The problem with this wonderful theory is that the people working in the field don't seem to buy into this claim. I searched for the terms "homosexual pedophile" "bisexual pedophile" and "heterosexual pedophile" in scientific journals published since 2000. And guess what? Plenty of articles that use these terms to refer to persons who are attracted only to the same sex of child, both sexes of child, and only the opposite sex of child.
Now, at this point you are probably going to say, "But people that are sexually attracted to children are not necessarily 'gay' in the sense of being attracted to adults of the same sex." There is certainly truth to that statement for many, probably most pedophiles who have sex with children of the same sex. However, studies as recently as 2000 surveying the literature concluded:
The best epidemiological evidence indicates that only 2–4% of men attracted to adults prefer men (ACSF Investigators, 1992; Billy et al., 1993; Fay et al., 1989; Johnson et al., 1992); in contrast, around 25–40% of men attracted to children prefer boys (Blanchard et al., 1999; Gebhard et al., 1965; Mohr et al., 1964). Thus, the rate of homosexual attraction is 6–20 times higher among pedophiles.Over the years, I have picked up a number of news stories about people who are openly gay and were not just interested in adults, like Nelson Garcia, a member of the North American Man-Boy Love Association, a convicted pedophile, and an activist for gay causes. Or people who are clearly gay, such as:
Lombard, associate director of Duke's Center for Health Policy, was arrested Wednesday evening at his home. Investigators seized two webcams, five computers and a sex toy, among other items, after searching his home.
The 5-year-old and another child in the home were placed in protective custody.Or this charming fellow:
...
Lombard, a licensed clinical social worker with a master's degree in social work, is a health-disparities researcher who studies HIV/AIDS in the rural South.
ASHEVILLE — A community activist and actor pleaded guilty to 16 counts of sexual exploitation of a minor after using the Internet to collect and share graphic child pornography.I have seen many other similar examples. I'm not saying that every homosexual (or even most homosexuals) are child molesters. That is not the case. But pretending that those who molest children are, by definition, not homosexuals, is simply not supported by the evidence.
A judge sentenced Andrew Douglas Reed, 53, to a minimum of 10 months and a maximum of 12 months in prison, District Attorney Ron Moore said Thursday.
Reed was arrested on June 10, 2005, during a statewide operation conducted by the State Bureau of Investigation.
...
According to a warrant authorizing a search of his Dogwood Road home, SBI agents determined Reed used an e-mail account to post 169 images and three movies containing child pornography on file-sharing networks from Jan. 13, 2004, to May 9. Most depicted children as young as 6 engaged in sex acts with adults or other children.
Reed, who also worked as a columnist for the Asheville Citizen Times, often wrote in support of the "gay" agenda in the region.
I don't really think people have become this habituated to child rape. The janitor who had witnessed a previous one of Sandusky's escapades, and who had been to war, said it was more traumatic to him than what he witnessed in war. Sandusky's is a violent crime, and I think it will have that kind of effect on people.
ReplyDeleteI don't blame the guy for seeing it, and walking out. Your first reaction would probably be to get the hell out of there. What I blame him for is thinking his next reaction was to call dad. Get your shit together, and do the right thing, even if the right thing is calling 911.
The showering with an 11 year old boy should have raised a red flag. Yes, he should have called 911, but how many people saw things like that and didn't go so far as to report it to Paterno?
ReplyDeleteI saw a documentary on TV where one pedophile who was convicted of molesting boys never thought of himself as being gay. Apparently he just did his evil thing with the children available who happened to be boys.
Clayton - I don't have time to dig up the study right now, but I recall reading a study of not quite 6,000 people convicted of sex crimes against children under 14 (approx, but it mostly excluded ephebophiles). Somewhat less than 10% of the convicts were women, leaving slightly over 5,000 men.
ReplyDeleteOf those men, about 75% had an adult sexual preference for women, about 8% for men, about 8% for men *and* women, and about 8% had no interest in adults sexually.
So 3/4 were otherwise heterosexual, 1/12 gay, 1/12 bi, and 1/12 purely pedophilic. Given that gay men and bi men seem to be about 1/30 each of the population, that means that gay and bi men are about 2.5 times as likely as straight men to be actively pedophilic.
Dave:
ReplyDeletectually, what the teaching assistant saw was not Sandusky showering with an 11 year old, but sodomizing him in the shower.
Anthony:
This is about what I would expect--a disproportionate number of gay and bi men, but still a minority, since gay and bi men are a tiny minority of the population.
Nonetheless, my larger point is that there are molesters who are exclusively heterosexual in their attraction (for both adults and children), and exclusively homosexual in their attraction (again, for both adults and children), and those who are bisexual in their attraction.
Pedophile does not exclude heterosexuality, homosexuality, or bisexuality in sexual attraction. A pedophile might have a "respectable" heterosexual adult relationship--or a respectable (by modern lights) homosexual adult relationship. Neither precludes an attraction to children, and those who insist that it does are clearly incorrect.
Sebastian:
ReplyDeleteMy first reaction, perhaps because I know so many victims, and have seen the damage it does, would be draw and order immediate withdrawal. Failure to do so under those circumstances is a lawful use of deadly force in every state.
Clayton:
ReplyDeleteI think you dodged Anthony's larger point while raisin a straw man of folks who argue someone who likes little kids can't be "gay."
I'd like to see Anthony's study. I don't doubt there are some who have adult attractions to the same sex or opposite sex who are also attracted to children. AND that a great deal of pedophiles are ONLY attracted to children.
We just need to straighten the numbers out.
Sandusky, as far as we know, is attracted ONLY to the opposite sex in his adult orientation making him otherwise heterosexual.
If you can't evince, on Sandusky's part, either self identification as gay or bi OR attraction to or behavior with adult men, then Sandusky doesn't belong in the "gay or bi" box.
Someone who is heterosexual in his adult sexual orientation, but is homosexual in his child sexual orientation is there not bisexual? It reminds me of when I used to see the claim that women shouldn't be charged a higher rate for health insurance because, except for having children, their health care costs aren't any higher than men.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like you are trying to make "gay or bi" a rather exclusive club, where men who have sex with men and boys aren't part of the club; men who have sex with men and women are part of the club; men who have with men and little girls aren't part of the club. One of the reasons that most AIDS research now uses the more PC term "men who have sex with men" (MSM) because there are a lot of men who are technically homosexual or bisexual but who for various reasons choose not to call themselves gay or bi, and who those who want to construct gay as a positive identity would prefer not admitting are part of the club.
I would like to see the study as well. Anthony's description indicates that only 8% had no adult attraction. This seems to be a pretty small part of the population of molesters (keeping in mind that a survey population of those convicted may be atypical of the general molester population). Some years ago, I ran into a study that found that Catholic priests (all Catholic priests) had 11x the AIDS rate of the general population, and that 81% of the victims of molesting Catholic priests were boys. You don't normally get AIDS by molesting little boys.
The only reason I care to make a semantic issue of this is because of the games you play with the numbers in getting a baseline for "gay or bi" and concluding "X" times more likely to molest.
ReplyDeleteI agree that there is a disconnect between self identification and actual orientation/behavior. And which we use makes a big difference. You like to narrow the gay or bi box to diminish the significant of gays but then broaden it to include folks like Sandusky. You can't have your cake and eat it too. If the box is more "inclusive" the smaller baseline number for gays or bis has to go and be replaced with something closer to 10% which bisexuals greatly outnumber pure homosexuals.
8.2% engage is same sex behavior. Over 10% admit some kind of same sex attraction. Yet. 3.5% identify as gay, lesbian or bi. And around 2% (a little less) purely gay.
http://wiwp.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Gates-How-Many-People-LGBT-Apr-2011.pdf
As I read the data that means 3.5% are from 3-6 on the sexual orientation scale, the "gay or bi" identifiers. The others are not 0s, but still straight identifying.
The way I understand homo-bisexuality, only about 3.5% belong in the box. We err if we then conclude 96.5% of the population have a perfectly functioning pure heterosexual orientation. For all I know, there may be as many or more asexuals as pure homosexuals (there certainly seems a lot prominent folks who may be from Lindsay Graham to Condi Rice to Justices Souter and Kagan to Ralph Nader). And someone who is only attracted to children or animals doesn't belong in either the "gay or bi" OR "straight" boxes.
The study in question reports that 8.2% have at some point engaged in homosexual sex. But that is going to include homosexual actions as teenagers (something that used to be relatively common among boys, but which does not continue into adulthood), prisoners, and homosexuals who have straightened out. Spitzer's work demonstrates that among those committed to reparative therapy, about half were successful in changing their sexual orientation. One guy I used to go to church with turned straight shortly after he became a Christian, and completely lost interest thereafter.
ReplyDeleteMany studies have used "have you had sex with a member of the same sex in the last year? last five years?" as a measure of current orientation. Asking about a lifetime's actions is certainly interesting, but about as meaningful for measuring sexual behavior as asking, "Are you now or have you ever been a child?" and concluding that 100% of the population is a child.
There may be a fair number of asexuals out there--although your examples above may be people who are just quite discreet with respect to who they have sex with! (What a concept: discretion.) There are also people who have no sexual relationships, but are completely heterosexual in their orientation and desires, but because of personality and temperament, have a hard time finding a partner. I have a friend like that.
I don't know how many people are ONLY interested in animals or children, but I suspect that it isn't terribly large.
One more point: to eliminate the disproportionate homosexual and bisexual involvement in child molestation would require something like 15-30% (depending on which studies you use for preference of pedophiles) of the population at any given time be homosexual or bisexual. This is clearly not the situation--not even close.
ReplyDeleteMore importantly: men are disproportionately child molesters, and by a comparable or even large ratio than homosexuals/bisexuals. Men are also disproportionately murderers and very disproportionately rapists. This leads to bigotry against men, who, in the absence of other information about an individual man, is often assumed to be a potential rapist, murderer, or child molester.
There are times that this is disappointing; a woman who does not know me and runs into me in an isolated place is likely to be nervous. For the same reason, a stranger is less likely to trust me to watch a child than a strange woman. This is bigotry, pure and simple, but it is a bigotry based on facts. While it is somewhat painful, I can fully understand that concern and agree with taking actions based on it.
Yet I don't feel personally affronted by that fact, or feel a need to challenge or disprove that fact. But that is because my identity is not, "Clayton Cramer, man" but "Clayton Cramer, individual." This is the fundamental flaw of identity politics--the need to turn everyone into a representative of their group.