Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us (20 page)

You might think that Rind and his fellow investigators had a dark agenda of some sort (and certainly many critics have accused them of such), but in fact they were exceedingly careful to note that their findings shouldn’t be used to implement any policy changes to existing laws concerning underage sex. Rather, their intention was only to call into question some widely held assumptions about the universal harmfulness of such developmental experiences. But then the conservative radio talk-show host Dr. Laura Schlessinger (whose Ph.D., incidentally, is in physiology, not psychology, not that she’s ever let that get in the way of giving mental health advice with a side of Old Testament gloom) somehow got wind of it and proceeded to stir up a bit of a hornet’s nest by complaining about Rind’s “junk science” and pedophilia apologia to listeners of her nationally syndicated program. That incendiary development, combined with NAMBLA’s (the notorious North American Man/Boy Love Association) gushing over Rind’s findings on its website, quickly escalated into outright political chaos.

Before long, some members of Congress learned of the study (whether that was from being regular listeners of Schlessinger’s show or from being loyal followers of NAMBLA is hard to say). By the spring of 1999, Alaska, California, Illinois, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania had passed official resolutions executively condemning Rind’s scientific findings. On July 12 of that same year, in an incident without precedent in the history of psychology, the U.S. House of Representatives convened to establish Resolution 107, in which 355 members of the House (all of whom were even less qualified than Dr. Laura Schlessinger to evaluate a study in psychological science) legislatively lampooned Rind’s empirical work by declaring—data be damned—that any and all sexual relations between minors and adults were categorically abusive and harmful. Just a few weeks later, the Senate passed this anti-Rind resolution by a unanimous “Hear! Hear!” voice-vote margin of 100 to 0. (No senator would dare to go against the grain and kiss any future political aspirations goodbye by being known as the one pervert voting in favor of Rind’s findings.)
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The advisory board members of the APA, meanwhile, butted heads with these suits in Washington, D.C., over the fallout. After all, the former were in the business of science, not moralizing. They staunchly defended the
Psychological Bulletin
editor’s decision to publish the study in their prestigious outlet. Moreover, the study had been carefully vetted—and ultimately recommended for acceptance—by other experts in the field. The Rind data remain polarizing, with some researchers still questioning his methods and motives, and others, in turn, questioning
their
motives for questioning his. Given the brouhaha, scholars on both sides of the debate left things for a while on a “Let’s just agree to disagree” note (which essentially meant cursing each other under their breath and taking a break from duking it out in public). But in 2006, the psychologist Heather Ulrich replicated the 1998 findings, concluding cautiously that the presumption of universal harm from juveniles having a sexual encounter with an adult is too simplistic to account for the variance in people’s subjective interpretations of their own life experiences.

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Now, ostensibly, there’s no good way for one to lean on this hot-button issue. If you conclude from Rind’s findings that having sex with minors is “sometimes okay,” then to many people you’ll sound like an advocate of child molestation. Yet if you still get red in the face and believe that anyone having sex with a minor is manipulating an innocent child, then you’re glossing over all the gray areas. Much of the disagreement, I think, stems from our failure to define our terms. When, exactly, does “childhood innocence” end? Most of us have some vague sense of once having had it—or at least something like it—but how does one quantify or even standardize such an abstract construct? At what precise moment in time, for instance, did you lose yours? Perhaps you never had it, or perhaps you never lost it.

Few of us are so naive as to believe that it happens at the stroke of midnight dividing childhood from legal adulthood, anyway, especially given that such a line is culturally arbitrary. There are a lot of uncomfortable philosophical problems with age-of-consent laws that continue to lead to people, including teenagers themselves who have sex with someone just three or four years younger, being treated unfairly in our society. It’s only when it comes to sex that on some mandated calendar day the legal concept of “consent” changes so abruptly from being a chronological state to a mental state. Having sex with a person before the bell tolls on that day, even if it’s the minor who makes the first move and you’re but the target of his or her passionate underage desires, will change you abruptly into a criminal sex offender. Whatever was going on inside the minor’s head is usually seen as inconsequential. In other legal contexts, however, minors are tried as adults precisely
because
of what was going on inside their heads at the time. A sixteen-year-old boy who rapes a woman after she rejects his solicitous advances would typically be punished as an adult. But if a woman encourages a solicitous sixteen-year-old boy after he tries to kiss her, he’d be regarded by criminal prosecutors as a child victim. In other words, legally, the minds of minors matter only when they’ve caused adults sexual harm; their mental states are inadmissible in court when they cause adults sexual pleasure. I don’t know about you, but to me there’s an unsettling tension in the logic between these contrasting scenarios.

Age-of-consent laws are quite admirably meant to protect adolescents from being sexually exploited by adults (and there are, sad to say, plenty of the latter out there for parents to be concerned about). But there are problems with a hard-line approach to this emotional immaturity argument as well. One might be stigmatized for doing so, but it’s perfectly lawful to have sex with consenting adults who have the intellectual and emotional capacity of an underage child. To take a rather extreme example, the average mental age of an adult with Down syndrome is eight, yet unlike having sex with a seventeen-year-old equipped with a three-digit IQ, being with someone with this or any other developmental delay isn’t a crime, so long as the person is eighteen years of age or older and “consents.” So if we’re really trying to protect the vulnerable from sexual harm due to their mental immaturity, then using
chronological
age, rather than
mental
age, to draw the legal line seems a somewhat odd way to go about it. I can assure you after an early dating mishap with one particular—to put it both kindly and mildly—intellectually blunt grown man, these are often orthogonal measures.

Recent work by the cognitive neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore shows in fact that there’s no hard-and-fast threshold at which a person crosses over into a clear brain-based psychological adulthood. The prefrontal cortex, arguably the neuroanatomical region most relevant to sexual decision making due to its executive role in long-term planning abilities, empathy, and social awareness, doesn’t stop growing until we’re in our mid-thirties. For some, it’s still developing well into the fifth decade of life. Those who want to have sex with minors often cite in their defense the cultural arbitrariness of ages of consent. But they’re at least right about that, and these numbers are in perpetual flux even
within
cultures.

The first such age-restricting statute, Westminster I, appeared about seven centuries before the popular TV series
To Catch a Predator
first aired, in the year of our Lord 1275, under the heading of a broader rape law in England. According to this new legislation, any man who dared to “ravish” a “maiden within age,” with or without her consent, was guilty of a misdemeanor. English legal scholars interpret the phrase “within age” to mean the age of marriage, which at the time was twelve. Had the man been married to this same twelve-year-old girl, in other words, this age-based rape statute wouldn’t have applied. In the centuries that followed, similar edicts meant to protect children (namely girls) from sexual abuse or exploitation by adults (namely men) started to dust the globe. And wide variations in the age of consent are written across this historical landscape.

In the sixteenth century, for example, the North American colonies adopted from Britain the age of ten as the appropriate cutoff, and this remained in the formal legislatures of thirty-seven U.S. states until long after the Civil War. Of the other existing states in the 1880s, only nine had by then decided that the “advanced age” of twelve was probably a more reasonable number. (One state, Delaware, had even lowered its cutoff to a mind-boggling
seven
.) Only in the late nineteenth century was the age of consent raised to sixteen throughout most of America, a concession by the social reformers who had spearheaded the campaign and had initially sought to have it changed nationwide to eighteen, which they’d largely accomplish by 1920. Some in the growing feminist movement even hoped to raise it to twenty-one, the age at which women could legally inherit property.
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Tidal changes were happening with Europe’s age-of-consent laws over this time span as well. With the Enlightenment really coming into bloom in the eighteenth century, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s influential ideas on childhood spread throughout France and beyond. His portrayal of children as social tabulae rasae, or “blank slates,” lasted well into the Napoleonic era and replaced the archaic notion of kids as adults in miniature. Inspired by Rousseau, public sentiment came to hold that children were intrinsically pure and became tainted only by the corrupting influence of society. Rousseau also marks the dawn of developmental psychology and the implementation of age-segregated education. Children and teenagers were now seen as having qualitatively different kinds of minds from grown-ups, marching through what Rousseau believed was a universal pattern of cognitive and emotional stages. (Development wasn’t just a matter of acquiring more and more facts, in other words, but the very way in which one processes information and perceives the world changes over time as well.) Yet even at the peak of this radical new moral Enlightenment, the sexual readiness of children was, strangely enough, apparently seen as a separate issue. The age of consent in France during this whole time was a mere eleven, getting bumped up to thirteen only in the year 1863.

By the late nineteenth century, thirteen had also been chosen as the carnal threshold in other European nations, including Portugal, Switzerland, Spain, and Denmark. Today, Spain is the only country in the region to keep thirteen as its age of consent, with other nations variously lifting theirs to fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen, at most. Deplorable tales of child prostitution during the Industrial Revolution spurred moral reformers in England and Wales, meanwhile, to raise the age of consent across the British Isles from thirteen to sixteen, a social cause to combat child exploitation that had also reverberated in the American age-of-consent campaign mentioned earlier.

Similarly wobbly views on sex and adolescents—or rather sex
with
adolescents—are on profligate historical display elsewhere. It goes in the opposite direction, too. The age of consent in 1920s Chile was twenty, but now it’s sixteen. A century ago in Italy, it was sixteen, too. But today it’s fourteen there. Overall, studying the numbers contained in even the most contemporary international age-of-consent table will give you the impression that you’re looking at a flurry of seemingly random digits between twelve and twenty-one (a sizable range): it’s thirteen in Argentina, eighteen in Turkey, sixteen in Canada, twelve in Mexico, twenty in Tunisia, sixteen in Western Australia, fifteen in Sweden, and so on. “More than 800 years after the first recorded age of consent laws,” writes the historian Stephen Robertson, “the one constant is the lack of consistency.” Just as when we’re assessing religions with conflicting theologies, we can draw only two possible conclusions from Robertson’s observation: either some societies have the one true age of consent and every other has therefore got it wrong, or any given society’s age of consent is based on what its citizens have simply chosen to believe about human sexuality and psychological development. And similar to what any objective analysis of competing religious beliefs would force us to conclude, there’s no evidence that the former is the case for cultural variations in age of consent laws (that there is “one true age”) and every reason for us to conclude the latter is in fact what we’re dealing with.

*   *   *

In the context of this somewhat scandalous discussion, it’s important to remember that earlier distinction in moral logic, the one that assigns a different harm value to thought and action. Even when it comes to “true pedophiles” (those who are actually attracted to prepubescent children, not adolescents), thoughts alone are abstractions that—as unpalatable as they may be—cannot rape, molest, touch, batter, or bruise. If contained in the mind, desires are intrinsically harmless to children; only when they’re driven into action can harm occur. But there’s also that rather salient personal distress qualification for the paraphilias in the
DSM-5
that we went over in the last chapter, and so regardless of whether one’s sexual deviancy is harmful to anyone else, it could still be causing subjective harm to the unfortunate paraphiliac in whose brain it burns. In the world of nonsexual mental illness, for instance, the voice in a schizophrenic’s head may be distressing to that person whether or not the auditory hallucinations are responded to out loud for anyone else to hear. Having to listen to obnoxious personalities belittling you or egging you on all day long isn’t the most pleasant way to live one’s life, after all. Similarly, having a paraphilia can be a living hell even if it’s kept under cranial lock and key. A paraphilia is a way of seeing the world through a singular sexual lens, and this lens can’t be easily adjusted, repaired, or even, in the absence of a lobotomy anyway, broken. The paraphiliac’s deviant desires are far less treatable than the voices jeering a schizophrenic. (If you’re a schizophrenic paraphiliac, I only wish there were a God around to have mercy on your tortured soul.)