood events. Also
parents may unconsciously transform their memories when asked to
recollect the childhood of their son, who happened to be condemned to
a long prison term for pedophilia some time ago. Finally, some
experts claim that the probability of arrest and subsequent sentence
for ***ual offenses is dependent on the individual’s social class.
Family structure and childrearing procedures in low income families
may be quite different from the middle class ideals to which they are
compared, and eventually described as deviant by the scientists. All
these reasons make descriptions of differences in childhood
experiences between pedophiles and non-pedophiles particularly risky
and even if we assume a modest influence of the factors mentioned
above, we will find that pedophiles are no different from others.
It seems most unlikely that the causes for the attraction to children
or adolescents are to be found in factors unrelated to ***uality.
Instead, I suggest that children, for some reason or another, have
acquired ***ual incentive properties for
those expressing pedophilic behavior while they do not have such
properties for others. Adult individuals, of the same or of the
opposite ***, are also ***ual incentives for the pedophile exactly as
they are for almost everyone else. This simple suggestion can easily
be subjected to experimental test. We could, for example, expose
pedophiles to ****ographic movies depicting ***ual interaction between
adults. To these movies, the pedophiles should show exactly the same
response as nonpedophiles, that is an erection. Both groups could then
be exposed to a ****ographic movie depicting ***ual interactions
between a child and an adult. In this case, we would predict that the
pedophile would respond with erection whereas the non-pedophile would
not. In fact, according to social expectations, the nonpedophile
should respond with disgust to the latter movie. The predictions
concerning differential erection response in pedophiles and
non-pedophiles have been tested in a number of studies. However, none
of them has employed the most appropriate stimulus material. We know
from Chapters 4 and 9 that the most efficient ***ual incentives for
enhancing genital blood flow are ****ographic movies depicting ***ual
interaction between members of the preferred ***. Moving pictures
produce a larger and more reliable response than slides, and slides
are more efficient than audiotapes describing ***ual activities.
Despite this solid knowledge, studies of ***ual arousal in pedophilia
employ usually slides or audiotapes. I do not know why this is the
case, but it seems that clinical researchers are slow to follow
developments in basic research. Notwithstanding the regrettable choice
of stimulus material, data are consistent. Pedophiles and
non-pedophiles show a similar response to slides depicting adult
incentives or audiotapes describing ***ual interaction between adults.
On the contrary, slides depicting young incentives or audiotapes
describing ***ual interactions with children caused a larger response
in pedophiles than in controls (e.g. Avery-Clark and Laws, 1984;
Marshall et al., 1986; Wormith, 1986; Grossman et al., 1992). This
appears to be a quite consistent finding, which has been confirmed in
a large number of studies. Contradictory observations are rare, and
can easily be explained by deficiencies in methods. The fact that a
child of the preferred *** causes a larger response in pedophiles than
in control subjects unequivocally shows that it is an efficient ***ual
incentive for pedophiles, and less so for others.
Some non-pedophiles show responses of similar magnitude to adult and
child incentives (Hall et al., 1995), suggesting that the age of the
incentive is not a critical determinant of its incentive value in all
individuals. Regrettably, the exact age of the girls depicted on the
stimulus slides was not given. All we are told is that they were
prepubertal. I interpret this as meaning that these girls lacked pubic
hair and developed breasts as well as the body shape of an adolescent.
Nevertheless, they may have displayed some stimuli carrying the ***ual
incentive properties of an adult woman, such as hairstyle, way of
looking, and similar. Since we do not know the features of
an adult woman’s body, shown on a slide, that carry her ***ual
incentive property, it is entirely possible that some men recognize
the crucial feature also on a picture of a prepubescent girl. An
elegant study employing slides depicting women of different
ages suggests that this explanation is not impossible. Non-pedophilic
men show some increase in their penile response to slides of young
girls when age increases from 5 to 13. The increase is much larger
when the age of the incentive jumps from 13 to 20. There is no change
in response magnitude when the age of the incentive increases from 20
to 24 (Marshall et al., 1988). Nevertheless, these data indicate that
young girls are not devoid of ***ual incentive properties for
non-pedophiles. However, their mean magnitude of response is well
below that of the pedophiles.
The issue of an erectile response to stimuli depicting or describing
children in non-pedophiles is not of much scientific concern.
Individual variation is legion, and some overlap between groups is not
problematic as long as the means are reliably different. A
non-pedophilic man showing a larger response to a picture of a child
than to that of an adult woman does not invalidate the observation
that an overwhelming majority of pedophiles does show a larger
response to the child than most non-pedophiles. In contrast, when the
erectile response to a picture of a child is employed as a clinical
tool for distingui****ng pedophiles from others, then there is a
problem. In the clinic, the procedures for determining penile
tumescence carry the graceful name of phallometry. Because some
non-pedophilic men indeed respond to the child, there will be some
false positives. Being classified as a pedophile while not being one
may have devastating consequences if the classification is used in
court. It might actually influence the verdict. It may also be used in
prisons, for determining release on probation, and by child care
workers when deciding custody. All these uses of penile responses to
***ual incentives are completely grotesque. Adequate use of a research
instrument for scientific studies is most desirable, but taking it out
from the laboratory and making it instrumental in decisions of vast
im****tance for the fate of a human being appears to be extremely
doubtful. A well formulated critique against phallometric *****sment
has been published elsewhere (Marshall and Fernandez, 2000, 2003).
From a thesis called Reconstructing Paedophilia: An Analysis of
Current Discourses And The Construct of Close Relation****ps
In this chapter an analysis of positivist discourses of paedophilia is
provided. Working from a social constructionist perspective, inherent
contradictions within positivist discourses on paedophilia will be
identified and challenged.
Social constructionism is a theoretical paradigm that falls within and
that is informed by the philosophical field of postmodernism (Paul
and Sailor, 2004). The social constructionist perspective breaks with
conventional conceptions of social problems by analyzing them as a
social process of definition. Social problems, such as paedophilia,
are not seen as objective conditions to be studied and corrected,
they are rather orientations to alleged conditions that are argued to
be immoral or unjust (Holstein and Miller, 1993).
It is therefore assumed that the way in which we experience reality is
not an ahistorical given, but that it varies between different
historical periods and between various cultural systems. Within the
context of this study, the conceptual tools provided by social
constructionist theory will be used to explore the multiple ways of
understanding paedophilia. This theoretical position does not deny
the the value of positivist discourses on paedophilia, but rather aims
to forge a less restrictive conceptual space in which they can begin
to compete with alternative constructs of the phenomenon.
It has been demonstrated that the positivist paradigm, although
limited in usefulness, is still the dominant paradigm from which
paedophilia is studied and that it informs the dominant discourses
that define and classify this phenomenon. While positivism claims to
be a value free endeavour, critics have begun to seriously question
these contentions (Green, 2002; Schmidt, 1990, 2002). Many theorists
and researchers (Gergen, 1994; Weeks, 1985) now accept, almost as
axiomatic, that contradictory to positivist ideology, morality and
political agenda precede science in any positivist study. Consequently
positivist research also contains many crucial value judgments
regarding paedophilia. These judgments are then disguised as
'scientific findings' that are held to be absolute and unquestionable
(Rind, et al., 2000). The purpose of this chapter is to uncover these
implicit moral assumptions and judgments,and to show the link between
these discourses and contem****ary institutions.
The following is from this website
http://www.inquisition21.com/article143.html
(there is only one
paragraph I question in this and that's the question about age of
consent laws in other countries. I think the laws have changed in some
of these countries.)
***ual fascism in America - scapegoats and shunning
Progressives in America are rightly concerned about increasing signs
of fascism in this country, such as a so-called war on terrorism that
allows massive invasion of privacy and wholesale imprisonment without
charge; such as state manufacture of propaganda for its own people;
such as the assertion that anyone who challenges policies on these
matters is a traitor; such as a ‘great leader’ who puts himself
clearly above and outside the law. They ought to be concerned also
about another sign of the demise of American justice and human
decency: scapegoating. One sign of fascism has always been the
creation of a scapegoated class whom people are taught to fear and
hate, and whose very existence demands a totalitarian state apparatus
of surveillance and control. A class whom no-one would dare defend.
There is a class of people in America today, numbering two million or
more, who have been utterly scapegoated, ostracized, demonized and
shunned. There is no longer any defence available for these people.
Almost no-one on the left or the right, civil libertarians or ordinary
citizens, will defend their rights. They are regularly vilified with
the most vicious and hate-filled language - language previously
reserved for cl***** now protected: Jews, Blacks, homo***uals. They
are fair game as targets of abuse and vandalism. They are subject to
utter public scorn. About 600,000 of them have been rounded up and
forced to register - many soon to be monitored for life with
electronic bracelets and global positioning devices. Nearly 4000
have been locked up for life, not on criminal charges, but by civil
commitment, and those numbers are growing by the day. The
remainder are mostly in hiding, desperately afraid of sudden exposure
and witch hunts by neighbors, fellow-workers and friends, whom they
fear will suddenly see them as monsters beyond redemption. They are a
class defined not by specific crimes (though they are accused of many
offences) but by their very being, their desires, their constitution,
as allegedly broken human beings. Presidents and governors call them
‘despicable’, ’disgusting’, ‘incapable of rehabilitation or reform’,
‘beyond help’. They are loudly reviled as examples to be shunned by
fundamentalist and bigoted preachers, but also by left-wing media,
progressive community leaders and feminists.
Who are these s***? Arab terrorists? Muslim fanatics? No, those
evil-doers appear almost benign when compared to this heinous mob.
These are the most awful people in the world: *** offenders. Worse,
many are pedophiles. In fact, these two terms become mingled. Jeb Bush
recently alluded to all the *** offenders in Florida as child
molesters, though fewer than 1/3 of those incarcerated in that state
for ‘*** crimes’ involved people under 18. Bush went on, "These are a
group of people who are the sickest of the sick. They are truly
perverts and it's not curable. Instead of civil detention, we ought to
make sure...these pedophiles...are locked up forever."
Of course among these *** offenders are indeed some criminals who have
caused extreme harm: violent rapists of adult women as well as
children. A few of them have kidnapped, tortured or murdered their
victims. Dr. Fred Berlin of the Johns Hopkins University *** Disorders
Clinic in Baltimore estimates that such crimes account for less than
1/10th of 1% of all *** offences in America. His studies also show
that fewer than 10% of child *** offenders re-offend - though
recidivism is usually given as a reason for draconian measures against
them. As child abuse experts point out, about 50 children are
re****ted kidnapped and raped or murdered by strangers annually,
compared to more than 3,000 children murdered by parents and
other family members in non-***ual cases. Most *** offenders, says one
therapist who works with *** offenders in a state prison system, are
"Gentle grandfathers who made one mistake in judgment years ago and
fondled their grandchild. Or lonely, geeky gay men - teenagers some of
them – who sought mutual ***ual release with adolescent boys. Or young
female teachers who suc***bed to the wiles of handsome adolescent boys
or girls. Or young men who got drunk and pushed their girlfriends over
a line that is now called date rape." Yet the media, police,
prosecutors and politicians continue to insist that children are in
dire need of protection from serial rapists and murderers. Two-thirds
of parents surveyed said they feared their children would be kidnapped
and or murdered by strangers. Facts simply do not matter when hysteria
is involved.
Study after study of *** offenders, as well as the countless media
exposés, insist that most *** offenders are ordinary men and women
from all walks of life, indistinguishable from others in every way
except their ***ual desires or orientation. The New York Times
recently published a sensational story about a teenage boy who went on
line to entice more than 15,000 customers to watch his own
****ographic images of himself. The Times re****ter, acting less like a
re****ter and more like a crusading cop, coaxed the boy away from his
life of debauchery, reminding him he would instantly switch from
‘victim’ to ‘perpetrator’ when he passed his 18th birthday. (Actually,
those under 18 may be treated as perpetrators, too.) He helped get the
boy to the FBI to close in on many of his key customers, whom the
Times had further investigated on its own. These customers included
police officers, lawyers, ministers, rabbis, social workers, and
especially those who work with children and adolescents. Many also
were parents and grandparents with ostensibly happy families of their
own. Surely one sign that something is wrong with this picture is that
the ‘heinous criminals’ are otherwise law-abiding, decent human beings
with successful careers and ‘normal’ personal lives. No. With
scapegoating, such apparent normalcy is just one more sign of devious
perversity.
The key ingredients of this scapegoating campaign are of course ***
and children. "Nowhere," wrote Linda Williams in Children and ***
(1993), "is ***uality more feared in America than in the lives of
children." (Williams has spent her professional career assuring that
these ingredients produce repression.) The core demon in the campaign
is the recently created category of ‘pedophile’ (which does not
predate the 1960s as a so-called scientific construct). Although
defined by the American Psychiatric Association as persons with a
dominant ***ual desire for pre-pubescent children, the pedophile tag
now applies to any person who every entertained a ***ual desire or had
a ***ual incident, however minor, with anyone under 18. In some
circles, the term pedophile is now used to put down any older person
who has an affair or shows interest in younger persons - 35-year-olds,
for instance, who ‘prey on’ 20-year olds. By the early 2000s,
pedophile had become morphed with the still broader ‘*** offender’,
with even mainstream media free to refer to the feared and hated class
as ‘pervs’ and ‘perps’ and ‘deviants’.
This scapegoating also requires public exposure and shunning, even of
those who dare defend the civil liberties of pedophiles and ***
offenders or challenge attacks on them. In particular, public wrath is
displayed against those who would challenge ‘age of consent’ laws,
which are higher in the United States (now effectively 18 in all
states due to Federal statutes) than in most other societies.
(Mexico's age of consent is 12 in most cases; Japan is 13; Spain is
now 14 - raised recently; France, 15; and Germany 16 and under 16 with
parental consent.) Although as of the 1880s, common law age of consent
was 10 in England and its former colonies, and zero in many other
societies - where child-brides were common - it has been increasingly
raised until there is today, within UNESCO's campaign to protect
children, a call for a universal age of 21. All *** between persons
under 18 and those over 18 (or 21) thus becomes ‘abuse’, since there
is the myth that underage persons are simply not capable of consent.
Journalists and scientific researchers who challenge this construct -
or who defend some relation****ps between adults and minors as not
being abusive - face severe consequences. In the only instance of a
U.S. Congressional resolution against a scientific paper, the House of
Representatives, with only minimal opposition, denounced a study by
Dr. Bruce Rind & others, published in the scholarly review,
Psychological Bulletin, in 1998. This ‘meta-analysis’ reviewed several
research protocols about adult-child ***uality, and summarized them as
showing that relation****ps in which force was not used did not appear
to cause harm, and sometimes might be beneficial. Rind and his
co-authors have been systematically ostracized and excluded from
many scholarly journals. In 2005, a book by a major publisher, which
contained another scholarly article by Rind, was withdrawn by that
publisher (Hayworth) because of protests from fundamentalist
Christians. Other gay writers like William Herdt and John DeCecco who
researched ***ual outlaw behavior in the U.S. (DeCecco) or
intergenerational ***uality in non-western cultures (Herdt) simply
moved on to other topics. This did not keep DeCecco from experiencing
extreme persecution - while a professor in San Francisco he had to
hire bodyguards to protect him from right-wing attackers.
A number of women researchers and radical feminists have attempted to
undermine or slow down the *** panic. Among them have been Camille
Paglia, Debbie Nathan, Joan Nelson, Elizabeth Stoney, Laura Marks,
Gayle Rubin, Pat Califia, Carole Vance, Marjorie Heins, Joanne
Wypijewski, Janice Irvine and Judith Levine. Paglia has been
castigated by other *** researchers and many feminist writers for her
defence of man-boy ***ual relation****ps in particular. Although she
has published lengthy, well-researched summaries of the history of
***uality and ***ual research, she is seldom included in university
curriculums involving these topics.
Many of the other women writers suffered similar consequences or
censor****p of their views. Debbie Nathan, who exposed and virtually
stopped the so-called satanic cult child *** panic with her book
Satan's Silence (Basic Books, 1996), has spoken of the icy reception
her work has sometimes received. She said, "... I have often had a
sense of being intellectually and professionally marginalized, and I
have experienced instances of editors killing pieces I've written
about ***ual hysteria because they got cold feet, as well as refusals
to assign such stories." One woman writer, who had never had problems
with previous articles on other subjects for a prestigious national
magazine, attempted a balanced look at the crusade against Catholic
priests, especially the sensational case of Father Paul Shanley. She
was called in by the editor who said he simply could not run her
piece.
Even before Judith Levine's Harmful to Minors: The Perils of
Protecting Children from *** was published in 2002, a massive
campaign by fundamentalist Christian groups, including Concerned Women
for America, attacked the publisher, the University of Minnesota
Press. While the book was published, the Press created a new process
forreviewing its books before publication. Levine spoke publicly about
how she was humiliated time and again in public. She said the
manuscript for her book had been turned down by many publishers,
treated as if it were ‘radioactive’. Among other insights, Levine
wrote that "obsession with pedophiles stems for the reluctance to
confront ***** and the rampant ***ualization of children" in American
culture. "Adults project the *****cized desire outwards, creating a
monster to hate, hunt down and destroy." Of the outcry against her
book she added, "What happened to me is a perfect example of the
hysteria my book is about."
Nowhere is censor****p and shunning greater than against those who
would describe or depict childhood or adolescent ***uality,
or mere ****ity. The ‘victims’ of the evil perpetrators must also be
protected - and projected as the spotless mirror image of
their violators - at all costs - their purity and innocence asserted
(even in the face of post-Freudian revelations of the ***ual lives and
interests of children).
Anything ****traying the physical beauty of children or *****c aspects
of their lives must be banned. (See Bob Chatelle's excellent summaries
of the impact of the child **** crusade on freedom of expression:
Kiddie **** Panic, 1993; Limits of Free expression and The Problem of
Child ****, 1997.)
A spate of prominent photographers were censored beginning in the late
1980s, for photos of **** children or adolescents. The most prominent
case was that of the gay photographer, Robert Maplethorpe, whose works
were removed from galleries across the country, including the Corcoran
Gallery in Wa****ngton in 1990, with conservative attacks on the
National Endowment for the Arts which had funded some of his work.
Some cases involved prize-winning women photographers, including Sally
Mann, Star Ockenga, and Judith Livingston. Each of them was pilloried.
Livingston's son was tem****arily removed from her home after she
published a photo of him ****. Livingston was eased out of her
professor****p at Cornell, and Ockenga was dismissed as director of the
MIT photography exhibitions.
Sally Mann, who did some of the most widely-published **** photos of
children. Her frankly *****c photos of her own children were called
*****uous, pedophilic and ****ographic. Feminist writer Germaine
Greer has said of her work, "The censoring of a mother's physical
delight in her children marks the last stage in the denial of the
sensuality of children." Mann now does landscape photography, and
Ockenga, after a period of not working at all, turned to photographs
of flowers.
Allen Ginsburg and Joseph Richy published an essay in 1990 against the
radical departure from art history in which **** children and
adolescents are out of bounds. In "The Right to Depict Children in the
****," their main point was that *** and ****ity in children, and
especially adolescents, had been a primary theme of the visual and
literary arts throughout Western culture, as well as in many
non-Western societies. He pointed out that even popular advertising
used photos and drawings of **** children - especially boys - and
Norman Rockwell often ****trayed **** or seem-**** boys on the cover of
the Saturday Evening Post. Suddenly, all such photos and pictures
disappeared. By the 1990s, when Calvin Kline made public a campaign to
sell jeans showing scantily clad teenagers, he was forced to withdraw
it within days. The **** child disappeared. In fact, almost ALL
photographs of pubescent and post-pubescent boys and girls vanished
from most public media. No wonder, since the Faber Supreme Court
decision in 1982 labelled child ****ography as wholly unprotected
expression not covered under the Bill of Rights, and since the child
****ography acts, beginning in 1990, increasingly criminalized almost
all such depictions of any person appearing to be under 18, even when
‘real children’ were not depicted in drawings and simulations. (This
was part of the 1996 law, but the Supreme Court declared that part of
the bill unconstitutional. The language has reappeared in the 2006
bill now before Congress.)
Almost the sole exception to the disappearance of *****c depictions of
children has been Greer's The Beautiful Boy (Rizolli, 2003). She
notes, "At the end of the 20th century, the guilty panic about
pedophilia completed the criminalization of awareness of the desires
and charms of boys." She took care not to provoke with openly ***ual
photographs, but she was clear that her purpose was to resurrect the
*****c image of the boy, not as pedophilia, but as a reasonable *****c
interest of homo***ual or hetero***ual artists. The response to Greer
has been largely positive in the art world, though not without
expected attacks in mainstream newspapers and conservative journals in
which she is labelled a ‘female pederast’ among other things. Greer is
Australian and has always been known as one to challenge taboos and
court sensational publicity.
A Supreme Court decision (Knox V United States,1993) criminalized
photographs of even clothed children, if they could be deemed *****c.
Most anti-censor****p organizations simply stopped complaining about
censor****p in cases involving depictions of **** children or *****c
situations involving children. These were now deemed beyond the pale
of civil liberty. The Parade magazine cover (Feb. 19, 2006) featured
the words in large, bold type,"...Every image of a ***ually displayed
child - be it a photograph, a tape or a DVD - records both the rape of
the child and an act against humanity." The feature article from which
these words came was by Andrew Vachss, not a child ***uality expert,
but a very high-priced lawyer who has successfully sued institutions
and individuals in child *** abuse cases. Vachss does not define a
‘***ually displayed child’ - neither in terms of age (a 17 year old is
still a child in most jurisdictions and under most laws), nor in terms
of what it includes - ****ity? Nearly **** *****c poses? - but he makes
the absolute statement that it is rape and a crime against humanity.
Nothing could be more heinous (his word). Who says? Why? Those
questions are not asked and may not be asked. To ask them is to risk
being accused of complicity with rape and crimes against humanity!
Vachss goes on to urge stiffer penalties for mere possession or
viewing of a downloaded photograph from the internet - one assumes he
means at least life in prison (which is already in force for many such
offences). The utterly evil act becomes the basis for completely
scapegoating the utterly evil perpetrator.
The full force of this shunning and scapegoating is aimed at those who
can be labelled pedophiles. As the National Center for Reason and
Justice, a group that sup****ts those it deems wrongly accused in ***
cases, says on its website: "Especially vulnerable have been those
accused of *** offences against children and adolescents. While none
of us deny that these crimes occur, those accused nevertheless have
the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty and to receive
fair trials. But too often, hysteria reigns and the accused are tried
and convicted by the media."
Until the 1980s, the notion that any offender would be forced to
register and be tracked - and publicly shamed - for life - went
against the American notions of fairness and rehabilitation. "I've
done my time" was considered a reasonable statement when prison
sentences and parole was completed. In Canada, the Supreme Court has
denied police the right to make public the names of registered
offenders, since this would thwart the goal of rehabilitation of
prisoners. In the United States, the very purpose of the *** offender
registry is to make it available to the public. This, and subsequent
measures to monitor and restrict *** offenders, have put an end to any
idea of rehabilitation for an ever-growing class of former prisoners.
Longer and longer sentences and increasing length of parole or
probation were not enough to satisfy the *** panic that has gone on
uninterrupted from one phase to another since the 1960s.
The first registries appeared in 1990. By 1994, with Megan's law -
inspired like many of the other *** offender initiatives by a specific
and isolated case of a horrendous murder of a child - federal and
state laws required that personal and work addresses and other
personal information of *** offenders be made public in various ways -
from the internet and television to newspaper ads and billboards. In
some states, special auto license tags and signs required at the door
posts of offenders were mandated. By 2005, every state had adopted a
registry and all but two state were incor****ated into the federal
registry and tracking system.
As Mark Matthews wrote (Feb. 9) in Stateline.org newsletter, not known
for its radical viewpoints, "*** offenders are a different type of
criminal, increasingly punished under a different set of rules. Upon
release from prison or parole, they are followed by satellite,
showcased on the internet and prohibited from living in certain
neighborhoods." Twelve states now require many *** offenders
(including those with even the mildest offence against minors) to wear
electronic monitoring (GPS) bracelets for life. Bills to this effect
are in the legislatures of eleven more states and likely to pass.
Special laws have been passed for this special class of human beings
in virtually every area of life. These include requirements in one or
more states that they stay away from schools and out of parks; denial
of the right to work in areas ranging from education and health care
to massage therapy and even restaurants which cater to families;
denial of post-secondary education; requirements for juvenile
offenders that they attend special segregated schools; restrictions on
travel, including denial of the right to cross state lines. Eight
states now require castration of some *** offenders before they can be
released. Florida has passed legislation aimed at making the death
penalty more likely if a *** act is involved in a killing, or even in
the case of some child rapes where murder is not involved. Louisiana
is set to execute the first *** offender in a non-murder case.
Another feature of recently passed or just introduced *** offender
laws is to do away with all statutes of limitation, and to force
registration and other restrictions on hundreds of thousands of people
not now required to register. People who accepted a plea bargain
twenty years ago because of a ***ual misjudgment, with the assurance
their sentence or parole would mean the end of it, now face a
life-time of being hounded, shamed and shunned. Their families--that
is millions more ordinary, decent human beings - also face the stress
and humiliation of these actions, wondering when the police will crash
through the door looking for their loved one. Several states have
introduced bills to make it a felony for family members and others,
with possible punishment of years in prison, to refuse to reveal the
whereabouts of *** offenders.
Adding insult to injury, ‘children’, that is persons under 18, may
also be labelled *** offenders, required to register and sometimes
face life-long monitoring and various forms of shunning and shaming.
One teenage boy committed suicide in Oakland County, Michigan in 2004,
when faced with 23-years of being on a public registry, which would
include public humiliation at his school. He was convicted of *** with
a 14-year-old girl, which was conceded to be non-forced, but violated
the state's age of consent laws. Matthew Limon, in Kansas was given 17
years in prison for a consensual blow-job given the week after his
18th birthday to a boy who was almost 15. Limon is also mentally
handicapped. Limon's case was overturned and he was let out of prison
after serving more than five years because the U.S. Supreme Court
ruled the Kansas law which mandated longer sentences for homo***ual
acts was nconstitutional. He will still have to register for life as a
child *** offender. South Carolina Supreme Court justice Costa M.
Pleciones opined from the bench that children as young as nine should
be subject to life-time registration for *** offences. Estimates are
that more than thirty-five thousand children and adolescents have been
convicted of *** offences and are required to register.
The worst deprivation of rights comes in the form of life-time civil
commitment of *** offenders after incarceration. Seventeen states have
some version of this measure, and 21 more states are considering it.
As of December, 2004, according to researchers at the Wa****ngton
think-tank that has followed this since Wa****ngton passed the first
such law in 1990, 3,493 persons were in locked mental facilities or
special prisons under civil commitment. As of that date, only 427 of
persons ever locked up under these laws had been released. Usually
called ‘***ually Violent Predator Laws’, these almost always include
non-violent offences against persons under the age of consent in that
state. In some states, persons accused of various crimes including
child ****ography, prostitution and even indecent exposure are
included as ‘***ually violent predators’. As Mark McHarry wrote in his
thorough summary in Z Magazine, November, 2001, civil commitment
procedures deprive citizens of virtually all their constitutional
rights: the right to remain silent, to have a lawyer at
interrogations, bail, provisions against double jeopardy and ex post
facto laws--and many more. The New York Bar Association, challenging
Governor Pataki's administrative order in 2005 to move all ***
offenders to locked mental facilities upon release, commented, "It
cannot be overstated how readily *** civil commitment may be abused."
*** offenders - especially ‘pedophiles’, in its expanded definition to
include anyone who has ‘offended’ against any person under the age of
consent - now effectively 18 everywhere - are purely and simply
outcasts, untouchables. No one wants them in their neighborhood, and
virtually no-one will house or employ them. They may be publicly
humiliated and vilified, and they are deemed worthy of shunning by an
outraged public. Even those suspected of ***ual deviancy are likely to
be included in the shunning. The media and politicians of both parties
simply have a field day with the new scapegoated categories, and
virtually no one complains.
Formerly progressive alternative media have jumped on the bandwagon.
The Free Times in Ohio, for instance, put a photo of an alleged
‘molester’ of teenage boys on its January, 2006 cover, with the
drawing of a bloody pen piercing his forehead, and an equally bloody
red headline, calling him ‘Neighborhood Monster’. Mainstream media
like NBC and the New York Times now run series that would have been
found a decade ago only in yellow journalism outlets like the National
Inquirer. Debbie Nathan (CounterPunch, February 17, 2006) has
thoroughly exposed the shoddy journalism of the Times in its recent
exposé of ‘child prostitution’. Slate commentator Jack Shafer noted
(Slate.com, Dec.19, 2005) that the article (described above) by Kurt
Eichenwald in the Times that same day about Justin, the teenage boy
who marketed his own image in *** acts, crossed the line from
journalism to advocacy, to outright solicitation of FBI and police
involvement. The NBC ‘Predator’ series likewise involves police in
sting activity, boasting that it has ensnared more than 50 men in
cases where they will be charged with *** crimes involving no real
‘victims’, but media and police plants on internet sites. The NBC
re****ter, Chris Hansen, makes no pretence of objectivity. "We are
dazed, amazed and disgusted," he says, "They're back! The on-line
predators." Using terms like ‘deviates’ and ‘perverts’, it is no
wonder that the NBC site attracts thousands of blog comments that urge
vigilante justice: "Put a bullet in the perp's head," says one. One
can hope all this will rather quickly erode public confidence in the
media as independent of law enforcement.
Such media coverage has an immediate impact even in the courts. An
MSNBC afternoon news summary, which once jokingly called itself "all
pedophiles all the time," re****ts each day on new cases of priests and
***, teachers and ***, and the like. A January, 2006 crusade by this
MSNBC program as well as the Fox network, railed against Vermont judge
Edward Cashman. Fox's Bill O'Reilly called him the worst judge in
America. Cashman had sentenced a child *** offender to sixty days in
jail and a treatment program rather than a lengthy prison sentence,
where the man would not get treatment. Judge Cashman first insisted,
"The Court cannot be swayed by the media or the mob." After days of
abuse in the media, which the judge said had deeply distressed him, he
reversed his ruling and handed down a sentence of "not less than three
years" in prison. Letters to the very liberal Burlington Free Press
were almost universal in their sentiment: "Lynch him" (the offender)
said one writer.
At testimony on a Maryland bill to require life-time electronic
monitoring for almost all *** offenders, a spokesman for the Maryland
Public Defenders' Office (quoted in the Wa****ngton Post), said, "I did
think of 1984. Where are we going with these types of measures? What
happens next session?" Speaking about the new Federal Registry list of
more than 500,000 *** offenders, which it shares on-line with the
public, Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center
noted, "It's not difficult to imagine that the government might
publish watch lists for other things." Already, Massachusetts is
considering laws which would create registries and require electronic
monitoring for ALL ‘dangerous’ offenders. Massachusetts would become
the first state to expand these measures beyond *** offenders, but it
surely will not be the last.
Liberal Democrats, socialists and green party candidates vie with
Republicans to ‘save the innocent children’ and ‘protect our children
from monsters’. There is clear evidence that these kinds of measures
(registration, electronic monitoring, and the like) are not effective.
Castration, for instance, has been shown to be wholly incapable of
affecting ***ual desire. Since most *** offences take place within the
family at the home of the offender, monitoring devices do no good.
Public exposure and humiliation of *** offenders is likely to
increase, not decrease, shame and guilt, which are likely factors in
further offending. Yet politicians of all stripes rush to put forward
more and more such draconian restrictions on the hated class of ***
offenders and pedophiles. A Baltimore Sun article (Feb. 17, 2006)
called anti-*** offender bills ‘apple pie’ that all politicians rush
to take credit for.
To paraphrase Janice Irvine in Let's Talk About *** (U. California
Press, 2002), which chronicled the hijacking of *** education in
America by right-wing Christians, the ‘depravity narratives’ about ***
offenders will rule the day so long as there is a ‘culture of stigma’
on ***ual topics, and so long as the ‘innocent child’ model of
childhood prevails. "We must reinvent the construct of childhood,"
Irvine wrote.
In the past, a central feature of the American system of government
was supposed to be that it applied to all citizens equally. At least
that was the case after the Reconstruction era amendments that assured
equal application to former slaves and other people of color, and
after the voting rights amendment for women in the 1920s. Now, certain
categories simply don't have the same rights - possibly no rights at
all. The creep of repression is bound to occur - more and more groups
will be demonized and seen as outside the ordinary protections of the
law.
As Michael Neumann wrote in CounterPunch, February 13, 2006, in his
excellent article on America's ‘culture of piety' in its reaction to
the Muslim protests against depictions of the Prophet Mohammed: "The
most basic notions of the rule of law -- that you should not be
punished for what you cannot help, like the feelings you have, that no
one should be expected to obey laws so vague that the criteria of
obedience are mysterious - were thrown away years ago. They cannot be
picked out of the trashcan and held up as ****ny Western ideals just
because it is now convenient to do so." Neumann urged America to
"....go back to judging real crimes by real standards of evidence. It
can turn its attention to real, vulgar, observable, concrete human
needs - like decent food, clothing, and shelter."
One day, perhaps fifty or a hundred years from now, it will appear
ludicrous that our society was so consumed with anger at this class of
scapegoats that it obliterated its fine traditions of liberty and
justice in favor of retribution and vengeance. It will seem odd, that
American society was obsessed with concern about ***ual acts with
teenagers even as it pursued a pointless war that killed thousands of
teenagers and others on both sides of that war. People will hopefully
someday recoil when told that a person convicted in Federal court of
making a photograph of a 17 year old masturbating would receive a
mandatory sentence of life in prison, yet a person convicted of the
(non ***ual) murder of that teen would face far less. It will seem
incredible that the focus was on ***ual deviance rather than on the
astronomical rate of murder and other real violence, or the growing
gap between rich and poor, and the indelible mark of real poverty on
so many children. Until such a day of greater sanity, this
scapegoating and shunning of all *** offenders and ‘pedophiles’ will
inevitably lead to less freedom and more insecurity for all who might
engender the wrath of Puritan preachers or stoke the greed of media
outlets and pandering politicians. For now, it seems unlikely that
even those who traditionally guard our civil liberties or those who
traditionally challenge state repression from the left, will dare
speak out, lest they, too, be marginalized and shunned.
(The writer remains anonymous because he writes and is politically
active in several completely unrelated social justice movements. He
fears that the shunning and marginalization he describes for those who
write about this topic could compromise (unfairly) his other work.)
In response to the writer’s musings of how far this may have to go
until it is stopped, two thoughts may be relevant. First at Salem,
they stopped naming and executing witches when it became apparent that
no one was safe, and that situation must be close in America today.
Second the child *** abuse and child ****ography measures are hitting
a very large number of educated men who were good citizens before
their lives were ruined, thus creating an intelligent underclass that
is now striking back. Most of these men have wives, mothers, sisters
and brothers. This is a very dangerous situation for any state.
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