August 02, 2024

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Excerpts from Paidika: Dr. John P. DeCecco interview (Part 3)

Dr. John P. DeCecco is a Professor of Psychology and Human Sexuality at San Francisco State University, San Francisco, California, and Director of Human Sexuality Studies for the University. He is also Director of the Center for Research and Education in Sexuality (CERES), and Editor of the Journal of Homosexuality. The interview took place in December 1987 in Amsterdam, where Dr. DeCecco is a visiting professor.

Power and Consent

Pdk: One of the principal attacks on paedophilia has been in the area of power differentials between the participants in the relationship, and over the question of consent. How would you formulate the issue of consent: what constitutes consent for the minor partner? What about power in the relationship?

JDC: The issue of consent is a difficult one. We have trouble with it even in peer relationships. It would at least include knowledge of what one is consenting to.

Pdk: How much knowledge? Here we touch on the argument of “informed consent”, which holds that it is impossible for the child, out of his experience, to imagine what he will feel like thirty years later about the experience, and therefore cannot truly consent.

JDC: Yes, that’s it. As if any woman who is consenting to have sex with a man can!

Pdk: But she at least has had some parallel experiences on which to base a decision. By the time one is twenty or so, you have been around a little in the world at least …

JDC: Well, why don’t we outline what consent must minimally require, what the criteria of informed consent must be. It has to be some knowledge of what the act is, right at that moment, what one is consenting to, and that, in fact, what one consents to is what really transpires. Add to that the anticipated consequences of the consent, not only personal in the sense of ‘Will I really enjoy this?’, ‘Will it harm me in some way?’, but also the social consequences of reputation, of societal judgement, parental interdiction, and so on. If you lay out all those qualifications, I don’t think there are many adult acts of full consent. In a way, if we could know that much ahead of time, much of the sexual excitement would be gone, because what we often hope for, I think, in a sexual encounter, is that something new and unexpected might occur.

Pdk: So, you are suggesting that there actually are no relationships where there is truly full consent that meets all of those criteria?

JDC: Yes, I would be hard pressed to believe that that could occur, and even that people want it to occur. There are certain non-consensual elements which people value in emotional and sexual relationships. What is romance? Romance is when you get onto this roller coaster you know, and you go up and down. If you could anticipate all the suffering that’s going to be involved, you probably wouldn’t start it, but you know there’s at least going to be this thrilling undulating effect.

Pdk: To say there is no true consent in any relation doesn’t answer the question of what exactly consent should be in the power-charged, unequal situation of an adult and a minor.

JDC: Well, I’m not trying to evade your question. I think that sexuality is not exempt from ethical constraints, nor is any other area of our lives. We have not arrived at a social consensus on what sexuality is, on what forms of touching, of conversation, on what we see in a picture – police can see pornography where others don’t. For better or for worse I think we have not arrived at a consensus as to what it is we are consenting to. So, what can a person do in a situation in which the culture provides only very confused and disordered notions of what it is that one’s consenting to, what can an adult, operating within some kind of ethical community, do? I think the answer must be that one must show enormous respect for the desires of the child, and the feelings of the child, and some sense of who that child is, and how whatever transpires is going to fit into the larger frame of that child’s life.

Pdk: So, in other words, the adult’s experience should compensate for the child’s inexperience. If it’s two adults, each one has a little better idea of what they may be consenting to; in the case of a cross-generational relationship the adult must be especially considerate of those things.

JDC: Exactly, but I think it’s only in the area of ethical responsibility. I don’t think you can substitute adult experience for childhood experience, and vice versa. And I don’t think you should even be required to; it can’t be done. But what you can do is … the adult must take full ethical responsibility for himself; that is, you must operate within ethical constraints – which I hope would include the respect for the fact that this child is a unique human being, whose uniqueness must be valued, and that the experiences that you have with the child would then somehow make it more possible for that uniqueness to develop rather than curtailing or suffocating it. This may mean giving up sex even when it is possible. In a particular case, this might mean that you would be even more sexually responsive, possibly, knowing that the child at that moment desires it, welcomes it and would benefit from it. But the ethical responsibility is a heavy one because this society is not defining what those ethical considerations should be, and because the child may or may not yet be a part of any ethical community, so that he or she can’t make these judgements very well. That is why an enlightened law must have a role in protecting the child. Because the child, less than the adult, can know the consequences of his acts, there is still a place for laws that protect the child from clearly demonstratable exploitation or immediate harm. But the enforcement of such laws would have to respect the perceptions, judgements, and desires of the child.

Pdk: This leads into another question, about how paedophiles can develop a healthy relationship in the midst of a society that condemns them.

JDC: The word ‘healthy’ is here a substitution for ethics. It’s the medical profession taking over the cleric’s responsibilities – I prefer to have those definitions remain with the people who think and know about them. I would just say again everything I said about the ethical considerations; I would prefer them to be frankly phrased as moral and ethical considerations, rather than ‘health’ because I think that plays right back into medicine and the medical control of sexuality. Medicine is embarrassingly involved with sexuality. I think that at one point it was an adventure, a huge expansion of its institutional power. I think today it’s terribly embarrassed and would like to get out of the business if it could.

Pdk: In relation to the whole question of power within their relationships, might looking at sexual relationships rather than sexual identities clarify the whole matter – because inequalities of power are one of the things that are common within all sexual relationships, which might help to clarify the question of inequalities of power within paedophile relationships.

JDC: Or vice versa. The exploration of paedophile relationships, when the adult often is extraordinarily concerned with the issues of imbalance of power, is an exploration of how power can be handled in interpersonal relations in which we’re entrusting people with our emotions, and our bodies. These relations inevitably revolve around power, so that ethical notions of what is fair and equitable are crucial. Women are beginning to complain about the kind of sexist treatment that they have been subjected to – there are any number of books on the American market now, you know: ‘Women Who Love Men Who Hate Women’, and so on. Those books have a very angry tone, yet I get the impression, are still written without any real examination of the dynamics of the whole structure of the relationships women have with men, which themselves result in those dynamics. They want to change the dynamics without changing the structures. Thoughtful adults who have sexual relations with children, have had to look at everything, the dynamics and the whole structure of their relationships, which have been forbidden in Western society. So again, I think these individuals have a lot to contribute, as in the case of childhood sexuality, in the case of adult sexuality, and now in the case of relationships. I believe that it’s the quality of the people involved that often determines the quality of the relationship. If you have sleazy characters, you are going to have a sleazy relationship; two people who have a sense of fairness and mutuality, are often going to have a good relationship. You’ve got to have ethical people to have good relationships, and ethics is a matter of persons.

Pdk: Can you pursue that a little farther – how you see paedophiles restructuring traditional roles in their relationships?

JDC: The persons I have met here in Amsterdam who identify themselves as paedophiles certainly don’t impress me as being stereotypical macho American males, thank God, but in many ways, they are also extraordinarily brave and pioneering men, which is part of the male stereotype. So, what I guess this means is that they show a kind of androgyny, this incredible nurturance, and yet this rather fearless dedication that shows that maybe men can be men in a way that does not require brute force. In other words, that men can be powerful, but powerful in a moral way, that there can be a kind of moral power that can combine with nurturance, so that power and nurturance don’t have to be seen as opposing attributes. So, , I think that these men redefine what it is to be a man. And then, of course, you constitute another threat, because one of the great threats that adult child relationships have especially, is that the adult is not reproducing the model of the father, of the stern, aggressive totally self-confident male. You’re providing another kind of a model, with another kind of a very subtle, pervasive power that comes from understanding and knowing and responsiveness. That, you see, doesn’t fit the image that we have of the totalitarian father. Therefore, even though you’re providing an understanding of how males can be quite different people than they stereotypically are, that poses a threat. It is possible for males to have this enormously nurturant relationship to kids. Your authority in a kid’s life, comes to the extent that you represent something that he wants to trust, but doesn’t completely, and cannot completely understand at the moment, but something that he will someday understand and then assume himself, which is not the transmission of male power as we think of it in the family. There are not many options open, but there are a few things that we could be doing with kids that we’re not doing today, and I think paedophiles have an intuitive and often an experiential understanding of them.

Pdk: Do you have any summary you wish to make?

JDC: There are two points I would stress. I think the idea of sexual identity reduces the importance of the individual, and that the focus of inquiry must be, should be, would most profitably be, on how the sexuality of a given person fits into that person’s life, and how that person’s life fits into the broader social context. We ought to use the current categories of sexuality, at best, as categories of desire and behaviour, but not as categories of people. . I think my other point is that the investigation of paedophilia could be important, because it can be one means by which we can shed light on childhood sexuality, on issues of consent in all sexual relations, not only intergenerational relationships, and how sexual relationships are regulated, not in the interest of the individuals, but in the interest of our rulers.

Previous Parts:

Excerpts from Paidika: John P. DeCecco Interview (Part 1)…

Excerpts from Paidika: John P. DeCecco Interview (Part 2)…