Over at Sex Crimes, Correy Yung has this reaction to my post yesterday about pedophilia. He says:
I picked this part of the post because I think the area where Erickson is over-reaching the most. While there is a debate to be had over whether all pedophiles are actually all "sick," that doesn't mean there isn't a very high level of mental illness among the pedophile population. I think the simplest evidence of the psychological issues at play is the incredible cycle of sexual violence that exists. Molesters were often molested themselves. That is not just a coincidence. We may not understand the exact reasons for the connection between being a victim and a molester, but simply discounting medical explanations seems like a big mistake to me.
This is a common perception, that sex offenders were themselves abused (and that explains their behavior). Indeed, the "cycle of violence" crime theory gets a lot of pay these days. Yet, what evidence is there that it is true?
The answer is not much. Some studies report moderate to high rates of self-reported sexual abuse by pedophiles while others do not. But as I've said over and over, the science behind our enduring pedophilia problem isn't very good. In fact, there's not much good science in many areas of the sex crimes arena. Last year, in preparing a manuscript, I tried to find reliable numbers for the prevalence of incest in the United States. Guess what? Those numbers cannot be found. Like so many aspects of sex crimes, our beliefs are built mostly on urban legends than empirical fact. That is why Rind et al.'s study was so hated by so many -- its findings were directly at odd with what we all thought had to be true. Sometimes, our moral sentiments are strongest over matters we empirically know the least about.
Yet, even if the cycle of violence of pedophilia is true, that in no way makes pedophilia a mental illness, just as the cycle of violence surrounding domestic violence is not one. Perhaps I'm too much of a biological psychiatry person, but if we can't point to an area of the brain were something is clearly awry in determining what is and isn't a mental illness, then we're simply back to the days of Freud when mental health professionals declared certain behaviors (like homosexuality) mental illnesses out of ipse dixit -- and do we really want that?
Leave a comment