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Reply for Dissident

Posted by lee lette on 2012-July-27 00:43:57 EDT, Friday
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The Importance of Truth - perhaps should be the Impotence of Truth since is is very difficult to actually find THE TRUTH.


OK having read your article here are some of my observations.

Child porn scare.

Really? Going from relatively few examples when photography was first developed in the mid 19th century to 5 million images, 100 GB websites (many others likely), 29 TB of related material and tens of thousands of websites (many commercial), numerous different means of obtaining these, vast numbers of images rating 6 on the COPINE scale and many busts of sharing networks - still rates only a "scare". What actually does rate as a serious problem? Paedophiles playing down what potentially does harm their image is understandable but I thought "truth" was the subject matter. I've pointed out several times the ways in which the worst aspects of paedophilia have been used to typify all paedophiles but this will not win many friends.


1) Children never lie when they say they have been sexually abused.

One, two or several incidents does not in itself tell us that children will lie about such matters but that they can and often will be actors directed for some particular agenda. I am sure these kinds of cases do occur all around the world but in the main children do not lie about any sexual abuse they have suffered unless they are given leading questions or feel good reasons to do so and we recognise this to be a problem now. Very young children often do not have the requisite knowledge to describe accurately what has occurred and will not lie unless they perhaps feel pressured by various constraints such as protecting those who might have abused them. It is well known that children above the age of about two can lie and will by the age of six be quite proficient at lying. Whether they will do so is more down to how any information is elicited from them and how they feel about what is happening and their understanding of it all. Perhaps in the future, although slightly intrusive, we might use lie-detection technology to verify such cases - reliable technology that is, not necessarily the polygraph.

Hence, children can lie when they say they have been sexually abused but usually they don't.


2) Every adult who commits genuine acts of sexual abuse against kids have and are primarily motivated by a sexual attraction to kids.

I don't have much to say here since I am mostly in agreement - that is it is often not the case.


3) Kids have no real sexual desire.

If this is all the evidence you could find Dissident then go looking again. This tells us nothing about the level of interest - even 5-year-olds will be having an interest in "sex" when they discover how they were born and perhaps want to know by what mechanism they were produced. This is simply the innate curiosity of all children to learn about virtually everything and since it will hardly have passed them by that sex is important to adults and since sex (and even porn) are perhaps sometimes to be found in their environment it is hardly unnatural that they would use the most powerful method available to them to go searching for such stuff. This does not indicate in any way their sexual desire but is mainly curiosity as is much of the sex-play frequently found in younger children. Trying to convince us that this is children's sexuality on display is simply feeble. Some "kids" have sexual desire and some "kids" don't but from the paper I quoted in one thread and from the book I mentioned in another post it seems that sexual desire is not high on the activities of pre-pubescents even if playing at it is for a few.


4) Kids were being sexually abused in truly horrific and often preposterous ways in the U.S.--and possibly across the world--by groups of mysterious and diabolical cultists who worshipped Satan and were abusing these kids in "honor" of the ultimate Lord of Evil.

I don't know if any of these cases have any basis in fact but their relevance to the overall topic of child sexual abuse is pretty limited as are those sexually abused in the making of child pornography but we do know the latter exists all too readily and they have suffered just as much as those purported to be in these "cults."


5) Innumerable people who were sexually abused in their childhood were so traumatized by the alleged abuse that they repressed the memory deep into their subconscious, which could subsequently be retrieved at any point in their adulthood by deep hypnosis.

As I've commented I remember precisely what happened to me but since these were a few quite discrete incidents and I was about eleven at the time this might be understandable. Because of this I do find it difficult to relate to those who do not apparently remember any abuse they might have suffered. However, because we do know that many people will dissociate when faced with situations that are truly traumatic it is possible that memories are repressed and will only be available under therapy. I would have as much concern as yourself about such therapy to regain true memories but I would not categorically say that all such "memories" are likely to be false ones.

"including the rather unproven contention that psychopathic tendencies have a genetic basis according to one of the theories he seems to support". Perhaps not genetic but there does appear to be evidence that it is structural rather than simply being a personality flaw although as we know the brain structure might simply be the result.

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-05-psychopathy-linked-specific-abnormalities-brain.html


6) All cases of what is legally considered child pornography are always produced by adults and never by the minors themselves.

I have no problem with this except that there is a vast difference in the ages of what we mean by "minors." Also since sexting is relatively new it seems that there is still some scope for disagreement, with perhaps as many as 30% actually doing this but in a relatively harmless manner - slight nudity perhaps - and very much less by pre-pubescents if at all.

http://psychcentral.com/news/2012/06/14/1-in-5-teens-sexting-many-without-a-clue/40142.html

As to any pre-pubescents actually producing their own pornography I think we can discount this happening to any significant extent. Perhaps it does happen but these will be in a considerable minority. I couldn't care less if teenagers do so as they will or should know better and if they pay later rather than now then that is what they will have to live with. A bit harsh perhaps but you will be the first to acknowledge they are fully capable of consenting or even initiating such actions. My concerns are with pre-pubescents and paedophilia.


7) The brains of adolescents are inherently faulty due to innate biological factors and thus they have an inherent tendency to make poor decisions that necessitate denying them most of their civil rights and keeping them under the control of their parents and other adults for their own good.

As above, I am perfectly willing to see changes in how adolescents are perceived, treated and given appropriate rights including those relating to more sexual freedoms and expression if it can be shown that these will not impact on their future welfare. What I do not see changing is how we treat pre-pubescents as they are developmentally different and deserving of more protections. The fact is that although we might have invented the concept of "childhood" we have much evidence from all the related sciences that children below puberty are fundamentally different in many ways than adults or even adolescents and we need to treat them differently.


8) Mutually consensual sexual contact between anyone today considered to be 'minors' and those who are adults is always traumatizing for the younger person and will likely cause lifelong psychological 'damage' to them, no matter how much the minor in question may have enjoyed and desired the experience.

Firstly, I do not believe that it is inevitably traumatizing but we should recognise a difference between the various classes of "minors", something which Levine does not do apparently.

"Self-reported reactions to and effects from CSA indicated that negative effects were neither pervasive nor typically intense, and that men reacted much less negatively than women. The college data were completely consistent with data from national samples. Basic beliefs about CSA in the general population were not supported."

I don't know if the Rind report has any true validity since we will never know if those who had such sexual relationships might have looked at things differently if they had not had them. We can't assess their psychological profile to look within to see if everything was ticketyboo such that they are merely playing out a role that will not admit to any harms that might have occurred. What I do think is that in the vast majority of these cases the relationships were initiated by the older person, for their own sexual gratification and thus was intrusive into the lives of those children.

To quote Sarah Goode from her book Understanding and Addressing Adult Sexual Attraction to Children -

"I suggest that the harm caused by adult sexual contact with children is fundamentally related to psychological intrusion and violation of intimacy. ... Some adults who have sexual contact with children genuinely believe that they care about the child. They may feel fond of the child or even feel that they love the child. The abuse may take place in a relationship otherwise characterised by love and trust, for example a parent-child relationship. How is it possible for the adult not to realise the harm they are causing the child? It is possible because of the structural, social, cultural, interpersonal and psychological processes which underlie every human encounter. These processes produce a situation where the power every adult (even the empathetic, liberal, libertarian adult) holds over every child can be rendered invisible. For the child, any capacity for the child to speak their mind freely, even to move freely, is constrained by their inhibition at opposing an adult's will, by their eagerness to please, their desire not to hurt the adult's feeling, their confusion and, fundamentally, their lack of concepts and words to describe their view of the situation. The child is also constrained by their desire not to embarrass the adult or those around them: the child feels protective. More often than we realise, the child may feel compassion for the adult. They may assume responsibility for the situation and for the feelings of the adult. Children are prepared to to sacrifice themselves for those they love. Often they would rather take the hurt into themselves, and deny the hurt, than confront the adult or admit to others what is happening."

This last aspect can often be seen in those involved in child prostitution who will defiantly emphasise that their relationships are more akin to "lovers" or that their clients are just "boyfriends."

[...]

"When an adult has sexual contact with a child, no matter how much the adult may regard the relationship as loving, it is (highly probable) harmful. It coerces the child into something which is invasive and intrusive, an intimacy which the young child has as yet no developmental boundaries to protect against. The younger the child, and the more intimate the context, the more fundamental is the distortion of the child's developmental experiences. The child's autonomy and self-determination are violated; the need to explore and learn about one's own sexual being at one's own pace, under one's own control. The child's first experience of a sexual relationship becomes a coerced experience, deeply embedded and re-experienced within the the child's body and mind. The psychological sense of one's own body as inviolable, under one's own control, for one's own self, is broken."

Even when there is no apparent harm we have the following from your much-vaunted Rind report -

Dr. Rind made it clear that he was only willing to be objective and courageous to a certain extent when he made the following statement to his detractors in response to their claim that the findings of his report "condoned" the abuse of kids:

"[...] critics have implied that [our] conclusions condone sexual abuse. In fact, in our article, we clearly state that our review of the research literature does not condone CSA, and changes nothing with regard to moral or legal views of abuse. We wrote that 'lack of harmfulness does not imply lack of wrongfulness,' that moral and legal codes of society need not be (and often are not) based on findings of psychological harmfulness, and that 'the findings of the current review do not imply that moral or legal definitions of or views on behaviour, currently classified as CSA, should be abandoned or even altered.'"

a) Children have an inherent lack of ability to consent to sexual contact with adults because they do not understand what sex is. This despite the fact that it's been proven in many studies that pre-pubescents, let alone adolescents, are fully capable of experiencing sexual pleasure and enjoyment and are not traumatized by mutually desired contact of this nature with either peers or adults ...

Sexual pleasure and enjoyment are not enough to justify such interactions - the pleasure centres of the brain are geared to seek such experiences and for them to be reinforced otherwise we would not see so many addictions and compulsive behaviours. This is part of the problem, not any sort of justification.

b) Children are "pre-sexual" (yes, one of the commenters actually uses the latter term). This fashionable assumption is flatly contradicted by any child who has ever engaged in "playing doctor" with each other, peeked in at their older sister or cousin when she was changing her clothes, pulled up the dress of a peer, was caught masturbating, secretly told each other "dirty" jokes, or who surfed the Web looking for porno sites (which was revealed by that study conducted by Symantec that I mentioned and linked to up above in one of my previous points in this essay). Children are well known to be sexually curious, and this sometimes manifests in the ways described above or even with full blown sexual experimentation (i.e., "sex play") initiated with a peer or a trusted adult. While it's certainly true that pre-pubescent children do not have the same type of sexual desires as adults do, and generally do not seek to engage in all of the activities that adults (and adolescents, who are young adults) do with each other, they are clearly not entirely asexual as is commonly believed, and are naturally curious about sexuality. It's amazing how many adults wilfully forget what it was like being a child and practice denial of this aspect of their childhood.

As Sarah Goode pointed out children are not asexual neither are they sexual. Some can be either, but it seems that for the vast majority it is mostly sex-play and exploration if it occurs at all during pre-pubertal life and very, very few have what we as adults would consider to be fully sexual relationships with either another child or with an adult or adolescent.

c) Even if children can receive pleasure from mutually consensual sexual contact with adults and are not magickally traumatized by it, it's still always a form of abuse on the part of the adult because children and younger teens cannot understand the full ramifications or consequences of engaging in such activity. What type of consequences are likely to result from sexual activity as long as sufficient precautions are taken in regards to STDs, pregnancy (in regards to teen girls), etc? Should kids be denied the right to take risks when it's been established via good and objective scientific studies that such risks are not extreme or are not likely to result in any serious psychological problems? Is sexual activity really too "complicated" for children and even teens to understand? Again, is it all that "complicated" to understand what brings you pleasure and what doesn't?

See remarks quoted from Sarah Goode above.

d) Intergenerational sexual contact is always a form of abuse by the adult because of the inherent power differential between adults and minors.

As above.

e) Sexual activity that occurs between adults and minors is always initiated by the adult because kids "don't do that stuff."

Minors to mean pre-pubescents then yes they mostly do not initiate such relationships so trying to conflate pre-pubescents with teenagers is not helpful.

f) Pedophilia is a mental disorder.

We don't know what it is at the moment but my guess is that it is some kind of fault in development either structurally (biological, genetic, etc.) or by other mechanisms such that trying to justify it is pointless and a waste of effort unless one had specific self-interest to cause one to do so.

g) The word "trauma" can have many different meanings or conceptions, and Susan Clancy only uses one of them in her book. Hence, her research and the main premise of her book is faulty.

Can't really comment here since I haven't read any of this stuff.



Some information as to how children are affected by their early experiences -

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-06-father-greatest-personality.html
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-07-exposure-sexual-content-popular-movies.html
http://phys.org/news/2011-03-experiencing-violence-aggression-children.html

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