Paedophilias?
Book review by: Jeffrey Weeks
THE CHILD-LOVERS: A Study of Paedophiles in Society - Glenn D Wilson and David N Cox (Peter Owen, £9.95)
This short, and unfortunately expensive book (£9.95 for 132 pages), is based on a survey of the members of the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) in 1978. Members were circulated with two questionnaires: the Paedophile Questionnaire, which looked at behaviour, attitudes and beliefs, and the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire, which tested for "temperamental characteristics". Seventy-seven members replied, and this book is a collation and analysis of their response, together with an attempted theoretical extrapolation. The first aspect is more valuable than the second.
The authors suggest that this is the first survey of paedophiles which is not based on a clinical or prison population. They exaggerate. But they do, produce some fascinating data about PIE membership at least, if not the paedophile population at large. They find that PIE members are largely professional in employment (in this similar to most sexual self help groups), with only fourteen percent in blue collar jobs. A large proportion of the professionals worked in jobs which brought them into contact with children. Seventy-one percent of the sample were interested in boys, twelve percent in girls, and seventeen percent with girls and boys. The peak of sexual interest was with children aged twelve to fourteen, with some people interested in young people over sixteen. Quite why the latter were willing to accept the stigma of paedophilia when their preference was for near young adults even by our age of consent laws is an interesting question.
When asked why they were attracted to young people the most common responses referred to smooth skin, good looks, innocence, openness, curiosity, spontaneity, vitality; that is, qualities which suggest a romanticized view of non-adulthood. What comes overwhelming sexual passion for young people; characteristic terms used for relations with children are "affectionate", "caring", "loving", "gentle", "intimate", "platonic", "fatherly". Only eighteen out of seventy-seven mentioned genital sexuality, and that largely oral and masturbatory. Rather there is an idealisation of a lost state of grace.
Within that, there is a marked diversity of statements of desire and need, suggesting there is no particular organizing sexual urge. A similar diversity is re!ea1ed in ther personality test. Here Wilson and Cox find a striking normality (page 57). The sample is not distinctly pathological as a group, the authors conclude, nor clinically abnormal. PIE members tend to be shyer, but also less obsessional, less concerned with looks, less humorous - and less fond of their mothers. It's doubtful whether it's fair, on this basis, to conclude as Wilson and Cox do that "our paedophiles are to some extent sad and isolated individuals". The extended interviews also included in this book also suggest a variety of styles and moods, and some are even witty. A married informant, 'Rex', noted that "paedophiles need a good travel agent rather than a psychiatrist" - reminding us that PIE was pretty embattled in the late 1970s.
The book becomes more dubious when all this interesting data is incorporated into a theoretical framework. The authors allegiance is to a diluted form of socio-biology. They argue early on in this book that paedophilia might be simply an exaggeration of inherent male characteristics of attraction to youth: ... it seems to be a typically male trait to take pleasure from initiating, seducing or "corrupting" young, virginal sex partners.
This essentialist argument is later fitted into a full blown evolutionist framework. They argue that paedophilia is one of several alternative modes of adaptation to the problem of lack of success in inter-male competition for access to, females. Because of their possibly inherited submissiveness, paedophiles are less successful than other males, and paedophilia is a substitute. This theory has the effect of allowing the authors to argue for the relative normality of adult-child sexuality, as simply an exaggeration of normal trends; but at the expense of having to find those unifying characteristics that unite paedophiles which their data actually suggest are not there. At this point the authors are forced to hint at possibly hereditary and evolutionary factors because they have absolutely no evidence for it. The evidence of the book proposes a different view: that the label of paedophilia artificially lumps together a series of different sexual practices and needs, all of which are stimatized because of the general taboo against all non-familial adult child relations. The example of the man who desired boys over sixteen indicates that self definition as a paedophile, owes more to the needs of political identification and solidarity rather than any pre given biological or psychological similarities. Just as there are heterosexualities and homosexualities, so there are paedophilias.
source: Book review 'Paedophilias?' by Jeffrey Weeks; Gay News [London], Number 263; 29 April 1983