MaryKay Letourneau (sp?)
Nice slur on the mentally-ill there. :rolleyes:
He was 13- a borderline age, and I am not sure how mature he was for that age.
Would you prefer: “anyone who is sexually attracted to a pre-pubesent child is mentally ill”?
I’d like a cite of any mental illness where a defining symptom is sexual attraction to children.
Interesting question, Dex – but according to some analysis I saw a few years ago (sorry, no cites; I don’t hang on to everything) the trend was that historically boys were more apt to be molested than girls, though adult males were slightly more apt to be the molesters than adult females. The suggestion was that boys were allowed significantly more freedom, at least in the past, than girls of the same age, and further tended to do more daring, adventuresome things that would bring them in contact with strangers and alone with adults. They were therefore more “available” for predation, consensual or otherwise. The adult male thing was attributed to the historical male-dominance role.
Another interesting element that has definitely not been explored is pre-puberty sexuality – anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that at least a small percentage of children are sexually aware if very naive individuals at ages while adults are still considering them naive and not yet interested in matters romantic or sexual – which further complicates the issue.
Now what I remember from my searching (lost my cites too) was that girls were far more likely to be the victims than boys, with family members/Mom’s new boyfriend the typical perpetrators. At the same time, the molesters who preyed on boys were found to have committed far more acts, something like 50 per.
Oh bullshit. Hetero/Homo are sexual orientations. Pedophilia is a perversion of both. It is not about sex, it’s about control and manipulation.
widdley
Correct. I’ve heard it speculated that the reason is the “homosexual” label, as odd as that may seem. Only the most intense and unwavering pedophile are willing to cross that line. Those with some amount of reservations or self-loathing tend not to want to pile more on. Those who have none don’t care about male or female, only access and power. And a lot of adult men have access and power over young boys.
I doubt there are any hard facts. This whole thing could easily get dumped in Great Debates, but it’s worth discussing.
For what it’s worth, Paul Gore, PhD and all like that, with the University of Missouri-Kansas City, has a pretty good brief rundown on pedophilia in general. Relevant quote:
“While most pedophiles who engage in or fantasize about same-sex children do not participate in heterosexual adult sexual relations, they also deny being homosexual.”
Further, he notes that fixated pedophiles are mostly men who consider themselves to be children, and end up victimizing boys. However, these men do not typically maintain any adult relationships, and (my conclusion) cannot be considered “homosexual” in any real sense.
These people are fixated pedophiles, no more; this is deviant behavior and unrelated to sexual orientation as we think of it. It carries with it specific behavior patterns and an unrealistic self-image, while homosexuality and heterosexuality merely imply an attraction to a specific (adult) gender.
However, (still rolling with my own conclusions) the fact that this type of pedophilia leads to methodical and planned encounters (unlike many other types), it gets lots of airtime. The public draws the conclusion that, because it primarily results in men victimizing boys, it correlates in some way with homosexuality. As I said, this doesn’t seem to be the case - fixated pedophiles who target boys don’t generally initiate relationships with adults at -all-.
Moving along, whoever wanted a cite on pedophilia as a mental illness should dig out their home version of the DSM-IV. It’s in there, but in a more limited way than in the DSM-III. Or so I’m told - I don’t have a copy handy to dig it out, but a couple of websites were complaining that the standard had changed.
On the flip side:
The Family Research Institute has a long article with lots of footnotes attempting to show that homosexuals are more likely to be pedophiles.
They, and some other researchers, appear to reach this conclusion simply by defining the terms the way they like. When a pedophile targets same-gendered children, they get to count him or her as a homosexual, even if that person is not sexually attracted to same-gendered adults. This is a bit disingenious, but again seems to be the source of the claim generally.
I find it vaguely amusing that they cite the Kinsey report, which is pretty well discredited, thanks to the work of someone else claiming a link between homosexuality and pedophilia, Dr. Judith Reisman.
Doc Reisman, I should note, is a lawyer, and a political activist, who argues that homosexuals should not be allowed to be part of “mainstream” society. By claiming that homosexuality is a sexually devient behavior, as is pedophilia, she can segue into equating the two more smoothly than the FRI folks, but she uses the same term-definition argument in the end.
So my conclusion - hardly a factual answer, but I’ve been reading enough on the subject to make me ill - is that there is no demonstrated correlation between the two if you assume that pedophiles who target the same gender are not homosexual unless they maintain homosexual adult relationships, or at least have a homosexual self-image.
Now, if you assume that fixated pedophiles are in fact homosexual by defining the term that way, then yes, a given homosexual is statistically more likely to molest children.
However - and this is a big however - I would conclude that -anyone- who maintains close adult relationships, romantic or not, is unlikely to be a fixated pedophile, regardless of sexual orientation.
Further, anyone not exhibiting behavior patterns associated with pedophilia (of any stripe) is equally likely to be a pedophile as anyone else not exhibiting these patterns. Anyone exhibiting behavior patterns associated with pedophilia is equally likely to be a pedophile as anyone else exhibiting these patterns.
These conclusions are based mainly on the fact that I see no medical or law enforcement references claiming a correlation between homosexual orientation and pedophilia; they only refer to behaviors as indicators, and none of them list “buggery” as a relevant behavior pattern. Those claiming a correlation appear to be playing with semantics.
Mind you, I don’t see any statistical analysis that throws out same-gender child molesters who are not homosexual, so I can’t say there’s absolutely not a correlation. But the first person who says “if you can’t prove it isn’t true, how can we take the chance?” gets to go three rounds with the cluebat. If someone wants to spend some Serious Time digging through primary sources and doing the math, I bet the results would be interesting.
Two final notes - First, remember that pedophiles are not necessarily child molesters, but the potential is there, particularly when alcohol, drugs, and/or stress gets involved. If you (not anyone specifically, but any readers in general) are a pedophile, see a psychiatrist, and avoid situations where temptation might strike.
(If you’re a child molester, see a psychiatrist -right now-. It’s tempting to say something mean and improbable, but, like, seriously. Get some help.)
Second, I’m happily and strictly heterosexual, because that’s my sexual orientation. The point of bringing this up is that I’ve no special agenda to push, here, if you care to take my word for it.
Second-and-a-half. I am not a psychiatrist, nor a doctor, nor a statistical analyst. Not even a lawyer like Dr. Judy “Doc” Reisman, PhD. I’m a glorified dishwasher who sometimes gets to set things on fire at work. But I can smell an argument by definition a mile away, and the simple fact is that people are defining the terms for political use differently than the medical-types do.
-Maybe-. In the course of my reading for the post I just made, I noted that it’s pretty much accepted among researchers that female molestation of boys is widely unreported, both in the US and in Europe, so there’s no good numbers at -all- to draw the first conclusion from.
The second conclusion appears to be an artifact of the above; the women who -did- commit an awful lot of acts were the ones who eventually got caught, skewing the numbers.
Er, the first link in my post mentions it toward the bottom, and it’s a recurring theme throughout university and journal publications on the subject.
Any statement statistically comparing female and male child molesters is meaningless. -Probably- more girls are victims of molestation by men than boys by women, is about the best you’ll get me to commit to. There’s a whole category of pedophiles that primarily consists of men who prey on boys, which would shore up the numbers somewhat, if there -were- any good numbers on this, which there aren’t.
This might help. It is a quote from the Diagnostic and Staistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th Ed., Text Revision, put out by the American Psych. Association. I think it is current: Pedophilia
Be sure to read the cautionary statement on the link though!
I know that there is a movement to have it removed from the current or upcoming DSM.
No. Specific types of pedophiles have different motivations and behavior patterns, which correlate well to the gender of their targets. “Intense” and “unwavering” are not categories of pedophilia. Access and power are motivations for the regressed pedophile, whose targets tends to match his or her sexual orientation.
Now pipe down; some of us are trying to contribute meaningfully here.
Pardon the rehashing of what others have mentioned, but-
if you Google homosexuals and pedophilia, you will find that almost all roads ultimately lead to the aforementioned Paul Cameron. This man is either evil or insane and his absolutely-no-room-for-doubt-or-equivocation-proven-outright-lies about gays are legendary and well documented (the reason he was thrown out of the American Psychological Association was specifically connected to falsifying of data about gays*. Most of Cameron’s articles appear in vanity presses or are self-published. Unfortunately few people outside of academia understand the notion of “peer reviewed” journals and professional sounding names like Psychological Reports** and Adolescence*** impress them. (They’re even listed as “peer reviewed” in some databases which bugs me to no end; I’ve written letters but to no avail so far.)
Most despicable is when academics, like asshats Benne & McDermott (authors of the net’s most widely circulated attacks on gay marriage (and which I think I successfully deconstructed here and elsewhere- I also wrote their department head complaining of the lack of ethics in their claims but he of course never answered [religious institution]), cite Cameron when they most definitely know how to distinguish good from bad sources. The hell of it is that if they actually read Cameron’s articles, *even HE says that his studies might not be accurate!!!
Cameron is to gays what Cyril Burt was to the British lower classes or Julius Streicher was to Nuremberg Jewry. His complete lack of ethics and accusations of gays as pedophiles, murderers and short lived miserable individuals have been debunked by real professionals, confirmed or replicated by no respected entity, outright contradicted by all other reliable studies and condemned by individuals and organizations as conservative as a Texas Republican judge, William Bennett and Focus on the Family, but he continues to thrive courtesy of people too stupid or ideologically blinded to look behind the green curtain at the man giving them the facts that prop up their hatred. He is easily one of the most diabolical creatures in the nation, far more dangerous than Fred Phelps (whom even Falwell dismisses as a nut) because people do take the son-of-a-bitch seriously.
*By falsifying I mean “making shit up” (ala Cyril Burt), not the legitimate meaning of data falsification
**A total vanity press. Their current rate is $125 per page with an 8 page minimum. You could write an article entitled Sanford & Son Viewers More Likely to Commit Mass Murder and for evidence cite a previous article you wrote and they will print it.
***The “peer review” team for Adolescence is- I’m not making this up- a husband wife team who publish it out of their home in California. Even Cameron called the publication a joke that would allow claims no refereed journals would allow (almost his exact words)-- of course this was before he published in it.Cyril Burt was to
I wondered what those disclaimers were about. The “working paper; do not cite without written permission” stuff -was- kind of weird (see the FRI link in my long post for one, in the footnotes; they pop up everywhere he’s involved).
Here is a page at the University of California’s Psych Department with some statements by the APA on the matter.
Even so, his numbers don’t come from whole cloth, which is why he’s a dangerous fellow - by being picky about your primary data, and choosing your definitions, you too can “prove” just about any half-assed idea. He’s not the only one who read How_to_Lie_With_Statistics; others have used similar methodology to put numbers behind their prejudices.
Take Dr. Reisman, for example. The APA took particular issue with Cameron’s mis-use of the Kinsey report, but Reisman manages to squeeze different turnips and come up with blood. There’s more out there, too.
As I noted, the serious literature from university and gommint researchers doesn’t reach these conclusions, or use the same definitions. However, I couldn’t dredge up any good numbers from 'em, but I did see a couple long papers bemoaning the fact that there -are- no good numbers.
This is such a strange conversation - I feel like it’s important to know how to keep my babies safe (and I didn’t even HAVE kids back when the argument took place, but was just trying to combat ignorance & defend my gay friends). Yet going over the topic of pedophiles & molestation is leaving me queasy. Kind of like driving past a car wreck. Of course, I’ve figured out the answer - mine aren’t leaving the house until they’re 25 :p.
Just one more question. If you’re saying that being a pedophile is significantly different from having an adult sexual orientation and therefore not quantifiable in the same way (which makes sense, since it is rather off the charts) — what is the orientation of these men who abuse their own daughters? There’s one in the news today, he killed his own 3-yr-old girl and there are indications of a history of sexual abuse. But he was (at one time) married and had a son as well - that would seem to be an adult sexual orientation. How does that correlate with the other assertions made here?
There are a couple of questions you can ask:
- Of all pedophilic acts, what percent are a homosexual?
This would include males that have adult heterosexual relations which comprise the vast majority of pedophiles.
- What percent of the homosexual population are pedophiles versus heterosexual.
This would give you what you REALLY want to know.
Straight.
I can’t remember how to link to other threads, but in an earlier thread on this subject I actually called up Dr. Bill Marshall, a professor at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario and one of the world’s leading experts on deviant and criminal sexual behaviour. He once taught my father so I had an in with him. Professor Marshall told me, in essence:
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Virtually ALL men who molest pre-pubesecent boys and girls are straight when it comes to other adults. There may be the odd exception but it’s exceedingly rare. Dr. Marshall told me about some of his research, which included interviews with almost every serial sex offender in Canada (Kingston has seven federal prisons, so I guess Queen’s University is a great place to study criminal behaviour) and to be honest with you some of the data is kind of disgusting, but it included things like “89% of respondents had only had adult sexual relationships with other women and reported that boy’s bodies struck them as being feminine…” Kind of sickening, but to the point; a young boy’s body IS feminine - not hairy, soft, etc. - whereas a teenager’s body gets masculine practically overnight.
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The majority of men who molest pubescent boys, e.g. ages 12-16, are gay. Essentially all men who molest pubescent girls are straight.
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There than be exceptions to any rule if the circumstances of the offender’s life are such that normal sexual behaviour is restricted. In other words, you really should not leave children alone with Catholic priests.
The simple truth is this; your prepubescent child is safer with a gay man than with a straight men. I’m straight so I have no vested interest in saying this.
Well, since many Pedophiles can’t & don’t have normal sexual relations with any adults, I think your last statement is a bit much. Pretty much- your child is safe if left alone with anyone but a pedophile, and you really can’t tell who is or isn’t one of those all that easiliy.
I’m perfectly willing to be corrected via cites, etc. but I don’t believe you have a moderator’s right to shut down my own attempts at contributing to this thread. How’s about you pipe down on the ordering?