Last week Salon ran a comment piece by Tracy Clark-Flory which opened:
We usually hear pedophilia talked about in terms of mental illness – if not evil – but Aug. 17 a motley crew of self-identified “minor-attracted persons” and mental health professionals have gathered in Baltimore to talk about it as a sexual identity. At hand is an issue deeply important to both groups: the revision of the diagnostic criteria for pedophilia.
I asked Professor Caroline Taylor, Foundation Chair in Social Justice at Edith Cowan University, and Founder and Chair of Children of Phoenix, a charity that provides scholarships and mentoring support to children, adolescents and adults affected by childhood sexual abuse, to respond. Caroline has written for me before (‘A child failed: how 120 men got away with the sexual violation of a 12-year-old girl’ ) and is also a contributor to the soon-to-be-released Big Porn Inc: Exposing the harms of the global porn industry (Spinifex Press).
I have written elsewhere on the mental gymnastics employed by some of the judiciary when it comes to accepting either the vocabulary of excuses put forward by child sex offenders to exculpate them from responsibility for their offences, or minimising the harm suffered by child victims.
Of course these arguments, attitudes, utterances and opinions would not hold currency were it not for the lawyers who advance them on behalf of their clients and quarters of society that either accept them or give them tacit approval via a passive and apathetic response.
This week UK judges severely weakened legal rules that limited sex offenders’ unsupervised access to their own children. Judges declared that it was a human rights violation to prevent offenders’ from having this access. After all, they said, family life and unfettered access to ‘family life’ is their right – the rights of child victims factor in only as a secondary issue. Despite the rhetoric and declaration of a charter of human rights for children, they continue to have their status at citizens of equal worth negated. More troubling is the fact this so often occurs when children are most in need of protection from sexual predation or sexual violence.
In the same week, a US conference was held on ‘pedophilia’ under the rubric of men who are ‘minor-attracted – in other words men who desire and seek to sexually abuse children. The conference sought to advance the rights of this particular group of men by influencing the revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders to better reflect a particular understanding of pedophilia as a psychiatric illness.
The DSM is the psychiatric bible and has been criticized for its development as a diagnostic manual based largely on incomplete and unscientific data – indeed psychiatrists ‘vote’ on additions and revisions and much research has highlighted the gendered nature of the psychiatric illnesses proclaimed in the book with some disorders being so ridiculous they beggar belief.
That fact that many have been removed or revised in response to societal and cultural awareness and changes in attitudes to gender and race is a testament to how mental illness can be socially constructed and even vanish from our vocabulary and treatment as society and psychiatry reconcile certain social and cultural beliefs and attitudes.
The psychiatric nomenclature declaring certain types of sexual offenders or men who declare they have not yet engaged in sexual activity with a child but have a predilection of sexual attraction to children, as individuals with a mental illness as opposed to criminals (or at least potential abusers) is a worry for many reasons.
Why is this ‘illness’ the almost exclusive problem of men and not women? It is an ‘illness’ that has been going on for centuries without recourse to any successful treatment.
I have a problem with the term ‘pedophile’ because it can be literally translated as a lover of children. Chat rooms for pedophile advocates highlight that they do not seek to ‘hurt’ children, but it is patently clear they have no concept – morally or otherwise – of what it is to ‘hurt’ a child. And believe me in my professional work I have seen first- hand the hurt suffered by children by ‘pedophiles’ – hurt that punctures the very soul of young lives and leads to damage across adult lives.
If we accept it is an illness then it is an illness afflicting almost exclusively men and has inflicted a tsunami of catastrophic damage to the lives of countless millions of children that amounts to an emotional genocide across time and place that appears to have no end.
Those advocating for these men are concerned that the law and society misunderstand ‘pedophiles’ and view them alongside ‘molesters’ of children. There exists a problem in the teasing out of men who are sexually attracted to children but say they have not acted on it as opposed to men who say they are sexually attracted to children and have acted on it.
As studies continue to show, men who are sexually attracted to children will generally move to act on that attraction. Those who have not as yet physically acted on that attraction may very likely seek other forms of intimacy with that attraction perhaps by way of viewing child pornography or engaging in contact that might not be sexual but may well still be harmful to a child’s healthy development.
We should feel a strong discomfort about a group seeking to define the parameters of what they say is their sexual orientation and have it accepted as an illness when that particular ‘illness’ can and does lead to various forms of abuse and exploitation of children around the world.
There is also the problem of normalizing the idea that many men harbor sexual desires for children. At a time when we are battling the enormous and endemic problem of child pornography and child sex tourism, we need to ramp up our collective check of society’s moral compass on accepting, even reluctantly, that sexual desires for children are a modern illness afflicting men around the world.
There are moral, ethical and even psychological questions as to why the sexual predation, desire and sexualisation of children is the almost exclusive domain of men. In late modern society we need to ask ourselves some strong questions – is the sexualisation of children a link to the sexual desire for children and the growing market in child pornography and child sex tourism. And again to ask why these issues have the common denominator of children and men.
I worry about the gendered nature of an illness where men harbor sexual desires for children – and which research consistently shows so many men will act upon – and want this targeted behaviour to be classified as an illness. We have become a humanity that pathologies our behaviours and actions to an extraordinary degree, thus removing notions of responsibility, decency and a solid moral compass.
The 20th century is marked by consumerism with our identity linked to what we buy. I buy therefore I am, is the credo. And just as our high consumerism causes so much destruction – professionals have helped us craft a language of illness and pathology about our buying habits. Why reflect on a problem and see ourselves as central to it when we can tell ourselves it is an illness and thus another ailment in society we can seek treatment for.
Is it possible the DSM could become the book of appeasement refuting questions of morality and legal culpability with regard to child abuse and exploitation?
It is not the redefinition in the DSM that will ‘cure’ this peculiar illness of men nor provide the type of moral erudition needed to tackle the world wide problem of child sexual abuse. It is the refining of humanity and our capacity to deal with an entrenched crime inflicted on children.
See also: ‘Crimes cloaked in euphemisms’, Goddard and Mudaly. The Australian, Aug 25, 2011
8 Responses
I agree very much with almost everything said in the article. I also deplore the poor rate of conviction . I would also like to see some other methods that would protect children as the crime and punishment one is not always suitable from the point of view of the horrors of the trials for the children. I would also like a different type of offence for post puberty consenting children “such as abuse of sexual responsibility” to keep intact some internal sense of control for the child victims. Punishments could be just as severe as it is still a great breach of our duties.
I am a female. However I do have to differ on the question of this being a gendered problem. Perhaps my quite long experience working with children has been unique, but I think not. The rate of reported of female abuse (especially by mothers) does not reflect the reality. This may be because there is usually very little violence involved. The first mandated reportable disclosure of sexual abuse I had to make was by a little boy in relation to his mother. The only one I have seen in the flesh (very unfortunately) was when I accompanied a male worker, who was very worried, to a home. A mother, in a shower with her son, was fully sexually engaged with him. A shocking suicide of a grown man was because of disclosed abuse by his mother who continually tried to justify herself as detailed in your article.
Typically young teenage boys do not admit, even to themselves, this type of abuse as it makes them feel more powerless.
I wish, in your article, that the very good points made about the use of the “Illness” labels reflecting society’s moral compass had not been so gendered for I feel the views on sexual abuse of our children, the very people who need our protection, is even more skewed when it comes to sexual abuse by women.
I agree completely Melinda. Pedophiles looking to excuse behaviour rather than see it for what it is, a CRIME that has devastating life-long consequences for it’s victims and their future relationships.
As a child protection worker who has worked with countless children who have suffered at the hands of paedophiles, I cannot express how much this concerns me. Anybody who understands how pedophiles operate, know that they follow a very specific process, overcoming many obstacles (their own misgivings about their desires, gaining the trust of the parents to access a child, grooming the child) to reach the point where they are ready to actually sexually abuse the child. This is not an illness, it is a series of cold, calculated decisions designed to inflict a massive amount of harm on another human being for their own sexual gratification.
This is seriously disturbing. 🙁 Any push to decriminalise pedophiles should be resisted fiercely. I fear the world is becoming a more dangerous place for children.
This is not new because libertarian men have long advocated their ‘right’ (sic) of sexual access to female children and this old issue has once been raised only this time under cover of ‘mental illness.’ However, given so many males believe biologically born females are ‘mens sexual possessions’ are all these men ‘mentally ill’ or is something else happening which reinforces and justifies men’s pseudo right of sexual access to any female irrespective of age?
NAMBLA was a male organisation created in the 1980’s to promote male sexual violence against boy children because this organisation claimed it was men’s inalienable right to subject boy children to rape and sexual violence. NAMBLA claimed ‘sex between adult males and children was a positive act because it corresponded to the moral and sexual liberation of children.’ (See A Deafening Silence by Patrizia Romito page 140).
Now male sexual violence committed against female and male children is supposedly ‘a mental illness’ and is not a crime but a medical condition! Who benefits from such misogynistic claims? Not women and girls – but certainly men – especially those men who do not want to be criminalised and just perhaps punished for raping female and male children.
Pedophile is a weasel word commonly used to portray the male(s) as deviants rather than male child rapists. Men who commit sexual violence against female and to a lesser extent male children are not pedophiles – they are male child rapists.
The issue of whether or not mothers commit sexual violence against their biological children is one commonly raised when we hold male perpetrators accountable for committing sexual violence against female and to a lesser extent male children. The facts are some mothers do commit sexual violence against their biological children but the numbers of women are minute compared to the numbers of men who commit said violence against female and male children.
The issue is one of male power and male domination over women and girls and yet this issue has to be minimalised/ignored because male supremacy does not want male accountability to be subjected to scrutiny and accountability. Feminists have never ever said women do not commit sexual violence against their children but we do state the issue is not symmetrical rather it is asymmetrical. Female children are more at risk of male sexual violence than male children and furthermore as boys mature their chances of being subjected to male sexual violence diminish whereas females continue to be at risk of male sexual violence from the time they are born throughout their life span. That is the reality of living in a male supremacist society wherein male sexual access to women, girls and even female babies is increasingly seen as ‘acceptable’ or else is justified/minimalised by claims the male perpetrator is ‘mentally ill!’
Sigmund Freud uncovered the fact fathers in vast numbers were raping their female children but he swiftly recanted his findings because the male-dominated medical practitioners did not want this made public. Decades later Florence Rush, Sandra Butler and Louise Armstrong – to name just three feminist women uncovered male supremacy’s dirty little secret – that men particularly fathers and other male relatives in large numbers were and still are committing sexual violence against predominantly female children and to a lesser extent male children.
What happened? These three women and other feminists who carried on the good work of feminists in the late 19th century were demonised and told they were ‘man-haters.’ See A Deafening Silence by Patrizia Romito for succinct analysis and evidence of how male sexual violence against women and girls has been swiftly changed to one wherein women as mothers are supposedly to blame and the male perpetrators are not supposedly ‘responsible for their crimes against women and girls.’
Melinda – I completely agree with you re the culture of medicalising behaviour. I just said to my husband last night that “depressive illness” has become the ‘excuse’ for every kind of bad behaviour, from politicians to football players.
While I don’t discount that depression can cause a person to act in an uncharacteristic way and that it can affect judgement and behaviour, it seems to have become a blanket reason for every lapse.
We need to return to a state where people accept responsibility for their actions, face up to them, wear the consequences and stop hiding behind the curtain of “but I’m sick”.
As for paedophiles who claim they can’t help it, or it’s a physical/mental/hormonal affliction – if that is the case, then treat them medically and give them drugs that cut off their sexual drive – in other words, chemical castration. I have seen the damage wrought by child sexual abuse and if I could get my hands on the perpetrators, I might be more inclined towards a blunt bread knife rather than a pill or injection.
Children are always the victims in these cases and the number one priority should be their protection. It makes me feel physically ill to think about what (mostly) men do to little kids – boys and girls – to get their kicks.
Thank you for continuing to raise these issues – more power and a stronger voice to you.
God, how disgusting.
Emily…..just what I needed reminding of today. my case is drawing to a conclusion in the courts at present & feelings are overwhelming but what you wrote made me stop & think I have done the right thing by me, very important though we sometimes forget that!