From: kane@buast7.bu.edu (Hot Young Star)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc,ca.politics,ba.politics
Subject: Why "Child Abuse Causes Homosexuality" Really Doesn't Fly
Date: 14 Oct 92 02:13:00 GMT
Followup-To: talk.politics.misc
Organization: Astronomy Department, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA
Originator: kane@buast7.bu.edu

Clayton Cramer's recent postings entitled "The Mother of All Flame Wars,
Parts 1 Through 4" were a massive attempt on his part to scare us all into
believing that child molestation contributes to the development of
homosexuality, that homosexuals are more likely to be child molesters, and
that men who molest boys are necessarily homosexuals.

What he has done gives lots of little snippets which at first glance appear
to add up to some picture which makes a bit of sense. But closer inspection
reveals that the logic just doesn't add up. To use an analogy, it's like
building a large jungle gym out of a bunch of pipes, without any connectors
or a blueprint. Clayton has presented a lot of pipes, but hasn't managed
to put them together into any sort of reasonably climbable equipment.

Let's make use of an interesting child molestation stat. Actually it's an
estimate of the yearly number of child molestation incidents in this
country, taking into account the many incidences which go unreported.
Many sources claim 500,000 molestations occur annually in the U.S.

500,000!

Let's start off with some pessimistic assumptions:

1. All boy-molesters are either homosexuals or closet homosexuals. (One
can find a lot of sources that say otherwise---among the ones that Clayton
and I have mentioned are Abel and Harlow, Groth and Birnbaum, and Goldstein;
each says adult sexual orientation is separate from pedophilic preference)

2. Boy molestation is severely underreported. Most surveys report that
20% of molestations are with boys, 80% girls. Let's go out on a pessimistic
limb and say half of all molestations involve boys.

3. Let's assume that only 1% of the general population are homosexual men.
(Kinsey gave 4%)

4. Boy-molesters have many more victims than girl molesters. The ratio is
roughly 250 to 20.

5. Arthur Hu reports that as many as 25% of all gay men were victims of
child abuse.

Where does this lead us?

Of the approximately 500,000 molestations annualy, 250,000 involve boys.

Of the 250,000,000 people in the U.S., then 2.5 million are homosexual men.

Of the 250,000 molestations involving boys, for an average victim count of
250 per molester, that gives 1,000 boy molesters. Assuming these men are
all homosexuals (which is not in fact warranted), that means that 1,000
out of 2,500,000, or 0.4% of homosexual men are child molesters.

(1,000 per year seems reasonable---that's 20 per state on average, and if
only half are reported and half of those make headlines, that only 5 per
year per state, which is what I hear of here in Massachusetts)

Yet Hu claimed that 25% of homosexual men were victims of child abuse.

That should tell you that homosexuality isn't really part of the cycle
in which victimization begets abuse.

If it were, then you'd expect to see a lot more homosexual doing molesting,
not a mere 0.4% compared to the 25% that Hu claimed were victims in childhood.

After all, as Clayton rightly claims, the natural inclination of a male who
suffers abuse is to later abuse a victim who represents the abuser. If this
were the case, many many more homosexuals would abuse, not the (0.4%/25%)
= 1.6% of the abuse victims according to Hu's stats. If homosexuality appears
not to be a significant factor in 98.4% of cases of cyclic victim-abusers,
than one can say that child abuse does not directly cause significant amounts
of homosexuality.

Comparing with the girl molesters, out of a population of 120,000,000 nominally
heterosexual men, the 250,000 incidences involving girls, at an average
rate of 20 per molester, give 12,500 molesters of girls, or 0.1% of the
general male population.

(Abel and Harlow say only 21% of boy-molesters are gay. 21% of 0.4% is 0.08%)

(the Denver Hospital study I quoted in another article gave 1 out of
387 molesters as being gay, or 0.25%)

(Groth and Birnbaum, which I mentioned before, say that none of a sample of
175 boy-molesters were gay.)

You can see, no matter which sample we pick, heterosexual men or homosexual men,
the percentage that are child molesters is always roughly the same---0.1%.
That's 1 in a 1000, a scary number considering that a big city of 1,000,000
might have 1,000 child molesters lurking around. But it gives no indication
that homosexual are overrepresented.

Besides that given that only 1.6% of gay men who were abused as children go on
to later abuse children, homosexuality as part of a cyclic pattern does NOT 
appear to be the answer.

Later postings I shall address the issue of when sexuality develops, and
compare this age to the average age of molestation. I shall show you that
most psychologists and psychiatrists believe that sexuality become established
well BEFORE the bulk of molestation incidents occur.

Brian
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
kane@{buast7,astro}.bu.edu (Hot Young Star) Astronomy Dept, Boston University,
Boston, MA 02215. True personal salvation is achieved by absolute faith in
ones true self.
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