The boy reads in Newsweek that he is worse than a brutal war criminal, with a mind "beyond decent imagination."  He reads the reporter's sympathetic description of a priest who publicly states his desire to gun him down.  He must be a monster.  He seems to have two choices: to live up to society's expectations, or to kill himself.  He knows that even (or maybe especially) police and child care workers would celebrate if he did the latter.

One can argue that such attitudes are only directed toward those who abuse children, not all pedophiles.  But this is no more reassuring than telling gay youth that slurs against gays are only directed toward the irresponsible ones.  We all know that those who hold such attitudes about pedophiles (which seem to be almost everyone, obviously including the Newsweek reporters) hold them for all pedophiles.

This is the kind of climate that we have had in the United States for 20 years.  Accurate information is extremely difficult to obtain even for researchers and practitioners because of the severe taboo in this area.  Most information is buried in obscure journals or out-of-print books.  Those who attempt to present accurate information, even researchers, are dismissed as sick individuals trying to "justify pedophilia."  Responsible pedophiles of course cannot speak up themselves.  However, there are knowledgeable researchers and practitioners who specialize in this field.  The Newsweek reporters consulted only one or two of them, and only briefly.  They preferred to rely on the most gruesome stories recounted by those who have knowledge solely about sex offenders.

This kind of journalism does severe damage to society, children, and youth, and therefore has serious ethical and moral implications.  I believe that the authors have acted irresponsibly and unethically by writing such a report.

Ironically, Newsweek's own contributing editor Robert J. Samuelson addresses this issue in his new book Untruth: Why the Conventional Wisdom Is (Almost Always) Wrong.  He writes that "the media mislead Americans about what's wrong in their country."  They do this by reinforcing conventional wisdom: beliefs which don't have to be correct, just widely held and respectable.  He writes that this conventional wisdom is usually "an artful and selective arranging of facts and perceptions that creates a plausible-though misleading-rendering of reality. But it endures because it tells a story that, at one level or another, is appealing. The conventional wisdom draws its power from this ability to fulfill some psychological or political need. Our behavior then reinforces our beliefs. We see what we want to see. We hear what we want to hear. We search for authorities to repeat and strengthen our beliefs and prejudices....By its nature, the conventional wisdom resists assault by words or argument. People do not like to be disabused of familiar, self-serving, and satisfying ideas. There's a tendency to suppress doubts, dismiss inconvenient inconsistencies or deny contradictory evidence."

Child sex abuse is a real problem.  But problems and their causes are often oversimplified.  Samuelson originally went into reporting because "it was an excuse to ask questions usually off limits to ordinary citizens. Always, the quest was 'the truth,' even if the ultimate truth-often complex, ambiguous, and disputed-might be hard or impossible to locate."  A failure to search for the truth "leads to conventional wisdom that abounds with simplicities and stupidities, while inspiring 'solutions' that sometimes do more harm than good."  We can hope and pray that reporters, and the public, will some day ask those important questions about pedophilia-that they will rise above their "psychological or political need" to believe in monsters, and desire to know the facts about pedophilia.

Information for this article came from the following sources:

• Sexuality and Culture Vol. 4, No. 2 (Spring 2000) special issue on Consequences of Child Sexual Abuse
  
• Jay Feierman (ed.), Pedophilia: Biosocial Dimensions
  
• Philip Jenkins, Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America
  
• Ritch Savin-Williams, And then I Became Gay
  
• Jan Schuijer and Benjamin Rosse, "The Trade in Child Pornography"  (See also other works found at the Institute for Psychological Therapies
  
• Glenn Wilson & David Cox, The Child Lovers: A Study of Paedophiles in Society
  
• Untruth: Why the Conventional Wisdom Is (Almost Always) Wrong-Excerpt at http://www.msnbc.com/news/544621.asp
  

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