Вредно для несовершеннолетних

A month before the April 2002 publication of Harmful to Minors , in the middle of the Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal, I received a call from a reporter for a syndicated news service. His story focused on academics who were questioning the orthodoxy that every sexual experience between a minor and an adult is unwanted by the former, traumatic, and permanently damaging. A friend had referred the reporter to me, thinking that my academic-press book could use a little free publicity.

Although I began by informing the reporter that only a small portion of my book is about sex between adults and minors, I told him I agreed with researchers who believe the term «abuse» had become so broad as to be virtually useless. Fortunately, research was creating a more nuanced picture of the «victims» and their experiences; for instance, it was making distinctions between being raped nightly by a father and groped once by a stranger at the pool. Even the same act does not feel the same to everyone, I said. Some children or teens are traumatized, others unmoved, and some say they initiated the sex and enjoyed it.

«Could a priest and a boy conceivably have a positive sexual experience together?» the reporter asked.

« Conceivably? Absolutely it's conceivable,» I answered, «because the data tell us that some kids report such relationships as positive.» I cited a large meta-analysis of the abuse literature by Temple University psychologist Bruce Rind and two colleagues, published in the Psychological Bulletin of the American Psychological Association, which found that not all minor-adult sex is traumatic at the time nor leads to long-term harm; boys were likely to call the experiences neutral or positive, girls negative or abusive. The researchers stressed that their work was not meant to exonerate anyone. Rather, they hoped that isolating the factors that render such sexual events painful for the child or troubling long into adulthood could help in tailoring more effective therapies.

I knew I was treading on dangerous turf when I praised Rind. In 1997, he was the target of conservative radio talk show host «Dr.» Laura Schlesinger and Judith Reisman, a prominent right-wing activist against pornography, sex education, and sex research, who has made a career of discrediting pioneer sexologist Alfred Kinsey. An anti-homosexual group had objected to Rind's study and gotten in touch with Dr. Laura. She denounced him repeatedly on the air as an apologist for pedophilia and soon was joined by a coalition of Christian conservative organizations. They in turn found support from a group of therapists who specialize in the aftereffects of sexual abuse and whose work is based on the axiom that all child-adult sex leads to adult psychopathology; more controversially, many also believe that a troubled patient is likely to have sexual abuse in her past, even if she doesn't remember it and therefore needs the therapist's help in «recovering memories.» Dr. Laura and her friends eventually persuaded Congress to censure the APA for publishing work that suggested sexual abuse was not always harmful. Rather than defend its scientific peer-review process, the APA issued a mea culpa and vowed to vet politically sensitive material more carefully in the future. Dr. Laura's victorious legions looked for other infidels to subdue.

They found me. A few days after the interview with the syndicate's reporter, his story ran in the Web edition of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, my publisher's hometown paper, under the headline, «University of Minnesota Press Book Challenges Demonization of Pedophilia.» I was quoted this way: «[Levine] said the pedophilia among Roman Catholic priests is complicated to analyze, because it's almost always secret, considered forbidden and involves an authority figure. She added, however, that, 'yes, conceivably, absolutely' a boy's sexual experience with a priest could be positive.»

Although Harmful to Minors discusses pedophiles hardly at all, overnight I became the author of «the pedophilia book.» Although the book doesn't condone, much less promote, child molesting, that was suddenly its reputation.

Within days, the University of Minnesota Press was inundated with calls. Half were demanding that the press's management resign and Harmful to Minors — and maybe its author—be burned. The rest were from producers from talk shows. My publicist in New York was playing off requests from The Today Show against Good Morning America and Fox's Greta Van Susteren. The AM-radio shock jocks were the most numerous and persistent. «My host is very fair, very intelligent,» one from Los Angeles told me. With the sensitivity of an eagle a mile downwind of a field mouse, he could sniff his prey through the phone line. When he realized he was stalking an egghead, he added, «She's an NPR type.»

She wasn't.