NEW YORK – The underlying assumption that has led to the increasing legitimization of same-sex marriage is now fueling a growing effort in academic circles to mainstream pedophilia. Once considered taboo, psychologists are beginning to walk down the same path LGBT activists established more than 50 years ago, insisting that pedophilia is an inborn “sexual orientation,” not a learned sexual behavior. If people are born with a sexual attraction to minors, the argument goes, their “orientation” should be accepted as normative and not stigmatized. Cantor says his research concludes pedophiles share distinct characteristics of “brain wiring.” He contends some 1 to 5 percent of all men are predisposed to be primarily sexually attracted to children. However, many experts now, she wrote, “see it as a biologically rooted condition that does not change – like a sexual orientation – thanks largely to a decade of research by Dr. James Cantor at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.” Last fall, the American Psychological Association caused an uproar when the latest edition of its vaunted Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders called pedophilia a “sexual orientation.” After inquiries from news organizations, the APA issued a “correction” stating “sexual orientation” is not a term “used in the diagnostic criteria for pedophilic disorder.” Krafft-Ebing’s defining book, “Psychopathia Sexualis,” first published in 1886, defined various sexual practices, including homosexuality, bisexuality and pedophilia, as pathologies determined by a mental state that ultimately traced to a brain disorder. Cantor rejects Krafft-Ebing’s moral judgment and defines various “paraphilia” behaviors as sexual inclinations caused by observable differences in brain structures and functioning, which he calls “brain wiring.” Cantor’s research team at the Kurt Freund Phallometric Lab conducts experiments with convicted sex offenders. The men are shown nude images of children and adults of various sexes, while a device measures blood flow to their penises, the Times report said. The method, called phallometry, was invented by Freund in the 1950s. Cantor said it accurately measures sexual interests in 90 percent of men. Cantor has found pedophiles are shorter, on average, and are three times more likely to be left-handed or ambidextrous. Their IQs are about 10 to 15 points lower, and they are more prone to childhood head injuries, a characteristic Cantor attributes to an inborn clumsiness. Cantor finds that pedophiles are overwhelmingly men, about one-third of whom prefer boys, about one-third prefer girls and one-third are attracted to both. In an interview with the Canadian show “The Agenda” on the channel TVO, Cantor said pedophilia is not a psychological disorder of something “that went wrong in their parenting,” but a biological disorder such that “there’s something in the brain of a pedophile that is different from what’s in the brain of a non-pedophile.” In the interview, Cantor declared: “No one chooses to be attracted to adults, no one chooses to be attracted to children, affirming “you either are wired that way or you are not.” He also notes that people attracted to minors aren’t all necessarily molesters. Cantor argued: “We will be able to make much more contact with these people (pedophiles) when we indicate to them that we know they didn’t choose this, we know they had no opportunity to select what they are going to be attracted to, the best we can do in therapy is to manage their sexual interests.” He asserted: “Nobody has ever developed a therapy that’s capable of changing somebody’s sexual interests.”
|