Academic Freedom and the Nature of Sex

This blog is my current take on numerous proposed bills in the United States Congress that will have a direct impact on scholars’ ability to further inquiry into human sexuality, as well as the impact these bills will have on children.

It’s a scary time out there folks. States are literally pushing to ban all forms of sexual speech. They say it’s a “war on porn,” but when you actually dive into the bills and what they purport to regulate, you quickly realize that it’s not sexual speech that’s getting silenced, but speech about sex too. It’s one thing to want to ensure that children, especially young children, are not exposed to explicit sexual material. As a mom to a young child, I fully agree with this. My child will be too young for a long time yet, so I don’t want them exposed to material that could be harmful to their development. Yet I am deeply troubled by the inclusion of material targeted toward the LGBTQIA+ community in these bills, since it would effectively prohibit my child (or me, or anyone else for that matter) from obtaining legitimate information about human sexuality and human sexual function.

Let’s talk about Florida for a moment. This is the state that was once the dream retirement place for entire generations. Now, it is turning into a dystopian nightmare state for anyone who dares to speak about controversial issues, such as human sexuality, diversity in the workplace, racism, or (against) white supremacy. Some of the recent bills proposed or passed include a 6 week abortion ban, permit-less concealed carry for firearms, and the Governor is planning to sign bills into law that prohibit transgender use of bathrooms, eliminate pronoun use to identify staff and students in schools, as well as ending diversity and inclusion initiatives at public universities in Florida. If I may be sarcastic for a moment, why are we spending time on bathroom bills when we could actually be investing that time and money in evidence-based programs that protect children? The answer is simple: because these bills have nothing to do with children. They are smokescreen to distract us from the real agenda: eviscerating our civil and human rights, particularly the right to privacy.

There are even more bad bills coming that will restrict our ability to communicate. Florida was just the beginning. These bills include the Earn It Act, the Kids Online Safety Act, the Restrict Act, plus a plethora of age-verification bills offered or passed on the state level. To summarize, the purpose of these bills is to silence any speech about sex. Yes, the bills are promoted as measures to address child sexual abuse, but there is no evidence that they will do that (and plenty of evidence to suggest they’ll do the opposite – check out Bad Internet Bills for more information). If we cannot talk about the subject of child sexual abuse in its entirety, then we will fail in our endeavor to prevent it. These bills will make it easier to hurt kids, not harder.

This push to silence sexuality makes it impossible to talk about anything related to sex. Here’s why it matters for you: your kids need access to this information whether you want them to or not. Your kids are human beings and human beings are biologically wired to have sex (to procreate and just for fun!). Granted, not all sex is procreative, but your kids will be curious and will want to know about it. Don’t want sexual education taught in schools because you want to be in control of the information your child receives about human sexuality? That’s acceptable. But please realize, this means you are now on the hook as the parent to provide this information to your child. If you don’t, guess where they’ll look for it? That’s right. The internet!

Do you know what happens to children who have received no comprehensive sexual education in a meaningful and appropriate way? They get pregnant, early. They contract sexually transmitted infections (STIs) at rates far higher than those kids who do receive sex education. They are more likely to be involved in abusive and harmful relationships and experience sexual violence. They are more likely to start out life on their own in poverty and stay in that poverty. These consequences are significantly more pronounced in marginalized groups. Personally, I want my son to start out life in the best possible way – that’s what all parents should want for their children. But if you are keeping them ignorant about something as basic as human sexuality, what hope do we have for them to be successful?

These bills – in a thinly veiled attempt to “protect children” from the effects of porn – will do no such thing. Children access pornography for a number of reasons and if we don’t stop to ask why, we’ll be making the internet both less safe and less informative. I don’t want children watching sexually explicit material, especially not young children, because we know it is not healthy for them to view it. We should be arguing for a safer internet for our children. But that internet should still be open, accessible, with anonymity allowed. Age verification bills mean that you need to provide (in many cases) government-issued identification, such as a drivers’ license, passport, birth certificate, etc. Think about it – do you want to be handing over your drivers’ license to adult websites and data brokers so they can track what you watch? Remember, there are absolutely NO LAWS in the books in the U.S. to protect your digital data, which means that once it’s out there in the great black beyond of the internet, anyone can do with it as they please. This outcome is quite realistic since none of the bills on the table or that have been passed into law provide protections for your data. Protecting your private data is literally not even an afterthought. Think about this before supporting these bills – because even if you don’t mind having your data tracked, someone you know might not be.

That someone else brings me to this point – another (intended) consequence of these bills is to lay the groundwork for restricting access not only to sexually explicit material (i.e. pornography), but to anything [those in power deem] obscene or inappropriate. This could expand to materials about sexual orientation, gender identity (since these are the hot button topics du jour) – to materials about religion and spirituality, history, climate science, and medical and other health information, to name but a few. If you’re thinking this is starting to sound a lot like Gilead, you’re not wrong. These are first steps toward making an authoritarian dictatorship. Everyone deserves to have legitimate, appropriate, and accurate information about their bodies and environments. These bills will set a dangerous precedent if enacted as is. Please think about the consequences before blindly supporting something. It may not be you who is directly impacted, but it could be someone you love.

Beyond the impact these bills will have on our private lives, the impact will also be felt by scholars like me who study these very topics. I study human sexuality, specifically the paraphilias, and if access to this information is cut off because someone deemed it “obscene,” then I am unable to do my job. I am not too afraid that this will happen because these bills are targeted toward restricting the internet for those under 18, but it is those additional consequences that have me concerned. If we pass legislation restricting information to under-18s, it is entirely possible that entire fields of inquiry (such as mine) could be preemptively shut down out of fear of backlash. If scholars like me are unable to ask the difficult questions about the nature of human sexuality without fear of reprisals, then how will we make progress in protecting children from its harms? The short answer here is, we won’t.

I’ve been working on these topics for the last several weeks as part of my work with Prostasia Foundation. I do not have a perfect solution, but knowledge and experience tell me that rather than restricting the internet and what people may do on it, education and training may be the better route. Teaching children about their bodies and how to engage in healthy sexual behaviors – thereby giving them a framework for understanding any explicit material they come across – may just reduce their need to access pornography. Education can help them explain their wants and desires in a positive way and also empowers them to seek out support when something problematic occurs. This education also goes for adults. Teach parents how to use the internet safely, about device safety features, how to work with their children to supervise online activity, about how to have conversations about sex, as they will inevitably happen.

The internet does not have to be a scary place. We can and do have control over what we watch and what websites we visit. Let’s use some of that personal responsibility we all have to make the internet safer and more accepting for us all.

Exciting New Things!

My apologies for not updating this blog in a hot minute. Things have happened over here that pushed this blog to the back burner for a short while, but thankfully I have a bit of time now to catch up. So what has been going on in my life that has me so busy? Well, let me tell you!

On May 25th, I became the Executive Director of Prostasia Foundation. This is an organization I have worked closely with since its inception in 2018. Its mission of eradicating child sexual abuse through human-rights focused and evidence-based means is near and dear to my heart, which made it easy for me to transition into this position. I am really excited to support Prostasia’s mission and expand our reach into communities that have been traditionally excluded.

My history with Prostasia is simple: I started in 2018 and have worked my way up the chain as my involvement grew. I was approached by Prostasia’s founding Executive Director – Jeremy Malcolm – to become an Advisory Council member in April of that year. I thought, “why not?”, and haven’t looked back since. I have been able to combine my passions for conducting research on effective means to prevent child sexual abuse with community outreach and education in my roles first as Advisory Council member, then as Board of Directors member, and now as Executive Director. It is imperative that we get our message out there and bring voices together to end the sexual abuse of children.

Part of my interest in pursuing this opportunity was to be part of the solution to a challenge my field faces – the growing gap between what the research says and what the community knows. Research is a core part of my professional and personal identity; the scientific method is how I understand the world around me. I work in academia to pursue my own research projects and to assuage my constant curiosity about human nature. Yet I’ve noticed over the last few years that there is this growing chasm between what researchers and scientists know and what – if any – of that knowledge makes its way to clinical use and, better yet, to the public. This challenge is not unique to my field, nor is it a recent thing. Translational science, as a field, specializes in taking lab- and field-based research and applying it to real-world cases. Science communication and science journalism are fields dedicated to communicating research findings to the public. I am not alone in wanting to improve the effectiveness by which my field is able to effect change. I figured it was time to put my money where my mouth is (so the saying goes) and actually get my hands dirty. Welcome to my world of being an Executive Director!

I am completely new in this role. To say I am inexperienced is an understatement. However, I am excited to learn, to make mistakes, and to grow in my capacity. I believe strongly in Prostasia’s mission of protecting children by upholding the rights and freedoms of all, which makes the learning curve much more bearable. For those readers who are not yet familiar with Prostasia Foundation, check them out today! Subscribe to our newsletter, become a member, share our mission with those around you. Our organization is only as strong as its supporters, so join us today!

The last couple months have seen me reading everything I can find about non-profit management and leadership, fundraising, and board recruitment and retention (and that’s just for my day-to-day knowledge for running the organization!), in addition to material on digital rights, technology trust and safety regulations/development, generative AI, parenting and child protection, among many, many other things. Most of my work lately is either reading or writing about what I’ve read. Thankfully reading is one of my favorite pastimes, so keeping my nose in a book has been easy! I’m currently working my way through a book on raising children in a digital age, which I will write about for Prostasia in the coming weeks. I’m also working on pieces about sexual fantasy and behavior, parenting and digital safety, and reviews of recent publications in sex research. I can’t wait to share all of this with you!

Do you have any thoughts as I continue on my non-profit journey? I’d love to hear from you!

Minor Attraction and Pedophilia: Why Should You Know About Them?

To successfully prevent childhood sexual abuse, we must understand the *why*.

My apologies for not posting in a while. I welcomed my first child into this world and the first few months have been wonderful chaos. New mom life is nothing trivial. Respect to all the parents who have gone before me! I’ve been working on this post for a while, but my writing was put on hiatus when the babe arrived. So now after what feels like an eternity, I’m back to writing. Here’s my post on minor attraction and why it’s important for you to know about it.

In the words of close colleague and collaborator, attraction is NOT action. Remember this, as it’s important for the rest of our discussion here.

The prevention of child sexual abuse is one of the most important goals in society. I think we all agree on that. However, where we, as a society, tend to disagree is in *how* we most effectively achieve this. You can remember to the last post where I asked you to imagine in your mind’s eye what child sexual abuse prevention looked like and the ideas you developed. Incarceration, facilitation of reporting for affected children, programs to teach caregivers the signs of sexual abuse in children. The thing I wanted to highlight in the previous post was how if we only rely on these types of programs to prevent abuse, we will never achieve our goal. Abuse will continue because we are not attempting to stop it before it happens – only after it has begun. If we truly want to achieve prevention (specifically primary prevention), we must make society a place people want to be. Society must be worth living in and must be willing to accept all individuals, regardless of personality or trait. As put by a dear colleague Dr. James Cantor (whose career I can only hope to emulate), desperate people do desperate things in desperate times. In other words, if society is not a place where people feel welcome to exist without fear of consequence merely for *existing*, then we – as society – have failed. In this post I plan to discuss what pedophilia and minor attraction are and how we must fundamentally shift our assumptions about individuals with these preferences as one arm in our goal to prevent childhood sexual abuse.

What is pedophilia? I’m certain this is not a question many people ask themselves daily. Most are content to either not know or to assume what they are told from the media is accurate. I cannot blame anyone for taking either of these views, since this isn’t really a topic most want to discuss in-depth, much less for fun over the dinner table. But as someone who is a scholar in this field, I can tell you what pedophilia is not. It is not child sexual abuse. It is not behavior. It’s not the monstrous stories you see on TV or read in the news. It is a form of sexual orientation (though this is still debated in the scientific community, see here and here for examples). Pedophilia refers to how and what someone feels, not how they act or what they do. Orientation in this case refers to the physical developmental stage of the preferred sexual partner (age is sometimes used as a proxy variable for developmental stage, but this is incredibly unreliable as the age of puberty differs from person to person, culture to culture, and between the sexes). Developmental stage broadly refers to point during puberty, such as prepubertal (before puberty starts), pubertal (during puberty), and post-pubertal (adult). The fact that pedophilia is assumed by many to be synonymous with child sexual abuse is a result of incomplete journalism, historical studies that were unclear in their use of terms, and in our own (psychology/psychiatry) attempts to de-pathologize it (i.e. not make something that isn’t normally problematic a problem). I’ll focus a bit on that last point next.

For a long time, psychology and psychiatry have struggled with how to word diagnoses in the DSM such that clinicians are able to diagnose patients properly and adequately with a true disorder (true positive), while not diagnosing those without (true negative). But what happens when the diagnosis is based almost exclusively on behavior and not on thoughts or feelings? For many years it made legal sense to include pedophilia in the DSM to justify keeping child molesters in prison for longer. They must have had a mental illness which made them act out by sexually abusing children, right? The assumption behind this was that the behavior was disordered, therefore the person engaging in it must have some sort of mental illness. This gets us into a debate about what qualifies as a “mental illness,” and while it is an interesting and necessary discussion to have, it is perhaps best saved for another post. What we’ve come to realize in recent years is that not every person who experiences pedophilia *acts* on it (and the converse as well, many of those who engage in child sexual abuse behaviors do not have pedophilia). Mental illness cannot – and should not – be diagnosed from behavior alone. This leads us to confront that previous assumption about disordered behavior: if a person has these feelings but does not act on them, does that mean they have a mental illness? What this all means is that as experts and scholars in the field, we must realize that the answer to “what is pedophilia” is more complicated than previously thought. This is not a bad thing at all! This is what is supposed to happen in science and it means that the scientific approach is working. But what does this mean for you, the reader? Why do I feel that it’s necessary for you to know this? It is quite simple: the more you know, the more well prepared you’ll be to take care of your family and the higher the likelihood we’ll hopefully start advocating for more evidence-based prevention initiatives.

The DSM-5 takes the term pedophilia and – for the first time – attempts to separate the feelings from the behavior to refine our ability to diagnose truly problematic feelings and/or behaviors. Remember until now that in the DSM, pedophilia could only be diagnosed if there was behavior associated with it, meaning the individual in question must have engaged in child sexual abuse behaviors. Now, the in the DSM-5, a person can be assessed by a mental health professional as having pedophilia (without a formal diagnosis) so long as they are neither distressed or somehow impaired by their feelings, nor have they engaged in any abusive behaviors. Pedophilia, in this case, refers simply to the feeling portion of the orientation. New in the DSM-5 is a diagnosis for pedophilic disorder, separate from pedophilia in that pedophilic disorder must have accompanying distress or impairment (feelings) OR behavior. So now, in theory, anyone who experiences distress or engages in sexually abusive behaviors with prepubertal children can be diagnosed with pedophilic disorder. The remaining unresolved challenge with the addition of a pedophilic disorder diagnosis in the DSM is the pesky or clause. The addition of this clause makes it such that a person without the feelings could be diagnosed with pedophilic disorder based on behavior alone. See the problem here?

Without getting too much into detail (seriously, I could go on about this for days and well, I don’t think I’m lucky enough to keep your attention for *that* long!), science still has a long way to go to fully understand pedophilia. There are many open questions that remain about its origins, development, phenomenology (i.e. personal experience), relationship to behavior, and associations with other disorders that scientists like myself will be busy for years to come. However, I hope now you understand that pedophilia does not automatically mean abuse. Before I let you go, there is another term I’d like to explain because it’s one you may see more frequently in both scientific and popular publications.

Perhaps you’ve seen the term “minor attraction” popping up in the news or on TV? Ever wondered what it means? Well I can tell you it’s not our (scientists, researchers, treatment providers) attempt to legitimize or somehow normalize pedophilia or child sexual abuse. Let me be perfectly clear about that last point – none of us are here to say that child sexual abuse is ok. It is not. It harms both the children who are victimized as well as the victimizer. Minor attraction is simply another term to describe pedophilia and hebephilia (a form of sexual preference toward pubertal children; debate still ongoing as to whether it is also a form of sexual orientation) without the negative stigma attached to the term pedophilia. Minor attraction as a term is not scientific and broadly refers to a sexual preference for individuals who are under the legal age to consent. I use this term in some of my academic writing on the subject when the topic is specific to stigma, treatment/support access, or prevention initiatives. When I am discussing sexual orientation development, behavioral correlates, or treatment outcomes I use the term pedophilia as that is a scientific term with a broadly understood definition among scholars in my field.

My experience outside the lab suggests that these terms are frequently misunderstood and misused. Scientists like myself require specific words with specific meanings to accurately understand the world around us (seriously, it helps when scientists can generally agree on something to help explain the world). In many news articles and media stories, pedophilia and minor attraction are used interchangeably with child sexual abuse, thereby allowing readers to make the connection between preference and behavior. In reality preference and behavior are not as connected as stories and TV shows may present. Minor attraction and child sexual abuse can exist exclusively to each other. This post only scratches the surface of what is an incredibly complicated topic. Preventing child sexual abuse is one of the most important things we can do as adults, but we won’t succeed unless we work together to achieve our goal. I am not here to tell you how to feel about pedophilia – it is an emotional topic and each person has the right to feel about it as they choose. I only hope that knowing a little more about the topic might allow us to have a fruitful discussion as to how to keep kids safe and prevent victimization. Our language matters; my next post will focus on how parenthood has changed my views on this subject. That post should be good, check it out!

Greetings and Welcome!

Hello there!
I’m Dr. T and welcome to my blog. I plan to use this space to write generally about the topic of sexual abuse prevention, with specific posts dedicated to relevant – and often misconstrued – subtopics. This is one of my passion topics and I hope that with some time and patience, maybe we can all get to know one another. But first things first, it might help to know who I am and why I am writing about sexual abuse prevention.

If you google my name, you’ll find plenty of links to different articles I’ve written, my current employment, and probably this very page (if not my website itself). I am the director of the Sexual Neuroendocrinology Lab in Upstate NY, a scholar in the field of sexual abuse prevention and while other are perhaps more frequently giving public interviews, my passion lies in outreach and science communication. You can read about my academic history on my main website page and about the work my lab does, if you are so inclined to know more about me. I have published scholarly work on the topic of pedophilia and the prevention of sexual abuse, the reaction to which has pushed me to start blogging. My primary research question is “Where does pedophilia come from?” – that is, what mechanisms (specifically neurobiological, or brain-based ones) give rise to a person developing this form of sexual preference? As a follow-up to this question, I research how we use this information to improve sexual abuse prevention services. My approach has always been this: how can we prevent something if we don’t know what we’re preventing? Nothing is more important that our promise as a society to keep children safe, and I believe the best way to keep them safe is to make sure no one offends in the first place.

Here’s the thing – I’m here to write about sexual abuse prevention from the perspective of someone who does it and to promote a reasonable, objective, and informed response to it. I’ll take a few different approaches to this goal, for example writing about scientific studies in a more open language (because let’s face it, scientific jargon just complicates things), describing studies out of my lab and others that are of interest to the public, and (perhaps less often) writing opinion pieces on current events in the world of sexual abuse prevention.

I will caution readers that I don’t sugar coat the science and I am writing about topics that are controversial, emotionally charged, and incredibly nuanced in their detail. If you don’t want to read this, that’s fine – no one is forcing you to stay. I encourage you to stay long enough to read a bit and maybe understanding something today that you didn’t yesterday. Serious comments are welcome, but anything hateful, violent, harmful, or otherwise intending to inflict damage will be deleted. Let’s keep the conversation polite, shall we?