Mental Health: Why Would Someone Choose to Be a Monster?
Originally published in The Walrus. Read the full article here.
When he’s guest lecturing grad students or clinicians in training, brain scientist James Cantor will sometimes throw out a question to the audience. “How do you suppress your sexual interest in children?” The students are understandably tongue tied. “They’ll look at me like I have three heads,” he says. He might then come at them with another unanswerable question: “When did you choose to be attracted to adults?”
Cantor’s point is obvious: “We don’t decide what we’re attracted to. We just figure it out.” It’s a similar rhetorical parry to the one gay activists used to challenge homophobia. While you can, if you look for them, still find clusters of zealots who believe that homosexuality is a choice, few people doubt that humans are born straight or gay, but many are hesitant to apply the same logic to pedophiles—one of the demographics that Cantor studies.
These discussions can lead to uncomfortable questions. Chief among them: if pedophiles, like virtually everybody else, acquire their sexual orientation through no fault of their own, is the condition immoral? And how do we ask that question in light of the inescapable fact that there is no moral ambiguity around the abuse of a child?
That’s exactly where Cantor, a psychologist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (camh) in Toronto, comes in. Only, he’s not just asking questions. He’s trying to provide answers. Answers based on science. Answers that are still uncomfortable.
Since 2006, Cantor has been conducting large-scale brain scans of pedophiles, helping amass evidence that the condition is biologically predetermined. He’s one of only two leading clinicians in the world doing such research using neuroimaging—the other being Klaus Beier, in Berlin. “Most mental health professionals encounter few, if any, genuine pedophiles and find the topic aversive,” says Cantor. Plus, money for such research is scarce. “Funders and fundraisers are very conscious of the optics,” he says. “They do not want to risk an association with such a negative topic.”
The situation is both understandable and unfortunate. Because, if we’re serious about protecting kids from predators, doesn’t it make sense to understand those predators? Even if it means letting go of some emotionally satisfying, fear-based preconceived notions—like, for instance, that people who are sexually attracted to children deserve to be called predators.
So while Cantor’s work is rooted in the data-driven scientific method, his findings are inescapably political. Nobody, says Cantor, should be stigmatized for a sexual orientation they didn’t choose. He is careful, however, to distinguish between pedophilia (which he considers a biological condition, and thus morally neutral) and the act of molesting a child (which is certainly not). A culture that no longer demonizes pedophiles, he argues, may be one in which pedophiles themselves are more willing to seek help—and therefore one in which children are less likely to be abused.
This is an excerpt. Read the full article here.