A Review of Levine's Harmful to Minors
May 18, 2002

While everyone else is bouncing back and forth the question of �What did George Bush forget and when did he forget it,� I�m off writing a book report about sex. Story of my life."Those who can't, teach...." Ah well, the things that I do for accuracies sake.

Harmful to Minors

It has taken on gospel between the coasts of Blog-Land (and all the adjoining realms) that Judith Levine�s book Harmful to Minors is an advocacy tract, a manifesto for everyone who wants to diddle with a six-year old to come out of hiding, grab a banner, and in the best fashion of persecuted minorities throughout history, protest the horrible injustice done to them by the dominant, repressive heterosexual, white male Christian paradigm. Since Levine is a single, childless woman writer with a history of publishing articles on sex, who admits to once having a relationship with an older man when she was a teenager, it�s pointed out again and again that she is speeding the downfall of a Western Culture already caught up in a fast spin flow towards the bottom of the crapper. People like Progressive Catholic or Mark Shea and even the esteemed Tom Delay�s are the few voices of sanity, vowing to circle the wagons and defend America from a radical text that both endangers and imperils youth.

Were that that were so.

The more controversial the book the more necessary it is to actually read it. That is easily the best way to understand what the controversy is really about � reading the author�s words, understanding their argument and then trying to figure out how much of it makes or doesn�t make sense. It�s a way of not only exercising the brain but of also being intellectually honest about one�s own conclusions and points of view in reference to the subject. Of course, it�s also time consuming to do this and is far easier to just join the existing bandwagon and parrot the conventional wisdom making the rounds. Easier, but fair? Correct? Honest?

As this applies to Levine�s book, the conventional wisdom is actually quite wrong. While radical, Harmful is only so if you believe that providing honest information to kids and teens about sex and sexuality is a bad thing. If you believe that teens are incapable of making real decisions about how and when to be intimate, or that any decision other than �just saying no� until marriage is wrong, then the book will be radical. If however you feel that our current approach to the entire subject of young people and sex is misguided, incomplete and in many cases dangerous, then Levine�s book serves as a good starting point for further discussion. She points out many of the misconceptions and outright falsehoods that have developed in our culture about �kids� and sex, then advocates for a better way of approaching the entire subject -- one that is much more honest and straightforward.

Let�s Talk About Sex

Right up front, Levine states clearly that she does not believe sex is a bad thing:

Harmful to Minors says sex is not in itself harmful to minors. Rather, the real potential for harm lies in the circumstances under which some children and teens have sex, circumstances that pre-dispose them to what the public health people call �unwanted outcomes� such as unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

She is deeply concerned that, ��[c]urrent youth policy and parenting advice teeters between high anxiety child protection and higher-anger child punishment. It would appear that children are fragilely innocent until the moment they step over some line, at which point they become instantly, irredeemably wicked.�(xxvii) It is this disconnect that troubles her the most. In our American ��ambivalence about children and [in] our role�to protect the idealized child while squashing the sinner�� we wind up creating a contradictory system wherein as �� the age of consent for sex [is raised], we lower the age at which a wrongdoing child may be tried and sentenced as an adult criminal.�

She further writes that:

�I don�t mean to imply that if adults would just quit trying to suppress youthful sex, everything would be hunky-dory in American teens� bedrooms and automobile backseats�.Sex among America�s youths, like sex among its adults, is too often neither�egalitarian, nor pleasurable, nor safe. This book will argue that current psychological, legal and educational practices exacerbate rather than mitigate this depressing state of affairs��

�
Defining Kids

One of the first things she points out is that our American habit of grouping everyone under the age of 18 into a category called �kids� is at best misleading and at worst harmful

Legally designating a class of people categorically unable to consent to sexual relations is not the best way to protect children, particularly when 'children' include everyone from birth to eighteen. Criminal law, which must draw unambiguous lines, is not the proper place to adjudicate family conflicts over youngsters' sexuality. If such laws are to exist, however, they must do what Phillips [a researcher] suggests about sexual and romantic education: balance the subjective experience and the rights of young people against the responsibility and prerogative of adults to look after their best interests.

�
Six year olds are not the same as sixteen year olds and eight year olds aren�t the same as eighteen year olds. Anyone who has worked with kids and teens is well aware of this. Children are developmentally different than young adults; designating them all together under one category isn't appropriate. Indeed, it has only been relatively recently that we�ve regarded �teenagers� as children. (In fact the term �teenager� and the concept of a separate class of youth didn�t really arise until after World War II.)For much of the history of our country, if you could do a man�s (or woman�s) work, you were considered such. The American frontier was actually settled by people who today wouldn�t be allowed to drink, drive or, in some states, receive information about contraceptives.

Somewhere after the turn of the last century, under the influence of psychology, �white slavery� scares, immigration pressures and some very real and very deplorable working conditions for young people, the idea of teens as �large children� who are slaves to invading hormones, psychologically incapable of making valid decisions due to their lack of development, intellect and experience, as well as constantly under assault of a degenerative culture and clueless peers, took hold and evolved into our prevailing view today. Levine shows how research doesn�t bare out this popular view.

Dr. Daniel Offer, a psychiatrist at Northwestern University Medical School who has studied adolescent development extensively, points out that, intellectually, American 16-year-olds are as advanced as the adult population. ("In Defense of Adolescents." Journal of the American Medical Association. Volume 257, number 24 p.3408.) Their reasoning and decision making techniques are the same as those of adults. Psychologically, adolescents suffer the same rates of mental illness as the adult population. (Ibid, p. 3407) He further found that adolescents thrive with new responsibilities, share similar values with adults and actually have good relationships with those adults and others in authority. It is the situations in their lives to which they find themselves, brand new and never before encounters, that are the source of any anxieties or emotional responses they may display. Dr. Offer states, "the normal American teenager sees him or herself as a competent individual who is able to resolve the problems that come his way during the adolescent years, without too much pain, suffering, doubt, or indecision." (Offer, 1981, p.78.) He points out that our �adult fears and urges may interfere with their ability to correctly perceive what teenagers are really like.�

It�s this fear that Levine says is at the heart of our current beliefs about teens and about the policies we enact. By believing them to be children, we wall off much needed information from their preview.

Let�s Talk About Sex...

One of the chief criticisms leveled at Levine is that she is a (supposed) proponent of intergenerational sex, that she sees nothing wrong with adults and teens having sex, doesn�t believe that it is damaging and that , the rules preventing adults from having sex with teens should be abolished. That is actually not what she does in the book. She points out that teens have been having sex with those over 18 for a long time, and that both history and research points our that they do so willingly, that it isn�t always harmful, and that often they even are the ones initiating the encounters. She neither condemns or condones this sexual expression, but points out that:

�teens often seek out sex with older people and they do so for a variety of reasons: an older person makes them feel sexy and grown up, protected and special: often the sex is better than it would be with a peer who has as little skill as they do

�As a point of reference, there is a large body of research that backs up this statement. In the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth , a 22 (year1973-1995) survey �based on personal interviews conducted in the homes of a national sample of women 15-44 years of age in the civilian, non-institutionalized population of the United States�[t]he main purpose of [which] was to provide reliable national data on marriage, divorce, contraception, infertility, and the health of women and infants�� about 50 % of those surveyed between the ages of 15-19 reported that they�d had sex. One third of those surveyed between the ages of 15 and 17 had had intercourse. over two thirds of those between 18 and 19 years old had. Of those women who first had sex before the age of 16, 66% had first partners who were under 18 years of age. 21% had partners 18-19 years of age, 7 percent had partners 20-22 years of age, 2%, 23-24 years of age and 4 percent had first partners 25 years of age or older.

Kilpatrick�s Long Range Effects of Child and Adolescent Sexual Experiences (1992) returned similar results. 83 % of her 500 subjects had their first sexual experience between 15-17 years of age. 38% of the respondents reported the sexual experiences to be "pleasant" while only 25% reported them to be "unpleasant." 39% of these adolescents 15-17 years reported being the initiator. Only 4% of the respondents reported that they would have liked to have had counseling afterwards.

Historically, young adults were often married shortly after puberty, either to people their own age or those substantially older. 100 years ago few girls got out of their teens without being married. As little as 50 years ago, the median age for a female�s marriage was a few months past 18, which meant that almost half of newlyweds were in their mid-teens. In short, despite what our popular media points out in an alarming manner, teens continue to have sex as they always have -- and they are doing so again as they always have, with both their immediate peers and those older than they. What has changed in America is our view that they are victims of either �precocious sexuality� or of sexual abuse, whether they feel they are or not.

�Rather than presuming that adult-teen relationships are really a form of victimization or that they really represent unproblematic, consensual partnerships�rather than maintaining either that willingness means consent or that an age difference means an inherent inability to consent � we need to step back and probe the nuances of adult �teen relationships from the perspectives of young women who participate in them��. If we are going to educate young women to avoid potentially exploitative relationships �those strategies must speak to their lived realities and the cultural and personal values that they, their families and their communities hold regarding this issue�

�She takes a very broad, inclusive and open view of teens as sex. She does state that she finds the Dutch age of consent laws, where 16 is the age of full consent but those persons as young as 12 are also considered capable of giving consent provided there is no valid objection raised by a family member, to be a good guideline. She also finds that the general European attitude and philosophy, which Advocates For Youth characterizes as ��[a]societal openness and comfort in dealing with sexuality, including teen sexuality, and pragmatic governmental policies that create greater, easier access to sexual health information and services for all people, including teens�.leads to better sexual health outcomes...� is a much better paradigm to work from.

Sex education in those countries beings with the assumption that young people will carry on a number of sexual relationships during their teen years and initiate sex play short of intercourse long before that (which they do) and that sexual expression is a healthy and happy part of growing up. The goal of sex ed, which grows out of a generally more reld attitude toward sexuality, is to make sure that this sexual expression is healthy and happy, by teaching children and teens the values of responsibility and the techniques of safety and even pleasure.

This attitude, across the board, has resulted in lower rates of teen pregnancy, STD transmission, HIV infection, and number of partners among European youth. (The U.S. rate of teen pregnancy alone is more than nine times higher than that in the Netherlands, nearly four times higher than the rate in France, and nearly five times higher than that in Germany.) She takes great issue with the �abstinence-only� educational policy, which she says isn�t helpful and may actually be harmful to the sexual health of young people. (Research, such as that from National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, bares this out.)

Parents are willing to accept the pundits worst conjectures about their children�s sexual motives. It�s as if they cannot imagine that their kids seek sex for the same reasons they do: they like or love the person the are having it with. It gives them a sense of beauty, worthiness, happiness or power. And if feels good.

What about the Children?

Levine does raise the point that sexuality, like all our feelings, is a life long in duration. Even the youngest of children express these feelings, mostly by touching themselves (or other children) in their respective erogenous zones. In light of our �out of sight, out of mind� attitude towards young children, Levine�s argument that ignoring or squashing children�s attempts at expressing their sexuality, it is much better, and far more productive, to encourage it within the milieu of all the other values that they are already instilling in children honesty, kindness, and respect to self and other. She believes quite strongly that walling off sexuality from everything else children are experiencing doesn�t help them to both better deal with those feelings and to integrate them fully into their lives. It�s this sexuality positive attitude, I think, that causes a lot of the misplaced hue and cry from social arch-conservatives.

Our fears of pedophiles on the internet and child predators lurking around every corner are overblown and have little to do with reality. There is little evidence that child porn is made or distributed in numbers any higher than in the 1960, at the height of the last public outcry. She quotes from Paul Okami, a professor at admission�s psychology department and an expert on the subject of pedophilia that there are in fact few real pedophiles in the population. The problem with the wildly varying numbers that numerous experts give for the pedophile population, numbers that range any where from 1% to 50% depending on who you ask and what their personal philosophy is, that a �..�pedophile�, depending on the legal statute, the perception of the psychologist, or the biases of the journalist, can be anything from a college freshman who has once masturbated with a fantasy of a twelve year old in mind to an adult who has had sexual contact with an infant.� Okami believes that the number of people whose primary erotic focus is on pre-pubescent children, the �classic pedophile,� is only about 1% of the population. Worst case scenarios of children being abducted, raped and killed in the US works out to between 1:364,000 and 1:1 million. Tragic enough, but a child�s risk of dying in a car accident are twenty five to seventy five times greater.

It�s focusing on the �enemy out there� that distracts from the real threat to children � their own families. The threat of sexual abuse from a member within the family or a parental substitute is much greater than anything recorded as coming �in� from �outside,� with 217,000 incidents recorded in 1993 (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Third National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect, 1993) While this does not say that families are harmful to children, most of the harm that does come to children, occurs from within their families.

...Or Not

Levine closes out her book by saying:

Peril is inevitable in childhood, and adult�s greatest pain may be the powerlessness to prevent it� But as children move out into the world, protecting them from sex will not protect them from those dangers that have little to do with sex but may ultimately make sex dangerous�.Sex is not harmful to children. It is a vehicle to self-knowledge, love healing, creativity, adventure and intense feelings of aliveness. There are ways many of the smallest children can partake of it. Our moral obligation to the next generation is to make a world in which every child can partake safely, a world in which the needs and desires of every child�for accomplishment, connection, meaning and pleasure�can be marvelously fulfilled.

Sex is a good thing. The positive, safe and healthy expression of it should be the goal for any parents interactions with their children and teens. Rather than treating sex as an unwanted aspect of life, it should be integrated into all aspects of life. The disservice done to young people is by misleading them as to the dangers of sex, denying any conversations about it or in forcing its sole acceptable expression into the narrow view of heterosexual, monogamous, life long marriage � something which, even its firmest supporters are only able to achieve 50% of the time (ignoring the data on infidelity.)

If we are really interested in the sexual health of our young people -- and not in just scoring political points by being alarmist and grandstanding-- then it�s worthwhile to read and consider the issues Levine raises. Our approach to our young people is misguided and flawed. Teaching our children and guiding our young adults requires honesty, compassion and understanding. Fostering ignorance through misinformation and shame only leads to scandal and tragedy.

Posted by Jody at May 18, 2002 05:45 PM

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