Studies on Adult Sexual Contact with Children

Abstract

The previous chapter concentrated on the work of one author, Alfred Kinsey, and his view of ‘children’s sexuality’, a view based not on children’s experiences of their sexuality but on adults’ experiences of their sexual interactions with children, using the one criterion which Kinsey found important and to which everything else became subservient: the orgasm. Kinsey wished to argue that children have a sexuality which is not harmed by being used for adult gratification, and thus he saw adults ‘manipulating’ children to orgasm as synonymous with children’s own authentic and autonomous sexuality. His views on childhood sexuality have continued to shape understandings of paedophilia and child sexual abuse up to the present day. In particular, Kinsey articulated a view of sex in which the only ‘abnormal’ sex is no sex and therefore, by extension, paedophilia does not exist as a pathology or even as a separate concept. Children — like animals, adults or wet dreams — are simply another ‘sexual outlet’ which may be used for orgasm. Kinsey also argued persuasively that ‘sex offenders’ do not exist and so should not be criminalized. Neither of his two encyclopaedic books on human sexuality deals with the reality of rape and nowhere is the concept of non-consensual sex addressed. According to Kinsey, therefore, it would be absurd to prosecute anyone for such an offence as ‘paedophilia’ or ‘child sexual abuse’, and indeed, his work has been used to argue for leniency and, more fundamentally, to revise legislation to make it less vigorous in prosecuting sexual offences.