What do women with sexual interest in children (SIC) tell us about the assumed cause of their SIC, (non-)disclosure, and professional help?
[To be added later. It's a long article with many pictures and tables and such.]
Butterfly Kisses: Researching Female Pedophilia
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RoosterDance
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RoosterDance
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Re: Butterfly Kisses: Researching Female Pedophilia
The Romance of Henry James’s Female Pedophile
by Jenn McCollum
MP: An Online Feminist Journal Summer 2010: Vol. 3, Issue 1
The surplus of criticism on Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw is enough to turn even the most creative contemporary critics away. Since the novella’s publication in 1898, the uncanny incidents at Bly have continued to taunt critics, especially those primed to unearth a coherent plot. Despite the raging wars of interpretation among different camps, James’s knotty ghost story has refused to ease its death-grip on readers’ imaginations. Perhaps today more than ever, readers are bewildered about what the text means, never mind what it suggests. The ambiguities of plot continue to feed the most recent analyses despite William Van Peer’s and Ewout Van der Knapp’s painstakingly scientific study in 1995 that anatomized every claim made about The Turn of the Screw’s plot. Van Peer and Van der Knapp identified two distinct species of argument: those which maintained that the tale is a ghost story, and those which interpreted the ghostly happenings at Bly as the governess’ sexual repression or hallucinations. Each camp had seven possible theories that prompted Van Peer and Van der Knapp to question the “truth” of each. After proving the validity of all fourteen theories, and thus proving that the two opposing arguments were equally legitimate, they concluded that “if the contradiction cannot be resolved by eliminating one of its terms, then presumably this is proof that in the realm of interpretation, contradiction may be tolerated” (706). Thus, the primary debate over the plot of The Turn of the Screw is potentially resolved – opposite interpretations mutually exclude each other, making both arguments valid. James’s novella, then, coheres when the contradictions of plot are embraced. While not every critic is willing to settle for such a thankless contradiction, the emptiness of the plot suggests that the relentless lure of the novella rests elsewhere.
More than a ghost story, The Turn of the Screw is an enthusiastic romance of children and sex. The implication that Miles, the young ward of an impressionable governess, is sexually aware, sexually experienced, and sexually hungry has its draw. Titillating in its inappropriateness, the novel suggests through metaphor and silences what was, and still is, unmentionable. Since Richard von Kraftt-Ebbing coined the term “pedophilia erotica” in his 1866 Psychopathia Sexualis, public attitudes toward child sexuality have become increasingly proscriptive and intimate relationships between adults and children suspect. During the Victorian period, Henry James witnessed several significant changes in the social reception of child-adult chumminess. The society that once embraced Charles Dodgson’s (Lewis Carroll’s) provocative photographs and drawings of nude and scantily clad child-bodies in compromising positions, was not the same set of Victorians that criticized The Turn of the Screw at the fin de siècle. Dodgson’s child art was permissible as Victorians, such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, considered his gaze at the child-body innocent (Leach; Gernsheim). In the tradition of William Blake’s imagining of childhood, in which children were esteemed as god-like in their purity and innocence, mid-Victorians still clung to the fantasy that a man who could appreciate the goodness of children must have an ivory-white soul himself. However, late-Victorians exchanged their Romantic ideal of childhood for a more modern model, as several reviews of James’s novella expressed his work as “horribly successful” (“Magic”), “distinctively repulsive” (“The Story”), “cruel and untrue” (“Mr. James’s”), “monstrous and incredible” (“Recent”), “hopelessly evil” (“Most Hopelessly”), and unsafe (Barry 173). Like critics today who continue to cling to the text’s impenetrable plot, Victorian critics wrestled uncomfortably with the scandalous implication of child sexuality.
Historically, the sexualization of children has courted conflict. In his Phaedrus, Plato uses a playfully sexual scene between Socrates and Phaedrus to posit that eros (sexual desire) and divine mania (madness) are necessary since the love of beautiful young boy-bodies is the first step toward understanding (remembering) the ideal Form. The mania inspired by kalos pais (erotic interaction) is a “pure and simple […] gift of the god” (244a: 8-9). Although Socrates believes that sexual relationships between men and boys are essential to enlightenment, he is also careful to note that such relations should be kept from the public eye:
Moral discourses about pedophilia today increasingly activate social panic. The media explodes with chilling tales of predatory men, instilling fear into parents and caregivers who want to protect their children from immorality and psychologically-debilitating experiences. A widespread moral panic infects many Americans, making them susceptible to manipulation by the media, or what Kathleen Woodward identifies as “statistical panic:” a psychological state in which a person fears for her safety due to media-driven cues (196). Resulting from the fear that “our own individual future is at stake” (196), statistical panic breeds uncertainty. Unsure of other people, and especially of ourselves, panic hinders risk-taking; “what we fear is risk itself” (211). Living in a world of images deemed “dangerous” by the media, Americans succumb to a fantasy of protection in which they have the responsibility to shelter youth from perceived risk. As the most potentially threatening site of risk to a child, sexual abuse “becomes the virus that nourishes us, that empty point of ignorance about which we are the most knowing” (Kincaid 11). A societal preoccupation with child molestation and sexual abuse allows a well-meaning public to place itself as the lighthouse of protection and surveillance; however, such a fantasy of protection requires an equal fantasy of injury. Popular imaginings of pedophilia enable a discourse of protection even though, as James Kincaid argues, “molesting and the stories protesting the molesting walk the same beat” (12). Both fantasies have the potential to wound children. The fantasy of protection imprisons children in a turret of moral and statistical panic that stagnates healthy risk-taking which has the potential to challenge social constructs; the fantasy of injury, on the other hand, silences a sexual politic through a fuzzy imagining of predatory men in which the culprit is unidentifiable, unknowable, and everywhere.
The attempt to “learn” the pedophile, and hence color the grayish face of injury, is an ongoing challenge. Defined through history as an immoral desire, a psychological disorder, and finally a criminal act, pedophilia has been institutionalized into numerous classifications but certain forms, like female pedophilia, elude recognition or direct confrontation in public discourses. Since the late-Victorians identified intimate child-adult relationships as a sign of immorality instead of purity, the American Psychiatric Association Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) went on in 1968 to establish pedophilia as a paraphilic mental disorder in which a person has recurrent, intense sexually-arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors that generally involve children. According to the DSM, “an adult who engages in sexual activity with a child is performing a criminal and immoral act and this is never considered normal or socially acceptable behavior.” As an abnormal, counter-social act, pedophilia occupies what Ann Cvetkovich terms a “counterpublic sphere,” which is marked by an “affective experience that falls outside of institutionalized or stable forms of identity or politics [which] can form the basis for public culture” (17). Although Cvetkovich does not consider pedophilia in her book, An Archive of Feelings, as one of the primary kinds of counterpublic spheres that have the potential to reform cultural concepts of normalcy, pedophiles nevertheless occupy this sphere as they are in direct opposition to the sanctioned, appropriated spaces of public discourse in which heterosexual sex among adults indicates normative sexual behavior. Whether or not pedophilia has the possibility to positively change culture is not a point I want to make, or feel invested in. Instead, I wish to show that by continuing to foster a hegemonic discourse about pedophilia, American culture represses a serious consideration of both child and female sexuality by refusing to realize either that they have one or that the one they have is socially unacceptable.
The reality of childhood sexuality is at stake in the socially-silenced discourses of pedophilia. Contemporary ideals of the sexualized child have a history, as Steven Angelides observes. Marking the 1980s as a critical stage in theories about childhood sexuality, Angelides posits that before 1980 society imagined childhood as both “sexual and innocent,” and that after 1980 society has become obsessed with making a “conscious effort to resolve this contradiction” (100). The American obsession with figuring childhood as innocent hearkens back to the Romantic ideal epitomized by Blake. As such, “the intra-psychic repression of childhood sexuality is redoubled by the cultural, or, dialogic repression of child sexuality” (Angelides 100). As Shoshana Felman argues in her psychoanalytical analysis of The Turn of the Screw, sexuality is part of a child’s unconscious epistemology of sex (Felman “Turning the Screw of Interpretation”). The media and commercial society do not create child sexuality, but rather these social indicators respond to a sexuality that already exists.
Just as the move to silence discourses of pedophilia enlarges the social fear of it, the persistent view of children as innocent makes them more erotic; “erotic children are manufactured – in the sense that we produce them in our cultural factories, the ones that make meanings for us” (Kincaid 9). Today’s erotic child, or what James Kincaid terms the “postromantic child,” has been deployed as “a political and philosophical agent, a weapon used to assault substance and substitute in its place a set of negative inversions: innocence, purity, and emptiness” (10). Although Kincaid counters Felman’s observation about unconscious sexual knowledge to suggest that children do have intrinsic innocence and that their sexuality is mass-produced, both theorists arrive at a similar claim: the move to ascribe children with innocence has torn their “innocence” (whether real or imagined) from them. The postromantic child is, indeed, Victorian. Its play at innocence is what makes it a sexual object.
The possibility of innocence in such a complicated world is a comfort that gives humanity a certain degree of hope. That the Victorians squeezed the ideal of childhood innocence to their bosoms like a last scrap of meat seems warranted, and sad, in a world that was increasingly polluted with markers of civilization; scholars such as Judith R. Walkowitz, Ronald Pearsall, and Christopher Herbert have convincingly argued that industry, war, class struggle, and the rise of the individual as an independent, isolated being were driving forces in the changing atmosphere of the Victorian period. Late-Victorians, especially, struggled to identify themselves as both individual and community in the aftermath of radical liberal individualism movements: a tradition led by Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham and followed by Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. Lost in the blur between individual and nation, defining the Victorian adult was no longer as clear as it may have been. Perhaps in their fear of losing identity or of losing the ability to understand what that identity meant, Victorians strived to define childhood. As Kevin Ohi observes, “to say that children aren’t queer is a way of asserting that we know what children are and that we therefore know what adults are” (82). Attributing children a definite characteristic, like innocence, allowed Victorians to entertain a fantasy of protection, which was essential in a world of such rapid change. However, by associating children with innocence, adults were simultaneously identifying their children as “others” – beings different than them and hence unknowable, even fearful. Children, in other words, were protected but still at risk. As “others,” children’s innocence made them urchins: little imps, scary in their mysterious embodiment of purity.
Like most children in Victorian literature, the innocence of Miles in The Turn of the Screw is suspect from the start. Indeed, his mixture of purity and sexuality angered Victorian critics as much as it angers critics today. Part of that anger arises because the distinction between adult and child is not as crystalline as readers may want it to be; “In this amusette, this erotic child’s play of a novella, it is difficult to say who is the seducer and who the seduced, or, for that matter, who is the child and who the adult” (Hanson 369). One critical tradition famously accuses Peter Quint, a deceased valet at Bly, of initiating Miles into queer, pedophilic relations, although “he remains guilty without proof, a fiend without a definite crime” (Hanson 367). That Miles is expelled from boarding school “can have but one meaning […] that he’s an injury to others” (James 11). According to Agieszka Soltysik, the “injury” must be Miles’s queer knowledge as he “[says] ‘things’ to boys he liked, who in turn repeated them to boys they liked” (248). Hence, most critics who read Miles as a sexualized child read him as a part of a queer tradition of silence. Quint, who was “much too free” with Miles (James 26), has been cast in the role of homosexual predator. However, his “unmentionable” sex acts do not seem to cause critics the kind of panic found in contemporary social discourses about pedophilia. On the contrary, critics such as Soltysik display an eagerness to address the issue of Qunit’s queer pedophilia. Within Quint’s relations with Miles is writ a familiar script: that of homosexuality. In fact, almost every critical register of Quint’s pedophilia is associated with homosexuality. Moreover, as Jonathan Flatley’s recent reading of The Turn of the Screw suggests, most contemporary critics that confront any aspect of sexuality in the text seem anxious to reveal a homosexual subscript as a way to make observations about James’s own sexuality. Although pedophilia and homosexuality are not interchangeable, most critics interchange them when analyzing Quint. Miles’s sexuality, as a result, is identified as homosexual, at least initially. Homosexuality is a familiar societal marker, as part of Mirkin’s second phase of sexual politics. So when Ellis Hanson argues that the reader is supposed to find Quint’s “desire to participate with perverse pleasure rather than paranoid disavowal in the queer erotics of children” inadmissible (368), he neglects that by relating Quint’s pederasty to homosexuality, he, like numerous other critics, appropriates it in some sense. There are two registers for the sexual atmosphere in the text: homosexual and heterosexual (Soltysik 249). However, curiously missing from these analyses is the pedosexual. What is less admissible, more unspeakable, than heterosexual pedophilia? And what, then, is more silenced than female pedophilia?
Seen as a most perverse act against nature, the existence of female pedophilia is still questioned today (Chow and Choy 213). Women’s social roles as nurturing mothers and care-givers have been essentialized since gender difference became a topic of discussion. The women’s movement in general was fueled by early feminist thinkers like Mary Wollstonecraft and Dinah Craik who argued that women have an important role in the nation in raising and educating children, and comforting companions. While most feminists challenge the biological differences between men and women, today many Americans continue to subscribe to a sociology of motherhood that passes the responsibility of child care primarily to the mother’s hands. The immense social discomfort Americans show toward issues of motherhood is apparent in the law system, as well as in literature. In family law, contact stipulations tended to favor the mother for the primary care of children after divorce through 1980 (some states still favor the mother), and have prompted father’s rights movements (American Bar Association). Similarly, Toni Morrison’s fictional depictions of compromised mother-figures who murder their children to save them, or rip the arms from children’s sockets out of jealousy, continue to meet with scathing criticisms for their “unwomanly” portrayals. Public reaction to Morrison’s mother-figures shows that Americans remain focused on the mother as the primary nurturer of children.
The first psychological study of a female pedophile, conducted by Eva Chow and Alberto Choy in 2002, has met with much debate. Despite the definition of pedophiles as people who desire sexual intimacy with children, many contemporary literary publications and social science studies about pedophilia slant their language at men. For example, in Mirkin’s study of sexual politics he describes pedophiles as “men whose sexual wishes and desires for relationship bonds and love are focused either primarily or exclusively on children who have not reached puberty” (473; italics added). Recent studies in criminology and psychiatry conducted by Kolja Schiltz and Boris Schiffer prove that today the trend is still to consider pedophilia as an entirely male pathology, as each study uses only male test subjects. The newest research that argues for pedophilia as a pathology is the same research that dismisses the space that women occupy as pedophiles in society. Furthermore, through the methods of gross examination, the male body is used as evidence to measure signs of pedophilia (such as erectile, brain, and skin responses), excluding the female body a potential site for disease. In response, researchers like Kelly Christopher and Kim Turner have conducted all-female studies to replicate the male-centered trends because “relatively little research has been conducted on female sex-offenders in comparison to males” (Christopher 872), and “female sex offenders may not fit neatly into the same typologies that criminal justice research has developed for male sex offenders” (Turner 880). Similarly, Dominique Roe-Sepowitz has taken necessary pains to show that “in contrast to portrayals in previous research […] female sex offenders are not a homogeneous group” (405).
Like A.J. Cooper’s clinical study of Miss K in 1990, Chow and Choy’s study of Miss A begins with the admission that “although there is a large body of literature on male sex offenders, there are few studies on female sex offenders” (211). Indeed, the slight amount of attention given to female pedophiles is staggering, considering that, according to David Finkelhor’s numerous studies, women’s sexual abuse of children is much more serious than men’s because women are more likely to have abused more children for a longer period of time (Murray 215), are more intrusive, and more likely to use higher rates of force than men (Moulden 388). Finkelhor found that in cases of daycare molestation, more than 60% of children who were molested, were molested by women (Murray 213). Heather Moulden’s 2007 follow-up to Finkelhor’s research verifies that “despite a social reluctance to acknowledge female sexual abusers, reports suggest that they account for between 3% and 15% of all sexual offences” (387). However, as Richard Tewksbury reports, that number is probably much higher since “female sex offending is […] acknowledged as possibly less likely to be detected or reported” (30). Despite the general reluctance to pursue female suspects and to incarcerate them (Moulden 199), criminal acts by female offenders have reached a ratio of 6:1 compared to male criminal acts (Palmero 30). Moulden’s study of female sex offenders found that “females offended against younger victims and were more violent as compared with male abusers” (399). Similarly, George Palmero recently observed that “girls, apparently less aggressive than boys in general, are becoming more antisocial and violent, participating in the large cauldron of criminality [which] may undermine the testosterone hypothesis that fuels a belief in the tendency to criminality in males” (494). With these findings, the resistance to consider the female pedophile in social science researching is suspect.
Chow and Choy’s study of Miss A, a 23-year old mother of two sons, found that she met DSM’s criteria for a pedophile. She confessed two incidents of sexual abuse to her priest in which she, while babysitting, bathed young girls and continued to lick or rub their vaginal area and then masturbated herself. Miss A admitted that she believed these girls, aged 4 and 5, were sexually taunting her and were pleased with her initiation of a sex act. She decided to seek help in the fear that she may someday give birth to a daughter (214). Miss A read her desire for child sex as unnatural, according to the social norms. According to Schmidt, “it is quite clear that pedophilia in contemporary Western societies represents a form of sexuality that cannot be lived out, since it is in conflict with a central social covenant based upon sexual self-determination and consensual sexuality.” Schmidt goes on, though, to identify this tension as an entirely male problem: “That is the dilemma of the male pedophile” (376).
The dilemma of the female pedophile is that female desire for child sex does not exist in the body of social consciousness. Femininity has become a kind of genre that society believes it can read. Lauren Berlant asserts that “for femininity to be a genre like an aesthetic one means that it is a structure of conventional expectation that people rely on to provide certain kinds of affective intensities” (4). Although perhaps to a lesser degree than in the past, society still looks to women as representatives of national affect. Arlie Hochschild has argued in her book, The Managed Heart, that “feeling rules,” or scripts of emotion, are appropriated by women and affect women more markedly than men:
What is more alluring than The Turn of the Screw’s plot is the identity of the governess. She frustrates critics more than any other character in the novella because she eludes classification. Like the female pedophile, she is the ultimate non-entity. And even more like the female pedophile, James’s governess meets all the characteristics for the DSM description of pedophilia. I am not the first critic to observe that the governess desires child sex. Although, with such an abundant amount of work on the governess in the long critical tradition of The Turn of the Screw, few scholars have followed in Sami Ludwig’s shoes, despite the fact that most analyses display an obsessive preoccupation with the governess. Ludwig’s essay, “Metaphors, Cognition, and Behavior: The Reality of Sexual Puns in The Turn of the Screw,” analyzes James’s text most similarly to my own analysis, and I would like to use his claims to push forward into a more risky arena. Ludwig insists that the puns and the obscure language in the text make the most sense when literal sex is read into the plot; “sex now makes the imagery cohere and [sex] becomes a real issue in the world represented” (40). If, as Hanson has suggested, Peter Quint, with his “rare instances of working-class testosterone” fails as a romantic hero (367), perhaps the governess can be read as a kind of romantic hero, and her love affair with Miles, a true romance.
Reading The Turn of the Screw as a romance between the governess and Miles requires an understanding of the history of pedophilia, the role that the female pedophile plays in that history, and the history of child sexuality. Apart from these histories, which I have only briefly delineated, the governess has her own critical history, begun by Edmund Wilson who was the first to theorize that her undeniably sexual obsessions were signs of repression, centered on an insatiable desire for the children’s absent uncle. According to Wilson, the governess projects her lustful feelings for the uncle onto the children in a way that reflects Victorian discourses about sex. Several critics follow in Wilson’s shoes by continuing to view the governess’ “sexual repression” in the classical Victorian context. Antonio Sanna has most recently added to Wilson’s claim by observing that:
Of all my forthcoming arguments, the one that will meet the most resistance is that The Turn of the Screw is the first literary romance of the female pedophile of its kind. I do not argue that a romance must be comfortable; in fact, the best ones aren’t. Even those who buy into Ludwig’s assertion that Miles’s “death” at the end of the novella is only figurative, may find the “romantic” aspect of my argument uncomfortable. As Sheila Teahan suggests, the governess uses the terms “literal” and “figurative” in opposite ways: “the governess says ‘literally’ when she means ‘figuratively.’ The categories of literal and figurative have no clear application to the idiom in question, which is neither overtly figurative in character nor contains a dead metaphor that could be activated” (64). Teahan’s analysis shows that the “literal” death of Miles can be dismissed in several ways, and not only according to the method suggested by Ludwig. Ludwig reads Miles’s "death" as a mere symbol of “transition, an act of sexual initiation, which leaves Miles alive. Thus we would have a triple pun on ‘death:’ 1) physical death, 2) orgasm, 3) rite of passage” (50). I need not make the same argument about the erotic interactions between Miles and governess, since Ludwig does an excellent job delineating the textual evidence. But if I am to pick up where he leaves off to argue that James intended for readers to suspect that Miles is still alive, I must show that James opens the possibility of Miles’s perseverance, and hence the emergence of a fascinating, although wayward, love story.
Miles is Douglas from the novella’s frame, and the playful anonymous narrator of the same frame is no other than our unnamed governess. Miles does not die at the end of the action at Bly but rather he lives on, continuing to experience sexual pleasure with his governess and, after marrying her, continues to relish the moments of scandalous equivocation that their romance is dependent upon. The playful, flirtatious conversation between Douglas and the narrator in the frame is the first hint of their true identities. The narrator watches with a kind of sardonic pleasure as Douglas approaches the fire to tell a story that “nobody but [him], till now, has ever heard” (1). The narrator and Douglas play off each other, using the same kind of ambiguous language that Miles and the governess use in the governess’ story; they excite their listeners with the promise of scandal in a similar fashion. Together, they construct the ultimate fairy tale. By using pseudonyms, either in the story or in their encounter with others around the fire, they separate themselves from judgment of their peers. Furthermore, by telling that the governess “has been dead these twenty years” (2), and that Douglas himself did not participate in the occurrences at Bly, they are able to narrate their peculiar love story to strangers while protecting the governess’ identity. Above all, the governess’ identity must be protected because an association with female pedophilia would wreak havoc on their position among strangers. Moreover, there is no language for it.
Douglas does not censor himself in the same way that he censors the governess. His relationship to the governess is the same as Miles’s: “she was ten years older than I. She was my sister’s governess.” He doesn’t hide the fact that he “liked her extremely and am glad to this day to think she liked me too” (2). Implicating himself in a pedophilic relationship is much different than implicating her. Indeed, Mrs. Griffin enjoys imagining a young boy in love with an older woman; “Well, if I don’t know who she was in love with I know who he was […] it’s rather nice” (3). A young boy loving a grown woman is “nice,” but a woman loving a boy has no affective function in the story. The story is told, firstly, as a love story: “I see. She was in love” (3). Everyone wants to know with whom was the governess in love – in fact, it is the object of everyone’s attention – but no one present can imagine the truth. And Douglas is right – the story will not tell that Miles and the governess were lovers in a “literal, vulgar way” (3). The most vulgar way would be to say the “word” that even Mrs. Grose keeps back when addressing the governess:
pedophile. However, the story isn’t really a vulgar one, despite the churlish context. The Turn of the Screw tells a story of two inexperienced, feverishly-sexed lovers coming together under the horrific circumstances of a socially-condoned act of pedophilia. A story that begins with the callow governess on a “see-saw” of “the right throbs and the wrong” (6) finishes with the ripe ejaculation of a job well done. The sexually-naïve governess transforms, by the end, into a woman who has discovered the right jerks and strokes to make Miles utter “the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss” (88). She hardly upholds the image of a repressed, patriarchal Victorian spinster. As Miles falls into her arms, she begins “to feel what it truly was that [she] held” – not Miles’s corpse, but rather the slack, satisfied body of a boy disposed of the sexual temptation haunting him heretofore. According to Ludwig, there are three “turns” in the development of sexual temptation between Miles and the governess that lead to literal sexual intercourse: “sexuality, which first appeared merely in the symbolic imagery and then openly became a question between the two, must now, in the third rhetorical turn, be metaphorically transferred to a real context” (49). The newly sexually-proficient governess marries Miles, as evidenced by the fact that they are still together, as well as their closing words in the frame:
But even the outcome of marriage between Douglas and the governess, which naturalizes an otherwise preternatural act of female pedophilia by returning a counterpublic feeling to the public discourse, may not be enough to persuade some critics. There is a long tradition of reading of the governess as a displaced non-entity, as critics often pillage her authority, her sense of self – even her very existence – by supplanting her identifying characteristics to someone or something else. Like the cultural tradition of pedophilia, and especially female pedophilia, critical confrontation of the governess attempts to argue her away. Although they don’t know what to do with her, and don’t seem to want her there, critics can’t seem to leave the governess alone. By squeezing her into the context of Victorian prudery, most critics argue, like Wilson, that the governess is sexually repressed. A distinction needs to be made between the social and cultural atmosphere of sexual repression in which the governess lives, and the very different nature of her actions and emotions. Butterworth-Dermott is correct to observe that “In the Victorian era, the sexual act was seen as animalistic, and sometimes even ‘monstrous’” (44). Commenting on Victorian sexual repression, Foucault claims that:
That critics have tried to erase the governess from the text is obvious. Like Alejandro Amenabar’s 2001 film adaptation The Others, critics have attempted to read the governess as a ghost herself. Namwali Serpell questions the existence of the governess by reading James’s use of mirrors and reflections through the text as symbols of her disintegrating identity;
If the governess’ authority is not her own, if even her actions belong to a male superior, then what is she left? Perhaps only the governess’ emotions are left to speak for her. As Alison Jaggar argues, emotions are closely related to action and values as “they are ways in which we engage actively and even construct the world” (152-153). If the governess has no tangible existence and if even her sexual actions can be disregarded, then her emotions still have a voice. The politics of emotion, like sexual politics, have a history of exclusion in which “the Western tradition has not seen everyone as equally emotional” (Jaggar 157). While my reading of the governess’ emotion integrates arguments along the line of affect theory, which has as deep a history as sexual politics, I do not wish to make the distinction here between emotion and affect. Although making the distinction would subtly complicate my claims, I must save such complication for a longer piece. The term “emotion” will be used to signify the expression of feeling, as we read it in James’s novella, through the governess’ language, silences, and perceived tone.
Although the New Critics have traditionally read tone as a “de-emotionalized concept,” it can give readers cues about the emotions of characters, as well as involve the reader in emotional response (Ngai 29). In the governess’ rainbow of feelings, her primary emotional register is excitement. Indeed, while reading James’s tale, which is conveyed through the governess’ language, we cannot help but feel her excitement. Her narrative language builds a rollercoaster of emotion, but the governess always seems excited about where it will go next – not anxious or scared. Like an enraptured child, she narrates her tale always on the precipice of extreme jouissance. The hodgepodge of exclamation points, emphasized words in italics, dashes, and thrilling silences throughout the governess’ narration speak for themselves; I need not pull out a specific passage to evidence this, as any passage will suffice. She is not ashamed. Nor is she hysterical. She is only what seems most upsetting; she is egregiously excited. Her narration of Miles’ actions and language, as well, serve to illustrate the same point: he is enthusiastically agog with anticipation of sex with the governess. After all, the governess has already lived the experience she relays. Her ambition is not to show readers her fear but rather to expose her pleasure – the pleasure of the female pedophile – which has no vehicle except through the metaphorical language of fiction.
The “animatedness” of the governess’ language may cause anxiety for readers (since, as critics always point out, we are not sure what the plot is), but the governess herself does not show overwhelming signs of anxiety. Nevertheless, critics want to see the governess as a nervous woman on the verge of hysteria. Because “symptoms of hysteria are the result of trauma” (Kaplan 26), viewing the governess as a hysterical female allows a normative reading of her pedophilic actions. Hysteria is related to trauma, which has an undeniable history of shame. As Cathy Caruth argues, “for those who undergo trauma, it is not only the moment of the event, but of the passing out of it that is traumatic; the survival itself, in other words, can be a crisis” (9). Survivors of a traumatic event will often feel guilt, which may proceed to shame. Indeed, Choy and Chow observed from their case study of Miss A that “shame and guilt were prominent emotions in female sex offenders” (211). Readers expect the governess to show shame, as a regular sex offender would. Many critics, like David Wagenknecht and Albaraq Mahboboah, have used evidence from Freudian theory and phenomenology to show that the governess meets the criteria for hysteria. Furthermore, several feminist critics, such as Paula Cohen, have attempted to rescue the governess from injurious theories of hysteria by claiming that her hysteria operates as a protest against oppression (65). Regardless of whether critics mean to appropriate the governess’ hysteria or not, by interpreting the governess’ emotions as a part of the hysteria-trauma-shame continuum, they attempt to criminalize her pedophilia and hence fix the problem of the text without ever acknowledging it. By suggesting that the governess is hysterical or feels shame is to say that she acknowledges the wrongness of her desires. Such an acknowledgment lessens the effect/affect that the possibility of female pedophilia opens.
What is most traumatic about the governess’ narrative is its effect on readers. As the body of criticism about The Turn of the Screw shows, readers tend to avoid the distresses that the idea of female pedophilia presents in the text. The avoidance of the issue of female pedophilia is not restricted to the text alone, but can be used as a way to suggest that the evasion exists on a social level. It is not the governess’ trauma that preoccupies us, but our own. American society has silenced the female pedophile from public discourses, removing her from history, because she threatens to deconstruct the cultural imagining of femininity as a genre. By coming to terms with the current (mis)understandings of female pedophilia and child sexuality, by exhuming the fears that each of these issues present, Americans can continue to re-construct their history, to heal some disavowed, disowned wounds. As Cathy Caruth claims, “through the notion of trauma […] we can understand that a rethinking of reference is aimed not at eliminating history but at resituating it in our understanding, that is, a precisely permitting history to arise where immediate understanding may not” (Unclaimed 11).
Through fiction, James narrated the first romance of the female pedophile. Perhaps pedophilia is safest in the context of fiction. Certainly, I have not been arguing that pedophilia, female or male, should be reconsidered as a safe or beneficial practice. Nevertheless, allowing that females and children each have a substantial sexual history beyond the normative cultural imagination offers a way to change or terminate the “ritually sealed and almost inescapable” feeling rules (Hochschild 19) that threaten to stagnate social progress. Dabbling into alternative readings of counterpublic issues, like pedophilia, advances theories of everyday trauma that help us occupy these spaces rather than evacuating them (Cvetkovich 15). Polarizing monstrosity and innocence, like essentializing femininity and masculinity, has its cost. The overwhelming panic that greets us in almost every facet of everyday life seems to get larger the more we insist on separating purity from possible contamination. By allowing even the most hideous of faces to take shape in public, by interpreting the most unfathomable reading into a classical text, we have the ability to quell the disease that is avoidance.
Works Cited
by Jenn McCollum
MP: An Online Feminist Journal Summer 2010: Vol. 3, Issue 1
The surplus of criticism on Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw is enough to turn even the most creative contemporary critics away. Since the novella’s publication in 1898, the uncanny incidents at Bly have continued to taunt critics, especially those primed to unearth a coherent plot. Despite the raging wars of interpretation among different camps, James’s knotty ghost story has refused to ease its death-grip on readers’ imaginations. Perhaps today more than ever, readers are bewildered about what the text means, never mind what it suggests. The ambiguities of plot continue to feed the most recent analyses despite William Van Peer’s and Ewout Van der Knapp’s painstakingly scientific study in 1995 that anatomized every claim made about The Turn of the Screw’s plot. Van Peer and Van der Knapp identified two distinct species of argument: those which maintained that the tale is a ghost story, and those which interpreted the ghostly happenings at Bly as the governess’ sexual repression or hallucinations. Each camp had seven possible theories that prompted Van Peer and Van der Knapp to question the “truth” of each. After proving the validity of all fourteen theories, and thus proving that the two opposing arguments were equally legitimate, they concluded that “if the contradiction cannot be resolved by eliminating one of its terms, then presumably this is proof that in the realm of interpretation, contradiction may be tolerated” (706). Thus, the primary debate over the plot of The Turn of the Screw is potentially resolved – opposite interpretations mutually exclude each other, making both arguments valid. James’s novella, then, coheres when the contradictions of plot are embraced. While not every critic is willing to settle for such a thankless contradiction, the emptiness of the plot suggests that the relentless lure of the novella rests elsewhere.
More than a ghost story, The Turn of the Screw is an enthusiastic romance of children and sex. The implication that Miles, the young ward of an impressionable governess, is sexually aware, sexually experienced, and sexually hungry has its draw. Titillating in its inappropriateness, the novel suggests through metaphor and silences what was, and still is, unmentionable. Since Richard von Kraftt-Ebbing coined the term “pedophilia erotica” in his 1866 Psychopathia Sexualis, public attitudes toward child sexuality have become increasingly proscriptive and intimate relationships between adults and children suspect. During the Victorian period, Henry James witnessed several significant changes in the social reception of child-adult chumminess. The society that once embraced Charles Dodgson’s (Lewis Carroll’s) provocative photographs and drawings of nude and scantily clad child-bodies in compromising positions, was not the same set of Victorians that criticized The Turn of the Screw at the fin de siècle. Dodgson’s child art was permissible as Victorians, such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, considered his gaze at the child-body innocent (Leach; Gernsheim). In the tradition of William Blake’s imagining of childhood, in which children were esteemed as god-like in their purity and innocence, mid-Victorians still clung to the fantasy that a man who could appreciate the goodness of children must have an ivory-white soul himself. However, late-Victorians exchanged their Romantic ideal of childhood for a more modern model, as several reviews of James’s novella expressed his work as “horribly successful” (“Magic”), “distinctively repulsive” (“The Story”), “cruel and untrue” (“Mr. James’s”), “monstrous and incredible” (“Recent”), “hopelessly evil” (“Most Hopelessly”), and unsafe (Barry 173). Like critics today who continue to cling to the text’s impenetrable plot, Victorian critics wrestled uncomfortably with the scandalous implication of child sexuality.
Historically, the sexualization of children has courted conflict. In his Phaedrus, Plato uses a playfully sexual scene between Socrates and Phaedrus to posit that eros (sexual desire) and divine mania (madness) are necessary since the love of beautiful young boy-bodies is the first step toward understanding (remembering) the ideal Form. The mania inspired by kalos pais (erotic interaction) is a “pure and simple […] gift of the god” (244a: 8-9). Although Socrates believes that sexual relationships between men and boys are essential to enlightenment, he is also careful to note that such relations should be kept from the public eye:
According to Greek tradition, giving way to sexual passion with boys is appropriate in private but must be kept from the public eye which might “find fault” with it. While Greeks may have been more forgiving of sexual adult-child relationships than contemporary American perspectives, Greek pederasty was not an arrangement without critical judgment. Today, pedophilia is a problematic area of sexual politics. As Harris Mirkin observes, discourses about pedophilia resemble the first phase of sexual politicizing, which involves “a battle to prevent the battle, to keep the issue from being seen as political and negotiable” (1). Second phase movements, into which feminism and gay/lesbian politics have recently surfaced, argue over rights and privileges, while the first phase is stagnated, without rights or privileges. As a silenced politic, pedophilia is not a “real discussion” (12). Even though, as Gunter Schmidt argues, “consensual sexual acts between children and adults [are difficult to imagine except in] cases of boys just entering puberty and who have masturbated or had other experiences leading to orgasm with peers” (474), the social excommunication of pedophiles does not allow for a conversation about the differences between consensual and non-consensual child sex. Much of this silencing has to do with social mores, as well as psychological implications.It’s inevitable that a lover will be found out […] The result is that whenever people see you talking with him they’ll think you are spending time together just before or after giving way to desire. But they won’t even begin to find fault with people for spending time together if they are not lovers; they know one has to talk to someone, either out of friendship or to obtain some other pleasure. (232a-b)
Moral discourses about pedophilia today increasingly activate social panic. The media explodes with chilling tales of predatory men, instilling fear into parents and caregivers who want to protect their children from immorality and psychologically-debilitating experiences. A widespread moral panic infects many Americans, making them susceptible to manipulation by the media, or what Kathleen Woodward identifies as “statistical panic:” a psychological state in which a person fears for her safety due to media-driven cues (196). Resulting from the fear that “our own individual future is at stake” (196), statistical panic breeds uncertainty. Unsure of other people, and especially of ourselves, panic hinders risk-taking; “what we fear is risk itself” (211). Living in a world of images deemed “dangerous” by the media, Americans succumb to a fantasy of protection in which they have the responsibility to shelter youth from perceived risk. As the most potentially threatening site of risk to a child, sexual abuse “becomes the virus that nourishes us, that empty point of ignorance about which we are the most knowing” (Kincaid 11). A societal preoccupation with child molestation and sexual abuse allows a well-meaning public to place itself as the lighthouse of protection and surveillance; however, such a fantasy of protection requires an equal fantasy of injury. Popular imaginings of pedophilia enable a discourse of protection even though, as James Kincaid argues, “molesting and the stories protesting the molesting walk the same beat” (12). Both fantasies have the potential to wound children. The fantasy of protection imprisons children in a turret of moral and statistical panic that stagnates healthy risk-taking which has the potential to challenge social constructs; the fantasy of injury, on the other hand, silences a sexual politic through a fuzzy imagining of predatory men in which the culprit is unidentifiable, unknowable, and everywhere.
The attempt to “learn” the pedophile, and hence color the grayish face of injury, is an ongoing challenge. Defined through history as an immoral desire, a psychological disorder, and finally a criminal act, pedophilia has been institutionalized into numerous classifications but certain forms, like female pedophilia, elude recognition or direct confrontation in public discourses. Since the late-Victorians identified intimate child-adult relationships as a sign of immorality instead of purity, the American Psychiatric Association Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) went on in 1968 to establish pedophilia as a paraphilic mental disorder in which a person has recurrent, intense sexually-arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors that generally involve children. According to the DSM, “an adult who engages in sexual activity with a child is performing a criminal and immoral act and this is never considered normal or socially acceptable behavior.” As an abnormal, counter-social act, pedophilia occupies what Ann Cvetkovich terms a “counterpublic sphere,” which is marked by an “affective experience that falls outside of institutionalized or stable forms of identity or politics [which] can form the basis for public culture” (17). Although Cvetkovich does not consider pedophilia in her book, An Archive of Feelings, as one of the primary kinds of counterpublic spheres that have the potential to reform cultural concepts of normalcy, pedophiles nevertheless occupy this sphere as they are in direct opposition to the sanctioned, appropriated spaces of public discourse in which heterosexual sex among adults indicates normative sexual behavior. Whether or not pedophilia has the possibility to positively change culture is not a point I want to make, or feel invested in. Instead, I wish to show that by continuing to foster a hegemonic discourse about pedophilia, American culture represses a serious consideration of both child and female sexuality by refusing to realize either that they have one or that the one they have is socially unacceptable.
The reality of childhood sexuality is at stake in the socially-silenced discourses of pedophilia. Contemporary ideals of the sexualized child have a history, as Steven Angelides observes. Marking the 1980s as a critical stage in theories about childhood sexuality, Angelides posits that before 1980 society imagined childhood as both “sexual and innocent,” and that after 1980 society has become obsessed with making a “conscious effort to resolve this contradiction” (100). The American obsession with figuring childhood as innocent hearkens back to the Romantic ideal epitomized by Blake. As such, “the intra-psychic repression of childhood sexuality is redoubled by the cultural, or, dialogic repression of child sexuality” (Angelides 100). As Shoshana Felman argues in her psychoanalytical analysis of The Turn of the Screw, sexuality is part of a child’s unconscious epistemology of sex (Felman “Turning the Screw of Interpretation”). The media and commercial society do not create child sexuality, but rather these social indicators respond to a sexuality that already exists.
Just as the move to silence discourses of pedophilia enlarges the social fear of it, the persistent view of children as innocent makes them more erotic; “erotic children are manufactured – in the sense that we produce them in our cultural factories, the ones that make meanings for us” (Kincaid 9). Today’s erotic child, or what James Kincaid terms the “postromantic child,” has been deployed as “a political and philosophical agent, a weapon used to assault substance and substitute in its place a set of negative inversions: innocence, purity, and emptiness” (10). Although Kincaid counters Felman’s observation about unconscious sexual knowledge to suggest that children do have intrinsic innocence and that their sexuality is mass-produced, both theorists arrive at a similar claim: the move to ascribe children with innocence has torn their “innocence” (whether real or imagined) from them. The postromantic child is, indeed, Victorian. Its play at innocence is what makes it a sexual object.
The possibility of innocence in such a complicated world is a comfort that gives humanity a certain degree of hope. That the Victorians squeezed the ideal of childhood innocence to their bosoms like a last scrap of meat seems warranted, and sad, in a world that was increasingly polluted with markers of civilization; scholars such as Judith R. Walkowitz, Ronald Pearsall, and Christopher Herbert have convincingly argued that industry, war, class struggle, and the rise of the individual as an independent, isolated being were driving forces in the changing atmosphere of the Victorian period. Late-Victorians, especially, struggled to identify themselves as both individual and community in the aftermath of radical liberal individualism movements: a tradition led by Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham and followed by Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. Lost in the blur between individual and nation, defining the Victorian adult was no longer as clear as it may have been. Perhaps in their fear of losing identity or of losing the ability to understand what that identity meant, Victorians strived to define childhood. As Kevin Ohi observes, “to say that children aren’t queer is a way of asserting that we know what children are and that we therefore know what adults are” (82). Attributing children a definite characteristic, like innocence, allowed Victorians to entertain a fantasy of protection, which was essential in a world of such rapid change. However, by associating children with innocence, adults were simultaneously identifying their children as “others” – beings different than them and hence unknowable, even fearful. Children, in other words, were protected but still at risk. As “others,” children’s innocence made them urchins: little imps, scary in their mysterious embodiment of purity.
Like most children in Victorian literature, the innocence of Miles in The Turn of the Screw is suspect from the start. Indeed, his mixture of purity and sexuality angered Victorian critics as much as it angers critics today. Part of that anger arises because the distinction between adult and child is not as crystalline as readers may want it to be; “In this amusette, this erotic child’s play of a novella, it is difficult to say who is the seducer and who the seduced, or, for that matter, who is the child and who the adult” (Hanson 369). One critical tradition famously accuses Peter Quint, a deceased valet at Bly, of initiating Miles into queer, pedophilic relations, although “he remains guilty without proof, a fiend without a definite crime” (Hanson 367). That Miles is expelled from boarding school “can have but one meaning […] that he’s an injury to others” (James 11). According to Agieszka Soltysik, the “injury” must be Miles’s queer knowledge as he “[says] ‘things’ to boys he liked, who in turn repeated them to boys they liked” (248). Hence, most critics who read Miles as a sexualized child read him as a part of a queer tradition of silence. Quint, who was “much too free” with Miles (James 26), has been cast in the role of homosexual predator. However, his “unmentionable” sex acts do not seem to cause critics the kind of panic found in contemporary social discourses about pedophilia. On the contrary, critics such as Soltysik display an eagerness to address the issue of Qunit’s queer pedophilia. Within Quint’s relations with Miles is writ a familiar script: that of homosexuality. In fact, almost every critical register of Quint’s pedophilia is associated with homosexuality. Moreover, as Jonathan Flatley’s recent reading of The Turn of the Screw suggests, most contemporary critics that confront any aspect of sexuality in the text seem anxious to reveal a homosexual subscript as a way to make observations about James’s own sexuality. Although pedophilia and homosexuality are not interchangeable, most critics interchange them when analyzing Quint. Miles’s sexuality, as a result, is identified as homosexual, at least initially. Homosexuality is a familiar societal marker, as part of Mirkin’s second phase of sexual politics. So when Ellis Hanson argues that the reader is supposed to find Quint’s “desire to participate with perverse pleasure rather than paranoid disavowal in the queer erotics of children” inadmissible (368), he neglects that by relating Quint’s pederasty to homosexuality, he, like numerous other critics, appropriates it in some sense. There are two registers for the sexual atmosphere in the text: homosexual and heterosexual (Soltysik 249). However, curiously missing from these analyses is the pedosexual. What is less admissible, more unspeakable, than heterosexual pedophilia? And what, then, is more silenced than female pedophilia?
Seen as a most perverse act against nature, the existence of female pedophilia is still questioned today (Chow and Choy 213). Women’s social roles as nurturing mothers and care-givers have been essentialized since gender difference became a topic of discussion. The women’s movement in general was fueled by early feminist thinkers like Mary Wollstonecraft and Dinah Craik who argued that women have an important role in the nation in raising and educating children, and comforting companions. While most feminists challenge the biological differences between men and women, today many Americans continue to subscribe to a sociology of motherhood that passes the responsibility of child care primarily to the mother’s hands. The immense social discomfort Americans show toward issues of motherhood is apparent in the law system, as well as in literature. In family law, contact stipulations tended to favor the mother for the primary care of children after divorce through 1980 (some states still favor the mother), and have prompted father’s rights movements (American Bar Association). Similarly, Toni Morrison’s fictional depictions of compromised mother-figures who murder their children to save them, or rip the arms from children’s sockets out of jealousy, continue to meet with scathing criticisms for their “unwomanly” portrayals. Public reaction to Morrison’s mother-figures shows that Americans remain focused on the mother as the primary nurturer of children.
The first psychological study of a female pedophile, conducted by Eva Chow and Alberto Choy in 2002, has met with much debate. Despite the definition of pedophiles as people who desire sexual intimacy with children, many contemporary literary publications and social science studies about pedophilia slant their language at men. For example, in Mirkin’s study of sexual politics he describes pedophiles as “men whose sexual wishes and desires for relationship bonds and love are focused either primarily or exclusively on children who have not reached puberty” (473; italics added). Recent studies in criminology and psychiatry conducted by Kolja Schiltz and Boris Schiffer prove that today the trend is still to consider pedophilia as an entirely male pathology, as each study uses only male test subjects. The newest research that argues for pedophilia as a pathology is the same research that dismisses the space that women occupy as pedophiles in society. Furthermore, through the methods of gross examination, the male body is used as evidence to measure signs of pedophilia (such as erectile, brain, and skin responses), excluding the female body a potential site for disease. In response, researchers like Kelly Christopher and Kim Turner have conducted all-female studies to replicate the male-centered trends because “relatively little research has been conducted on female sex-offenders in comparison to males” (Christopher 872), and “female sex offenders may not fit neatly into the same typologies that criminal justice research has developed for male sex offenders” (Turner 880). Similarly, Dominique Roe-Sepowitz has taken necessary pains to show that “in contrast to portrayals in previous research […] female sex offenders are not a homogeneous group” (405).
Like A.J. Cooper’s clinical study of Miss K in 1990, Chow and Choy’s study of Miss A begins with the admission that “although there is a large body of literature on male sex offenders, there are few studies on female sex offenders” (211). Indeed, the slight amount of attention given to female pedophiles is staggering, considering that, according to David Finkelhor’s numerous studies, women’s sexual abuse of children is much more serious than men’s because women are more likely to have abused more children for a longer period of time (Murray 215), are more intrusive, and more likely to use higher rates of force than men (Moulden 388). Finkelhor found that in cases of daycare molestation, more than 60% of children who were molested, were molested by women (Murray 213). Heather Moulden’s 2007 follow-up to Finkelhor’s research verifies that “despite a social reluctance to acknowledge female sexual abusers, reports suggest that they account for between 3% and 15% of all sexual offences” (387). However, as Richard Tewksbury reports, that number is probably much higher since “female sex offending is […] acknowledged as possibly less likely to be detected or reported” (30). Despite the general reluctance to pursue female suspects and to incarcerate them (Moulden 199), criminal acts by female offenders have reached a ratio of 6:1 compared to male criminal acts (Palmero 30). Moulden’s study of female sex offenders found that “females offended against younger victims and were more violent as compared with male abusers” (399). Similarly, George Palmero recently observed that “girls, apparently less aggressive than boys in general, are becoming more antisocial and violent, participating in the large cauldron of criminality [which] may undermine the testosterone hypothesis that fuels a belief in the tendency to criminality in males” (494). With these findings, the resistance to consider the female pedophile in social science researching is suspect.
Chow and Choy’s study of Miss A, a 23-year old mother of two sons, found that she met DSM’s criteria for a pedophile. She confessed two incidents of sexual abuse to her priest in which she, while babysitting, bathed young girls and continued to lick or rub their vaginal area and then masturbated herself. Miss A admitted that she believed these girls, aged 4 and 5, were sexually taunting her and were pleased with her initiation of a sex act. She decided to seek help in the fear that she may someday give birth to a daughter (214). Miss A read her desire for child sex as unnatural, according to the social norms. According to Schmidt, “it is quite clear that pedophilia in contemporary Western societies represents a form of sexuality that cannot be lived out, since it is in conflict with a central social covenant based upon sexual self-determination and consensual sexuality.” Schmidt goes on, though, to identify this tension as an entirely male problem: “That is the dilemma of the male pedophile” (376).
The dilemma of the female pedophile is that female desire for child sex does not exist in the body of social consciousness. Femininity has become a kind of genre that society believes it can read. Lauren Berlant asserts that “for femininity to be a genre like an aesthetic one means that it is a structure of conventional expectation that people rely on to provide certain kinds of affective intensities” (4). Although perhaps to a lesser degree than in the past, society still looks to women as representatives of national affect. Arlie Hochschild has argued in her book, The Managed Heart, that “feeling rules,” or scripts of emotion, are appropriated by women and affect women more markedly than men:
While both men and women tend to privatize their socially-unaccepted sexual feelings toward children, the public reception of those private feelings is certainly different and dependent upon gender. There is still little room in the genre of femininity to allow for alternative readings. While male pedophiles occupy the imagination of Americans obsessed with protecting youth, female pedophiles are not allowed a voice in the national imagination. They are completely swallowed into obscurity by what Berlant terms “mass-mediated identity:”As a matter of tradition, emotion management has been better understood and more often used by women as one of the offerings they trade for economic support. Especially among dependent women of the middle and upper classes, women have the job (or think they ought to) of creating the sense of surprise at birthdays, or displaying alarm at the mouse in the kitchen. Gender is not the only determinant of skill in such managed expression and in the emotion work needed to do it well. But men who do this work well have slightly less in common with other men than with other women. When the “womanly” art of living up to private emotional conventions goes public, it attaches itself to a different profit-and-loss statement. (20)
As mass-mediated entities, then, female pedophiles may question, like society, whether they, themselves, actually exist. The female pedophile is the ultimate non-entity.Addressing femininity from the perspective of the mediated fantasies that magnetize many different kinds of women to the scene of suffering, sacrifice, survival, criticism, and sometimes sublimity that has historically provided the narrative of women’s culture thus shows us something about the operation of mass-mediated identity. (11)
What is more alluring than The Turn of the Screw’s plot is the identity of the governess. She frustrates critics more than any other character in the novella because she eludes classification. Like the female pedophile, she is the ultimate non-entity. And even more like the female pedophile, James’s governess meets all the characteristics for the DSM description of pedophilia. I am not the first critic to observe that the governess desires child sex. Although, with such an abundant amount of work on the governess in the long critical tradition of The Turn of the Screw, few scholars have followed in Sami Ludwig’s shoes, despite the fact that most analyses display an obsessive preoccupation with the governess. Ludwig’s essay, “Metaphors, Cognition, and Behavior: The Reality of Sexual Puns in The Turn of the Screw,” analyzes James’s text most similarly to my own analysis, and I would like to use his claims to push forward into a more risky arena. Ludwig insists that the puns and the obscure language in the text make the most sense when literal sex is read into the plot; “sex now makes the imagery cohere and [sex] becomes a real issue in the world represented” (40). If, as Hanson has suggested, Peter Quint, with his “rare instances of working-class testosterone” fails as a romantic hero (367), perhaps the governess can be read as a kind of romantic hero, and her love affair with Miles, a true romance.
Reading The Turn of the Screw as a romance between the governess and Miles requires an understanding of the history of pedophilia, the role that the female pedophile plays in that history, and the history of child sexuality. Apart from these histories, which I have only briefly delineated, the governess has her own critical history, begun by Edmund Wilson who was the first to theorize that her undeniably sexual obsessions were signs of repression, centered on an insatiable desire for the children’s absent uncle. According to Wilson, the governess projects her lustful feelings for the uncle onto the children in a way that reflects Victorian discourses about sex. Several critics follow in Wilson’s shoes by continuing to view the governess’ “sexual repression” in the classical Victorian context. Antonio Sanna has most recently added to Wilson’s claim by observing that:
Sanna’s reading of the text is useful since he upholds several conventions of interpretation: 1) the children suffer sexual damage 2) the sexual damage is delivered through Quint or Jessel 3) Quint and Jessel involve Miles and Flora, respectively, in a homosexual bond 4) the governess upholds a repressive, patriarchal view of intercourse, which causes the havoc at Bly. Despite the volumes of criticism on this perplexing tale, very few analyses contradict more than one of the stipulations Sanna presents, and no analyses challenge all of them. My reading of The Turn of the Screw attempts to challenge each of these theories by showing that Miles is not wholly sexually damaged, that all the sexual intercourse involving children also involves the governess, that Miles is predominately implicated in a heterosexual bond, and that the governess is not sexually repressed, nor does she uphold a patriarchal, conservative ideal of sex.If we think of the governess’s behavior as enforcing the sexual prudery and strictures of the Victorian age on the children (and particularly those of the end of the century, when the tale was published), we could say that she enforces on them the rules to which she herself has submitted. If we think of the children as actually enjoying the continued community of sexual affections with Quint and Miss Jessel through the ghosts’ apparitions, the governess is attempting to enforce the power of nineteenth-century patriarchy over the desires of Miles and Flora by preventing them from a possible (homo)sexual bond with the ghosts. She reenacts over Miles and Flora the power which has been enacted on her, the submission to the masculine element in the family, to patriarchy. (105)
Of all my forthcoming arguments, the one that will meet the most resistance is that The Turn of the Screw is the first literary romance of the female pedophile of its kind. I do not argue that a romance must be comfortable; in fact, the best ones aren’t. Even those who buy into Ludwig’s assertion that Miles’s “death” at the end of the novella is only figurative, may find the “romantic” aspect of my argument uncomfortable. As Sheila Teahan suggests, the governess uses the terms “literal” and “figurative” in opposite ways: “the governess says ‘literally’ when she means ‘figuratively.’ The categories of literal and figurative have no clear application to the idiom in question, which is neither overtly figurative in character nor contains a dead metaphor that could be activated” (64). Teahan’s analysis shows that the “literal” death of Miles can be dismissed in several ways, and not only according to the method suggested by Ludwig. Ludwig reads Miles’s "death" as a mere symbol of “transition, an act of sexual initiation, which leaves Miles alive. Thus we would have a triple pun on ‘death:’ 1) physical death, 2) orgasm, 3) rite of passage” (50). I need not make the same argument about the erotic interactions between Miles and governess, since Ludwig does an excellent job delineating the textual evidence. But if I am to pick up where he leaves off to argue that James intended for readers to suspect that Miles is still alive, I must show that James opens the possibility of Miles’s perseverance, and hence the emergence of a fascinating, although wayward, love story.
Miles is Douglas from the novella’s frame, and the playful anonymous narrator of the same frame is no other than our unnamed governess. Miles does not die at the end of the action at Bly but rather he lives on, continuing to experience sexual pleasure with his governess and, after marrying her, continues to relish the moments of scandalous equivocation that their romance is dependent upon. The playful, flirtatious conversation between Douglas and the narrator in the frame is the first hint of their true identities. The narrator watches with a kind of sardonic pleasure as Douglas approaches the fire to tell a story that “nobody but [him], till now, has ever heard” (1). The narrator and Douglas play off each other, using the same kind of ambiguous language that Miles and the governess use in the governess’ story; they excite their listeners with the promise of scandal in a similar fashion. Together, they construct the ultimate fairy tale. By using pseudonyms, either in the story or in their encounter with others around the fire, they separate themselves from judgment of their peers. Furthermore, by telling that the governess “has been dead these twenty years” (2), and that Douglas himself did not participate in the occurrences at Bly, they are able to narrate their peculiar love story to strangers while protecting the governess’ identity. Above all, the governess’ identity must be protected because an association with female pedophilia would wreak havoc on their position among strangers. Moreover, there is no language for it.
Douglas does not censor himself in the same way that he censors the governess. His relationship to the governess is the same as Miles’s: “she was ten years older than I. She was my sister’s governess.” He doesn’t hide the fact that he “liked her extremely and am glad to this day to think she liked me too” (2). Implicating himself in a pedophilic relationship is much different than implicating her. Indeed, Mrs. Griffin enjoys imagining a young boy in love with an older woman; “Well, if I don’t know who she was in love with I know who he was […] it’s rather nice” (3). A young boy loving a grown woman is “nice,” but a woman loving a boy has no affective function in the story. The story is told, firstly, as a love story: “I see. She was in love” (3). Everyone wants to know with whom was the governess in love – in fact, it is the object of everyone’s attention – but no one present can imagine the truth. And Douglas is right – the story will not tell that Miles and the governess were lovers in a “literal, vulgar way” (3). The most vulgar way would be to say the “word” that even Mrs. Grose keeps back when addressing the governess:
pedophile. However, the story isn’t really a vulgar one, despite the churlish context. The Turn of the Screw tells a story of two inexperienced, feverishly-sexed lovers coming together under the horrific circumstances of a socially-condoned act of pedophilia. A story that begins with the callow governess on a “see-saw” of “the right throbs and the wrong” (6) finishes with the ripe ejaculation of a job well done. The sexually-naïve governess transforms, by the end, into a woman who has discovered the right jerks and strokes to make Miles utter “the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss” (88). She hardly upholds the image of a repressed, patriarchal Victorian spinster. As Miles falls into her arms, she begins “to feel what it truly was that [she] held” – not Miles’s corpse, but rather the slack, satisfied body of a boy disposed of the sexual temptation haunting him heretofore. According to Ludwig, there are three “turns” in the development of sexual temptation between Miles and the governess that lead to literal sexual intercourse: “sexuality, which first appeared merely in the symbolic imagery and then openly became a question between the two, must now, in the third rhetorical turn, be metaphorically transferred to a real context” (49). The newly sexually-proficient governess marries Miles, as evidenced by the fact that they are still together, as well as their closing words in the frame:
In a work full of puns, this pun on the title of the governess’ story and class evidences a claim that many critics have already asserted: that the governess is concerned about moving up into Miles’s class. Even critics, like Christine Butterworth-Dermott, who decline to acknowledge the governess’ sexual longing for Miles, still maintain that even though “her fantasy centers not on sexual consummation, [it does focus on] marriage” (44). Butterworth-Dermott maintains that The Turn of the Screw, read as a fairy tale, ends in tragedy as the governess “never realizes that what she desires is only possible in fiction” (46). However, by reading the frame as an incognito continuation of the governess’ story, the fiction is precisely the method through which the governess achieves her desire: a desire that is not allowed even in the imagination of the community – the hankering for both sexual consummation and marriage with Miles. The implication in the closing lines of the frame is that Douglas has sacrificed his “title” so that the governess can gain one. The story itself functions as a kind of marriage license.Mrs. Griffin to Douglas: What’s your title?
Douglas: Oh I haven’t one.
Governess: Oh I have!
But even the outcome of marriage between Douglas and the governess, which naturalizes an otherwise preternatural act of female pedophilia by returning a counterpublic feeling to the public discourse, may not be enough to persuade some critics. There is a long tradition of reading of the governess as a displaced non-entity, as critics often pillage her authority, her sense of self – even her very existence – by supplanting her identifying characteristics to someone or something else. Like the cultural tradition of pedophilia, and especially female pedophilia, critical confrontation of the governess attempts to argue her away. Although they don’t know what to do with her, and don’t seem to want her there, critics can’t seem to leave the governess alone. By squeezing her into the context of Victorian prudery, most critics argue, like Wilson, that the governess is sexually repressed. A distinction needs to be made between the social and cultural atmosphere of sexual repression in which the governess lives, and the very different nature of her actions and emotions. Butterworth-Dermott is correct to observe that “In the Victorian era, the sexual act was seen as animalistic, and sometimes even ‘monstrous’” (44). Commenting on Victorian sexual repression, Foucault claims that:
By not having his characters speak directly about sex, then, James attempts to reveal the sexual nature of their interactions. Despite the repressive potential of some aspects of Victorian society, James seems to suggest, like Foucault, that “we must abandon […] the hypothesis that modern industrial societies ushered in an age of increased sexual repression” (49). James’s portrayal of a most unorthodox sexuality, that of the female pedophile, speaks more loudly than any other in the text. The unnamed governess and her unnamable act are hence the most articulated. A discourse of female pedophilia rivals the repressive sexual environment of The Turn of the Screw.by speaking about it so much, by discovering it multiplied, partitioned off, and specified precisely where one had placed, what one was seeking essentially was to conceal sex. Until Freud at least, the discourse of sex – the discourse of scholars and theoreticians – never ceased to hide the thing it was speaking about. (53)
That critics have tried to erase the governess from the text is obvious. Like Alejandro Amenabar’s 2001 film adaptation The Others, critics have attempted to read the governess as a ghost herself. Namwali Serpell questions the existence of the governess by reading James’s use of mirrors and reflections through the text as symbols of her disintegrating identity;
Serpell suggests that not only is the governess ghost-like, but that she may actually be or become a ghost. Similarly, Kiyoon Jang has proposed “an analogy between the secretarial ghostwriter figure in the nineteenth-century and the governess [as] both figures are situated in a system of delegation. Placed in an intermediary position between a text-property and the author/proprietor, they substitute for their employers, carrying out and textualizing their employers’ ideas” (15). By “substituting” the governess’ position with both the uncle and James himself, Jang attempts to dismiss her reality. John Carlos Rowe has emphasized the medium-like quality of the governess by “insisting that her narrative merely enacts and re-enacts the ‘absent authorities’ of the master and James” (qtd. in Jang 13). These popular imaginings either obliterate the governess’ identity as a human being or replace the governess’ femininity with masculinity so that, even if she is a pedophile, she is seen as acting as a male instead of a woman. With a ghost-like identity like Peter Quint, then, the governess of these readings would involve Miles in a kind of homosexual pedophilic relationship which, although rather uncouth, is not as gauche as the alternative: heterosexual female pedophilia.The governess puts herself in the position of the vanished visitor, even imitating[the ghost’s] exact gesture of applying his face to the window pane. This action alone suggests a kind of stepping through the looking glass. […] Not only does the governess become what she was looking at, she then also gets to see what she looked like when she was looking. (241)
If the governess’ authority is not her own, if even her actions belong to a male superior, then what is she left? Perhaps only the governess’ emotions are left to speak for her. As Alison Jaggar argues, emotions are closely related to action and values as “they are ways in which we engage actively and even construct the world” (152-153). If the governess has no tangible existence and if even her sexual actions can be disregarded, then her emotions still have a voice. The politics of emotion, like sexual politics, have a history of exclusion in which “the Western tradition has not seen everyone as equally emotional” (Jaggar 157). While my reading of the governess’ emotion integrates arguments along the line of affect theory, which has as deep a history as sexual politics, I do not wish to make the distinction here between emotion and affect. Although making the distinction would subtly complicate my claims, I must save such complication for a longer piece. The term “emotion” will be used to signify the expression of feeling, as we read it in James’s novella, through the governess’ language, silences, and perceived tone.
Although the New Critics have traditionally read tone as a “de-emotionalized concept,” it can give readers cues about the emotions of characters, as well as involve the reader in emotional response (Ngai 29). In the governess’ rainbow of feelings, her primary emotional register is excitement. Indeed, while reading James’s tale, which is conveyed through the governess’ language, we cannot help but feel her excitement. Her narrative language builds a rollercoaster of emotion, but the governess always seems excited about where it will go next – not anxious or scared. Like an enraptured child, she narrates her tale always on the precipice of extreme jouissance. The hodgepodge of exclamation points, emphasized words in italics, dashes, and thrilling silences throughout the governess’ narration speak for themselves; I need not pull out a specific passage to evidence this, as any passage will suffice. She is not ashamed. Nor is she hysterical. She is only what seems most upsetting; she is egregiously excited. Her narration of Miles’ actions and language, as well, serve to illustrate the same point: he is enthusiastically agog with anticipation of sex with the governess. After all, the governess has already lived the experience she relays. Her ambition is not to show readers her fear but rather to expose her pleasure – the pleasure of the female pedophile – which has no vehicle except through the metaphorical language of fiction.
The “animatedness” of the governess’ language may cause anxiety for readers (since, as critics always point out, we are not sure what the plot is), but the governess herself does not show overwhelming signs of anxiety. Nevertheless, critics want to see the governess as a nervous woman on the verge of hysteria. Because “symptoms of hysteria are the result of trauma” (Kaplan 26), viewing the governess as a hysterical female allows a normative reading of her pedophilic actions. Hysteria is related to trauma, which has an undeniable history of shame. As Cathy Caruth argues, “for those who undergo trauma, it is not only the moment of the event, but of the passing out of it that is traumatic; the survival itself, in other words, can be a crisis” (9). Survivors of a traumatic event will often feel guilt, which may proceed to shame. Indeed, Choy and Chow observed from their case study of Miss A that “shame and guilt were prominent emotions in female sex offenders” (211). Readers expect the governess to show shame, as a regular sex offender would. Many critics, like David Wagenknecht and Albaraq Mahboboah, have used evidence from Freudian theory and phenomenology to show that the governess meets the criteria for hysteria. Furthermore, several feminist critics, such as Paula Cohen, have attempted to rescue the governess from injurious theories of hysteria by claiming that her hysteria operates as a protest against oppression (65). Regardless of whether critics mean to appropriate the governess’ hysteria or not, by interpreting the governess’ emotions as a part of the hysteria-trauma-shame continuum, they attempt to criminalize her pedophilia and hence fix the problem of the text without ever acknowledging it. By suggesting that the governess is hysterical or feels shame is to say that she acknowledges the wrongness of her desires. Such an acknowledgment lessens the effect/affect that the possibility of female pedophilia opens.
What is most traumatic about the governess’ narrative is its effect on readers. As the body of criticism about The Turn of the Screw shows, readers tend to avoid the distresses that the idea of female pedophilia presents in the text. The avoidance of the issue of female pedophilia is not restricted to the text alone, but can be used as a way to suggest that the evasion exists on a social level. It is not the governess’ trauma that preoccupies us, but our own. American society has silenced the female pedophile from public discourses, removing her from history, because she threatens to deconstruct the cultural imagining of femininity as a genre. By coming to terms with the current (mis)understandings of female pedophilia and child sexuality, by exhuming the fears that each of these issues present, Americans can continue to re-construct their history, to heal some disavowed, disowned wounds. As Cathy Caruth claims, “through the notion of trauma […] we can understand that a rethinking of reference is aimed not at eliminating history but at resituating it in our understanding, that is, a precisely permitting history to arise where immediate understanding may not” (Unclaimed 11).
Through fiction, James narrated the first romance of the female pedophile. Perhaps pedophilia is safest in the context of fiction. Certainly, I have not been arguing that pedophilia, female or male, should be reconsidered as a safe or beneficial practice. Nevertheless, allowing that females and children each have a substantial sexual history beyond the normative cultural imagination offers a way to change or terminate the “ritually sealed and almost inescapable” feeling rules (Hochschild 19) that threaten to stagnate social progress. Dabbling into alternative readings of counterpublic issues, like pedophilia, advances theories of everyday trauma that help us occupy these spaces rather than evacuating them (Cvetkovich 15). Polarizing monstrosity and innocence, like essentializing femininity and masculinity, has its cost. The overwhelming panic that greets us in almost every facet of everyday life seems to get larger the more we insist on separating purity from possible contamination. By allowing even the most hideous of faces to take shape in public, by interpreting the most unfathomable reading into a classical text, we have the ability to quell the disease that is avoidance.
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Re: Butterfly Kisses: Researching Female Pedophilia
Evaluating Female Sex Offenders Without Prejudice
by Susan Hatters Friedman, MD, Renee M. Sorrentino, MD, Daniel Riordan, MBBS, MA, MSc, and Kerri Eagle, LLB (Hon), LLM, MPsych, MBBS
J Am Acad Psychiatry Law 51:466–74, 2023. DOI:10.29158/JAAPL.230064-23
Dr. Hatters Friedman is involved in the editorial leadership of The Journal; however, she did not participate in any aspect of this article’s review and acceptance.
While popular films have been used to teach about paraphilias,1 they rarely involve women with paraphilias. In American Pie, the still-popular 1999 coming-of-age film, Finch (a high school senior) has sex with the character known in the film as “Stifler's mom.”2 This liaison is portrayed as a contemporary Mrs. Robinson's experience. (n.b., Mrs. Robinson seduced a 21-year-old man, not a high school student in The Graduate).3 Similarly, in the sitcom portraying a popular radio psychiatrist, Frasier, the titular character remembers his first sexual experiences as a high school student with his piano teacher.4 Whereas other characters are seemingly impressed by this sexual prowess, only Frasier's father is disturbed, because he paid for the piano lessons. In neither instance is the adult female–teen male sexual experiences portrayed as abusive or inappropriate. Yet, in American Beauty, also from 1999, audiences watched the protagonist struggle over his attraction to his teenage daughter's friend and ultimately get killed after the pair were about to have intercourse.5 In 2000, All-American Girl: The Mary Kay Letourneau Story dramatized the real-life story of the teacher who had an affair with her sixth-grade student Vili Fualaau.6
Although much less frequently than their male counterparts, a significant percentage of sexual offending is perpetrated by women. This is the case despite sexual relations of a youth with an adult female sometimes being viewed as a rite of passage rather than sexual offending with long-term consequences; for example, “hot for teacher” and “hottest female sex offenders” are websites.7 Debra Lafave was a 23-year-old teacher arrested for having sex with a 14-year-old student.8 Female teachers, like Letourneau and Lafave, are often significantly older than their victims. Other women are noted to demonstrate less romantic and more sadistic behaviors in their offending; still other women are coerced into sexually abusing others by a male partner.
Gender Bias in Evaluations
Psychiatry has a long history of misinterpreting sexual offending. Freud ignored reported childhood sexual abuse and rather focused on the child having Oedipal fantasies.9 In 1978, Sgroi noted: “recognition of sexual abuse is entirely dependent on individuals' inherent willingness to entertain the possibility that the condition may exist” (Ref. 10, p xvi). Historically, the risks of misunderstanding child sexual abuse have included discounting the offender's responsibility, blaming the child for being seductive, and minimizing the impact of the abuse on that child.9
Gender role stereotypes conceptualize women as nurturing and men as more violent. Sexual agency may not be ascribed to women. Unintended consequences of these chivalrous stereotypes include allowing women to continue to sexually offend unchecked, with less likelihood of arrest, lower sentences, and less compulsory treatment than their male counterparts.7,11,–,13 This tendency exists despite the fact that the sexual abuse of children by female and male perpetrators is of similar severity.14 Table 1 lists the significant problems perpetuated by misunderstandings and gender bias regarding female sexual offenders.
Salter noted: “The average person does not seem to want to believe that women, particularly the child's mother, could do such a thing” (Ref. 9, p 77). In addition to idealized beliefs about women, confusion exists about what constitutes sexually abusive behavior. Women may perpetrate sexual abuse while bathing or dressing their children and may not be detected. Women have much more access to children alone and are seen as always nurturing. Yet, female sex offenders are more likely than men to have victims of both genders.15
Although some ask how a woman could sexually offend without having a penis, Finkelhor and Russell, as early as 1984, noted, “most sexual abusers get their satisfaction not from intercourse but from either manipulating the child's genitals or having the child manipulate their own. Women could do this too, getting satisfaction from touching or having the child manually stimulate them” (Ref. 16, p 182). Salter noted, “women offenders are capable of the same severity of sexual abuse as male offenders are. Nor does the lack of a penis stop them from penetrating a child” (Ref. 9, p 78). Myths about female sexual offenders that this article seeks to dispel are listed in Table 2.
Harms of Female Sex Offending
Contrary to the belief that sexual abuse by women does not harm the victim, there is evidence that abuse by female offenders significantly affects both male and female victims.14,18 This harm includes both physical damage and psychological harms such as posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms, anxiety and depression, suicidal ideation and self-harm, inability to express emotions, rage, and interpersonal difficulties, such as feelings of isolation, difficulties with trust, and sexual problems.18,–,21 Some accounts claim that sex between an adolescent boy and an adult female is considered a rite of passage with little impact.22 Yet, even a male who experiences physical pleasure at the time may subsequently experience a betrayal of trust and subsequent trauma symptoms.18,20 The impact on female incest survivors may be worse when perpetrated by a female.18 Victims may be further affected when they disclose the abuse because they may be subsequently physically punished or not believed, or the impact of the abuse may be minimized or the acts reframed as consensual.18 Further, services primarily set up for helping victims of male perpetrators cannot adequately respond to the needs of victims of female perpetrators because of a lack of understanding.
Prevalence
Accurate assessment of the prevalence of female sexual abuse is hampered by the belief that female-perpetrated sexual abuse is so rare that it is not much of a problem, confusion about what constitutes sexually abusive behavior,23 and the amount of hidden behavior occurring in the caretaker role. In addition, given the denial and taboo surrounding female sex offending, it is less likely to be disclosed if victims believe their experience is extraordinary or if victims believe that they will not be taken seriously.24,25
In a review of studies available by 1984, Finkelhor and Russell found that “the best estimates, based on a variety of surveys of the general population, put the percent of sexual contacts by older women to be about 20 percent (range 14% to 27%) for male children and about 5 percent (range 0 to 10%) for female children” (Ref. 16, p 177). Finkelhor and Russell noted that Kinsey included data about childhood sexual abuse experiences, reporting in his 1948 study26 that “[t]he record includes some cases of preadolescent boys involved in sexual contact with adult females, and still more cases of preadolescent boys involved with adult males” (Ref. 16, p 175).
More recently, Cortoni and colleagues27 found that when averaged across nations including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, official records data and victimization survey data demonstrated that approximately five percent of sexual offenses were committed by women.27 An even more recent meta-analysis of data from 12 countries found a fixed-effect meta-analytical average of 2.2 percent of sexual offenses that were reported to authorities being perpetrated by women.28 In contrast, the fixed-effect meta-analytical average of 11.6 percent prevalence of female sexual offending rates found in victimization surveys was almost six times higher.28
Moreover, in a recent study, Stemple and colleagues revealed higher prevalence rates, contradicting the idea that female sexual offending is rare.12 They analyzed data from four surveys conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Bureau of Justice Statistics, two of which were in the general population and two among incarcerated persons. Strikingly, these surveys found that nonconsensual sex occurred for men and women at a similar 12-month prevalence.12 Women were more likely to report having been raped during their lifetime, however. Although only 1.7 percent of men reported being raped in their lifetime, the CDC's limited definition of rape requires the penetration of the victim. But 6.7 percent of men had reported that they were “made to penetrate” someone during their lifetime.12 Those who had been “made to penetrate” reported female perpetrators in 79 percent of cases. Analysis of a national household survey of both rape and sexual assault found that 28 percent of male victims and four percent of female victims reported female perpetrators acting alone.12 When men and boys were incarcerated, staff perpetrators of sexual violence were overwhelmingly female.12 When inmate-on-inmate sexual assault occurs, women prisoners are more likely to be victimized by female inmates than male prisoners victimized by male inmates.12
A study examining sexual victimization revealed that of 302 undergraduate men, 51 percent reported having been sexually victimized at least once since age 16, with six percent reporting victimization by a male perpetrator, 48 percent by a female perpetrator, and three percent by perpetrators of both sexes.29 In a study examining sexual coercion, 43 percent of the 284 male high school and college participants reported that they experienced sexual coercion, with 95 percent reporting women as the perpetrators.30
Typologies of Female Sexual Offenders
Table 3 describes several typologies of female sexual offenders. Matthews and colleagues31 described a sample of 16 women referred to a female sex offender treatment program in Minnesota. They described three categories: teacher-lovers, those who were intergenerationally predisposed, and those who had been coerced by men. They noted that often the teacher-lover “had a difficult time believing that her behavior was criminal since she has no malice for the children she had abused. She taught children about sexuality in discussions and games, and she fell in love with an adolescent male, who became her sexual partner” (Ref. 29, p 208). In contrast, the intergenerationally predisposed had been victims themselves, and their victims were family members. Those coerced by men were noted to be extremely passive in their relationships with feared partners. Matthews and colleagues' typology has been noted to be a cornerstone in the field,18 helpful in understanding motivations.
Salter9 later described three groups of female sex offenders who offend against children. The first group are those who abuse (usually their own) young children, often with sadistic behaviors. “Many of these mothers seem to be fused with their children and unable to function as a maternal figure” (Ref. 9, p 77). The second group are teacher-lovers, who are usually approximately twice as old as their victims. “These women …romanticize their involvement …and tend to deflect the responsibility for it onto their victims” (Ref. 9, p 78). The third are women who are initially coerced into abusing. “Their initial motivations are generally to please the male or, at the least, to avoid abandonment by him. As time progresses, however, some research indicates that many of these women begin to enjoy the sex with children and eventually molest them on their own” (Ref. 9, p 78). Teacher-lovers tend to fall into two groups; those who abuse either younger or older children preferentially.8
Vandiver and Kercher32 studied the Texas sex offender registry using a cluster analysis and described six types of female sexual offenders. Their largest group was the heterosexual nurturer group, which they noted coincided with the teacher-lovers as well as a larger group of women in a mentoring or caretaking role. Other types included the noncriminal (referring to the absence of a prior criminal history) homosexual offender who was least likely to have subsequent arrests; the female sexual predator who was most likely to have a re-arrest; the young adult child exploiter; the homosexual criminal; and the aggressive homosexual offender who victimized the oldest group and was the most likely to commit a sexual assault.
In 2010, Wijkman and colleagues33 analyzed data using multiple correspondence analysis on all female sexual offenders in the Netherlands, finding four prototypical offenders. Those in the psychologically disturbed co-offenders category often abuse their children; they resemble Matthews and colleagues' predisposed type. The young assaulters category includes young women without mental illness who fondle or commit oral sex acts often during babysitting (corresponding with Vandiver and Kercher's young adult child exploiter). Those in the rapists category engage in penetration, usually on older victims of either gender; they have a personal history of sexual abuse, resembling both the female sexual predator and the intergenerationally predisposed molester types. Passive mothers (who were often over 40 years of age) watch for or provide the opportunity for the abuse of their own children to occur, and they resemble Matthews and colleagues' male-coerced type. As Williams and Bierie noted, “reliance on samples of offenders from the latter stages of the justice system can be problematic because the literature suggests that a proportion of [female sexual offenders] go undetected or face insubstantial penalties for their crimes” (Ref. 11, p 238).
Characteristics of Female Sexual Offenders
Male and female sex offenders appear to share some characteristics, but important differences in the risk of recidivism and factors related to their sexually abusive behavior have been found.34 Offense characteristics show that female offenders tend to offend against known victims.18 Female sexual offenders offend against both males and females; they are more likely than male offenders to offend against same-gender victims.11 It had been thought that a large proportion of these women are coerced into sexual offending by a male accomplice, but studies reveal that only about one-third of cases of female sexual offending involve a co-offender. This finding means that two-thirds of women commit solo sexual offenses.11 Female sexual offenders are slightly more common among juvenile offenders than adult offenders.27
With regard to pedophilic interests in women, in an online survey, four percent of women reported some likelihood of having sex with children or viewing child pornography if they knew they would not get caught.35 Further, four percent of university women reported the hypothetical likelihood of sex with a child if nobody were to find out.36 In a sample of female college students, 2.8 percent reported sexual attraction to a child.37
Mental Disorder and Cognitive Distortions
It has been a commonly held belief that women who sexually abuse must invariably be mentally ill, arising from the assumption that normal women would not wish to hurt a child or engage in sexual acts with a child.38 The proportion of female sexual offenders with psychosis or substance abuse is similar to that of female nonsexual violent offenders.39 Female sexual offenders were often victims of sexual and other abuse.40,41 The mental disorders experienced by female sexual offenders appear to be predominantly trauma-related or related to emotional regulation,40,42 disorders which are not usually found legally exculpatory for such offending.
One study found that almost half (48%) of a cohort of female sexual offenders prosecuted in the Netherlands had some form of mental disorder, including depression, alcohol addiction, intellectual disability, or borderline personality disorder.43 In another study of incarcerated women, no significant differences were found in the prevalence of personality disorders for sexual offenders compared with nonsexual offenders.42 In a meta-analysis of 61 studies, 51 percent of a cohort of female sexual offenders had a psychiatric disorder (including intellectual disability), especially depression.41 It was noted in the meta-analysis that most of the studies were undertaken in the incarcerated environment with small cohorts and that health professionals are more likely to conclude that female sex offenders have psychopathology.41 Further, most studies only include those sexual offenders who are incarcerated.
The prevalence of a psychotic disorder in female sexual offenders was no more common than in nonsexual violent offenders.39 Compared with women in the general population, however, those women convicted of sexual offenses had elevated rates of psychotic disorder diagnosis.39 In a nationwide Swedish study that considered 93 female sexual offenders over 13 years, 37 percent had previously been hospitalized in a psychiatric facility. Still, only eight percent of those had been diagnosed with a psychotic disorder on discharge, and only one individual had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. The other psychotic disorders were either bipolar disorder, drug-induced psychosis, organic psychosis, or another psychotic disorder.38 A number of studies do not identify the proportion, if any, of psychotic disorders in calculating the prevalence of mental disorders.41,43 In one study, no identifiable association was found between the type of female sexual offending and neuropsychological functioning.43
Female sexual offenders have not been found to abuse substances at a higher rate than other offenders.15,39,41,42 Compared with women in the general population, however, those women convicted of sexual offenses had elevated rates of substance use disorders.39
A small proportion of female sexual offenders have been diagnosed with paraphilias,43 and paraphilia may be underdiagnosed in women. A proportion of sexual offenders experience deviant arousal during sexual offending, but women may also be motivated by rejection and revenge.44
Female sexual abusers have been found to have offense-supporting cognitive distortions similar to their male counterparts (e.g., uncontrollability, dangerous world, children as sexual beings)40 and can have equally significant empathy deficits.45 Female offenders who sexually offend alone have increased offense-supportive cognitions, suggesting different treatment needs for solo female sexual offenders compared with those who co-offend with men.45 A study of a female pedophilia website found a number of cognitive distortions similar to those associated with male sexual offending.46 In a deductive thematic analysis of the website, Lambert and O'Halloran identified several themes, including sexual motivation; cognitive distortions (e.g., the child as a seducer, the relationship as consensual, sexual contact with children as a natural, positive experience); recognition barriers; personal factors such as early sexualized experiences and poor socialization; and the role of the Internet in providing a sense of community and reinforcing distorted cognitions.46
Recidivism and Risk Factors
It is believed that female sexual offenders re-offend at a substantially lower rate than male sexual offenders.27,47 There has been a dearth of empirical data on the recidivism patterns of female sexual offenders,47 however, and available recidivism data are likely to be underestimated.48
In a sample of 1,041 women convicted of a sexual offense in New York, 1.8 percent were re-arrested for a sexual offense within five years, and 27 percent had any re-arrest over the same period.47 In a meta-analysis of 10 studies, female sexual offenders had a one to three percent sexual recidivism rate after being detected and sanctioned.27 General (nonsexual) recidivism rates were noted to be higher, from 19 to 24 percent.27 Yet, in another study of recidivism of 57 female sexual offenders against children, 18 percent were charged for a subsequent sexual crime, which is a much higher sexual recidivism rate.48
Rates of sexual recidivism in female sex offenders generally range from 1.5 to 7 percent.27,49 In some studies finding a higher rate of sexual offender recidivism, prostitution-related offenses were included.47,49 Including prostitution-related offenses may artificially inflate sexual offender recidivism. The true rate of female sexual recidivism (excluding prostitution-related offenses) among women is thought to be less than five percent.
Distinct groups of female sexual offenders have been found to have higher rates of re-arrest for any offense.32,47 Those who sexually recidivated, like their male counterparts, were more likely to have prior nonsexual convictions.47 Female sexual offenders who had a first conviction for promoting or patronizing prostitution of a minor have been found to recidivate at a significantly increased rate sexually.47 The authors noted the financial aspect of promoting prostitution, in distinction to other sexual offending. In a study of all registered adult female sexual offenders in Texas, the group categorized as female sexual predators were found to be the most likely to be re-arrested after their target offense.32
Assessment of Female Sexual Offenders
We know little about risk assessment and treatment of female sex offenders because of the small number of female sex offenders and limited research. It is difficult to develop a meaningful analysis of risk factors for sexual offender recidivism, and the static and dynamic risk factors related to sexual recidivism in women are unknown. Researchers have questioned whether a prior history of child maltreatment (nonsexual), victimization, or mental health problems may be related to sexual recidivism.47,49
The evaluation of sexual offenders consists of a psychosexual assessment based on identifying evidence-based risk factors for recidivism. In male sexual offenders, the presence of substantial data identifying risk factors is the foundation for a risk assessment.50 The standard of care in evaluating male sexual offenders includes risk assessment tools such as the Static-99R and the Stable 2007.51,52 These tools are based on a statistical association with recidivism across large samples. Similar tools have not been developed in female offenders because of the dearth of research on this group. As a result, there are no established risk assessment tools for female sexual offenders. The risk factors identified for male sexual offender recidivism are invalid for women.53 Male sexual offender risk assessment tools are inappropriate for women because they overestimate the risk for female offenders.53 The general recommendation for the use of risk assessment tools in female sexual offenders has been to consider using validated tools to assess the risk of general and violent (nonsexual) recidivism while framing opinions about female sex offender recidivism within the limits of available research.54
As with their male counterparts, the psychosexual evaluation of females should include a diagnostic assessment to determine whether a psychiatric disorder is present, including paraphilic disorders. The relationship between psychiatric disorders and sexual offending should be understood, given the recidivism and treatment implications. Women may have behaviors that resemble risk factors in male sexual offenders, such as poor problem-solving skills, or using sex as a coping mechanism. The identification of such factors may be important as targets for treatment, but their relationship to sexual recidivism is unknown for women.
The role of typologies or offense motivations in female sexual offending is important in conceptualizing the behavior. Motivations such as pleasing a partner, sexual gratification, or emotional immaturity may be important as targets of treatment, but typologies and offense motivations do not quantify risk.
Given the low rate of reoffending in women after being sanctioned, referral questions concerning the risk of sexual recidivism should generally be answered as “low.”55 The exceptions to low risk include cases in which the risk of committing a future sexual offense is clear, such as cases in which the female states she will commit another offense or she will commit another offense if her co-offending partner requests.55
The role of treatment in a population of low-risk offenders is unclear. Treatment guidelines have not been established for female offenders with a higher risk of reoffending. Recommendations have been made for probable treatment needs addressing offense-supportive cognitions, relationship factors (including dependency and intimacy challenges), emotional regulation, coping deficits, and the particular goals underlying the sexual offense.53 Clinically, it makes sense to target inappropriate sexual interests, maladaptive coping strategies, psychiatric comorbidities, and trauma histories. The role of cognitive-behavioral therapies, such as those prescribed for male sexual offenders, is not fully understood. One approach is to adopt gender-responsive treatment programs for women who perpetrate general violence. Another approach is to focus treatment on the unique typologies of female sexual offending. This approach would take into account the similarities and differences between male and female sex offenders. Potential treatment targets are the role of sociocultural messages about sexuality and the victim–offender duality of roles that exist among some women, as well as the role of relationships and family.56,57 Such treatment, however, does not specifically address sexual offending.
In summary, the evaluation and treatment of female sexual offenders is poorly understood. Women who are identified as high risk, who engage in serious sexual offenses, or who have a psychiatric disorder, including a paraphilic disorder related to sexual offending, merit specific treatment.
Conclusions
Suggestions for helping to manage gender bias in evaluations of female sexual offenders are given in Table 4. In the past few decades, the literature on male sexual offending has grown exponentially. Evidence-based tools are now the standard of care in determining a male sex offender's risk of committing a future sexual offense. In contrast, the literature on female sexual offending is in its infancy. As a result, there is no standard of care in evaluating female sexual offenders, estimation of risk of recidivism, or treatment modalities. Women who engage in sexually abusive behaviors have largely been overlooked. The societal gender bias and tendency to see women as nurturing, not violent, and less sexual compared with male counterparts have obscured the path to understanding female sexual offending. Women who sexually offend should not be presumed to be mentally ill. One answer to this problem lies in gender-specific research to examine female offending, taking into account gender-specific understandings. This research approach, together with what we know about male sexual offenders, should lead to an evidence-based understanding of female sexual offenders.
Acknowledgments
The authors greatly appreciate the child protection insights of Joshua Friedman, MD, PhD, in drafting this manuscript.
by Susan Hatters Friedman, MD, Renee M. Sorrentino, MD, Daniel Riordan, MBBS, MA, MSc, and Kerri Eagle, LLB (Hon), LLM, MPsych, MBBS
J Am Acad Psychiatry Law 51:466–74, 2023. DOI:10.29158/JAAPL.230064-23
Dr. Hatters Friedman is involved in the editorial leadership of The Journal; however, she did not participate in any aspect of this article’s review and acceptance.
While popular films have been used to teach about paraphilias,1 they rarely involve women with paraphilias. In American Pie, the still-popular 1999 coming-of-age film, Finch (a high school senior) has sex with the character known in the film as “Stifler's mom.”2 This liaison is portrayed as a contemporary Mrs. Robinson's experience. (n.b., Mrs. Robinson seduced a 21-year-old man, not a high school student in The Graduate).3 Similarly, in the sitcom portraying a popular radio psychiatrist, Frasier, the titular character remembers his first sexual experiences as a high school student with his piano teacher.4 Whereas other characters are seemingly impressed by this sexual prowess, only Frasier's father is disturbed, because he paid for the piano lessons. In neither instance is the adult female–teen male sexual experiences portrayed as abusive or inappropriate. Yet, in American Beauty, also from 1999, audiences watched the protagonist struggle over his attraction to his teenage daughter's friend and ultimately get killed after the pair were about to have intercourse.5 In 2000, All-American Girl: The Mary Kay Letourneau Story dramatized the real-life story of the teacher who had an affair with her sixth-grade student Vili Fualaau.6
Although much less frequently than their male counterparts, a significant percentage of sexual offending is perpetrated by women. This is the case despite sexual relations of a youth with an adult female sometimes being viewed as a rite of passage rather than sexual offending with long-term consequences; for example, “hot for teacher” and “hottest female sex offenders” are websites.7 Debra Lafave was a 23-year-old teacher arrested for having sex with a 14-year-old student.8 Female teachers, like Letourneau and Lafave, are often significantly older than their victims. Other women are noted to demonstrate less romantic and more sadistic behaviors in their offending; still other women are coerced into sexually abusing others by a male partner.
Gender Bias in Evaluations
Psychiatry has a long history of misinterpreting sexual offending. Freud ignored reported childhood sexual abuse and rather focused on the child having Oedipal fantasies.9 In 1978, Sgroi noted: “recognition of sexual abuse is entirely dependent on individuals' inherent willingness to entertain the possibility that the condition may exist” (Ref. 10, p xvi). Historically, the risks of misunderstanding child sexual abuse have included discounting the offender's responsibility, blaming the child for being seductive, and minimizing the impact of the abuse on that child.9
Gender role stereotypes conceptualize women as nurturing and men as more violent. Sexual agency may not be ascribed to women. Unintended consequences of these chivalrous stereotypes include allowing women to continue to sexually offend unchecked, with less likelihood of arrest, lower sentences, and less compulsory treatment than their male counterparts.7,11,–,13 This tendency exists despite the fact that the sexual abuse of children by female and male perpetrators is of similar severity.14 Table 1 lists the significant problems perpetuated by misunderstandings and gender bias regarding female sexual offenders.
Salter noted: “The average person does not seem to want to believe that women, particularly the child's mother, could do such a thing” (Ref. 9, p 77). In addition to idealized beliefs about women, confusion exists about what constitutes sexually abusive behavior. Women may perpetrate sexual abuse while bathing or dressing their children and may not be detected. Women have much more access to children alone and are seen as always nurturing. Yet, female sex offenders are more likely than men to have victims of both genders.15
Although some ask how a woman could sexually offend without having a penis, Finkelhor and Russell, as early as 1984, noted, “most sexual abusers get their satisfaction not from intercourse but from either manipulating the child's genitals or having the child manipulate their own. Women could do this too, getting satisfaction from touching or having the child manually stimulate them” (Ref. 16, p 182). Salter noted, “women offenders are capable of the same severity of sexual abuse as male offenders are. Nor does the lack of a penis stop them from penetrating a child” (Ref. 9, p 78). Myths about female sexual offenders that this article seeks to dispel are listed in Table 2.
Harms of Female Sex Offending
Contrary to the belief that sexual abuse by women does not harm the victim, there is evidence that abuse by female offenders significantly affects both male and female victims.14,18 This harm includes both physical damage and psychological harms such as posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms, anxiety and depression, suicidal ideation and self-harm, inability to express emotions, rage, and interpersonal difficulties, such as feelings of isolation, difficulties with trust, and sexual problems.18,–,21 Some accounts claim that sex between an adolescent boy and an adult female is considered a rite of passage with little impact.22 Yet, even a male who experiences physical pleasure at the time may subsequently experience a betrayal of trust and subsequent trauma symptoms.18,20 The impact on female incest survivors may be worse when perpetrated by a female.18 Victims may be further affected when they disclose the abuse because they may be subsequently physically punished or not believed, or the impact of the abuse may be minimized or the acts reframed as consensual.18 Further, services primarily set up for helping victims of male perpetrators cannot adequately respond to the needs of victims of female perpetrators because of a lack of understanding.
Prevalence
Accurate assessment of the prevalence of female sexual abuse is hampered by the belief that female-perpetrated sexual abuse is so rare that it is not much of a problem, confusion about what constitutes sexually abusive behavior,23 and the amount of hidden behavior occurring in the caretaker role. In addition, given the denial and taboo surrounding female sex offending, it is less likely to be disclosed if victims believe their experience is extraordinary or if victims believe that they will not be taken seriously.24,25
In a review of studies available by 1984, Finkelhor and Russell found that “the best estimates, based on a variety of surveys of the general population, put the percent of sexual contacts by older women to be about 20 percent (range 14% to 27%) for male children and about 5 percent (range 0 to 10%) for female children” (Ref. 16, p 177). Finkelhor and Russell noted that Kinsey included data about childhood sexual abuse experiences, reporting in his 1948 study26 that “[t]he record includes some cases of preadolescent boys involved in sexual contact with adult females, and still more cases of preadolescent boys involved with adult males” (Ref. 16, p 175).
More recently, Cortoni and colleagues27 found that when averaged across nations including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, official records data and victimization survey data demonstrated that approximately five percent of sexual offenses were committed by women.27 An even more recent meta-analysis of data from 12 countries found a fixed-effect meta-analytical average of 2.2 percent of sexual offenses that were reported to authorities being perpetrated by women.28 In contrast, the fixed-effect meta-analytical average of 11.6 percent prevalence of female sexual offending rates found in victimization surveys was almost six times higher.28
Moreover, in a recent study, Stemple and colleagues revealed higher prevalence rates, contradicting the idea that female sexual offending is rare.12 They analyzed data from four surveys conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Bureau of Justice Statistics, two of which were in the general population and two among incarcerated persons. Strikingly, these surveys found that nonconsensual sex occurred for men and women at a similar 12-month prevalence.12 Women were more likely to report having been raped during their lifetime, however. Although only 1.7 percent of men reported being raped in their lifetime, the CDC's limited definition of rape requires the penetration of the victim. But 6.7 percent of men had reported that they were “made to penetrate” someone during their lifetime.12 Those who had been “made to penetrate” reported female perpetrators in 79 percent of cases. Analysis of a national household survey of both rape and sexual assault found that 28 percent of male victims and four percent of female victims reported female perpetrators acting alone.12 When men and boys were incarcerated, staff perpetrators of sexual violence were overwhelmingly female.12 When inmate-on-inmate sexual assault occurs, women prisoners are more likely to be victimized by female inmates than male prisoners victimized by male inmates.12
A study examining sexual victimization revealed that of 302 undergraduate men, 51 percent reported having been sexually victimized at least once since age 16, with six percent reporting victimization by a male perpetrator, 48 percent by a female perpetrator, and three percent by perpetrators of both sexes.29 In a study examining sexual coercion, 43 percent of the 284 male high school and college participants reported that they experienced sexual coercion, with 95 percent reporting women as the perpetrators.30
Typologies of Female Sexual Offenders
Table 3 describes several typologies of female sexual offenders. Matthews and colleagues31 described a sample of 16 women referred to a female sex offender treatment program in Minnesota. They described three categories: teacher-lovers, those who were intergenerationally predisposed, and those who had been coerced by men. They noted that often the teacher-lover “had a difficult time believing that her behavior was criminal since she has no malice for the children she had abused. She taught children about sexuality in discussions and games, and she fell in love with an adolescent male, who became her sexual partner” (Ref. 29, p 208). In contrast, the intergenerationally predisposed had been victims themselves, and their victims were family members. Those coerced by men were noted to be extremely passive in their relationships with feared partners. Matthews and colleagues' typology has been noted to be a cornerstone in the field,18 helpful in understanding motivations.
Salter9 later described three groups of female sex offenders who offend against children. The first group are those who abuse (usually their own) young children, often with sadistic behaviors. “Many of these mothers seem to be fused with their children and unable to function as a maternal figure” (Ref. 9, p 77). The second group are teacher-lovers, who are usually approximately twice as old as their victims. “These women …romanticize their involvement …and tend to deflect the responsibility for it onto their victims” (Ref. 9, p 78). The third are women who are initially coerced into abusing. “Their initial motivations are generally to please the male or, at the least, to avoid abandonment by him. As time progresses, however, some research indicates that many of these women begin to enjoy the sex with children and eventually molest them on their own” (Ref. 9, p 78). Teacher-lovers tend to fall into two groups; those who abuse either younger or older children preferentially.8
Vandiver and Kercher32 studied the Texas sex offender registry using a cluster analysis and described six types of female sexual offenders. Their largest group was the heterosexual nurturer group, which they noted coincided with the teacher-lovers as well as a larger group of women in a mentoring or caretaking role. Other types included the noncriminal (referring to the absence of a prior criminal history) homosexual offender who was least likely to have subsequent arrests; the female sexual predator who was most likely to have a re-arrest; the young adult child exploiter; the homosexual criminal; and the aggressive homosexual offender who victimized the oldest group and was the most likely to commit a sexual assault.
In 2010, Wijkman and colleagues33 analyzed data using multiple correspondence analysis on all female sexual offenders in the Netherlands, finding four prototypical offenders. Those in the psychologically disturbed co-offenders category often abuse their children; they resemble Matthews and colleagues' predisposed type. The young assaulters category includes young women without mental illness who fondle or commit oral sex acts often during babysitting (corresponding with Vandiver and Kercher's young adult child exploiter). Those in the rapists category engage in penetration, usually on older victims of either gender; they have a personal history of sexual abuse, resembling both the female sexual predator and the intergenerationally predisposed molester types. Passive mothers (who were often over 40 years of age) watch for or provide the opportunity for the abuse of their own children to occur, and they resemble Matthews and colleagues' male-coerced type. As Williams and Bierie noted, “reliance on samples of offenders from the latter stages of the justice system can be problematic because the literature suggests that a proportion of [female sexual offenders] go undetected or face insubstantial penalties for their crimes” (Ref. 11, p 238).
Characteristics of Female Sexual Offenders
Male and female sex offenders appear to share some characteristics, but important differences in the risk of recidivism and factors related to their sexually abusive behavior have been found.34 Offense characteristics show that female offenders tend to offend against known victims.18 Female sexual offenders offend against both males and females; they are more likely than male offenders to offend against same-gender victims.11 It had been thought that a large proportion of these women are coerced into sexual offending by a male accomplice, but studies reveal that only about one-third of cases of female sexual offending involve a co-offender. This finding means that two-thirds of women commit solo sexual offenses.11 Female sexual offenders are slightly more common among juvenile offenders than adult offenders.27
With regard to pedophilic interests in women, in an online survey, four percent of women reported some likelihood of having sex with children or viewing child pornography if they knew they would not get caught.35 Further, four percent of university women reported the hypothetical likelihood of sex with a child if nobody were to find out.36 In a sample of female college students, 2.8 percent reported sexual attraction to a child.37
Mental Disorder and Cognitive Distortions
It has been a commonly held belief that women who sexually abuse must invariably be mentally ill, arising from the assumption that normal women would not wish to hurt a child or engage in sexual acts with a child.38 The proportion of female sexual offenders with psychosis or substance abuse is similar to that of female nonsexual violent offenders.39 Female sexual offenders were often victims of sexual and other abuse.40,41 The mental disorders experienced by female sexual offenders appear to be predominantly trauma-related or related to emotional regulation,40,42 disorders which are not usually found legally exculpatory for such offending.
One study found that almost half (48%) of a cohort of female sexual offenders prosecuted in the Netherlands had some form of mental disorder, including depression, alcohol addiction, intellectual disability, or borderline personality disorder.43 In another study of incarcerated women, no significant differences were found in the prevalence of personality disorders for sexual offenders compared with nonsexual offenders.42 In a meta-analysis of 61 studies, 51 percent of a cohort of female sexual offenders had a psychiatric disorder (including intellectual disability), especially depression.41 It was noted in the meta-analysis that most of the studies were undertaken in the incarcerated environment with small cohorts and that health professionals are more likely to conclude that female sex offenders have psychopathology.41 Further, most studies only include those sexual offenders who are incarcerated.
The prevalence of a psychotic disorder in female sexual offenders was no more common than in nonsexual violent offenders.39 Compared with women in the general population, however, those women convicted of sexual offenses had elevated rates of psychotic disorder diagnosis.39 In a nationwide Swedish study that considered 93 female sexual offenders over 13 years, 37 percent had previously been hospitalized in a psychiatric facility. Still, only eight percent of those had been diagnosed with a psychotic disorder on discharge, and only one individual had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. The other psychotic disorders were either bipolar disorder, drug-induced psychosis, organic psychosis, or another psychotic disorder.38 A number of studies do not identify the proportion, if any, of psychotic disorders in calculating the prevalence of mental disorders.41,43 In one study, no identifiable association was found between the type of female sexual offending and neuropsychological functioning.43
Female sexual offenders have not been found to abuse substances at a higher rate than other offenders.15,39,41,42 Compared with women in the general population, however, those women convicted of sexual offenses had elevated rates of substance use disorders.39
A small proportion of female sexual offenders have been diagnosed with paraphilias,43 and paraphilia may be underdiagnosed in women. A proportion of sexual offenders experience deviant arousal during sexual offending, but women may also be motivated by rejection and revenge.44
Female sexual abusers have been found to have offense-supporting cognitive distortions similar to their male counterparts (e.g., uncontrollability, dangerous world, children as sexual beings)40 and can have equally significant empathy deficits.45 Female offenders who sexually offend alone have increased offense-supportive cognitions, suggesting different treatment needs for solo female sexual offenders compared with those who co-offend with men.45 A study of a female pedophilia website found a number of cognitive distortions similar to those associated with male sexual offending.46 In a deductive thematic analysis of the website, Lambert and O'Halloran identified several themes, including sexual motivation; cognitive distortions (e.g., the child as a seducer, the relationship as consensual, sexual contact with children as a natural, positive experience); recognition barriers; personal factors such as early sexualized experiences and poor socialization; and the role of the Internet in providing a sense of community and reinforcing distorted cognitions.46
Recidivism and Risk Factors
It is believed that female sexual offenders re-offend at a substantially lower rate than male sexual offenders.27,47 There has been a dearth of empirical data on the recidivism patterns of female sexual offenders,47 however, and available recidivism data are likely to be underestimated.48
In a sample of 1,041 women convicted of a sexual offense in New York, 1.8 percent were re-arrested for a sexual offense within five years, and 27 percent had any re-arrest over the same period.47 In a meta-analysis of 10 studies, female sexual offenders had a one to three percent sexual recidivism rate after being detected and sanctioned.27 General (nonsexual) recidivism rates were noted to be higher, from 19 to 24 percent.27 Yet, in another study of recidivism of 57 female sexual offenders against children, 18 percent were charged for a subsequent sexual crime, which is a much higher sexual recidivism rate.48
Rates of sexual recidivism in female sex offenders generally range from 1.5 to 7 percent.27,49 In some studies finding a higher rate of sexual offender recidivism, prostitution-related offenses were included.47,49 Including prostitution-related offenses may artificially inflate sexual offender recidivism. The true rate of female sexual recidivism (excluding prostitution-related offenses) among women is thought to be less than five percent.
Distinct groups of female sexual offenders have been found to have higher rates of re-arrest for any offense.32,47 Those who sexually recidivated, like their male counterparts, were more likely to have prior nonsexual convictions.47 Female sexual offenders who had a first conviction for promoting or patronizing prostitution of a minor have been found to recidivate at a significantly increased rate sexually.47 The authors noted the financial aspect of promoting prostitution, in distinction to other sexual offending. In a study of all registered adult female sexual offenders in Texas, the group categorized as female sexual predators were found to be the most likely to be re-arrested after their target offense.32
Assessment of Female Sexual Offenders
We know little about risk assessment and treatment of female sex offenders because of the small number of female sex offenders and limited research. It is difficult to develop a meaningful analysis of risk factors for sexual offender recidivism, and the static and dynamic risk factors related to sexual recidivism in women are unknown. Researchers have questioned whether a prior history of child maltreatment (nonsexual), victimization, or mental health problems may be related to sexual recidivism.47,49
The evaluation of sexual offenders consists of a psychosexual assessment based on identifying evidence-based risk factors for recidivism. In male sexual offenders, the presence of substantial data identifying risk factors is the foundation for a risk assessment.50 The standard of care in evaluating male sexual offenders includes risk assessment tools such as the Static-99R and the Stable 2007.51,52 These tools are based on a statistical association with recidivism across large samples. Similar tools have not been developed in female offenders because of the dearth of research on this group. As a result, there are no established risk assessment tools for female sexual offenders. The risk factors identified for male sexual offender recidivism are invalid for women.53 Male sexual offender risk assessment tools are inappropriate for women because they overestimate the risk for female offenders.53 The general recommendation for the use of risk assessment tools in female sexual offenders has been to consider using validated tools to assess the risk of general and violent (nonsexual) recidivism while framing opinions about female sex offender recidivism within the limits of available research.54
As with their male counterparts, the psychosexual evaluation of females should include a diagnostic assessment to determine whether a psychiatric disorder is present, including paraphilic disorders. The relationship between psychiatric disorders and sexual offending should be understood, given the recidivism and treatment implications. Women may have behaviors that resemble risk factors in male sexual offenders, such as poor problem-solving skills, or using sex as a coping mechanism. The identification of such factors may be important as targets for treatment, but their relationship to sexual recidivism is unknown for women.
The role of typologies or offense motivations in female sexual offending is important in conceptualizing the behavior. Motivations such as pleasing a partner, sexual gratification, or emotional immaturity may be important as targets of treatment, but typologies and offense motivations do not quantify risk.
Given the low rate of reoffending in women after being sanctioned, referral questions concerning the risk of sexual recidivism should generally be answered as “low.”55 The exceptions to low risk include cases in which the risk of committing a future sexual offense is clear, such as cases in which the female states she will commit another offense or she will commit another offense if her co-offending partner requests.55
The role of treatment in a population of low-risk offenders is unclear. Treatment guidelines have not been established for female offenders with a higher risk of reoffending. Recommendations have been made for probable treatment needs addressing offense-supportive cognitions, relationship factors (including dependency and intimacy challenges), emotional regulation, coping deficits, and the particular goals underlying the sexual offense.53 Clinically, it makes sense to target inappropriate sexual interests, maladaptive coping strategies, psychiatric comorbidities, and trauma histories. The role of cognitive-behavioral therapies, such as those prescribed for male sexual offenders, is not fully understood. One approach is to adopt gender-responsive treatment programs for women who perpetrate general violence. Another approach is to focus treatment on the unique typologies of female sexual offending. This approach would take into account the similarities and differences between male and female sex offenders. Potential treatment targets are the role of sociocultural messages about sexuality and the victim–offender duality of roles that exist among some women, as well as the role of relationships and family.56,57 Such treatment, however, does not specifically address sexual offending.
In summary, the evaluation and treatment of female sexual offenders is poorly understood. Women who are identified as high risk, who engage in serious sexual offenses, or who have a psychiatric disorder, including a paraphilic disorder related to sexual offending, merit specific treatment.
Conclusions
Suggestions for helping to manage gender bias in evaluations of female sexual offenders are given in Table 4. In the past few decades, the literature on male sexual offending has grown exponentially. Evidence-based tools are now the standard of care in determining a male sex offender's risk of committing a future sexual offense. In contrast, the literature on female sexual offending is in its infancy. As a result, there is no standard of care in evaluating female sexual offenders, estimation of risk of recidivism, or treatment modalities. Women who engage in sexually abusive behaviors have largely been overlooked. The societal gender bias and tendency to see women as nurturing, not violent, and less sexual compared with male counterparts have obscured the path to understanding female sexual offending. Women who sexually offend should not be presumed to be mentally ill. One answer to this problem lies in gender-specific research to examine female offending, taking into account gender-specific understandings. This research approach, together with what we know about male sexual offenders, should lead to an evidence-based understanding of female sexual offenders.
Acknowledgments
The authors greatly appreciate the child protection insights of Joshua Friedman, MD, PhD, in drafting this manuscript.
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Re: Butterfly Kisses: Researching Female Pedophilia
Footnotes
- Dr. Hatters Friedman is involved in the editorial leadership of The Journal; however, she did not participate in any aspect of this article's review and acceptance.
- Disclosures of financial or other potential conflicts of interest: None.
- © 2023 American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law
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Re: Butterfly Kisses: Researching Female Pedophilia
From: Queer Girls and Intergenerational Lesbian Sexuality in the 1970s, in Historical Reflections
by Amanda H. Littauer (2020) 46:1, 95-108:
Abstract
Drawing on letters and writings by teenage girls and oral history interviews, this article aims to open a scholarly conversation about the existence and significance of intergenerational sexual relationships between minor girls and adult women in the years leading up to and encompassing the lesbian feminist movement of the 1970s. Lesbian history and culture say very little about sexual connections between youth and adults, sweeping them under the rug in gender-inflected ways that differ from the suppression of speech in gay male history and culture about intergenerational sex between boys and men. Nonetheless, my research suggests that, despite lesbian feminists’ caution and even negativity toward teen girls, erotic and sexual relationships with adult women provided girls access to support, pleasure, mentorship, and community.
Interviews
Lisa (14-17 with a woman of 28). "Relationships with adults sometimes helped teens figure out what forms of intimacy they wanted. Adult partners could draw on experience that youth did not have, not only sexual but also emotional, relational, and cultural. Lisa, a black lesbian whom I interviewed about her childhood on the South Side of Chicago, spoke at length about a sexual relationship she shared with a twenty-eight-year-old woman when she was still in high school [14-17 years old - NewgonWiki] and subject to her mother’s rules and curfew. Lisa had prior sexual experience with age peers, but her experience with this older lover was quite different. “She was a woman, like an adult woman, a real woman,” Lisa recalled with a smile. “She was sensitive. She was gentle. She was open.” Lisa also described her as “warm” and “nurturing.” Lisa described herself as “large” and her lover as significantly larger than herself; her lover was comfortable in her own skin and with asking for what she wanted, and she was sexually responsive and enthusiastic. “It was fulfilling. It was. It was all of the things that I think I had imagined.” Lisa’s lover encouraged and supported her. Even through ups and downs and breaks in the relationship, Lisa credits it with helping her get into college" (p. 98-99)
Jeanne (14 with her 25-year-old neighbor, a mother of 2). "Jeanne reported that Paula had helped her work through her feelings, stop using drugs, and come out to her friends, who reacted supportively. Three years after the breakup, Jeanne wrote: “She is one of my closest friends.” (p. 99).
Sylvia (15 with a 35-year-old mother). "Sylvia remembered being attracted to girls by the age of thirteen and recognizing the feelings as sexual at fifteen, when she became involved with a thirty-five-year-old woman who was married with young children. When an interviewer asked how Sylvia felt about the relationship, Sylvia responded: “Just marvelous, I was just awestruck, it was the most marvelous thing to discover and it was an odd relationship.” She continued: “I suppose I really joined the family, there was no hassle, her husband knew what the relationship was and it didn’t bother him.” In fact, she explained, she was “devoted to him, too,” to the point that when Sylvia was staying with the family to help with the children during their mother’s illness, Sylvia became “sexually involved” with her lover’s husband, because “it just seemed the right sort of comforting thing to do.” The interviewer asked if Sylvia felt the need to tell other people in order to gain support, and Sylvia answered “no”; she “had a feeling of secrecy” to protect the relationship, because it was “so absolutely acceptable to all of us” but would almost certainly baffle her parents" (p. 101)
Carmen Vázquez (16 - helped to found the San Francisco Women’s Building in the 1970s). "There was this woman Toni, who’s a friend of the family, who was a closeted lesbian, whom I slept with and partied with for probably a year. I was this little butch thing. She was a femme. She would take me to these women’s houses who were, you know, lesbian-femme couples. We’d go to underground places. I was 16 years old, going on 17. [...] Toni was seven years older than me and the women that she was hanging out with were older than her. So I’m talking [with] women in their late twenties, early thirties, who absolutely knew that they were dead meat if they were caught with a minor, and they did it anyway. You know, they just did. They took care of me. They would let me have a beer now and then, but, you know, it’s mostly Coca-Cola. You don’t get the rum in the Coke until you’re older. But they also taught me how to dance, how to dress, how to flirt, and it was fabulous. It was completely fabulous. . . . So, that was sort of my sexual awakening, was with these older women." (p. 102).
Kate Day (15-18, multiple partners including radical feminist Victoria Brownworth; attempted to legally emancipate herself to protect her lover; participated in lesbian feminist activist group Dyke-Tactics). "The story of another young lesbian named Kate Day further illustrates the extraordinary resourcefulness of teens for whom sex formed one aspect of their efforts to survive, connect, and become who they wanted and needed to be. Born in 1958, [...] She first met radical feminist Victoria Brownworth when she was fifteen or sixteen, [... who] began showing her the bars, helping her act tough enough to get in, and helping her learn the etiquette of working-class lesbian Philadelphia. Like Vázquez, Day said that the adults told her she was “jailbait” and that they had to be careful, but they mentored her anyway, including, ultimately, one time, in bed" (p. 103). "After this one-time sexual mentoring session, Kate felt more confident and entered into sexual encounters and relationships with other adult lesbians. She got into a lasting relationship with a woman, Chris, who was ten years older than her [25-28 - Newgon], and who worked as a nurse while living at home with her parents. Around this time, Kate’s parents found out about and strongly discouraged the relationship, and Kate moved into Chris’s family home. Chris’ parents, however, became nervous that they or their daughter could face legal exposure because of Kate’s underage status, so Kate took the extraordinary step of working with a feminist lawyer — with whom she was interning through her high school — to become an emancipated minor. [Eventually] Chris and Kate moved into a women’s collective in West Philadelphia, while Kate was still finishing up high school." (p. 104).
by Amanda H. Littauer (2020) 46:1, 95-108:
Abstract
Drawing on letters and writings by teenage girls and oral history interviews, this article aims to open a scholarly conversation about the existence and significance of intergenerational sexual relationships between minor girls and adult women in the years leading up to and encompassing the lesbian feminist movement of the 1970s. Lesbian history and culture say very little about sexual connections between youth and adults, sweeping them under the rug in gender-inflected ways that differ from the suppression of speech in gay male history and culture about intergenerational sex between boys and men. Nonetheless, my research suggests that, despite lesbian feminists’ caution and even negativity toward teen girls, erotic and sexual relationships with adult women provided girls access to support, pleasure, mentorship, and community.
Interviews
Lisa (14-17 with a woman of 28). "Relationships with adults sometimes helped teens figure out what forms of intimacy they wanted. Adult partners could draw on experience that youth did not have, not only sexual but also emotional, relational, and cultural. Lisa, a black lesbian whom I interviewed about her childhood on the South Side of Chicago, spoke at length about a sexual relationship she shared with a twenty-eight-year-old woman when she was still in high school [14-17 years old - NewgonWiki] and subject to her mother’s rules and curfew. Lisa had prior sexual experience with age peers, but her experience with this older lover was quite different. “She was a woman, like an adult woman, a real woman,” Lisa recalled with a smile. “She was sensitive. She was gentle. She was open.” Lisa also described her as “warm” and “nurturing.” Lisa described herself as “large” and her lover as significantly larger than herself; her lover was comfortable in her own skin and with asking for what she wanted, and she was sexually responsive and enthusiastic. “It was fulfilling. It was. It was all of the things that I think I had imagined.” Lisa’s lover encouraged and supported her. Even through ups and downs and breaks in the relationship, Lisa credits it with helping her get into college" (p. 98-99)
Jeanne (14 with her 25-year-old neighbor, a mother of 2). "Jeanne reported that Paula had helped her work through her feelings, stop using drugs, and come out to her friends, who reacted supportively. Three years after the breakup, Jeanne wrote: “She is one of my closest friends.” (p. 99).
Sylvia (15 with a 35-year-old mother). "Sylvia remembered being attracted to girls by the age of thirteen and recognizing the feelings as sexual at fifteen, when she became involved with a thirty-five-year-old woman who was married with young children. When an interviewer asked how Sylvia felt about the relationship, Sylvia responded: “Just marvelous, I was just awestruck, it was the most marvelous thing to discover and it was an odd relationship.” She continued: “I suppose I really joined the family, there was no hassle, her husband knew what the relationship was and it didn’t bother him.” In fact, she explained, she was “devoted to him, too,” to the point that when Sylvia was staying with the family to help with the children during their mother’s illness, Sylvia became “sexually involved” with her lover’s husband, because “it just seemed the right sort of comforting thing to do.” The interviewer asked if Sylvia felt the need to tell other people in order to gain support, and Sylvia answered “no”; she “had a feeling of secrecy” to protect the relationship, because it was “so absolutely acceptable to all of us” but would almost certainly baffle her parents" (p. 101)
Carmen Vázquez (16 - helped to found the San Francisco Women’s Building in the 1970s). "There was this woman Toni, who’s a friend of the family, who was a closeted lesbian, whom I slept with and partied with for probably a year. I was this little butch thing. She was a femme. She would take me to these women’s houses who were, you know, lesbian-femme couples. We’d go to underground places. I was 16 years old, going on 17. [...] Toni was seven years older than me and the women that she was hanging out with were older than her. So I’m talking [with] women in their late twenties, early thirties, who absolutely knew that they were dead meat if they were caught with a minor, and they did it anyway. You know, they just did. They took care of me. They would let me have a beer now and then, but, you know, it’s mostly Coca-Cola. You don’t get the rum in the Coke until you’re older. But they also taught me how to dance, how to dress, how to flirt, and it was fabulous. It was completely fabulous. . . . So, that was sort of my sexual awakening, was with these older women." (p. 102).
Kate Day (15-18, multiple partners including radical feminist Victoria Brownworth; attempted to legally emancipate herself to protect her lover; participated in lesbian feminist activist group Dyke-Tactics). "The story of another young lesbian named Kate Day further illustrates the extraordinary resourcefulness of teens for whom sex formed one aspect of their efforts to survive, connect, and become who they wanted and needed to be. Born in 1958, [...] She first met radical feminist Victoria Brownworth when she was fifteen or sixteen, [... who] began showing her the bars, helping her act tough enough to get in, and helping her learn the etiquette of working-class lesbian Philadelphia. Like Vázquez, Day said that the adults told her she was “jailbait” and that they had to be careful, but they mentored her anyway, including, ultimately, one time, in bed" (p. 103). "After this one-time sexual mentoring session, Kate felt more confident and entered into sexual encounters and relationships with other adult lesbians. She got into a lasting relationship with a woman, Chris, who was ten years older than her [25-28 - Newgon], and who worked as a nurse while living at home with her parents. Around this time, Kate’s parents found out about and strongly discouraged the relationship, and Kate moved into Chris’s family home. Chris’ parents, however, became nervous that they or their daughter could face legal exposure because of Kate’s underage status, so Kate took the extraordinary step of working with a feminist lawyer — with whom she was interning through her high school — to become an emancipated minor. [Eventually] Chris and Kate moved into a women’s collective in West Philadelphia, while Kate was still finishing up high school." (p. 104).
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Re: Butterfly Kisses: Researching Female Pedophilia
Child sex: why are we so fucked up about it?
By Miranda S Givings
The prevailing view in our modern western society is that children shouldn't have sex. This presupposes that there is a broad consensus on what we mean by 'children' and 'sex', when, in reality, the terms can mean very different things to different people. Should childhood be defined by civil laws that lay down the legal age at which a child may engage in sexual activity, always assuming we can agree what we mean by 'sexual activity', or should childhood end when an individual has attained puberty? At the present time the legal constraints which most western countries, including the UK, impose upon children are widely out of step with the biological age at which puberty occurs. Should a child be legally permitted to have sex at puberty, and if not, what outlets (if any), should it be permitted to express it's natural urges during the intervening years between puberty and the age of sexual consent?
Before we can answer that, we need to clarify what we mean by 'having sex'. In the popular mind it generally means sexual intercourse. Whilst most parents would be rightly horrified at the thought of their prepubertal children engaging in sexual intercourse, they may take a different view of other forms of sexual contact. As the mother of two grown-up children for whom bath time was a daily ritual for many years I am only too well aware that it is virtually impossible to wash a child without touching their genitals! Does that make me and millions of other parents a paedophile? Of course not. What about the child who touches their own genitals or those of its playmates in play, or in conscious experimentation? It is a most unusual child who does not explore their sexuality unless prevented from doing so by a parent or guardian. Quite why parents might wish to prevent or discourage such exploration is something this article will try to address.
Although British criminal laws make it a punishable offence for adults to touch the genitals or breasts of children under some circumstances, the law is very vague about whether a child who touches themselves, or another child, is committing a criminal offence. What about a parent or guardian that touches a girl's breasts at bath time as I mentioned above? Is this an offence? Or a father than assists his son to go to the lavatory by holding his penis? I could go on about the confusion, both popular and legal, which exists in our society on the subject of childhood sexuality. The fact remains that adults and children alike today find themselves in a desperate situation which ignorance and repression do nothing to enlighten or alleviate. How have we got ourselves into this dreadful mess?
I lay the blame firmly at the door of the Church. From the beginning, the Church was a conservative, patriarchal organisation which considered human sexuality an inconvenience at best, and a certain path to hellfire and eternal damnation at worst. Women were debarred from the Priesthood and every method, both legitimate, and illegitimate was employed to excise sex from the body catholic. This was due in no small part to the role sex had played in the so-called 'pagan' religions which preceded the establishment of dogmatic Christianity, which the Church was determined to stamp out, not least because well-adjusted, sexually satisfied human beings are unlikely to embrace the concepts of sin and redemption which the early Church Fathers so zealously taught to their guilt-ridden followers.
Anything which tended to remind people that a sexually fulfilling relationship was their natural birthright was ruthlessly suppressed, and as most sexual activity takes place without clothes on, nakedness became quickly associated with sex, and thus with the pernicious dogma of 'original sin'. Once you have convinced someone that sex is a dirty necessity needed to procreate the race, it is a small step to persuade them that anything which might encourage such activity is equally shameful. Where better to begin such 'instruction' than with the children of those parents who were already firmly convinced that the ignorant dogmas the Church taught, were essential for their 'salvation'?
Prior to ascendancy of the Church children were generally regarded as either potential adults or actual adults in the eyes of the societies in which they grew up. As such they were valued for the actual or potential contribution they could make to the prosperity and culture of their communities. Work was not incompatible with play, and went hand in hand with their gradual transformation into adults. But after the abuses, to which the industrial revolution subjected the children of poorer families, our young were gradually excluded from the labour force. As these developments continued, the lot of children vastly improved, but their role as productive, even essential, members of society diminished.
And so we arrive at the modern era of the development of institutional education for children. Prior to this, families had lived in larger units, including grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and so forth. Within this structure most of the education of children took place. While in older times little verbal instruction was given about sex in the modern sense of 'sex education,' children learned by seeing and hearing what went on in the family and in the natural world around them. As the extended family was replaced by the nuclear family, outside institutions took over the education of children, and the natural, family form of sex education began to disappear along with much of the rest of traditional instruction.
This resulted in the modern view that children are to be completely 'protected,' cared for, isolated in various ways, and treated as a fragile, vulnerable species entirely different from adults. This inversion of the natural order culminated in the cult of childhood and of 'the teenager', both entirely artificial constructs with no basis in biological or psychological reality. These radical changes have rapidly brought us to the point where children are often worshipped, treated as 'trophies' and increasingly 'spoiled,' yet contribute little or nothing to the practical, productive life of our society.
The result was a head-on clash between the biological and sexual maturity of children and the new social roles assigned to them, which provide no socially sanctioned outlet for their sexuality. When this conflict was eventually noticed, both secular society and the Church were forced by their own bondage to the childhood culture they had created to declare children to be non-sexual. But when faced with the awkward biological reality of the 'non-sexual' child who could not help but explore and express their sexuality, the adult social, educational and religious powers turned to a variety of repressive tactics to keep the dirty little moppets down. These tactics ranged from admonitions about how 'nice' girls didn't 'play with themselves', through physical restraints and corporal punishment, to legal sanctions and psychiatric committals, culminating in the 19th century obsession with chastity belts and diabolically ingenious mechanical devices to prevent masturbation.
Some might consider this an overly harsh indictment of the role of the Church in fostering sexual repression, but having met countless numbers of people who can vividly recall the fear, shame and physical punishments connected with their sexual development as a child, I am left in no doubt that their ignorance and guilt was largely the outcome of the pernicious dogmas of fanatical Christianity. The irony is that many of the parents who continue to inculcate these misguided notions into their children are neither practising Christians nor particularly religious, and often blissfully unaware of the origin of the repressive beliefs they embrace. The end result is that many millions of parents have passed on to even more millions of children the belief that their sexuality and their naked bodies are things to be ashamed of and concealed.
Nowhere is this more evident or prevalent than in the United States, where many senior politicians and pillars of society routinely fulminate against any expression of sexuality by children and enthusiastically endorse the imposition of ever more ludicrous legislation in an attempt to stem what they see as a tide of unbridled promiscuity and hedonism among American teenagers. And yet the same guardians of morality do nothing to curb the violence inherent in US society nor to restrict the availability of the 'weapons of mass destruction' which every US citizen regards as their God-given right to own and use. In 21st century America, it's OK to display a handgun, but God forbid that a woman should display a naked breast or a teenage girl show a bit of leg in case it might encourage passersby to sexually molest or assault them. Have we so little self-control that we need to be protected from our own sexuality?
One of the areas which the treatment of children as a species apart from adults has most affected, is marriage. Throughout most of human history societies have allowed marriage at or near the time of puberty, sometimes very much earlier. When it was done at very early ages it was almost always for political reasons which are irrelevant to this discussion. The Church itself for centuries tended to follow the Jewish pattern of a minimum age of twelve for girls and thirteen for boys, though by no means everyone married that early! Yet puberty clearly marked the point at which childhood ended and adulthood began — just as it does in nature. Most earlier societies recognised and celebrated this important transition with 'rites of passage and 'puberty rituals' which formally signaled the entrance of the child into the privileges and responsibilities of adulthood. These practices continue to this day in some so-called 'primitive' cultures where young people are expected to be sexually active at puberty and often begin raising families soon afterwards, even though most Western civil and religious laws forbid it.
In such cultures children are not only permitted sexual play and experimentation from puberty, but actively encouraged in it. This is seen as the beginning of a natural process that prepares them for their future role as sexually balanced adults. Perhaps the most pernicious effect of the modern cult of 'childhood' is the widespread denial that our children also indulge in various kinds of sex play. Yet, because that play is either ignored, actively discouraged or even punished, it becomes part of the secret life of our children who quickly acquire the guilt and shame which contribute so largely to the ignorance, denial and repression which bedevil adult sexual relations in our society.
It is ironic that despite the so-called 'swinging sixties' and the sexual freedoms which they ushered in — particularly for women — we cling to the notion that sexual activity should only begin with marriage, despite the fact that most of us reach puberty many years, sometimes decades before we marry. I firmly believe that not only are healthy, sexual relations within marriage seriously inhibited by the negative teachings most of us received as children, but that even more damage is done by the typical postponement of marriage far into the years of sexual maturity.
In the affluent nations of the world (coincidentally the same nations that have the greatest problems with pornography and paedophilia) the average marriageable age has steadily advanced through recent centuries to the mid-twenties — some twelve years later than the average age of puberty! This irony has not been lost on many health professionals and psychologists, yet continues to be completely ignored by the vast majority of parents and teachers.
The evidence from historical, cultural, biological and psychological causes overwhelmingly demonstrates that Nature intended us to be sexual adults at puberty and to experiment sexually to some degree much earlier. Yet our modern, western culture so inhibits this natural growth process that we enter adulthood seriously crippled sexually, psychologically and often morally and spiritually too, often unable to enjoy satisfying lives of sexual intimacy. It is my firm conviction that the primary cause of this dire state of affairs is the sexual persecution and guilt inflicted on children by the traditional negative views of dogmatic Christianity and our sexually repressed, western culture.
What alternative is left to our children, conditioned to regard sex as 'dirty' and their bodies as 'shameful', but to succumb to furtive, guilt-ridden fumblings on the one hand, or the denial and repression of the most fundamental of our desires on the other? Is it any wonder that countless millions grow up to become deeply frustrated, confused and damaged adults, who in turn, will pass the same dreadful inheritance onto their children, thus continuing the vicious circle of guilt, repression, perversion and abuse? It does not surprise me in the least that millions of frustrated and damaged adults should seek some outlet for their sexual urges in pornography, nor that some should wish to have sex with children, nor that many others can only express their sexuality through pain, humiliation and abuse. What does surprise me is that we are not all like that!
Well, some of us are clearly headed in that direction as a recent Internet news item reporting the complaints of two women against the proprietor of an American petrol station for selling 'pornographic' cigarette lighters, brought home to me all too painfully. The lighters apparently 'featured' pictures of naked men and women engaged in various sexual acts, the mere sight of which caused one of the female complainants, a Ms Danielle Dickenson to say, "I just looked over to my right and I saw there was these lighters with women's breasts exposed."
Women's breasts? Exposed! Heaven forbid that we should be exposed to the sight of something we women have possessed since creation which our babies (and sometimes, our lucky husbands and lovers, too) see and fondle daily. The outraged miss went on to say: "I don't want to have to go into a gas station, pay for gas and see naked people having sex, that's not appropriate at all." No doubt Ms Dickenson thinks it is appropriate to pay for 'gas' and see men killing each other on television and other men buying the weapons that make America the murder capital of the world. Another customer, also female I am ashamed to say, is reported to have added: "I'm just shocked at what is on these lighters." Is she really. Am I the only one who finds such attitudes not only hypocritical but also deeply disturbing? What possible hope is there for the children of such women to grow up into loving, well adjusted, sexually mature adults?
Until we as adults learn to accept, heal, and explore our own sexuality as a natural part of our humanity and spirituality, there is little hope that the dreadful descent into ever more extreme forms of aberrant sexual activity and its attendant evils of mental illness, abusive relationships, repression and violence, can be halted.
We need to teach our children that it is perfectly natural and normal to explore their own sexuality and that of their peers. Children need to see that their parents are not ashamed of their own sexuality. Parents who deliberately conceal their own bodies and sexual encounters through misguided feelings of guilt and shame do not realise how much damage they are doing to their children. The most serious sexual problem in our society today is not premarital sex, unwanted teenage pregnancies, paedophilia, AIDS or even sexually explicit cigarette lighters; it is our failure to accept that children are sexual beings. By denying them the right to explore, express and enjoy their sexuality as nature intended, we are ensuring that many of them will grow up to be the paedophiles, perverts and rapists of the future.
By Miranda S Givings
The prevailing view in our modern western society is that children shouldn't have sex. This presupposes that there is a broad consensus on what we mean by 'children' and 'sex', when, in reality, the terms can mean very different things to different people. Should childhood be defined by civil laws that lay down the legal age at which a child may engage in sexual activity, always assuming we can agree what we mean by 'sexual activity', or should childhood end when an individual has attained puberty? At the present time the legal constraints which most western countries, including the UK, impose upon children are widely out of step with the biological age at which puberty occurs. Should a child be legally permitted to have sex at puberty, and if not, what outlets (if any), should it be permitted to express it's natural urges during the intervening years between puberty and the age of sexual consent?
Before we can answer that, we need to clarify what we mean by 'having sex'. In the popular mind it generally means sexual intercourse. Whilst most parents would be rightly horrified at the thought of their prepubertal children engaging in sexual intercourse, they may take a different view of other forms of sexual contact. As the mother of two grown-up children for whom bath time was a daily ritual for many years I am only too well aware that it is virtually impossible to wash a child without touching their genitals! Does that make me and millions of other parents a paedophile? Of course not. What about the child who touches their own genitals or those of its playmates in play, or in conscious experimentation? It is a most unusual child who does not explore their sexuality unless prevented from doing so by a parent or guardian. Quite why parents might wish to prevent or discourage such exploration is something this article will try to address.
Although British criminal laws make it a punishable offence for adults to touch the genitals or breasts of children under some circumstances, the law is very vague about whether a child who touches themselves, or another child, is committing a criminal offence. What about a parent or guardian that touches a girl's breasts at bath time as I mentioned above? Is this an offence? Or a father than assists his son to go to the lavatory by holding his penis? I could go on about the confusion, both popular and legal, which exists in our society on the subject of childhood sexuality. The fact remains that adults and children alike today find themselves in a desperate situation which ignorance and repression do nothing to enlighten or alleviate. How have we got ourselves into this dreadful mess?
I lay the blame firmly at the door of the Church. From the beginning, the Church was a conservative, patriarchal organisation which considered human sexuality an inconvenience at best, and a certain path to hellfire and eternal damnation at worst. Women were debarred from the Priesthood and every method, both legitimate, and illegitimate was employed to excise sex from the body catholic. This was due in no small part to the role sex had played in the so-called 'pagan' religions which preceded the establishment of dogmatic Christianity, which the Church was determined to stamp out, not least because well-adjusted, sexually satisfied human beings are unlikely to embrace the concepts of sin and redemption which the early Church Fathers so zealously taught to their guilt-ridden followers.
Anything which tended to remind people that a sexually fulfilling relationship was their natural birthright was ruthlessly suppressed, and as most sexual activity takes place without clothes on, nakedness became quickly associated with sex, and thus with the pernicious dogma of 'original sin'. Once you have convinced someone that sex is a dirty necessity needed to procreate the race, it is a small step to persuade them that anything which might encourage such activity is equally shameful. Where better to begin such 'instruction' than with the children of those parents who were already firmly convinced that the ignorant dogmas the Church taught, were essential for their 'salvation'?
Prior to ascendancy of the Church children were generally regarded as either potential adults or actual adults in the eyes of the societies in which they grew up. As such they were valued for the actual or potential contribution they could make to the prosperity and culture of their communities. Work was not incompatible with play, and went hand in hand with their gradual transformation into adults. But after the abuses, to which the industrial revolution subjected the children of poorer families, our young were gradually excluded from the labour force. As these developments continued, the lot of children vastly improved, but their role as productive, even essential, members of society diminished.
And so we arrive at the modern era of the development of institutional education for children. Prior to this, families had lived in larger units, including grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and so forth. Within this structure most of the education of children took place. While in older times little verbal instruction was given about sex in the modern sense of 'sex education,' children learned by seeing and hearing what went on in the family and in the natural world around them. As the extended family was replaced by the nuclear family, outside institutions took over the education of children, and the natural, family form of sex education began to disappear along with much of the rest of traditional instruction.
This resulted in the modern view that children are to be completely 'protected,' cared for, isolated in various ways, and treated as a fragile, vulnerable species entirely different from adults. This inversion of the natural order culminated in the cult of childhood and of 'the teenager', both entirely artificial constructs with no basis in biological or psychological reality. These radical changes have rapidly brought us to the point where children are often worshipped, treated as 'trophies' and increasingly 'spoiled,' yet contribute little or nothing to the practical, productive life of our society.
The result was a head-on clash between the biological and sexual maturity of children and the new social roles assigned to them, which provide no socially sanctioned outlet for their sexuality. When this conflict was eventually noticed, both secular society and the Church were forced by their own bondage to the childhood culture they had created to declare children to be non-sexual. But when faced with the awkward biological reality of the 'non-sexual' child who could not help but explore and express their sexuality, the adult social, educational and religious powers turned to a variety of repressive tactics to keep the dirty little moppets down. These tactics ranged from admonitions about how 'nice' girls didn't 'play with themselves', through physical restraints and corporal punishment, to legal sanctions and psychiatric committals, culminating in the 19th century obsession with chastity belts and diabolically ingenious mechanical devices to prevent masturbation.
Some might consider this an overly harsh indictment of the role of the Church in fostering sexual repression, but having met countless numbers of people who can vividly recall the fear, shame and physical punishments connected with their sexual development as a child, I am left in no doubt that their ignorance and guilt was largely the outcome of the pernicious dogmas of fanatical Christianity. The irony is that many of the parents who continue to inculcate these misguided notions into their children are neither practising Christians nor particularly religious, and often blissfully unaware of the origin of the repressive beliefs they embrace. The end result is that many millions of parents have passed on to even more millions of children the belief that their sexuality and their naked bodies are things to be ashamed of and concealed.
Nowhere is this more evident or prevalent than in the United States, where many senior politicians and pillars of society routinely fulminate against any expression of sexuality by children and enthusiastically endorse the imposition of ever more ludicrous legislation in an attempt to stem what they see as a tide of unbridled promiscuity and hedonism among American teenagers. And yet the same guardians of morality do nothing to curb the violence inherent in US society nor to restrict the availability of the 'weapons of mass destruction' which every US citizen regards as their God-given right to own and use. In 21st century America, it's OK to display a handgun, but God forbid that a woman should display a naked breast or a teenage girl show a bit of leg in case it might encourage passersby to sexually molest or assault them. Have we so little self-control that we need to be protected from our own sexuality?
One of the areas which the treatment of children as a species apart from adults has most affected, is marriage. Throughout most of human history societies have allowed marriage at or near the time of puberty, sometimes very much earlier. When it was done at very early ages it was almost always for political reasons which are irrelevant to this discussion. The Church itself for centuries tended to follow the Jewish pattern of a minimum age of twelve for girls and thirteen for boys, though by no means everyone married that early! Yet puberty clearly marked the point at which childhood ended and adulthood began — just as it does in nature. Most earlier societies recognised and celebrated this important transition with 'rites of passage and 'puberty rituals' which formally signaled the entrance of the child into the privileges and responsibilities of adulthood. These practices continue to this day in some so-called 'primitive' cultures where young people are expected to be sexually active at puberty and often begin raising families soon afterwards, even though most Western civil and religious laws forbid it.
In such cultures children are not only permitted sexual play and experimentation from puberty, but actively encouraged in it. This is seen as the beginning of a natural process that prepares them for their future role as sexually balanced adults. Perhaps the most pernicious effect of the modern cult of 'childhood' is the widespread denial that our children also indulge in various kinds of sex play. Yet, because that play is either ignored, actively discouraged or even punished, it becomes part of the secret life of our children who quickly acquire the guilt and shame which contribute so largely to the ignorance, denial and repression which bedevil adult sexual relations in our society.
It is ironic that despite the so-called 'swinging sixties' and the sexual freedoms which they ushered in — particularly for women — we cling to the notion that sexual activity should only begin with marriage, despite the fact that most of us reach puberty many years, sometimes decades before we marry. I firmly believe that not only are healthy, sexual relations within marriage seriously inhibited by the negative teachings most of us received as children, but that even more damage is done by the typical postponement of marriage far into the years of sexual maturity.
In the affluent nations of the world (coincidentally the same nations that have the greatest problems with pornography and paedophilia) the average marriageable age has steadily advanced through recent centuries to the mid-twenties — some twelve years later than the average age of puberty! This irony has not been lost on many health professionals and psychologists, yet continues to be completely ignored by the vast majority of parents and teachers.
The evidence from historical, cultural, biological and psychological causes overwhelmingly demonstrates that Nature intended us to be sexual adults at puberty and to experiment sexually to some degree much earlier. Yet our modern, western culture so inhibits this natural growth process that we enter adulthood seriously crippled sexually, psychologically and often morally and spiritually too, often unable to enjoy satisfying lives of sexual intimacy. It is my firm conviction that the primary cause of this dire state of affairs is the sexual persecution and guilt inflicted on children by the traditional negative views of dogmatic Christianity and our sexually repressed, western culture.
What alternative is left to our children, conditioned to regard sex as 'dirty' and their bodies as 'shameful', but to succumb to furtive, guilt-ridden fumblings on the one hand, or the denial and repression of the most fundamental of our desires on the other? Is it any wonder that countless millions grow up to become deeply frustrated, confused and damaged adults, who in turn, will pass the same dreadful inheritance onto their children, thus continuing the vicious circle of guilt, repression, perversion and abuse? It does not surprise me in the least that millions of frustrated and damaged adults should seek some outlet for their sexual urges in pornography, nor that some should wish to have sex with children, nor that many others can only express their sexuality through pain, humiliation and abuse. What does surprise me is that we are not all like that!
Well, some of us are clearly headed in that direction as a recent Internet news item reporting the complaints of two women against the proprietor of an American petrol station for selling 'pornographic' cigarette lighters, brought home to me all too painfully. The lighters apparently 'featured' pictures of naked men and women engaged in various sexual acts, the mere sight of which caused one of the female complainants, a Ms Danielle Dickenson to say, "I just looked over to my right and I saw there was these lighters with women's breasts exposed."
Women's breasts? Exposed! Heaven forbid that we should be exposed to the sight of something we women have possessed since creation which our babies (and sometimes, our lucky husbands and lovers, too) see and fondle daily. The outraged miss went on to say: "I don't want to have to go into a gas station, pay for gas and see naked people having sex, that's not appropriate at all." No doubt Ms Dickenson thinks it is appropriate to pay for 'gas' and see men killing each other on television and other men buying the weapons that make America the murder capital of the world. Another customer, also female I am ashamed to say, is reported to have added: "I'm just shocked at what is on these lighters." Is she really. Am I the only one who finds such attitudes not only hypocritical but also deeply disturbing? What possible hope is there for the children of such women to grow up into loving, well adjusted, sexually mature adults?
Until we as adults learn to accept, heal, and explore our own sexuality as a natural part of our humanity and spirituality, there is little hope that the dreadful descent into ever more extreme forms of aberrant sexual activity and its attendant evils of mental illness, abusive relationships, repression and violence, can be halted.
We need to teach our children that it is perfectly natural and normal to explore their own sexuality and that of their peers. Children need to see that their parents are not ashamed of their own sexuality. Parents who deliberately conceal their own bodies and sexual encounters through misguided feelings of guilt and shame do not realise how much damage they are doing to their children. The most serious sexual problem in our society today is not premarital sex, unwanted teenage pregnancies, paedophilia, AIDS or even sexually explicit cigarette lighters; it is our failure to accept that children are sexual beings. By denying them the right to explore, express and enjoy their sexuality as nature intended, we are ensuring that many of them will grow up to be the paedophiles, perverts and rapists of the future.
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RoosterDance
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Re: Butterfly Kisses: Researching Female Pedophilia
Out of the Mouth of Babes: Youth Speak Out on Youthlove
Kids Club Anthology #1
What are the Kids Club anthologies?
Sexual attraction to youth, youth sexuality, adult/youth relationships, and the age of consent are all topics - grouped under the word "youthlove" for convenience - which inspire a multitude of emotions and opinions depending on who you talk to. Though not an over-whelming amount, there is still a plethora of intriguing material that has been wrtt:en on the subject. While more negative and antagonistic anaylses of these subjects aren't difficult to come by, positive, neutral, and engaging discourse around the topics are less likely to be found by the average person.
Therefore, this is the first in a series of anthologies which are an attempt by me to put together and distribute a variety of often overlooked viewpoints concerning these subjects. So much information and many opinions about these topics are hard to find, restricted to academics or people lucky enough to be able to visit archives, and spread far across many publications and disciplines.
These collections are by no means exhaustive or definitive; due to my mother tongue, they will unfortunately be Anglocentric and limited almost entirely to pieces originally written in English.
I hope these anthologies can be of use to those attacted to youth, those interested in a fuller range of opinions on these topics, academics and researchers in search of historical documents, and those who wish to further understand the attraction to youth and issues surrounding the age of consent and adult/youth relationships.
It is my sincere hope that these anthologies will contribute to further understanding of these topics and spur discussion of the subjects that go beyond a simple anti or pro view and fully engage with the questions and issues that arise when these conversations occur.
Introduction
Despite all of the noise from the anti, pro, and neutral side of youthlove, there is one group whose voice is often forgotten - youth themselves. Whether this is from an ageist assu-mption that youth don't know what's good for them or the unfortunate reality that youth don't often get a chance to express their view in print media, it represents a glaring omission in most discussions of topics such as youthlove, the age of consent, and adult/youth relationships. A true discussion of these subjects can't be had if only adults are granted a chance to speak.
This anthology collects material from the late 70s to the mid 90s written by gay boys and lesbians, self-proclaimed dykes and fags, feminists, youth liberationists, and groups for queer youth.
Several recurring themes emerge throughout the pieces: ageism both in communities and in legislation, a youth's right to decide for themselves, and the ways in which imbalances of power can be fixed. No matter the subject, one message is clear throughout: "listen to us!"
A Militant Young Dyke's Feminist Perspective on the Age of Consent Question
by Anonymous
This anonymous essay appeared in Gay Youth Community News (vol. 1, no. 5, December 1979/January 1980), a Bay Area-based newspaper published by the National Gay Youth Network. The network, composed of youth groups, student unions, and sponsors, offered state resources and information on how someone could start their own gay youth group. The essay appeared in response to a piece by Lynne Shapiro in the Los Angeles-based, bimonthly feminist lesbian magazine The Lesbian Tide, wherein the author denied age of consent and pederasty as being "gay issues" and spoke against having age of consent reform be part of the demands of the 1979 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights.
In the September/October [1979] issue of Lesbian Tide was an article entitled "Women Loving Women Denounce Men 'Loving' Boys."
It was an enraging experience to read this article. For all its outrageousness, though, it seemed familiar.
It was representative of a great population of older Lesbians' perspective of age of consent.
The article was an outline of Lesbian Feminist Liberation's 1 position and rationale for objecting to making the lowering of the age of consent one of the demands for the March on Washington.
Arguments are:
This anonymous essay appeared in Gay Youth Community News (vol. 1, no. 5, December 1979/January 1980), a Bay Area-based newspaper published by the National Gay Youth Network. The network, composed of youth groups, student unions, and sponsors, offered state resources and information on how someone could start their own gay youth group. The essay appeared in response to a piece by Lynne Shapiro in the Los Angeles-based, bimonthly feminist lesbian magazine The Lesbian Tide, wherein the author denied age of consent and pederasty as being "gay issues" and spoke against having age of consent reform be part of the demands of the 1979 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights.
No dialog with Young women. Voilà, we have an obnoxious insult to Young people. (And for all the patronization for Young women we get a special treat of oppression.) There is another fundamental problem with the foundation of LFL's position besides misinformed and adult-biased "studying."
It seems to be either unknown or regarded as irrelevant that: 1) Young people can be/are punished for willfully consenting to a sexual relation with an adult; 2) Young people are not allowed (do not have the right) to engage in sexual relationships with each other, either, under present laws protecting us.
But now I'll go on with the arguments against the lowering of the age of consent.
"Power differences between adults and children make consent highly doubtful."
The very same "tremendous power differences" noted in defense of age of consent laws make Real Protection from coercive or exploitative sexual experiences more than doubtful.
In fact, these power differences make for repression of our sexuality from above - so to speak - and exploitation in the dark. (You know some of the most "protective" fathers in this world creep into their daughter's bedroom at night...)
Yes, young people have less power, to be sure, and older people denying Young people's ability to say yes or no are participating in such imbalance by denying us that right.
"Repeal of the age of consent laws presents great dangers to Young women as 97-99% of molested children are girls who are raped and taken advantage of by heterosexual men."
Yes, it may be mostly Young women being raped and abused by heterosexual men.
It is also significant to note the popularized fact that it mostly occurs within the family home which emphasizes how "protective" control over Young people is most corrupt where it is most centralized.
Why do older women refuse to see the obvious correlation of Young women having the right to say no in general - not having control over her living situation or her own body - her body and her life being her parent's property - and sexual abuse by the possessors?
Consider how a woman is being raped every minute.... consider how millions and millions of women over 21 are being used and abused as pornography models and as prostitutes... under laws that allow male-female sex....
If age of consent laws are such a valuable, viable "protection" for Young women from sexual abuse - it seems logical too that heterosexual sex between persons of any age be outlawed.
Men should be sent to prison for one to five years and women should be hospitalized in a mental institution indeterminately until they are "rehabilitated" and no longer engage in such self-destructive behavior.
"It is outrageous to consider framing laws in terms of male needs when the vast majority of those affected are female."
This is true. And it is a patriarchal interest to maintain "protective" control over our bodies.
Think about how over half of Young women institutionalized in this country are there for committing a status offense, while 18% of Young men are put away on that basis. About five times as many Young women as Young men are institutionalized for sexual behavior before reaching the age of consent. While as stated above, most adult/youth sexual abuse is perpetrated by men!
With laws the way they are it is important (and intelligent) to look at who's getting caught for what and why!
How many sexually abusing guardians or close family members are being prosecuted and institutionalized?
LFL and company are not thinking with this perspective though.
Actually, it seems their intended meaning was the quintessence of sexist as well as ageist thinking, buying into the idea that boys have sexual feelings and are more able to protect themselves from sexual abuse while girls are more "pure" and defenseless, and are therefore in need of more strong-handed "protection from the arm of the law."
What a scream-worthy "feminist" line!
"It is not a children's rights issue."
I have had fully consensual sexual relationships with women (who happened to be over 21) since the age of 13. I could have been punished. I could have been punished beyond my relationship being destroyed, cut off, taken away... my lovers imprisoned... my being put through a trial and pressured to testify against them... I could have been taken "into custody" by the state. I could have been processed by a juvenile institution (a "home" or "school" or "camp") for an unlimited (until age 18) sentence as a status offender (for being involved in a sexual relationship and/or for being willfully and independently seeing a woman against my guardians' wishes - or for leaving their home).
The only reason it didn't happen is because my guardians either did not know of the relationships, or did not exercise thier prerogative to have me put away. Tell me about how the right to consent isn't a child's rights issue!
"People genuinely concerned with children's liberation should instead approach their legal oppression in a much broader sense than just changing the age at which they can have sex."
I must agree wholeheartedly that people concerned with children's and Young people's liberation should approach Young people's oppression in a much broader sense than just changing the age at which people can have sex. Yes. Status offenses as a whole should be eliminated. Yes. Young people must gain full First Amendment rights in our homes and schools and communities. Young people must have the right to direct our education. Young people must gain the right o live independently. Yes! Our bodies must become sovereign - not property to be spanked, molested or otherwise used and abused! And I agree that older men wanting to fight first, foremost, and only for "lowering of the age of consent" are certainly not concerned with Young people's rights - they are concerned with their interest in being sexual with "kids" or "youngsters" or "chickens" (to use their own ageist terminology). Not our right to make choices.
It would also be a perfect step for LFL and those agreeing with them to follow that idea of a "broader sense" on their side. Approach our sexual exploitation in a "much broader sense" than attempting to "protect" Young people - Young women - by upholding laws which bar Young people from exercising our choices about our feelings, our bodies, and our relationships.
Notes
1. LFL is a national group based in New York which lobbies against the demand proposed and lobbied for by both a "Men Loving Boys" group and a member of Gay Youth of New York.
2. "Children" is supposed to denote all people under age 18 (or presumably under legal consenting age in states with a different age of consent.) There are no distinctions made by LFL - or Lynn Shapiro, author of the article - between children 2 years, 6 years, or 16 years of age in all the statements regarding "children."
Fuck the Age of Consent!
Lesbian & Gay Freedom Movement
The Lesbian and Gay Freedom Movement was a radical, anarchist-aligned queer group based in London whose outlook and vocabulary was reminiscent of 70s gay liberation. Their support for youth and youthlovers was explicit, aiming for sexual freedom for all as well as children's liberation and freedom to choose their own sexuality. Two articles from the collective's newsle4er are included here - Fuck the Age of Consent! (Winter 1993) and Criminal Justice Act (Spring 1995). It's unknown if the two pieces were penned by the same author, as none of the newsle4er's articles specify who wrote them.
Fuck the Age of Consent!
As a queer teenager I'm often expected to support other gay and bisexual men in their quest for an equal age of consent. When I give the 'politically incorrect' stance of not supporting them they seem to have a look of complete disbelief on their faces and often attack me and patronise me as a young child who "just doesn't understand politics." Any age of consent oppresses me, allowing the state to have control over when I'm allowed sex. I wanted sex at 11 and would have taken it had it been offered. As I see it, an age of consent protects no-body. It doesn't stop abuse or give young people (straight or gay) the power to say "no," or report the abuse. All it does is create an aura of fear around sex for the queer under 21 or the straight woman under 16. Once 21 or 16 are reached, it's almost as if we must have sex to be considered normal or just because we've reached the age when we should be consen-ting. The age of consent doesn't do anything other than oppress, create fear, and allow the state to control our most personal feelings and desires. It's as if they have created the law to make sure we feel ashamed and keep to their morals. It's up to each person whether they have sex at 8 or 12 or 16 or 21 or 89 or never, and there should be information about sex and access to safer sex materials at any age. So whenever they ask me about the age of consent I'll say NO to 21, NO to 18, NO to 16, and NO to the age of consent itself. Abuse can't be stopped by the law, neither can protection be given; but control, guilt and fear can and will occur.
FUCK 21, FUCK 18, FUCK 16, WE SAY FUCK THE AGE OF CONSENT!
Criminal Justice Act
The Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill 1 having become an Act of Parliament, is having far reaching effects upon the way we demonstrate peacefully and live our lives. As the government tightens its grip of control over our lives people are being arrested as a result of this act.
It is no longer legal for us to have spontaneous or planned demonstrations or actions against State Policy or the rich without police permission. The effect this may have on isolating and dividing dissent against the government may be great. In a country supposedly advocating
free speech so many voices and ways of expressing anger peacefully have been silenced and stopped.
Certain groups such as ravers and squatters, travelers and hunt sabs 2 have been forced into illegality in order to follow their lifestyles or carry out their beliefs. The hypocrisy of the State tries to create anti-discrimination legislation for some groups yet chooses others to be hounded out of society and used as scapegoats for their own policies which cause violence and poverty.
The State makes grudging concessions to gays and lesbians by reducing the legal age for gay sex from 21 to 18 and decriminalising homosexuality for both sexes in the armed forces, but at the same time reduces the rights of squatters, travelers, ravers and those who wish to protest. The State hopes to divide up anger against the system by rewarding some who conform and punishing those who disobey and want to change.
As a young faggot I'm meant to be proud of the age of consent reduction from 21 to 18 for us men loving men contained within the Act. I'm meant to rejoice at the kindness and tolerance of the State in allowing me to follow my perversion. Well all I feel is sick in the gut that so many gays sold out to the State. It was more important to get permission from the state to love and fuck their own sex than to stick with everyone like squatters, travelers and so on who lost what security they had when this became an act. The only permission I need for having sex is my own. No-one has the right to decide when, how or who I fuck.
As long as we both consent it's none of their business. The State is assimilating queers the same way it turned punk, the politics and lifestyles, into punk - the fashion-accessory. For many queers who advocate marriage rights, army rights, church rights and so on the mental assimilation is almost complete. For queers, bisexuals, dykes, gender traitors, boy-lovers, S&Mers, girl-lovers, non-conforming hetties, homos, faggots, sexual mutants, drags, femmes, butches and so on the assimilation will never start until society has changed from its oppressive, unequal form to an all-embracing, all equal, all loving, all fun, diverse society. For me in my room the fight to change society will carry on, the fight to get rid of the State won't stop.
I'm not going to be a gay sell-out. For the squatters who can now have violence used against them in evictions, the travelers whose whole way of life is under threat, the ravers who shall be punished for not following the State guidelines for fun, the fight will not be over. Until everyone can live their lives without laws confining them the fight will not be over. The Criminal Justice Act is one piece in the framework of the State's way of control and oppression of us all. Oppose the Act, change society and have fun!!
Notes
1. The Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill of 1994 introduced a number of changes to existing lesgislation and was especially focused on, as Part IV of the bill called it, "collective trespass or nuisance on land" - essentially, as the article mentions, ravers, travelers, squatters, and campers. The bill also reduced the age of consent for homosexual acts from 21 to 18 years of age - still 2 years older than the heterosexual age of consent of 16.
2. "Hunt sab" is short for "hunt sabotage," in which animal rights activists take direct action to interefere with hunting activities.
42 & 13 - Our Love is Real
by Anonymous
This piece is a letter printed in the January/February 1986 issue of Lesbian Connection, a bimonthly newsletter created by the Ambitious Amazons collective in Lansing, Michigan. The newsletter's first issue declares it to be "A National Lesbian Forum - News & Ideas For, By & About Lesbians," and it has fulfilled its mission from 1979 to today. Along with the original letter, this collection includes response letters published in later issues.
I am a 13-year-old originally from Lima, Peru. I went to a Catholic school there and fell in love with one of the nuns, Anne, my English teacher. At the time I was involved with a girl my own age and I was very scared because the school did not approve of gays. I used to confide all my problems to Anne, and she was always so sweet and sympathetic. She was the only one who understood. When she told us that she was going back to the United States and leaving the religious order, I cried for weeks and weeks. Later, I found out that she had been accused of being a bad influence on us and had been sent back to the US.
We kept in touch by letter. Then, because I was at the top of my class, I got to come to the States on an exchange students program. After living with an American family for three months I moved in with Anne, against the family's wishes. She is 42 years old and we are now lovers. We have some problems, because people are mean and do not approve. Everyone that we know says it will not work, but I am so happy and I love her very much. She works at a women's center as a counselor for battered women and she is afraid of losing her job if anybody finds out. I am in high school now and learning English. I love this country. People are more understanding. Some of them. Anne used to be very active in Dignity, an organization for Catholic Gays, but some of the women there who knew about us gave us a lot of trouble. One of them called her sick and said that she would get in trouble with the law. I was approached several times to see if I needed help. They don't understand that I am the one who wants to live my life with Anne. So we have just a few dear friends who do not care about our age difference.
I want to tell you there is nothing wrong with her or me. I am not looking for a mot-her, nor I am replacing my mother with her, like someone said to me. We have a commit-ment to each other. We have a full sex life which is very satisfying for both of us. People don't understand that young people have sexual feelings too (I am usually the aggressive one). I have learned to be careful and discreet with certain people. We know of one other similar couple (they are 15 and 29), and we visit them. And we are most happy when we are together. I do also have friends my own age, and I participate in school activities (next year I will be a cheerleader). I only know that I have never been so happy in my life and I don't want it to ever change. The only reason I am writing is to let you know that there truly are more girls like me, who are not ashamed or confused about our sexuality. I only wish that more people would take us seriously. Some of us are happy the way we are, and we will grow up to be responsible adults because of the love and understanding we get from grown-up people.
--BellAire, TX
Two letters in reply, one negative and one a bit more positive, were printed in the following March/April, 1986 issue.
Seeking Emancipation in San Francisco
by Jes Harrison
Jes Harrison (age 16) gave this speech at the “Man/Boy Love and Sexual Liberation” panel held during a North American Man/Boy Love conference at the Pride Center in San Francisco on October 7, 1984. He tells of how he is seeking legal emancipation from his mother and abusive stepfather, and had to go to San Francisco to find a social worker who believed that he was abused at home and not "molested" by his 19 year old lover. Also present at the conference was Ma4achine Society founder Harry Hay, journalist and International Gay and Lesbian Archives founder Jim Kepner, and early gay rights activist Morris Kight.
On June 1st I met a 19 year old student at the JC (junior college) and we started going out and everything and my parents found out and they didn't approve of it. And before this I used to bring him over before they found out he was gay, and they just loved him, they thought he was the greatest guy in the world. The second they found out, they just got totally hostile and they just went the whole nine yards to [accuse him of] child molesting, you know, put him in jail.
My mother approved of it at first, my stepfather didn't. The first thing she said one day when I came up the front steps, she said, "Dad knows, now." Then he drove up and then the interrogation began: you know, hitting me, threatening me and stuff to say everything that had happened. So I was scared, I was very naive at the time. They were telling me things like if I didn't tell them everything, they were going to put me in an insane asylum and stuff like that, just really off the wall stuff. And I'm from Santa Rosa, I don't know any of this! And so, I believed it all, I'm crying and I tell them everything. And then, I had no idea it was going to the police. So then I get in the car and we go down to the-- It was just exactly like you see in the movies: a dark room, the lamp, interrogation. I was in there for about two and a half hours, a taped interview, and me telling them all what happened.
And then my lover, Paul, my mom got on the phone to him and totally just told him never to call again, you know, and all this stuff, and told him that he was sick in the head and needed psychiatric help. And then the next day at work, I contacted my lover and from that point on, we just did everything we could to keep him out of jail and we had both quite good reputations at school with everything so we had to keep those reputations up. And then the only other thing I could do was to come down here to San Francisco and get emancipated to keep him out of jail and keep both our reputations up. And that's basically my present situation: I'm trying to be emancipated. And it isn't the easiest thing in the world!
I thought it was against the law to be gay! I thought you could be thrown in jail for being gay! I was lucky in Santa Rosa to see a gay person on the street. I just got all excited, "Oh, wow, maybe I can pick him up!" Two gay people - I was in heaven! Kids do have some kind of power, but I knew nothing of it. I was being bombarded with bullshit! The things they were telling me, "You can't do this, we're going to do this to you, and you're going to say this and you can't do nothing about it!" Maybe there's some kind of pamphlet they can send out to everybody explaining their rights.
Children and Sex - A View From the Staff
Youth Liberation
Youth Liberation was an organization based in Ann Arbor, Michigan run directly by youth which served as the hub for youth liberation information and organization around the United States. This piece appeared in the April/June 1978 issue of FPS, which had several articles centering on the subject of children and sexuality. FPS (later subtitled The Magazine of Young People's Liberation) was the successor of CHIPS (Cooperative High school Independent Press Service), which provided articles and graphics for (official and underground) school papers and youth in general. FPS continued to provide the same services as CHIPS and expanded to include original contributions and bibilographic resources.
Most people, it seems, find it abhorrent to associate children and sex. If the subject is forced into their consciousness through reading a newspaper article or watching 60 Minutes they are apt to get a distortion: images of children in bondage, or being kidnapped from happy midwestern homes and sold on the streetcorners of New York.
Depending on one's tastes, politics, sexuality, upbringing and commitment to the liberation of young people, the meaning and significance of those articles and TV shows can vary wildly. Many people on the far right, as well as some on the left, are extremely puri-tanical and suggest that children and sex should be kept as far apart as possible. Others may favor childhood sex, yet be disgusted by child/adult sex. Still others may feel that child/adult sex could be acceptable, but that child pornography is the ultimate exploitation of young people.
We present our views here because the question of children and sex is rarely discus-sed from the perspective of the rights of the young people themselves.
There are three major areas we will consider: prostitution, pornography and sex. We would prefer not to have to address prostitution and pornography at all, but since they are in the forefront of the media barrage and are quite popular in this society we can't ignore them. At first we were hesitant to write this article, because it touches on very sensitive points, yet it cannot possibly be long enough to thoroughly explain the reasoning behind our position. We therefore ask the reader to do some serious thinking on this subject herself before accepting or rejecting our position.
Sex Between Old And Young
Youth Liberation believes that children should have the right to control their bodies. We are immediately suspicious of anyone who claims to protect children by restricting their rights (including their 'right' to be a prostitute or to have sex with an adult). Generally, neither children nor any other oppressed group is truly helped by such protection.
One peril that young people certainly don't need to be protected from is sexual exper-ience with other young people. We support the right of young people to engage in sex with other young people. In fact, we encourage it. We know of no evidence that child sex is dangerous or harmful, and we feel there is ample research which shows that children enjoy sex and participate in it fully and freely unless repressed by adults.
We also feel that there is nothing inherently wrong with sexual relationships between adults and young people. Again, we don't know of any valid evidence that consensual sex between adults and teenagers, or sex play between adults and very young children, is harm-ful. Our own experience, knowledge, and intuition suggest that sex between adults and children is enjoyable and can be helpful for later sexual development. The major problem, as Kinsey discovered about 30 years ago, is not the fact that sex takes place, but the reaction of the community, laying on its "old tired ethics."
Alfred Kinsey was America's most important sex researcher - personally interviewing thousands of people about their sexual experiences during his career. He did some research on adult/child sex which he conducted by interviewing adults who had sex with children and young people who had been involved with adults. He concluded:
There is another aspect of the consent question, one which is a classic example of ageism in action.
An unspoken belief held by many who argue that young people can't give consent is that young people aren't sexual, and therefore could not give consent even if they wanted to. However, studies of other societies shows quite the opposite. In many societies pre-adolescents are allowed to engage in sex and to observe sexual behavior in adults. Kinsey found that children were capable of reaching multiple orgasms, and that males actually reach their sexual peak during their teen years.
Anthropologists Bronislaw Malinowski reported that the children of the Trobiand Islands of Oceania participated in erotic games at age 4, and were enjoying regular sexual intercourse at about age ten. 2 Similar data has been gathered for other regions of the world. Anthropologist Richard Currier writes: "It is hard to avoid the conclusion that -given the opportunity - children will develop their sexual skills along with all the other social skills that will be needed in adult life."3
Unfortunately, there is always potential for abuse in adult/child relationships, just as there is in all sexual relationships. Rape by fathers of daughters is probably the most common form of child sexual abuse. Rape and all other non-consensual sex should fall under child abuse laws, but the mere fact of sex between children and adults should not be considered abuse. Furthermore, the definition of child sexual abuse should closely parallel that for adults. Wives should have as much right to be protected from sexual abuse from men as do children (and it is a fact that almost all sexual abuse is perpetrated by men).
Prostitution
The question of child prostitution presents many questions, the most important of which is what opinion should one have of prostitution in general? We feel that prostitutes provide a service that is important and valuable in this society. We hope that won't always be the case, but since it is now, prostitution is work that should be respected, legal, well-paid and free from danger. It is as valid as modeling or professional sports or other jobs where one sells one's body. But should young people have equal access to the profession of prostitution?
Youth Liberation feels they should, just as we feel young people should have the right to work at Ford or in coal mines or in other exploitative jobs. Many jobs in this society are based on exploitation, but to deny young people the right to participate in them is to deny them the right to participate in society itself. If one ignores the moralistic arguments about prostitution, it's not that much different from any other job, though prostitutes often have more control over their immediate work situation than do other workers.
It is precisely on this point that the idea of young people's liberation takes on its most important significance. Youth Liberation is not and cannot be seen solely as a movement to integrate young people equally into American society, because many aspects of American society are oppressive. We feel that denying young people the right to participate fully in this society protects them from very little - basically the same conditions that adults must function under every day. And it denies them the knowledge and experience necessary to change the society.
Denying young people the 'right' to be prostitutes or to engage in other forms of work is phony protection - it denies young people experience and income that is probably no more harmful or helpful to them than it is for adults engaged in similar professions. The only way to wipe out juvenile prostitution is to wipe out prostitution altogether, and the only way to do that is to eliminate the two pillars of prostitution, capitalism and sexual repression.
A full page ad which recently appeared in the Metropolitan News, a Minneapolis sex tabloid, illustrates the ageism involved in preventing juvenile prostitution:
"If you are a prostitute, refuse to work with juveniles. Do not introduce her to custo-mers of yours. If she is a runaway, attempt to contact her parents to inform them of her whereabouts...
"If you are a pimp, respect yourself enough to deal with women, not children. Pimps who turn out weak-minded, unhappy, and confused school girls, do so because they aren't man enough to handle women. If you have associates who traffic in juveniles, let them feel your disapproval..." (emphasis added)
Primo Times, an alternative paper from the mid-west, showed more insight in an editorial explaining why they weren't terrified of child prostitution and pornography:
"We do not advocate the exploitation of children; if we did then we'd stop messing around with this magazine and invest in one of those Hong Kong clothing factories where kids work ten hours a day for $1.00 an hour."
On the other hand, we feel that many young women who become prostitutes don't do it because they want to, but because there are no other decent paying jobs available, especia-lly if they are runaways. The problem here is not so much that young women are becoming prostitutes - it's that this society has so little respect for the young that it provides no decent jobs or alternatives for oppressive home situations. The prostitution problem can only be solved by providing young people with concrete alternatives and this society seems unwilling to do that.
Finally, we feel that prostitutes, young and old, should have a right to at least the same working conditions as other workers. We are opposed to pimps and parlor owners controlling prostitutes through physical force, drug dependency and the like as we are to the State denying young people equal rights. Prostitution should be decriminalized for minors and adults as a first step, and we should all work for social changes that will mini-mize the need for prostitution at all.
Child Pornography
Should child pornography be outlawed? Should children be denied the 'right' to be photographed and filmed for erotica? Everyone has read in the media that children are forced to partake in such sessions, that parents sometimes 'sell' their children to porn pro-ducers, that children are forced to engage in conduct that is utterly repulsive to them. Well, whenever those conditions exist, we feel they should be considered child abuse and should be illegal.
But does that mean that young people who are photographed quite willingly (as boys often are for gay men's magazines, for example) should be prohibited from making money for that? Or that movies such as Pretty Baby should be banned? We don't think so, because taking nude photographs of children doesn't necessarily involve force or evil. The best way to regulate the production and sale of child pornography is to work to end the sexual repre-ssion that makes such items profitable.
There are several other reasons to argue for the right of children to participate in sex, and for allowing the distribution of child pornography. One is that history has shown that when there are restrictions placed on the First Amendment it is often political and educa-tional materials that end up getting banned, not pornography. In a more progressive society perhaps it would be possible to ban materials that were abusive to women and children (as pornography usually is) without endangering other freedoms. But in the U.S. at this time it is not.
For example, in 1977 New York State passed a law which prohibits all books with sexually explicit photographs of children. The excellent sex education book Show Me! is now illegal there. The publisher, along with the Association of American Publishers, the American Booksellers Association and the Freedom to Read Foundation is now challenging the law. They received a favorable decision in District court, but the State is appealing. A related reason to defend the right of a mingling between children and sex is to confront head-on the section of the right wing represented by people like Anita Bryant4. The right wing is mounting an attack on the few positive aspects and trends in American cul-ture. If they open a crack they may unleash a flood of regressive laws against homosex-uality, lesbianism, non-marital sex, teenage sex and who knows what else. Sexual repres-sion is a political tool of the right and we must vigorously defend the right of young people to be winners rather than pawns in that struggle.
Towards The Future
Finally, we must contrast our limited view of present conditions with how we think things should be. In rational society, sex would be celebrated, not repressed. Sex among children, sex between children and adults and sex in general would be judged by how it made people feel, not by puritanical moral standards.
Richard Currier, in an article in Human Behavior magazine, suggestions that the explosion in child pornography, child prostitution and interest in sex is evidence that American children can no longer be insulated from the changes in sexual mores.
He says that "...Western society has undergone a revolution in sexual values, but has tried to apply it exclusively to adults... How do we explain to our kids that while sex is natural, healthy, normal and good, they should refrain from enjoying it until they grow up and leave home?"5
Hopefully fewer and fewer parents are dishing out that line, and even if they are young people don't seem to be paying very close attention. But we are still a long way from a society where sexual relationships aren't surrounded with repression and misinformation, where sex will be a creative, enjoyable and less mysterious part of life. Sexual relationships are fantastically diverse and someday we will be able to celebrate that diversity rather than distorting it and hawking it on street corners and in dimly lit bookstores.
It is unfortunate that we have to fight some of the battles for children's freedom on the territory of prostitution and pornography. But if we don't fight there we may lose the war.
Notes
1. Alfred Kinsey, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders Company, 1953)
2. Bronislaw Malinowski, The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1929)
3. Richard Currier, "Juvenile Sexuality in Global Perspective," republished in L.L. Constantine and Floyd Martinson, eds., Children and Sex (Boston: Little, Brown, 1981)
4. Anita Bryant was an American singer turned anti-gay activist who led the 1977 Save the Children campaign in Dade County, Florida in an attempt to repeal a sexual orientation anti-discrimination ordinance.
5. Richard Currier, 1981.
I was "Only a Kid" to My Mother's Lovers
by Sky
This piece was contributed by Sky, who left home at 15 to work with Youth Liberation of Ann Arbor, to the 1978 Youth Liberation anthology Growing Up Gay. Along with the FPS magazine, Youth Liberation published pamphlets and books which discussed youth liberation and related topics such as youth culture, high school women's liberation, and student and youth organizing.
I've always been more attracted to women than men. That's not to say I've never been attracted to a man, but I've always been more comfortable with women - physically, socially and emotionally.
Although my best friend called me a 'lesbian' at age 9 when I tried to sit very close to her, I didn't consider myself a lesbian until I was 11. That year I moved in with my wild 'liberal' mother, and I met some of her lesbian friends. I finally saw that women loving women were real, and not a myth.
I've never felt any guilt about my lesbianism, but I've been hurt many times by the ageist and anti-gay atttudes I've encountered. For example, many adults (gay or straight) repress sexual feelings they have toward young people, and ignore any sexual desires that young people have toward them. Gay adults are especially afraid of showing any sexual or physical affection to young people because of the danger of being labeled a 'child molester'.
Statutory rape laws contribute to this fear, while effectively taking away young people's rights to sexual lives. Adults can be convicted of statutory rape (having a sexual relationship with a minor) regardless of the young person's consent. One of my woman lovers flatly admitted that it was fear that had made her reject my crush on her four years earlier. Even my mother's lover, Catherine, refrained from touching or kissing me, or my mother in my presence, despite the love she felt for both of us.
The sexual exclusion I experienced is very much tied to the social limits placed on me because of my youth. None of my mother's lesbian friends developed a relationship with me independent of my mother. Ageism infects the gay community just as it does the straight one.
Consider that there are no gay advocates in America working for sexual, social and economic freedom for kids. Nor are there many gay adults trying to include young people in their struggles against homophobia. And the 'Sexual Sanity' petition circulated by Ms. (magazine) limits its demand to freedom of sexual activity for consenting adults only. My mother's lesbian friends, like much of the gay community, didn't realize I had any sexua-lity. Most of them didn't see me as a whole person at all, but just 'Sabrina's kid'.
I've never hidden my lesbianism, but to this day there are many people who are unaware of it because of their ageist or heterosexist assumptions. My experiences have shown me that it is as necessary to fight the ageism of the gay community as the straight-ness of the rest of the world. Without both of these struggles, young gay people will never be liberated.
Continued in the next post...
Kids Club Anthology #1
What are the Kids Club anthologies?
Sexual attraction to youth, youth sexuality, adult/youth relationships, and the age of consent are all topics - grouped under the word "youthlove" for convenience - which inspire a multitude of emotions and opinions depending on who you talk to. Though not an over-whelming amount, there is still a plethora of intriguing material that has been wrtt:en on the subject. While more negative and antagonistic anaylses of these subjects aren't difficult to come by, positive, neutral, and engaging discourse around the topics are less likely to be found by the average person.
Therefore, this is the first in a series of anthologies which are an attempt by me to put together and distribute a variety of often overlooked viewpoints concerning these subjects. So much information and many opinions about these topics are hard to find, restricted to academics or people lucky enough to be able to visit archives, and spread far across many publications and disciplines.
These collections are by no means exhaustive or definitive; due to my mother tongue, they will unfortunately be Anglocentric and limited almost entirely to pieces originally written in English.
I hope these anthologies can be of use to those attacted to youth, those interested in a fuller range of opinions on these topics, academics and researchers in search of historical documents, and those who wish to further understand the attraction to youth and issues surrounding the age of consent and adult/youth relationships.
It is my sincere hope that these anthologies will contribute to further understanding of these topics and spur discussion of the subjects that go beyond a simple anti or pro view and fully engage with the questions and issues that arise when these conversations occur.
Introduction
Despite all of the noise from the anti, pro, and neutral side of youthlove, there is one group whose voice is often forgotten - youth themselves. Whether this is from an ageist assu-mption that youth don't know what's good for them or the unfortunate reality that youth don't often get a chance to express their view in print media, it represents a glaring omission in most discussions of topics such as youthlove, the age of consent, and adult/youth relationships. A true discussion of these subjects can't be had if only adults are granted a chance to speak.
This anthology collects material from the late 70s to the mid 90s written by gay boys and lesbians, self-proclaimed dykes and fags, feminists, youth liberationists, and groups for queer youth.
Several recurring themes emerge throughout the pieces: ageism both in communities and in legislation, a youth's right to decide for themselves, and the ways in which imbalances of power can be fixed. No matter the subject, one message is clear throughout: "listen to us!"
A Militant Young Dyke's Feminist Perspective on the Age of Consent Question
by Anonymous
This anonymous essay appeared in Gay Youth Community News (vol. 1, no. 5, December 1979/January 1980), a Bay Area-based newspaper published by the National Gay Youth Network. The network, composed of youth groups, student unions, and sponsors, offered state resources and information on how someone could start their own gay youth group. The essay appeared in response to a piece by Lynne Shapiro in the Los Angeles-based, bimonthly feminist lesbian magazine The Lesbian Tide, wherein the author denied age of consent and pederasty as being "gay issues" and spoke against having age of consent reform be part of the demands of the 1979 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights.
In the September/October [1979] issue of Lesbian Tide was an article entitled "Women Loving Women Denounce Men 'Loving' Boys."
It was an enraging experience to read this article. For all its outrageousness, though, it seemed familiar.
It was representative of a great population of older Lesbians' perspective of age of consent.
The article was an outline of Lesbian Feminist Liberation's 1 position and rationale for objecting to making the lowering of the age of consent one of the demands for the March on Washington.
Arguments are:
- "Tremendous power differences" between adults and children 2 make consent doubtful.
- Repeal of the age of consent laws presents great dangers to Young women as 97-99% of "molested children" are girls who are raped and "taken advantage of" by heterosexual men.
- It is outrageous to consider framing laws in terms of male needs when the vast majority of those affected are female.
- It is not a children's rights issue... "just plays into the fantasies adults have about their, our childhoods."
- It is mentioned that: "in developing their position, LFL relied heavily on Florence Rush's research on child molestation..."
This anonymous essay appeared in Gay Youth Community News (vol. 1, no. 5, December 1979/January 1980), a Bay Area-based newspaper published by the National Gay Youth Network. The network, composed of youth groups, student unions, and sponsors, offered state resources and information on how someone could start their own gay youth group. The essay appeared in response to a piece by Lynne Shapiro in the Los Angeles-based, bimonthly feminist lesbian magazine The Lesbian Tide, wherein the author denied age of consent and pederasty as being "gay issues" and spoke against having age of consent reform be part of the demands of the 1979 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights.
No dialog with Young women. Voilà, we have an obnoxious insult to Young people. (And for all the patronization for Young women we get a special treat of oppression.) There is another fundamental problem with the foundation of LFL's position besides misinformed and adult-biased "studying."
It seems to be either unknown or regarded as irrelevant that: 1) Young people can be/are punished for willfully consenting to a sexual relation with an adult; 2) Young people are not allowed (do not have the right) to engage in sexual relationships with each other, either, under present laws protecting us.
But now I'll go on with the arguments against the lowering of the age of consent.
"Power differences between adults and children make consent highly doubtful."
The very same "tremendous power differences" noted in defense of age of consent laws make Real Protection from coercive or exploitative sexual experiences more than doubtful.
In fact, these power differences make for repression of our sexuality from above - so to speak - and exploitation in the dark. (You know some of the most "protective" fathers in this world creep into their daughter's bedroom at night...)
Yes, young people have less power, to be sure, and older people denying Young people's ability to say yes or no are participating in such imbalance by denying us that right.
"Repeal of the age of consent laws presents great dangers to Young women as 97-99% of molested children are girls who are raped and taken advantage of by heterosexual men."
Yes, it may be mostly Young women being raped and abused by heterosexual men.
It is also significant to note the popularized fact that it mostly occurs within the family home which emphasizes how "protective" control over Young people is most corrupt where it is most centralized.
Why do older women refuse to see the obvious correlation of Young women having the right to say no in general - not having control over her living situation or her own body - her body and her life being her parent's property - and sexual abuse by the possessors?
Consider how a woman is being raped every minute.... consider how millions and millions of women over 21 are being used and abused as pornography models and as prostitutes... under laws that allow male-female sex....
If age of consent laws are such a valuable, viable "protection" for Young women from sexual abuse - it seems logical too that heterosexual sex between persons of any age be outlawed.
Men should be sent to prison for one to five years and women should be hospitalized in a mental institution indeterminately until they are "rehabilitated" and no longer engage in such self-destructive behavior.
"It is outrageous to consider framing laws in terms of male needs when the vast majority of those affected are female."
This is true. And it is a patriarchal interest to maintain "protective" control over our bodies.
Think about how over half of Young women institutionalized in this country are there for committing a status offense, while 18% of Young men are put away on that basis. About five times as many Young women as Young men are institutionalized for sexual behavior before reaching the age of consent. While as stated above, most adult/youth sexual abuse is perpetrated by men!
With laws the way they are it is important (and intelligent) to look at who's getting caught for what and why!
How many sexually abusing guardians or close family members are being prosecuted and institutionalized?
LFL and company are not thinking with this perspective though.
Actually, it seems their intended meaning was the quintessence of sexist as well as ageist thinking, buying into the idea that boys have sexual feelings and are more able to protect themselves from sexual abuse while girls are more "pure" and defenseless, and are therefore in need of more strong-handed "protection from the arm of the law."
What a scream-worthy "feminist" line!
"It is not a children's rights issue."
I have had fully consensual sexual relationships with women (who happened to be over 21) since the age of 13. I could have been punished. I could have been punished beyond my relationship being destroyed, cut off, taken away... my lovers imprisoned... my being put through a trial and pressured to testify against them... I could have been taken "into custody" by the state. I could have been processed by a juvenile institution (a "home" or "school" or "camp") for an unlimited (until age 18) sentence as a status offender (for being involved in a sexual relationship and/or for being willfully and independently seeing a woman against my guardians' wishes - or for leaving their home).
The only reason it didn't happen is because my guardians either did not know of the relationships, or did not exercise thier prerogative to have me put away. Tell me about how the right to consent isn't a child's rights issue!
"People genuinely concerned with children's liberation should instead approach their legal oppression in a much broader sense than just changing the age at which they can have sex."
I must agree wholeheartedly that people concerned with children's and Young people's liberation should approach Young people's oppression in a much broader sense than just changing the age at which people can have sex. Yes. Status offenses as a whole should be eliminated. Yes. Young people must gain full First Amendment rights in our homes and schools and communities. Young people must have the right to direct our education. Young people must gain the right o live independently. Yes! Our bodies must become sovereign - not property to be spanked, molested or otherwise used and abused! And I agree that older men wanting to fight first, foremost, and only for "lowering of the age of consent" are certainly not concerned with Young people's rights - they are concerned with their interest in being sexual with "kids" or "youngsters" or "chickens" (to use their own ageist terminology). Not our right to make choices.
It would also be a perfect step for LFL and those agreeing with them to follow that idea of a "broader sense" on their side. Approach our sexual exploitation in a "much broader sense" than attempting to "protect" Young people - Young women - by upholding laws which bar Young people from exercising our choices about our feelings, our bodies, and our relationships.
Notes
1. LFL is a national group based in New York which lobbies against the demand proposed and lobbied for by both a "Men Loving Boys" group and a member of Gay Youth of New York.
2. "Children" is supposed to denote all people under age 18 (or presumably under legal consenting age in states with a different age of consent.) There are no distinctions made by LFL - or Lynn Shapiro, author of the article - between children 2 years, 6 years, or 16 years of age in all the statements regarding "children."
Fuck the Age of Consent!
Lesbian & Gay Freedom Movement
The Lesbian and Gay Freedom Movement was a radical, anarchist-aligned queer group based in London whose outlook and vocabulary was reminiscent of 70s gay liberation. Their support for youth and youthlovers was explicit, aiming for sexual freedom for all as well as children's liberation and freedom to choose their own sexuality. Two articles from the collective's newsle4er are included here - Fuck the Age of Consent! (Winter 1993) and Criminal Justice Act (Spring 1995). It's unknown if the two pieces were penned by the same author, as none of the newsle4er's articles specify who wrote them.
Fuck the Age of Consent!
As a queer teenager I'm often expected to support other gay and bisexual men in their quest for an equal age of consent. When I give the 'politically incorrect' stance of not supporting them they seem to have a look of complete disbelief on their faces and often attack me and patronise me as a young child who "just doesn't understand politics." Any age of consent oppresses me, allowing the state to have control over when I'm allowed sex. I wanted sex at 11 and would have taken it had it been offered. As I see it, an age of consent protects no-body. It doesn't stop abuse or give young people (straight or gay) the power to say "no," or report the abuse. All it does is create an aura of fear around sex for the queer under 21 or the straight woman under 16. Once 21 or 16 are reached, it's almost as if we must have sex to be considered normal or just because we've reached the age when we should be consen-ting. The age of consent doesn't do anything other than oppress, create fear, and allow the state to control our most personal feelings and desires. It's as if they have created the law to make sure we feel ashamed and keep to their morals. It's up to each person whether they have sex at 8 or 12 or 16 or 21 or 89 or never, and there should be information about sex and access to safer sex materials at any age. So whenever they ask me about the age of consent I'll say NO to 21, NO to 18, NO to 16, and NO to the age of consent itself. Abuse can't be stopped by the law, neither can protection be given; but control, guilt and fear can and will occur.
FUCK 21, FUCK 18, FUCK 16, WE SAY FUCK THE AGE OF CONSENT!
Criminal Justice Act
The Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill 1 having become an Act of Parliament, is having far reaching effects upon the way we demonstrate peacefully and live our lives. As the government tightens its grip of control over our lives people are being arrested as a result of this act.
It is no longer legal for us to have spontaneous or planned demonstrations or actions against State Policy or the rich without police permission. The effect this may have on isolating and dividing dissent against the government may be great. In a country supposedly advocating
free speech so many voices and ways of expressing anger peacefully have been silenced and stopped.
Certain groups such as ravers and squatters, travelers and hunt sabs 2 have been forced into illegality in order to follow their lifestyles or carry out their beliefs. The hypocrisy of the State tries to create anti-discrimination legislation for some groups yet chooses others to be hounded out of society and used as scapegoats for their own policies which cause violence and poverty.
The State makes grudging concessions to gays and lesbians by reducing the legal age for gay sex from 21 to 18 and decriminalising homosexuality for both sexes in the armed forces, but at the same time reduces the rights of squatters, travelers, ravers and those who wish to protest. The State hopes to divide up anger against the system by rewarding some who conform and punishing those who disobey and want to change.
As a young faggot I'm meant to be proud of the age of consent reduction from 21 to 18 for us men loving men contained within the Act. I'm meant to rejoice at the kindness and tolerance of the State in allowing me to follow my perversion. Well all I feel is sick in the gut that so many gays sold out to the State. It was more important to get permission from the state to love and fuck their own sex than to stick with everyone like squatters, travelers and so on who lost what security they had when this became an act. The only permission I need for having sex is my own. No-one has the right to decide when, how or who I fuck.
As long as we both consent it's none of their business. The State is assimilating queers the same way it turned punk, the politics and lifestyles, into punk - the fashion-accessory. For many queers who advocate marriage rights, army rights, church rights and so on the mental assimilation is almost complete. For queers, bisexuals, dykes, gender traitors, boy-lovers, S&Mers, girl-lovers, non-conforming hetties, homos, faggots, sexual mutants, drags, femmes, butches and so on the assimilation will never start until society has changed from its oppressive, unequal form to an all-embracing, all equal, all loving, all fun, diverse society. For me in my room the fight to change society will carry on, the fight to get rid of the State won't stop.
I'm not going to be a gay sell-out. For the squatters who can now have violence used against them in evictions, the travelers whose whole way of life is under threat, the ravers who shall be punished for not following the State guidelines for fun, the fight will not be over. Until everyone can live their lives without laws confining them the fight will not be over. The Criminal Justice Act is one piece in the framework of the State's way of control and oppression of us all. Oppose the Act, change society and have fun!!
Notes
1. The Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill of 1994 introduced a number of changes to existing lesgislation and was especially focused on, as Part IV of the bill called it, "collective trespass or nuisance on land" - essentially, as the article mentions, ravers, travelers, squatters, and campers. The bill also reduced the age of consent for homosexual acts from 21 to 18 years of age - still 2 years older than the heterosexual age of consent of 16.
2. "Hunt sab" is short for "hunt sabotage," in which animal rights activists take direct action to interefere with hunting activities.
42 & 13 - Our Love is Real
by Anonymous
This piece is a letter printed in the January/February 1986 issue of Lesbian Connection, a bimonthly newsletter created by the Ambitious Amazons collective in Lansing, Michigan. The newsletter's first issue declares it to be "A National Lesbian Forum - News & Ideas For, By & About Lesbians," and it has fulfilled its mission from 1979 to today. Along with the original letter, this collection includes response letters published in later issues.
I am a 13-year-old originally from Lima, Peru. I went to a Catholic school there and fell in love with one of the nuns, Anne, my English teacher. At the time I was involved with a girl my own age and I was very scared because the school did not approve of gays. I used to confide all my problems to Anne, and she was always so sweet and sympathetic. She was the only one who understood. When she told us that she was going back to the United States and leaving the religious order, I cried for weeks and weeks. Later, I found out that she had been accused of being a bad influence on us and had been sent back to the US.
We kept in touch by letter. Then, because I was at the top of my class, I got to come to the States on an exchange students program. After living with an American family for three months I moved in with Anne, against the family's wishes. She is 42 years old and we are now lovers. We have some problems, because people are mean and do not approve. Everyone that we know says it will not work, but I am so happy and I love her very much. She works at a women's center as a counselor for battered women and she is afraid of losing her job if anybody finds out. I am in high school now and learning English. I love this country. People are more understanding. Some of them. Anne used to be very active in Dignity, an organization for Catholic Gays, but some of the women there who knew about us gave us a lot of trouble. One of them called her sick and said that she would get in trouble with the law. I was approached several times to see if I needed help. They don't understand that I am the one who wants to live my life with Anne. So we have just a few dear friends who do not care about our age difference.
I want to tell you there is nothing wrong with her or me. I am not looking for a mot-her, nor I am replacing my mother with her, like someone said to me. We have a commit-ment to each other. We have a full sex life which is very satisfying for both of us. People don't understand that young people have sexual feelings too (I am usually the aggressive one). I have learned to be careful and discreet with certain people. We know of one other similar couple (they are 15 and 29), and we visit them. And we are most happy when we are together. I do also have friends my own age, and I participate in school activities (next year I will be a cheerleader). I only know that I have never been so happy in my life and I don't want it to ever change. The only reason I am writing is to let you know that there truly are more girls like me, who are not ashamed or confused about our sexuality. I only wish that more people would take us seriously. Some of us are happy the way we are, and we will grow up to be responsible adults because of the love and understanding we get from grown-up people.
--BellAire, TX
Two letters in reply, one negative and one a bit more positive, were printed in the following March/April, 1986 issue.
- I just read the article "42 & 13 - OUR LOVE IS REAL" (vol. 8/issue 4) and was incensed. It is women of this ilk that give Lesbians a bad name. For a 42-year-old woman to molest a child of 13 is simply incomprehensible. It staggers the mind. If the relationship is truly based on love, Anne, being the "adult", should let the child grow up, unmolested, and pursue a rela-tionship of "love" outside of the bedroom until the 13-year-old is more capable of making the choice as an adult. I feel the 13-year-old should see a good counselor, and Anne should go to jail for molesting a child and see a psychiatrist for her pedophilic behavior.
--Hurleyville, NY - Having just read the article "42 & 13 - OUR LOVE IS REAL," I can imagine the kind of condemnation Anne will receive in your next issues. I'm sure she will be called everything from a pedophile to a pervert, but perhaps Anne and her young friend would best be served by a little understanding and compassion. I certainly believe that both parties in this rela-tionship would have been be:er off if they had waited a few years before consummating this union. Sometimes, however, human beings are caught up in situations governed by such emotional intensity that they do not always do what is best or even rational. One would hope that Anne, being the adult in the situation, would step back and reevaluate it. If she and the 13-year-old still feel the same way in a few years, when the 13-year-old has had a chance to grow and really make choices, then their love will have obviously stood the most important test of all - time.
--A Fellow Frail Human Being
- I just could not believe my eyes when I read the response to "42 & 13 - OUR LOVE IS REAL" (vol. 8/issue 5 Responses). I do think young people have a right to make choices about their intimate relationships. If this society has succeeded in keeping most of them helpless and "not able to make their own choices," this certainly does not mean that lesbians should also deny the right to control own's own life to a young woman who has - thank Goddess - managed to escape the restrictions the rest of us are taking for granted. Are we taking inequality so much for granted, too, that the only relationship we can imagine between a 13-year-old and a 42-year-old is the power of the latter over the former? Whatever the practical problems these women are facing, please do not add to them by declaring one of them in need of protection because of her "immaturity" and threatening the other with the classical punishment tools of our patriarchal society: prison and psychiatry. Dear "42 & 13": your lives won't always be easy but don't let anyone break your spirit.
--32 and Not Yet Adult, Helsinki, FINLAND - I was hoping for much more compassion for the "42 & 13 - OUR LOVE IS REAL" author. When will we ever understand that love and maturity are a state of mind, not necessarily related to chronological age? So what if she is 13? Who is to say she isn't mature, and capable of making choices about her own life? Who is to say she isn't mature, and capable of making choices about her own life? I have known several women who have dated 16-year-old girls, and they bedded them down as well. I don't know about your community, but this is not uncommon in mine. It is tacitly accepted, but everyone pretends it isn't happening for fear of being called child molesters. Let's be honest. Let's understand this isn't a plot to gain converts. Let's understand we are talking about women, not men. Let's say what it is - love. I say let's applaud the 13-year-old for knowing her lesbianism at such an early age. I say let's embrace them in the love they have for each other.
--San Antonio, TX - In response to the girl who wrote about her LOVE FOR AN OLDER WOMAN, I would like to add something. I was 16 when I first came out sexually. The woman I got involved with was 38 and my best friend's mother. At the time I didn't feel age had anything to do with our love, but it did. As our affair continued (it lasted 3 months), we came across a lot of prejudices. In public places people mistook us for mother and daughter and that hurt. My mother questioned our relationship, saying it was unnatural for anyone my age to even be friends with a woman her age. The relationship ended after a lot of arguments (in which she sometimes referred to me as a child). It hurt so badly, I felt my world crumble around me and I cried a lot. The positive side was it was my first learning experience sexually and that was OK. But I would not want what we went through to ever happen to me again. This was 14 years ago. Now that I'm older, I won't get involved with anyone younger because of my experience. But it's really up to you. This is not a letter to tell you what to do. I just wanted you to know what I went through.
--Pittsburgh, PA - I too, must say I was appalled at the 13/42 RELATIONSHIP. I do understand that the 13-year-old feels adult, but any adult knows 13 is still part of childhood. They are not to be blamed or censured for what they feel, but to be protected by responsible adults. This is child abuse, pure and simple.
--Seattle, WA - To 13 AND 42 - Don't let either the outraged ones or the condescending ones get you down. You know what's best for you. If you stay together, more power to you, and if you don't, neither do most couples, regardless of age. It's wonderful for women who can love each other to find each other, at any points in their stays on this planet.
-- San Francisco, CA - The responses to "42 & 13 - OUR LOVE IS REAL" were so degrading and ageist. Thirteen-year-old women are smart, sensual, and capable of making decisions in their lives. Obvi-ously, these two women have a lot to share - now. I bless your courage and give you support to endure ridicule from every direction. It is easy to be drawn to young women and it is easy to be drawn to older women. Young lesbians are extremely isolated because of taboo. I am tired of taboo and am alive to break them. When two women come together, it is for a purpose. We as womenalities can't see the reasons sometimes, but they are there. Let's not be judgmental. 42 & 13, your love is beautiful, I'm glad you have found each other, you've probably been loving each other for centuries. Wish I'd come out at 13 instead of 19.
--Annie Ocean, 36, Rainbow's End, OR
Seeking Emancipation in San Francisco
by Jes Harrison
Jes Harrison (age 16) gave this speech at the “Man/Boy Love and Sexual Liberation” panel held during a North American Man/Boy Love conference at the Pride Center in San Francisco on October 7, 1984. He tells of how he is seeking legal emancipation from his mother and abusive stepfather, and had to go to San Francisco to find a social worker who believed that he was abused at home and not "molested" by his 19 year old lover. Also present at the conference was Ma4achine Society founder Harry Hay, journalist and International Gay and Lesbian Archives founder Jim Kepner, and early gay rights activist Morris Kight.
On June 1st I met a 19 year old student at the JC (junior college) and we started going out and everything and my parents found out and they didn't approve of it. And before this I used to bring him over before they found out he was gay, and they just loved him, they thought he was the greatest guy in the world. The second they found out, they just got totally hostile and they just went the whole nine yards to [accuse him of] child molesting, you know, put him in jail.
My mother approved of it at first, my stepfather didn't. The first thing she said one day when I came up the front steps, she said, "Dad knows, now." Then he drove up and then the interrogation began: you know, hitting me, threatening me and stuff to say everything that had happened. So I was scared, I was very naive at the time. They were telling me things like if I didn't tell them everything, they were going to put me in an insane asylum and stuff like that, just really off the wall stuff. And I'm from Santa Rosa, I don't know any of this! And so, I believed it all, I'm crying and I tell them everything. And then, I had no idea it was going to the police. So then I get in the car and we go down to the-- It was just exactly like you see in the movies: a dark room, the lamp, interrogation. I was in there for about two and a half hours, a taped interview, and me telling them all what happened.
And then my lover, Paul, my mom got on the phone to him and totally just told him never to call again, you know, and all this stuff, and told him that he was sick in the head and needed psychiatric help. And then the next day at work, I contacted my lover and from that point on, we just did everything we could to keep him out of jail and we had both quite good reputations at school with everything so we had to keep those reputations up. And then the only other thing I could do was to come down here to San Francisco and get emancipated to keep him out of jail and keep both our reputations up. And that's basically my present situation: I'm trying to be emancipated. And it isn't the easiest thing in the world!
I thought it was against the law to be gay! I thought you could be thrown in jail for being gay! I was lucky in Santa Rosa to see a gay person on the street. I just got all excited, "Oh, wow, maybe I can pick him up!" Two gay people - I was in heaven! Kids do have some kind of power, but I knew nothing of it. I was being bombarded with bullshit! The things they were telling me, "You can't do this, we're going to do this to you, and you're going to say this and you can't do nothing about it!" Maybe there's some kind of pamphlet they can send out to everybody explaining their rights.
Children and Sex - A View From the Staff
Youth Liberation
Youth Liberation was an organization based in Ann Arbor, Michigan run directly by youth which served as the hub for youth liberation information and organization around the United States. This piece appeared in the April/June 1978 issue of FPS, which had several articles centering on the subject of children and sexuality. FPS (later subtitled The Magazine of Young People's Liberation) was the successor of CHIPS (Cooperative High school Independent Press Service), which provided articles and graphics for (official and underground) school papers and youth in general. FPS continued to provide the same services as CHIPS and expanded to include original contributions and bibilographic resources.
Most people, it seems, find it abhorrent to associate children and sex. If the subject is forced into their consciousness through reading a newspaper article or watching 60 Minutes they are apt to get a distortion: images of children in bondage, or being kidnapped from happy midwestern homes and sold on the streetcorners of New York.
Depending on one's tastes, politics, sexuality, upbringing and commitment to the liberation of young people, the meaning and significance of those articles and TV shows can vary wildly. Many people on the far right, as well as some on the left, are extremely puri-tanical and suggest that children and sex should be kept as far apart as possible. Others may favor childhood sex, yet be disgusted by child/adult sex. Still others may feel that child/adult sex could be acceptable, but that child pornography is the ultimate exploitation of young people.
We present our views here because the question of children and sex is rarely discus-sed from the perspective of the rights of the young people themselves.
There are three major areas we will consider: prostitution, pornography and sex. We would prefer not to have to address prostitution and pornography at all, but since they are in the forefront of the media barrage and are quite popular in this society we can't ignore them. At first we were hesitant to write this article, because it touches on very sensitive points, yet it cannot possibly be long enough to thoroughly explain the reasoning behind our position. We therefore ask the reader to do some serious thinking on this subject herself before accepting or rejecting our position.
Sex Between Old And Young
Youth Liberation believes that children should have the right to control their bodies. We are immediately suspicious of anyone who claims to protect children by restricting their rights (including their 'right' to be a prostitute or to have sex with an adult). Generally, neither children nor any other oppressed group is truly helped by such protection.
One peril that young people certainly don't need to be protected from is sexual exper-ience with other young people. We support the right of young people to engage in sex with other young people. In fact, we encourage it. We know of no evidence that child sex is dangerous or harmful, and we feel there is ample research which shows that children enjoy sex and participate in it fully and freely unless repressed by adults.
We also feel that there is nothing inherently wrong with sexual relationships between adults and young people. Again, we don't know of any valid evidence that consensual sex between adults and teenagers, or sex play between adults and very young children, is harm-ful. Our own experience, knowledge, and intuition suggest that sex between adults and children is enjoyable and can be helpful for later sexual development. The major problem, as Kinsey discovered about 30 years ago, is not the fact that sex takes place, but the reaction of the community, laying on its "old tired ethics."
Alfred Kinsey was America's most important sex researcher - personally interviewing thousands of people about their sexual experiences during his career. He did some research on adult/child sex which he conducted by interviewing adults who had sex with children and young people who had been involved with adults. He concluded:
Many people have serious reservations about consent in relationships between adults and young people. Consent is important in all sexual relationships and when it doesn't exist the possibility of exploitation immediately arises. Can a young person, or a teenager, give knowledgeable consent to sex? Many adults think not. But our experience has shown us that teenagers and even very young people are much more capable of making their needs and wishes known, and enforcing them, than adults give them credit for. Consent would obviously be difficult to determine from children who can't talk, but we see no point in actively discouraging sex with or among them. Abusers will act in spite of law or society's concern for the welfare of children. The only effective way to avoid abuse is to educate adults to be sensitive to the needs and desires of children and lessen the general level of sexual repression in the society. Current morality more often inhibits people who would be good with children rather than the abusers."It is difficult to understand why a child, except for its cultural conditioning, should be disturbed at seeing the genitalia of other persons, or disturbed at having its genitalia touched, or disturbed at even more specific sexual contacts... Some of the more experienced students of juvenile problems have come to believe that the emotional reactions of parents, police officers, and other adults who discover that the child has had such a contact, may disturb the child more seriously than the sexual contacts themselves."1
There is another aspect of the consent question, one which is a classic example of ageism in action.
An unspoken belief held by many who argue that young people can't give consent is that young people aren't sexual, and therefore could not give consent even if they wanted to. However, studies of other societies shows quite the opposite. In many societies pre-adolescents are allowed to engage in sex and to observe sexual behavior in adults. Kinsey found that children were capable of reaching multiple orgasms, and that males actually reach their sexual peak during their teen years.
Anthropologists Bronislaw Malinowski reported that the children of the Trobiand Islands of Oceania participated in erotic games at age 4, and were enjoying regular sexual intercourse at about age ten. 2 Similar data has been gathered for other regions of the world. Anthropologist Richard Currier writes: "It is hard to avoid the conclusion that -given the opportunity - children will develop their sexual skills along with all the other social skills that will be needed in adult life."3
Unfortunately, there is always potential for abuse in adult/child relationships, just as there is in all sexual relationships. Rape by fathers of daughters is probably the most common form of child sexual abuse. Rape and all other non-consensual sex should fall under child abuse laws, but the mere fact of sex between children and adults should not be considered abuse. Furthermore, the definition of child sexual abuse should closely parallel that for adults. Wives should have as much right to be protected from sexual abuse from men as do children (and it is a fact that almost all sexual abuse is perpetrated by men).
Prostitution
The question of child prostitution presents many questions, the most important of which is what opinion should one have of prostitution in general? We feel that prostitutes provide a service that is important and valuable in this society. We hope that won't always be the case, but since it is now, prostitution is work that should be respected, legal, well-paid and free from danger. It is as valid as modeling or professional sports or other jobs where one sells one's body. But should young people have equal access to the profession of prostitution?
Youth Liberation feels they should, just as we feel young people should have the right to work at Ford or in coal mines or in other exploitative jobs. Many jobs in this society are based on exploitation, but to deny young people the right to participate in them is to deny them the right to participate in society itself. If one ignores the moralistic arguments about prostitution, it's not that much different from any other job, though prostitutes often have more control over their immediate work situation than do other workers.
It is precisely on this point that the idea of young people's liberation takes on its most important significance. Youth Liberation is not and cannot be seen solely as a movement to integrate young people equally into American society, because many aspects of American society are oppressive. We feel that denying young people the right to participate fully in this society protects them from very little - basically the same conditions that adults must function under every day. And it denies them the knowledge and experience necessary to change the society.
Denying young people the 'right' to be prostitutes or to engage in other forms of work is phony protection - it denies young people experience and income that is probably no more harmful or helpful to them than it is for adults engaged in similar professions. The only way to wipe out juvenile prostitution is to wipe out prostitution altogether, and the only way to do that is to eliminate the two pillars of prostitution, capitalism and sexual repression.
A full page ad which recently appeared in the Metropolitan News, a Minneapolis sex tabloid, illustrates the ageism involved in preventing juvenile prostitution:
"If you are a prostitute, refuse to work with juveniles. Do not introduce her to custo-mers of yours. If she is a runaway, attempt to contact her parents to inform them of her whereabouts...
"If you are a pimp, respect yourself enough to deal with women, not children. Pimps who turn out weak-minded, unhappy, and confused school girls, do so because they aren't man enough to handle women. If you have associates who traffic in juveniles, let them feel your disapproval..." (emphasis added)
Primo Times, an alternative paper from the mid-west, showed more insight in an editorial explaining why they weren't terrified of child prostitution and pornography:
"We do not advocate the exploitation of children; if we did then we'd stop messing around with this magazine and invest in one of those Hong Kong clothing factories where kids work ten hours a day for $1.00 an hour."
On the other hand, we feel that many young women who become prostitutes don't do it because they want to, but because there are no other decent paying jobs available, especia-lly if they are runaways. The problem here is not so much that young women are becoming prostitutes - it's that this society has so little respect for the young that it provides no decent jobs or alternatives for oppressive home situations. The prostitution problem can only be solved by providing young people with concrete alternatives and this society seems unwilling to do that.
Finally, we feel that prostitutes, young and old, should have a right to at least the same working conditions as other workers. We are opposed to pimps and parlor owners controlling prostitutes through physical force, drug dependency and the like as we are to the State denying young people equal rights. Prostitution should be decriminalized for minors and adults as a first step, and we should all work for social changes that will mini-mize the need for prostitution at all.
Child Pornography
Should child pornography be outlawed? Should children be denied the 'right' to be photographed and filmed for erotica? Everyone has read in the media that children are forced to partake in such sessions, that parents sometimes 'sell' their children to porn pro-ducers, that children are forced to engage in conduct that is utterly repulsive to them. Well, whenever those conditions exist, we feel they should be considered child abuse and should be illegal.
But does that mean that young people who are photographed quite willingly (as boys often are for gay men's magazines, for example) should be prohibited from making money for that? Or that movies such as Pretty Baby should be banned? We don't think so, because taking nude photographs of children doesn't necessarily involve force or evil. The best way to regulate the production and sale of child pornography is to work to end the sexual repre-ssion that makes such items profitable.
There are several other reasons to argue for the right of children to participate in sex, and for allowing the distribution of child pornography. One is that history has shown that when there are restrictions placed on the First Amendment it is often political and educa-tional materials that end up getting banned, not pornography. In a more progressive society perhaps it would be possible to ban materials that were abusive to women and children (as pornography usually is) without endangering other freedoms. But in the U.S. at this time it is not.
For example, in 1977 New York State passed a law which prohibits all books with sexually explicit photographs of children. The excellent sex education book Show Me! is now illegal there. The publisher, along with the Association of American Publishers, the American Booksellers Association and the Freedom to Read Foundation is now challenging the law. They received a favorable decision in District court, but the State is appealing. A related reason to defend the right of a mingling between children and sex is to confront head-on the section of the right wing represented by people like Anita Bryant4. The right wing is mounting an attack on the few positive aspects and trends in American cul-ture. If they open a crack they may unleash a flood of regressive laws against homosex-uality, lesbianism, non-marital sex, teenage sex and who knows what else. Sexual repres-sion is a political tool of the right and we must vigorously defend the right of young people to be winners rather than pawns in that struggle.
Towards The Future
Finally, we must contrast our limited view of present conditions with how we think things should be. In rational society, sex would be celebrated, not repressed. Sex among children, sex between children and adults and sex in general would be judged by how it made people feel, not by puritanical moral standards.
Richard Currier, in an article in Human Behavior magazine, suggestions that the explosion in child pornography, child prostitution and interest in sex is evidence that American children can no longer be insulated from the changes in sexual mores.
He says that "...Western society has undergone a revolution in sexual values, but has tried to apply it exclusively to adults... How do we explain to our kids that while sex is natural, healthy, normal and good, they should refrain from enjoying it until they grow up and leave home?"5
Hopefully fewer and fewer parents are dishing out that line, and even if they are young people don't seem to be paying very close attention. But we are still a long way from a society where sexual relationships aren't surrounded with repression and misinformation, where sex will be a creative, enjoyable and less mysterious part of life. Sexual relationships are fantastically diverse and someday we will be able to celebrate that diversity rather than distorting it and hawking it on street corners and in dimly lit bookstores.
It is unfortunate that we have to fight some of the battles for children's freedom on the territory of prostitution and pornography. But if we don't fight there we may lose the war.
Notes
1. Alfred Kinsey, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders Company, 1953)
2. Bronislaw Malinowski, The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1929)
3. Richard Currier, "Juvenile Sexuality in Global Perspective," republished in L.L. Constantine and Floyd Martinson, eds., Children and Sex (Boston: Little, Brown, 1981)
4. Anita Bryant was an American singer turned anti-gay activist who led the 1977 Save the Children campaign in Dade County, Florida in an attempt to repeal a sexual orientation anti-discrimination ordinance.
5. Richard Currier, 1981.
I was "Only a Kid" to My Mother's Lovers
by Sky
This piece was contributed by Sky, who left home at 15 to work with Youth Liberation of Ann Arbor, to the 1978 Youth Liberation anthology Growing Up Gay. Along with the FPS magazine, Youth Liberation published pamphlets and books which discussed youth liberation and related topics such as youth culture, high school women's liberation, and student and youth organizing.
I've always been more attracted to women than men. That's not to say I've never been attracted to a man, but I've always been more comfortable with women - physically, socially and emotionally.
Although my best friend called me a 'lesbian' at age 9 when I tried to sit very close to her, I didn't consider myself a lesbian until I was 11. That year I moved in with my wild 'liberal' mother, and I met some of her lesbian friends. I finally saw that women loving women were real, and not a myth.
I've never felt any guilt about my lesbianism, but I've been hurt many times by the ageist and anti-gay atttudes I've encountered. For example, many adults (gay or straight) repress sexual feelings they have toward young people, and ignore any sexual desires that young people have toward them. Gay adults are especially afraid of showing any sexual or physical affection to young people because of the danger of being labeled a 'child molester'.
Statutory rape laws contribute to this fear, while effectively taking away young people's rights to sexual lives. Adults can be convicted of statutory rape (having a sexual relationship with a minor) regardless of the young person's consent. One of my woman lovers flatly admitted that it was fear that had made her reject my crush on her four years earlier. Even my mother's lover, Catherine, refrained from touching or kissing me, or my mother in my presence, despite the love she felt for both of us.
The sexual exclusion I experienced is very much tied to the social limits placed on me because of my youth. None of my mother's lesbian friends developed a relationship with me independent of my mother. Ageism infects the gay community just as it does the straight one.
Consider that there are no gay advocates in America working for sexual, social and economic freedom for kids. Nor are there many gay adults trying to include young people in their struggles against homophobia. And the 'Sexual Sanity' petition circulated by Ms. (magazine) limits its demand to freedom of sexual activity for consenting adults only. My mother's lesbian friends, like much of the gay community, didn't realize I had any sexua-lity. Most of them didn't see me as a whole person at all, but just 'Sabrina's kid'.
I've never hidden my lesbianism, but to this day there are many people who are unaware of it because of their ageist or heterosexist assumptions. My experiences have shown me that it is as necessary to fight the ageism of the gay community as the straight-ness of the rest of the world. Without both of these struggles, young gay people will never be liberated.
Continued in the next post...
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Re: Butterfly Kisses: Researching Female Pedophilia
Continued...
I'm 14, I'm gay & I want a boyfriend
by Lee
This interview with Lee, performed by human rights campaigner and journalist Peter Tatchell, was published in the gay and lesbian weekly magazine Thud (August 15, 1997). Though it's unfortunate that Lee himself did not get to write the article, Tatchell at the very least extensively quotes Lee's words and allows him to speak for himself. Tatchell himself was involved with the radical queer group OutRage! and led a campaign of theirs to lower the age of consent from 16 to 14.
Lee is 14. He’s been having sex with boys since the age of eight, and with men since he was 12. Lee has a serious problem. He wants a steady relationship and has been going out recently with a guy in his mid-twenties, who he met at the hairdressers. But in the eyes of the law, Lee's partner is a paedophile and Lee is a victim of child abuse. That's not, how-ever, the way Lee sees it: "I want to have a boyfriend. It's my choice. No one's abusing me. Why should we be treated like criminals?"
I am sitting in the kitchen of a friend’s house talking with Lee. Wearing a white T-shirt and combat trousers, his sophisticated gay image makes him look older than 14. He comes across as bright, articulate, sure of himself, and mature beyond his years. It's hard to imagine anyone getting away with taking advantage of him.
We are discussing the new Sex Offenders Act. Lee is concerned. Under this legisla-tion, which comes into effect next month, men over 19 who have consensual sex with guys under 18 are classified as dangerous sex criminals, on a par with the abusers of young children. After serving their sentence, they will be required to register their address with the police for a minimum of five years, and may have their identity revealed to the public. This is a live issue for Lee because he prefers relationships with older guys.
"I don’t get on with people my own age," says Lee. "They're too immature. I like men in their 20s or early 30s. They are more experienced and serious. With them, you can get into a closer relationship than with a teenager."
The age of consent laws don't make it easy for Lee to have a stable gay relationship.
"Some men run a mile when they discover how old I am," he moans. "They’re worried about getting done by the law."
Even without the Sex Offenders Act, any man who has sex with Lee could face a maximum sentence of 10 years for kissing, touching, sucking or wanking, and life impri-sonment for anal sex. The top penalty for the offence of "unlawful sexual intercourse" with a 14 year old girl is, in contrast, two years!
Having a relationship with someone his own age would, paradoxically, put Lee in greater legal danger than sex with an older person. The law says that a homosexual act with a male under 16 is a serious crime, even if the person committing the act is himself below the age of 16. So, by having anal sex with another 14 year old boy, Lee would be guilty of a major offence which can, at least in theory, be punished by jail for life.
"The law is stupid," according to Lee. "If I know what I'm doing and I'm not harming anyone else, I should be allowed to have sex with who I want."
Lee is just one of a growing number of lesbians and gays who are coming out at an ever earlier age…twelve, thirteen and fourteen is not uncommon nowadays. Research published by Project Sigma in 1993 shows that 9 percent of gay men had their first homo-sexual experience by the age of 10, 19 percent by the age of 12, and 35 per cent by the age of 14. Yet most gay campaign groups seem only interested in the human rights of the over-16s.
"There's nothing much for young gays like me," says Lee. "Nobody cares about our rights."
Lee first realised he was gay at the age of eight. Well, he didn't call himself gay. He just had sex with boys or, to begin with, one particular boy.
"My first gay sex was with a friend from school called John. I was eight and half. He was the same age. We used to go swimming together. It all started at the local swimming pool. One day we were in the cubicles getting changed and somehow we started kissing. Then we had oral sex."
How did you know what to do?
"Oh, I saw it on TV," quips Lee. You did? "They were talking about men having oral sex, so that's where I got the idea from."
Weren't you nervous about being caught?
"No. It just happened. I didn't think it might be wrong or that we could get into trouble."
How did you feel about your first gay experience? Lee beams with evident fond memories and confides: "I liked it a lot. It was great. But I did think sex with a boy was sort of strange. Until that time with John, I didn't have much idea about sex. It was mostly from the papers and television. I thought that men only had sex with women. For a while it left me feeling a bit weird and confused." He pauses for a moment, then adds emphatically: "I soon got over it."
Lee continued having regular sex with John for two years. "We were boyfriends," he boasts proudly. "I don’t have any regrets at all."
The relationship with John did not, however, stop Lee from experimenting with heterosexuality. "I had sex with John's twin sister. He found out and got very angry. He stormed out. For a while we weren't speaking. We made up afterwards."
Did you enjoy straight sex?
"Yeah," says Lee, "but sex with John was better."
So when did Lee start thinking of himself as being gay?
"It was a few months later, after I turned nine. I was watching a TV debate about gays. It made me realise that I was gay, and that it wasn't wrong. Since then, I've never had a problem about my sexuality."
Lee's next big love affair happened when he was ten. "It was with a black kid who lived on my road, Michael. He was the same age. My friends introduced him. One day, we were in his bedroom playing on his computer and we started messing around. It ended up with sex. Other times, we had a game called 'kick the cancan,' which involved kicking a can around. The can would often end up in the bushes, and we'd run there to look for it. Sometimes Michael and me would have sex there."
Around this time, Lee first came out to his mom. "She was good about it. Her first reaction was that I was a bit too young to be gay. She told me to leave it a couple of years. Then, if I still wanted to be gay, she said she'd accept it. I left it a few weeks, before telling her again. She realised I was serious, and respected my feelings and wishes. Ever since, she’s been really understanding."
At the age of 11, Lee had a relationship with a 14 year old named Andrew. "Because of family difficulties, I ended up in a children's home. They sent me to an education centre. That's where I met Andrew. We used to hang around together and became really close frie-nds. After a while he told me that he was on the rent scene. I asked him if he wanted a boy-friend and he said yeah. So we started going out with each other. That was when I first had anal sex and learned about condoms. Andrew pulled out a packet and went on about stopping HIV and AIDS. I shagged him and he shagged me. It bought tears to my eyes. It was painful, but I liked it as well. I enjoyed it more than sex with a girl. I got more of a sexual sensation."
For about 18 months, Lee joined Andrew doing sex for money, picking up men in the local gardens and bus station.
"It was mostly me just wanking them off. I stopped about a year and half ago. When I was doing it, I felt sick. I didn't enjoy it. I was only doing it for the money to buy drugs – mostly speed, acid and cannabis. I also had a few bad experiences with punters. Once Andrew and I were tied up and raped."
In the children’s home, Lee got taunted and bullied for being gay. "They called me queer and it ended up in fights. The staff didn't do anything to protect me, so I started run-ning away."
Lee is clearly very angry that no one took action to stop the bullying: "When I was being beaten up, the authorities did nothing. Now I'm gay and want to have sex, they're suddenly very concerned about my welfare."
When you ran away from the children's home, where did you go?
"I used to stay with this paedophile that I met in the gardens. He was okay. There was no pressure for me to have sex, but I did. I had sex with him because I wanted to feel loved and respected."
What do you think of that man now?
"Well, he didn't beat me up or hurt me like was happening in the children's home."
And what do you think about paedophiles in general?
"It depends on what kind of paedophiles," says Lee. "The paedophiles I knew always asked me if I wanted sex. They didn't pressure me. If you consent to having sex with a paedophile, it's fine. If you don't, it’s not."
How can a young child understand sex and give meaningful consent?
Lee admits: "The really young ones can't. But I was 12 when I first had sex with an adult man. I knew what was happening. The other boys I know who had sex with men were in their early teens. They understood what they were doing."
Perhaps your friends were particularly mature for their age. Most young people are not so sophisticated about sex.
"They shouldn't have sex then," according to Lee. "And other people shouldn't take advantage of them. No one should be having sex with a child who is very young or who has emotional and mental problems. You could have a relationship with them, but not sex – not until they are old enough to understand the responsibilities invol-ved."
Many people worry that the power imbalance in a relationship between a youth and an adult means the younger person can be easily manipulated and exploited. It's a concern that Lee acknowledges: "Yeah, that can happen. It's wrong. But that doesn’t mean that every kid who has sex with a man is being abused."
At what age do you think people should to be allowed, by law, to have sex?
"Sixteen is too high," says Lee. "Most kids I know had sex long before then. It's stupid for the law to brand us as criminals."
Do you worry about being arrested for under-age sex?
"Sometimes. I mostly worry for the older guys that I'm having sex with. They could get life imprisonment and be denounced as a paedophile. They might end up on the sex offenders register. It could ruin their life."
What do you think the age of consent should be?
"About 14."
Why?
"That's the age a lot of young people start having sex. If they are not forcing or hurting other kids they shouldn't have the threat of a policeman knocking on their door. The current age of 16 (or 18 for gays) means that those who are younger don't get proper sex education. My sex edu-cation at school was useless. The law makes it difficult for teachers to give out stuff about contraception, safer sex and AIDS. If the age was lower, the facts about sex could be taught sooner. It's stupid giving kids this information after they've started sex. That's too late. They need to know the facts about sex from around the age of 10."
I point out to Lee that an age of consent of 14 would not have been much help to him, since he was having sex from the age of eight. Even with consent at 14, most of his past sexual relationships would have remained illegal.
"Young people under 14 should be al-lowed to have sex with someone up to a year or so older," he suggests. "That way they've got freedom, and are protected against exploitation by older men."
Even with a permitted one year age differential, Lee's affair with Andrew, who was three years older, would not have been legal. Something a bit more flexible is required. The idea of a sliding-scale age of consent is something that OutRage! is promoting. In addition to supporting an age of consent of 14 for everyone (gay and straight), OutRage! argues that sex involving young people under 14 should not be prosecuted providing both partners consent and there is no more than three years difference in their ages.
When I put this idea to Lee, he nods with approval: "Some young people mature earlier than others. They should be able to have a relationship with someone a bit older. Society should accept that kids have sexual feelings."
This is the nub of the problem. Our current legal system refuses to acknowledge that young people have a sexuality. The law says a person under 16 is incapable of giving their consent to a sexual act. Any sex with such a person is automatically deemed "indecent assault."
Lee thinks that is "ridiculous": "I'm only 14 but I know what I’m doing. I under-stand what consent involves. So does the person I'm having sex with. No one is indecently assaulting me. That's a stupid suggestion. The law should stop treating young people like idiots."
Many people fear that making sex easier for under-age teenagers will expose them to dangers like HIV. Isn't that a legitimate worry?
"I know about safer sex," protests Lee. "I didn't get that information from school. It came from TV and boyfriends. Some of them had HIV and died. I'm okay because we did safer sex. People say that older guys will take ad-vantage of teenagers like me, but my partners made sure we took precautions – even the paedophiles. If people want to protect kids against AIDS, they should support better sex education lessons, starting in primary school. Education is the best prevention. But it isn't happening in most schools. Why doesn't someone make a fuss about that?"
Lee thinks it's time the law-makers listened to young people: "They are always trying to tell us how to live our lives. Why don't they treat us with respect? We've got opinions. We deserve to be heard. When a kid gets sexually abused, the social workers listen to what he says and back up his complaint. But when a kid wants to have a gay relationship, his wishes get ignored. That's what is happening to me. I'm under a care order which states that my feelings have to be taken into account. But society won't accept my feelings. It says I'm forbidden to have sex with a man until I'm 18. A perfect relationship is what I want. It would make me very happy. So why is the law trying to stop me?"
Scrap the "Young Love" Laws
Shocking Pink Collective
Shocking Pink was a feminist magazine which existed from 1979 to 1992, written entirely by young women for young women. Arising from talk at a young women's 1979 feminist conference, the magazine was helped and supported by the larger feminist magazine Spare Rib, which ran ads about Shocking Pink and helped the young women learn how to put together their magazine. The magazine's contents contained subjects such as gender, race, music, politics and, as this piece shows, sexuality and the law. The following piece appeared in the first issue, which came out late 1980 or early 1981.
Fury over bid to make sex under 16 legal
About a year ago a report by the National Council for One Parent Families came out, calling for the abolition of the Age of Consent laws for heterosexuals. This lead to some wild reporting in the press.
You probably know that under these laws it is illegal for a man to have intercourse with a woman if she is under sixteen years of age.
Maybe a few of you are thinking that this law protects young women, for example from rape. In fact there are very few prosecutions under this law and when they do happen they are against young people who have both consented.
I talked to some women, all of whom are under sixteen, about what they thought about the laws.
'Why age of consent law is out-dated'
I think this is ridiculous and am against the age of consent laws for both heterosexuals and homosexuals, because I believe that all people who give their consent to sex, both young and old should have the right to determine their own sex lives.
At the moment, if a woman under sixteen decides to enter into a sexual relationship, it means she can be placed in care on the grounds that she is in 'moral danger' to herself because of her, wait for it, 'abnormal sexual appetite'.
It is only the man who can be prosecuted, as the law says that whether she wanted sex or not is irrelevant. We as women are not taken seriously. When these laws were thought up, our sexual desires were ignored, in fact it was thought that we didn't have any.
An example of this is that there is no age of consent for lesbians as Queen Victoria didn't think it was possible for women to have fulfilling sexual relationships together.
Sex under 16 storm
A STORM of protest last night greeted a Government-financed report calling for the age of sexual consent, at present 16, to be abolished.
It's stupid, no one takes any notice anyway, if they want to sleep with people they will do it regardless of the law.
Have you slept with a boy?
Yes.
Are you taking any precautions?
No.
Why not?
'Cause I don't want to go to the doctor as he'd tell my Mum.
It's alright but people should be allowed to do what they want, they shouldn't get prosecuted.
Do you think that the law would stop you?
Probably, but I don't want to sleep with anyone yet anyway.
If the laws were abolished, would it make any difference?
No, people do it when they want, but I think that when they do they should be able to get contraception.
I don't think that it is a good idea.
Why?
Everyone should be able to do what they want to.
Have you ever slept with a boy?
No.
Is it the law that's stopped you?
No, I just don't want to do it.
You think it should be lowered to 12. Why not get rid of it altogether?
If it was any lower people would get forced into it.
Why?
'Cause men are men.
Why 12?
'Cause you know what you want at that age.
Sense not sensation
These laws are a result of a society which punishes consenting young people, while turning a blind eye to a lot of cases of rape and violence.
We as young women get the worst of it all round. Some doctors won't give contra-ception to women under sixteen years, and a lot of young women are frightened to go and get contraception, or to tell a doctor they are pregnant in case the doctor tells their parents.
The report was bierly aacked last night by Mrs. Mary Whitehouse. She said:
I'm not saying that we should all be having sex before we are sixteen. What I am saying however, is that at the moment the law decides when we should have sex, not us; the law says when we should get contraception, not us; the law says whether we can have an abortion, not us.
We should not have our sexual relationships made illegal and should not be punished for them. We must have the right to determine our own sex lives.
* * *
One le4er sent in about the piece was published and replied to in the second issue.
We feel that your letter glorifies virginity in a way that's oppresive to women - who ever worries about men being virgins? We feel that women's sexuality should be recog-nized in its own right instead of being seen as belonging to other people - the idea of having to love your 'boyfriend' before having sex denies women the right to explore their own sexuality and pleasures. Love doesn't have to equal sex - sex can be great by itself.
Also the idea of 'maturity' in our society is a bit contradictory - young people in general aren't treated as people or adults so how can they be 'mature'? The whole idea of 'maturity' stems from adult prejudice; it's people and their attitudes that matter regardless of age.
We feel that age doesn't necessarily have anything to do with a woman's ability to make decisions, it's just society's attitude to age that puts more pressure on the younger woman and makes it more difficult for her.
Shocking Pink
I Know What I Am: Gay Teenagers and the Law
Joint Council For Gay Teenagers
This piece is an excerpted section of I Know What I Am: Gay Teenagers and the Law, an 18-page publication put out by the Joint Council For Gay Teenagers (JCGT) in 1980 in response to the government's "Working Paper on the Age of Consent." JCGT, which existed from 1978 to 1982 when it was absorbed into the Gay Youth Movement, helped gay youth groups in the UK to connect with each other and published material for youth workers and the gay movement.
The purpose of this response is straightforward: it is to make it clear beyond doubt that young homosexual people of both sexes are a reality and are, in our society, demanding recognition and possible support, not legal sanctions. This response is therefore addressed only to those parts of the Working Paper1 dealing with the age of consent or "minimum age" for homosexual relations.
The Joint Council for Gay Teenagers (JCGT), set up in late 1978, comprises many of the principal organizations in the United Kingdom that provide support to young gay people. Our constituent organizations have a great deal of first hand experience and knowledge of gay teenagers' needs. We are aware not only of the difficulties they often face but also that a new generation of gay people is growing up unwilling to suffer as previous generations have been expected to. Indeed the separation between "them" and "us" is false, as many gay men under the present minimum age and many young lesbians help run the support services for gay people.
During 1979 the JCGT also collected statements from 98 gay teenagers in England, Wales and Scotland. Seventeen of these were supplied by a Manchester-based group who had collected them as part of a separate project. In addition some extracts were provided from letters written to a member organization during the previous two years. Together, these present a unique record of how young gay men and women see themselves and the frequently hostile world in which they live. It is interesting that it is only with the emer-gence of the gay movement during the 1970s that it has become possible to collect such statements which originate not from the traditional clinical or penal settings but from ordinary life. Extracts from these have been used as illustrations throughout this response. Except where the teenagers themselves insisted otherwise, identities have been disguised. Behind much of the discussion in the paper on the minimum age for homosexual relations between men is the specter of a teenage boy readily cajoled into gay sexual acts; and the unprovable and improbable theory that seduction will fix the sexual orientation of those for whom it has previously not been fixed. Although such a theory would presu-mably work in both directions, the Policy Advisory Committee evidently is concerned solely with the supposed pressures on heterosexual (or "potentially heterosexual") people. This is really special pleading since, even if the case they make out were true, it is not balanced by the opposite and much more evident and widespread pressures on young gay people.
The world the Joint Council lives in, far from encouraging homosexuality in young people, is daily filled with heterosexual propaganda - in advertising, in entertainment, in the news media, in religion, in school and so on. This propaganda frequently takes the form of openly anti-homosexual prejudice and jibes. The "strong disapproval" of homo-sexual relations that the Committee identifies too often spills over into acts of physical violence against gay people. Young gay women frequently have to put up with unwanted advances from heterosexual men, which they are expected to find flattering, or which are openly hostile.
It is under these sorts of pressures that young gay people have to grow up. More often than not they feel themselves unable to talk to anyone at all about their emotions and needs, and live lives of almost total repression and isolation. Many have adopted, at least partially, society's negative valuation of their sexuality. Their sexual relationships and general contact with other gay people, in these circumstances, are necessarily restricted to ones that are furtive and unsatisfactory to themselves.
Some of these young gay men and women are subjected to severe pressures by their peer group, family, psychiatrists and others to get married. The gay help organizations frequently have calls from married people, some of whom (mostly men) were specifically advised to get married as a "cure" for their homosexuality. In these cases the spouses are used as an unknowing instrument of those who cannot accept the validity of homosexual feelings. This leads to immense personal complications and unhappiness. Whilst women often come to terms with the fact that they have married a gay man, it is common for a man to brutally reject a wife who he finds is lesbian. Where there are children, courts often deny custody and limit access for the gay parent.
It is only in the last decade or so that this bleak pattern of repression, and the resultant distortions in relationships, have been broken to any great extent - by the efforts of gay people themselves.
In light of this picture, it is odd that the Committee should concentrate so much in their Working Paper on imagined dangers to heterosexual young men and ignore the evident pressures on homosexuals of both sexes. It is even odder that the Committee should link this imagined danger to prostitution. The popular press always finds prostitution (heterosexual or homosexual) an attractive topic, but it is not a significant issue in relation to the vast majority of gay people of any age. No doubt this wrong emphasis is a result of the way homosexuality has been treated traditionally, as a purely penal or clinical matter, and not as part of everyday life.
The law cannot of itself change social attitudes and prejudices, but it should have no part in reinforcing their ill effects. The Committee appears to have some notion of these ill effects but fails to make the connect between them and the way the law operates. Gay people are not going to go away: they will only prosper or suffer according to the way society - including the law - regards them. The situation is analogous to the way the law influences race relations or sex equality.
A vital part of helping gay people to lead happy and fulfilling lives (just as it is for heterosexual people) is to provide them from an early age with positive advice, with others whose lives can act as models for their own, and the opportunity to experience relationships and emotions. The Committee appears to accept this for gay men 18 and over, although they have nothing to say on this subject in relation to women. But apparently they would prefer gay men under 18 either to repress their sexual feelings entirely or to face the thread of penal sanctions if they can not or will not do so. At present it is only that fortunate minority of gay teenagers aged under 18 who have contacted gay help services who are able to grow up without first going through a long period of isolation, private torture and self-rejection.
Colin, 17, Leicester:
I was so isolated and always far too nervous to attend any type of meeting. I became more and more depressed and finally called Gayline (when I was 15) and asked for a befriending meeting. It was so good just to meet two other gay people. I was very happy for a long while afterwards, just knowing that I wasn't the only one.... I have a lot more confidence and I am able to cope much better at work. Other people just don't bother me any more. Things would certainly be very different if I had no social life and no gay friends to give me encouragement and support. The second time maybe I would have cut my wrists properly.
The underlying feeling of the Committee appears therefore to be that homosexuality is much more worrying to them in the case of men than in women. This is evidenced by the fact that lesbians are accorded only one paragraph to themselves, while the bulk of the other 34 paragraphs in the section on homosexuality is concerned exclusively with men.
The needs of young lesbians include exactly those we have described above. Admit-tedly the current effective minimum age of 16 for lesbians is far preferable to the age propo-sed for men. But the balance of the Working Paper reflects exactly one special difficulty for lesbians - that the sexuality of women is frequently discounted and ignored. In this way the Working Paper, despite its claim to go some way towards meeting the demand for equality between the sexes, is in fact little more than a reflection of the most basic sex discrimination, in which the sexuality of men is accorded prime importance.
What We Propose
It follows from the foregoing arguments that a minimum age of 16 for homosexual men we would regard as far preferable to one of 18. It is tempting to reinforce the point by showing that, on the Home Office's own evidence2, if this minimum age had already been 16 only about 25 persons convicted in 1973 for consensual behavior would not have been so convicted. But what is at stake is human happiness is, as we have tried to show above, far greater than the figure implies; and in precisely the reverse direction to that assumed by the Committee.
The same Working Party makes other recommendations about prosecution policy6 which we endorse. Some of the arguments it puts forward concerning the negative effect which the age of consent has on the welfare of consenting young heterosexual people have parallels in the case of young gay people; for example a legal minimum age deters them from seeking advice on relationships or on avoiding exploitive or unwanted relationships. This kind of advice is probably more important for people under 18.
If a minimum age of 16 were adopted we strongly recommend that prosecution policy strictly limit its use to cases where consent was absent or where the younger partner was less than 14 years old. Even in the latter cases which were found to be consensual, penalties should be limited to fines and community service orders.
The only civilized answer to the question put to the Policy Advisory Committee would be to remove consensual sexual acts altogether from the realm of the criminal law. Only then can hundreds of thousands of young gay people freely seek and receive the best help and advice, make relationships of their choosing without constant fear of sanction, and use their energies and skills fully to make the world a better, kinder place. Only then, too, can the heterosexual majority obtain the help and education it needs to live in harmony with gay women and men at home, at school and at work.
Notes
1. Home Office, Policy Advisory Committee on Sexual Offences, Working Paper on the Age of Consent in relation to Sexual Offences, June 1979, HMSO.
2. Home Office Research Study No. 54, Sexual Offences, Consent and Sentencing (1979), HMSO, p. 9.
3. Report of Working Party on the Law in relation to Sexual Behaviour, 1974
4. Evidence to the Criminal Law Revision Commi4ee, 1976
5. National Council for One Parent Families and Community Development Trust, Pregnant at School, 1979, para 314
6. Ibid., para 313
Girl and Woman
by Amy
Texan lesbian Amy was 16 when she wrote this originally untitled essay for the 1983 anthology One Teenager in Ten: Writings by Gay and Lesbian Youth. The anthology came about after a request for submissions in the back of another one of the publisher's gay youth-centered books, Young, Gay and Proud. This piece was one of the few removed from the book's 1994 update, Two Teenagers in Twenty.
I am a sixteen-year-old lesbian. I have been a lesbian since I was twelve. I had known my dance teacher for three years before she brought me out. I was very attracted to her when I first saw her, and from then on, I grew to be more and more in love with her. When I was ten, I had a crush on a friend of my older sister, and some time after that another crush on a cousin of mine. But these didn't last long.
I always wanted to be near my teacher, dance well for her, and have her touch me!
Often while falling asleep at night I would think about her holding me in her arms while I'd go to sleep or about her kissing me. I didn't know anything about lesbians then, so I didn't associate my feelings with anything but my love for her.
We became lovers the weekend I was asked to give a special dance presentation in another city. My dance instructor chose me and accompanied me there. She was 23.
After the performance, we returned to our room. She was elated with my reception, and hugged me and told me how good I was. I felt so good being held by her, being so close to her; secure in the arms of a woman I had admired and loved for three years.
Her eyes were so alive, so exciting; her smile so sensuous. When she said, "Let me help you take this off," I could only hope something might happen. I let my arms hang loose as she slipped the leotards over my shoulders, then I cooperated with her so my arms could be freed, leaving the costume hanging at my waist, with my breasts bare.
"You are so pretty," she said, placing her hands on my neck and then running them down my chest and then running them down my chest, over my breasts and then cupping them in her hands. I loved what she was doing, especially when she licked her index finger and began rubbing my left nipple, making it hard. She did the same with the right one, and I held her tightly around the waist.
"Does this feel good?" she asked.
"Yes, don't stop."
Then she took a nipple in each hand and rolled them between her fingers. At the same time she moved closer to me. From the waist down we were touching; from the waist up, separated enough for her to get her hands on my breasts. Somehow our lips met, tentative at first and then we kissed passionately with her tongue edging its way into my mouth. I began sucking her tongue, and for the first time I felt tingly all over. My next sensation was our deep breathing, then I felt her hands move from my front to my back, and she pressed tighter to me. Then she moved her hands down to my butt, massaging, and pushing my pelvis into hers. When I felt some thrusts of her pelvis against mine, my eyes opened wide.
She responded by saying, "You really turn me on...do you like this?"
"Oh, yes."
She said "Let's take this off," referring to the costume still covering my bottom. Down it came, and I stepped out of it.
She held me at arms length, saying, "I want to look at you." Her hands moved from my neck, to my shoulders, down over my nipples to my waist; one hand on each side. Then she told me I was sexy and moved her right hand down my stomach and lower. I knew what she was going to do, hoping those sensations I had felt before would be even better. They were, as she concentrated on my clitoris with a circular motion, slipping her middle finger between my lips and occasionally into me.
"I want to make love to you. Let's go to bed."
We continued that night, all weekend and for almost three years until I had to move with my family. I became a lesbian and a woman that weekend!
My teacher was the first person I can recall who ever used the word lesbian to me.
After she brought me out, and I started going over to her house, I noticed books about lesbianism out in the open. I picked one up, and looked through it. She began telling me about lesbianism and people's attitudes towards homosexuals. Until that time, I can't recall ever thinking that what we were doing was unacceptable. For one thing, I always thought that what boys and girls did to each other was bad. Besides that, I thought what we had was special, and since some of the other girls had a crush on my teacher, I wanted her all to myself. So I thought the secrecy and privacy was for that reason; not because others would think it was bad.
I think that finding out that people think homosexuality is bad made me more firm in my desire to stay a lesbian regardless of what would happen to me.
My parents do not know or suspect that I am a lesbian. We are very conservative Baptists, and they would not stand for my being a lesbian at all. My older sister got pregnant when she was seventeen and they went wild! Who knows what they would do with me if they knew.
The only person in my family who knows is my older sister, and she has been wonderful about it. She first suspected about me when I was with my teacher, but I didn't tell her until after we had moved. (She has been very helpful. My teacher swore she would never send a letter to my house for my parents to accidentally find, so my sister receives my mail for me at her address.) I would never tell my parents - at least not before I graduate from college - because they are so religious.... There's no telling what they might do to me. I date guys occasionally, so they will not suspect anything. They don't want me to date much anyway, especially with what happened to my sister, so that keeps the pressure off.
Some of the other girls who were in lessons knew that I was attracted to my dance teacher. I think a couple of them were also attracted to her. After we became lovers, none of my friends knew what was going on. They were a little jealous that I was the teacher's pet, but they thought that was because I was a good dancer. The time we spent together was explained to them, and to my parents, as additional lessons. Dancing lessons, not love lessons!
Since I moved, my teacher and I talk occasionally on the phone, and we write each other. We are not lovers anymore; she has a lover she lives with now. But if we were together, and alone, I know I would want to go to bed with her. We are still very close, though not as close as we were before she moved in with her present lover.
Since my teacher, I have had three lovers including my present lover. The other two relationships occurred just before I was sixteen, and both lasted just a short time. My present lover and I have been together for almost a year. She is the daughter of a family that my parents are close to in church. She is fifteen and will be in ninth grade next year.
Both of the other relationships were with older women. I enjoyed the relationships but the other women didn't. I really liked them and thought they were very sexy and attractive. But both of them called me a "baby dyke," and couldn't handle having a relation-ship with me. I think they felt guilty, and felt they were making me do something I didn't want to do - which isn't true. My teacher never called me a baby dyke and never hesitated about me being her lover, even though I was very young.
I guess the feelings I have about being a young lesbian come from being rejected by those two women. But I have also met adult lesbians who are not even interest in being a friend to me. Maybe they are afraid they'll be attracted to me and try to seduce me. Or that I will try to seduce them. Young women have enough problems trying to sort out their sexual feelings, and dealing with their parents and other people who don't like their being a lesbian without adult lesbians giving them hassles about being underage. I am disappo-inted in lesbians for not caring for us young lesbians. My lover and I are very happy, but we really would like to associate with older lesbians.
Confronting Ageism
by Michael Alhonte
Although 18 at the time of writing this piece, Michael Alhonte had been involved with relationships with older men ranging from 31 to 49 since he came out as gay at the age of 15. He worked extensively with Gay Youth of New York and founded the organization PIGLUT (Politically Involved Gays and Lesbians Under Twenty-two). The following is one of a few essays wri4en exclusively for the 1981 anthology The Age Taboo.
Most of what has recently been said and written about man/boy love has come from adults. Few think to ask young people whether this issue is important to them and, if so, what their thoughts about it are. This oversight is directly traceable to two things: the adults who feel the opinions of children would be worthless anyway (since they can't fully understand the implications of these relationships), and the children who normally would speak out but who instead have internalized the ageism of their adult neighbors and discredit their own thoughts and feelings. Unfortunately, adult supporters of man/boy love often neglect the very real problems confronting those who involve themselves in such relationships. Inst-ead, they seem to concentrate on a boy's right to have sex, which often translates to their right to have sex with boys. This is an important issue to be sure, but is a moot point to those who are currently involved in these relationships. More important problems confront these people, and these are to be the focus of this article.
Even the most sincere and well-meaning boy-lover is often the victim of his own childhood when it comes to relating to boys. So many precepts about behavior "appropriate to age" are absorbed by a child while he grows, that when adulthood is reached, it is very difficult to escape from these psychological fetters. They lead to a great deal of unconscious oppression which is often so ingrained (as ageism usually is) that it is almost impossible to detect.
Domination
One of the chief manifestations of this oppression is the assumption that youth mandates passivity, primarily sexually but also in other matters. Many men might do well to take a good look at what happens in their relationships and then think back on who made these decisions. It is not that men deliberately ignore the likes or dislikes of the boys they date, but that children in general are so accustomed to being stepped on that if a suggestion is made by an adult it is often very difficult for the boy to admit to anything but agreement.
Additionally, so many men look up sexual dominance as an expression of power that they would not allow themselves any other role. The idea that a teenage boy might enjoy some-thing other than the "submissive" role is also foreign to many men. Of course, the opposite case is often true as well. A number of men seek a boy to dominate them. In my experience, however, it is very rare that one can find a man who is willing to be "switchable" - and in so doing, to totally divorce the age of the partners from the sexual acts they might enjoy.
There is also a great deal of stereotypical perception on both sides which can create friction. Boys are cast as either the young, ingenuous protégé or the streetwise, butch, jock punk. They are considered either utterly innocent or falsely cocky and self-assured. In either case they are possessed of remarkable stamina and sexual ferocity. Men, on the other hand, are considered stable, omniscient, and self-reliant. Unfortunately, the majority of boys are not so easily categorized - and many end up modifying their personalities uncon-sciously to fit their lover's conceptions of them. Similarly, men are rarely as rock-hard and perfect as their starry-eyed boys imagine. And when people on either side digress from stereotypical programs it can lead to problems. This in itself is possibly the most irritating aspect of ageism. I have been courted by numerous men who believe that I will be utterly and completely charmed by financial solvency. To those who subscribe to this mode of thinking, anyone who can afford to buy me a drink is rightfully entitled to my body. This does not even entail his actually buying the drink. Still others automatically assume that I desire to be ravished by a strong, suave man. I will admit that the thought has flickered more than once through my mind, but I do not feel that way all the time. Additionally, strength and suavity are no always sufficient.
The other side of the coin concerns men who are embarrassed or even offended if I should happen to demonstrate an interest in them. These men are sexually attracted to me -but they feel that they, as older men, should make the first approach. Too many times I have heard the refrain, "But, my God, - you're so young!" They find me old enough to screw but not old enough to talk to.
Which leads to the problem of objectification. Too many men adore boys as abstract, sexual beings, but refuse (or are unable) to deal with them as people. If they do pretend to show interest in what a boy has to say after sex, it is usually in a patronising , superior manner; often it is punctuated with degrading estimations of the boy's sexual value - as if this were the only level on which a boy can be valuable - perhaps intended as sincere comp-liments but more likely to be the only statements the man can honestly make, since he has not bothered in the slightest to get to know something about the boy.
There is also the unique situation of a younger lover growing "too old." When I reached 18, I was seized by an irrational fear that since I was no longer "chicken" I could no longer attract older boy-lovers. At the same time I felt I was not old enough to appeal to other older men. I was worried that I would be in a sort of sexual limbo. I have since learn-ed that this is hardly the case. The percentage of exclusive "boy"-lovers is quite low; addi-tionally, many people were open to me now, who had not been when I was still a minor, merely because I was over 18 - though I looked and acted quite the same as when I was 17.
My adulthood made a relationship seem more sensible to some people. And yet, I have been involved in relationships with people who did not want me any older than I was. I was embarrassed and irritated by the hairs sprouting on my face and chest because my lover was not attracted to hairy people. Of course it wasn't under my control; my body was simply completing its physical maturation. This problem was never resolved; we broke up shortly due to utterly unconnected influences. But how many couples do break up for that reason?
Economic Imbalance
Society has also set up a framework for the relationship which is quite difficult to overcome. The boy is often economically unequipped to contribute anything towards the costs of a date or other expenses. If a man and boy want to move in together the financial burden must fall primarily on the man. This produces an unpleasant imbalance within the relationship. The boy usually has parents to answer to - a situation which may have become too far removed for the man to understand. These things, and others like them, are compounded by an ageist refusal to adapt to the unique deficiencies of one another's positions.
These are some of the problems which ageism creates within a man/boy relationship.
Confronting these things may not be easy but it is essential. Though a man may not want to give up the power that age can give him, he must make this sacrifice if he is truly interested in man/boy love and not only man/boy sex. By the same token, a boy may not want to accept the responsibilities attached to a true emotional relationship, but with these responsibilities will come a new closeness to the man he loves. Both parties must fully analyze the expectations they have of their partners. Which of these expectations stems from the actual person's capabilities and which from an ageist stereotype?
A heavy emphasis is placed on youth by the American culture, and through a man/boy relationship both parties can enjoy some of youth's charms: the adult vicariously, and the younger person through being confronted with the adult lifestyle. But one must never allow the desire for youthfulness to obstruct the avenues for growth and self-expression in a relationship. To identify the factor that enchants a man with a boy as merely the boy's youth is to ageistically negate a whole range of positive traits that the boy has. Perhaps his youth is part of it, but it is dangerous to attempt to stagnate the metamorphosis of a boy into an adult merely to preserve one arbitrary factor. Change is, and always has been, an important component of a relationship. If you cannot grow with a person, what use is he?
The problems that ageism creates are not significantly different from the problems of any relationship, in that they all involve a failure to see a partner as he really is. Ageism is one of the most difficult oppressions around to conquer, and I hope this article will help some people to better understand and try to battle it. For if we young people cannot even find a refuge from it with our older lovers, where else is such to be found?
I'm 14, I'm gay & I want a boyfriend
by Lee
This interview with Lee, performed by human rights campaigner and journalist Peter Tatchell, was published in the gay and lesbian weekly magazine Thud (August 15, 1997). Though it's unfortunate that Lee himself did not get to write the article, Tatchell at the very least extensively quotes Lee's words and allows him to speak for himself. Tatchell himself was involved with the radical queer group OutRage! and led a campaign of theirs to lower the age of consent from 16 to 14.
Lee is 14. He’s been having sex with boys since the age of eight, and with men since he was 12. Lee has a serious problem. He wants a steady relationship and has been going out recently with a guy in his mid-twenties, who he met at the hairdressers. But in the eyes of the law, Lee's partner is a paedophile and Lee is a victim of child abuse. That's not, how-ever, the way Lee sees it: "I want to have a boyfriend. It's my choice. No one's abusing me. Why should we be treated like criminals?"
I am sitting in the kitchen of a friend’s house talking with Lee. Wearing a white T-shirt and combat trousers, his sophisticated gay image makes him look older than 14. He comes across as bright, articulate, sure of himself, and mature beyond his years. It's hard to imagine anyone getting away with taking advantage of him.
We are discussing the new Sex Offenders Act. Lee is concerned. Under this legisla-tion, which comes into effect next month, men over 19 who have consensual sex with guys under 18 are classified as dangerous sex criminals, on a par with the abusers of young children. After serving their sentence, they will be required to register their address with the police for a minimum of five years, and may have their identity revealed to the public. This is a live issue for Lee because he prefers relationships with older guys.
"I don’t get on with people my own age," says Lee. "They're too immature. I like men in their 20s or early 30s. They are more experienced and serious. With them, you can get into a closer relationship than with a teenager."
The age of consent laws don't make it easy for Lee to have a stable gay relationship.
"Some men run a mile when they discover how old I am," he moans. "They’re worried about getting done by the law."
Even without the Sex Offenders Act, any man who has sex with Lee could face a maximum sentence of 10 years for kissing, touching, sucking or wanking, and life impri-sonment for anal sex. The top penalty for the offence of "unlawful sexual intercourse" with a 14 year old girl is, in contrast, two years!
Having a relationship with someone his own age would, paradoxically, put Lee in greater legal danger than sex with an older person. The law says that a homosexual act with a male under 16 is a serious crime, even if the person committing the act is himself below the age of 16. So, by having anal sex with another 14 year old boy, Lee would be guilty of a major offence which can, at least in theory, be punished by jail for life.
"The law is stupid," according to Lee. "If I know what I'm doing and I'm not harming anyone else, I should be allowed to have sex with who I want."
Lee is just one of a growing number of lesbians and gays who are coming out at an ever earlier age…twelve, thirteen and fourteen is not uncommon nowadays. Research published by Project Sigma in 1993 shows that 9 percent of gay men had their first homo-sexual experience by the age of 10, 19 percent by the age of 12, and 35 per cent by the age of 14. Yet most gay campaign groups seem only interested in the human rights of the over-16s.
"There's nothing much for young gays like me," says Lee. "Nobody cares about our rights."
Lee first realised he was gay at the age of eight. Well, he didn't call himself gay. He just had sex with boys or, to begin with, one particular boy.
"My first gay sex was with a friend from school called John. I was eight and half. He was the same age. We used to go swimming together. It all started at the local swimming pool. One day we were in the cubicles getting changed and somehow we started kissing. Then we had oral sex."
How did you know what to do?
"Oh, I saw it on TV," quips Lee. You did? "They were talking about men having oral sex, so that's where I got the idea from."
Weren't you nervous about being caught?
"No. It just happened. I didn't think it might be wrong or that we could get into trouble."
How did you feel about your first gay experience? Lee beams with evident fond memories and confides: "I liked it a lot. It was great. But I did think sex with a boy was sort of strange. Until that time with John, I didn't have much idea about sex. It was mostly from the papers and television. I thought that men only had sex with women. For a while it left me feeling a bit weird and confused." He pauses for a moment, then adds emphatically: "I soon got over it."
Lee continued having regular sex with John for two years. "We were boyfriends," he boasts proudly. "I don’t have any regrets at all."
The relationship with John did not, however, stop Lee from experimenting with heterosexuality. "I had sex with John's twin sister. He found out and got very angry. He stormed out. For a while we weren't speaking. We made up afterwards."
Did you enjoy straight sex?
"Yeah," says Lee, "but sex with John was better."
So when did Lee start thinking of himself as being gay?
"It was a few months later, after I turned nine. I was watching a TV debate about gays. It made me realise that I was gay, and that it wasn't wrong. Since then, I've never had a problem about my sexuality."
Lee's next big love affair happened when he was ten. "It was with a black kid who lived on my road, Michael. He was the same age. My friends introduced him. One day, we were in his bedroom playing on his computer and we started messing around. It ended up with sex. Other times, we had a game called 'kick the cancan,' which involved kicking a can around. The can would often end up in the bushes, and we'd run there to look for it. Sometimes Michael and me would have sex there."
Around this time, Lee first came out to his mom. "She was good about it. Her first reaction was that I was a bit too young to be gay. She told me to leave it a couple of years. Then, if I still wanted to be gay, she said she'd accept it. I left it a few weeks, before telling her again. She realised I was serious, and respected my feelings and wishes. Ever since, she’s been really understanding."
At the age of 11, Lee had a relationship with a 14 year old named Andrew. "Because of family difficulties, I ended up in a children's home. They sent me to an education centre. That's where I met Andrew. We used to hang around together and became really close frie-nds. After a while he told me that he was on the rent scene. I asked him if he wanted a boy-friend and he said yeah. So we started going out with each other. That was when I first had anal sex and learned about condoms. Andrew pulled out a packet and went on about stopping HIV and AIDS. I shagged him and he shagged me. It bought tears to my eyes. It was painful, but I liked it as well. I enjoyed it more than sex with a girl. I got more of a sexual sensation."
For about 18 months, Lee joined Andrew doing sex for money, picking up men in the local gardens and bus station.
"It was mostly me just wanking them off. I stopped about a year and half ago. When I was doing it, I felt sick. I didn't enjoy it. I was only doing it for the money to buy drugs – mostly speed, acid and cannabis. I also had a few bad experiences with punters. Once Andrew and I were tied up and raped."
In the children’s home, Lee got taunted and bullied for being gay. "They called me queer and it ended up in fights. The staff didn't do anything to protect me, so I started run-ning away."
Lee is clearly very angry that no one took action to stop the bullying: "When I was being beaten up, the authorities did nothing. Now I'm gay and want to have sex, they're suddenly very concerned about my welfare."
When you ran away from the children's home, where did you go?
"I used to stay with this paedophile that I met in the gardens. He was okay. There was no pressure for me to have sex, but I did. I had sex with him because I wanted to feel loved and respected."
What do you think of that man now?
"Well, he didn't beat me up or hurt me like was happening in the children's home."
And what do you think about paedophiles in general?
"It depends on what kind of paedophiles," says Lee. "The paedophiles I knew always asked me if I wanted sex. They didn't pressure me. If you consent to having sex with a paedophile, it's fine. If you don't, it’s not."
How can a young child understand sex and give meaningful consent?
Lee admits: "The really young ones can't. But I was 12 when I first had sex with an adult man. I knew what was happening. The other boys I know who had sex with men were in their early teens. They understood what they were doing."
Perhaps your friends were particularly mature for their age. Most young people are not so sophisticated about sex.
"They shouldn't have sex then," according to Lee. "And other people shouldn't take advantage of them. No one should be having sex with a child who is very young or who has emotional and mental problems. You could have a relationship with them, but not sex – not until they are old enough to understand the responsibilities invol-ved."
Many people worry that the power imbalance in a relationship between a youth and an adult means the younger person can be easily manipulated and exploited. It's a concern that Lee acknowledges: "Yeah, that can happen. It's wrong. But that doesn’t mean that every kid who has sex with a man is being abused."
At what age do you think people should to be allowed, by law, to have sex?
"Sixteen is too high," says Lee. "Most kids I know had sex long before then. It's stupid for the law to brand us as criminals."
Do you worry about being arrested for under-age sex?
"Sometimes. I mostly worry for the older guys that I'm having sex with. They could get life imprisonment and be denounced as a paedophile. They might end up on the sex offenders register. It could ruin their life."
What do you think the age of consent should be?
"About 14."
Why?
"That's the age a lot of young people start having sex. If they are not forcing or hurting other kids they shouldn't have the threat of a policeman knocking on their door. The current age of 16 (or 18 for gays) means that those who are younger don't get proper sex education. My sex edu-cation at school was useless. The law makes it difficult for teachers to give out stuff about contraception, safer sex and AIDS. If the age was lower, the facts about sex could be taught sooner. It's stupid giving kids this information after they've started sex. That's too late. They need to know the facts about sex from around the age of 10."
I point out to Lee that an age of consent of 14 would not have been much help to him, since he was having sex from the age of eight. Even with consent at 14, most of his past sexual relationships would have remained illegal.
"Young people under 14 should be al-lowed to have sex with someone up to a year or so older," he suggests. "That way they've got freedom, and are protected against exploitation by older men."
Even with a permitted one year age differential, Lee's affair with Andrew, who was three years older, would not have been legal. Something a bit more flexible is required. The idea of a sliding-scale age of consent is something that OutRage! is promoting. In addition to supporting an age of consent of 14 for everyone (gay and straight), OutRage! argues that sex involving young people under 14 should not be prosecuted providing both partners consent and there is no more than three years difference in their ages.
When I put this idea to Lee, he nods with approval: "Some young people mature earlier than others. They should be able to have a relationship with someone a bit older. Society should accept that kids have sexual feelings."
This is the nub of the problem. Our current legal system refuses to acknowledge that young people have a sexuality. The law says a person under 16 is incapable of giving their consent to a sexual act. Any sex with such a person is automatically deemed "indecent assault."
Lee thinks that is "ridiculous": "I'm only 14 but I know what I’m doing. I under-stand what consent involves. So does the person I'm having sex with. No one is indecently assaulting me. That's a stupid suggestion. The law should stop treating young people like idiots."
Many people fear that making sex easier for under-age teenagers will expose them to dangers like HIV. Isn't that a legitimate worry?
"I know about safer sex," protests Lee. "I didn't get that information from school. It came from TV and boyfriends. Some of them had HIV and died. I'm okay because we did safer sex. People say that older guys will take ad-vantage of teenagers like me, but my partners made sure we took precautions – even the paedophiles. If people want to protect kids against AIDS, they should support better sex education lessons, starting in primary school. Education is the best prevention. But it isn't happening in most schools. Why doesn't someone make a fuss about that?"
Lee thinks it's time the law-makers listened to young people: "They are always trying to tell us how to live our lives. Why don't they treat us with respect? We've got opinions. We deserve to be heard. When a kid gets sexually abused, the social workers listen to what he says and back up his complaint. But when a kid wants to have a gay relationship, his wishes get ignored. That's what is happening to me. I'm under a care order which states that my feelings have to be taken into account. But society won't accept my feelings. It says I'm forbidden to have sex with a man until I'm 18. A perfect relationship is what I want. It would make me very happy. So why is the law trying to stop me?"
Scrap the "Young Love" Laws
Shocking Pink Collective
Shocking Pink was a feminist magazine which existed from 1979 to 1992, written entirely by young women for young women. Arising from talk at a young women's 1979 feminist conference, the magazine was helped and supported by the larger feminist magazine Spare Rib, which ran ads about Shocking Pink and helped the young women learn how to put together their magazine. The magazine's contents contained subjects such as gender, race, music, politics and, as this piece shows, sexuality and the law. The following piece appeared in the first issue, which came out late 1980 or early 1981.
Fury over bid to make sex under 16 legal
About a year ago a report by the National Council for One Parent Families came out, calling for the abolition of the Age of Consent laws for heterosexuals. This lead to some wild reporting in the press.
You probably know that under these laws it is illegal for a man to have intercourse with a woman if she is under sixteen years of age.
Maybe a few of you are thinking that this law protects young women, for example from rape. In fact there are very few prosecutions under this law and when they do happen they are against young people who have both consented.
I talked to some women, all of whom are under sixteen, about what they thought about the laws.
'Why age of consent law is out-dated'
I think this is ridiculous and am against the age of consent laws for both heterosexuals and homosexuals, because I believe that all people who give their consent to sex, both young and old should have the right to determine their own sex lives.
At the moment, if a woman under sixteen decides to enter into a sexual relationship, it means she can be placed in care on the grounds that she is in 'moral danger' to herself because of her, wait for it, 'abnormal sexual appetite'.
It is only the man who can be prosecuted, as the law says that whether she wanted sex or not is irrelevant. We as women are not taken seriously. When these laws were thought up, our sexual desires were ignored, in fact it was thought that we didn't have any.
An example of this is that there is no age of consent for lesbians as Queen Victoria didn't think it was possible for women to have fulfilling sexual relationships together.
Sex under 16 storm
A STORM of protest last night greeted a Government-financed report calling for the age of sexual consent, at present 16, to be abolished.
It's stupid, no one takes any notice anyway, if they want to sleep with people they will do it regardless of the law.
Have you slept with a boy?
Yes.
Are you taking any precautions?
No.
Why not?
'Cause I don't want to go to the doctor as he'd tell my Mum.
It's alright but people should be allowed to do what they want, they shouldn't get prosecuted.
Do you think that the law would stop you?
Probably, but I don't want to sleep with anyone yet anyway.
If the laws were abolished, would it make any difference?
No, people do it when they want, but I think that when they do they should be able to get contraception.
I don't think that it is a good idea.
Why?
Everyone should be able to do what they want to.
Have you ever slept with a boy?
No.
Is it the law that's stopped you?
No, I just don't want to do it.
You think it should be lowered to 12. Why not get rid of it altogether?
If it was any lower people would get forced into it.
Why?
'Cause men are men.
Why 12?
'Cause you know what you want at that age.
Sense not sensation
These laws are a result of a society which punishes consenting young people, while turning a blind eye to a lot of cases of rape and violence.
We as young women get the worst of it all round. Some doctors won't give contra-ception to women under sixteen years, and a lot of young women are frightened to go and get contraception, or to tell a doctor they are pregnant in case the doctor tells their parents.
The report was bierly aacked last night by Mrs. Mary Whitehouse. She said:
I believe that all women should have the right to abortion on demand, free contra-ception, and we should be able to get info on these things at any age."The one message children will receive from this report is that sex is okay. This can only lead to greater promiscuity among the young with consquent rises in veneral disease and cervical cancer."'
I'm not saying that we should all be having sex before we are sixteen. What I am saying however, is that at the moment the law decides when we should have sex, not us; the law says when we should get contraception, not us; the law says whether we can have an abortion, not us.
We should not have our sexual relationships made illegal and should not be punished for them. We must have the right to determine our own sex lives.
* * *
One le4er sent in about the piece was published and replied to in the second issue.
- Dear Shocking Pink,
This concerns the article about sex under 16. I think that if the law was changed it should go higher not lower although I think 16 is about right. I agree contraception should be avaliable to all women regardless of age.
If the age was lowered to 12 a virgin would be a rare thing. I disagree that a girl of 12 knows what she wants. You should only make love if you love your boyfriend. You have to be mature to love somebody that much and I think at 12 a girl just isn't mature enough, many aren't at sixteen. The trouble with the present law is that when a girl is 16, she may think "Great, I can do it now", and lose her virginity to the first boy she meets. I know a couple of friends who had sex under 16 and now regret it because they've finished with that boy and feel used. I think this is a very hard subject to discuss.
Sarah Kelly
We feel that your letter glorifies virginity in a way that's oppresive to women - who ever worries about men being virgins? We feel that women's sexuality should be recog-nized in its own right instead of being seen as belonging to other people - the idea of having to love your 'boyfriend' before having sex denies women the right to explore their own sexuality and pleasures. Love doesn't have to equal sex - sex can be great by itself.
Also the idea of 'maturity' in our society is a bit contradictory - young people in general aren't treated as people or adults so how can they be 'mature'? The whole idea of 'maturity' stems from adult prejudice; it's people and their attitudes that matter regardless of age.
We feel that age doesn't necessarily have anything to do with a woman's ability to make decisions, it's just society's attitude to age that puts more pressure on the younger woman and makes it more difficult for her.
Shocking Pink
I Know What I Am: Gay Teenagers and the Law
Joint Council For Gay Teenagers
This piece is an excerpted section of I Know What I Am: Gay Teenagers and the Law, an 18-page publication put out by the Joint Council For Gay Teenagers (JCGT) in 1980 in response to the government's "Working Paper on the Age of Consent." JCGT, which existed from 1978 to 1982 when it was absorbed into the Gay Youth Movement, helped gay youth groups in the UK to connect with each other and published material for youth workers and the gay movement.
The purpose of this response is straightforward: it is to make it clear beyond doubt that young homosexual people of both sexes are a reality and are, in our society, demanding recognition and possible support, not legal sanctions. This response is therefore addressed only to those parts of the Working Paper1 dealing with the age of consent or "minimum age" for homosexual relations.
The Joint Council for Gay Teenagers (JCGT), set up in late 1978, comprises many of the principal organizations in the United Kingdom that provide support to young gay people. Our constituent organizations have a great deal of first hand experience and knowledge of gay teenagers' needs. We are aware not only of the difficulties they often face but also that a new generation of gay people is growing up unwilling to suffer as previous generations have been expected to. Indeed the separation between "them" and "us" is false, as many gay men under the present minimum age and many young lesbians help run the support services for gay people.
During 1979 the JCGT also collected statements from 98 gay teenagers in England, Wales and Scotland. Seventeen of these were supplied by a Manchester-based group who had collected them as part of a separate project. In addition some extracts were provided from letters written to a member organization during the previous two years. Together, these present a unique record of how young gay men and women see themselves and the frequently hostile world in which they live. It is interesting that it is only with the emer-gence of the gay movement during the 1970s that it has become possible to collect such statements which originate not from the traditional clinical or penal settings but from ordinary life. Extracts from these have been used as illustrations throughout this response. Except where the teenagers themselves insisted otherwise, identities have been disguised. Behind much of the discussion in the paper on the minimum age for homosexual relations between men is the specter of a teenage boy readily cajoled into gay sexual acts; and the unprovable and improbable theory that seduction will fix the sexual orientation of those for whom it has previously not been fixed. Although such a theory would presu-mably work in both directions, the Policy Advisory Committee evidently is concerned solely with the supposed pressures on heterosexual (or "potentially heterosexual") people. This is really special pleading since, even if the case they make out were true, it is not balanced by the opposite and much more evident and widespread pressures on young gay people.
The world the Joint Council lives in, far from encouraging homosexuality in young people, is daily filled with heterosexual propaganda - in advertising, in entertainment, in the news media, in religion, in school and so on. This propaganda frequently takes the form of openly anti-homosexual prejudice and jibes. The "strong disapproval" of homo-sexual relations that the Committee identifies too often spills over into acts of physical violence against gay people. Young gay women frequently have to put up with unwanted advances from heterosexual men, which they are expected to find flattering, or which are openly hostile.
It is under these sorts of pressures that young gay people have to grow up. More often than not they feel themselves unable to talk to anyone at all about their emotions and needs, and live lives of almost total repression and isolation. Many have adopted, at least partially, society's negative valuation of their sexuality. Their sexual relationships and general contact with other gay people, in these circumstances, are necessarily restricted to ones that are furtive and unsatisfactory to themselves.
Some of these young gay men and women are subjected to severe pressures by their peer group, family, psychiatrists and others to get married. The gay help organizations frequently have calls from married people, some of whom (mostly men) were specifically advised to get married as a "cure" for their homosexuality. In these cases the spouses are used as an unknowing instrument of those who cannot accept the validity of homosexual feelings. This leads to immense personal complications and unhappiness. Whilst women often come to terms with the fact that they have married a gay man, it is common for a man to brutally reject a wife who he finds is lesbian. Where there are children, courts often deny custody and limit access for the gay parent.
It is only in the last decade or so that this bleak pattern of repression, and the resultant distortions in relationships, have been broken to any great extent - by the efforts of gay people themselves.
In light of this picture, it is odd that the Committee should concentrate so much in their Working Paper on imagined dangers to heterosexual young men and ignore the evident pressures on homosexuals of both sexes. It is even odder that the Committee should link this imagined danger to prostitution. The popular press always finds prostitution (heterosexual or homosexual) an attractive topic, but it is not a significant issue in relation to the vast majority of gay people of any age. No doubt this wrong emphasis is a result of the way homosexuality has been treated traditionally, as a purely penal or clinical matter, and not as part of everyday life.
The law cannot of itself change social attitudes and prejudices, but it should have no part in reinforcing their ill effects. The Committee appears to have some notion of these ill effects but fails to make the connect between them and the way the law operates. Gay people are not going to go away: they will only prosper or suffer according to the way society - including the law - regards them. The situation is analogous to the way the law influences race relations or sex equality.
- Jeff, 19, Speke:
After I met Mike I started to spend a lot of time with him, staying at his house overnight sometimes.... When I was 15 I went to court and they made a care order [commitment to an institution]. They did it partly because of Mike. I hated it in care and I used to run away to stay with Mike. Eventually they prosecuted Mike. I was 16 at the time and I had to go to court. It was a bad time. We had a good lawyer and Mike got off with probation.... I think all we have been through has brought us together more. - Glyn, 19, Manchester:
My man was caught cottaging [cruising] and arrested. The next day four policemen came to school to collect me and take me to the police station. There I was given a rigorous medical and interrogated intensely. My life was wrecked.... I didn't go to school for three months. I was recovering from a nervous breakdown.... The case spanned nearly a year and eventually he was sentenced to eighteen months in prison. - Trevor, 17, Northhampton:
When I rang (the number of a local gay group) he said... that I was too young for him to help me.... If I don't meet someone soon, I swear, I'll do something I'll regret. I wish people could understand how lonely it can be.
A vital part of helping gay people to lead happy and fulfilling lives (just as it is for heterosexual people) is to provide them from an early age with positive advice, with others whose lives can act as models for their own, and the opportunity to experience relationships and emotions. The Committee appears to accept this for gay men 18 and over, although they have nothing to say on this subject in relation to women. But apparently they would prefer gay men under 18 either to repress their sexual feelings entirely or to face the thread of penal sanctions if they can not or will not do so. At present it is only that fortunate minority of gay teenagers aged under 18 who have contacted gay help services who are able to grow up without first going through a long period of isolation, private torture and self-rejection.
Colin, 17, Leicester:
I was so isolated and always far too nervous to attend any type of meeting. I became more and more depressed and finally called Gayline (when I was 15) and asked for a befriending meeting. It was so good just to meet two other gay people. I was very happy for a long while afterwards, just knowing that I wasn't the only one.... I have a lot more confidence and I am able to cope much better at work. Other people just don't bother me any more. Things would certainly be very different if I had no social life and no gay friends to give me encouragement and support. The second time maybe I would have cut my wrists properly.
- Sue, 18, Highbury:
....whilst in the company of gay women I felt great. To me there didn't seem to be anything "bad" or "wrong" but for a while I clung to the idea that it was better to wait until society's attitude towards gays changed.... I could have been waiting forever! - Peter, 19, Leicester:
My feelings of loneliness and isolation disappeared completely.... I have told all my close friends that I am gay, a thing I would have found impossible to do had I not known other gay people. - Martin, 17, Edinburgh:
Now I feel "Thank God I'm gay." The only thing that makes me depressed sometimes is other people's attitudes to homosexuality. - Tim (female), 19, Cardiff:
Now I'm happy and quite proud. It's my way of life. - Phil, 18, Kirkby:
I began to see that being gay was not as bad as it's painted, and to lose the idea that gays are dirty old men.
- Peter, 19, Leicester:
I think I always knew what I was and accepted it myself. The biggest shock came when I went to comprehensive school and discovered words like "queer," "poof," etc., and realized that I was one of these "vile, disgusting perverts" and as far as I knew the only one. I was very often physically and mentally bullied at school and several times narrowly escaped violent attacks.... Because of the abuse I shut myself off from the outside, not only at school but at home as well.... The sex education talks at school never mentioned homosexuality and I assumed that it was so uncommon that it wasn't worth mentioning. - Stephen, 15, London:
....every boy at school calls me a "poof" or a "queer" and some say things like "Hello, love" and "How's your bum, love?" I feel like throwing myself under a bus sometimes. - David, 18, Yorkshire:
....it would be helpful if sex education in schools would include gay sex instead of being totally heterosexual in orientation.
The underlying feeling of the Committee appears therefore to be that homosexuality is much more worrying to them in the case of men than in women. This is evidenced by the fact that lesbians are accorded only one paragraph to themselves, while the bulk of the other 34 paragraphs in the section on homosexuality is concerned exclusively with men.
The needs of young lesbians include exactly those we have described above. Admit-tedly the current effective minimum age of 16 for lesbians is far preferable to the age propo-sed for men. But the balance of the Working Paper reflects exactly one special difficulty for lesbians - that the sexuality of women is frequently discounted and ignored. In this way the Working Paper, despite its claim to go some way towards meeting the demand for equality between the sexes, is in fact little more than a reflection of the most basic sex discrimination, in which the sexuality of men is accorded prime importance.
What We Propose
It follows from the foregoing arguments that a minimum age of 16 for homosexual men we would regard as far preferable to one of 18. It is tempting to reinforce the point by showing that, on the Home Office's own evidence2, if this minimum age had already been 16 only about 25 persons convicted in 1973 for consensual behavior would not have been so convicted. But what is at stake is human happiness is, as we have tried to show above, far greater than the figure implies; and in precisely the reverse direction to that assumed by the Committee.
- Patrick, 17, London suburb:
I hope that discrimination against gay people stops sooner or later. I think it's wrong, especially things like age of consent. I hope that maybe I'll see it in my lifetime. - Jim, 19, Colchester:
They could make (the age of consent) 16 or 14, or abolish it altogether. It's probably less important to have an age of consent for gay males than for heterosexual couples -after all, there are no babies. - Robert, 18, Essex:
I feel as though I'll go insane if I have to wait until I'm 21 as my parents have suggested, before they allow me to stay homosexual.
The same Working Party makes other recommendations about prosecution policy6 which we endorse. Some of the arguments it puts forward concerning the negative effect which the age of consent has on the welfare of consenting young heterosexual people have parallels in the case of young gay people; for example a legal minimum age deters them from seeking advice on relationships or on avoiding exploitive or unwanted relationships. This kind of advice is probably more important for people under 18.
If a minimum age of 16 were adopted we strongly recommend that prosecution policy strictly limit its use to cases where consent was absent or where the younger partner was less than 14 years old. Even in the latter cases which were found to be consensual, penalties should be limited to fines and community service orders.
The only civilized answer to the question put to the Policy Advisory Committee would be to remove consensual sexual acts altogether from the realm of the criminal law. Only then can hundreds of thousands of young gay people freely seek and receive the best help and advice, make relationships of their choosing without constant fear of sanction, and use their energies and skills fully to make the world a better, kinder place. Only then, too, can the heterosexual majority obtain the help and education it needs to live in harmony with gay women and men at home, at school and at work.
Notes
1. Home Office, Policy Advisory Committee on Sexual Offences, Working Paper on the Age of Consent in relation to Sexual Offences, June 1979, HMSO.
2. Home Office Research Study No. 54, Sexual Offences, Consent and Sentencing (1979), HMSO, p. 9.
3. Report of Working Party on the Law in relation to Sexual Behaviour, 1974
4. Evidence to the Criminal Law Revision Commi4ee, 1976
5. National Council for One Parent Families and Community Development Trust, Pregnant at School, 1979, para 314
6. Ibid., para 313
Girl and Woman
by Amy
Texan lesbian Amy was 16 when she wrote this originally untitled essay for the 1983 anthology One Teenager in Ten: Writings by Gay and Lesbian Youth. The anthology came about after a request for submissions in the back of another one of the publisher's gay youth-centered books, Young, Gay and Proud. This piece was one of the few removed from the book's 1994 update, Two Teenagers in Twenty.
I am a sixteen-year-old lesbian. I have been a lesbian since I was twelve. I had known my dance teacher for three years before she brought me out. I was very attracted to her when I first saw her, and from then on, I grew to be more and more in love with her. When I was ten, I had a crush on a friend of my older sister, and some time after that another crush on a cousin of mine. But these didn't last long.
I always wanted to be near my teacher, dance well for her, and have her touch me!
Often while falling asleep at night I would think about her holding me in her arms while I'd go to sleep or about her kissing me. I didn't know anything about lesbians then, so I didn't associate my feelings with anything but my love for her.
We became lovers the weekend I was asked to give a special dance presentation in another city. My dance instructor chose me and accompanied me there. She was 23.
After the performance, we returned to our room. She was elated with my reception, and hugged me and told me how good I was. I felt so good being held by her, being so close to her; secure in the arms of a woman I had admired and loved for three years.
Her eyes were so alive, so exciting; her smile so sensuous. When she said, "Let me help you take this off," I could only hope something might happen. I let my arms hang loose as she slipped the leotards over my shoulders, then I cooperated with her so my arms could be freed, leaving the costume hanging at my waist, with my breasts bare.
"You are so pretty," she said, placing her hands on my neck and then running them down my chest and then running them down my chest, over my breasts and then cupping them in her hands. I loved what she was doing, especially when she licked her index finger and began rubbing my left nipple, making it hard. She did the same with the right one, and I held her tightly around the waist.
"Does this feel good?" she asked.
"Yes, don't stop."
Then she took a nipple in each hand and rolled them between her fingers. At the same time she moved closer to me. From the waist down we were touching; from the waist up, separated enough for her to get her hands on my breasts. Somehow our lips met, tentative at first and then we kissed passionately with her tongue edging its way into my mouth. I began sucking her tongue, and for the first time I felt tingly all over. My next sensation was our deep breathing, then I felt her hands move from my front to my back, and she pressed tighter to me. Then she moved her hands down to my butt, massaging, and pushing my pelvis into hers. When I felt some thrusts of her pelvis against mine, my eyes opened wide.
She responded by saying, "You really turn me on...do you like this?"
"Oh, yes."
She said "Let's take this off," referring to the costume still covering my bottom. Down it came, and I stepped out of it.
She held me at arms length, saying, "I want to look at you." Her hands moved from my neck, to my shoulders, down over my nipples to my waist; one hand on each side. Then she told me I was sexy and moved her right hand down my stomach and lower. I knew what she was going to do, hoping those sensations I had felt before would be even better. They were, as she concentrated on my clitoris with a circular motion, slipping her middle finger between my lips and occasionally into me.
"I want to make love to you. Let's go to bed."
We continued that night, all weekend and for almost three years until I had to move with my family. I became a lesbian and a woman that weekend!
My teacher was the first person I can recall who ever used the word lesbian to me.
After she brought me out, and I started going over to her house, I noticed books about lesbianism out in the open. I picked one up, and looked through it. She began telling me about lesbianism and people's attitudes towards homosexuals. Until that time, I can't recall ever thinking that what we were doing was unacceptable. For one thing, I always thought that what boys and girls did to each other was bad. Besides that, I thought what we had was special, and since some of the other girls had a crush on my teacher, I wanted her all to myself. So I thought the secrecy and privacy was for that reason; not because others would think it was bad.
I think that finding out that people think homosexuality is bad made me more firm in my desire to stay a lesbian regardless of what would happen to me.
My parents do not know or suspect that I am a lesbian. We are very conservative Baptists, and they would not stand for my being a lesbian at all. My older sister got pregnant when she was seventeen and they went wild! Who knows what they would do with me if they knew.
The only person in my family who knows is my older sister, and she has been wonderful about it. She first suspected about me when I was with my teacher, but I didn't tell her until after we had moved. (She has been very helpful. My teacher swore she would never send a letter to my house for my parents to accidentally find, so my sister receives my mail for me at her address.) I would never tell my parents - at least not before I graduate from college - because they are so religious.... There's no telling what they might do to me. I date guys occasionally, so they will not suspect anything. They don't want me to date much anyway, especially with what happened to my sister, so that keeps the pressure off.
Some of the other girls who were in lessons knew that I was attracted to my dance teacher. I think a couple of them were also attracted to her. After we became lovers, none of my friends knew what was going on. They were a little jealous that I was the teacher's pet, but they thought that was because I was a good dancer. The time we spent together was explained to them, and to my parents, as additional lessons. Dancing lessons, not love lessons!
Since I moved, my teacher and I talk occasionally on the phone, and we write each other. We are not lovers anymore; she has a lover she lives with now. But if we were together, and alone, I know I would want to go to bed with her. We are still very close, though not as close as we were before she moved in with her present lover.
Since my teacher, I have had three lovers including my present lover. The other two relationships occurred just before I was sixteen, and both lasted just a short time. My present lover and I have been together for almost a year. She is the daughter of a family that my parents are close to in church. She is fifteen and will be in ninth grade next year.
Both of the other relationships were with older women. I enjoyed the relationships but the other women didn't. I really liked them and thought they were very sexy and attractive. But both of them called me a "baby dyke," and couldn't handle having a relation-ship with me. I think they felt guilty, and felt they were making me do something I didn't want to do - which isn't true. My teacher never called me a baby dyke and never hesitated about me being her lover, even though I was very young.
I guess the feelings I have about being a young lesbian come from being rejected by those two women. But I have also met adult lesbians who are not even interest in being a friend to me. Maybe they are afraid they'll be attracted to me and try to seduce me. Or that I will try to seduce them. Young women have enough problems trying to sort out their sexual feelings, and dealing with their parents and other people who don't like their being a lesbian without adult lesbians giving them hassles about being underage. I am disappo-inted in lesbians for not caring for us young lesbians. My lover and I are very happy, but we really would like to associate with older lesbians.
Confronting Ageism
by Michael Alhonte
Although 18 at the time of writing this piece, Michael Alhonte had been involved with relationships with older men ranging from 31 to 49 since he came out as gay at the age of 15. He worked extensively with Gay Youth of New York and founded the organization PIGLUT (Politically Involved Gays and Lesbians Under Twenty-two). The following is one of a few essays wri4en exclusively for the 1981 anthology The Age Taboo.
Most of what has recently been said and written about man/boy love has come from adults. Few think to ask young people whether this issue is important to them and, if so, what their thoughts about it are. This oversight is directly traceable to two things: the adults who feel the opinions of children would be worthless anyway (since they can't fully understand the implications of these relationships), and the children who normally would speak out but who instead have internalized the ageism of their adult neighbors and discredit their own thoughts and feelings. Unfortunately, adult supporters of man/boy love often neglect the very real problems confronting those who involve themselves in such relationships. Inst-ead, they seem to concentrate on a boy's right to have sex, which often translates to their right to have sex with boys. This is an important issue to be sure, but is a moot point to those who are currently involved in these relationships. More important problems confront these people, and these are to be the focus of this article.
Even the most sincere and well-meaning boy-lover is often the victim of his own childhood when it comes to relating to boys. So many precepts about behavior "appropriate to age" are absorbed by a child while he grows, that when adulthood is reached, it is very difficult to escape from these psychological fetters. They lead to a great deal of unconscious oppression which is often so ingrained (as ageism usually is) that it is almost impossible to detect.
Domination
One of the chief manifestations of this oppression is the assumption that youth mandates passivity, primarily sexually but also in other matters. Many men might do well to take a good look at what happens in their relationships and then think back on who made these decisions. It is not that men deliberately ignore the likes or dislikes of the boys they date, but that children in general are so accustomed to being stepped on that if a suggestion is made by an adult it is often very difficult for the boy to admit to anything but agreement.
Additionally, so many men look up sexual dominance as an expression of power that they would not allow themselves any other role. The idea that a teenage boy might enjoy some-thing other than the "submissive" role is also foreign to many men. Of course, the opposite case is often true as well. A number of men seek a boy to dominate them. In my experience, however, it is very rare that one can find a man who is willing to be "switchable" - and in so doing, to totally divorce the age of the partners from the sexual acts they might enjoy.
There is also a great deal of stereotypical perception on both sides which can create friction. Boys are cast as either the young, ingenuous protégé or the streetwise, butch, jock punk. They are considered either utterly innocent or falsely cocky and self-assured. In either case they are possessed of remarkable stamina and sexual ferocity. Men, on the other hand, are considered stable, omniscient, and self-reliant. Unfortunately, the majority of boys are not so easily categorized - and many end up modifying their personalities uncon-sciously to fit their lover's conceptions of them. Similarly, men are rarely as rock-hard and perfect as their starry-eyed boys imagine. And when people on either side digress from stereotypical programs it can lead to problems. This in itself is possibly the most irritating aspect of ageism. I have been courted by numerous men who believe that I will be utterly and completely charmed by financial solvency. To those who subscribe to this mode of thinking, anyone who can afford to buy me a drink is rightfully entitled to my body. This does not even entail his actually buying the drink. Still others automatically assume that I desire to be ravished by a strong, suave man. I will admit that the thought has flickered more than once through my mind, but I do not feel that way all the time. Additionally, strength and suavity are no always sufficient.
The other side of the coin concerns men who are embarrassed or even offended if I should happen to demonstrate an interest in them. These men are sexually attracted to me -but they feel that they, as older men, should make the first approach. Too many times I have heard the refrain, "But, my God, - you're so young!" They find me old enough to screw but not old enough to talk to.
Which leads to the problem of objectification. Too many men adore boys as abstract, sexual beings, but refuse (or are unable) to deal with them as people. If they do pretend to show interest in what a boy has to say after sex, it is usually in a patronising , superior manner; often it is punctuated with degrading estimations of the boy's sexual value - as if this were the only level on which a boy can be valuable - perhaps intended as sincere comp-liments but more likely to be the only statements the man can honestly make, since he has not bothered in the slightest to get to know something about the boy.
There is also the unique situation of a younger lover growing "too old." When I reached 18, I was seized by an irrational fear that since I was no longer "chicken" I could no longer attract older boy-lovers. At the same time I felt I was not old enough to appeal to other older men. I was worried that I would be in a sort of sexual limbo. I have since learn-ed that this is hardly the case. The percentage of exclusive "boy"-lovers is quite low; addi-tionally, many people were open to me now, who had not been when I was still a minor, merely because I was over 18 - though I looked and acted quite the same as when I was 17.
My adulthood made a relationship seem more sensible to some people. And yet, I have been involved in relationships with people who did not want me any older than I was. I was embarrassed and irritated by the hairs sprouting on my face and chest because my lover was not attracted to hairy people. Of course it wasn't under my control; my body was simply completing its physical maturation. This problem was never resolved; we broke up shortly due to utterly unconnected influences. But how many couples do break up for that reason?
Economic Imbalance
Society has also set up a framework for the relationship which is quite difficult to overcome. The boy is often economically unequipped to contribute anything towards the costs of a date or other expenses. If a man and boy want to move in together the financial burden must fall primarily on the man. This produces an unpleasant imbalance within the relationship. The boy usually has parents to answer to - a situation which may have become too far removed for the man to understand. These things, and others like them, are compounded by an ageist refusal to adapt to the unique deficiencies of one another's positions.
These are some of the problems which ageism creates within a man/boy relationship.
Confronting these things may not be easy but it is essential. Though a man may not want to give up the power that age can give him, he must make this sacrifice if he is truly interested in man/boy love and not only man/boy sex. By the same token, a boy may not want to accept the responsibilities attached to a true emotional relationship, but with these responsibilities will come a new closeness to the man he loves. Both parties must fully analyze the expectations they have of their partners. Which of these expectations stems from the actual person's capabilities and which from an ageist stereotype?
A heavy emphasis is placed on youth by the American culture, and through a man/boy relationship both parties can enjoy some of youth's charms: the adult vicariously, and the younger person through being confronted with the adult lifestyle. But one must never allow the desire for youthfulness to obstruct the avenues for growth and self-expression in a relationship. To identify the factor that enchants a man with a boy as merely the boy's youth is to ageistically negate a whole range of positive traits that the boy has. Perhaps his youth is part of it, but it is dangerous to attempt to stagnate the metamorphosis of a boy into an adult merely to preserve one arbitrary factor. Change is, and always has been, an important component of a relationship. If you cannot grow with a person, what use is he?
The problems that ageism creates are not significantly different from the problems of any relationship, in that they all involve a failure to see a partner as he really is. Ageism is one of the most difficult oppressions around to conquer, and I hope this article will help some people to better understand and try to battle it. For if we young people cannot even find a refuge from it with our older lovers, where else is such to be found?
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RoosterDance
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Re: Butterfly Kisses: Researching Female Pedophilia
On woman/girl love, or lesbians do "do it"
Originally published in Gay Community News, 3 March, 1979.
Least of all is known about paedophilia between women and children, of either sex. I think I know why this is the case, but who better to explain the phenomenon than a woman? The following is an extract from a personal letter between two women, which the recipient submitted for publication in a feminist magazine:
'Women are brought up to marry and fulfil themselves through motherhood and loving their children: this is normal, pure and completely unsexual – so we are told. In fact, this is part of the whole sexist myth that women have no sexuality of their own (just like children), and that sex is something that is given to a woman by a man. Hence, lesbians either don't really exist, or if they do, they can't really do anything with one another, etc.
'In the same way that countless women grow up, are married and go through their whole lives without realising that the attraction they feel for other women is, in fact, sexual and that they are really gay, many women do not identify their feeling of love and attraction to children as sexual. Perhaps they don't really enjoy sex with men, but get enormous pleasure from cuddling, caressing and bathing children. They get satisfaction from this but don't see their natural spontaneous feelings as anything to do with paedophilia.
A friend of mine, whose girlfriend had a baby, enjoyed a close loving relationship with the child and did see it as sexual – they had a lot of fun together. 4 In Mexico, mothers and grandmothers often lick their babies' genitals to soothe them to sleep. The babies obviously like it. Is this a sexual assault? Should they all be arrested? It's well known that babies and small children need to be touched and held a lot, otherwise they suffer severe emotional problems that can continue throughout their lives. So when do we define a touch as sexual? And indeed should we make that distinction at all?' 5
Some would define the sexuality or otherwise of a touch in terms of its effect on the toucher, i.e. if the touch is accompanied by specifically genital arousal in the toucher, then it is a sexual touch. So when the correspondent talks about the 'enormous pleasure' women get from cuddling and caressing children, it is a moot point whether this pleasure is genital. In terms both of semantic precision and of the clarity of thought which such precision implies, the distinction as to what is, and is not, sexual pleasure is important.
On the other hand, we should not lose sight of the fact that the effect on the child is the important thing in the last analysis. Does it really make any difference to the baby whether the adult who gives it delight by licking its genitals is definitely turned on sexually, or turned on from a more generalised sensuality, or even from the 'pure' non-sexual motive of deriving satisfaction from the pleasure given to the child? As the correspondent rightly says, should we bother to make the distinction at all?
Her comments go a long way to explaining why female paedophilia, like lesbianism, is largely invisible in our society. Women have a licence to be intimate with children, and their motives for doing so are invariably interpreted as non-sexual, in all but undeniably sexual situations, chiefly coitus. Thus occasionally a woman appears before the courts if she has allowed or encouraged boys to have intercourse with her. 6 By contrast, in the absence of coitus as a possibility, sexual acts between women and girls are rarely proceeded against. I imagine most people think they never happen and that women just do not want them – yet I personally know women who feel that a major part of their sexual response is towards little girls.
The following account of lesbian paedophilia appeared in Body Politic, 7 the Canadian gay magazine, and relates a story from the youngster's point of view. As will be seen, concern over the effects of a relationship need not be all one way.
'Donna lives in a small town in staunch Presbyterian Ontario where everyone knows everyone else, and where "it's difficult to be unconventional and almost impossible to be lesbian." Sharon was a teacher at her public school. "She first taught me sixth grade. I guess I was attracted to her then though I didn't think of it in sexual terms. But then I didn't think of anything in sexual terms at the time." Sharon was a married woman – her husband was also a teacher – and she had two children. At the time. she was more than twice Donna's age.
'The first woman Donna was actually involved with, however, was Jean. "I worked away from home the summer I was fourteen. I met Jean and was really impressed by her. But it's hard to imagine going to bed with a school friend's mother. It was the next summer before I actually had the nerve to do it. I was fifteen – she was forty-three. She was a beautiful woman, but our relationship was fraught with contradictions. I wanted it and initiated it, but I also felt guilty and fearful; I knew Jean's life as a forty-three-year-old wife and mother of seven children was complicated enough without the added burden of a lesbian relationship with a fifteen-year-old kid."
'Meanwhile, Donna had maintained a regular correspondence with Sharon.
'"It seems quite strange, looking back on it, the way we cultivated our friendship. Real child-adult friendships are probably quite rare. We wrote letters even though we only lived a few miles apart; that made it seem a bit furtive, too. I guess we had to be content with melodrama when we had so few opportunities to see each other and when there were no acceptable forms for expressing what we felt for each other. That is, until I came out for the first time."
'By the following summer, Sharon and Donna had been able to contrive some way of spending time together. "I had just turned sixteen when I told her about Jean and me. In retrospect my big confession seems sort of unreal. We had been out canoeing and had gone ashore on a small island. It sounds very romantic, doesn't it? I was a regular little Conspirator. Only it didn't turn out exactly the way I had planned. I was more or less saying to Sharon 'All right, if you feel the same way about me as I feel about you, don't be afraid. You aren't leading me astray. You aren't taking me anywhere I haven't already been.' Her reaction seemed mostly to be shock. I guess I wasn't the most tactful sixteen-year-old."
'But Donna's coming out about her relationship with Jean eventually did have the desired effect. "Sharon later told me that she felt strongly, almost magnetically drawn to me for those few minutes on the island and that her own responses were what really shocked her. Ours was her first lesbian relationship and seemed, for her, to carry all the significance of a first exploration of her sexual identity."
'But again I felt guilty. Partly because of society's condemnation, should the nature of our relationship ever become known. But more because, although Sharon's sexual orientation is to other women, she has chosen to live a heterosexual lifestyle. And I was a threat to her family – her security. Again, I wondered if maybe I wasn't taking more from her in emotional support and understanding than I could return.'
In many people's eyes, it would be inappropriate to say that Donna was a 'child' at the time of her association with Jean and Sharon. But what about Beth Kelly, now mature in years, and a radical lesbian feminist, who, as a 'precocious' eight-year-old, developed a relationship with a grown woman? She writes:
'The first woman I ever loved sexually was my great-aunt; our feelings for each other were deep strong, and full. The fact that she was more than fifty years older than I did not affect the bond that grew between us. And, yes, I knew what I was doing – every step of the way – even though I had not, at the time, learned many of the words with which to speak of these things.
'Aunt Addie was a dynamic, intelligent, and creative woman – who refused, all her life, to be cowed by convention. In an extended family where women played out "traditional" housewifely roles to the hilt, she stood out, a beacon of independence and strength. She was a nurse in France during the First World War, had travelled, read books, and lived for over twenty years in a monogamous relationship with another woman. Her lover's death pre-dated the start of our sexual relationship by about two years But we had always been close and seen a great deal of each other. In the summers, which my mother, brother and I always spent at her seashore home, we were together daily. In other seasons, she would drive to visit us wherever we were living, and often stayed for a month or so at a time. .
'I adored her; that's all there was to it. I had never been taught at home that heterosexual acts or other body functions were dirty or forbidden, and I'd been isolated enough from other children to manage to miss a lot of the usual sexist socialisation learned in play. It never occurred to me that it might be considered "unnatural" or "antisocial" to kiss or touch or hold the person I loved, and I don't think that Addie was terribly concerned by such things either. I do know that I never felt pressured or forced by any sexual aspects of the love I felt for her. I think I can safely say, some twenty years later, that I was never exploited – physically emotionally, or intellectually – in the least.' 8
As so often happens, this joyous liaison eventually foundered on the rocks of parental disapproval, when Beth's mother chanced upon her and Addie in bed together. But disapproval of paedophilia or, rather, disapproval of child sexuality, has a significance far beyond its disastrous impact on the lives of the relatively limited numbers of children and adults in paedophilic relationships. The impact of the sex-negative outlook has to be seen in a wider societal context in order to appreciate its full significance. In this context, to which attention will now be turned, we can see reasons why a climate in which children come to view all consensual sex positively and without guilt, including consensual paedophilia, may be necessary for the welfare of everyone.
Notes
4. Freud was in no doubt that mothers have sexual feelings towards their children.
'A child's intercourse with anyone responsible for his care affords him an unending source of sexual excitation and satisfaction from his erotogenic zones. This is especially so since the person in charge of him, who, after all, is as a rule his mother, herself regards him with feelings that are derived from her own sexual life: she strokes him, kisses him, rocks him and quite clearly treats him as a substitute for a complete sexual object' (In 'Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality' in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol.7, Hogarth Press, London, 1953-74).
Dr Alayne Yates, a psychiatrist, tells us that mothers sometimes report serial orgasms brought about by the sexual pleasure they feel when breastfeeding their babies (A. Yates, Sex Without Shame, Temple Smith, London, 1979). ^
5. Sequel, March 1978. ^
6. Even then the law is at pains to assign a passive role to the female. At Caernarvon Crown Court in 1976 a woman aged thirty-five, who was alleged to have had intercourse with some boys aged twelve to fifteen, faced charges of indecent assault against them. The judge directed the jury to find her not guilty, saying that there is not and never has been an offence of a woman having sexual intercourse with a boy under sixteen. He told the jury that if they were 'to consider this particular case, the prosecution could not rely on the mere fact of intercourse with the boys as of itself constituting an indecent assault'. Reported in The Daily Telegraph, p.3, and the Daily Mail, p.3, 8 October, 1976. See also M. Rae et al., First Rights: A Guide to Legal Rights for Young People, NCCL, London, 1979, p.60, and Paedophilia: Some Questions and Answers, PIE, London, 1978, Appendix on the Law. ^
7. In an article by Christine Bearchell, Body Politic, June 1978. ^
8. Beth Kelly, 'On woman/girl love, or lesbians do "do it"', Gay Community News, 3 March, 1979.
Originally published in Gay Community News, 3 March, 1979.
Least of all is known about paedophilia between women and children, of either sex. I think I know why this is the case, but who better to explain the phenomenon than a woman? The following is an extract from a personal letter between two women, which the recipient submitted for publication in a feminist magazine:
'Women are brought up to marry and fulfil themselves through motherhood and loving their children: this is normal, pure and completely unsexual – so we are told. In fact, this is part of the whole sexist myth that women have no sexuality of their own (just like children), and that sex is something that is given to a woman by a man. Hence, lesbians either don't really exist, or if they do, they can't really do anything with one another, etc.
'In the same way that countless women grow up, are married and go through their whole lives without realising that the attraction they feel for other women is, in fact, sexual and that they are really gay, many women do not identify their feeling of love and attraction to children as sexual. Perhaps they don't really enjoy sex with men, but get enormous pleasure from cuddling, caressing and bathing children. They get satisfaction from this but don't see their natural spontaneous feelings as anything to do with paedophilia.
A friend of mine, whose girlfriend had a baby, enjoyed a close loving relationship with the child and did see it as sexual – they had a lot of fun together. 4 In Mexico, mothers and grandmothers often lick their babies' genitals to soothe them to sleep. The babies obviously like it. Is this a sexual assault? Should they all be arrested? It's well known that babies and small children need to be touched and held a lot, otherwise they suffer severe emotional problems that can continue throughout their lives. So when do we define a touch as sexual? And indeed should we make that distinction at all?' 5
Some would define the sexuality or otherwise of a touch in terms of its effect on the toucher, i.e. if the touch is accompanied by specifically genital arousal in the toucher, then it is a sexual touch. So when the correspondent talks about the 'enormous pleasure' women get from cuddling and caressing children, it is a moot point whether this pleasure is genital. In terms both of semantic precision and of the clarity of thought which such precision implies, the distinction as to what is, and is not, sexual pleasure is important.
On the other hand, we should not lose sight of the fact that the effect on the child is the important thing in the last analysis. Does it really make any difference to the baby whether the adult who gives it delight by licking its genitals is definitely turned on sexually, or turned on from a more generalised sensuality, or even from the 'pure' non-sexual motive of deriving satisfaction from the pleasure given to the child? As the correspondent rightly says, should we bother to make the distinction at all?
Her comments go a long way to explaining why female paedophilia, like lesbianism, is largely invisible in our society. Women have a licence to be intimate with children, and their motives for doing so are invariably interpreted as non-sexual, in all but undeniably sexual situations, chiefly coitus. Thus occasionally a woman appears before the courts if she has allowed or encouraged boys to have intercourse with her. 6 By contrast, in the absence of coitus as a possibility, sexual acts between women and girls are rarely proceeded against. I imagine most people think they never happen and that women just do not want them – yet I personally know women who feel that a major part of their sexual response is towards little girls.
The following account of lesbian paedophilia appeared in Body Politic, 7 the Canadian gay magazine, and relates a story from the youngster's point of view. As will be seen, concern over the effects of a relationship need not be all one way.
'Donna lives in a small town in staunch Presbyterian Ontario where everyone knows everyone else, and where "it's difficult to be unconventional and almost impossible to be lesbian." Sharon was a teacher at her public school. "She first taught me sixth grade. I guess I was attracted to her then though I didn't think of it in sexual terms. But then I didn't think of anything in sexual terms at the time." Sharon was a married woman – her husband was also a teacher – and she had two children. At the time. she was more than twice Donna's age.
'The first woman Donna was actually involved with, however, was Jean. "I worked away from home the summer I was fourteen. I met Jean and was really impressed by her. But it's hard to imagine going to bed with a school friend's mother. It was the next summer before I actually had the nerve to do it. I was fifteen – she was forty-three. She was a beautiful woman, but our relationship was fraught with contradictions. I wanted it and initiated it, but I also felt guilty and fearful; I knew Jean's life as a forty-three-year-old wife and mother of seven children was complicated enough without the added burden of a lesbian relationship with a fifteen-year-old kid."
'Meanwhile, Donna had maintained a regular correspondence with Sharon.
'"It seems quite strange, looking back on it, the way we cultivated our friendship. Real child-adult friendships are probably quite rare. We wrote letters even though we only lived a few miles apart; that made it seem a bit furtive, too. I guess we had to be content with melodrama when we had so few opportunities to see each other and when there were no acceptable forms for expressing what we felt for each other. That is, until I came out for the first time."
'By the following summer, Sharon and Donna had been able to contrive some way of spending time together. "I had just turned sixteen when I told her about Jean and me. In retrospect my big confession seems sort of unreal. We had been out canoeing and had gone ashore on a small island. It sounds very romantic, doesn't it? I was a regular little Conspirator. Only it didn't turn out exactly the way I had planned. I was more or less saying to Sharon 'All right, if you feel the same way about me as I feel about you, don't be afraid. You aren't leading me astray. You aren't taking me anywhere I haven't already been.' Her reaction seemed mostly to be shock. I guess I wasn't the most tactful sixteen-year-old."
'But Donna's coming out about her relationship with Jean eventually did have the desired effect. "Sharon later told me that she felt strongly, almost magnetically drawn to me for those few minutes on the island and that her own responses were what really shocked her. Ours was her first lesbian relationship and seemed, for her, to carry all the significance of a first exploration of her sexual identity."
'But again I felt guilty. Partly because of society's condemnation, should the nature of our relationship ever become known. But more because, although Sharon's sexual orientation is to other women, she has chosen to live a heterosexual lifestyle. And I was a threat to her family – her security. Again, I wondered if maybe I wasn't taking more from her in emotional support and understanding than I could return.'
In many people's eyes, it would be inappropriate to say that Donna was a 'child' at the time of her association with Jean and Sharon. But what about Beth Kelly, now mature in years, and a radical lesbian feminist, who, as a 'precocious' eight-year-old, developed a relationship with a grown woman? She writes:
'The first woman I ever loved sexually was my great-aunt; our feelings for each other were deep strong, and full. The fact that she was more than fifty years older than I did not affect the bond that grew between us. And, yes, I knew what I was doing – every step of the way – even though I had not, at the time, learned many of the words with which to speak of these things.
'Aunt Addie was a dynamic, intelligent, and creative woman – who refused, all her life, to be cowed by convention. In an extended family where women played out "traditional" housewifely roles to the hilt, she stood out, a beacon of independence and strength. She was a nurse in France during the First World War, had travelled, read books, and lived for over twenty years in a monogamous relationship with another woman. Her lover's death pre-dated the start of our sexual relationship by about two years But we had always been close and seen a great deal of each other. In the summers, which my mother, brother and I always spent at her seashore home, we were together daily. In other seasons, she would drive to visit us wherever we were living, and often stayed for a month or so at a time. .
'I adored her; that's all there was to it. I had never been taught at home that heterosexual acts or other body functions were dirty or forbidden, and I'd been isolated enough from other children to manage to miss a lot of the usual sexist socialisation learned in play. It never occurred to me that it might be considered "unnatural" or "antisocial" to kiss or touch or hold the person I loved, and I don't think that Addie was terribly concerned by such things either. I do know that I never felt pressured or forced by any sexual aspects of the love I felt for her. I think I can safely say, some twenty years later, that I was never exploited – physically emotionally, or intellectually – in the least.' 8
As so often happens, this joyous liaison eventually foundered on the rocks of parental disapproval, when Beth's mother chanced upon her and Addie in bed together. But disapproval of paedophilia or, rather, disapproval of child sexuality, has a significance far beyond its disastrous impact on the lives of the relatively limited numbers of children and adults in paedophilic relationships. The impact of the sex-negative outlook has to be seen in a wider societal context in order to appreciate its full significance. In this context, to which attention will now be turned, we can see reasons why a climate in which children come to view all consensual sex positively and without guilt, including consensual paedophilia, may be necessary for the welfare of everyone.
Notes
4. Freud was in no doubt that mothers have sexual feelings towards their children.
'A child's intercourse with anyone responsible for his care affords him an unending source of sexual excitation and satisfaction from his erotogenic zones. This is especially so since the person in charge of him, who, after all, is as a rule his mother, herself regards him with feelings that are derived from her own sexual life: she strokes him, kisses him, rocks him and quite clearly treats him as a substitute for a complete sexual object' (In 'Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality' in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol.7, Hogarth Press, London, 1953-74).
Dr Alayne Yates, a psychiatrist, tells us that mothers sometimes report serial orgasms brought about by the sexual pleasure they feel when breastfeeding their babies (A. Yates, Sex Without Shame, Temple Smith, London, 1979). ^
5. Sequel, March 1978. ^
6. Even then the law is at pains to assign a passive role to the female. At Caernarvon Crown Court in 1976 a woman aged thirty-five, who was alleged to have had intercourse with some boys aged twelve to fifteen, faced charges of indecent assault against them. The judge directed the jury to find her not guilty, saying that there is not and never has been an offence of a woman having sexual intercourse with a boy under sixteen. He told the jury that if they were 'to consider this particular case, the prosecution could not rely on the mere fact of intercourse with the boys as of itself constituting an indecent assault'. Reported in The Daily Telegraph, p.3, and the Daily Mail, p.3, 8 October, 1976. See also M. Rae et al., First Rights: A Guide to Legal Rights for Young People, NCCL, London, 1979, p.60, and Paedophilia: Some Questions and Answers, PIE, London, 1978, Appendix on the Law. ^
7. In an article by Christine Bearchell, Body Politic, June 1978. ^
8. Beth Kelly, 'On woman/girl love, or lesbians do "do it"', Gay Community News, 3 March, 1979.
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RoosterDance
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Re: Butterfly Kisses: Researching Female Pedophilia
“We Do Exist”: The Experiences of Women Living with a Sexual Interest in Minors
By Rebecca Lievesley1 and Rhia Lapworth1
Archives of Sexual Behavior (2022) 51:879–896
Received: 22 June 2021 / Revised: 15 September 2021 / Accepted: 15 September 2021 / Published online: 17 November 2021
Abstract
The current body of the literature studying minor-attracted persons (MAPs) predominantly focuses on the experiences of men who experience sexual attractions to children. To shed more light on the experiences of women within this population, we conducted anonymous semi-structured interviews with six self-identified female MAPs, who were recruited through online support forums for individuals with sexual attractions to children. Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) was used to analyze the interview transcripts. Two superordinate themes were identified from the dataset that highlighted the uniqueness of the experience of being a woman within the MAP community (“A minority within a minority”) and themes of social isolation and the effects of this on identity (“A lonely secret existence”). The findings reported here highlight how the experiences of female MAPs both converge with and diverge from their male counterparts in important ways. We discuss the implications of these experiences in relation to more effective service provision for women who are sexually attracted to children.
Introduction
Interest in the area of sexual attractions to children or minors (referred to in this paper as “minor attraction”) is increasing in academic and social contexts. This is largely due to the theoreti-cal link between minor attraction and sexual offending against children (Finkelhor, 1984; Seto, 2018a, 2019; Ward & Beech, 2006), but more recently has been driven by an acknowledg-ment that many minor-attracted persons (MAPs) live offense-free within the community (Cantor & McPhail, 2016; Dombert et al., 2016). These individuals commonly report difficulties in coping with their sexual attractions within a social context that stigmatizes them (Jahnke et al., 2015a), which leads to difficulties (e.g., perceived barriers and a lower level of will-ingness) in seeking professional support when this is needed (Grady et al., 2018; Levenson & Grady, 2019; Lievesley et al., 2020). That is, individuals who are sexually attracted to children often acknowledge that they would either like or need support to help them manage their sexual attractions, but fear doing so due to (1) being “outed” within society, (2) becoming the subject of community discrimination or hatred, or (3) a lack of understanding from healthcare professionals (or a combination of these things).
Although there has been a recent increase in the availability of data relating to minor attraction in the community within the literature (e.g., Dymond & Duff, 2020; Elchuk et al., 2021; Freimond, 2013; Grady et al., 2018; Houtepen et al., 2016; Lev-enson & Grady, 2019; Lievesley et al., 2020), this knowledge stems from samples of men within the community with such sexual attractions. In this paper we report what we believe to be the first qualitative analysis of the lived experiences of a sample of minor-attracted women.
Defining “Minor Attraction”
The phrase “minor attraction” acts as an umbrella term to describe a range of chronophilic orientations. A chronophilia is a distinct type of sexual attraction pattern that varies as a function of the ages of preferred sexual targets (Seto, 2017). The most studied chronophilic category is pedophilia, which is defined as a primary or exclusive sexual attraction to pre-pubertal children, typically between the ages of 3 and 10 years (Blanchard et al., 2009). However, Seto’s (2017) model of chronophilias takes a much broader view and acknowledges that some people may have sexual preferences for younger infants (nepiophilia), pubescent children aged 11–14 years (hebe-philia), or older minors who, depending on the legal code of a given jurisdiction, may be below the age of consent (ephebo-philia). This latter category is controversial, in that some argue how some level of sexual attraction to post-pubescent minors who are approaching the age of consent is a normative form of sexuality (for a discussion, see Stephens & Seto, 2016). Seto’s (2017) chronophilias continue to encompass attractions to adults of traditional reproductive age (teleiophilia), middle age (mesophilia), and older age (gerontophilia). For the purposes of this paper, we consider “minor attraction” to encompass the nepiophilic, pedophilic, and hebephilic attraction categories.
Researchers believe that most MAPs are males (Seto, 2018a), which is consistent with work in relation to the preva-lence of other forms of statistically atypical sexual interests (Joyal et al., 2015). Exploring the prevalence of minor attrac-tion, studies have stated that 5–10% of male college students reported having sexual fantasies involving young children (Bagley et al., 1994; Templeman & Stinnett, 1991; Wurtele et al., 2014). Furthermore, a large community-based study of almost 9000 German men found that 4.1% reported having sexual fantasies involving children (Dombert et al., 2016; see also Santtila et al., 2010). Depending on the study method, these estimates of the prevalence of some degree of minor attrac-tion can reach around 25% among men when using chat-room transcripts, where this proportion of men continued to sexualize a conversation that involved an ostensibly 14-year-old minor. That is not to say that 25% of men are primarily or even regu-larly sexually attracted to children, but this proportion appears to demonstrate a willingness to engage in non-contact sexual behaviors (in this case, sexualized online conversations) with individuals that they know or suspect to be below the legal age of consent. However, the more consistent prevalence estimates for minor attraction in a more clinical sense (i.e., involving directed masturbation to materials or fantasies involving chil-dren) congregate around 5% (Dombert et al., 2016; Santilla et al., 2010; Wurtele et al., 2014).
However, there is less prevalence-related research that has been conducted with women; of the few that have, it has been stated that between 1 and 4% of women declare a sexual attrac-tion to children (Fromuth & Conn, 1997; Smiljanich & Briere, 1996). In Wurtele et al.’s (2014) work, the authors compared the prevalence of sexual attractions to children between men and women, finding that women expressed such sexual attractions at around one-quarter to one-third of the male prevalence rate (1–3% vs. 4–9%). However, a study of the prevalence of sexual fantasy use found that men and women do not statistically differ in their engagement with sexual fantasies that involve children under the age of 12 years (Joyal et al., 2015). This suggests that differences in the prevalence rates of sexual attractions to children between men and women may reflect differences in the prevalence of sexual attractions to older children or teen-agers (i.e., in hebephilia). This observation is supported in the work of Bártová et al. (2021). In their wide-ranging work comparing the prevalence of paraphilias in men (n = 5,023) and women (n = 5,021) it was reported that pedophilic interest was expressed by 1.7% of men and 0.4% of women. However, when exploring hebephilic interests, the prevalence rates were 13.7% in men and 1.3% in women, reflecting a much larger sex difference. These disparities were also observed in relation to self-reported anticipated arousal to these paraphilic themes, sexual fantasy engagement, and pornography use.
What Do We Know About MAP Experiences?
Most work with MAPs is currently confounded by conviction status, in that our knowledge of this population (specifically pedophiles, who are the usual group studied in research) is based on data from samples that are, or have been, incarcer-ated for sexual offenses (Capra et al., 2014; Freimond, 2013; Horn et al., 2015). Although the population of individuals with sexual convictions and the MAP community represent differ-ent groups, phrases such as “pedophile” are commonly used as synonyms for convicted populations (Feelgood & Hoyer, 2008; Harper & Hogue, 2017; Harrison et al., 2010). This conflation occurs despite research evidence showing that the number of people who experience with an attraction to chil-dren far outnumber those who have committed child sexual offenses (Theaker, 2015), and that less than half of all indi-viduals with child sexual offense convictions meet the clinical criteria for pedophilia (Schmidt et al., 2013; Seto, 2018a). As stated previously, there is also a burgeoning evidence base into “non-offending pedophiles” (Cantor & McPhail, 2016, p. 1) and other MAPs who do not offend that suggests that many individuals live in society while experiencing sexual attractions to children (Beier, 2019; Beier et al., 2009; Elchuk et al., 2021; Jahnke et al., 2015b; Lievesley et al., 2020). Although there may be some overlap between convicted samples recruited in pris-ons and community samples (the degree to which this overlap exists is currently unknown due to the logistical difficulties in obtaining a “representative” MAP sample), most of the avail-able research that uses community-based MAPs recruit from online forums that strongly condemn offending behavior. As such, although offending status cannot be completely elimi-nated, studying individuals with sexual attractions to children who live in the community at least minimizes the extent to which offending propensities impact the data that are collected.
Most of what we know currently comes from small-scale qualitative investigations, though these do all appear to report similar themes that indicate a degree of reliability in MAP accounts of their experiences. In one of the earliest analyses, Houtepen et al. (2016) reported how some MAPs liken their sexual development to other forms of sexuality, with an early age of recognition and a combination of both sexual and roman-tic attractions to children being experienced (see also Dymond & Duff, 2020; Martijn et al., 2020). According to the available literature on MAPs who are living within the community, a significant proportion of this population would like support in dealing with the psychosocial effects of living with their sexual attractions (B4U-ACT, 2011a; Elchuk et al., 2021; Lievesley et al., 2020). The most common topic of study in this regard is the experience of stigma. The effects of stigma appear to include depression, anxiety, and substance misuse conditions (e.g., Cohen et al., 2018; Elchuk et al., 2021; Raymond et al., 1999; Schaefer et al., 2010), social isolation (Elchuk et al., 2021; Jahnke et al., 2015b), and the internalization of stigma and self-loathing (Lievesley et al., 2020; McPhail & Stephens, 2020; Stevens & Wood, 2019). As an acknowledgment that these factors are known to increase the likelihood that an indi-vidual may sexually offend, some researchers have begun to discuss how MAP-directed support services should first aim to address mental health issues, with sexual offense prevention being a by-product of effective service provision (for a discus-sion, see Lievesley & Harper, 2021).
Exploring MAP experiences of living with their sexual attractions is a useful way of progressing social and profes-sional discussions about the most suitable treatment approaches and targets. Common methods of coping among MAPs include the use of masturbation and sexual fantasy (Houtepen et al., 2016), internalized self-acceptance of unchosen sexual attrac-tions (Dymond & Duff, 2020), and disclosure to others. The latter of these (i.e., disclosure) is a vital first step in obtaining external support, but many MAPs report having negative expe-riences when disclosing their sexual attractions (Grady et al., 2018; Levenson & Grady, 2019) and help-seeking histories are unrelated to mental health experiences (Lievesley et al., 2020). Reports of negative experiences within the MAP community lead to an inherent mistrust of professionals, which in turn results in a reluctance to seek support if or when it is needed (Dymond & Duff, 2020; Grady et al., 2018). This means that there is a need to develop mechanisms by which MAPs can feel comfortable to seek help or disclose their sexual attractions in a safe way and without judgment or persecution (Goodier & Lievesley, 2018; Grady et al., 2018; Levenson et al., 2017; Lievesley & Harper, 2021). We believe that the successful design of such mechanisms is contingent on having input from MAPs themselves, as understanding their experiences and needs should produce more responsive and effective therapeu-tic practices.
The Current Study
As outlined above, there has been a relatively recent emergence of research into the MAP community, their experiences of minor attraction, and how to support them in terms of improv-ing their wellbeing and assisting them to remain offense-free (Dymond & Duff, 2020; Elchuk et al., 2021; Grady et al., 2018; Levenson & Grady, 2019; Lievesley et al., 2020). However, this research focuses primarily on the experiences of male MAPs and therefore potentially misses important experiences of female MAPs, who represent a fringe group within this already hidden population. There is a general lack of data cur-rently available that pertain to female MAPs. However, given that there are well-documented sex differences among adult-attracted individuals in sexual selection strategies (Buss, 1998; Buss et al., 2020; Conroy-Beam et al., 2015; Schmitt et al., 2012), preferences for short- and long-term mating opportuni-ties (Kennair et al., 2009; Pedersen et al., 2002; Schmitt et al., 2012; Townsend & Wasserman, 2011), and sex-related emo-tions such as jealousy, regret, and disgust (Al-Shawarf et al., 2018; Crosby et al., 2020; Kennair et al., 2016), it makes logical sense that such differences may also exist in the experiences of people with sexual attractions to children. We also know that gay men and lesbian women differ in the extent to which their experience psychosocial adjustment issues, with lesbian women seemingly faring better than their gay male counterparts (e.g., Shenkman & Toussia-Cohen, 2020). This better adjustment (operationalized as improved self-concept and lower depression scores) may be associated with more positive social attitudes toward lesbian women than gay men (Bettinsoli et al., 2020; Herek, 2002; LaMare & Kite, 1998; Pistella et al., 2018). This may be particularly relevant to the MAP context, where nega-tive social attitudes have been linked to stigma-related stress (Jahnke et al., 2015b), the internalization of stigma, the suppres-sion of sexual thoughts, and reduced wellbeing (Lievesley et al., 2020), and a reluctance to seek help when it is either wanted or needed (Dymond & Duff, 2020; Grady et al., 2018; Levenson & Grady, 2019). If this reduced level of stigma toward women from sexual minorities also applies to those with sexual attrac-tions to children, this could highlight a difference in the needs of female MAPs that is currently hidden by the androcentric nature of existing MAP research.
There are currently two published studies that report data from women who identify as MAPs, with these both presenting frequency analyses of sexual attraction patterns, the content of sexual fantasies, and female MAPs’ engagement with child abuse imagery. For example, Tozdan et al. (2020) compared a sample of 42 female MAPs to a control sample of 832 commu-nity-based women and found no differences between the groups in terms of self-reported sexual orientation (i.e., heterosexual vs. homosexual vs. bisexual), relationship status, or age. How-ever, the MAP subsample was more likely to have engaged with child abuse imagery involving children and teenagers and had a significantly higher level of sexual fantasizing about children (with the largest between-groups difference being in relation to fantasies involving girls). Studying a smaller sample of female MAPs (n = 20, who were compared to 208 male MAPs), Ste-phens and McPhail (2021) reported how this group were less likely to be erotically attracted to girls (and more likely to be attracted to boys) than male MAPs. They were also more likely to report current adult-oriented sexual behaviors, which may correspond to a greater degree of sexual fluidity among female MAPs than men with sexual attractions to children (consistent with the broader sexuality literature that shows greater fluidity among women than men; Diamond, 2016; Geary et al., 2018; Kuyper & Vanwesenbeeck, 2009; Massey et al., 2021). How-ever, few other differences were found in relation to sexual attractions, such as in relation to age of onset and duration of sexual attractions to children, exclusivity of these attractions, or the chronophilic orientations of their attractions. In both of these papers, a comparatively very small number of female MAPs were compared to either male MAPs or non-MAP com-munity-based women, and the focus was on sexological features of their attractions to children. However, the experiences of liv-ing with sexual interests in children, from a phenomenological perspective, have yet to be explored.
As such, in this study we begin to address this knowledge gap by offering what we believe to be the first in-depth quali-tative analysis of the experiences of women who have sexual attractions to children. It is important to note that we do not set out to compare the experiences of men and women who experience such attractions, nor do we assume similarities or differences between male and female MAP populations. In a similar vein, we do not intend to compare women with and without sexual attractions to children. Early sexological analy-ses of these kinds have already been presented by Stephens and McPhail (2021) and Tozdan et al. (2020), respectively. Instead, our principal aim is to offer an initial exploratory account of the lived experiences of female MAPs to inform future research studies and to provide recommendations about how to best sup-port this group to both maximize their mental wellbeing and, where risks might exist, to prevent sexual offending.
1 Department of Psychology, Nottingham Trent University, 50 Shakespeare Street, Nottingham NG1 4FQ, UK
Method
Participants
The participant sample compromised six adult women who had a self-identified sexual attraction to children. Participant ages ranged from late teens (inclusion criteria meant they had to be over 18) to mid-40 s. Participants were recruited internationally, with three residing in the UK and three residing in USA. Four participants were non-exclusively minor-attracted (i.e., they also reported having sexual attractions to adults), while two were exclusively attracted to prepubescent children. All partici-pants reported that they had not engaged in any illegal behavior involving children. Countries of residence and age specific to each participant are not reported here to protect anonymity. That is, given that there are relatively few women within the already small MAP community, providing these details risks identifying individual participants within our sample. Table 1 outlines participant information.
Procedure
Prior to the beginning of data collection, ethical approval was granted from the Nottingham Trent University Ethics Com-mittee. An interview schedule was organized into three broad domains, exploring participants’ sexual attractions, methods and strategies used for managing their sexual attractions, and their experiences of disclosure and seeking support. The semi-structured nature of the interview allowed us to remain on-topic while also affording us the flexibility to explore additional matters that might arise (Smith, 2015). The aim of the inter-view schedule was to allow for free-flowing insights without the participant being directed by too many questions (Smith & Osborn, 2003). To maximize replicability and transparency, we have made the full interview schedule available at https://osf.io/xeshn/?view_only=013ebee ... 264140b4cb
Participants were recruited via an advert posted on Twit-ter and on two online forums for MAPs.1 Upon contacting the research team expressing an interest in the study, potential participants were provided with information sheets stating the research objectives, aims, and methods. It was explicitly speci-fied that participation was voluntary, and participants could choose to withdraw at any point without justification. The information sheet warned of any distressing/sensitive topics that may be discussed as well as the limits of confidentiality. If participants were still willing to take part, written consent was obtained and an interview date was scheduled.
Informed consent was obtained once again at the beginning of each interview, with these conducted using either Skype audio (n = 5) or email (n = 1). Both of these methods are recog-nized as beneficial for interpretive researchers as they provide rich accounts of participant experiences (Curasi, 2001; Smith et al., 2009), with email interviews suggested when consider-ing the comfort, safety, and restrictions of participants (Hawk-ins, 2018; Mason & Ide, 2014; Ratislavová & Ratislav, 2014). As one participant reported high levels of anxiety and distress when considering audio interview methods, email was consid-ered to be the most appropriate option.
Each participant was interviewed once, with a mean audio interview duration of 76 min (range = 66–105 min). The audio interviews were recorded with a password-protected recording device and transcribed verbatim. The email interview followed previous guidelines and recommendations (e.g., Bowden & Galindo-Gonzalez, 2015; Meho, 2006) and involved an initial set of questions being sent to the participant via email once informed consent and rapport had been established. Once the participant had responded, additional questions were sent to the participant to follow up on previous answers, request fur-ther details or clarification on previous answers, and to cover additional areas of interest. This process was repeated until the authors had no further questions. At the end of their interview, participants received a debrief form, which provided partici-pants with various helplines for further support. To protect confidentiality, recordings and transcripts were stored on a password-protected computer that was accessible only by the research team. Additionally, any names or places were removed from the transcripts to protect participants’ anonymity.
Data Analysis
It is argued that interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) is the most effective of the qualitative methods when research-ing topics that are novel, emotionally laden, nuanced, and vague (Smith & Osborne, 2003; 2015), which is particularly relevant to the present study as it offers the first exploration of the experiences of female MAPs. Smith et al (2009) suggest that IPA is suited to data collection methods that allow “par-ticipants to offer a rich, detailed, first person account of their experiences” and “facilitate elicitation of stories, thoughts and feelings about the target phenomenon” (p. 56). While the most widely used method of data collection for IPA research is face-to-face semi-structured interviews, a range of other methods including audio interviews (e.g., telephone, Skype) and email interviews is considered appropriate as it is possible to generate equally rich data via these methods (Curasi, 2001; Smith et al., 2009). As such, IPA was used here to explore and make sense of the participants’ lived experiences and personal accounts (Smith & Osborn, 2003). The phenomenological focus allows understanding of conscious experiences, insights and meaning, with participants viewed as experts in the phenomenon being explored (Reid et al., 2005). IPA employs a double hermeneu-tic (i.e., two levels of interpretation), which involves the par-ticipants’ interpretation of their own experiences within their narratives, followed by the researcher’s interpretation of these (Smith & Osborn, 2003). It is considered that interview meth-ods such as email may enhance this interpretation, encouraging a process of reflection throughout the interview for both the par-ticipant and researcher, and allowing the researcher to interpret the data before responding with follow-up questions (Bowden & Galindo-Gonzalez, 2015; Ratislavová & Ratislav, 2014).
The analysis was guided by previous precedents (Pietkie-wicz & Smith, 2014) entailing listening to the audio recordings multiple times, verbatim transcription, multiple readings of the transcripts to ensure familiarity and noting down the authors’ primary observations of the participants’ narratives. These notes were later reviewed to establish emergent themes. The connections, similarities, and differences between the themes were then explored in order to establish clusters, and where themes were deemed to have an insufficient evidential basis, they were discarded. These clusters were then given a descrip-tive label—these are the superordinate and subordinate themes (Pietkiewicz & Smith, 2014). This involved an iterative process, moving between the transcripts and themes to ensure that the final themes were firmly grounded in the data and representa-tive of participants’ accounts. A form of inter-rater reliability was also implemented—both authors analyzed sections of the transcripts independently. These were then checked by the co-author and an additional independent researcher to assess the validity of the interpretations being made (Willig, 2008).
1 Due to the small number of female MAPs that exist within this com-munity, we assured all participants that they would not be identifiable in research outputs. This included not revealing the exact forums from which they were recruited.
Results and Discussion
This paper unpacks two superordinate themes and the asso-ciated subthemes that were identified through the process of analysis. Table 2 provides an overview of these themes.
“A Minority Within a Minority”
Questioning Existence
All participants discussed how many people do not recognize the existence of female MAPs, suggesting that they are hidden in social discussions about minor attraction:
There is an established literature that suggests women dem-onstrate higher levels of sexual fluidity than men (for a review, see Diamond, 2016). It may therefore be that more minor-attracted men are exclusively (or predominantly) attracted to children (and thus not to adults), with recent research finding the rate of exclusive minor attraction (operationalized as the endorsement of chronophilias below teleiophilia) is some-where between 50 and 75% (Elchuk et al., 2021; Lievesley et al., 2020). In contrast, minor-attracted women might experi-ence such attractions more incidentally (or as part of a broader attraction pattern that also encompasses adult targets). Other analyses have reported that female MAPs are more likely to be engaged in sexual behaviors with adults in comparison with male MAPs (Stephens & McPhail, 2021). Engaging in adult-adult sexual relationships may help female MAPs remain hid-den within the community and appear teleiophilic (i.e., attracted to adults) to their friends and families. The increased rates of adult-directed sexual activity among female MAPs might also explain the apparent higher rates of minor attraction among men than women among community MAP samples, with the former viewing this as a dominant theme of their sexual iden-tity and, subsequently, being more likely to seek support in online communities. This could indicate that there is potentially a higher rate of sexual attractions to children among women within the general community than currently known, with such individuals being able to hide this (or perhaps even not recog-nizing their minor attraction) due to their maintenance of sexual relationships with adult partners.
In addition, media representations of MAPs often evoke the stereotype of the “predatory male pedophile” (King & Roberts, 2017, p. 72), further concretizing the view that the MAP com-munity is predominantly or exclusively made up of men. For some of our participants, this denial or uncertainty surround-ing the existence of female MAPs had an impact on their own beliefs:
A Double-Edged Sword
The participants in our sample discussed both positive and negative aspects of being a woman with sexual attractions to children. While the experience of being a member of the MAP community is one that is often fraught with feelings of differ-ence from the rest of society (Jahnke et al., 2015b), the female MAPs in our sample discussed feeling like they are further isolated and excluded because of their gender. Throughout the narratives, the majority of participants discussed how it felt being part of a population that is dominated by males:
A Lonely Secret Existence
Hidden Part of Identity
Within their narratives, participants expressed how they felt that they were being secretive by not sharing what they thought to be a core aspect of their identity with others that they cared about. Despite this, some felt unable to reveal their sexual attraction.
For our participants, the effects of the concealment of their sexual attractions on how they view their peer relationships may be linked to gendered norms related to social styles. That is, men typically build larger and more socially diffuse networks, whereas women (on average) tend to prefer smaller peer groups and more intimate bonds with others (Benenson, 2019; Vigil, 2007). In this sense, our participants have an additional layer of complication tied up in their concealment that male MAPs perhaps do not. Not only are they hiding their sexual attractions from their peers for risk of judgment or reprisal, but in doing so they are contravening the female norm of sharing personal details with trusted (typically female) peers (see Agrawal et al., 2002).
This concealment appears to have some negative impacts on psychosocial function within our sample. In describing her-self as a “very very open person,” it is clear how Participant 2 contrasts this element of being secretive against the rest of her personality and life. The impact of her identity concealment is highlighted in the resultant effect of feeling that she is not being true to herself and “living a lie.” This is also echoed by Partici-pant 1, who discusses feelings of “living deceitfully” as a result of her “deepest darkest secret.” This process of hiding important parts of one’s core identity, and the subsequent effects on the quality of social and personal relationships, echoes the nar-ratives of male MAPs (Elliott & Lievesley, 2018; Freimond, 2013; Houtepen et al., 2016). That is, men experiencing minor attraction have also reported that withholding their sexual iden-tities as MAPs left them feeling inauthentic with others. In not having authentic close relationships with others, those in our sample may be missing an important support mechanism via the achievement of the primary human good of relatedness or connectedness to other people (Harper et al., 2020; Ward & Stewart, 2003). That is, one prominent positive psychologi-cal model that has been applied to both forensic and clinical psychological contexts asserts that the achievement of a range of universally strived-for goals is important for the attainment of a “good life” (Barnao et al., 2016; Ward et al., 2007). In not having authentic relationships, our participants (and the MAP community more broadly) are not achieving a sense of social connectedness, which is a core part of living a healthy and happy life. Although Participant 1 acknowledges the negative feelings associated with hiding this part of herself, it is clear that she has considered the potential effects of disclosing their sexual attractions, such as losing her partner and being unhappy.
These are common experiences for MAPs who do disclose to others (Freimond, 2013; Goode, 2010). For Participant 1, these costs are deemed to be too high, and so her sexual attraction toward children remains concealed from those closest to her. For some participants, the hidden part of their identity, and the need to constantly keep this secret, impacted upon their health and wellbeing:
Alienation and Loneliness
Throughout the narratives, participants expressed feelings of being alienated and isolated because of their attractions.
The added layer of frustration does not appear to link only to the sexual aspects on minor attraction, but also to the romantic aspects of being sexually attracted to children. Recent work by Martijn et al. (2020) found that self-reported prevalence of falling in love with children rose as a MAP’s attraction exclu-sivity increased (that is, exclusively minor-attracted individuals reported falling in love with children—but not with adults—at higher rates than those MAPs who were also sexually attracted to adults). Similarly, Dymond and Duff’s (2020) qualitative work highlights how the sexual aspects of being minor-attracted (i.e., the need for celibacy) are often easier to cope with than the experiences of romantic attraction to children. This is especially the case for Participant 5, who is exclusively minor-attracted. In this sense, it is often easier for people who are sexually attracted to children to suppress physical sexual desires than it is to ignore the emotional connections that they feel toward children. There are links here to positive psychological mod-els of living a “good life,” where interpersonal connection and intimate relationships form a vital part of the human experience (Harper et al., 2020; Ward et al., 2007). The acknowledgment for some MAPs that sexual celibacy may also be combined with emotional disconnection through a lack of intimate partners leads to increased loneliness and exacerbated social isolation (Dymond & Duff, 2020; Elliott & Lievesley, 2018; Jahnke et al., 2015b; Jeske, 2016).
Participant 5 discusses an additional pain related to others’ lack of understanding or ability to relate to her difficulties, which for her are because she has not disclosed or shared her attraction with others. However, her comment also suggests a generalization of this point, in that others simply cannot empa-thize with such things. Similar research with male MAPs has found that non-disclosure of their sexual attractions led to par-ticipants feeling excluded in social settings, particularly in con-versations about love interests or intimacy (Dymond & Duff, 2020; Freimond, 2013; Houtepen et al, 2016). These feelings further contribute to the suffering, feelings of alienation and isolation experienced by the participants.
For some, isolation is to some extent a choice:
2 There is currently no consensus among the academic and clinical communities about whether minor attraction (or, more specifically, pedophilia) represents a form of sexual orientation. A detailed explo-ration of this debate is beyond the scope of this paper. However, we highlight this debate here as our participants’ experiences relate to one particular aspect of this debate (namely the immutability or change-ability of sexual attractions to children).
Continued in the next post...
By Rebecca Lievesley1 and Rhia Lapworth1
Archives of Sexual Behavior (2022) 51:879–896
Received: 22 June 2021 / Revised: 15 September 2021 / Accepted: 15 September 2021 / Published online: 17 November 2021
Abstract
The current body of the literature studying minor-attracted persons (MAPs) predominantly focuses on the experiences of men who experience sexual attractions to children. To shed more light on the experiences of women within this population, we conducted anonymous semi-structured interviews with six self-identified female MAPs, who were recruited through online support forums for individuals with sexual attractions to children. Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) was used to analyze the interview transcripts. Two superordinate themes were identified from the dataset that highlighted the uniqueness of the experience of being a woman within the MAP community (“A minority within a minority”) and themes of social isolation and the effects of this on identity (“A lonely secret existence”). The findings reported here highlight how the experiences of female MAPs both converge with and diverge from their male counterparts in important ways. We discuss the implications of these experiences in relation to more effective service provision for women who are sexually attracted to children.
Introduction
Interest in the area of sexual attractions to children or minors (referred to in this paper as “minor attraction”) is increasing in academic and social contexts. This is largely due to the theoreti-cal link between minor attraction and sexual offending against children (Finkelhor, 1984; Seto, 2018a, 2019; Ward & Beech, 2006), but more recently has been driven by an acknowledg-ment that many minor-attracted persons (MAPs) live offense-free within the community (Cantor & McPhail, 2016; Dombert et al., 2016). These individuals commonly report difficulties in coping with their sexual attractions within a social context that stigmatizes them (Jahnke et al., 2015a), which leads to difficulties (e.g., perceived barriers and a lower level of will-ingness) in seeking professional support when this is needed (Grady et al., 2018; Levenson & Grady, 2019; Lievesley et al., 2020). That is, individuals who are sexually attracted to children often acknowledge that they would either like or need support to help them manage their sexual attractions, but fear doing so due to (1) being “outed” within society, (2) becoming the subject of community discrimination or hatred, or (3) a lack of understanding from healthcare professionals (or a combination of these things).
Although there has been a recent increase in the availability of data relating to minor attraction in the community within the literature (e.g., Dymond & Duff, 2020; Elchuk et al., 2021; Freimond, 2013; Grady et al., 2018; Houtepen et al., 2016; Lev-enson & Grady, 2019; Lievesley et al., 2020), this knowledge stems from samples of men within the community with such sexual attractions. In this paper we report what we believe to be the first qualitative analysis of the lived experiences of a sample of minor-attracted women.
Defining “Minor Attraction”
The phrase “minor attraction” acts as an umbrella term to describe a range of chronophilic orientations. A chronophilia is a distinct type of sexual attraction pattern that varies as a function of the ages of preferred sexual targets (Seto, 2017). The most studied chronophilic category is pedophilia, which is defined as a primary or exclusive sexual attraction to pre-pubertal children, typically between the ages of 3 and 10 years (Blanchard et al., 2009). However, Seto’s (2017) model of chronophilias takes a much broader view and acknowledges that some people may have sexual preferences for younger infants (nepiophilia), pubescent children aged 11–14 years (hebe-philia), or older minors who, depending on the legal code of a given jurisdiction, may be below the age of consent (ephebo-philia). This latter category is controversial, in that some argue how some level of sexual attraction to post-pubescent minors who are approaching the age of consent is a normative form of sexuality (for a discussion, see Stephens & Seto, 2016). Seto’s (2017) chronophilias continue to encompass attractions to adults of traditional reproductive age (teleiophilia), middle age (mesophilia), and older age (gerontophilia). For the purposes of this paper, we consider “minor attraction” to encompass the nepiophilic, pedophilic, and hebephilic attraction categories.
Researchers believe that most MAPs are males (Seto, 2018a), which is consistent with work in relation to the preva-lence of other forms of statistically atypical sexual interests (Joyal et al., 2015). Exploring the prevalence of minor attrac-tion, studies have stated that 5–10% of male college students reported having sexual fantasies involving young children (Bagley et al., 1994; Templeman & Stinnett, 1991; Wurtele et al., 2014). Furthermore, a large community-based study of almost 9000 German men found that 4.1% reported having sexual fantasies involving children (Dombert et al., 2016; see also Santtila et al., 2010). Depending on the study method, these estimates of the prevalence of some degree of minor attrac-tion can reach around 25% among men when using chat-room transcripts, where this proportion of men continued to sexualize a conversation that involved an ostensibly 14-year-old minor. That is not to say that 25% of men are primarily or even regu-larly sexually attracted to children, but this proportion appears to demonstrate a willingness to engage in non-contact sexual behaviors (in this case, sexualized online conversations) with individuals that they know or suspect to be below the legal age of consent. However, the more consistent prevalence estimates for minor attraction in a more clinical sense (i.e., involving directed masturbation to materials or fantasies involving chil-dren) congregate around 5% (Dombert et al., 2016; Santilla et al., 2010; Wurtele et al., 2014).
However, there is less prevalence-related research that has been conducted with women; of the few that have, it has been stated that between 1 and 4% of women declare a sexual attrac-tion to children (Fromuth & Conn, 1997; Smiljanich & Briere, 1996). In Wurtele et al.’s (2014) work, the authors compared the prevalence of sexual attractions to children between men and women, finding that women expressed such sexual attractions at around one-quarter to one-third of the male prevalence rate (1–3% vs. 4–9%). However, a study of the prevalence of sexual fantasy use found that men and women do not statistically differ in their engagement with sexual fantasies that involve children under the age of 12 years (Joyal et al., 2015). This suggests that differences in the prevalence rates of sexual attractions to children between men and women may reflect differences in the prevalence of sexual attractions to older children or teen-agers (i.e., in hebephilia). This observation is supported in the work of Bártová et al. (2021). In their wide-ranging work comparing the prevalence of paraphilias in men (n = 5,023) and women (n = 5,021) it was reported that pedophilic interest was expressed by 1.7% of men and 0.4% of women. However, when exploring hebephilic interests, the prevalence rates were 13.7% in men and 1.3% in women, reflecting a much larger sex difference. These disparities were also observed in relation to self-reported anticipated arousal to these paraphilic themes, sexual fantasy engagement, and pornography use.
What Do We Know About MAP Experiences?
Most work with MAPs is currently confounded by conviction status, in that our knowledge of this population (specifically pedophiles, who are the usual group studied in research) is based on data from samples that are, or have been, incarcer-ated for sexual offenses (Capra et al., 2014; Freimond, 2013; Horn et al., 2015). Although the population of individuals with sexual convictions and the MAP community represent differ-ent groups, phrases such as “pedophile” are commonly used as synonyms for convicted populations (Feelgood & Hoyer, 2008; Harper & Hogue, 2017; Harrison et al., 2010). This conflation occurs despite research evidence showing that the number of people who experience with an attraction to chil-dren far outnumber those who have committed child sexual offenses (Theaker, 2015), and that less than half of all indi-viduals with child sexual offense convictions meet the clinical criteria for pedophilia (Schmidt et al., 2013; Seto, 2018a). As stated previously, there is also a burgeoning evidence base into “non-offending pedophiles” (Cantor & McPhail, 2016, p. 1) and other MAPs who do not offend that suggests that many individuals live in society while experiencing sexual attractions to children (Beier, 2019; Beier et al., 2009; Elchuk et al., 2021; Jahnke et al., 2015b; Lievesley et al., 2020). Although there may be some overlap between convicted samples recruited in pris-ons and community samples (the degree to which this overlap exists is currently unknown due to the logistical difficulties in obtaining a “representative” MAP sample), most of the avail-able research that uses community-based MAPs recruit from online forums that strongly condemn offending behavior. As such, although offending status cannot be completely elimi-nated, studying individuals with sexual attractions to children who live in the community at least minimizes the extent to which offending propensities impact the data that are collected.
Most of what we know currently comes from small-scale qualitative investigations, though these do all appear to report similar themes that indicate a degree of reliability in MAP accounts of their experiences. In one of the earliest analyses, Houtepen et al. (2016) reported how some MAPs liken their sexual development to other forms of sexuality, with an early age of recognition and a combination of both sexual and roman-tic attractions to children being experienced (see also Dymond & Duff, 2020; Martijn et al., 2020). According to the available literature on MAPs who are living within the community, a significant proportion of this population would like support in dealing with the psychosocial effects of living with their sexual attractions (B4U-ACT, 2011a; Elchuk et al., 2021; Lievesley et al., 2020). The most common topic of study in this regard is the experience of stigma. The effects of stigma appear to include depression, anxiety, and substance misuse conditions (e.g., Cohen et al., 2018; Elchuk et al., 2021; Raymond et al., 1999; Schaefer et al., 2010), social isolation (Elchuk et al., 2021; Jahnke et al., 2015b), and the internalization of stigma and self-loathing (Lievesley et al., 2020; McPhail & Stephens, 2020; Stevens & Wood, 2019). As an acknowledgment that these factors are known to increase the likelihood that an indi-vidual may sexually offend, some researchers have begun to discuss how MAP-directed support services should first aim to address mental health issues, with sexual offense prevention being a by-product of effective service provision (for a discus-sion, see Lievesley & Harper, 2021).
Exploring MAP experiences of living with their sexual attractions is a useful way of progressing social and profes-sional discussions about the most suitable treatment approaches and targets. Common methods of coping among MAPs include the use of masturbation and sexual fantasy (Houtepen et al., 2016), internalized self-acceptance of unchosen sexual attrac-tions (Dymond & Duff, 2020), and disclosure to others. The latter of these (i.e., disclosure) is a vital first step in obtaining external support, but many MAPs report having negative expe-riences when disclosing their sexual attractions (Grady et al., 2018; Levenson & Grady, 2019) and help-seeking histories are unrelated to mental health experiences (Lievesley et al., 2020). Reports of negative experiences within the MAP community lead to an inherent mistrust of professionals, which in turn results in a reluctance to seek support if or when it is needed (Dymond & Duff, 2020; Grady et al., 2018). This means that there is a need to develop mechanisms by which MAPs can feel comfortable to seek help or disclose their sexual attractions in a safe way and without judgment or persecution (Goodier & Lievesley, 2018; Grady et al., 2018; Levenson et al., 2017; Lievesley & Harper, 2021). We believe that the successful design of such mechanisms is contingent on having input from MAPs themselves, as understanding their experiences and needs should produce more responsive and effective therapeu-tic practices.
The Current Study
As outlined above, there has been a relatively recent emergence of research into the MAP community, their experiences of minor attraction, and how to support them in terms of improv-ing their wellbeing and assisting them to remain offense-free (Dymond & Duff, 2020; Elchuk et al., 2021; Grady et al., 2018; Levenson & Grady, 2019; Lievesley et al., 2020). However, this research focuses primarily on the experiences of male MAPs and therefore potentially misses important experiences of female MAPs, who represent a fringe group within this already hidden population. There is a general lack of data cur-rently available that pertain to female MAPs. However, given that there are well-documented sex differences among adult-attracted individuals in sexual selection strategies (Buss, 1998; Buss et al., 2020; Conroy-Beam et al., 2015; Schmitt et al., 2012), preferences for short- and long-term mating opportuni-ties (Kennair et al., 2009; Pedersen et al., 2002; Schmitt et al., 2012; Townsend & Wasserman, 2011), and sex-related emo-tions such as jealousy, regret, and disgust (Al-Shawarf et al., 2018; Crosby et al., 2020; Kennair et al., 2016), it makes logical sense that such differences may also exist in the experiences of people with sexual attractions to children. We also know that gay men and lesbian women differ in the extent to which their experience psychosocial adjustment issues, with lesbian women seemingly faring better than their gay male counterparts (e.g., Shenkman & Toussia-Cohen, 2020). This better adjustment (operationalized as improved self-concept and lower depression scores) may be associated with more positive social attitudes toward lesbian women than gay men (Bettinsoli et al., 2020; Herek, 2002; LaMare & Kite, 1998; Pistella et al., 2018). This may be particularly relevant to the MAP context, where nega-tive social attitudes have been linked to stigma-related stress (Jahnke et al., 2015b), the internalization of stigma, the suppres-sion of sexual thoughts, and reduced wellbeing (Lievesley et al., 2020), and a reluctance to seek help when it is either wanted or needed (Dymond & Duff, 2020; Grady et al., 2018; Levenson & Grady, 2019). If this reduced level of stigma toward women from sexual minorities also applies to those with sexual attrac-tions to children, this could highlight a difference in the needs of female MAPs that is currently hidden by the androcentric nature of existing MAP research.
There are currently two published studies that report data from women who identify as MAPs, with these both presenting frequency analyses of sexual attraction patterns, the content of sexual fantasies, and female MAPs’ engagement with child abuse imagery. For example, Tozdan et al. (2020) compared a sample of 42 female MAPs to a control sample of 832 commu-nity-based women and found no differences between the groups in terms of self-reported sexual orientation (i.e., heterosexual vs. homosexual vs. bisexual), relationship status, or age. How-ever, the MAP subsample was more likely to have engaged with child abuse imagery involving children and teenagers and had a significantly higher level of sexual fantasizing about children (with the largest between-groups difference being in relation to fantasies involving girls). Studying a smaller sample of female MAPs (n = 20, who were compared to 208 male MAPs), Ste-phens and McPhail (2021) reported how this group were less likely to be erotically attracted to girls (and more likely to be attracted to boys) than male MAPs. They were also more likely to report current adult-oriented sexual behaviors, which may correspond to a greater degree of sexual fluidity among female MAPs than men with sexual attractions to children (consistent with the broader sexuality literature that shows greater fluidity among women than men; Diamond, 2016; Geary et al., 2018; Kuyper & Vanwesenbeeck, 2009; Massey et al., 2021). How-ever, few other differences were found in relation to sexual attractions, such as in relation to age of onset and duration of sexual attractions to children, exclusivity of these attractions, or the chronophilic orientations of their attractions. In both of these papers, a comparatively very small number of female MAPs were compared to either male MAPs or non-MAP com-munity-based women, and the focus was on sexological features of their attractions to children. However, the experiences of liv-ing with sexual interests in children, from a phenomenological perspective, have yet to be explored.
As such, in this study we begin to address this knowledge gap by offering what we believe to be the first in-depth quali-tative analysis of the experiences of women who have sexual attractions to children. It is important to note that we do not set out to compare the experiences of men and women who experience such attractions, nor do we assume similarities or differences between male and female MAP populations. In a similar vein, we do not intend to compare women with and without sexual attractions to children. Early sexological analy-ses of these kinds have already been presented by Stephens and McPhail (2021) and Tozdan et al. (2020), respectively. Instead, our principal aim is to offer an initial exploratory account of the lived experiences of female MAPs to inform future research studies and to provide recommendations about how to best sup-port this group to both maximize their mental wellbeing and, where risks might exist, to prevent sexual offending.
1 Department of Psychology, Nottingham Trent University, 50 Shakespeare Street, Nottingham NG1 4FQ, UK
Method
Participants
The participant sample compromised six adult women who had a self-identified sexual attraction to children. Participant ages ranged from late teens (inclusion criteria meant they had to be over 18) to mid-40 s. Participants were recruited internationally, with three residing in the UK and three residing in USA. Four participants were non-exclusively minor-attracted (i.e., they also reported having sexual attractions to adults), while two were exclusively attracted to prepubescent children. All partici-pants reported that they had not engaged in any illegal behavior involving children. Countries of residence and age specific to each participant are not reported here to protect anonymity. That is, given that there are relatively few women within the already small MAP community, providing these details risks identifying individual participants within our sample. Table 1 outlines participant information.
Procedure
Prior to the beginning of data collection, ethical approval was granted from the Nottingham Trent University Ethics Com-mittee. An interview schedule was organized into three broad domains, exploring participants’ sexual attractions, methods and strategies used for managing their sexual attractions, and their experiences of disclosure and seeking support. The semi-structured nature of the interview allowed us to remain on-topic while also affording us the flexibility to explore additional matters that might arise (Smith, 2015). The aim of the inter-view schedule was to allow for free-flowing insights without the participant being directed by too many questions (Smith & Osborn, 2003). To maximize replicability and transparency, we have made the full interview schedule available at https://osf.io/xeshn/?view_only=013ebee ... 264140b4cb
Participants were recruited via an advert posted on Twit-ter and on two online forums for MAPs.1 Upon contacting the research team expressing an interest in the study, potential participants were provided with information sheets stating the research objectives, aims, and methods. It was explicitly speci-fied that participation was voluntary, and participants could choose to withdraw at any point without justification. The information sheet warned of any distressing/sensitive topics that may be discussed as well as the limits of confidentiality. If participants were still willing to take part, written consent was obtained and an interview date was scheduled.
Informed consent was obtained once again at the beginning of each interview, with these conducted using either Skype audio (n = 5) or email (n = 1). Both of these methods are recog-nized as beneficial for interpretive researchers as they provide rich accounts of participant experiences (Curasi, 2001; Smith et al., 2009), with email interviews suggested when consider-ing the comfort, safety, and restrictions of participants (Hawk-ins, 2018; Mason & Ide, 2014; Ratislavová & Ratislav, 2014). As one participant reported high levels of anxiety and distress when considering audio interview methods, email was consid-ered to be the most appropriate option.
Each participant was interviewed once, with a mean audio interview duration of 76 min (range = 66–105 min). The audio interviews were recorded with a password-protected recording device and transcribed verbatim. The email interview followed previous guidelines and recommendations (e.g., Bowden & Galindo-Gonzalez, 2015; Meho, 2006) and involved an initial set of questions being sent to the participant via email once informed consent and rapport had been established. Once the participant had responded, additional questions were sent to the participant to follow up on previous answers, request fur-ther details or clarification on previous answers, and to cover additional areas of interest. This process was repeated until the authors had no further questions. At the end of their interview, participants received a debrief form, which provided partici-pants with various helplines for further support. To protect confidentiality, recordings and transcripts were stored on a password-protected computer that was accessible only by the research team. Additionally, any names or places were removed from the transcripts to protect participants’ anonymity.
Data Analysis
It is argued that interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) is the most effective of the qualitative methods when research-ing topics that are novel, emotionally laden, nuanced, and vague (Smith & Osborne, 2003; 2015), which is particularly relevant to the present study as it offers the first exploration of the experiences of female MAPs. Smith et al (2009) suggest that IPA is suited to data collection methods that allow “par-ticipants to offer a rich, detailed, first person account of their experiences” and “facilitate elicitation of stories, thoughts and feelings about the target phenomenon” (p. 56). While the most widely used method of data collection for IPA research is face-to-face semi-structured interviews, a range of other methods including audio interviews (e.g., telephone, Skype) and email interviews is considered appropriate as it is possible to generate equally rich data via these methods (Curasi, 2001; Smith et al., 2009). As such, IPA was used here to explore and make sense of the participants’ lived experiences and personal accounts (Smith & Osborn, 2003). The phenomenological focus allows understanding of conscious experiences, insights and meaning, with participants viewed as experts in the phenomenon being explored (Reid et al., 2005). IPA employs a double hermeneu-tic (i.e., two levels of interpretation), which involves the par-ticipants’ interpretation of their own experiences within their narratives, followed by the researcher’s interpretation of these (Smith & Osborn, 2003). It is considered that interview meth-ods such as email may enhance this interpretation, encouraging a process of reflection throughout the interview for both the par-ticipant and researcher, and allowing the researcher to interpret the data before responding with follow-up questions (Bowden & Galindo-Gonzalez, 2015; Ratislavová & Ratislav, 2014).
The analysis was guided by previous precedents (Pietkie-wicz & Smith, 2014) entailing listening to the audio recordings multiple times, verbatim transcription, multiple readings of the transcripts to ensure familiarity and noting down the authors’ primary observations of the participants’ narratives. These notes were later reviewed to establish emergent themes. The connections, similarities, and differences between the themes were then explored in order to establish clusters, and where themes were deemed to have an insufficient evidential basis, they were discarded. These clusters were then given a descrip-tive label—these are the superordinate and subordinate themes (Pietkiewicz & Smith, 2014). This involved an iterative process, moving between the transcripts and themes to ensure that the final themes were firmly grounded in the data and representa-tive of participants’ accounts. A form of inter-rater reliability was also implemented—both authors analyzed sections of the transcripts independently. These were then checked by the co-author and an additional independent researcher to assess the validity of the interpretations being made (Willig, 2008).
1 Due to the small number of female MAPs that exist within this com-munity, we assured all participants that they would not be identifiable in research outputs. This included not revealing the exact forums from which they were recruited.
Results and Discussion
This paper unpacks two superordinate themes and the asso-ciated subthemes that were identified through the process of analysis. Table 2 provides an overview of these themes.
“A Minority Within a Minority”
Questioning Existence
All participants discussed how many people do not recognize the existence of female MAPs, suggesting that they are hidden in social discussions about minor attraction:
Honestly I think it's more expected from guys. Yeah I mean I mean most paedophiles are just depicted as being men. Yeah. When it comes to women I think there’s a lot of people that say you know female pedophiles don’t exist.
(Participant 4)
This observation of a lack of awareness about women within the MAP community is reflective of both the existing literature on minor attraction on the one hand and social stereotypes about sexuality on the other. To our knowledge the work presented in this paper is the first formal examination of the lived experi-ences of women with sexual attractions to children. Previous work has either only included men as participants (Cacciatori, 2017; Dymond & Duff, 2020; Freimond, 2013; Houtepen et al., 2016), has involved larger quantitative analyses of sur-veys wherein women make up only a minority of each sample (Cohen et al., 2018; Elchuk et al., 2021; Lievesley et al., 2020; McPhail & Stephens, 2020), or has only studied descriptive sexological features of sexual attractions to children among female MAPs (Stephens & McPhail, 2021; Tozdan et al., 2020). This lack of focus on minor attraction across the gender spec-trum seemingly risks alienating women within the MAP com-munity, while simultaneously limiting our understanding of this population at a broader level (Goode, 2010).I don’t think people are aware of the fact that females can be pedophiles too but we do exist…Women are not known to be pedophiles. If a woman is a pedophile, it’s rare for her to say so. The stigma is that “all pedo-philes are men”
(Participant 3)
There is an established literature that suggests women dem-onstrate higher levels of sexual fluidity than men (for a review, see Diamond, 2016). It may therefore be that more minor-attracted men are exclusively (or predominantly) attracted to children (and thus not to adults), with recent research finding the rate of exclusive minor attraction (operationalized as the endorsement of chronophilias below teleiophilia) is some-where between 50 and 75% (Elchuk et al., 2021; Lievesley et al., 2020). In contrast, minor-attracted women might experi-ence such attractions more incidentally (or as part of a broader attraction pattern that also encompasses adult targets). Other analyses have reported that female MAPs are more likely to be engaged in sexual behaviors with adults in comparison with male MAPs (Stephens & McPhail, 2021). Engaging in adult-adult sexual relationships may help female MAPs remain hid-den within the community and appear teleiophilic (i.e., attracted to adults) to their friends and families. The increased rates of adult-directed sexual activity among female MAPs might also explain the apparent higher rates of minor attraction among men than women among community MAP samples, with the former viewing this as a dominant theme of their sexual iden-tity and, subsequently, being more likely to seek support in online communities. This could indicate that there is potentially a higher rate of sexual attractions to children among women within the general community than currently known, with such individuals being able to hide this (or perhaps even not recog-nizing their minor attraction) due to their maintenance of sexual relationships with adult partners.
In addition, media representations of MAPs often evoke the stereotype of the “predatory male pedophile” (King & Roberts, 2017, p. 72), further concretizing the view that the MAP com-munity is predominantly or exclusively made up of men. For some of our participants, this denial or uncertainty surround-ing the existence of female MAPs had an impact on their own beliefs:
This extract highlights the doubt and confusion instilled in participants regarding their sexual attractions as a result of a lack of acknowledgment of female MAPs more broadly. This appears to have had a particularly profound effect on Participant 5. The doubt surrounding the legitimacy (or realism) of her sexual attractions to children, coupled with her lack of attraction to adults, caused emotional turbulence and the feeling that her issues may be “all in my head.” Joining an online forum and dis-covering other female MAPs were therefore an important point for all participants in confirming and validating their existence:…we can't really say how what proportion of pae-dophiles are female. It's like I don't think there's ever, well there has not been a study on that and you can't really determine that from the forum but erm but even even in regards to that there have been times when I doubted my my own mind in that way because because I had been just doing so much research and had pretty much come across nothing on paedophilia in women. I doubted in my own mind if pedophilia exists in women and I had even came across researchers saying that it might not exist in women, which made me wonder for a bit of time whether it was all in my head.
(Participant 5)
I had got to such a desperate position. I kind of didn't care anymore or I went on the Internet thought fuck it. If I die I die. But that was at the same time when I started thinking about therapy and everything. But that is after 26 years of keeping it secret…But yeh it helps seeing that there’s others. It really helps seeing that there is other women there and there is loads which I didn’t expect, I thought I was the only one so it’s a bit of reassurance that you’re not alone.
(Participant 1)
These extracts accentuate the self-doubt and confusion they felt at times as a result of the internalized belief that female MAPs do not exist. The discovery of others was therefore met with surprise, but ultimately provided a sense of comfort and confirmation that what they had been feeling or experiencing was both real and shared by others. The extracts presented here echo the narratives and experiences of male MAPs in previous work (Dymond & Duff, 2020; Elchuk et al., 2021; Houtepen et al., 2016) and are further explored in Theme 2 (below) and emphasize the isolation and loneliness that our participants had at times felt. However, the recognition that they were “not alone” allowed the participants to overcome some of these emotions, easing the loneliness and providing reassurance and support.Whenever there’s a new female member on the online forum, one of the first things they say is “wow there are other women here, I didn’t expect that. I thought I was pretty much the only one in the world”.
(Participant 5)
Here, Participant 1 discusses the positive impact of devel-oping a friendship with another female MAP online. Her use of “like us” suggests that all women with a sexual attraction to minors are the same, and that their attraction is part of what defines them. It is clear that she had previously had a very negative perception of herself and others who share her attrac-tion patterns, and while viewing others in a positive light has allowed her to reconsider and challenge this view, she has not completely moved past it with the recognition that they “aren’t just hideous monsters.” This internalization of social stigma is not a new phenomenon, having been observed in a range of marginalized sexuality groups, and recently among MAPs. These internalized feelings of abnormality and self-discom-fort often lead to negative mental health outcomes, including depression, anxiety, substance misuse disorders, and suicidality (Austin et al., 2017; Heiden-Rootes et al., 2020; Szymanski et al., 2008). Among MAPs, McPhail and Stephens (2020) have developed an internalized pedo-negativity measure that pur-ports to quantify the internalization of social stigma among the minor-attracted community. They have found that higher scores on this measure are predictive of poor psychological wellbe-ing and substance misuse issues (see also Elchuk et al., 2021; Lievesley et al., 2020). For Participant 1 in particular, building a positive relationship with someone she views as being suc-cessful while being minor-attracted allowed her to see that it is possible to incorporate her sexual attractions to children into a prosocial and successful broader identity, and this helped her to feel some positivity toward her future. The forensic literature has made a recent move toward seeing people as more than just what they have done, or what their sexual attractions are (Seto, 2018b; Willis, 2018). However, the narratives of the women in our sample suggest that having positive role models that show how a full life can be lived with minor attraction instills hope, which in turn is associated with greater levels of wellbeing among MAPs (Lievesley et al., 2020). This observation is con-sistent with the narratives of male MAPs in previous work, who suggest that gaining support from fellow MAPs is an effective way of managing one’s own negative emotions, coping with one’s sexual attractions, and reducing sexual risk (Freimond, 2013; Houtepen et al., 2016). Although this consistency across the literature is encouraging, treating female MAPs in the same way as men within the MAP community risks ignoring some of the unique challenges facing this group.Being friends with her online has helped enormously because she is really really clever and you can tell she is really intelligent… I have got her online and she is beau-tiful and she is successful and is clever and it made me think, wow ok people like us aren’t just hideous monsters and it has been extremely helpful and helped me keep positive for my future.
(Participant 1)
A Double-Edged Sword
The participants in our sample discussed both positive and negative aspects of being a woman with sexual attractions to children. While the experience of being a member of the MAP community is one that is often fraught with feelings of differ-ence from the rest of society (Jahnke et al., 2015b), the female MAPs in our sample discussed feeling like they are further isolated and excluded because of their gender. Throughout the narratives, the majority of participants discussed how it felt being part of a population that is dominated by males:
I joined an online forum years ago… I was the only female on there and I was kind of always seen as the odd one out and there is definitely a feeling of being a minor-ity within a minority and er…I have always felt kind of you know, like I am a double freak because of it…there was one or two users who doubted I was a woman…like a lot of them are a little bit suspicious if you mention that you’re a female and they don’t necessarily believe we exist, so that’s something that has been frustrating and alienating.
(Participant 5)
The extracts here echo the sentiments emerging from pre-vious work with MAPs that identify loneliness, isolation, and internalized stigma as key parts of the MAP experience (Dymond & Duff, 2020; Elchuk et al., 2021; Freimond, 2013; Houtepen et al., 2016; Lievesley et al., 2020). However, the points raised here identify a certain level of stigmatization of female MAPs from within their own community, exacerbating the feelings of loneliness that they might experience throughout the course of their life. Participant 5’s labeling of herself as a “double freak” is particularly telling, adding layers of intersec-tional stigma to her identity.There are quite a lot of women on the forums now but hardly any in comparison to men…we’re definitely out-numbered which is sometimes hard because they don’t always understand it from our perspective, or understand what it’s like to feel ignored or not have the same level of support or connection to others because there’s so many of them.
(Participant 6)
Here, Participant 2 discusses feeling different to other female MAPs for not sharing the same attractions to girls. Her observa-tion about the targets of sexual attractions among female MAPs is not necessarily supported by the limited evidence currently available (according to Stephens and McPhail (2021), women in this population appear to be more likely to be attracted to boys than girls, with the same rate of opposite-sex attraction also observed in male MAP groups), but is consistent with the genders of attraction seen in our sample. By referring to herself as “an alien” she is suggesting a perception of stark contrast between herself and others, and the feeling that she does not belong. While this has more of an internal emphasis, she then goes on to describe herself as “an outcast.” This experience of perceived social exclusion, alienation, and discrimination is commonly reported by other sexual minority groups and has been identified as a key factor driving mental health disparities, substance use disorders, and suicidality (Gevonden et al., 2014; Grella et al., 2009; Meyer et al., 2008; Warner et al., 2004). What is of concern is the potential for internalizing these feel-ings. That is, if individuals are seeking support for their sexual attractions and are then rejected or marginalized by the com-munity that is supposed to understand, this leads to an increased risk of further mental health difficulties related to confusion about one’s identity and ties to others. When combined with the experiences of Participant 5 above, this potentially has signifi-cant implications for the design of safe spaces for female MAPs to find support. That is, these narratives might suggest that there is a need to develop specific forums for women with sexual attractions to children to seek and offer support with others. Some participants discussed the positive aspects of being a woman with this attraction, with the view that it was in some way considered “a softer blow” (Participant 5) than for males with the same attraction.In addition, for some participants they were also marginal-ized due to the gendered nature of their sexual attractions: I have noticed that the majority of women online are mainly attracted to young girls…So at times I can feellike an alien as my attractions are 80% younger boys, 15% girls and 5% adults, so when I am in a thread where no one is attracted to young boys I feel a bit of an outcast. So at times I can almost feel more alienated there than if it was all men who were attracted to younger boys, if that makes sense.
(Participant 2)
I would say that the stigma is higher for men and I think this is because people believe that men are more aggres-sive or have a higher sex drive. But at the same time I don’t think I have really heard about like female pedo-philes in the media or anything, it’s all males…I don’t think there can be a stigma towards something you don’t know exists, but if they did know then the hatred would be just as bad.
(Participant 2)
The extracts here highlight how participants felt that miscon-ceptions, and a lack of understanding from society, contributed to less stigma toward them in comparison with male MAPs, with the view that “it is not quite as bad.” Participant 2 attributes this to public perceptions of increased aggression and sex drive in men, in comparison with women, again skewed by societal stereotypes and media representations of sexual crime (Harper & Hogue, 2017; King & Roberts, 2017). However, this view of a more lenient approach to women is then discarded when considered in light of the possibility that others simply do not know they exist (as discussed in Theme 2), but should they know then the response would be comparable. Indeed, some individuals who have less rigid views about sexual crime may actually express more punitive attitudes toward women with sexual attractions to children. In one study, Harper and Bartels (2018) reported how participants with incremental (or malle-able) beliefs about sexual crime recommended more severe punishments for female perpetrators of child abuse than male perpetrators. The exact reasons for this were not explored, but one potential explanation is tied to the perception of “double deviance” (Harper & Bartels, 2018, p. 289), linking to the ear-lier “double freak” attribution made by Participant 5. Bringing these findings together it appears that societal perceptions about the role of gender in sexuality exacerbate the internalization of stigma among female MAPs and provide additional lay-ers of difficulty in understanding and coping with their sexual attractions.I think there’s actually less stigma attached towards females and it is not quite as bad for some reason or they don’t realize that they exist.
(Participant 4)
A Lonely Secret Existence
Hidden Part of Identity
Within their narratives, participants expressed how they felt that they were being secretive by not sharing what they thought to be a core aspect of their identity with others that they cared about. Despite this, some felt unable to reveal their sexual attraction.
It does feel a little bit like I have to hide a part of myself from people and I’m usually a very very open person, so I found that a bit odd for me to hide something that I consider to be important that I’m not telling anybody and it sometimes feels that I am living a lie.
(Participant 2)
The extracts above highlight how both participants felt that they had to hide a part of their identity, part of themselves, by withholding their sexual attraction to maintain relationships with others. This is similar to the experiences of individuals who have other marginalized sexual identities, including those who comprise the LGBT spectrum. That is, many individu-als within sexually marginalized groups may seek to conceal their identities to try to avoid experiencing discrimination or rejection (Pachankis et al., 2020). Although this concealment may be seen as an initial coping strategy among these groups, hiding one’s sexual identity is correlated with adverse mental health outcomes such as anxiety, depression, and substance misuse issues (Pachankis et al., 2020; Ragins et al., 2007). Of course, the experience of minor attraction (as a sexual attrac-tion pattern directed toward a population who both legally and morally cannot consent to sexual activity) is different to other sexual minorities within which consensual sexual activity is both legal and a healthy route to sexual satisfaction. In drawing such a comparison we do not draw any parallels about the legal-ity or morality of acting on any form of sexual attraction, nor do we suggest or advocate for any correlations between LGBT identities and sexual attractions to children. What we do refer to, though, are the similarities within the lived experiences of individuals who live with sexual attractions that are subject to stigmatization.The feeling of living deceitfully, because in a way it is a terrible deceit to be with someone you love so much and not tell them your deepest darkest secret is a worry. It is a deceit and that feels horrible, but at the same time I want a partner and I want to be relatively happy as I can be in life.
(Participant 1)
For our participants, the effects of the concealment of their sexual attractions on how they view their peer relationships may be linked to gendered norms related to social styles. That is, men typically build larger and more socially diffuse networks, whereas women (on average) tend to prefer smaller peer groups and more intimate bonds with others (Benenson, 2019; Vigil, 2007). In this sense, our participants have an additional layer of complication tied up in their concealment that male MAPs perhaps do not. Not only are they hiding their sexual attractions from their peers for risk of judgment or reprisal, but in doing so they are contravening the female norm of sharing personal details with trusted (typically female) peers (see Agrawal et al., 2002).
This concealment appears to have some negative impacts on psychosocial function within our sample. In describing her-self as a “very very open person,” it is clear how Participant 2 contrasts this element of being secretive against the rest of her personality and life. The impact of her identity concealment is highlighted in the resultant effect of feeling that she is not being true to herself and “living a lie.” This is also echoed by Partici-pant 1, who discusses feelings of “living deceitfully” as a result of her “deepest darkest secret.” This process of hiding important parts of one’s core identity, and the subsequent effects on the quality of social and personal relationships, echoes the nar-ratives of male MAPs (Elliott & Lievesley, 2018; Freimond, 2013; Houtepen et al., 2016). That is, men experiencing minor attraction have also reported that withholding their sexual iden-tities as MAPs left them feeling inauthentic with others. In not having authentic close relationships with others, those in our sample may be missing an important support mechanism via the achievement of the primary human good of relatedness or connectedness to other people (Harper et al., 2020; Ward & Stewart, 2003). That is, one prominent positive psychologi-cal model that has been applied to both forensic and clinical psychological contexts asserts that the achievement of a range of universally strived-for goals is important for the attainment of a “good life” (Barnao et al., 2016; Ward et al., 2007). In not having authentic relationships, our participants (and the MAP community more broadly) are not achieving a sense of social connectedness, which is a core part of living a healthy and happy life. Although Participant 1 acknowledges the negative feelings associated with hiding this part of herself, it is clear that she has considered the potential effects of disclosing their sexual attractions, such as losing her partner and being unhappy.
These are common experiences for MAPs who do disclose to others (Freimond, 2013; Goode, 2010). For Participant 1, these costs are deemed to be too high, and so her sexual attraction toward children remains concealed from those closest to her. For some participants, the hidden part of their identity, and the need to constantly keep this secret, impacted upon their health and wellbeing:
I was thinking well what is the point if I have to live a lie, if nobody knows the real me then what is the point living, there is just no point because all my relationships are just fake.
(Participant 1)
Here, Participant 1 expresses the impact of keeping her sexual attractions a secret and the effect this had on her mental health at a time when she was considering suicide, emphasizing the emotional distress she felt. The extract projects a sense of feeling trapped, with the recognition that her life and relation-ships are false as a result of her secret, but unable to resolve or overcome this due to the potential consequences of disclosing her sexual attractions. From her perspective, an inauthentic life is not worth living, which signals that she has reached a point of exacerbation and could no longer continue. Similarly, Participant 6 recognizes the detrimental impact that lying to others had on her mental health, contributing to the negative sense of self that she already felt due to her attraction. These experiences are not uncommon within sexual minority groups, including among MAPs, with identity concealment being asso-ciated with poorer mental health outcomes (Gamarel et al., 2012; Lehavot & Simoni, 2011; Meyer, 2003; Pachankis, 2007; Pachankis et al., 2020). Recent work with MAP participants has also found significant levels of social isolation and loneliness that are correlated with psychological distress and suicidality (Elchuk et al., 2021). Relatedly, Lievesley et al. (2020) reported correlations between thought suppression and lower levels of wellbeing. Taken together, these data suggest that identity con-cealment, and the subsequent effects of perceived social isola-tion, can result in severe psychosocial outcomes for MAPs. These experiences are not rare among MAPs, with 46% of those with sexual attractions to children having previously considered suicide, and 67% of this subgroup stating that they were unable to speak to others about this (B4U-ACT, 2011b). As such, there appears to be a need to promote environments within which both male and female MAPs feel comfortable to disclose their sexual attractions and maintain authentic personal relationships with others.Lying to people I cared about made me feel like even more of a terrible person and contributed to my mental state with the depression and the anxiety.
(Participant 6)
Alienation and Loneliness
Throughout the narratives, participants expressed feelings of being alienated and isolated because of their attractions.
Well it’s very isolating for one thing. I’m not really not very social but when I do, sex is a big topic and it’s some-thing that people in their late 20’s early 30s talk about a lot and it’s very hard for me to relate to those conversations.
(Participant 5)
The extracts above highlight how participants experienced feelings of isolation and being an outsider within their friend-ship group. For these participants, it appeared to hinder their relationships in a similar way to the experiences reported in the previous subordinate theme. However, here the process was not the conscious concealment of their identity, but more the recognition that they cannot “relate” or “bond” in the same way due to an inability to contribute to what they perceived to be normal discussions about sex and romantic relationships. It is worth noting that Participant 5 is exclusively attracted to children. This may play a role in the way she perceives herself within her social groups, as they are not able to draw on broader sexual attractions to adults as a method to mask her attractions to children. As such, she resorted to retreat from social interac-tions, which exacerbated feelings of difference.I can’t have the same discussions with them about like dating or about things because I don’t have any romantic interests in people my own age…I just can’t relate to like wanting to date people, having crushes on appropriately aged people so I can’t bond with my friends on those things.
(Participant 2)
It’s hard for me to not resent them at times because all my friends who are straight, gay or bi seem to have so much fun but I will never have that sort of experience of life which makes me sad at times.
(Participant 3)
From the narratives it is clear how the comparison of themselves in relation to their peers leads to a range of dif-ficult emotions, including resentment, frustration, and sadness linked to the stark awareness that they will never have the same experiences and enjoyment in life because of a sexual attrac-tion pattern that they have not chosen for themselves, and that they are powerless to change. This supports previous theoriz-ing that suggests that pedophilia (as a specific form of minor attraction) operates as a sexual orientation, being unchosen and remaining stable throughout life (Grundmann et al, 2016; Seto, 2012; though see Tozdan and Briken [2017, 2018, 2019] 2 ).It’s very frustrating like to know that I’m never going to be able to even so much as kiss on the lips somebody who I’m really attracted to and it’s kind of a frustrating, painful thing to think about and it’s something that people can’t really empathize with.
(Participant 5)
The added layer of frustration does not appear to link only to the sexual aspects on minor attraction, but also to the romantic aspects of being sexually attracted to children. Recent work by Martijn et al. (2020) found that self-reported prevalence of falling in love with children rose as a MAP’s attraction exclu-sivity increased (that is, exclusively minor-attracted individuals reported falling in love with children—but not with adults—at higher rates than those MAPs who were also sexually attracted to adults). Similarly, Dymond and Duff’s (2020) qualitative work highlights how the sexual aspects of being minor-attracted (i.e., the need for celibacy) are often easier to cope with than the experiences of romantic attraction to children. This is especially the case for Participant 5, who is exclusively minor-attracted. In this sense, it is often easier for people who are sexually attracted to children to suppress physical sexual desires than it is to ignore the emotional connections that they feel toward children. There are links here to positive psychological mod-els of living a “good life,” where interpersonal connection and intimate relationships form a vital part of the human experience (Harper et al., 2020; Ward et al., 2007). The acknowledgment for some MAPs that sexual celibacy may also be combined with emotional disconnection through a lack of intimate partners leads to increased loneliness and exacerbated social isolation (Dymond & Duff, 2020; Elliott & Lievesley, 2018; Jahnke et al., 2015b; Jeske, 2016).
Participant 5 discusses an additional pain related to others’ lack of understanding or ability to relate to her difficulties, which for her are because she has not disclosed or shared her attraction with others. However, her comment also suggests a generalization of this point, in that others simply cannot empa-thize with such things. Similar research with male MAPs has found that non-disclosure of their sexual attractions led to par-ticipants feeling excluded in social settings, particularly in con-versations about love interests or intimacy (Dymond & Duff, 2020; Freimond, 2013; Houtepen et al, 2016). These feelings further contribute to the suffering, feelings of alienation and isolation experienced by the participants.
For some, isolation is to some extent a choice:
Participant 3 describes a strategy she uses to hide her attrac-tions by consciously isolating herself, which both sacrifices social relationships and acts as a barrier to accessing appropri-ate therapy. Although she considers this a safer option than making people being aware of her sexual attraction, the result of this is loneliness and the associated risks of negative psychoso-cial effects (Elchuk et al., 2021). Goode (2010) stated that often MAPs are left to cope alone with their thoughts and feelings about their attractions, and that social support is a vital aspect of their maintenance of emotional health and stability. This isola-tion is exacerbated by an inherent mistrust of professionals— from whom support might otherwise be sought—regarding a fear or lack of clarity over reporting requirements (B4U-ACT, 2011a; Dymond & Duff, 2020; Grady et al., 2018; Levenson & Grady, 2019). As such, a common theme in the narratives of our participants was a general lack of social support or understand-ing from others that, when combined with a fear of discovery (Jahnke et al., 2015b), leaves them with no other option than to withdraw from relationships and try to cope alone.It’s honestly very lonely to live with this attraction… Due to the anxiety that I feel towards my sexual inter-est, I prefer social isolation over potentially revealing my thoughts. I shut people out and refuse to talk to my therapist. So it does get lonely at times, and I imagine it will only get worse.
(Participant 3)
2 There is currently no consensus among the academic and clinical communities about whether minor attraction (or, more specifically, pedophilia) represents a form of sexual orientation. A detailed explo-ration of this debate is beyond the scope of this paper. However, we highlight this debate here as our participants’ experiences relate to one particular aspect of this debate (namely the immutability or change-ability of sexual attractions to children).
Continued in the next post...