Destigmatising paedophilia

After certain press criticism and a productive online backlash in the blogosphere, the American Psychiatric Association is performing a gratifying volte-face in its use of the term sexual “orientation” for paedophilia. In its fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM V), the American Psychiatric Association (APA) has distinguished between paedophilic disorder and paedophilic orientation. Paedophilia-advocacy groups, like B4U-ACT, a grassroots lobby group, have long seen the declassification of paedophilia to the status of an “orientation” for “minor-attracted persons” (MAPs) to be a necessary means to their ends.1 The North American Man-Boy Love Association (and numerous international affiliates advocating sex between men and boys) see these and other developments as an important step towards their continuing objective of legalising and normalising paedophile activity. In response to the online critique, the APA has confirmed in the last few days that the DSM will be altered and that “it stands firmly behind efforts to criminally prosecute those who sexually abuse and exploit children and adolescents.”

Whatever the recent anxieties that have caused editors of the DSM to have a sudden rethink, efforts to abolish the age of consent have a long, though not so venerable, history. In 1977 around seventy French intellectuals signed a petition seeking the abolition of all age of consent laws. Michel Foucault in his History of Sexuality2 reports that these included himself and Helene Althusser, Louis Althusser, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and André Glucksmann, Roland Barthes, Guy Hocquenghem, the jurist Jean Danet, filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet, writer Philippe Sollers, pediatrician and child psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto and many others.

Alfred Kinsey and his eponymous institute are hailed respectively as father and foundation of the sexual revolution. He is known for his books, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), also known as the Kinsey Reports, as well as the Kinsey scale. Kinsey’s research spawned a new and lucrative field of academic endeavour both propping up and benefiting from the porn industry. Be that as it may, few realise that Kinsey’s highly acclaimed evidence on the normality of child sex was won by timing sexual acts performed on babies and small children. It took Judith Reisman, a lone researcher and concerned mother, to unearth the abhorrent and criminal truth about the evidence on which the pornographic revolution was founded. Much of the Kinsey research purported to show that desires hitherto regarded as morally unacceptable were in fact widespread and thus normal. Reisman demonstrated that the evidence was gleaned from people imprisoned for sex crimes, a far from random sample. 1,400 criminals and sex offenders were classified as “normal” and the “human male” category therefore included incarcerated pedophiles, pederasts, homosexual males, boy prostitutes and miscellaneous sexual predators. Despite her admirable exposé, Reisman is widely regarded among sexual progressives as a ‘narrow-minded bigot’, a term used routinely now to terrorise those whose thought and work threaten an increasingly lethal, liberal zeitgeist.

To normalise the abnormal, there should be a ready supply of ‘useful idiots’. These are the journalists and quasi-intellectuals that can be relied on to give their blessing to the destruction of innocence perpetrated by decaying predators. That these ever-ready dim-wits exist should be obvious by the complicity of the press and broadcasting media that for decades suppressed complaints about the old pervert Jimmy Savile. Savile’s earthly span passed in a spirit of fearless predatory, necrophilic and paedophilic bliss. Those who challenged his revolting reign were ridiculed as, guess what, narrow-minded bigots. The alleged bigots  were, needless to say, swiftly silenced. Police were fobbed off. Journalists, entertainers and managers lauded his antics as progressive. Giggling alongside the old abuser were police officers, judges, adminstrators and a catalogue of professionals who would have been on notice about the complaints leveled against him.

That there is a superabundance of willing (if ignorant) colluders should not be doubted. There are so many it is difficult to know where to begin. But one who has recently emerged is journalist Miranda Sawyer. Miranda, it seems, regards age of consent laws as “laughably unrealistic” (so too are laws against contract killing but that does not justify abandoning laws against contract killing). She argues that the ‘Government, by banning all sex for everyone under 16, is turning what’s natural and normal into something dirty and wrong’. Er … yes, Miranda, laws are meant to do that and dirty old men preying on youngsters whether in institutions or online ought to have their collars felt.

As if paedophilia were not enough, bestiality now has cachet in familiar philosophical circles. Peter Singer, the Princeton prima donna whose texts I’ve elsewhere analysed, aside from promoting a sickening infanticide ethic also recommends bestiality on utilitarian grounds of human preference maximisation. His 2001 review of Midas Dekkers’Dearest Pet: On Bestiality, argues in favour of a new harm principle: only sexual activities between humans and animals that cause injury to the animal should be criminalised. But, it is pointed out, “sex with animals does not always involve cruelty”. Singer carefully elaborates his view that “mutually satisfying activities” of a sexual nature may well take place between humans and animals. Singer, a recipient of the prestigious Companion in the General Division of the Order of Australia is Australia’s most famous gift to the world of philosophy.

Part of the problem with speaking to the sexual revolutionary is that he does not classify harm to a child as any harm to a full person at all. Children barely figure in his ethical universe of persons. He does not understand abuse of power. He sees a child as an opportunity for personal gratification. Family breakdown is not regarded as harmful, whether to the child or the adult he becomes. Vulnerability is prized as an occasion for exploitation. Sexual activity with those the powerful refuse to protect is seen as a source of profit. Children and animals are viewed ruthlessly as fair game because autonomy of ‘persons’ trumps the protection of the vulnerable whose rights are predicated on the work or Lockean shared labour of ‘full persons’. Human trafficking is a mere logical extension of these principles licensing abuse.

Just when a child should be engaged in innocent pursuits, supposedly avant-garde thinkers, their intellects and consciences mutilated by widespread error, endemic feeble-mindedness and the drip-drip effects of the sexual revolution, appear with paedophiles in tow. These latter are all too ready to damage the lives of young children, whole families and floundering secular societies. The normalisation of paedophilia, necrophilia, bestiality and other human perversions threaten the defenceless and corrupt the perpetrator. Any furious back-pedalling by the APA is warmly to be welcomed. Those professionals who would deny the grief and destructive social implications  of psychological disorders are, to be sure, part of the problem.