Therapy
This chapter is about children who “molest” and the gradual pathologizing of childhood sexuality. Levine goes into normative sexual behaviors for children, such as play between siblings and children flirting and touching between children in general. However, even if these encounters are willing the older child (or the initiator) is often punished. The full chapter follows the stories of multiple child sex-offenders.
One example is Brian Flynn, at 14 in 1993 he was charged with sexual misconduct. His crime (which was denied by both alleged participants) was either asking or allowing his ten-year-old sister to lick his penis. Brian spent two years in the states custody as a result. When he went AWOL from one of his placements the county sent a SWAT team. Half a dozen cop cars with loud speakers saying to beware of a “dangerous sex offender.” There was also a helicopter—and a police officer chased him with a gun.
This chapter also goes into the abusive practices of sex-offender treatment programs for youth.
Normal is not an exact scientific term. It can mean what most people do or what some people consider healthy, moral, regular, or natural, as opposed to sick, sinful, weird, or unnatural … Normal is enormously susceptible to swinging with the gusts of politics and history. Disguised as scientific and fixed, it is subjective and protean … Normal is problematic, because you can’t have normal without abnormal. Acceptable behavior needs “unacceptable” (or “inappropriate”) behavior to find its place in the world. To have an in-crowd, you have to have outcasts.
Parenting-advice columns in women’s magazines, which for decades handed out reassurances that it’s perfectly fine if kids touch each other, masturbate, and talk incessantly about penises, now anatomize how much might be too much or when is the wrong time.
And if there is creeping pathology, adults have begun to fear, then there must also be more danger to other, “healthy” children. Most people felt that the North Carolina school administration overreacted almost ludicrously when it censured the freckle-nosed first-grader Jonathan Prevette for kissing a classmate. But since then, “zero-tolerance” rules on student flirtation have become more extreme in some places. For instance, in 2001 the eight-year-old of a Vermont acquaintance had the charge of “sexual harassment” entered into her elementary school record. Her crime: sending a note to a classmate asking if he wanted to be her boyfriend.
These school policies do not fall outside the norm. The principals were acting inside a growing consensus: that physical demonstrations of affection between children are “sex” and that sex between children is always traumatic.
As they did during the last plague, the prophets of this one claimed the problem was enormous, but that we didn’t see it because we weren’t looking. “[Children who molest] make all of us uncomfortable,” wrote McFarlane in When Children Abuse, “so uncomfortable we’ve had to deny their existence and/or minimize their behavior until now. We’ve called their behavior ‘exploration’ or ‘curiosity’ until they were old enough for us to comfortably call it what it is: sexual abuse of other children. Who are they?” She continued. “So far, relatively few have come to our attention.” One LA Weekly article said professionals in the field claimed that 80-90 percent of such crimes go unreported. Neither the “professionals” nor the report cited any evidence of this allegation. Soon they’d have it, generated by the perpetual motion machine of expanded definitions of sexual abuse, which lead to more “proof” of epidemic sexual abuse. Although it is unlikely that juvenile sexual behavior had undergone a radical turn toward the violent over a decades time, in 1994 the U.S. Department of Justice recorded ten thousand “Other Violent Sex Offenses” by juveniles (these exclude forcible rape), an increase of 65 percent from 1985.
Note: McFarlane is the same woman responsible for a lot of the unsubstantiated cases of satanic ritual abuse.
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.”20
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.
… the National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect, the U.S. government’s official count of family-inflicted harm to children, in 1996 added a category of “other or unknown sexual abuse”: “inadequate or inappropriate supervision of a child’s voluntary sexual activities.”23 All children, in other words, need to be protected from their own errant sexuality. And parents who take a laissez-faire stance regarding sex play are, by their failure to intervene, “abusers.”
Whether they’ve had traumatic experiences or not, most children seem to exhibit more or less the same sexual behaviors.26
In spite of paucity of empirical data, we know that masturbation is ubiquitous from early on, more noticeably among little boys than little girls. So is “playing doctor,” inserting fingers into orifices, and other such pastimes. In so-called latency years, from about seven to eleven, children continue to masturbate, touch each other, and have crushes on their classmates and friends.27 In fact, the disappearance of visible sexual behavior probably means only that children have gotten the message that adults don’t want to see it. “It seems likely that sexual interest and probably some form of activity continue” in middle childhood, Friedrich wrote, “but that as children learn the cultural standards these interests are concealed.”28
Toni Cavanagh Johnson offers a clue to the distress she and her colleagues are most concerned about: not children’s. Her behavior chart alerts parents to seek professional help when children’s eroticized play is “directed at adults who feel uncomfortable receiving” it, when the child “wants to be nude in public after the parents say ‘No,’” or when he “touches the genitals of animals.”
What’s wrong with these things? I asked University of Georgia social work professor Allie Kilpatrick, who conducted an in-depth study of women’s childhood sexual experiences and their aftermath. “They make parents nervous,” she answered.
I asked Barbara Bonner, who ran the largest component, in Oklahoma City, of the five-year study funded by the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, to explain the rationale for calling behavior inappropriate and harmful if it doesn’t worry the child (or her parents). In short, why label a child a victim if she doesn’t feel victimized?
Bonner, a helpful and well meaning woman, thought awhile. “I don’t know if it’s the degree of pleasantness or unpleasantness that ought to be the guideline that determines whether it is appropriate or not,” she said at length. “The victim should be defined by somebody other than the child.”
Why? “Well, if a kid is eating chocolate all day long, we stop them, whether they like it or not.”
But eating chocolate all day is demonstratably harmful, I pressed. It gives them cavities and it has caffeine in it, which hypes them up and stunts their growth. Is unhurtful sex harmful?
Bonner laughed amicably at the chocolate analogy. Finally, she said, “As hopefully knowledgeable people, and as a society, we recommend what we consider to be appropriate and in the best interest of children.” In “the best interest of the child,” the program’s Sexual Behavior Rules for six- to eleven-year-olds included “It’s not OK to touch other people’s private parts” and “Its not OK to show your private parts to other people”—acts that might be considered perfectly appropriate, normal, and even salutary in many families or communities.
Bonner admitted that her team’s recommendations were not based in empirical study; it would be impossible to predict or measure the harm of certain sexual experiences, because replicating them in a clinical setting would pose obvious ethical problems. But, she conjectured, too much sex too early “might [cause children to] become oversexually stimulated and prefer sexual behavior to sports, dance, or other more appropriate activities. They might become promiscuous adults.” On the other hand, she added with midwestern frankness, “They may turn out to be normal. We don’t really know. We don’t have long-term outcomes.”
In fact, we do have some “long-term” outcomes of childhood sex. At the University of California at Los Angeles, a thorough review of the literature and a major longitudal study of families from a child’s birth to it’s eighteenth year found that three-quarters of kids had engaged in masturbation or some kind of sex with other kids before the age of six. Was there a “pernicious influence” of such experiences, a “main effect” correlating early sex play with childhood distress or later maladjustment, as many psychologists hypothesize? “No such correlations were apparent,” the California group concluded.31
Even incest between siblings (the most common behavior, as far as I can tell, in children-who-molest cases) is not ipso facto traumatic. A study of 526 New England undergraduates revealed “no differences . . . on a variety of adult sexual behavior and sexual adjustment measures” between those students who had had sexual experiences with brothers or sisters, those who’d had them with kid’s outside their families, and those who’d had none at all.32 Sociologist Floyd Martinson, an éminence grise in the study of child sexuality, collected scores of reminiscences of happy consensual sex among kids under twelve, including play between siblings and kids five years or more apart in age, both crimson flags in the children-who-molest literature.
Indeed, just about everything Toni Cavanagh Johnson considers worrisome is unremarkable someplace else in the world. Clellan Ford and Frank Beach in their classic Patterns of Sexual Behavior examined 191 of the world’s peoples, including Americans. “As long as the adult members of a society permit them to do so,” they discovered, “immature males and females engage in practically every type of sexual behavior found in grown men and women,” including “oral-genital contact and attempted copulation.”34 Cunningham and McFarlane, in their children-who-molest text, earmark the “reenactment of specific adult sexual activity” as “abnormal”35—a behavior so common around the globe that it has a well-worn name among anthropologists: “sexual rehearsal play.”
But where does the “pairing” of sex with aggression become “negative,” and when is it “abnormal” enough to be treated as a disorder or a crime? Just like the word abuse, the word consent is subject to multiple meanings.38 Negotiation is a part of children’s sex play. It may involve bribes and trickery, conflict, trade-offs, and power imbalances, like all other interactions between children. Older and bigger does not necessarily add up to more powerful, though. And a wide spectrum of behavior involving power differences between children seems to be normative (or if I’ve soured you on normative, then apparently harmless). Psychologists Sharon Lamb and Mary Coakley surveyed three hundred psychologically healthy Bryn Mawr students about their childhood sexual experiences. The young women wrote about thrilling games of porn star, prostitution, rape, and slave girl, all at ages in the single digits, indicating that the pairing of sex and aggression or sex and power differences, too, may be “normal.”39 Simon Beauvoir described in her memories the titillation of enacting on her little sister the mortifications of the Catholic saints. And sexologist Leonore Tiefer suggested that even if coercion ought to be corrected, it shouldn’t be pathologized. “Kids push and hit and demand, until they’re socialized,” she said, “Aggression is normal in children.” Given the contemporary American culture, it should surprise nobody that when a child acts out aggressively, he might use the lingua franca of sexuality to express himself.
Harm also exists on a continuum, and it can come from different sources. As we saw in the previous chapter, the trauma of youngsters’ sex, with anyone, often comes not from the sex itself but from adults going bananas over it. As for “sexual behavior problems” the trauma inflicted by the “cure” may be far worse than the “disease” itself.
A great deal of what passes for sex-offender treatment (such as an increasing number of “emotional growth” and other behavior-modification programs for misbehaving and violent youths) has been challenged as dubiously therapeutic and even abusive in itself.40 Moreover, unlike kids whose sentences are meted out by the juvenile justice system, those who become entangled in the mechanism of “cure” are denied the legal protections afforded even adult perpetrators of the most heinous crimes.
When I visited it, the regime at McWhirter’s STEPs, or Sexual Treatment Education Program and Services, in San Diego, was surely not the worst. But it was typical of youth sex-offender “therapy” today: steeped in conservative sexual values, behaviorist in approach, and employing classic good cop-bad cop manipulations by staff. It’s stated intentions sounded like children’s rights propaganda: promote self-esteem and empathy, consent and equality. But the practice was anything but consensual, and the rights of both children and parents were all but disregarded. The minute a child touched his neighbors penis or buttocks, he had been assumed devoid of moral faculties; there was simply no debating whether what he did was wrong. A patient received no due process: as long as he protested his innocence, he was “in denial” (the psychotherapeutic equivalent of “in contempt”) and could be dropped from the program that was a prerequisite of reunification with his family.
Or worse: His treatment, unlike a jail sentence, could go on for years, during which he relinquished his own and his friends’ rights to privacy. Anything he said could be reported to the authorities, and in many programs he was required to furnish the names of everyone he’d had sex with.
Using a cognitive-behavioral approach common to many prison-based sex-offender treatment programs, programs like STEPs aim to change the boys’ actions by teaching them to think differently. As Barnett explained, the boys at STEPs were instructed to write down a “cycle” of every thought, feeling, and sensation leading up to, during, and after a sexual “offense.” They then developed “back-up plans”—thought processes free of “thinking errors”—to be used to prevent “reoffending.” When he started dreaming about sex with a younger kid, for instance, a boy might substitute a picture of himself behind bars. The inmates were required to report on their masturbation in detail, confessing whatever fantasies were left in their strip-searched imaginations. For eight hours a day, five days a week, with two hours off for schoolwork, they were under surveillance, earning points for good behavior, losing them, for say, uttering “fuck off.” Touching, whether aggressive or affectionate, by staff or inmates, was prohibited, because, Barnett said, “these boys don’t know their boundaries.”
Even outside the building, STEPs was watching. The boys were not allowed contact with their “victims” without program permission or ever to be alone with anybody considered “victim age.” They were required to submit to random drug tests, avoid being alone, and inform all potential romantic interests of illicit age that they were sex offenders. “I will always lock the door whenever I am using the bathroom and when there is anyone else on the premises,” read the contract.
“Once they’ve developed enough empathy,” Barnett told me, “we start looking at atonement,” which involves a twenty-step process from Exposing the Offense to Learning to Forgive Oneself, with Preventing Suicide and Finding Meaning in Life in between.
Step seven was Apologizing on the Knees to the victim, the victim’s family, and the boy’s own family, Barnett told me. “Sometimes the parents will be saying, ‘I will send you to court!’ The mother is shouting, ‘I’ll kill you!’ It’s very emotional.” She continued, her voice becoming smoother, “As soon as that kids knees hit the floor, most often, he will be sobbing. To the parents, it will look like I am being mean. But I will tell them, ‘When this is all over, you will have your own boy back.‘”
Their own boy, obedient, broken, expiated of deviant fantasy. Or maybe of sexual fantasy altogether.
Does such treatment do any good? The ACLU Prison Project has sued a number of similar programs for adults, including one in Vermont, in which “drama therapy” compelled inmates to simulate anal rape while the therapist shouted obscenities at them.43 Expert witnesses argued that such treatment was not only unproven as curative but likely to be psychologically damaging, and the court enjoined the prison to cease what the judge deemed to be cruel and unusual punishment disguised as treatment. The programs director, William Pithers, was codirector of the Vermont component of Barbara Bonner’s study on “sexual behavior problems,” helping to devise treatment for children.45 The methodology of McWhirter’s and other such programs also strikingly resembles the “treatment” gays and lesbians were subjected to in the 1950s and 1960s to cure them of their attractions to their own sex. Those who underwent such cures usually attest to their dolorous effects on self-esteem and dignity and their utter failure to reroute erotic patterns of many years’ standing. At least the “diagnosis” was on the mark, though: those people were homosexual. The kids in Toni Cavanagh Johnson’s consulting room or in the building that housed David McWhirter’s STEPs may not have been afflicted by the disease of which they were being cured. They were not violent sex offenders (otherwise, they would not be eligible for the program); they may not even have been sexual aggressors. Many were kids who’d had sex that simply made adults nervous.46
The antidote to cruel or unusual treatment is not to argue that what is at any moment viewed as deviant is really “normal” or “natural.” For normal is what a particular culture or historical era calls it: male homosexuality was regarded as normal in classical Greece; intergenerational sex has been normal as sexual initiation in many preindustrial societies;47 even rape has historically been normal in wartime … It is a real challenge to speak positively about children’s sexuality without calling on the palliatives natural or normal; I find myself frequently turning to my battered March’s Thesaurus. Instead of repairing to normal, with its assumption that anything that falls outside is harmful, what’s needed are some more neutral descriptions of actual experience and assessments of actual harm. Asking kids themselves is the best beginning. In the meantime, we might be as honest as Okalhoma’s Barbara Bonner, who told me, “Until we are more informed about children’s sexual development, our work will continue to be driven by values.”
There are some values that parents and professionals, clerics and politicians, would agree should be instilled in children: be kind, considerate, respectful of self and others, noncoercive in sex as in all things. But “normality” is a fickle and disruptive virtue, and given its potential as a confederate in therapeutic abuse and social disenfranchisement, it is overrated.
20 – Johnson, “Child Perpetrators,” 221.
23 – The Third National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (NIS-3) (Washington, D.C., U. S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1997), 2-14.
26 – William N. Friedrich and Patricia Grambsch, “Child Sexual Behavior Inventory: Normative and Clinical Comparison,” Psychological Assessment 4, (1992): 303-11; Robert D. Wells et al., “Emotional, Behavioral, and Pyshical Symptoms Reported by Parents of Sexually Abused, Nonabused, and Allegedly Abused Prepubescent Females,” Child Abuse and Neglect 19 (1995): 155-62. J. A. Cohen and A. P. Mannarino, “Psychological Symptoms in Sexually Abused Girls,” Child Abuse and Neglect 12 (1988): 571-77; R. J. Weinstein et al., “Sexually Aggressive Behavior in Girls Experiencing Child Abuse and Precocious Puberty,” paper presented at annual convention of APA, New Orleans, 1989.
27 – Friedrich, “Normative Sexual Behavior in Children”; William N. Friedrich et al., “Normative Sexual Behavior in Children: A Contemporary Sample,” Pediatrics 101, no. 4 (April 1998), e9; William N. Friedrich, Theo G. M. Sandfort, Jacueline Osstveen, and Peggy T. Cohen-Kettensis, “Cultural Differences in Sexual Behavior: 2-6 Year Old Dutch and American Children,” Journal of Psychology and Human Sexuality 12, nos. 1-2 (2000): 117-29; Allie C. Kilpatrick, Long-Range Effects of Child and Adolescent Sexual Experiences: Myths, Mores, Menaces (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1992); Sharon Lamb and Mary Coakley, “‘Normal’ Childhood Sexual Play and Games: Differentiating Play from Abuse,” Child Abuse and Neglect 17 (1993): 515-26; Floyd M. Martinson, The Sexual Life of Children (Westport, Conn.: Bergin and Garvey, 1994); Paul Okami, Richard Olmstead, and Paul R. Abramson, “Sexual Experiences in Early Childhood: 18-Year Longitudal Data from the ULCA Family Lifestyle Project,” Journal of Sex Research 34, no. 4 (1997): 339-47; Jany Rademakers, Marjoke Laan, and Cees J. Straver, “Studying Children’s Sexuality from the Child’s Perspective,” Journal of Psychology and Human Sexuality 12, nos. 1-2 (2000): 49-60; sources at note 32.
28 – Friedrich et al., “Normative Sexual Behavior in Children” (1998).
31 – Okami, Olmstead, and Abramson, “Sexual Experiences in Early Childhood.”
32 – Evan Greenwald and Harold Leitenberg, “Long-Term Effects of Sexual Experiences with Siblings and Nonsiblings during Childhood,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 18, no. 5 (1989): 389; Harold Leitenberg, Evan Greenwald, and Mathew J. Tarran, “The Relationship between Sexual Activity among Children during Pre-adolescence and/or Early Adolescence and Sexual Behavior and Sexual Adjustment in Young Adulthood,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 18, no. 4 (1989): 299 ff.
34 – Clellan S. Ford and Frank A. Beach, Patterns of Sexual Behavior (New York: Harper and Row, 1951), 197, 188.
35 – Cunningham and McFarlane, When Children Abuse, 28.
38 – Okami, “‘Slippage’ in Research in Child Sexual Abuse.”
39 – Lamb and Coakley, “‘Normal’ Childhood Sexual Play and Games.”
40 – Martha Shirk, “Emotional Growth Programs ‘Save’ Teens, Stir Fears,” Youth Today 8 (May 1999); Martha Shirk, “Kid Help or Kidnapping?” Youth Today 8 (June 1999).
43 – U.S. District Court (Vermont), Civil Action No. 2: 93-CV-383: Robert Goldstein et al., v. Howard Dean et al.
45 – NCCAN Discretionary Grants, FY 1991, award no. 90CA1470.
46 – Dorothy Otnow Lewis, Shelley S. Shankok, and Jonathan H. Pincus, “Juvenile Male Sexual Assaulters,” American Journal of Psychiatry 136, no. 9 (September 1979): 1194-96.
47 – Gisela Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg, “Pedastry among Primitives: Institutionalized Initiation and Cultic Prostitution,” Male Intergenerational Intimacy, ed. Theo Sandfort, Edward Brongersma, and Alex van Narseen (New York: Hawthron Press, 1991), 13-30; William H. Davenport, “Adult-Child Sexual Relations in Cross-Cultural Perspectives,” The Sexual Abuse of Children: Theory and Research, vol. 1, ed. William O’Donohue and James H. Geer (Hillsdale, N. J.: Lawrence Ehrlbaum Associates, 1992), 73-80.
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