Highlights
Excerpt: Introduction – Is Sex Harmful?
Sex is a moral issue. But it is neither a different nor greater moral issue than many other aspects of human interaction. Sex is not a separate category of life; it should not be regarded as a separate category of art, education, politics, or commerce, or of emotional harm or benefit. Child or teen sex can be moral or immoral. And so can our treatment of the children and teens who desire it and act on that desire.
Harmful to Minors launches from two negatives: sex is not ipso facto harmful to minors; and America’s drive to protect kids from sex is protecting them from nothing. Instead, often it is harming them.
Excerpt: Introduction – Panic
Conservative legislators have effectively shut down government-funded research on adults’ sexual behavior, motives, or feelings. As for surveying minors about the same subjects, this is practically illegal. How do children and teens feel about sex? What do they actually do? Only a handful of researchers are asking, and few are likely to soon.
Squeamish or ignorant about the facts, parents appear willing to accept the pundits’ worst conjectures about children’s sexual motives. It’s as if they cannot imagine that their kids seek sex for the same reasons they do: They like or love the person they are having it with. It gives them a sense of beauty, worthiness, happiness or power. And it feels good.
Excerpt: Introduction – Is Sex Harmful?
Harmful to Minors says sex is not in itself harmful to minors. Rather, the real potential harm lies in the circumstances under which some children and teens have sex, circumstances that predispose them to what the public-health people call “unwanted outcomes,” such as unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, not to mention what Id also consider an unwanted outcome: plain old bad sex.
Excerpt: Introduction – Birth of the Child
All this history lives on in us: zeitgeists do not displace each other like weather systems on a computerized map. We still invest the child with romantic innocence: witness John Gray’s cherub-bedecked Children Are From Heaven. The Victorian fear of the poisonous knowledge of worldly sexuality is still with us; lately it’s reemerged in the demonic power we invest in the Internet. Hall’s image of teen sexuality as a normal pathology informs child psychology, pedagogy, and parenting: think of “risk behaviors” and “raging hormones.”
Excerpt: Censorship – Harmed
Evidence of the harm of exposure to sexually explicit images or words in childhood is inconclusive, even nonexistent. The 1970 U.S Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, the “Lockhart commission,” uncovered no link between adult exposure to pornography and bad behavior and called for dismantling legal restrictions on erotica. Not only did the panelists fail to find harm to children in viewing erotica, moreover, they went so far as to suggest it could “facilitate much needed communication between parent and child over sexual matters.” The 1985 Commission on Pornography (the Meese commission), chaired by Reagan’s attorney general Edwin Meese and assembled specifically to overturn the 1970 findings, could not establish factual links between sexually explicit materials and antisocial behavior either. Indeed, researchers have more evidence that the opposite is true. Interviewers of sex criminals including child molesters reveal that the children who eventually became rapists were usually exposed to pornography less than other kids; if they’d seen the same amount, the exposure had not occurred earlier in life than other children’s. According to Johns Hopkins University’s John Money, one of the world’s foremost authorities on sexual abnormalities, “the majority of patients with paraphilias”—deviant sexual fantasies and behaviors—”described a strict anti-sexual upbringing in which sex was either never mentioned or was actively repressed or defiled.”
Excerpt: Censorship – Premature
It is unlikely the air will get less dense with information or with sex. No law, no Internet filter, no vigilant parent will be able to keep tabs on every page and pixel that passes before a child’s eyes beyond the age of two. In that exquisite teenage tone of sarcastic pity, high school freshman Laura Megivern addressed parents who imagined they could “protect” their children in this way. “I have something else you might be interested in,” she wrote in her local Vermont newspaper, “A closet with a lock”—to put the kids away and keep them there.
Adults may have more influence over their kids’ media consumption than Laura thinks. But she is right that censorship is not protection. Rather, to give children a fighting chance in navigating the sexual world, adults need to saturate it with accurate, realistic information and abundant, varied images and narratives of love and sex.
Excerpt: Manhunt – The Enemy Is Us
Our culture fears the pedophile, say some social critics, not because he is deviant, but because he is ordinary. And I don’t mean because he is the ice-cream man or Father Patrick. No, we fear him because he is us. In his elegant study of “the culture of child-molesting,” the literary critic James Kincaid traced this terror back to the middle of the nineteenth century. Then, he said, Anglo-American culture conjured childhood innocence, defining it as desireless subjectivity, at the same time as it constructed a new ideal of the sexually desirable object. The two had identical attributes—softness, cuteness, docility, passivity—and this simultaneous cultural invention has presented us with a wicked psychosocial problem ever since. We relish our erotic attraction to children, says Kincaid (witness the child beauty pageants in which JonBenet Ramsey was entered). But we also find that attraction abhorrent (witness the public shock and disgust at JonBenéts “serialization” in those pageants). So we project that eroticized desire outward, creating a monster to hate, hunt down, and punish.
Excerpt: Manhunt – The Enemy Is Us
Psychologists and law enforcers call the man who loves teenagers a hebephile. That’s a psychiatric term, denoting pathological sexual deviance. But if we were to diagnose every American man for whom Miss (or Mr.) Teenage America was the optimal sex object, we’d have to call ourselves a nation of perverts. If the teenage body were not the culture’s ideal of sexiness, junior high school girls probably would not start starving themselves as soon as they notice a secondary sex characteristic, and the leading lady (on-screen or in life) would not customarily be twenty to forty years younger than the leading man. I asked Meg Kaplan, a widely respected clinician who treats sex offenders at the New York State Psychiatric Institute’s Sexual Behavior Clinic, about the medicalization and criminalization of the taste for adolescents flesh. “Show me a heterosexual male who’s not attracted to teenagers,” she snorted. “Puh-leeze.”
Excerpt: Manhunt – False Security
Those who work with sex offenders have warned that such policies might do no good and could even do harm. For one thing, former sex offenders are at far lower risk of committing new crimes than those released from prison after serving time for other crimes. Nevertheless, rage against sex criminals is often far greater, and community notification laws serve to focus that rage. Since their inception, such programs have fueled harassment and vigilantism, which further isolate and unnerve the parolee, leading to the exact opposite of the law’s intended effect. “You ban somebody from the community, he has no friends, he feels bad about himself, and you reinforce the very problems that contribute to the sex abuse behavior in the first place,” Robert Freeman-Longo, former director of the Safer Society Program and president of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, told me, “You make him a better sex offender.”
Some criminal-justice practices, moreover, seem to have no other intent but to keep the public on the edge of its seats. During the summer of 1997, California’s Justice Department set up a sort of side-show booth at state fairs featuring an LED screen that endlessly scrolled the names of the state’s sex offenders, along with their addresses–sixty-four thousand in all. What the shocked viewers did not know was that because of registration in that state covered crimes committed as far back as the 1940s, many of the “predators” on the list had been arrested for victimless misdemeanors like soliciting a prostitute or cruising a man in a gay bar. Tom Masters, program director of correctional treatment services at Oregon State Hospital, described such policymaking succinctly: “A lot of crime legislation is a function of politics, and not rehabilitation or community safety.”
Nor, I would add, is it a function of community sanity. In 1984, at the beginning of the sex-lawmaking frenzy, the authors of the final report on U.S. Senator William V. Roth’s Child Pornography and Pedophilia hearings noted what they called a paradox. “Good laws often lead to more arrests,” they wrote, “thus making it appear that more new laws are needed to curb what the public perceives as an increase in crime.” Nevertheless, the commissioners recommend more laws, which led to more bureaucracy, more agents, and more investigations, and more arrests. And that, said Eric Lotke of the National Center for Institutions and Alternatives, created another paradox: the public felt falsely safer and also more fearful.
Excerpt: Manhunt – False Security
Trying to fortify the nuclear family by fermenting suspicion of strangers fractures the community of adults and children; it can leave children defenseless in abusive homes. Projecting sexual menace onto a cardboard monster and pouring money and energy into vanquishing him distract adults from teaching children the subtle skills of loving with both trust and discrimination. Ultimately, children are rendered more vulnerable both at home and in the world.
Excerpt: Therapy – Unsuspecting
For the details of diagnosis, most of these new specialists turned to Johnson’s checklist of child sexual behaviors, divided between those that are “natural,” those that an observer should worry about, and those that require rushing the child to the doctor. For kindergarten to fourth-grade children, for instance, “looks at the genitals, buttocks, breasts of adults” was in the “Natural and Expected column, but “touches/stares at the genitals, etc.” was listed under “Of Concern,” and “sneakily or forcibly touches genitals . . .” was under “Seek Professional Help.” These determinations, beyond being arbitrary, were based on conclusions reached in the 1980s that were so tenuous and tautological that they might have been reported in Wonderland: “While norms do not presently exist for what is normal sexual behavior in children,” wrote Johnson in 1988, “the behaviors exhibited . . . Led us to label the behaviors as being outside the normal range of sexual activity for their age group.”
Nonetheless, as the diagnosis of “sexual behavior problems” gained currency in sex-abuse circles, it also was on its way to wider ratification, which in turn boosted media attention, funding, and business.
Excerpt: Crimes of Passion – Parents’ Rights, Parents’ Responsibilities
Legal solutions neither offer emotional satisfaction (which shouldn’t be the role of the law anyway) nor fix a bad situation. At the beginning of the twentieth century, “age-of-consent law and the juvenile court system merely perpetuated the stigma and supported the punishment of working-class females who engaged in unorthodox sexual behavior,” wrote Odem. At the end of the century, this is still true, the the additional fillip that the laws punish the unorthodox behavior of boys as well, if they are gay. But the law also perpetuates a stigma on behavior that is not particularly unorthodox—the “intergenerational” relationship. In fact, the coupling of a taller, richer, stronger older man with the smaller, younger, less experienced woman is not only the romantic ideal, it is the norm. Research from the 1970s on has consistently found that whatever the law, a majority of girls lose their virginity to someone older than they. At this writing, that means a tenth to a quarter of young women’s chosen lovers are criminals.
Most important, as Lynn Phillips pointed out, such laws do nothing to address the needs for love and guidance, economic autonomy, respect, social status, or sexual agency that lead some girls into such liaisons, nor do they redress the age and gender inequalities that prevent those girls from negotiating equally with their partners over safe sex, pregnancy, or money and that render them vulnerable to domestic violence and abandonment.
Excerpt: Crimes of Passion – Creating Victims
Many psychologists believe that adults’ reactions even to certifiable sexual abuse can exacerbate the situation for the child, both in the short and in the long-term. “There is often as much harm done to the child by the system’s handling of the case as the trauma associated with the abuse,” the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect reported in 1978. But the system’s handling did not appreciably improve in the next two decades, especially as criminal proceedings increased against adults in adult-minor liaisons. When the youngster has had what she considers a relationship of love and consensual sex, it does no good to tell her she has been manipulated and victimized. “To send out the message that you’ve been ruined for life and this person was vile and they were pretending to care—that often does a lot of damage,” commented Fred Berlin, a psychiatrist at John Hopkins University and a well respected expert on treating sex offenders.
Excerpt: Crimes of Passion – Creating Victims
Teens often seek out sex with older people, and they do so for understandable reasons: an older person makes them feel sexy and grown up, protected and special; often the sex is better than it would be with a peer who has as little skill as they do. For some teens, a romance with an older person can feel more like salvation than victimization. Wrote Ryan, a teenager who had run away from home to live in a Minnesota commune with his adult lover, “John was the first person in my life who let me be who I wanted to be. . . . Without John I would have been dead because I would have killed myself.”
Excerpt: Crimes of Passion – Creating Victims
Which story is true—freely chosen love or sweet-talked dupery? Both, said Thompson wisely when I asked her. Philips seemed to agree. “Rather than presuming adult-teen relationships are really a form of victimization or that they really represent unproblematic, consensual partnerships—rather than maintaining either that willingness means consent or that an age difference means an inherent inability to consent—we need to step back and probe the nuances of adult-teen relationships from the perspectives of young women who participate in them,” Philips wrote. If we are going to educate young women to avoid potentially exploitative relationships, “those strategies must speak to [their] lived realities and the cultural and personal values that they, their families, and their communities hold regarding this issue.”
Excerpt: Crimes of Passion – “Scrambled Scripts”
There is no distinct moment at which a person is ready to take on adult responsibilities, nor is it self-evident that only those who have reached the age of majority are mature enough to be granted adult privileges. People do not grow up at sixteen, eighteen, or twenty-one, if they ever do. A three-decade study of thirty thousand adolescents and adults concluded that, cognitively and emotionally, both groups operated at an average developmental age of sixteen.
Legally designating a class of people categorically unable to consent to sexual relations is not the best way to protect children, particularly when “children” include everyone from birth to eighteen. Criminal law, which must draw unambiguous lines, is not the the proper place to adjudicate family conflicts over youngsters’ sexuality. If such laws are to exist, however, they must do what Philips suggests about sexual and romantic education: balance the subjective experience and the rights of young people against the responsibility and prerogative of adults to look after their best interests, to “know better.” A good model of reasonable legislation is Holland’s.
The Dutch parliament in 1990 made sexual intercourse for people between twelve and sixteen legal but let them employ a statutory consent age of sixteen if they felt they were being coerced or exploited. Parents can overule the wishes of a child under sixteen, but only if they make a convincing case to the Council for the Protection of Children that they are really acting in the child’s best interest. “Through this legislation, therefore, Dutch children of 12 to 16 years accrued conditional rights to consent to sexual behaviors, and parental authority was conditionally reduced,” wrote David T. Evans in Sexual Citizenship. “Simultaneously it was recognized that all under 16 remained open to, and thus had the right to protection from, exploitation and abuse. . . . Overall, the legal message here is that children over 12 are sexual and potentially self-determining, and they remain weaker than adults, and should be protected accordingly, but not under the autonomous authority of parents.”
Excerpt: No-Sex Education – Family Life
These recent moves toward parent education bespeak a contradiction inside sex ed. One the one hand, they are consistent with the historical conservatism of the discipline, which has always consigned sex to marriage and aimed to strengthen parental authority. On the other, they represent a retreat from the critique of the family implicit in school-based sexuality education, which endorses the sexual-intellectual autonomy of children and suggests that the family, with its hierarchal structure, its neuroses, ignorance, and taboos, is not the best sex educator after all.
Excerpt: No-Sex Education – “Criminal” Activities
Some formerly committed teachers have lined up at the abstinence-only trough, ethics be damned. A Minneapolis sex-ed consultant told me boldly one morning in 1998 that “we’ve been doing sex ed wrong for the past fifteen years.” How so? “We say sex is bad for kids, and it isn’t.” The interview was rushed, because that afternoon she was scheduled to do a teacher-training workshop—on the city’s new abstinence-only curricula. Huh? “It helps me get more business in town,” the educator explained. If a woman with these beliefs was now concealing them in order to preach the gospel of chastity to young teachers, I despaired of the next generation of sex educators, not to mention their students.
Excerpt: Epilogue
We also need to start seeing children as citizens. Twenty-five years ago, the child development sage Gisele Konopka identified nine basic requirements for children to grow up happy and healthy. Along with such personal essentials as kids’ need to experiment with identities and roles, she named “the need to participate as citizens.” Indeed, she put it first on her list. “A sense of belonging” and “a feeling of accountability to others” were among the nine too. But responsibility and duty weren’t all children needed, said Konopka. Also crucial were the experiences that would “cultivate the capacity to enjoy life.”
When we are ready to invite children into the community as fully participating citizens, I believe we will also respect them as people not so different from ourselves. That will be the moment at which we respect their sexual autonomy and agency and realize that one way to help them cultivate the capacity to enjoy life is to educate their capacity for sexual joy.
“The twin concepts of innocence and ignorance are vehicles for adult double standards. A child is ignorant if she doesn’t know what adults don’t want her to know, but innocent if she doesn’t know what adults don’t want her to know” -Jenny Kitzinger, “Children, Power, And the Struggle against Sexual Abuse”
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