Is there a reason for paedophilia?

Shane Leavy examines some of the many genetic and biological theories that have been put forward as to why some people abuse children

Many people are angry with the Catholic Church these days, not least because the Vatican Secretary of State blamed homosexuality for the Church’s child sex abuse. Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone was denying that celibacy had any role in causing child abuse when he added that psychologists and psychiatrists had instead demonstrated ‘a relationship between homosexuality and paedophilia’. So, have they?
No, although they considered the notion in the past. For most of the 20th century, mental health professionals believed that homosexual adults were more likely to abuse children than heterosexuals. One reason for this, according to the American Psychological Association, was that early studies of homosexual people interviewed only those already in therapy for some issue, skewing the results and showing up disproportionate mental health problems.
Until 1975, the Association included homosexuality on its list of emotional and mental disorders; from then on, a growing professional consensus separated homosexuality from paedophilia.
“The research to date all points to there being no significant relationship between a homosexual lifestyle and child molestation,” wrote psychologist Dr Nicholas Groth in 1982. “There appears to be practically no reportage of sexual molestation of girls by lesbian adults, and the adult male who sexually molests young boys is not likely to be homosexual.”
This did not quite end the debate. By the early 1990s, statistics for victims of child sexual abuse showed that around twice as many female children were abused as male. However homosexuals were believed to make up only around 2-4 per cent of the total adult population. Since most child abusers are male, this made some moral campaigners argue that homosexuals must be far more inclined to abuse children than heterosexuals.
American Mayo Clinic
A review of studies on paedophilia by the American Mayo Clinic discussed the observation in 2007. “The percentage of homosexual paedophiles ranges from 9 per cent to 40 per cent, which is approximately four to 20 times higher than the rate of adult men attracted to other adult men (using a prevalence rate of adult homosexuality of 2 per cent to 4 per cent),” it said. “This finding does not imply that homosexuals are more likely to molest children, just that a larger percentage of paedophiles are homosexual or bisexual in orientation to children.”
In other words, a homosexual man is not a particular threat to children. Most paedophiles are also sexually attracted to adults – around 50 per cent will marry at some point – however, a paedophile’s sexual orientation towards other adults does not tell us what his sexual orientation towards children will be.
A heterosexual man with paedophilia may be attracted to male children, or female children, or both; many researchers conclude that paedophilia should be considered a discrete sexual orientation, unconnected to any attraction to adults of either sex.
For some reason, homosexual paedophiles (that is, men who sexually abuse male children) also tend to abuse more children, and abuse more often, than heterosexual paedophiles (men who abuse female children). This tends to push up the proportion of male victims of child abuse.
So the average paedophile is more likely to be attracted to male children than the average non-paedophile man is likely to be attracted to adult males, but homosexuals are no more inclined to desire children than heterosexuals. Weeding out homosexuals from young men joining the priesthood, therefore, will not reduce the incidence of child sex abuse. So far, Cardinal Bertone’s claim seems to be untrue.
Catholic child sex abuse
There is another odd angle to the story of Catholic child sex abuse, though, one that seems to push homosexuality back into the debate. In general, more female children are abused than male, a situation observed here in Ireland in the 2002 Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland (SAVI) report. SAVI found that 20.4 per cent of women surveyed had experienced contact sexual abuse in childhood, compared with 16.2 per cent of boys.
Victims of Catholic clerical child sex abuse are overwhelmingly male, however. Several years ago, the John Jay College of Criminal Justice published an in-depth study into all the alleged sexual offences by Catholic priests on minors under 18 in the United States from 1950 to 2002. The report showed that a massive 81 per cent of alleged victims were male. Priests who abused minors tended to abuse males far more than non-priest abusers.
One explanation may be in the fact that many ‘paedophile priests’ are not, in fact, paedophiles – their victims are often adolescent. These victims are often under the age of consent but not actually children, so the term ‘paedophile’ is used incorrectly to refer to their abusers.
Professor Philip Jenkins of the Pennsylvania State University has written extensively on child abuse in the Catholic Church. His 1996 book Pedophiles and Priests: An Anatomy of a Contemporary Crisis criticised sensationalist media coverage of clerical child sex abuse, and he points out that inaccurate use of language helped create a moral panic around clerical child sex abuse.
“A man who has sex with a male of fourteen, fifteen, sixteen or seventeen years is not a paedophile,” he said. “What is he? Is he a homosexual? A pederast? English is lacking in terms for such behaviour.”
Nearly 40 per cent of all the alleged victims listed in the John Jay report were between 14 and 17 years of age, so their abusers were not technically paedophiles at all.
(Numbers abusing babies and toddlers were extremely low. Altogether, 14.2 per cent of victims were nine years old or younger and the single worst age for abuse was 12.)
What this means is that a disproportionately large number of adolescent victims of American Catholic clerical sex abuse were male. Psychologists have argued that homosexuals are no more likely to sexually abuse other adults than heterosexuals – so does this imply that a disproportionate number of Catholic priests are homosexual?
“I have an open mind on this,” admitted Prof Jenkins. “I know of no reason in terms of reporting why male victims would show up more, so that does lend credence to the homosexuality view. I’m prepared to be convinced.”
So Cardinal Bertone may have his connection between homosexuality and abuse – though not quite the one he wanted. The Church might simply have lots more gay men working in it than other organisations.
Clerical celibacy
The flip side to this debate, the side Bertone was responding to when he blamed homosexuality, is the claim that clerical celibacy somehow increases the likelihood of priests abusing children. Even some in Catholic circles have begun to seriously discuss this issue, including retired Australian bishop Geoffrey Robinson, who wrote that celibacy could produce the ‘unhealthy’ psychological state, ideas and environment that produce abuse.
Yet there is no evidence of celibacy increasing the likelihood of individuals abusing children at all – none at all. Elaine Mears of the Rape Crisis Network Ireland called the idea ‘offensive to men.’ “Celibacy is a red herring – men’s level of access to sex does not seem to have any correlation to proclivity to abuse,” she said. “Abuse is about power.” If celibacy does not actively spark the perversion that leads to child abuse, perhaps mandatory clerical celibacy might attract some men who already have confused sexual desires, as a refuge to avoid having to form heterosexual relations. There is one very strong reason to question even this idea, however.
If clerical celibacy really does attract paedophiles and rapists, then there should be particularly high incidence of child sex abuse by Catholic priests – and there simply is not.
The John Jay report, for example, estimates that allegations of abuse of minors was made against roughly 4 per cent of all priests working in the US between 1950 and 2002. Of those against whom allegations were made, only 6 per cent had been convicted, so only 0.24 per cent of all priests active in the US from 1950 to 2002 were ever convicted of child sex abuses.
“There is no credible evidence that Roman Catholic clergy abuse young people at a rate different from that of clergy of any other denomination, or from members of secular professions who deal with children,” Jenkins writes in a forthcoming American Conservative magazine issue. “Paedophile priests certainly did exist, but in tiny numbers. At the heart of the clergy abuse crisis was a core of highly persistent serial paedophiles, who massively ‘over-produced’ criminal behaviour, and some were the targets of hundreds of plausible complaints.
“Out of 100,000 priests active in the US in this half-century, a select cadre of just 149 individuals – one priest out of every 750 – accounted for over a quarter of all the allegations of clergy abuse.”
Sex abuse statistics
Protestant denominations that allow clergy to marry have similar sex abuse statistics as Catholics; insurance companies that cover churches in case of claims for sexual abuse charge the Catholic Church no higher premiums than any other religion. The Catholic Church produces no more sex abusers than any other organisation.
To Jenkins, there are a number of reasons for the media emphasis on the Catholic Church, some related to the sheer size and structure of the Church as ‘a highly bureaucratic institution that prides itself on preserving records of institutional continuity.’ A huge bulge of abuse cases came to light in the 1990s and 2000s after being hidden for decades, keeping the media narrative of the ‘paedophile priest’ in the news.
Jenkins even points out that the concealment of abuse by Church hierarchies is mirrored by events in the American school system, where one Congress report estimated that as many as 4.5 million students are subject to sexual misconduct by school employees over the course of their school years. There too, authorities shifted abusers secretly from one school to another rather than acknowledge the abuse problem.
Celibacy is a weak indicator of child sex abuse, as is homosexuality. So what causes it?
In 2002, American scientists began discussing a bizarre incident in which a 40-year-old man developed an uncontrollable sexual attraction to children, after an egg-sized tumour grew in his brain. The man, who had never shown paedophiliac inclinations before, began visiting child pornography sites, soliciting sex in massage parlours and finally making sexual advances towards young child-ren. Once the tumour was removed, he returned to ordinary behaviour.
Prof Russell Swerdlow of the University of Kansas worked with the patient and noted that the tumour had affected his ability to control himself. “He had a demonstrable reduction in impulse control, due to a lesion in his orbitofrontal cortex. Patients with orbitofrontal cortex damage and impulse control problems have been reported since the mid-19th century,” explained Swerdlow.
“It is natural to wonder why our patient’s loss of impulse control manifested the way it did. Did he have an inherent, underlying predisposition that had previously been controlled? That question is difficult to empirically address.”
Innate biological trait
Other patients with orbitofrontal cortex damage had been observed losing impulse control, but did not then exhibit sexual attraction to children. So it has been postulated by some that perhaps paedophilia is an innate biological trait, rather than one sparked off by environmental factors like forced celibacy.
A number of other studies have noted correlations between paedophilia and traits with biological causes. Dr James Cantor at Canada’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health was involved in a number of studies showing that paedophiles tend to have higher rates of left-handedness than non-paedophiles.
“There’s only one thing that influences a person’s handedness and that’s the organisation of the brain,” said Dr Cantor. “So even though there is nothing about left-handedness that’s causing paedophilia, because there exists an association we know that there has to be a difference in brain organisation.”
Other studies found that paedophiles tended to have lower than average IQ, lesser than average physical height and higher than average likelihood of having suffered a head injury than non-paedophiles. So, far from paedophilia developing in the celibate halls of the seminary, it may have much deeper, and earlier roots.
“The best explanation so far is that there is a chain of events,” said Dr Cantor.
“Whatever seems to start that chain does seem to be before or very near birth. There’s no direct evidence of it being genetic, but there’s a lot of evidence suggesting that it’s very strongly, and possibly entirely, biological.”
l References on request.