From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Fri Jul 26 2002 - 18:08:31 MDT
On 26 Jul 2002 at 16:56, Hermit wrote:
>
> [Hermit 1] ..."Pedophilia means a loving attraction towards feet" and has nothing to do with either children or sex.
>
> [Joe Dees 2] I'm sure that the 'a' was dropped somewhere in the intervening two millennia.
>
> [Hermit 3] Only in the US. Only in the last century. Probably due to ignorance. A bit like some American's belief that
buggery included fellatio and bestiality. Still, even if you argue that it does not matter
whether we are talking about
feet or children, it does not add sex into the mixture.[hr]
>
In fact, the Greeks recognized three kinds of love; filias, or brotherly love, was the least
of these, eros, or the love between a man and a woman, was considered greater, and
agape, the love between a man and a boy, was considered the highest (the xtians then
borrowed this term to refer to the love of the pious for their god). Perhaps the term
Paedagapia would have been more historically correct, but as he is a US writer, I have
no objection to his using the local spelling of the accepted term.
>
> [Hermit 1] When an author can't even define their subject correctly, I don't expect their writings to be particularly
insightful. And this was certainly the case here. In my opinion, this was not so much a
researched and reasoned
article as a case of tossing together a salad of generally held public misapprehensions,
prejudices and biases with
an unhealthy topping of whipped emotion.
>
> [Joe Dees 2] Examples, please. Unsupported ad hominems mean about as much as an appeal to authority, in
which I would be engaging if I mentioned that the author of the article, Dr. Thomas
Szasz, is a libertarian icon of
psychological criticism, best known for his work "The Myth of Mental Illness" ;~)
>
> [Hermit 3] Accurate reporting and statement of opinion of the lack of worth of an article is now "Ad Hominem"?
>
> [Hermit 3] The author, irrespective of his credentials, didn't define the subject properly, and I didn't find his writings
worthwhile. The archives of the CoV are replete with threads on this and related topics.
To save you the bother, try
this.
> Q: Who is going to argue that, magically, all children in the USA form the capability to provide informed consent
at 18 and do not possess it before then?
> A: Proponents of child protection legislation perhaps?
>
> Q: Who is going to argue against action to prevent child abuse?
> A: Nobody. Society's prejudice is too wide-spread.
>
> Q: Does this suggest that those who wish to pass bills which would probably otherwise be rejected as too intrusive,
might choose to push this demagogic button - allowing them, however invalidly, to
portray those opposing them as
being "members of Nambla" or "anti-children" or "soft on child pornography" etc.?
> A: Look at the increasingly strident public hysteria and stringent legislation passed "to protect children" since the
late 1970s.
>
> Q: Does this help children or society?
> A: http://www.tc.umn.edu/~under006/Library/Antisexuality.html[hr]
> [Hermit 1] The author(s?) of this report demonstrate exactly this bias by condemning unread (or deliberately
misreporting) the only modern peer-reviewed work on the impact on the victims of
sexual predation of children.
>
Technically, those men sexually attracted to adolescent boys are not paedophiles, but
ephebophiles. Paedophilia is technically reserved for those sexually attracted to pre-
pubescent children, whom in the overwhelming predominance of cases cannot, I
believe, give informed consent to seduction by a smarmily 'friendly' adult willing to
abuse his rellative position as a trusted authority figure (and adults are almost
automatically considered authority figures by prepubescent children, and a child's
default position is all too often to prima facie trust adults). They certainly cannot marry,
sign legal documents or purchase real estate in the US.
>
> [Joe Dees 2] And that would be....?
>
> [Hermit 3] It was (mis)reported in the article.
[I note: here Hermit is quoting the Szasz paper]: "In July 1998 Temple University
psychologist Bruce Rind and two colleagues published their research on pedophilia in
the Psychological Bulletin, a journal of the American Psychological Association. The
authors concluded that the deleterious effects on a child of sexual relations with an adult
"were neither pervasive nor typically intense." They recommended that a child™s
"willing encounter with positive reactions" be called "adult-child sex" instead of "abuse."
Not surprisingly, this conclusion created a furor, which led to a retraction and apology.
Raymond Fowler, chief executive officer of the American Psychological Association,
acknowledged that the journal™s editors should have evaluated "the article based on its
potential for misinforming the public policy process, but failed to do so."
.
> [Hermit 3] The July 1998 issue of Psychological Bulletin, a peer-reviewed publication of the APA, included an
article, "A meta-analytic examination of assumed properties of child sexual abuse using
college samples," (Bruce
Rind, Philip Tromovitch, Robert Bauserman). This article reported their hypothesis,
methodology, data collected
and results, and concluded that the harm done to the victims of sexual abuse was much
less widespread and less
significant than generally believed, and that much actual harm identified was caused by
the representatives of the
protection systems.
>
But children, as I have noted before, are unable to give informed and responsible
consent. Many of the priest-seduced (talk about a trusted authority figure for a Catholic
child!) boys-n-girls have been haunted by the experience throughout their adolescent
and adult years, and that organization is now reaping the financial, legal and public
opinion whirlwind for their pooh-poohing, nodwinkandsmile approach to such priestly
abuse. If the protection systems need reform, then let's reform them, but their ham-
handedness is no excuse for the sexual abuse they are attempting to forfend.
>
> [Hermit 3] As you can imagine, congress went ape-shit when they heard about it - and everyone backpedaled to
try to avoid being caught in the shitstream.
>
> [Hermit 3] The result is that no further research has been performed in this area, despite the fact that this might
help child-victims recover faster.
>
I'm always in favor of studying things.
>
> [Hermit 3] I read the report. It seems that Dr. Thomas Szasz did not, or chose to mischaracterize it. In any case,
I find the idea he appears to promote, that research should be "adjusted" or even
suppressed to support public
preconceptions and opinion, deeply distasteful.
>
Actually, he quoted the article's conclusions in the quote you supplied. He did not
mention that the article found great distress in protective services action, but he did
mention that the effects of the abuse did not seem to be as deleterious as people had
previously supposed. However, I would maintain that it is indeed a soul-shattering
violation for a significant percentage of abusees, as recent events have shown.
>
> [Hermit 3] It would, perhaps, not have been totally unexpected, had I known that he is a "libertarian". After all,
it seems that most libertarians only object to restrictions of their own beliefs and actions,
but still believe that others
behavior and thoughts should be regulated in order to better protect society. Actually,
that is not entirely fair to
libertarians. It seems to apply to most of society.
>
Funny; they are known for just the opposite; for instance, they are in favor of abolishing
antidrug and other victimless crime laws and most government regulations and
departments, although they can be as adamantine in their extremism as the most
vociferous communist, fascist, theist or atheist.
>
> Regards
>
> Hermit
>
> "Children of a future age,
> reading this indignant page
> know that in a former time
> Love, Sweet Love!
> was thought a crime!"
>
> William Blake
>
> PS For anyone responding, please don't try to warp these comments into a defense of, or recommendation to,
sexually assault anyone. My justified opinion that no person has any right to cause harm
to another, outside of
self-defense or the defense of others, is sufficiently well articulated in our archives for it
to be a waste of effort.
Such attempts will simply indicate either laziness or lack of comprehension and treated
as they deserve.
>
Our main difference is perhaps in the restriction of pedophilia to sexual abuse of
prepubescents (the technical meaning of the term), which I do not believe that you do;
you, like the laws, apply it to all under-eighteens, but psychology does not. Given the
technical definition of the term, would you still maintain that a prepubescent child could
give informed consent to sexual seduction by an adult?
>
> ----
> This message was posted by Hermit to the Virus 2002 board on Church of Virus BBS.
> <http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=51;action=display;threadid=25803>
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