Joyce activated, issue 41
In which I look at an unusually toxic topic, even for me: what is known about the motives of those who abuse children, and how to stop them.
I’ve recently started a new part-time, short-term project, and adjusting my schedule is proving a challenge. I’m afraid that for the next few weeks delivery of this newsletter will prove a bit uneven—I hope things will soon settle down.
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In this issue, I’m going to look at the evidence regarding whether paedophilia is innate, and what the answer means for public policy. It’s a controversial question, at least in part because of the “naturalistic fallacy”—the mistake of thinking that if something is natural, it is therefore morally good, or at least morally neutral.
Some people fear that accepting paedophilia as a particularly unfortunate “orientation”—if that is indeed what it is—would open up a line of argument that “minor-attracted persons” belong on the rainbow flag; that they too deserve to be out and proud, accepted for who they are. I see that risk, and agree that we need to guard against it. But in the end what causes paedophilia, and whether it is innate, are empirical questions. And they merit answers not just for reasons of intellectual curiosity, but for the making of public policy too.
First, some definitions. A person is a paedophile if they are solely, or almost solely, aroused by prepubescent bodies. Paedophilia not an act, it’s a state of being. A child-abuser, by contrast, is someone who commits sexual acts with children (under-16s; in some jurisdictions also older children over whom they have institutional power, for example teachers with pupils up to the age of 18). A paedophile does not necessarily abuse any children; a child-abuser need not be a paedophile.
That distinction means something that probably seems counterintuitive until you give it a little thought: much child-abuse is not committed by paedophiles. For a start, a fair amount is committed by other children, whom criminologists would not classify as paedophiles because their sexual interests are likely to mature as they do. But also, lots of children aren’t pre-pubescent. Those who sexually assault them may not be motivated by specific desire for a child’s body.
The perpetrators, whether paedophiles or not, are almost all men. Women commit almost no sex crimes against people of any age: in prisons, where women make up about 5% of all offenders, only about 5% of that 5% are in for sex crimes. And some of that tiny share will be in for non-contact crimes such as taking payment to procure a child for sexual abuse or for the production of pornography. Horrible crimes, of course; my point is merely that these crimes are probably motivated by money rather than sexual desire.
As with all sexual crimes, those against children are terribly under-reported. But you can get some sense of the scale by looking at rape statistics. In a large share of all reported rapes, the victim is under 16. In the UK, around 30% of all rapes of females reported to the police are of under-16s, as are around 60% of all rapes against males.
Plausibly, a larger share of rapes against children are reported than of rapes against adults. Victims, and those around them, probably think that a conviction is more likely to be secured when something as cut-and-dried as the victim’s age means the perpetrator cannot claim the act was consensual. But in any case it’s clear that there’s a lot of rape of children, both before and after puberty. Official statistics are also available for rapes according to the age of the victim, broken down in five-year bands: victims aged 10-14 account for 16% of all reported rapes, and those aged 15-19 for 23%. (Figures here, see paragraphs 5 and 6 of the executive summary. I’ve used the accompanying chart as this email’s sole image, right up top; for obvious reasons I couldn’t really think of photos to illustrate it.)
There’s no reason to think that the men who abuse children who’ve been through puberty—mostly girls—are interested in immature bodies. In other words, there’s no reason to think they’re paedophiles. From the point of view of a man with the standard interest in mature female bodies and no conscience, a 14- or 15-year-old girl is the perfect victim: as physically appealing as an adult but worse at weighing risks and more ignorant of the world. What such a man is interested in is vulnerability.
Understanding what motivates crimes is essential if you want to reduce their frequency. And the sexual abuse of post-pubescent children is motivated by the same things as crimes against adult women, with the additional factor that such children make easier victims. That suggests it can be tackled by making children less vulnerable. Some of the crimes that would otherwise have been committed against children may be “displaced” onto adults, but some will simply never happen, because adults are better able to protect themselves. (Of course we also need to do what we can to make sexual crimes against adults rarer. But that’s a different subject.)
Reducing vulnerability means thinking of child-abuse as a crime of opportunity. These are the unplanned crimes that are the result of a rational choice made in the moment when a willing perpetrator sees and seizes their chance. Much theft falls into this category: someone spots a bag on the floor by a seat in a café, or a purse on a kitchen counter next to an open window, and reaches out and takes it. Some violent crime is opportunistic, too: in a badly lit park with little foot traffic, the occasional person walking through may provide a sudden easy target—wrong place, wrong time.
These crimes can be reduced most simply and effectively by making attractive opportunities rarer. When car alarms get better, car theft falls; bike theft can be reduced by better locks and enclosed bike parks with CCTV. Designing parks to have multiple routes through means more people use them, making them feel less scary and thereby encouraging more use, in a virtuous circle that makes opportunistic victimisation less likely.
Similar “design thinking” is visible in any toilets built before the recent mania for making facilities “gender-neutral”. Women’s toilets will be placed at the end of a corridor whenever possible, and in any case not where they have to be passed to get to the men’s, thus reducing the opportunity for men to hang around outside them, or to enter claiming confusion.
Reducing opportunities to victimise children is just the same. In schools and children’s clubs, you make it as hard as possible for adults to be alone with children in places other people cannot see. That means putting glass panels in classroom doors, and banning adults from giving lifts to unrelated children. It also, blindingly obviously, means allowing no man or boy, however he identifies, into spaces where girls are especially vulnerable, such as toilets and changing-rooms. These measures aren’t targeted at anyone, and they don’t mean you think all boys and men are predators—any more than getting a good bike lock means you think everyone who walks along the street is a thief.
Crimes of opportunity can also be reduced by making it easier for victims to remove themselves from risky situations, and easier for anyone who knows they’re happening to report the crime. If you want to reduce domestic violence you have to make it easier for women to leave abusive husbands—and that means making sure those women have financial support, somewhere to go and the assurance of protection against perpetrators seeking revenge. It means making reporting both easier and more effective: police have to investigate and prosecute.
Exactly the same measures would reduce some sorts of sexual crimes against children. For an article some years ago I spoke to adults who had been raped by family members when younger. A common trajectory was that the man started to rape a girl only when she had gone through puberty. I remember a daughter who told me that she was sure she had been the only child her father victimised, and that he did so many, many times until she was old enough to leave home—again, showing the central role that vulnerability plays in crimes of opportunity. The victims commonly said that they thought their mothers might have known, but were either unable or unwilling to kick the perpetrator out, leave the home with the children or report the crimes.
So that’s the easy stuff: ensuring that under-16s aren’t sitting ducks for men without morals. (I know it’s not really easy, in the sense that it takes political will and funding. What I mean is that it’s not conceptually complicated, although when it comes to supporting women to get out of relationships in which they or their children are abused, we’re really not doing it.)
But what about the paedophiles? These men’s sexual desires can’t just be corralled away from people who are sexually mature but legally still children, and redirected towards adults capable of consent and self-protection. And if a man’s sole sexual interest is in pre-pubescent children, and that unfortunate fact is unchangeable, then there’s no way round it: keeping children safe means he is required to maintain permanent sexual abstinence. That’s a big ask, and it’s more likely to happen if we understand why some people are paedophiles in the first place—and that’s back to my starting question.
Understanding and stopping paedophiles is particularly important because, even if they are a minority of child-abusers, they are likely to be prolific. Once a man motivated by sexual desires that cannot be satisfied in any other way breaks through the pain barrier of committing one of the most stigmatised, reviled actions in our society, he’s likely to be all in. Moreover, his victims will be younger than those of opportunistic child-abusers. I don’t think anyone would disagree with the idea that the rape of a ten-year-old is (even) worse than that of a 15-year-old, and (even) more important to stop.
We know that men who have committed crimes against pre-pubescent children display abnormal physiological responses to sexual stimuli. This sort of research is hard to carry out, for obvious reasons: showing, or even possessing, child pornography is a crime in many jurisdictions, even if that material is drawn rather than photographed. Ways around this include using materials seized during police investigations—as far as I know this isn’t done any more, but there’s some past research that took this approach—or using written material rather than visual. (I know there’s a huge ick factor in all of this—but we cannot afford to let that stop us from doing research that could help keep children safe.)
To sum this work up, researchers have presented various sorts of stimuli to men known to have assaulted pre-pubescent children, and to control groups (either men who have sexually assaulted older children or adults, or men not known to have sexually assaulted anyone). These stimuli may be (adult) pornography, material likely to be appealing to paedophiles, and neutral but exciting stuff (car chases and the like—the point is to distinguish between general physiological arousal and specifically sexual arousal).
The men are hooked up to a “penile plethysmograph”—a pressure gauge that can tell when they get an erection. As expected, men who have committed sex crimes involving young children become sexually aroused in response to the child-related stimuli much more often than the control groups.
Several research findings suggest that paedophilia involves a biological predisposition. Paedophiles are more likely than the average sex offender to be short or left-handed (sorry to readers who are either; the point is that both are somewhat associated with neurological problems, not that all, or even many, short or left-handed people have such problems). They are more likely to have low IQ, and some evidence from brain scans suggests they are also more likely to have abnormalities in the connective white matter.
All this suggests the possibility that at least some paedophiles are “wrongly wired” in some way. It may be that they react to some, but not all, of the cues that evolution has primed men to use when seeking a mate. These cues fall into two clusters: signs of youth and signs of maturity. The first group of cues includes things like soft, unlined skin, which indicate that a woman has not left her fertile days behind her; the second includes things like curves, which indicate she is no longer a child and has therefore entered the stage of life in which she is fertile. A man who responds to stimuli in the first group but not stimuli in the the second may see children as sexy.
Another possible “mis-wiring” starts from the observation that most people think children are beautiful. We are primed to find their large eyes, silky skin and hair, sweet voices and so on deeply appealing—but in ways that trigger protective love rather than sexual desire. A paedophile might be someone in whom child-like beauty triggers the wrong sort of response.
There is, however, other evidence that suggests that paedophilia can be learned behaviour. People who were sexually abused as children are over-represented among child-abusers. (Some perpetrators lie about this, in the hope of gaining sympathy. But studies with lie-detectors—which aren’t as accurate as people think, but are definitely known to encourage truth-telling—suggest that not all the reported difference in incidence can be explained away like this.)
Another striking finding is that men who abuse little children usually prefer boys. This is another place where great care is needed. Gay men are often slurred as paedophiles, but being gay, like being straight, is about what sort of adults you like. Most people, whatever their orientation, don’t find little children, of either sex, at all sexually appealing. Paedophilia is its own thing, and some psychoanalysts think this preference for the same sex is about perpetrators who identify with their victims—perhaps because they were abused themselves and are reliving past traumatic experiences with themselves in the position of power; perhaps because they find adults so frightening that it puts them off being adults themselves, and they are fantasising about still being children.
The takeaway from all this is that there are indeed people, almost all of them men, to whom it is as obvious and instinctive that children are “sexy” as it is to the rest of us that a beautiful adult of the right sex for our orientation is. We’re not particularly likely to be able to change that perception—we can’t do it for orientations towards adults, after all, as illustrated by the failure of “gay conversion therapy”.
The big question, which I’ll try to return to in a future issue, is what to do about this beyond making opportunistic offending harder, because obviously those men cannot ever have what they want.
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