Pedophilia and the culture wars - debating harmful effects of pedophilia

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

Speaking for the APA, Rhea Faberman, its Director of Communications, offered yet another reason for the organization's position. "Pedophilia is a mental disorder," she stressed. Unfortunately, Faberman has not kept up with the reformers' recent successes. Along with homosexuality, pedophilia per se has been dropped from the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, the official listing of mental disorders. For a pedophile to be diagnosed with a mental disorder, it is necessary that the sexual urges or behaviors cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning. Consequently, a pedophile does not meet the criteria for a mental disorder if he has managed to stay clear of law enforcement agencies, has maintained a job and social contacts, and is not distressed by his pedophilia.

Ideological contradictions

Clearly, the reasons the APA offers for its position cannot constitute the full story. Both their position and the reasons given for it are reversals of the APA's long standing ideology. Perhaps another reason lurks beneath the surface. As was suggested above, the core of the Left's dissatisfaction with the traditional nuclear family is that it is patriarchal: The father wields power over the wife and children, endangering their physical, sexual, and emotional well-being. Any evidence challenging this thesis threatens the very essence of the Left's critique of the traditional family and is strongly resisted. For example, feminists have fiercely contested two decades of research by the Family Violence Research Program at the University of New Hampshire showing that women have as high an incidence of domestic violence as men. Similarly, evidence of high levels of domestic violence between gay or lesbian partners has been ignored. If the traditional family is no more unsafe than the alternatives, then the attac k on the traditional family loses some of its force.

Similarly, the Rind, Bauserman, and Tromovitch study could be seen as yet another blow to the image of the traditional family as a danger zone. If father-child sex is not as harmful as had been thought, the traditional family is not as dangerous as thought. Perhaps this was a conclusion the APA could not endorse and may have contributed to its decision to call for a temporary truce in the culture wars; however, this truce is merely a tactical one, imposed on the APA by powerful political forces and by deep contradictions within its own ideology. Because the APA has yet to recognize the legitimacy of moral intuition in formulating social policy, the cultural battles will continue on other fronts.

Morality's place

The controversy surrounding the study reveals not only the ideologically driven process by which the organized mental-health profession formulates social policy but also the nature of contemporary public discourse about our fundamental values. For the most part, the Left's utilitarian ethics has framed the dialogue. Debates center on what is best medically, economically, psychologically--how to reduce crime, teenage births, drug use, welfare dependence; how to enhance education, career training, health, emotional adjustment, and productivity. In this framework, it is easy to equate morality with psychological and economic development and to leave questions of public policy to the social scientists.