Paper's massive error of judgment over paedophilia

[Jan Klimkowski]

From Henley's Guardian article:

a major if still controversial 1998-2000 meta-study suggests as J Michael Bailey of Northwestern University, Chicago, says that such relationships, entered into voluntarily, are "nearly uncorrelated with undesirable outcomes".

The link about Rind et al's meta-anlysis leads here.

The essence of the meta-analysis by Rind et al is as follows:

The authors stated their goal was to determine whether Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) caused pervasive, significant psychological harm for both males and females, controversially concluding that the harm caused by child sexual abuse was not necessarily intense or pervasive,[3] that the prevailing construct of CSA was not scientifically valid, as it failed empirical verification, and that the psychological damage caused by the abusive encounters depends on other factors such as the degree of coercion or force involved.[1] The authors concluded that even though CSA may not result in lifelong, significant harm to all victims, this does not mean it is not morally wrong and indicated that their findings did not imply current moral and legal prohibitions against CSA should be changed.

There are huge problems with this meta-analysis, ranging from the definitions used through the methodology adopted and statistical errors and onto the sample which consisted of college students (ie a select sample) and the use in the meta-analysis of "consensual peer experiences, sexual experiences that occurred during adulthood, and homosexual approaches during adolescence".

Rind et al claim that "[r]eviewers who are convinced that CSA is a major cause of adult psychopathology may fall prey to confirmation bias by noting and describing study findings indicating harmful effects but ignoring or paying less attention to findings indicating nonnegative outcomes". They then end up in the ridiculous position of "defend(ing) their deliberate choice of non-legal and non-clinical samples, accordingly avoiding individuals who received psychological treatment or were engaged in legal proceedings as a way of correcting this bias through the use of a sample of college students".

In other words, their claims that CSA does not generally cause harm is based on samples which exclude individuals who have been sufficiently harmed by CSA to claim psychiatric or legal help.

Finally, there's this:

In the years before the paper was written, both Rind and Bauserman had published articles in Paidika: The Journal of Paedophilia, a journal which was dedicated to "[demonstrating] that pedophilia has been, and remains, a legitimate and productive part of the totality of human experience".[38] In addition, Dallam and Salter stated that Rind and Bauserman were keynote speakers at a pedophile advocacy conference occurring in the Netherlands.[38] Another article described Bauserman and Tromovitch's involvement as "[presenting] their meta-analytic findings to a group of clinicians in the Netherlands [and] Robert Bauserman (1989), had published an article in Paidika, a Dutch journal that had previously featured manuscripts tolerant of pedophilia".[

It's the False Memory Syndrome, an organisation created by abusers to cover up their abuse, all over again.