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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   24870 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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The new House Speaker, Mike Johnson, is an Evangelical Christian that has positions and stances on homosexuality that I do not share (I confess, I remain a Millennial lib that has no problem with gay people doing gay things). Nonetheless, this CNN video where they discuss his positions on homosexuality and conversion therapy just seems so bizarre to me. In it, they refer to the idea of someone going from gay to straight as "debunked", quote Johnson saying, "there's freedom to change if you want to", and "homosexual behavior is something you do, not who you are".

Despite my own inclination to completely accept gay people qua gay people, I find nothing objectionable about Johnson's statements and see them as a much more accurate model of reality than what the CNN crew is expressing. I have zero doubt that sexual preferences and predilections can be substantially altered through a combination of conditioning, cognitive therapy, and repetition. I'm agnostic on whether this could allow someone who has a natural inclination towards homosexuality (or heterosexuality) to groom attraction for the sex that they didn't initially prefer, but it's not obvious to me, and I don't think there's good reason to say that it's deboonked as though this is just a common stylized fact. Likewise, even if it proves impossible to change one's underlying preference, it certainly remains true that one can elect to follow a different pattern of behavior than their natural tendency. I might have a natural tendency to hook up with a flirtatious woman at the bar while I'm on a work trip, but Mrs. O'Dim wouldn't appreciate this and I value her so much more than some stupid hookup. Were I a religious man, I might be inclined to view my religious obligations through the same sort of lens.

But really, the thing that keeps hitting me with dissonance isn't even the above points, which I can at least countenance reasonable counterarguments to, but the incongruity with the belief that gender itself is a mere social construct that is fully malleable to an individual's stated preference. A man attracted to other men cannot become a straight man, but he can become a straight woman. Do the people articulating this view not notice that this is at least a difficult pair of propositions to adhere to? Do they see no conflict? Do they understand the conflict, but believe that it's a question that's been solved by The Science, so better to just trust The Science and move on? Cynically, I think it's mostly that expressing the opposite view will get you bullied and fired.

predilections can be substantially altered through a combination of conditioning, cognitive therapy, and repetition

And if this isn't true then we should seriously consider making pedophilic urges result in irreversible life imprisonment (but I bet a popular alternative would be execution).

I dislike the idea of thought crimes, even if they are heinous thoughts.

Agreed.

But if predilections are indeed not mutable by conditioning or therapy, then at the very least all convicted pedophiles must never be released from prison.

Under a nation of laws, this not exactly how it works. In practice, my understanding of the legal system in the United States is that pedophiles convicted of a serious sexual crime are imprisoned according to the letter of the law, and then upon release shifted into some kind of permanent* detention in a institution for the criminally insane. It is of course, not legal to imprison people simply based on the say so of a psychiatrist that they are a pedophile.

We can make new laws. If sexual predilections are not influenced by therapy or conditioning, then it could be made a legal requirement to hold child molesters in prison for many decades or for them to be involuntarily committed.

In other contexts people can be involuntarily held on the say so of a cop or a psychiatrist. If they are a likely danger. I don't want thought crimes, but being a pedophile is a real danger to children. This is not inherently legally impossible.

You don't want thought crimes, but you do want to put people in prison based on what they think and feel, and in the absence of them actually having done anything, based on the say so of a cop.

I don’t believe any state in the union involuntarily institutionalizes sex offenders, even for crimes against children. After being released from prison, such criminals are almost always put on a permanent, publicly-available sex offender registry; is that possibly what you’re thinking of?

Minnesota does:

The majority of these offenders served prison time and were then civilly committed because they were deemed too dangerous to release. Some came straight from juvenile custody.

The patients claim the Minnesota Sex Offender Program offers little rehabilitation or chance of release from facilities at Moose Lake and St. Peter. And, they say, the indefinite detention violates their constitutional right to due process.

In the history of the program, no one has been unconditionally released, Gustafson said. One man was granted provisional release two years ago. And as the experts evaluate more patients, he expects more orders.

EDIT: More background:

State courts have sent more than 560 high-risk sexual predators to the Minnesota Sex Offender Program for indefinite treatment since 1995. The only person ever released was later pulled back inside for a violation and died there.

Thanks for the correction. According to this article, 20 states allow for the involuntary commitment of sex offenders, which my previous Google search failed to pull up.

Also, the article I linked to is a bit more up-to-date than the two you quoted from. According to it, 15 inmates have been released completely and 135 transferred to “less secure facilities” over the past several years, following complaints about the program. On the other hand, 6% of the 741 inmates (all men) haven’t even been convicted of a crime, which raises serious red flags in my mind.

I’ll admit to being a bit torn about this. I tentatively support committing some fraction of criminals (both sex offenders and otherwise) whose crimes were particularly gruesome and who seem particularly likely to reoffend. Not knowing exactly what these 741 men did, I can’t say whether they would fit my (nebulous and ill-thought-out) criteria.

Not just this, but by not imprisoning high propensity to pediophilia people there are children who will end up getting abused who would not have been abused in the counterfactual. Now you can say that's fine and accept the background level of child abuse this causes as you believe this is less damaging than mass incarceration but you actually have to make an argument about the tradeoff between potential pedophile's freedom and the rights of children to not be abused, and I do not see anyone in modern western society being willing to touch that with a 100 ft barge pole.

The majority of child abuse, including sexual abuse, is committed by non-pedophiles so society is apparently already on board with such trade-offs. Advocating the incarceration of pedophiles simply due to their attractions is just a way for lazy self-righteous people to feel like they are protecting children without having to do the work of actually looking into the causes of abuse and thinking seriously about the trade-offs that would be required to avert it.

you actually have to make an argument about the tradeoff between potential pedophile's freedom and the rights of children to not be abused, and I do not see anyone in modern western society being willing to touch that with a 100 ft barge pole.

Oh, you're just clinging on to some scraps of believing in general sanity. They're already working on that trade-off:

Results from these broader healthcare practitioner studies revealed that MAPs’ abovementioned skepticism concerning therapists’ willingness to treat them and MAPs’ fear of being stigmatized or (unnecessarily) reported to legal authorities may not be unfounded. Mental health professionals and students in training indicated to being willing to report MAPs to legal authorities due to explicit stigmatization and/or a lack of knowledge about the administrative framework concerning reporting standards (e.g., Beggs Christofferson, 2019; Stephens et al., 2021; Walker et al., 2022). For example, clinicians’ decisions to officially report a client who disclosed sexual interest in children were a function of the number of client risk factors (i.e., child sexual exploitation material use, access to children), although, even in the absence of any risk factor, 12% of the clinicians indicated that they would report their client (Stephens et al., 2021). In a study by Beggs Christofferson (2019), 14% of the surveyed therapists considered reporting a client who disclosed sexual interest in children, even if this meant to break the relevant confidentiality law. Among social service students, 54% agreed to report “a pedophile” client (no sexual offense was mentioned) to the police (strikingly, this rate was reduced to 7% when the case in question was labeled as someone with sexual interest in children but who never has committed any offense against children; Walker et al., 2022).

You see? Minor Attracted Persons (please do not say 'paedophile', that is incorrect terminology) are reluctant to go to therapists because of fears around mandatory reporting. And the therapists we surveyed said they'd be willing to report clients they deemed dangerous. So the conclusion is... therapists have to learn to be more understanding and accepting, stop stigmatising, and drop the threat of reporting people to the cops.

In terms of therapist competency, only between roughly a quarter and 43% of practitioners answered correctly that pedophilia is a sexual attraction to children below the age of 11 and such general knowledge deficiencies about aspects related to minor attraction were associated with stigmatizing attitudes (Lievesley et al., 2022).

Even among the more enlightened Swiss, there are still those bad old stigmatising attitudes:

In terms of non-offending MAPs’ perceived dangerousness to children, the majority of Swiss therapists (58.8%) affirmed that a strong link exists between sexual interest in children and child sexual abuse and roughly one in five agreed that sexual interest in children will sooner or later lead to child sexual abuse (20.1%) or that many who have sexual interests in children will also have sex with children (19.4%; Table 2). Concerning punitive attitudes the large majority (84.7%) agreed that non-offending MAPs should not be allowed to work with children, and 40.3% believed that they should undergo mandatory psychotherapy. Roughly a quarter (26%) affirmed that citizens should be informed in case sexual offenders against children move into their neighborhood. However, only a minority opted for psychopharmacological “castration” (8.7%), preventive detention (6.8%), or openly accessible sexual offender registries (4.7%). Finally, aspects that related to deviancy were strongly affirmed by Swiss outpatient therapists: 80.3% believed that non-offending MAPs needed treatment, 57.1% agreed that these patients were sick, and 48.9% ruled out that they were normal with just rare sexual inclinations.

Therapists should be trained that MAPs are the No True Scotsman:

Rather than pondering the yet dominating question in MAP treatment of whether someone with pedohebephilic sexual interests will victimize children, therapists should focus on the question under which specific boundary conditions their clients might (or, importantly, might not) pose a risk to children and how these specific dynamic risk factors can be therapeutically dealt with – if necessary at all in an individual case. Given the fact that child sexual abuse is prevalently committed also by non-pedohebephilic individuals (e.g., Schmidt et al., 2013), this implies adequate knowledge about relevant risk factors. Such basic criminal psychological facts, however, are not part of current general clinical training curriculae in psychology or medicine and should help to keep the prevailing risk focus in check. This may be conducive to setting the stage for recognizing other concerns that lead MAPs to seek therapeutic help.

See? If someone abuses a child, then he was never a real MAP to begin with, and no MAP is likely to go on to abuse children (or at least, very unlikely except under specific circumstances which you should recognise and help them manage). So don't think about "are children at risk here?" when dealing with a client, or else you're just a big ol' meanie!

Definitely someone struggling with this, who hasn't done anything yet, and who is seeking therapy to change or at least sublimate their attraction should be able to get help and shouldn't be scared off by "They'll tell the cops and I'll be labelled a sex offender and my life will be ruined and a mob will try and beat me up or even kill me". But "shift to thinking about dynamic risk factors" will lead to the same attitudes that resulted in "violent rapist who assaulted two women and still has all functional genitals of course should go into a woman's prison as she was a real woman all along, even while raping cis women with her feminine penis and even though she didn't come out as trans until being prosecuted for those crimes". Yeah, no.

Long before you put paedophiles in jail, you should argue for the much cheaper approach of a special arm of the police whose job it is to surveil every house for child abuse. You could probably even farm most of it out to AI. So since we don't even do this, it's not just that society accepts the current level of child abuse in trade for not having to put an unknown fraction of the populace in jail, it accepts the current level of child abuse in trade for not providing every household with a Child Abuse Safety Siri, which is much lower. We don't even do this with schools or churches! In other words, just the cost of implicitly accusing every member of society of being a potential child molester is already too high to be worth stopping the vast majority of abuse that happens. In conclusion, society seriously does not care very much about the background noise of child suffering.

Would you support locking up anyone who feels the urge to commit violent crimes, even if they have succeeded in keeping this urge in check?

The premise here is the claim that sexual predilections are not subject to therapy or conditioning. So in the narrow context of sexuality you can't cure pedophiles or "cure" gay people through conversion therapy.

I don't mean this as fully general advocacy of thoughtcrime.

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