Abstract
The diagnostic category of “hebephilia” (the erotic preference for pubescent children) was suggested in 2008 for inclusion in the DSM-5. Immediately, a violent debate took place about whether this condition should be considered a disease or not, and the proposal to include hebephilia in the DSM-5 was rejected in 2012. In this paper I argue that the debate about the diagnostic validity of hebephilia was profoundly misguided. I first describe how the diagnosis of hebephilia plays a role in “sexually violent predator” (SVP) laws, which can preventively deprive “dangerous” people of their liberty if they are deemed mentally ill (for instance by suffering from hebephilia). I show that the legal requirement of mental illness for the application of SVP laws is supposed to serve two functions: to identify the most dangerous people, and to define them out of humanity by transforming them into quasi animals, thus safeguarding the constitutionality of SVP laws in a liberal context. I then argue that it fails to accomplish both tasks, and that the debate about hebephilia should have targeted this unsound legal requirement itself. Instead, because it was centered around the issue of diagnostic validity, the hebephilia debate rested on an implicit acceptance of the requirement of mental illness for the application of SVP laws.
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Notes
- 1.
See in particular several entries in his blog, www.psychologytoday.com/blog/dsm5-in-distress, as well as his recent book against the DSM-5 (Frances 2013).
- 2.
As far as I know, Blanchard never discusses Jerome Wakefield’s influential “harmful dysfunction” analysis of mental disorder. Yet it would be an obvious response to his point. According to Wakefield, two criteria must be met for a condition to qualify as a disease: it must be at the same time evolutionary dysfunctional and harmful. With these criteria, homosexuality is not a disease because while it might be evolutionary dysfunctional (if we assume that the evolutionary function of sex is reproduction), it is not harmful. Hebephilia would also not be a disease, but for the opposite reason: while it is harmful (by virtue of being a crime), it is not dysfunctional (because pubescent children are able to reproduce). See Wakefield (1992) and (2011).
- 3.
- 4.
To be fair to Blanchard, it is important to note that he has never “testified in any criminal case in any country, [has] never earned one penny from private practice [, and has] the same discomfort with American SVP civil commitment laws that many others have expressed” (Ray Blanchard, personal communication, August 9, 2013). There is therefore no direct causal link between SVP laws and Blanchard’s research. It is however obvious that his research would have no raison d’être without a forensic context. It is this context that explains why he studies hebephilia or pedophilia rather than the sexual preference for red-hair people, for instance. As a historical fact, all the main sexual perversions have a forensic origin, and hebephilia is no different in that respect.
- 5.
See Mill (1998, 190): “security no human being can possibly do without; on it we depend for all our immunity from evil, and for the whole value of all and every good, beyond the passing moment, since nothing but the gratification of the instant could be of any worth to us, if we could be deprived of everything the next instant by whoever was momentarily stronger than ourselves.” See also, for instance, the following passage from the 1905 case of Jacobson v. Massachusetts, quoted in Kansas v. Hendricks, 356–7: “[T]he liberty secured by the Constitution of the United States to every person within its jurisdiction does not import an absolute right in each person to be, at all times and in all circumstances, wholly free from restraint. There are manifold restraints to which every person is necessarily subject for the common good. On any other basis organized society could not exist with safety to its members.”
- 6.
On this topic, see the historically important discussion in the Annales médico-psychologiques 2 (1863), especially Dally’s contribution to the discussion, 260–295. For a more modern discussion of this issue, see Eagleman (2012, 151–192).
- 7.
As Richard Green says in an article against the inclusion of hebephilia in the DSM-5, “Thwarted suicide bombers who continue to pose a public threat can be caged without terrorism entering the DSM”; Green (2010, 586).
- 8.
My tiger analogy is not randomly chosen: in the early nineteenth century André Matthey suggested that people who have an extreme propensity to violence without delirium — what Pinel had called “mania without delirium” — should be diagnosed with “tigridomanie” (Matthey 1816, 117).
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Singy, P. (2015). Danger and Difference: The Stakes of Hebephilia. In: Demazeux, S., Singy, P. (eds) The DSM-5 in Perspective. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9765-8_7
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