Gay Life, Straight Work

by Donald West

  A. I certainly think that he must have understood the meaning of what he was saying and understood it was a threat, but I would go back and say that I don’t believe he would have made such threats or behaved in such a way had he been in a normal condition.

  Q. Which takes us back to our drunk, does it not?

  A. Could I make one distinction between this and my analogy with somebody who had become drunk through taking alcohol, presumably knowing what its effect might be, whereas I don’t think that was the case in this instance.

  Q. Can I tell you that not half an hour ago we heard evidence to the effect that when he was in London at the start the defendant did take his pills then he decided not to. Does that alter your comments?

  A. No …

  Q. Can I come to the question of telephone calls. You remember my learned friend referred to the 23 telephone calls that took place?

  A. Yes.

  Q. Does it make any difference to your analysis that during the course of the 23 telephone calls different personalities were used by the same person, Mr [K]?

  A. It seems to fit in with the elaborate, implausible fantasy he was advancing.

  Q. Tell me this: does it help you in any way to know, for example, one of the names use was Commander Nemo?

  A. It adds to the ridiculousness of it.

  Q. Does it help you to know that one of the names used was Colonel Digsby of MI5 or MI6?

  A. That doesn’t mean anything to me.

  This futile interchange served only to highlight the restrictive nature of the Mc’Naughton Rules that suggest that if an offender knows what he is doing, for instance if he knows what it is to sit on a chair and to form an intention to do so, he is legally sane. A person in a manic state is in the grip of such excitement and emotion and self-delusion that he perceives situations in a false light. Mr K believed that he could govern Cyprus better than anyone else. Even after his, possibly partial, recovery he argued at his trial that his offence was not blackmail, but a hoax, a sort of intelligence test meant to demonstrate the stupidity of the Cyprus government, and that he never expected any money would be delivered.

  Phrases in the judge’s summing up, though not explicitly citing Mc’Naughton, followed the rules closely. “[A medical witness] seemed to be suggesting that a person suffering from hypomania could not commit a crime, but that is not the law. A person who has drunk too much or taken drugs or is hypomanic and is thus abnormal, can form the necessary intent or intention and can understand full well what he is doing”. “Therefore, you look at the whole picture, bearing firmly in mind that it is only if he was or may have been in such a state as a result of drugs or hypomania, or both, that he could not or did not form the necessary intent to do what he did, and literally did not know truly what he was doing, that he can in the end be helped by the medical evidence”.

  Needless to say, Mr K was convicted. Fourteen years later he contacted me, sending me more materials to read, because he was intending to appeal to the Criminal Cases Review Committee. I replied that I was now retired, and in any case had nothing to add to my previous report and testimony. He persisted, phoning me at home, recording the conversation and posting me a transcript. He argued that his defence had been drug-induced psychosis and I had presented hypomania, which was the prosecution’s case. He suggested I might find the official trial transcript inaccurate. (I did not). I felt his determined pursuit of a hopeless cause was not a sign of mental health.

  Thoughts on Children and Sex

  My 1956 publication Homosexuality, criticising the then conventional medical views about the psychopathic traits of male homosexuals, provoked less reaction than when, much later, I criticised the demonisation of paedophiles. Not being a paedophile, self-interest was not my motive, but I had become concerned with the concept of an ‘age of consent’ for sex (the legal fiction defining all sexual contact with or between young persons as a criminal assault on the part of both participants). From the statistics of teenage pregnancies, it is clear that, regardless of its illegality, many youngsters under sixteen engage in consensual sex with others of similar age or older. Years ago I took part in a TV discussion on the age of consent conducted by Kilroy Silk. Supporters and opponents had been assembled for the programme, including several nubile young ladies protesting hotly that their boyfriends had been unfairly taken away or imprisoned.

  The Sex Offences Act 1967 fixed an age of consent at twenty-one for homosexual behaviour; as if men of twenty, some eight years following puberty, cannot decide the gender of sexual partner that they want. The legal age of consent has since been equalised at sixteen for both heterosexual and homosexual contacts, but if the offender is in a “position of trust” towards the young person, or if the concern is indecent pictures, the age limit is eighteen. Paedophilia, originally a psychiatric term for strong sexual attraction to pre-pubertal children, is nowadays used more loosely for any hint of sexual impropriety involving either a child or a post-pubertal teenager.

  To investigate the types and frequency of behaviours that actually occur, I organised two surveys(2) addressed to adults, males and females respectively, asking about their recollections of sexual contacts with older persons when they were under sixteen. About a fifth of males reported some incident with an adult man, and about six per cent with an adult woman. A higher proportion of females, about a half, recalled some unwelcome experience with a man, but half of these incidents did not involve physical contact (for example, telephone calls or seeing a ‘flasher’). Since so many women recall some such unwelcome experience, it is inconceivable that they are all permanently damaged individuals. In fact, just over two thirds of the women who had had an unwelcome experience expressed no current concern about what had happened. However, that left almost a third who felt affected in some way – e.g. guilt, sexual inhibition, anger or wariness of men. Among males, apart from a few homosexuals, almost all those who recalled an approach from an older man when they were boys described their response at the time as one of revulsion and swift rejection. Other than the minority experiencing incidents when they were very young, hardly any reported permanent effects. Among the almost five hundred male respondents, none reported offending parents, violent coercion or physical injury. Apparently, males are much less often exposed than females to serious damaging child sex abuse. These conclusions are not derived from just these limited surveys of small samples, but from an extensive literature including larger academic researches, accounts from victims of child molestation and their therapists, and the writings of paedophiles themselves.

  The evidence that sexual interference with children can have terrible and lasting effects is overwhelming, especially when it is violent or coercive or happening repeatedly within a family where the child is afraid to speak out. Although fortunately very rare, some paedophiles can be sadistic and murderous and inflict serious or fatal injury. Others kill to avoid the consequences of detection. Such incidents attract enormous publicity, giving rise to fear out of proportion to the extent of the risk. In contrast, some incidents now classed as crime are looked back upon by the so-called ‘victims’ as pleasant and rewarding. Boys initiated into sex by an older female often feel grateful for the experience, and gay men who admit to having seduced or been seduced by older males when they were boys recall this as a welcome event. Pubescent boys and girls are generally well able to recognise when an approach is sexual and to know whether they are attracted or repulsed. Younger children may not understand the significance of what is happening and acquiesce out of fear or simple obedience to an adult. The effect, especially on girls, can be traumatic, not always at the time, but later when they realise the enormous condemnation such incidents attract. Since parents are usually heterosexual, and fathers and stepfathers are more likely to be predatory than mothers, girls are at greater risk than boys from offenders within the family. Boys, however, are more likely to have one-off encounters with homosexual strangers outside the home, in amusement arcades, swimming pools and other lo
cations favoured by sexual predators, but these are situations it is easier for the child to withdraw from than if the adult is one of the family circle.

  Just as homosexual activists have in the past lobbied for tolerance, paedophiles have done the same, but without success. The small group known as the Paedophile Information Exchange was disbanded and forced underground by virtue of public denunciation and police investigations. Nevertheless, without having to agree with their pleas for freedom to have consensual sexual contacts with children, their arguments call attention to considerations too often brushed aside. The belief that young children lack interest in sex is challenged by covert observation of infants at play. Anthropological observations of so-called primitive society suggest that permissiveness towards sexual play between young children, and towards pacifying infants through genital pleasuring by their carers, does no apparent harm. From this, paedophiles argue that indecent handling of children is not the evil commonly supposed. Maybe, but we live in and must adjust to society where such behaviour is taboo and therefore harmful even if, in a biological sense, as Kinsey once remarked, it is difficult to see why touching a child’s genitals should be so damaging. Paedophile literature also points to instances of mutual love, as opposed to selfish satisfaction of adult lust. This may be true, and is well illustrated in a number of touching autobiographies, mostly authored by male homosexual paedophiles. A heterosexual example is the account published by one of the daughters of the artist Eric Gill, testifying that their loving but illicit contacts with him as children did them no harm at all. Boys involved sexually and emotionally with an older man sometimes maintain an affectionate friendship with him in later life, even after they have married and have families. More often, however, it seems the older man loses interest and brings the relationship to an end as the boy becomes physically mature, sometimes leaving the younger partner bereft of what was supposedly an ideal relationship of older mentor and friend, analogous to ancient Greek custom.

  The term paedophilia in popular usage has come to include anything from the horrors of the Fred West household, or the use of children as sex slaves, to schoolboy romps or the sublimated attractions depicted in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Calling attention to the wide range of behaviours and circumstances nowadays included under the label paedophilia runs counter to the climate of public opinion, fostered by a sensationalist media that treats sexuality in any shape or form with youngsters involved as an abomination.

  Academic research that might challenge the moral panic about paedophilia can rebound upon the researcher, as some of my own experiences have confirmed. An early warning of this occurred when Tom O’Carroll published Paedophilia: The Radical Case (London, 1980), arguing for tolerance of loving, consensual relationships with teenagers. The Institute of Criminology invited him to participate in a seminar discussing problems of paedophilia. A friendly senior judge, whose son took part in some Institute research, and who was aware that O’Carroll was connected with the Paedophile Information Exchange and likely to be prosecuted, warned us that the invitation was ill-advised. The seminar was abruptly cancelled. Some three decades later, O’Carroll released, under a pseudonym, a well-documented book about the late Michael Jackson and his contacts with young boys. It was condemnatory of Jackson’s behaviour and of the consequences for the boys involved. The blurb on the jacket of the book displayed favourable comments from five academics, including myself. At the last moment, when they discovered the author’s identity, and after various copies had been sent out, the publishers refused to distribute the book.

  In the eighties, my research into males’ sexual histories met with serious protest. In an effort to obtain a representative sample, questionnaires were addressed to individuals picked out from an electoral register. An MP, on behalf of a constituent offended by this, put a question to the Home Secretary, declaring the enterprise “prurience masquerading as science” and demanding that funding to the Institute of Criminology should cease. The incident was reported in the press. Fortunately, the research had not used Institute funds and Home Office officials made pacifying noises. In 1993, doctoral research by a clinical psychologist whom I had supervised was re-published in America. He had interviewed a sample of paedophiles and analysed what they had to say about their activities, motives and sexual histories. Many of them gave extenuating justifications for their crimes, but some expressed guilt and distress. Nowhere did the author express approval of their crimes, but he was able to extract useful information about the kinds of behaviour involved and the circumstances linked to increased risk of offending by these men. Nevertheless, some politically militant female social workers in the United States denounced the book. Their protests became known to the British Psychological Association, who ordered an investigation. The author, a family man, then working in a British hospital, was for some time under threat of suspension. The inquiry could find no evidence of professional misconduct.

  Another example of threat to academic free speech occurred in 1999 to a researcher of my acquaintance in the United States, the psychologist Bruce Rind. He had published in the official journal of the American Psychological Association a meta-analysis of a number of surveys, based on samples of normal adult populations, documenting the early and long-term effects of children’s sexual experiences with adults. His was sophisticated research incorporating results from more substantial projects than my own small efforts. He concluded that although sexual molestation often led to lasting damage, especially in girls and pre-pubertal children, and particularly where force or coercion was involved, devastating effects were not inevitable and a significant proportion did not think they had been affected at all. These findings, agreeably consistent with my own results, were unwelcome to many clinicians whose experience tends to be limited to cases linked to psychological disturbance. The publication was attacked by moralising TV presenters, who accused Rind of promoting homosexuality. It is an odd feature of such moral denunciations that boys’ encounters with men are said to have a seducing and homosexualising effect, whereas girls’ encounters are thought to cause heterosexual anxiety and inhibition. Politicians joined in the attacks on Rind and, in July 1999, the US Congress voted a condemnation of the “seriously flawed” research and a commendation of the APA for having resolved in future “to evaluate scientific articles it publishes in the light of their potential social, legal and political implications”. The APA could not go so far as to declare the findings invalid because the paper had been through the customary peer review and the statistics were unassailable.

  The writings of Eduard Brongersma, a Dutch homosexual paedophile, also caused a stir. His book Loving Boys (1987, Amsterdam: Global Academic) was a well-documented polemical defence of relationships between men and boys of an age to be fully consenting partners. He was a lawyer by profession and had been imprisoned for such relationships. Following release, he became a senator and was influential in the lowering of the age of consent in his country. A life-long campaigner and recorder of what he considered unjust and harsh punishments of paedophiles, he accumulated a massive archive of cases. I had a glimpse of this once and saw interesting correspondence with paedophiles serving very long sentences in US prisons, who remained preoccupied with the welfare of the young men with whom they had had forbidden relationships. I became involved when the editor of the Howard Journal, who had received a paper from Brongersma, was reluctant to publish it unless I would contribute a ‘balanced’ commentary, which I was glad to provide.

  When the outcry against paedophiles took hold in the Netherlands, as it had done elsewhere, Brongersma was vilified and his house stoned. By then an old man, saddened by the failure of his cause, he committed suicide in 1998, helped by his doctor, who was charged for having done so. His treasured archive, which he had left to a Foundation dedicated to ‘scientific’ study, was examined at the behest of the public prosecutor and individuals identifiable from the documents became crime suspects threatened with prosecution. As far as I know, on accoun
t of difficulties with the investigation, and the Dutch statute of limitation against the prosecution of long past offences, these threats were not in the end followed through.

  I came across yet another example of vilification following publication of unpopular views when I read a memoir written by a colleague known to me through a common interest in parapsychology. This was John Randall, a retired science teacher, who had published a book, Childhood and Sexuality: A Radical Christian Approach (1992, Pittsburg: Dorrance). It was only after reading his memoir that I learned what happened to him as a result of the book, which had been reviewed favourably in serious journals, but was attacked in the popular press as advocating paedophilia. He received “a stream of hate mail, phone calls in the middle of the night from anonymous persons calling me an evil bastard or worse”. More hurtfully, he was expelled from working in some charitable organisations and dismissed from the post of organist at his local church. He writes: “It was a serious, scholarly book, based on a large collection of research papers and books which I had accumulated over the years, together with my own observations of children via interviews and questionnaire … There had been tragic instances of children being dragged from their beds in the early hours of the morning and subjected to third-degree interrogation methods … The book certainly did not endorse paedophilia but neither did it endorse the sometimes brutal methods that were then being used in order to extract evidence… My book simply suggested that a more compassionate, essentially Christian way of dealing with these troublesome occurrences might be less harmful”.

  Two of these examples of opposition to the release of unpopular views were attacks on authors because they were ‘paedophiles’, although they were not molesters of small boys. It seemed to me wrong to disparage their well-informed and rational debate, simply because of the authors’ personal involvement, even though there may be ample reasons for disagreeing with some of their views. My own writings about homosexuality might have been similarly dismissed had I come out publicly as a homosexual.