Pedophile activism: Encyclopedia II - Pedophile activism - Impacts of scientific papers on pedophilia advocacy

Pedophile activism - Impacts of scientific papers on pedophilia advocacy

Pedophile activists often attempt to refute scientific research that finds all sexual contact between adults and children to be harmful. {for example: [1] [2] [3] [4]). The movement often uses scientific papers in its rhetoric, disputing some claims of psychological harm from child sexual abuse and using other papers to argue for changes in policy or public opinion. The researchers Fagan, Wise, Schmidt and Berlin, in their 2002 paper on pedophilia, wrote "our knowledge base about pedophilia have significant limitations." The paper also concluded that most child-sex abuse cases involve adults not motivated by sexual attraction to the child (pedophilia per se), and who are therefore not pedophiles in the medical sense. ^[5] Individual reinterpretations of these papers are often used to refute other research or make claims for changes in social norms.

It is important to note that scientific papers in general do themselves make claims to change law or social norms, as science is ideally about evidence more than rhetoric. However, the public often percieves papers cited by pedophile groups as "pro-pedophilia" papers, regardless of the author's attention to objectivity. Prominent psychologist Richard Green has proposed declassifying pedophilia as a mental illness, along with other paraphilias. One paper published in a scientific journal that was publicly percieved as supporting pedophilia, Rind et.al (1998), has been acted against by the U.S. Congress.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Impacts of scientific papers on pedophilia advocacy", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki