Sins of the Fathers

Is child molestation a sickness or a crime?

Thomas Szasz from the August/September 2002 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

Greek Love

Sex with minors was not always considered a disease. In ancient Greece, sexual relationships between men and boys were a normal part of life. Such relations, called "pederastic," typically occurred between a 20-to-30-year-old man and a 12-to-17-year-old boy. The man pursued the boy, and the boy submitted to him as the passive partner in anal sex. The man also played the role of mentor to his pupil. With the arrival of heavy pubic hair, usually at age 18, the younger man found a boy to mentor and get sexual satisfaction from. Sexual relations between men and young children played no part in Greek pederasty. Judaism and Christianity redefined same-sex relations as unnatural and condemned them as sinful. Then, as criminal laws supplemented or replaced ecclesiastical laws, same-sex relations became crimes as well. That understanding governed popular opinion until the rise of secularism and medical science.

The first person to propose redefining "pederasty," which in the 18th century became the term for what we call homosexuality, appears to have been the French physician Ambroise Tardieu (1818�1879). In 1857 Tardieu published a forensic-medical study to assist courts in cases involving pederasty. Tardieu believed that the penises of active homosexuals were anatomically different from the penises of passive homosexuals and "normal" men, that the anuses of passive homosexuals were anatomically different from the anuses of active homosexuals and normals, and that physicians could examine individuals and diagnose homosexuality by observing these alleged markers.

It remained for Karl Friedrich Otto Westphal (1833�1890), a famous German neurologist, to convert homosexuality from a disease identifiable by examining the subject's body into a mental illness identifiable by examining the subject's mind. Westphal renamed pederasty "sexual inversion" (in German, "contrary sexual feeling"), a term that was widely used well into the 20th century. It was also Westphal who popularized the erroneous idea, still held by many people, that male homosexuals are effeminate and female homosexuals are masculine. He argued that since sexual inversion was a disease it should be treated by doctors rather than punished by law.

A Return to Athens

Creating diseases by coining pseudomedical terms was raised to the level of art by Baron Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840�1902), a German-born professor of psychiatry at the Universities of Strasbourg, Graz, and Vienna. In his Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), which made him world famous, Krafft-Ebing authoritatively renamed sexual sins and crimes "sexual perversions" and declared them to be "cerebral neuroses." Lawyers, politicians, and the public embraced this transformation as the progress of science, instead of dismissing it as medical megalomania based on nothing more than the manipulation of language. "Sexology" became an integral part of medicine and the new science of psychiatry.

We have come a long way from Krafft-Ebing. In July 1998 Temple University psychologist Bruce Rind and two colleagues published their research on pedophilia in the Psychological Bulletin, a journal of the American Psychological Association. The authors concluded that the deleterious effects on a child of sexual relations with an adult "were neither pervasive nor typically intense." They recommended that a child's "willing encounter with positive reactions" be called "adult-child sex" instead of "abuse."

Not surprisingly, this conclusion created a furor, which led to a retraction and apology. Raymond Fowler, chief executive officer of the American Psychological Association, acknowledged that the journal's editors should have evaluated "the article based on its potential for misinforming the public policy process, but failed to do so."

Apparently no one noticed that, according to the fourth edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV, published in 1994), a person meets the criteria for pedophilia only if his "fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning." In short, pedophilia is a mental illness only if the actor is distressed by his actions.

Psychiatrists had likewise classified homosexuality as a disease if the individual was dissatisfied with his sexual orientation ("ego-dystonic homosexuality"), but not if he was satisfied with it ("ego-syntonic homosexuality"). Bending to the wind, the American Psychiatric Association later backtracked. In DSM-IV-TR, published in 2000, the requirement of "clinically significant distress or impairment" was omitted from the criteria for pedophilia.

Mental health professionals are not the only "progressives" eager to legitimize adult-child sex by portraying opposition to it as old-fashioned antisexual prejudice. In a 1999 article, Harris Mirkin, a professor of political science at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, stated that "children are the last bastion of the old sexual morality." As summarized by The New York Times, he argued that "the notion of the innocent child was a social construct, that all intergenerational sex should not be lumped into one ugly pile and that the panic over pedophilia fit a pattern of public response to female sexuality and homosexuality, both of which were once considered deviant." Mirkin cited precedents such as Greek pederasty. "Though Americans consider intergenerational sex to be evil," he wrote, "it has been permissible or obligatory in many cultures and periods of history." He told the Times: "I don't think it's something where we should just clamp our heads in horror....In 1900, everybody assumed that masturbation had grave physical consequences; that didn't make it true."

The analogy is fatally flawed. Autoerotic acts differ radically from heteroerotic acts. Masturbation is something the child does for himself; it satisfies one of his biological urges. In that sense, masturbation is similar to urination or defecation. That is why we do not call masturbation a "sexual relationship," a term that implies the involvement of two (or more) persons, one of whom may be an involuntary participant. Masturbation (in private) is an amoral act: Strictly speaking, it falls outside the scope of moral considerations. In contrast, every sexual relationship is intrinsically a moral matter; medical (or pseudomedical-psychiatric) considerations ought to play no role in our judgments of such acts. The religiously enlightened person may view same-sex relations as evil. The psychologically enlightened person may view any consensual sex relations as good. Society must decide which sexual acts are permissible, and individuals must decide which sexual acts they condemn, condone, or wish to engage in.

The Legal Line

The criminal law defines sex between adults and minors as a crime. But the law is a blunt instrument. Technically, an 18-year-old male who has a consensual sexual relationship with a 17-year-old female is committing a criminal act (statutory rape), even though he might be only one day older than his partner. Such "crimes" generally are not prosecuted.

Sexual contact between a priest and a 10-year-old boy is quite another matter, and here is where the medicalization of unwanted or prohibited behaviors hinders our understanding. To impress the laity, physicians long ago took to using Greek and Latin words to describe diseases. For example, they called inflammation of the lung "pneumonia" and kidney failure "uremia." The result is that people now think that any Greco-Latin word ending in ia -- or with the suffix philia or phobia -- is a bona fide disease. This credulity would be humorous if it were not tragic.

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Pingback| 10.31.09 @ 10:03PM

Pedophilia witch hunt discussed by academia and press | Human Stupidity: Irrationalit links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:

…from nonprocreative sexual acts — psychiatrists do not classify it as a disease. Thus a religion’s moral teachings shape what is ostensibly a scientific judgment. Sources: http://reason.com/archives/2002/08/01/sins-of-the-fathers http://www.staff.uwp.edu/academic/criminal.justice/chldabuse01bk.htm Kinsey’s interest in boys Reisman contends that Alfred Kinsey was the father not only of the revolution that…