Pedophilia and the culture wars - debating harmful effects of pedophilia

Public Interest, Wntr, 2000 by G. E. Zuriff

One of the best illustrations of the role of psychology in the critique of the nuclear family appears. in the June issue of the American Psychologist, the flagship journal of the APA. In this article, the authors, Louise Silverman and Carl Auerbach, challenge the belief that a father is essential for positive child development. Citing a variety of data, they conclude that not only is a father not essential but neither is a mother. According to these scholars, "Children need at least one responsible caretaking adult [of either gender] who has a positive emotional connection to them and with whom they have a consistent relationship." Although they concede that for practical reasons it is helpful to have a second adult caregiver, they argue that the two caregivers need not be of the opposite sex, married, or even biologically related to the child for him or her to develop good mental health. Predictably, the authors view the traditional value placed on a two-parent home as mere prejudice. In their words, "The e mphasis on the essential importance of fathers and heterosexual marriage represents ... an attempt to reassert the cultural hegemony of traditional values, such as heterocentrism, Judeo-Christian marriage, and male power and privilege."

Why did the APA blink?

After 25 years of this sort of research, what is left standing of the traditional nuclear family? Cone are heterosexuality, the necessity for two parents, marriage, gendered division of labor, hierarchy of power, and biological relatedness, Remaining is a mere shadow of the former family--a stable, emotionally connected adult caregiver of either gender and a child, who do not have sex with one another.

This brings us full circle to the original Rind, Bauserman, and Tromovitch article on pedophiha. In arguing that childadult sexual relations are usually not harmful to the child, these scholars appeared to stand at the next frontier for deconstructing the family, the prohibition against sex within the family. Can a psychologically healthy and therefore societally sanctioned family consist of a child and a stable, emotionally supportive pedophile? The APA peered into this abyss and backed off. Why?

This question is actually two questions. First, why did the APA not stand behind the editorial integrity of the world-renowned Psychological Bulletin and simply say, as did Rind, Bauserman, and Tromovitch, that lack of harmfulness does not imply lack of wrongfulness, that although pedophilia may often be psychologically harmless, it is nevertheless wrong and should remain illegal and socially unacceptable? The answer to this first question is not difficult to discern. For the APA to admit that judgments of morality may be independent of psychological adjustment would be to admit that moral intuition does indeed play a critical role in social policy, that psychological studies do not fully determine what is good. To admit this, however, is to grant that although homosexuality. single-mother families, sex between adolescents, out-of-wedlock births, the rearing of children in daycare, abortion, and divorce do not cause psychological harm, they may nevertheless be wrong. In the end, the APA could not turn its ba ck on a quarter century of social-policy positions.