Kids and Us: Convenient Lies

Just ran across this article by John Corvino, centered, of course, on the Church pedophilia scandal.

Comments earlier this week by Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone linking homosexuality to pedophilia have drawn almost universal condemnation from medical experts, gay-rights organizations, and government officials.

“Many psychologists, many psychiatrists have demonstrated that there is no relationship between celibacy and pedophilia but many others have demonstrated, I was told recently, that there is a relationship between homosexuality and pedophilia. That is true. I have the documents of the psychologists. That is the problem.”

He’s nearly half-right.

First off, in spite of Corvino's statement, he's nowhere near half right. Bertone may not be deliberately lying, but his statement is in direct opposition to statements by the pope and the Vatican's own study, as well as on the accumulated scientific research.

I'm not going to critique Corvino's article here -- it strikes me as diffuse and faintly muddy, as if he weren't quite sure what question he wanted to deal with. He seems to want to talk about the cover-up -- "complicity" he calls it -- which is a huge facet of the whole problem, but to hang that on the gay/pedophile connection, specious as it is, doesn't really do his argument any good.

Just a couple of comments on the gay priests/pedophiles angle of the Church distaster.

I've seen the argument, advanced by Bill Donohue and others (including a couple of the commenters to Corvino's article) that, since many of the incidents involve post-pubescent boys and adult men, they qualify as "homosexual." This is really a case of dodging the central issue: this is not about sexual orientation, it's about abuse of power. It strikes me that child molestation (and I'm taking "child" in this context to refer to any individual under the legal age of consent) is about power. That should be obvious from the methods the hierarchy has used to hide these cases, particularly swearing those involved to secrecy, often under threat of excommunication. It strikes me that child molestation is somewhat akin to rape, even if the child is ostensibly willing -- it's a power trip on the part of the perpetrator.

There's also the question, in the cases that can be strictly defined as "ephebophilia", of consent. We're talking about boys who are adolescents and who cannot be expected to make mature decisions about sex -- for crying out loud, they're not much more than hormones and energy at that age. And let's face it, it's easy to turn their heads. From a report on cases in Latin America:

Congressional investigators said more than 20 witnesses were called and some testified Barbosa and two other priests in the same northeastern archdiocese had abused boys as young as 12, plying them with money, clothes and other gifts.

As for the argument advanced by a Latin American cardinal that the victims were being deliberately seductive, my only response to that is: Excuse me, one supposes the priest is an adult. He doesn't know how to say 'No' to a child?" Asshole. (Sorry -- didn't think to store the link when I ran across that article.)

I do have to take issue with those who are characterizing all of these cases as rape. Statutorily, they are strictly accurate, but the picture they're painting is not a real one. The force being used here was not necessarily physical (although in some cases, I don't doubt that it was), but emotional. Calling is "rape" just fuzzes the issue.

If you want a carefully thought out and meticulously documented summary of the current research on the question of sexual orientation and child sexual abuse, see this article by Jim Burroway at Box Turtle Bulletin. This, I think, is a key point.

In some cases, he [the regressed molester] may temporarily relate to the child as a peer, much as a fixated offender relates to children. But more often, he is simply lashing out against the stresses in his life, and the child becomes a convenient target. The offender may find a sense of power in his sexual relationship with a child that he doesn't get with an adult. When that happens this relationship with the child is often violent. But regardless of the nature of the relationship, the gender of the child is often irrelevant — it’s the easy access and vulnerability that makes the child a target.

Regressed offenders are typically heterosexual in their adult relationships. Unlike our three percent sample, they date women and marry them. They often are parents, stepparents or extended family members of their victims. By all appearances — and by their own self-identification — they are straight. Drs. Groth and Birnbaum emphasized this point, saying:

In over 12 years of clinical experience working with child molesters, we have yet to see any example of a regression from an adult homosexual orientation. The child offender who is also attracted to and engaged in adult relationships is heterosexual.27

While Drs. Groth and Birnbaum were emphatic on this point, there’s no reason to believe that there’s no such thing as someone who is engaged in homosexual adult relationships while also molesting children. Surely they’re out there. I don’t think any group of fallible human beings can claim perfect innocence on this. But the experts generally agree: the phenomenon is rare.

It seems that even the Vatican has distanced itself from Cardinal Bertone's remarks -- or it's been trying to.

I'm sure we haven't heard the last of it, by any means. It will be interesting to see if the Church will do any real soul-searching because of this.