Sexuality,Adolescence and the Criminal Law

SUMMARY

The provisions in the German Criminal Code protecting sexual self-determinationeven after several penal law reforms-are still criminologically not yet coherently structured and carry some contradictions. Recent research implies that in the section of the German Criminal Code establishing sexual offences three very divergent forms of deviant behavior are lumped together in an undifferentiated way: violent offences, infractions of moral norms and commercialization of sexuality (the latter in most cases in the form of organised crime). Some offences lack empirical justification in the sense of a concept of protection, for example due to the fact that damage caused to victims is not proven. In addition the establishment of age limits turns out as a difficult task, i.e., when consensual (love) relations of adolescents and of young adults are concerned. International efforts to approximate (sexual) offences legislation carry the risk that reasoned, criminologically analysed and empirically justified regulations are sacrificed to populistic diffused mainstream-thinking.     

Science or Propaganda? An Examination of Rind,Tromovitch and Bauserman (1998)

SUMMARY

An article, “A Meta-analytic” Examination of Assumed Properties of Child Sexual Abuse Using College Samples, published in the July 1998 edition of the Psychological Bulletin resulted in an unprecedented amount of media attention and became the first scientific article to be formally denounced by the United States House of Representatives. The study's authors analyzed the findings of 59 earlier studies on child sexual abuse (CSA) and concluded that mental health researchers have greatly overstated CSA's harmful potential. They recommended that a willing encounter with positive reactions would no longer be considered to be sexual abuse; instead, it would simply be labeled adult-child sex. The study's conclusions and recommendations spawned a debate in both the popular and scholarly press. A number of commentators suggested that the study is pedophile propaganda masquerading as science. Others claimed that the authors are victims of a moralistic witch-hunt and that scientific freedom is being threatened. After a careful examination of the evidence, it is concluded that Rind et al. can best be described as an advocacy article that inappropriately uses science in an attempt to legitimize its findings.     

Sexual Consent

SUMMARY

What role can the criminal law play in the battle against child sexual abuse? Should sexual relations of, and with, persons under a certain age be criminalized regardless of the circumstances, even if they are consensual (“age of consent”, “minimum age”)? Where should such a minimum age-limit be fixed? Should there be a special, higher age-limit for particular conditions (e.g., “seduction”, “corruption”)? Should sexual contacts with minors within a relationship of authority be criminalized generally or just if authority is abused? Should criminal proceedings be instituted ex officio or upon complaint only? Should authorities be provided with a power of discretion or should they be obliged to prosecute and sentence in each case? In answering these important questions, it is highly beneficial to have a look across the borders to the solutions other countries have reached in this area.

This analysis will provide an overview on the criminal law governing the sexual behavior of, and with, children and adolescents in all European jurisdictions and in selected jurisdictions outside of Europe. It will show which categories of offenses exist and from which age onward young people can effectively consent to various kinds of sexual behavior and relations in the different countries. It turns out that all states in Europe and all of the studied jurisdictions overseas do have minimum age limits for sexual relations, do punish sexual relations with persons under a certain age. Nowhere is this age set lower than 12 years. In Europe in one-half of the jurisdictions, consensual sexual relations with 14-year-old adolescents are legal; in two-thirds with 15-year-olds; in a majority, this is also the case when the older partner has started the initiative (and also when the initiative contains an offer of remuneration). In nearly all jurisdictions, such relations are legal from the age of 16 onwards. Nearly all European jurisdictions set the same age limit in the criminal law for depicting sexual activity as for the sexual activity itself. Most states apply a higher age limit for contacts in relationships of authority. If the authority is not misused the age limit in most jurisdictions is set between 14 and 16; if it is misused between 16 and 18. Most states make no difference between heterosexual and homosexual relations.     

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs: First Theorist of Erotic Age Orientation

The nomination of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825–1895) as the first theorist of homosexuality may be placed in the oblique light of his eligibility for the nomination as the first theorist of erotic age orientation. In Ulrichs’s pamphlets, “man-manly” homosexuality emerged as a particular age orientation, with a subsequent typological breakdown that, importantly, blended gender orientation and age orientation. Into the early 20th century, erotic age orientation remained bound up with the classification and emancipation of what here was demarcated as Urningsliebe. Ulrichs’s pioneering and shifting comments on age eventually fed into his legal model of consenting adults in private. They also provide a starting point for the historical understanding of the trope of “grooming pedophile” as it, arguably, crossfaded with that of the “seducing homosexual” after the latter’s depsychiatricization across the Western world.     

University Students’ Perceptions of Child Sexual Offenders: Impact of Classroom Instruction

Research with the public suggests that knowledge about sexual offenders, especially child sexual offenders, is limited and often inaccurate. In general, the public tends to believe that adults who commit sex crimes against children are pedophiles or monstrous strangers who cannot be rehabilitated. However, there is some evidence to suggest that these perceptions can be changed through curricular intervention. The current study was designed to determine whether a course on sex crimes against children could influence college students’ knowledge and attitudes toward child sexual offenders. In a pretest–post-test design, students enrolled in the sex crimes course endorsed fewer stereotypes had more positive attitudes toward treatment and offender rehabilitation, along with reduced support for punitive sentencing compared with students enrolled in a general psychology class. Implications for improving public attitudes and suggestions for informing public policies are offered.     

Judicial Responses to the Protective Parent's Complaint of Child Sexual Abuse

No abstract available for this article.     

Treatment of Pedophilia with Leuprolide Acetate

Abstract

To date, the literature on the treatment of individuals who have committed sexual offenses has focused primarily on psychotherapeutic interventions and the use of antiandrogens. Recently case reports and small series supporting the efficacy of other psychiatric medication, such as serotonin reuptake inhibitors, have been published. Only a few publications have looked at the efficacy of leuprolide acetate, an LH-RH antagonist, in treatment of sex offenders. Leuprolide acetate has advantages in terms of less side effects and greater safety during administration when compared to other antiandrogens. In this paper we report on the use of leuprolide acetate in an individual who meets criteria for pedophilia and has multiple other comorbid psychiatric diagnoses. The case report illustrates that leuprolide acetate can be effective in decreasing pedophilic fantasies, urges and behaviors. In addition, individuals who receive effective individualized pharmacotherapeutic treatment for compulsive sexual urges and comorbid psychiatric conditions also respond better to psychotherapeutic interventions.     

Egalitarian: From Homophile to Helicophile in Post–World War II America

The presidency of gender in the Anglo-American taxonomy of sexualities historically has been haunted by the irruption of “other” parameters of medicalization, censure, and caesura, not in the least absolute and relative measures of age. Where today’s clinical psychologists feel the need to age-specify adult homosexuality in such Hirschfeldian terms as androphilia, however, the felt need is indeed still essentially clinical. That cosmopolitan expressions such as homosexual, LGB, or queer rarely require such specifications relies on a protracted and today, arguably, complete disarticulation of sex/gender and age/maturity as parameters of sexual orientation, accreditation, and mobilization. Notably disconnected discursive frames gave voice to this Anglophone crystallization of “the normal homosexual” (circa 1950–1980): criminological, psychiatric, psychophysiological, and psychodynamic typologies of “sexual deviation” (variably tending to correlate, align, or subsume same-sex and age-disparate intimacies); territorializing apologias of gay, but also of “Greek,” “pederast,” and “man-boy,” socialities; anthropological-historical exotification of “age-stratified homosexualities”; and mostly European, proto-queer critiques of all “bourgeois” sexual classification.     

The Political Use and Abuse of the “Pedophile”

ABSTRACT

The cognitive/affective construct designated by the term “pedophile” is delineated on the basis of how he is presented in the popular media. His salient characteristics are listed and then examined in the light of scientific and historical data. The “pedophile” is discovered to be a “social construct that floats in the thin air of fantasy.” Since the truth-value of the construct “pedophile” approaches zero, we are confronted with the question of why he continues to be such a central and emotionally fraught aspect of American culture. The answer to this question is found in his political usefulness. Specifically, the religious right uses him to further its agenda of sexual repression, and the political right uses him to dismantle the machinery of a free society.     

Politics versus Science

Abstract

The authors respond to Robert L. Spitzer's and Paul Jay Fink's discussion of their paper, “DSM-IV-TR and the Paraphilias: An Argument for Removal.” They note that Spitzer and Fink do not dispute their analysis of the problems with the DSM-IV-TR criteria for paraphilias nor do they suggest any solutions to the problems they identified. The authors go on to state the political and media reaction to the unauthorized distribution when their earlier paper was presented at the May 2003 meeting of the American Psychiatric Association (APA). They note that conservative organizations flagrantly misrepresented their statements and intents, the symposium where the paper was presented, and the APA itself. Specifically, it was alleged that the authors were defending pedophilia or at minimum, advocated the decriminalization of child sexual abuse. However, these points were specifically discussed and refuted clearly in the earlier paper. The result of this political conservative misrepresentation was that the focus of the debate shifted; the substance of the original paper, that is, the real flaws in the Paraphilia section, was ignored. The authors suggest that perhaps the main reason for keeping the Paraphilia category in the DSM is public opinion rather than science. This is at odds with the APA claim that the DSM is a dispassionate, scientific document with an empirical basis. The authors feel that all those who are concerned about the scientific basis of psychiatry should be watching these events.