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The Prevalence of Sexual Abuse in the Childhoods of Homosexuals
The self-serving explanation for homosexual distress, however, is undermined by what we now know about the terrible effects of childhood trauma on the emotional well-being of adults. Many studies demonstrate a sadly disproportionate extent of sexual abuse in the childhoods of homosexual men, suggesting at the least that both homosexual unhappiness and homosexuality itself derive from common causes, and that unhappiness is therefore an inherent accompaniment of homosexuality:
From May 1989 through April 1990, 1,001 adult homosexual and bisexual men attending sexually transmitted disease clinics were interviewed regarding potentially abusive sexual contacts during childhood and adolescence. Thirty-seven percent of participants reported they had been encouraged or forced to have sexual contact before age 19 with an older or more powerful partner; 94 percent occurred with men. Median age of the participant at first contact was 10; median age difference between partners was 11 years. Fifty-one percent involved use of force; 33 percent involved anal sex. Black and Hispanic men were more likely than white men to report such sexual contact. Using developmentally based criteria to define sexual abuse, 93 percent of participants reporting sexual contact with an older or more powerful partner were classified as sexually abused. Our data suggest the risk of sexual abuse may be high among some male youth, and increased attention should be devoted to prevention as well as early identification and treatment.
The same is true for pedophiles:
The association between perpetration of sexual abuse and the offender's own victimization as a child has been well documented in the literature. Various researchers have examined this relationship by assessing the exclusiveness of the sexual abuser's behavior, the gender of his victims and the gender of his own childhood abuser.... Subjects were 135 pedophiles ... who admitted to their offenses. A total of 42 percent of pedophiles ... reported being sexually victimized in their own childhoods .... [and] appear to choose their age-specific victims in accordance with the age of their own experience of sexual victimization. Although the cause of child molestation remains undetermined, these results support social-learning and modeling theories.
Is Social Disapproval the Cause of Distress Among Both Pedophiles and Homosexuals?
In spite of its superficial appeal and the activists' repeated claims, no studies support the hypothesis that the social disapproval of homosexuality is the prime cause of the high levels of internal distress evident in homosexual populations even long before AIDS. (That social stigma would cause some distress, is of course the small kernel of truth upon which the exaggeration is built.) Such studies as the one cited immediately above suggest that both the high levels of emotional distress, as well as homosexuality itself, have at least one common root in painful childhood experiences, in the same way that other deviations from the sexual norm (such as pedophilia) likewise do. It makes just as much sense to claim that the high levels of psychological abnormality and personal distress found among pedophiles are due solely to the social disapproval of pedophilia.
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