Sins of the fathers: is child molestation a sickness or a crime?

WE USE WORDS to label and help us comprehend the world around us. At the same time, many of the words we use are like distorting lenses: They make us misperceive and hence misjudge the object we look at. As Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, the great 19th-century English jurist, aptly put it, "Men have an all but incurable propensity to prejudge all the great questions which interest them by stamping their prejudices upon their language."

Consider the ongoing scandal involving Roman Catholic priests accused of molesting boys. American law defines sexual congress between an adult and a child as a crime. The American Psychiatric Association defines it as a disease called "pedophilia."

Crimes are acts we commit. Diseases are biological processes that happen to our bodies. Mixing these two concepts by defining behaviors we disapprove of as diseases is a bottomless source of confusion and corruption.

That confusion was illustrated by a February 8 letter to The Boston Globe in which the Rev. John F. Burns defended Boston Cardinal Bernard Law against critics who said he ought to resign. As an archbishop, Law had transferred the Rev. John J. Geoghan to a new parish despite allegations of sexual abuse. Geoghan eventually was accused of molesting more than 100 children over three decades.

"It should be noted that neither Cardinal Bernard Law nor Father John Geoghan was aware early on of the etiology or pathology of the disease of pedophilia," Burns wrote. "The cardinal did what an archbishop does best. He showed kindness and love to an apparent errant priest. Father Geoghan also did what more recent knowledge shows pedophiles do: namely, be in total denial, with hardly any remembrance or remorse for their diseased acts. Calling for the cardinal's resignation is absurd. Let the healing begin and the law take its course."

The law is taking its course not only in the suits filed against the church by the victims of Geoghan and other abusive priests. Geoghan himself has been convicted of molestation in one case and faces trial in another. But if his behavior was caused by "the disease of pedophilia," a condition that not only compelled him to fondle boys but erased his memory of those "diseased acts," how can it be just to punish him? The uncertainty introduced by viewing sexual abuse as the symptom of a disease played an important role in the church's failure to protect congregants from priests like Geoghan. In a May 8 deposition, Cardinal Law was asked how he approached molestation charges. "I viewed this as a pathology, as a psychological pathology, as an illness," he said. "Obviously, I viewed it as something that had a moral component. It was, objectively speaking, a gravely sinful act." The combination of these two irreconcilable views, medical and moral, was a recipe for inaction.

Medical Penal Establishment

Today virtually any unwanted behavior, from shopaholism and kleptomania to sexaholism and pedophilia, may be defined as a disease whose diagnosis and treatment belong in the province of the medical system. Disease-making thus has become similar to lawmaking. Politicians, responsive to tradition and popular opinion, can define any act, from teaching slaves to read to the cold-blooded murder of a bank guard, as a crime whose control belongs in the province of the criminal justice system.

Applied to behavior, especially sexual behavior, the disease label combines a description with a covert value judgment. Masturbation, homosexuality, and the use of nongenital body parts (especially the mouth and anus) for sexual gratification have, at one time or place, all been considered sins, crimes, diseases, normal behaviors, and even therapeutic measures. For many years psychiatrists imprisoned homosexuals and tried to "cure" them; now they self-righteously proclaim that homosexuality is normal and diagnose people who oppose that view as "homophobic." Psychiatrists diagnose the person who eats too much as suffering from "bulimia" and the person who eats too little as suffering from "anorexia nervosa." Similarly, the person who has too much sex suffers from "sex addiction," while the person who shows too little interest in sex suffers from "sexual aversion disorder." Yet psychiatrists do not consider celibacy a form of mental illness; celibate persons are not said to suffer from "anerotica nervosa."

Why not? Because psychiatrists, politicians, and the media respect the Roman Catholic Church's definition of celibacy as a virtue, a "gift from God," even though celibacy is at least as "abnormal" as homosexuality, which the church continues to define as a grievous sin--an "intrinsic evil," in the words of Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua. Regardless of how unnatural or socially destructive a pattern of sexual behavior might be, if the church declares it to be virtuous--as with celibacy or abstinence 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.