Political Pressure on Scientists

Science about sexuality, especially about pedophilia, was always under strong political pressure. This pressure has become completely open with the condemnation of the RBT study by the American Congress. But some other facts are also interesting:

• Legislators order audit of state university's pornography conference

Congress Resolution 107

The fact that there is strong political pressure on science not to publish results which are in favour of pedophiles has become obvious. In the US, this pressure is today open, official policy, written down in the Congress Resolution 107 (1999) which has passed the House by a vote of 355 to 0.

As a result of this pressure, the American Psychological Association has accepted self-censorship based on "polical implications" - as stated in the resolution: "the American Psychological Association should be congratulated for ... resolving to evaluate the scientific articles it publishes in light of their potential social, legal, and political implications".

The right wing groups which have initiated this resolution want even more: FRC's Chief Spokesperson Janet Parshall said "It's a good first step, but now the APA needs to root out the pro-pedophilic academicians who are trying to normalize child abuse."

How much influence has this pressure?

It is hard to judge about the seriousness of this pressure and how much it distorts the results. We have to take into account that many many scientists themself are biased too. Certainly the pressure is strong enough to force the scientists to distance themself from a study which they initially have defended as good science.

Nonetheless, it seems not justified to reject all results obtained by this type of research. Most scientists, like most other human beings, are not heros, but nonetheless do not like to lie and falsify without necessity. So, the usual research policy of scientists and publication policy of scientific journals under political pressure seems not to be open falsification, but avoidance of conflict:

• No publication of studies which consider volitional relations if they show no harm. As the result, there is almost no published research which considers this group separately. If there are thousends of studies about sexual abuse, but almost none about volitional relations, there are several possible explanations: such studies show no harm and not published because of political pressure, or because negative results are less often published, or they are not even made because most scientists believe there will be no harm. (The explanation that there are no such volitional relations is clearly rejected by the known and consistent results about the reaction of the children.)
• Comments in abstracts and conclusions which show bias against pedophiles. In these cases, it is hard to decide if the scientist shows his own bias or prefers to hide his true opinion to avoid problems.
• Nonetheless, if you ignore the comments and look at the numbers given in these studies, the picture is a completely different one. Evidence is that the criticized study by Rind et al. 1998 is a meta-analysis: it collects data from other papers which have not caused any political scandal.
• Another political influence on science is the political distribution of money. As a result, there is much more research about sexual abuse in comparison with physical abuse, and phychological and verbal abuse is mostly ignored. On the other hand, in the few papers which study these other types of abuse, the numbers given indicate that these types of abuse are even more important.
• Our own review of the research about the impact of sexual abuse gives a similar impression. The numbers seem to be consistent and reasonable, but the political dangerous results are not presented or commented.
• This impression is also supported by the final APA statement. The difference to an older version of this statement shows where scientists have been forced to make a compromise and where not: They have agreed to distance themself from the paper which they have previously tried to defend as wrongly understood. Nonetheless, they have avoided to lie about harm from volitional relations by a combination of "serious negative effects" of "childhood sexual abuse" and the moral position that "children can not consent to sexual activity". Another interesting point is the statement that the findings of the study are "being misreported by some in the media" - without specification of these media. All this seems typical for people under political pressure to lie who tried to avoid lying as much as possible.

We conclude that the results of scientific research show a lot of anti-pedophile bias do to political pressure. This does not mean that numbers themself will be falsified, but the comments and conclusions should be taken with caution. To obtain the real picture we cannot rely on moralistic statements of the scientists working in this domain.