Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us

by Bering, Jesse

  I know it’s a scary matter, but you’ve got to admit that operating with the default assumption that every stranger is a crafty pedophile with one wolfish eye secretly roving for children isn’t exactly the sign of a healthy society. I’m certain that I’d be overprotective and paranoid about pedophiles if I were a parent (at least a parent to children that don’t bark, chew on rawhides, and have tails—sadistic zoophiles do both frighten and enrage me). But irrespective of our own emotional investments concerning such hard-to-even-look-at topics, there’s still an unbiased scientific reality out there, and we really ought to look at this reality for the sake of everyone’s sanity.

  Now, assuming you’re not already a pedophile or a gerontophile, I suspect you’ll agree by your complete inability to be turned on by an eight-year-old or an eighty-year-old that your erotic age orientation is no more a conscious choice that you’ve made than whether you’re gay, bi, or straight. Your mom’s uterus wasn’t exactly like a Las Vegas casino (although I suppose that depends largely on what she ate while you were gestating), but nonetheless your own personal slot wheels started spinning the moment sperm met egg. And if you’re male, they slowed to a full stop right around the time that you were busy blowing out the candles at your tenth birthday party. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the harsh reality of what we’re dealing with here: just as a child can be said to be gay, a child can also be a fetishist, a sadist, and even, oddly enough, a pedophile. The hormones that will vivify a child’s sexuality and make him or her (potentially) dangerous are a few years away still, but come what may, the slot wheels have more or less already come to a grinding halt.

  Once he’s an adult, a pedophile may completely agree with us and understand, intellectually, that only other adults possess the emotional maturity needed for a proper sexual relationship. That’s all well and good, but since adults don’t do anything for him sexually, it’s also entirely useless. Telling a pedophile that he needs to be attracted to grown-ups, not kids, is like telling a lesbian that she just hasn’t found the right guy, trying to convince a transsexual woman that her gender dysphoria is only a phase, or attempting to persuade a straight man that he’ll really enjoy being anally penetrated by another man (maybe you’ve had better luck with that last one than I have). So if you really want to eradicate child sex abuse, you’re not going to do it by just standing there with a giant judicial broom in your hands and sweeping the endless flow of adult pedophiles into prisons and psychiatric facilities as they continue to spill out of the ether. You need to first figure out why there are so many of them and how, exactly, they’ve come to be this way.

  But doing so is far from simple. A good first step is acknowledging that pedophilia is indeed a sexual orientation. And like any other sexual orientation, its causal antecedents lie in early development, not in the adult’s perverted, against-what-is-right choice to “become” a pedophile. Even in science, we’re not quite to the point of being able to take such an objectively amoral approach to this issue, but once we are, research on other, less worrisome, sexual orientations may offer some directions for how to go about studying the childhood traits that best predict if a child will grow up to be a pedophile.

  In the early 1990s, the sexologists J. Michael Bailey and Kenneth Zucker started using the term “pre-homosexual” to refer to young children who were likely to grow up to be exclusively attracted to the same sex. Drawing from a variety of methods (including long-term studies that followed children as they grew up as well as retrospective studies in which gay and straight adults reflected back on their own childhoods), the researchers pinpointed a set of factors that could reliably forecast adult homo- or heterosexuality beyond statistical chance. Basically, the old stereotypes proved to have the best predictive value: there were plenty of exceptions, but generally speaking, displaying “gender-atypical” traits in early childhood was most closely associated with adult homosexuality. The little girls who gravitated to rough-and-tumble play with boys were more likely to become lesbians, for example, whereas the little boys who oriented to dolls and dress up with girl playmates were more likely to become gay men. We may not like the fact that these old stereotypes have any basis in reality, but irrespective of that, they do.* What Bailey and Zucker report is only a statistically meaningful trend, of course, not some inviolate law of the queer universe. There are plenty of traditionally masculine boys who grow up to be gay as well as girly future lesbians who love dolls. But the authors did find a strong “dosage” effect, so that the greater the number of gender-atypical traits found in a given child, the more likely he or she was to grow up to be gay. (I, for one, was a bit of an androgynous mix on these measures; I preferred hopscotch to football during grade-school recess, but when I did play sports, I was known as a ruthless little hack with a passion for kicking shins.)

  In principle, a similar predictive approach could be used to determine which children are most likely to grow up to become “minor-attracted adults” (as many pedophiles and hebephiles have begun referring to themselves in an effort to distance themselves from those less appealing descriptors). Obviously, calling their seven-year-old a “pre-pedophile” isn’t going to go over well with most parents, but that doesn’t mean that the underlying construct isn’t valid. And if we’re sincerely motivated to reduce harm to children, an empirical endeavor such as this can go a long way; we might not be able to change or “cure” their erotic age orientation by the time we’re able to scientifically identify them, but if the matter is handled sensitively, we can certainly intervene by educating these young people about their unique burden and the responsibilities that come with being who they are. This type of rational response can also quell these pre-pedophilic children’s fears of rejection. Their dawning awareness that they’re getting older but remain attracted only to those who are much younger will inevitably fester into internalized symptoms of personal distress in the absence of any social support. (One recent study found that pedophiles and hebephiles begin recognizing—and subsequently worrying about—their taboo sexual natures around the age of sixteen or seventeen.) That’s not good for any of us. Having disgruntled, misanthropic adult pedophiles walking around and blaming society for their cruel lot in life is just lighting a fuse; this will only encourage them to self-justify and rationalize any harm they’d cause, putting more children at risk.

  Yet aside from being logical and reasonable, elements that tend not to survive very long in the social atmosphere of a moral panic, such a preemptive social approach, in order to work, also requires a much better scientific understanding of pedophilia than what we currently have. After all, unlike many pre-homosexual children who stand out even to the casual observer as being likely to grow up to be gay, prospective pedophiles don’t have such blatant stereotypes for scientists to work with in studying them. There’s no obvious pre-pedophile equivalent of a “sissy,” that’s to say, and given that the only openly pedophile adults you’ll probably be able to find have been ignominiously outed by the authorities after committing some crime, these people’s retrospective childhood accounts may not reveal the traits of a pre-pedophile so much as a history of impulse-control problems.

  Complicating matters even more, there are two distinct subtypes of pedophile offenders in the “system,” according to the forensic psychiatrist Michael Seto. There are those whose crimes were hands-off (typically, child porn offenders), and then there are those who’ve committed hands-on offenses (pedophilic child molesters). These aren’t mutually exclusive categories, clearly, but they’re just as clearly not one and the same. So let’s first examine what the science tells us about the hands-off variety.

  Seto reports that only one in eight men arrested for child porn possession is known to have committed a hands-on offense against a child and that, despite the popular view that men who view child porn will eventually harm an actual child because the visual fantasy alone will eventually not be enough, the most compelling statistics actually speak to the contrary. Overall, Seto argues, these i
ndividuals are less likely to display the empathy deficits more characteristic of a hands-on offender. Although they’re pedophiles, they’re not necessarily cruel, and their normal supply of empathy helps to prevent them from physically acting out their desires with a real child.

  One of the more controversial studies on the rightfully volatile subject of child porn is a 2011 report by the biologist Milton Diamond. Similar to previous work showing that the more sexually explicit materials in a society, the fewer reported sex crimes against women (presumably with porn functioning as a sort of masturbatory “displacement” for nonconsensual sex in potential male offenders), Diamond showed that societies in which child porn was at one time legal had lower reported rates of child sex abuse during those periods. Diamond arrived at this startling conclusion by analyzing crime statistics in the Czech Republic. From 1948 to 1989, the country’s Communist regime strictly prohibited all forms of sexual expression (even the relatively mild Playboy and cheap romance novels were forbidden, although I’d probably still have been able to get my beloved muscle mags, mercifully). By late 1989, the regime had fallen, and porn quickly became a booming cottage industry in the newly democratic region. Almost overnight, Czechs went from absolutist laws barring the use of sexually explicit material to a completely unregulated marketplace where any type of porn, including child porn, was easily and legally obtained. In comparing the rates of child sex abuse in the seventeen years before the revolution with those during the eighteen years (1989–2007) after the revolution, Diamond uncovered a precipitous drop in reported child sex-abuse cases as well as sex crimes against women. (Nonsexual crime rates, by contrast, increased during the same postrevolutionary period, a fact that makes the sex-crime data difficult to explain away as the result of some rising general happiness quotient linked to these sweeping new political changes.)

  Diamond’s data speak for themselves, really, so there’s in fact little reason to doubt them, nor his theorizing about the sexual catharsis effect of giving porn to the masses. But it’s the nature of this particular porn category—involving kids—that makes it so difficult to accept. Nonetheless, researchers analyzing sex-abuse statistics in Japan and Denmark have also found that the legal availability of child porn is associated with reduced overall rates of child molestation (and in fact many pedophiles and hebephiles who use child porn will tell you the same thing, that these materials help to keep them from harming children). Yet it’s also difficult to know what to do with these data in practice. I mean, sure, fewer children may be molested due to child porn availability, but what about those children being abused and exploited in the production of this “displacement” material? It’s not displacement for them; it’s their actual, flesh-and-blood exploitation and abuse. This isn’t an airy hypothetical problem one tosses out in philosophy seminars as a sort of morally gray ethical dilemma; it’s a very real scenario involving very real children. Diamond and his Czech coauthors recognize this not insignificant problem as well. “We do not approve of the use of real children in the production or distribution of child pornography,” they write, “but artificially produced materials might serve.” In most places in the world, however, computer-generated child porn is strictly illegal too, so that’s not presently a viable option. It may make us personally squirm, but banning synthetic children for pedophiles’ private pleasures actually makes little sense when considered within the moral framework of harmfulness that we’ve been using throughout this book. Diamond’s data strongly suggest this ban ultimately will add up to more real children being harmed. In the absence of mindless (and therefore impossible to harm) erotic targets such as synthetic children, the only other alternative that manages to strike both a measure of pragmatism and child protection is a sort of government-controlled allocation of confiscated child porn to diagnosed pedophiles, particularly those deemed by clinicians likely to offend (or reoffend) by committing hands-on crimes. Perhaps only dated illicit material that has been approved for this use by the now adult models used in the images would be employed in this way. It certainly isn’t a happy scenario, but it could be a practical one where a tone of rationalism is sorely needed. With the modern Greek government already recognizing pedophilia as a mental disability deserving of state-sponsored pay benefits, the “medical” procurement of child porn in an effort to reduce harm to children may not be so far away. As the philosopher Michel Foucault once said, “When the monster violates the law by its very existence, it triggers the response of something quite different from the law itself. It provokes either violence, the will for pure and simple suppression, or medical care and pity.”

  * * *

  Meanwhile, a child porn conviction is a much better indicator of pedophilia than a child molestation conviction. The phrase “nonpedophilic child molester” sounds like an oxymoron, but in fact it’s not, since a large proportion of child molesters (shown in studies to be at least half) abuse children as sexual surrogates for adults. These so-called opportunistic offenders are often inebriated, sadistic, or otherwise afflicted by some short-circuiting error in their frontal lobes. From a clinical point of view, they aren’t “true pedophiles,” because in the lab they demonstrate a greater sexual response to nude images of adults than to kids. It may be helpful, conceptually, to think of these opportunistic offenders as being similar to Kinsey’s farm-bred males who couldn’t find a woman to have sex with, so instead they had sex with a goat (or some other nonhuman mammal grazing in the pastures). Just as the latter weren’t “true zoophiles,” neither are the former truly pedophilic. Rather, they simply violate whatever, or whoever, is available to them at that very unfortunate moment and use their imaginations.

  By contrast, those recurrently seeking out porn that features prepubescent children (or pubescent children in the case of hebephiles), when there’s a bottomless well of more-than-available grown-up porn, are obviously exhibiting an orientation to minors. In any event, while these two subtypes of criminal pedophiles—hands-on and hands-off—aren’t always distinguished from each other in studies, we do know a few of the traits that are associated especially with the hands-on variety. Before I share these with you, just be aware that these are statistical correlations only, which means that the co-occurring relationship between pedophilia and these traits is greater than would be expected by chance alone. Even if someone you know has all of these attributes (such as, ahem, that new boyfriend of yours), it’s still exceedingly unlikely that he’s attracted to prepubescent children. (Likewise, just because someone doesn’t have any of these traits doesn’t mean he’s not a pedophile.)

  The psychologist James Cantor, whom we met earlier while distinguishing the erotic-target paraphilias (who or what you’re attracted to) from the erotic-activity paraphilias (what you like doing), has uncovered a number of these patterns. For reasons presently unknown, for example, pedophiles are more likely than other men to be short in stature. Another finding is that there is a disproportionate number of left-handed pedophiles. Being a southpaw is usually just a genetic quirk that means nothing in particular, but it can also emerge as the result of damage to the cerebrum during prenatal development. So the overrepresentation of left-handedness in pedophiles hints at a neurological “born that way” basis of having a sexual interest in children (or perhaps, born with a predisposition for getting sexually imprinted that way). Cantor uncovered another revealing neurological trend among pedophiles who sexually abuse children: the younger their victims, the lower the offender’s IQ. It’s by no means a perfect correlation between IQ and erotic age orientation (if it were, all gerontophiles would be geniuses and all pedophiles would be drooling idiots, neither of which is true), but it does say something is different in the actual brains of pedophilic child molesters.

  Cantor’s big scoop, however, came when he discovered anomalies in the density of white matter in pedophile neuroanatomy. “The ‘white matter’ is the shorthand term for groupings of myelinated axons and glial cells that transmit signals throughout the gray matter that
composes the cerebrum,” he explained to a reporter in 2012. “Think of the gray matter like the houses on a specific electricity grid and the white matter like the cabling connecting those houses to the grid … There’s either not enough of this cabling [in pedophiles], not the correct kind of cabling, or it’s wiring the wrong areas together, so instead of the brain evoking protective or parental instincts when these people see children, it’s instead evoking sexual instincts. There’s almost literally a crossed wiring.”

  Yet even if it’s all a matter of white matter, this still tells us little about how the matter came to be. That’s to say, we know next to nothing about how to prevent mothers from giving birth to pre-pedophilic babies in whose soft heads the bungled white matter cabling process is already well under way. We run into the same problem as we did when trying to come up with (ethical) experiments using children that can isolate the specific cause of any paraphilia. In fact, it’s unthinkable in the present case. The ethical problems of turning kids into bee-loving melissaphiles for the sake of science pale in comparison to the atrocity of randomly assigning newborns to be in the “pedophile” or “nonpedophile” condition of a controlled experimental study. Imagine being the parent of a child in the pedophile condition and waiting patiently to see if the experimenter’s hypothesis pans out, with your bouncing baby boy (or girl) growing up to be an adult sexually aroused by six- and seven-year-olds.