More "Harmful" controversies...
April 22, 2002
Debbie Nathan at Alternet writes about the controversy around "Harmful to Minors" as well as other, similar work around young people and sexuality.
John Leo at US News and World Report also takes on the same subject. He goes a different direction, basically saying that the book is an apologia for pedophile whose author thinks it's a" good time to endorse some priest-boy sex." He further knocks the Rind study as "the new bible of pedophiles and their groups." He also plays the "child" and "boy" card, using those terms in a misleading and ultimately alarmist sense.
I'm no pedophile (not like you'd really know if I was lying...) God knows I've dealt with enough of them over the years, dealings that really cut your faith into what adults can and will do to the weakest among us. But as I've pointed out time and time again, there is an order of magnitude difference between a 17 year old and a 7 year old. Intellectually, developmentally and morally they aren't the same thing. This continuing to group them all together into the same category as "children," a grouping that is relatively recent in American history (70 years or so) and has no basis in reality, doesn't help to keep children or young adults safe.
The problem with books like Harmful and studies like Rind aren't that they legitimize child predators (they don't), but that they lend empirical credence that our "out of sight, out of mind" views of adolescent sexuality is a terribly misguided at best.
Posted by Jody at April 22, 2002 04:04 PM