Invasion of the hebephile hunters

Or, the story of how an archaic word
got a new lease on life

Stop a random passerby and ask what "hebephilia" means, and you’ll get a blank stare.

A few years ago, you would have gotten the same blank look from a forensic psychologist. Even from many who did risk assessments of sex offenders.

Not anymore. The obscure Greek word is gaining in popularity, and (for reasons I'll explain in a moment) may even be on the fast track to becoming a de facto psychiatric diagnosis. For that reason, it's a word worth knowing - and tracking.

Defining hebephilia is not as easy as you might think. I couldn't find it in my copy of Webster's dictionary, nor is it listed in several online dictionaries that I checked. Wikipedia (*) defines it as a variant of the word ephebophilia, meaning "sexual attraction to adolescents." Ephebia was the ancient Greek institution in which young men were trained as citizens and soldiers. Philein is the Greek "to love," as in philosophy (the love of wisdom) or philology (the study of literary texts).

Pioneering German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld is credited with coining the term around 1906-1908, as part of his efforts to catalogue the varieties of sexuality (the word transvestism is also his). A tireless campaigner for the rights of sexual minorities, Hirschfeld would roll over in his grave to see how his term is being used today - in the service of involuntarily committing people to state psychiatric hospitals.

Perhaps the most avid proponent of this creative new use is Dennis Doren, a psychologist who evaluates sex offenders for civil commitment and has authored a popular how-to manual for government experts, aptly named Evaluating Sex Offenders: A Manual for Civil Commitments and Beyond.

In his manual, Doren defines hebephilia as a "paraphilia." Another esoteric Greek word, paraphilia is a sexual deviancy characterized by sexual fantasies, urges, or activities involving nonhuman objects, suffering or humiliation of oneself or one's partner, or nonconsenting partners such as children. The paraphilias listed in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR) include exhibitionism, fetishism, frotteurism, voyeurism, sexual masochism, sexual sadism, and pedophilia. Hebephilia is not among the listed paraphilias.

Since hebephilia is excluded from the diagnostic bible, Doren trains evaluators to give hebephiliacs a diagnosis of "Paraphilia Not Otherwise Specified." This is but one of several efforts by Doren to broaden the diagnostic categories under which sex offenders can be civilly detained; in a previous post I discussed his use of the "Paraphilia NOS" diagnosis with rapists.

Hebephilia came close to extinction in 1933, when the Nazis plundered Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute of Sexual Science in Berlin and torched its massive archives in a public bonfire. Yet suddenly, 70-some years later and probably not coincidentally to the 2002 publication of Doren's manual, we are seeing a growing interest in the archaic construct.

In 2003, for example, a student researcher at the University of Montreal described "hebephiles" as an "alarming clinical reality" that was "almost completely absent from the scientific literature." In an unabashed display of self-promotion, she promised to "lift the veil of silence" on hebephilia through her research with Canadian men who had sexually offended against teens.

According to a 2007 publication by the esteemed Mayo Clinic, hebephilia is rapidly "becoming a generic term" to describe sexual interest in adolescents who are under the legal age of consent. The article defines a hebophile as someone interested in teenage girls, with ephebophile denoting attraction to post-pubescent boys. Basing a diagnosis on the legal age of consent seems to imply that a person could have a mental disorder in one jurisdiction but not in another, since the age of consent varies widely and adults may even marry teens under age 18 in many countries and U.S. states.

Hebephiles were the topic of another research study published this month in Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment. The study focused mainly on physical characteristics that purportedly distinguish pedophiles - men who are primarily attracted to prepubescent children - from normal men (who now have their very own label - teleiophiles). The study found that Canadian pedophiles are shorter on average than teleiophiles, with hebephiles somewhere in the middle of the height spectrum. This follows an earlier finding by the same research team, out of Toronto's Kurt Freund Laboratory, that pedophiles were more likely than teleiophiles to be left-handed. The researchers did not find any statistically meaningful relationship between hebephilia and handedness when using phallometry (penile erections) to measure primary erotic attraction. However, they still hypothesize that a neurological abnormality may underlie some men’s sexual attraction to teens.

The absurdity of describing erotic attraction to adolescents as a mental abnormality is that most normal heterosexual men are sexually attracted to teenage girls (who happen to be at the peak of their reproductive fertility). This fact is well established by multiple research studies over the past several decades. Such findings are certainly no surprise to the moguls of popular culture or to the advertising industry, which uses provocative images of teen girls and boys to sell everything from clothes to cars.

Given the scientifically unsupported nature of this emerging diagnosis, I suspect that clinicians will apply it arbitrarily, and especially to men who are sexually involved with male teenagers. I am already seeing this trend informally, in my reviews of forensic reports on sex offenders. Ironically, any such biased application will further turn the tables on Magnus Hirschfeld and the ancient Greeks' aesthetic appreciation for the adolescent male body.

FURTHER ARTICLES ON THIS CONTROVERSY ARE LISTED HERE. 

* Postscript: At the time that this post was written, Wikipedia did not have a page on hebephilia. Now, it does.

Painting: "The Death of Hyacinth" by Jean Broc. Hyacinth was the young lover of the God Apollo. Wikipedia public domain.

Sex offender program boasts remarkable success rate

Amidst the continuing controversy about whether treatment works for sex offenders, one prison rehabilitation program is boasting an almost 100% success rate.

That is a 24-year-old program in Missouri, at the Farmington Correctional Facility. Only 4% of sex offenders who complete the "MoSOP" (Missouri Sex Offender Program) are rearrested for a new sex offense within three years; after 10 years, the nonrecidivism rate is a whopping 94%.

Those are pretty mind-boggling statistics, considering that the rearrest rate for non-sex offenders within three years is about two-thirds. (In a 15-state study conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, car thieves had the highest rates of rearrest, at 79% within three years, followed by burglars, 3 out of 4 of whom were rearrested for another serious crime within three years of release.)

In Missouri, sex offenders who are sentenced to prison have the option of participating in MoSOP. The incentive is early release; those who decline are ineligible for parole and must serve their full prison term.

The program's approach - like most in the burgeoning sex offender industry - is cognitive-behavioral with a heavy focus on relapse prevention. Completion requires about 12 to 15 months, during which time prisoners engage in group and individual therapy, educational coursework, and intensive study that takes up most of their time.

Perhaps artificially elevating the success rate is that prisoners who fail to complete the program are not counted in the recidivism data. Only about 41% (or 521) of 1,273 prisoners finished the program between 2000 and 2004, for example; 2005 saw an additional 244 graduates. In 2006, only about half of all enrolled prisoners finished the entire two-phase program. I could not locate recidivism data for those who did not finish the treatment, although detected recidivism rates even for untreated sex offenders are fairly low, generally in the range of 14% to 17%.

A television news report on the Missouri program is available online.

ABA calls for death penalty moratorium

The American Bar Association today released findings of a three-year study on state death penalty systems and called for a nationwide moratorium on executions. Currently, more than 3,000 people are awaiting the needle, the chair, or the gallows.

In its detailed analyses of death penalty systems in eight U.S. states, the report highlights "key problems" that make the current system unfair, including racial disparities (more than 4 out of 10 death row prisoners are black, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics), inadequate defense services for indigent defendants, and irregular processes for clemency review. The report also documents serious problems with evidence collection, preservation, and analyses; state crime laboratories are systematically underfunded and look nothing like those on television's CSI.

Of relevance to forensic psychology, the ABA's investigatory committee found that many states do not ensure that lawyers who represent mentally ill and mentally retarded defendants understand the significance of their clients' mental disabilities. In addition, jury instructions do not always clearly distinguish between the use of insanity as a legal defense and the introduction of mental disability evidence to mitigate capital sentencing.

Prosecutors and death penalty supporters are calling the study biased, saying many of the attorneys on the state investigation teams are death penalty opponents.

The full report is available online through CNN.

Chart: Capital Punishment, 2005, Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice.

New articles on sex offenders

The latest issue of Sexual Offender Treatment is now available online, with some interesting articles - all of them free. The journal is an international peer-reviewed journal published by the International Association for the Treatment of Sexual Offenders. Current articles include:

Myths and Facts about Sexual Offenders: Implications for Treatment and Public Policy
by Timothy Fortney, Jill Levenson, Yolanda Brannon & Juanita N. Baker

Abstract: The purpose of this study was to determine to what extent perceptions about sexual offenders are based on empirical evidence or misconceptions…. Results revealed that both sex offenders and the public overestimated the rate by which strangers victimize children, and overestimated the number of sex offenders who were victims of sexual abuse in childhood. Both offenders and the public overestimated the number of sex crimes that come to the attention of authorities. The public more extensively than offenders overestimated the frequency of sexual recidivism rates and underestimated the efficacy of sexual offender treatment in comparison to the literature.

The Logic of Sexually Violent Predator Status in the United States of America
by Daniel F. Montaldi

Abstract: Sexually Violent Predator (SVP) laws have placed great legal weight on psychosexual evaluations of sex offenders by mental health experts. The conclusions of these evaluations are used to civilly commit hundreds of offenders throughout the United States after the completion of their criminal sentences, possibly for life. This paper examines the reasoning used by evaluators and attorneys for the state to justify the claim that someone is SVP. [The article discusses] flaws in this reasoning and show how arguments for SVP status must proceed if the case for civil commitment is to be logically coherent and consistent with constitutional values.

The Therapeutic Challenge of the Learning Impaired Sex Offender
by Ron Langevin & Suzanne Curnoe

Abstract: Learning impairment in childhood and adolescence was examined in a sample of 1915 sex offenders and 279 non-sex offender and community controls. They were compared on school dropouts, grade failures, and placement in special education classes. The sex offenders showed significantly lower education and higher incidences of dropouts than community controls. The offender groups more often had failed grades and had been in special education classes than the population at large. Neurodevelopmental factors such as birth complications and defects, motor and language developmental abnormalities, ADHD, neurological disease and injuries, mental retardation, and learning disorders, all contributed to the educational deficits, but learning disorders diagnosed in childhood contributed most. The importance of assessing learning impairment for treatment compliance and effectiveness is discussed.

Back issues of the Journal are also available online for free, including interesting articles on juvenile offenders, diagnostic accuracy, actuarial assessment, treatment efficacy, incest offenders, phallometric assessment, diagnosing sexual sadism, and public policy issues.

Prison for consensual teen sex "cruel and unusual," Georgia high court rules

In a case that garnered international attention, Georgia's Supreme Court today overturned the conviction of a young African American man serving a 10-year prison sentence for consensual oral sex with his 15-year-old girlfriend when he was 17.

The court overturned Genarlow Wilson's conviction on the grounds that it constituted cruel and unusual punishment, in violation of the U.S. Constitution. Wilson's 2005 conviction had sparked outrage. In its wake, the Georgia legislature reduced consensual sex between minors from a felony to a misdemeanor punishable by no more than one year in prison. But Genarlow remained in prison because the legislative change did not apply retroactively to him.

Among those who lobbied to free him were an ex-Georgia governor, former President Jimmy Carter, and even some of the jurors who convicted him.

Amazingly, the state high court ruling was a bare majority, with three out of four justices voting to uphold the draconian sentence. Genarlow has already served more than two years in prison.

The court's decision and press release are available online. Wikipedia has lots of additional background information on the case.

Crime rates: Disconnect between perception and reality

U.S. crime rates have leveled off at the lowest rates in recorded history, yet the public continues to think that crime is on the rise. So say the folks at Gallup, reporting on their latest poll. Check out these graphs.

First the public perception:

Now the reality (violent crime and property crime):



What's responsible for the profound disconnect between perception and reality? Over at Grits for Breakfast, they're saying the cause can be summed up in five words: "If it bleeds, it leads."

There's more to it than that, of course. Opportunistic politicians playing on fear of crime as a sure-fire way to get votes comes to mind. But the nightly newscast definitely deserves its share of the blame.