Ch 3 - NOTES AND REFERENCES

1.       See especially many of the writings of John Gagnon and William Simon, referred to in the Bibliography.

2.       D.J. West, Homosexuality Re-examined, Duckworth, London, 1977. 

3.       J.W. Mohr and R.E. Turner, Sexual Deviations, Part IV: Paedophilia', Applied Therapeutics, Vol. 9, No. 4,1967, pp.362-5. 

4.       T.C.N. Gibbens and J. Prince, Child Victims of Sex Offences, Institute for the Study of Delinquency, London, 1963.

5.       Gebhard, op. cit., p 819.

6.       F. Bernard, 'An enquiry among a group of paedophiles', Journal of Sex Research, Vol. 11, No.3, T975, pp. 242-55.

7.       See Kinsey, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female, op. cit., p. 110.

8.       See Gebhard, op. cit.

9.       West, op. cit., p. 214.

10.       K. Howells, 'Some meanings of children for paedophiles', paper presented at the International Conference on Love and Attraction, Swansea, 1977.

11.       The term paedophilia erotica' is almost invariably shortened in medical usage to plain 'paedophilia'. The absence of the 'erotica' part leaves a word which might be thought to suggest a non-sexual fondness for children. The word has in fact been used in this sense, though rarely. Rosemary Gordon (in Kraemer et al., The Forbidden Love, Sheldon Press, London, 1976) speaks of 'positive paedophilia' : feelings evidenced by the tenderness and gentleness many adult human and grown animals of other species exhibit towards the young, unaccompanied by sexual approaches (though not necessarily without some degree of sexual attraction).'Paederasty', an older but not ancient word (first recorded literary usage in seventeenth century), is unequivocally sexual, by virtue of incorporating the Greek 'erastes', meaning (sexual) lover. It has been defined, pejoratively, as 'sodomy with a boy' (Concise Oxford Dictionary), and thus denotes a specific act, rather than a predilection or orientation. The word is less in use now than of old, particularly in the last century, when it was virtually a synonym of 'sodomy', as the 'boy' in question could be a youth or even a young man.The first part of both words comes from 'pais', meaning 'boy', but only in the case of 'paedophilia' has this first part been generalised to include children of either sex. Also, a 'paedophile', unlike a 'paederast', may be a woman.It is usually taken that only an adult can be either a 'paedophile' or a 'paederast'. Neither term applies to children who engage in sexual acts together, although the sexual attraction of adolescents to children has been designated as 'paedophilia' and Lauretta Bender (see Chapter 2) has spoken of a boy who at the age of ten was 'taught paederasty' by a thirteen-year-old. There is no word in the English language to describe a child who is sexually attracted to adults. As children are capable of a wide range of erotic response, such a word would in fact be rather meaningless.Sometimes, the attraction of adults to adolescents, as opposed to (pre-pubertal) children, is referred to by the terms 'hebophilia' or 'ephebophilia'.

12.       Sixth edition, 1976.

13.       S. Lorand and H. I. Schneer, 'Sexual deviations', in A. M. Freedman et al. (eds), Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, Williams & Wilkins, Baltimone 1975.

14.       D.W. Swanson, 'Who violates children sexually?' Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality, February 1971, pp.184-97. Some go further and suggest that the use of the word 'paedophile' could be confined to those for whom their love impulse towards children is of great importance. There is a school of thought in Holland which holds this position. Loes Rouweler-Wutz considered that 'Paedophilia is a human condition in which the feelings of attraction towards children, including sexual feelings, are so important to the individual involved that they determine his whole life' (from a thesis, 'Paedophiles in contact or conflict with society', Nijmegen, 1976, quoted in a paper, 'The legal status of the paedophile', by Edward Brongersma, presented to the Psychiatric-Juridical Society, Amsterdam, 1977).

15.       A. Moll, op. cit., p.224.

16.       C.H. McCaghy, 'Child molesters: a study of their careers as deviants', in M.B. Clinard and R. Quinney (eds.), Criminal Behaviour Systems, Holt Rinehart & Winston, New York, 1967.

17.       I am often asked what proportion of the adu]t population is paedophilic and whether more are attracted to boys than to girls, or vice versa.The answer to either question involves definitional problems and the practical difficulty of obtaining accurate data. Is a woman a paedophile if she gets a 'buzz out of parenthood? What about those mothers who report genital arousal while breast-feeding? Or fathers who think they are conventionally heterosexual, but who find to their alarm (as sometimes happens) that cuddling a young son can bring on an erection? Do people have to be exclusively attracted to children, or self-defined as paedophi]ic, for the label to be appropriate? And what do we mean by a child'? Do we take puberty as the upper edge of childhood, or is the word 'paedophilia' to embrace the love of pubescent youngsters as well? Finally, in view of all these ambiguities, does the labelling process itself give a false impression of separable categories of people, when in fact the differences between them may be less important than the similarities?The problem of obtaining reliable data is even more difficult. Adults can be asked about their sexual preferences by means of a confidential questionnaire. Or inferences can be drawn about the sexual tastes of those whose behaviour leads them to court appearances for paedophilic offences. Or we ran be guided by the professional experience of the psychiatrists to whom paedophiles go for 'treatment'. None of these methods, or any others I have seen discussed, is at all satisfactory, for a variety of reasons. In particular, it cannot be over-emphasised that criminal statistics are misleading: a high percentage of those convicted of sexual offences involving children are not 'classic' paedophiles, i.e. they prefer an adult partner. In addition, only a small proportion of paedophiles have relationships which surface in the law courts. Of the practising paedophiles interviewed by Rossman, only 1 per cent had ever been arrested (Parker Rossman, Sexual Experience Between Men and Boys, p. 13).Dr Edward Brongersma has written, 'In a recently published French study, 129 men (average age 34 years) said they had had sexual contact with a total of 11,007 boys (an average of 85 different boys per man). The laws which make such contact criminal are thus in practice ineffective. This enormously high dark number shows that the law has degenerated to pure arbitrariness against a few unlucky individuals. According to the French study, only one in three thousand punishable acts comes to the knowledge of the police' (E. Brongersma, The legal status of the paedophile', paper presented to the Psychiatric-Juridical Society, Amsterdam, 1977).Reports from adults on sexual contacts made in their own childhood may give a reasonable guide to the extent of paedophilic activity, although they do not (because of the possibility of multiple contacts by any adult) give much idea as to the total number of paedophiles. In response to an inquiry conducted among students at Nijmegen Catholic University in Holland, 13 per cent of the boys and 18 per cent of the girls reported that, as children, they had had at least one sexual contact with an adult (reported in 'The unknown pardophile' by Edward Brongeisma). Kinsey had data from 4,441 women, of whom 24 per cent reported that they had been approached while they were pre-adolescert by adult males who appeared to be making sexual advances, or who had made sexual contacts with them. Half of these cases (.52 per cent) were of exhibitionism by the adult, and less than a quarter (22 percent) resulted in specifically genital contact with the child. At the University of California, 30 per cent of the male and 35 percent of the female students reported having had, as children, sexual relations with adults (J.Landis, 'Experience of 500 children with adult sexual deviation').Parker Rossman (op. Cit., p. 12) estimated that there are at least a million American men who since age 21 have been involved in one or more sex acts with young teen-age boys' and he added 'There are at least another half million males over age 21 in the United States who value sex play with boys and believe it should not be against the law, and who will on one or more occasions in the future be involved with teen-age boys in illegal sex acts.' He does not, however, state how these figures have been derived.The criminal statistics for England and Wales do not make any distinction between adult and child victims' for the offence of indecent assault, but the recent Home Office Research Unit study by R. Walmsley and K. White (Sexual Offences, Consent and Sentencing, Home Office Research Study No.54, HMSO, London, 1979, pp.30-32) found that in the year under study (1973) 88 per cent of male partners/ victims and about 70 per cent of female partners/victims in cases of indecent assault were under sixteen. In this year, 802 persons (8 of them female) were convicted of indecent assault on a male, and 3,006 (6 of them female) were convicted of indecent assault on a female.Also in 1973 (ibid., pp. 26-9), 640 males were convicted of unlawful sexual intercourse with a girl aged 13, 14 or 15, and 121 males were convicted of unlawlul sexual intercourse with a girl aged under thirteen. 135 males were convicted of buggery with a boy under sixteen.

18.       Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, Cmnd 247, HMSO, 1957.

19.       W. Simon and J.H. Gagnon, On psychosexual development', in D. Goslin (ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research in Socialization, Rand McNally, Chicago, 1969. Anyone still in doubt should consult the following works listed in the Bibliography: Landis; Tolsma; West; the Speijer Report; Rainer et al.; Money and Tucker.

20.       L. Bender and A. Blau, op. cit.

21.       L. Bender and A.L. Grugett, A follow-up report on children who had atypical sexual experience', American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, Vol.22, 1952, pp.825-37.

22.       L. Burton,Vulnerable Children, op. cit.

23.       L. Burton, The assaulted child', New Society, 20 May, 1965, pp. 17-19.

24.       See especially M. Ingram, A study of 92 cases of sexual contact between adult and child', British Journal of Sexual Medicine, Vol 6, No.44,January 1979, p, 22f(Part 1), and Vol 6, No.45, February 1979, p. 24f (Part 2).

25.       Presumably this Comment is intended to refer only to a minority who resent authority – such resentment would appear to be incompatible with the tendency to sidle up to' the teacher, noted above. 

26.       Results in any case need to be interpreted with caution. A Californian study reported in Mohr et al., op. cit., reported more disturbance among participant victims – but already 'disturbed' (possibly neglected) children may be more prone to seek out a relationship. 

27.       Michael Ingram, Fl LTHY: Reaction to paedophilic acts', Libertarian Education, No.21, 1977, pp.4-5.

28.       I think Ingram's point is not so much that the doctor's, 'buggery' was awful as an act, but that in the circumstances it was necessarily carried out formally, with cold, clinical indifference to the boy's feelings. While anal intercourse can itself be experienced as pleasant, within a loving relationship, a doctor's examination is scarcely likely to be so.

29.       Reported in a front-page lead story, News of the World, 4 September, 1977.

30.       Letter from Dr A.P. McEldowney, The Times, 16 February, 1978.

31.       E. Brongersma, The legal status of the paedophile', paper presented to the Psychiatric Juridical Society, Amsterdam, 1977.

32.       Robin Lloyd, Playland: A Study of Boy Prostitution, Blond & Briggs, London, 1977 (originally published as For Money or Love, Vanguard Press, New York, 1976).

33.       At the Old Bailey, in 1979, a defendant, Roger Moody, was acquitted of a charge of attempted buggery on a ten-year-old boy, on the directions of the judge, after it emerged that improper police questioning of the boy had yielded an unsound statement by the youngster. A further charge of indecent assault on the same boy was thrown out by the jury after only a fifteen-minute retirement. Both charges related to one alleged incident when the boy was sleeping on an adjacent mattress to the man during a holiday.The most important single feature of the proceedings was the testimony of the young 'victim' in court that he had not made a complaint against the man, but merely accepted the allegations as a possibility, when put to him by the police eighteen months after the 'offence', and then without a parent being present, as required by the proper procedure for questioning children of that age. In other words – so the jury must have accepted – the police had got him to state that a crime with a maximum sentence of life imprisonment had been attempted, and that one carrying a maximum of ten years' prison had actually taken place, even though he eventually accepted in court that whatever he thought had touched him might have been a hand, and it might have been accidental, and it was as he was just waking up anyway. . .Interestingly, Roger Moody had freely admitted to being a paedophile and that he had a great deal of affection for the boy. The fact that, in the full knowledge of this, both judge and jury were unhesitatingly in favour of acquittal, amounts to a massive indictment of police handling of the case. (Case reported in Peace News, 6 April, 1979.)