Latest hebephilia critiques: Point-counterpoint

I've just updated my Hebephilia and the DSM-5 Controversy resources page with two new articles in the Archives of Sexual Behavior critiquing the proposed diagnosis of pedohebephilia.

Green: Moral standards masquerading as science

In his boldly titled "Sexual Preference for 14-Year-Olds as a Mental Disorder: You Can’t Be Serious!!," prominent psychiatrist and sexologist Richard Green pulls no punches. Green, who teaches at the Imperial College of London, served on the Gender Identity Disorders subcommittee for DSM-IV. Back in the 1970s he was a forceful advocate for removing homosexuality from the manual of mental illnesses, a struggle he references in his current critique:

The parody of science masquerading as democracy made a laughing stock of psychiatry and the APA when it held a popular vote by its membership on whether homosexuality should remain a mental disorder. Decreeing in a few years time that 19-year-olds who prefer sex with 14-year-olds (5 years their junior) have a mental disorder … will not enhance psychiatry’s scientific credibility.

As he points out, the age of legal consent in several European countries falls within the range that the proposed pedohebephilia disorder would make pathological for the older participant:

If the general culture is accepting of participation by the younger party, but psychiatry pathologizes participation by the older party, then the mental health profession pronounces a moralistic standard and, if successful, becomes an agent of social control.

Green goes on to catalog "biased terms" and "logically frail arguments" in the proposal. In this, he joins a growing chorus of voices sounding the alarm about myriad problems with the proposed pedohebephilia diagnosis.

O'Donohue: Let's go even further

Coming at it from the opposite angle of most critics is William O'Donohue, a psychology professor at the University of Nevada at Reno and co-editor of the second edition of the widely consulted text Sexual Deviance.

O'Donohue argues for keeping it simple: "any sexual attraction to children … is a pathological, abnormal condition." His proposed diagnosis reads as follows: "The person is sexually attracted to children or adolescents under the age of 16" as evidenced by (1) self report, (2) laboratory findings, and/or (3) past behavior. Whether the person has acted on his or her attractions would not matter. The number of victims would not matter. And internal distress would not be required.

O'Donohue expresses a lack of concern over the inevitable false positive errors that such a broad net would ensnare. He argues that we should be more concerned about false negative errors -- pedophiles who escape diagnosis when the criteria are too narrow, for example when more than one known victim is required. And he applauds the move to expand pedophilia to include hebephilia, or attraction to pubescent minors.

Prosecution-retained evaluators in U.S. civil commitment cases will be salivating at the prospects for this one. But consider the source. O'Donohue is the psychologist who has argued for subjecting gay and lesbian parents to special scrutiny in child custody evaluations. (Respected child custody experts Jonathan Gould, David Martindale, and Melisse Eidman wrote an outstanding counterpoint, summarizing the empirical research as indicating that "sexual orientation is not a pertinent factor when considering the best psychological interests of children." In the interest of full disclosure, I share that view, as I wrote in an article published in the same journal a few years earlier.)

And, despite his support for diagnostic expansion, even O'Donohue concedes that the psychometric properties of the proposed diagnosis remain unknown. In other words, neither its reliability nor its validity have been empirically established. A wee problem, that.

A list of published articles on the hebephilia debate, with links to the publisher's web pages, is HERE. For the newest additions, look for the "NEW" icon towards the bottom of the page.