Richard Dawkins defends pedophiles

[General Zod]

Well I guess as long as it's only -mild- pedophilia it's not so bad?

Richard Dawkins defended "mild pedophilia" in an interview this weekend. And while the quote itself is quite jarring, especially to those who look to Dawkins for his influential writings on atheism (but haven't noticed some of his other strange stances), it's far from the first time that the scientist has launched a defense of the behavior — or talked about his own abuse at the hands of boarding school teachers. First, here's what Dawkins said to The Times magazine, as condensed by the Religion News Service:

Referring to his early days at a boarding school in Salisbury, he recalled how one of the (unnamed) masters “pulled me on his knee and put his hand inside my shorts.”
He said other children in his school peer group had been molested by the same teacher but concluded: “I don’t think he did any of us lasting harm.”
“I am very conscious that you can’t condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours. Just as we don’t look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism, I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can’t find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today,” he said.
He said the most notorious cases of pedophilia involve rape and even murder and should not be bracketed with what he called “just mild touching up.”
His reasons for defending the behavior seem to focus on three points. First, that "hysteria" over a fear of pedophilia is overblown by society; second, that instilling a child with fundamentalist religious beliefs is actually a worse way to abuse a child; and third, that he personally overcame childhood sexual abuse, meaning it must not be that big of a deal for anyone else who was subjected to similar behavior.

In April of this year, Dawkins compared two forms of what he sees as priestly abuse in an interview with Al Jazeera: sexual and theological. This exchange became pretty well-circulated in the conservative press.

He said:

There are shades of being abused by a priest, and I quoted an example of a woman in America who wrote to me saying that when she was 7 years old, she was sexually abused by a priest in his car.
“At the same time, a friend of hers, also 7, who was of a Protestant family, died, and she was told that because her friend was Protestant, she had gone to hell and will be roasting in hell forever.
“She told me, of those two abuses, she got over the physical abuse; it was yucky, but she got over it. But the mental abuse of being told about hell, she took years to get over. "
This line of thought goes back at least to 2006 for Dawkins, when he wrote "we live in a time of hysteria about paedophilia, a mob psychology that calls to mind the Salem witch-hunts of 1692," in his popular book the God Delusion. He continued:

All three of the boarding schools I attended employed teachers whose affections for small boys overstepped the bounds of propriety. That was indeed reprehensible. Nevertheless, if, fifty years on, they had been hounded by vigilantes or lawyers as no better than child murderers, I should have felt obliged to come to their defence, even as the victim of one of them (an embarrassing but otherwise harmless experience).
The Roman Catholic Church has borne a heavy share of such retrospective opprobrium. For all sorts of reasons I dislike the Roman Catholic Church. But I dislike unfairness even more, and I can’t help wondering whether this one institution has been unfairly demonized over the issue, especially in Ireland and America… We should be aware of the remarkable power of the mind to concoct false memories, especially when abetted by unscrupulous therapists and mercenary lawyers. The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has shown great courage, in the face of spiteful vested interests, in demonstrating how easy it is for people to concoct memories that are entirely false but which seem, to the victim, every bit as real as true memories. This is so counter-intuitive that juries are easily swayed by sincere but false testimony from witnesses.
There's more. In 2012, a few conservative publications finally noticed what Dawkins wrote in 2006, and dredged it up. Dawkins then defended pedophilia, again, in defense of those earlier remarks:

I was myself sexually abused by a teacher when I was about nine or ten years old. It was a very unpleasant and embarrassing experience, but the mental trauma was soon exorcised by comparing notes with my contemporaries who had suffered it previously at the hands of the same master.
The following quote, from the same defense, drives home what's so off about Dawkins's argument here, beyond the knee-jerk recoiling of the idea of defending a pedophile. Dawkins, a scientist, relies on anecdotal evidence and speculation to "prove" his point:

Thank goodness, I have never personally experienced what it is like to believe – really and truly and deeply believe ­– in hell. But I think it can be plausibly argued that such a deeply held belief might cause a child more long-lasting mental trauma than the temporary embarrassment of mild physical abuse.
Anecdotes and plausibility arguments, however, need to be backed up by systematic research, and I would be interested to hear from psychologists whether there is real evidence bearing on the question. My expectation would be that violent, painful, repeated sexual abuse, especially by a family member such as a father or grandfather, probably has a more damaging effect on a child’s mental well-being than sincerely believing in hell. But ‘sexual abuse’ covers a wide spectrum of sins, and I suspect that research would show belief in hell to be more traumatic than the sort of mild feeling-up that I suffered.
Dawkins gave the Times interview that put him back in the news this week in relation to his autobiography, by the way, comes out later this month.

Go home Dawkins, you're drunk.

[Crown]

So a self-confessed victim of pedophilia has a slightly different insight into it then you ...

Outrage!

[SilverWingedSeraph]

Except it is an outrage because he's saying it's not a big deal if adults molest children, fuckhead.

[Highlord Laan]

Except it is an outrage because he's saying it's not a big deal if adults molest children, fuckhead.

Actually, shit for brains, he's stated that he doesn't condemn pedophiles from his time as we do now, that physical traumas are easier to overcome than mental ones, and that there's a witch hunt atmosphere about the way we prosecute -and persecute- such cases now. Nowhere does he actually come to the defense of pedophiles, only point out that if a case is discovered fifty years out, it's a bit late.

Nice way to take everything about an article and ignore all of it in favor of the title, by the way. Though I guess knee jerking is far easier than actually engaging reading comprehension skills. Do you have a Fox News account, by chance?

[Crown]

Except it is an outrage because he's saying it's not a big deal if adults molest children, fuckhead.

He's not saying that at all and nor is he 'defending' pedophiles either (thread title wrong). He's making a nuanced argument based on his own experiences. <insert childish expletive here to show I'm all emotive>

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Laan argued the point rather bluntly, but he has the right of it: Those of you who see "Dawkins doesn't immediately come out full stop against all pedophilia, ever," then read it as "Dawkins defends pedophilia," and then blow your top over it are proving Dawkins' point. Nowhere (at least in the linked article's quotes and video) does he ever defend pedophilia -- he simply argues that all cases of it can't be tarred with the same brush, and that non-violent instances from the mid-20th century should be viewed in a historical light, rather than a damning, prosecutorial light. The whole point of his argument is that people immediately freak out at the mere mention of pedophilia, and disengage their Homo sapiens brains and instead react with the finest chimpanzee shit-flinging instincts.

[The Vortex Empire]

Yeah, he never said that lesser cases of child abuse are not so bad, he said that they are bad and worse ones are worse. Saying A is worse than B doesn't mean you're defending B or think B is fine. If I say murdering 1 person isn't as bad as murdering 50 people, am I saying murdering 1 person isn't so bad?

EDIT: His response. http://www.richarddawkins.net/foundatio ... rstanding#

Child Abuse: a misunderstanding.

by Richard Dawkins posted on September 12, 2013 02:40PM GMT

A is bad. B is worse.” How dare you defend A?

Anon: epitome of several Twitter attacks.

In my memoir, An Appetite for Wonder, I wrote the following, about an incident at boarding school.

I would watch games of squash from the gallery, waiting for the game to end so I could slip down and practise by myself. One day – I must have been about eleven – there was a master in the gallery with me. He pulled me onto his knee and put his hand inside my shorts. He did no more than have a little feel, but it was extremely disagreeable (the cremasteric reflex is not painful, but in a skin-crawling, creepy way it is almost worse than painful) as well as embarrassing. As soon as I could wriggle off his lap, I ran to tell my friends, many of whom had had the same experience with him. I don’t think he did any of us any lasting damage, but some years later he killed himself.

This paragraph, together with a subsequent statement to the Times that I would not judge that teacher by the standards of today, has been heavily criticised. These criticisms represent a misunderstanding, which I would like to clear up.

The standards of today are conditioned by our increasing familiarity with the traumatising effect that pedophile abuse can have on children, sometimes scarring them psychologically for life. Today we read, almost daily, of adults whose childhood was blighted by an uncle perhaps, or even a parent, who would day after day, week after week, year after year, sexually abuse a vulnerable child. The child would often have no escape, would not be believed if he/she told the other parent, or told a teacher. In many cases it is only now, when the abused children have reached adulthood, that these stories are coming out. To make light of their stories, even after all these years, might in some cases re-awaken the trauma of not being believed at the time when it was all happening, and when being believed would have meant so much to the child.

Only slightly less culpable than the abusers themselves are the institutions that protected them, of which the most prominent examples are to be found in the senior hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. This is why I personally donated £10,000 of my own money towards a fund, instigated by Christopher Hitchens and me, to build the legal case for prosecuting Pope Benedict XVI for his part (when Cardinal Ratzinger) in covering up sexual abuse of children by priests. Our initiative, for which I paid 50%, the rest being raised by Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, resulted in the book The Case of the Pope: Vatican accountability for human rights abuse, in which the distinguished barrister Geoffrey Robertson QC laid out the case for the prosecution should any jurisdiction in the world choose to take it up in the future.

Now, given the terrible, persistent and recurrent traumas suffered by other people when abused as children, week after week, year after year, what should I have said about my own thirty seconds of nastiness back in the 1950s? Should I have lied and said it was the worst thing that ever happened to me? Should I have mendaciously sought the sympathy due to a victim who had truly been damaged for the rest of his life? Should I have named the offending teacher and called down posthumous disgrace upon his head?

No, no and no. To have done so would have been to belittle and insult those many people whose lives really were blighted and cursed, perhaps by year-upon-year of abuse by a father or other person who was deeply important in their life. To have done so would have invited the justifiably indignant response: “How dare you make a fuss about the mere half minute of gagging unpleasantness that happened to you only once, and where the perpetrator was not your own father but a teacher who meant nothing special to you in your life. Stop playing the victim. Stop trying to upstage those who really were tragic victims in their own situations. Don’t cry wolf about your own bad experience, because it undermines those whose experience was – and remains – so much worse.”

That is why I made light of my own bad experience. To excuse pedophiliac assaults in general, or to make light of the horrific experiences of others, was a thousand miles from my intention.

I should have hoped that much was obvious. But I was perhaps presumptuous in the last sentence of the paragraph quoted above. I cannot know for certain that my companions’ experiences with the same teacher were are brief as mine, and theirs may have been recurrent where mine was not. That’s why I said only “I don’t think he did any of us lasting damage”. We discussed it among ourselves on many occasions, especially after his suicide, and there was indeed general agreement that his gassing himself was far more upsetting than his sexual depredations had been. If I am wrong about any particular individual; if any of my companions really was traumatised by the abuse long after it happened; if, perhaps it happened many times and amounted to more than the single disagreeable but brief fondling that I endured, I apologise.

[Ralin]

Dunno about the rest of you, but I feel really damned uncomfortable condemning Dawkins for having the wrong reaction to his own molestation.

That said, uh...was molesting kids more socially acceptable half a century ago or something? Serious question here, because I'm not sure what he's getting at there.

[Kitsune]

He stated in a previous book that being told that all your friends are going to hell because they are not Catholic in many cases scars a person far more than some mild groping by an adult. He is not saying it is right but that we should have some perspective.
Now, I think one problem is though that we are often told something should scar us mentally and we actually scar ourselves because of it.

[Channel72]

Dammit.

Dawkins is just too open about the way he feels. Really, nothing good can possibly come out of publicly downplaying any form of child molestation. While I personally agree that religious brainwashing is probably worse or at least arguably equivalent in terms of psychological damage to getting "mildly" molested - I probably wouldn't say that out loud if I was a celebrity atheist with millions of detractors. Really, saying that out loud does nothing but provide endless ammunition to religious apologists. It's bad enough that things like Stalinism are already (wrongly) associated with atheism in the popular mindset, now we have to deal with this shit too. The only take away from this for most people is going to be "DAWKINS (AND PROBABLY ALL ATHEISTS) ARE PRO-MOLESTING KIDS! SEE THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU TAKE GOD OUT OF YOUR LIFE! YOU TURN INTO A PEDOPHILE!!"

You know, honestly, I think what we really need is an outspoken celebrity atheist, who's also a hardcore, red-blooded heterosexual family man that likes steak and barbecues. I'd nominate our very own Darth Wong, except he's Canadian so it doesn't work.

[Grumman]

Dunno about the rest of you, but I feel really damned uncomfortable condemning Dawkins for having the wrong reaction to his own molestation.

Agreed. It reminds me of something we see in certain branches of feminism, where orthodoxy and supporting the cause have become more important than supporting women's rights.

That does not mean I agree with him in this case. There is a bit of a witch hunt going on today, but the victims are not men like this teacher, whose actions would have been sexual assault even if Dawkins had been an adult and even if he had not been one of his teachers.

[Sharp-kun]

Dunno about the rest of you, but I feel really damned uncomfortable condemning Dawkins for having the wrong reaction to his own molestation.

What's the "right" reaction?

I know someone who was abused in her early teens. She's mostly "over" it and doesn't let it bother her now (its almost 20 years on). Her complaint is when people learn about it they expect it to be the shadow over her life forever and don't seem to accept that she's put it behind her and that in her view she has more serious things to worry about now (ie kids and a job). Some people can't accept that for some reason and treat it as something that must scar the victim for life.

[Mr. Coffee]

That's beautiful. If Richard Dawkins was a member here I could troll him into getting himself banned.

[mr friendly guy]

The strawmen are going to be built here. That title is misleading.

My take on what he said.

a. He was a victim as a child

b. Its not as bad as some other victims because what the guy did to him and the other students were "mild" in comparison (no brainer here because he was just the victim of touched, and not rape etc which the other examples he gave)

c. The perp shouldn't get the same level of condemnation as more serious crimes and if he did, Dawkins would have to defend him. Again we don't mete out severe sentences for less severe crimes.

What is the big deal? Well there could be an element of puritanism in a nation (as the Americans tell me) where a flasher gets counted as a sex offender, thus is Dawkins isn't frothing at the mouth demanding the same condemnation/punishment for crimes big and small (or milder) he is perceived as defending the pedos. Yeah.

[Crown]

Dunno about the rest of you, but I feel really damned uncomfortable condemning Dawkins for having the wrong reaction to his own molestation.

What's the "right" reaction?

I know someone who was abused in her early teens. She's mostly "over" it and doesn't let it bother her now (its almost 20 years on). Her complaint is when people learn about it they expect it to be the shadow over her life forever and don't seem to accept that she's put it behind her and that in her view she has more serious things to worry about now (ie kids and a job). Some people can't accept that for some reason and treat it as something that must scar the victim for life.

I remember when we had a Roman Polanski thread on this board, the actual 13 year old victim is 40 something years old now and has a life and children actually told the press she wasn't obsessed with getting Polanski back to the US for trial and sentencing and people lost their mother fucking minds*.

Vympel (I believe) brought it into perspective correctly stating that it's the Crown/State vs Polanski and not the Victim vs Polanski to show why reasonable people should still be campaigning for his extradition. But some people just can't fathom the victim moving on.*


*This some people weren't necessarily on the board, jus the talking points flying around that particular revelation at the time.

[Scrib]

Yeah, I'm more uncomfortable about his decision to compare pedophilia and rape to religious indoctrination to make his point than anything else being implied. It seems..unwise, and the article rightly pointed out that he used a quite weak defense ("someone told me") most likely because he wanted to push his point.

It's bad enough that things like Stalinism are already (wrongly) associated with atheism in the popular mindset, now we have to deal with this shit too. The only take away from this for most people is going to be "DAWKINS (AND PROBABLY ALL ATHEISTS) ARE PRO-MOLESTING KIDS! SEE THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU TAKE GOD OUT OF YOUR LIFE! YOU TURN INTO A PEDOPHILE!!"

I think that if people are deep enough into the rabbit whole to swallow these arguments they'll get you in some other way anyway. I don't know,I've become skeptical about self-monitoring to appeal to conservatives.

[cosmicalstorm]

Obviously a lot of people are out to get him now that he began treating Islam like Christianity. I expect many more attempts to neutralize Dawkins via characther assasination.

[Covenant]

Really, saying that out loud does nothing but provide endless ammunition to religious apologists. It's bad enough that things like Stalinism are already (wrongly) associated with atheism in the popular mindset, now we have to deal with this shit too.

While I understand the knee-jerk reaction to "Oh god, now everytime hears I'm a non-theist they're going to say I support pedophilia," I don't think that's really the issue. Even if someone calls you to task on defending someone who belongs to a similar strain of thinking to you, you can readily blunt their sweeping accusation with the pretty clear evidence that belief in God certainly is no defense against pedophilia either. Then just say he's not defending what pedophiles do or feel, it was specifically about his reactions to the abuse he suffered, and just doesn't want people treating every form of abuse as if it was the same as murder. Lots of people, after they suffer some abuse or traumatic event, have lots of different reactions to it. For some it becomes a horribly scarring event. For others it is an uncomfortable, embarrassing thing that doesn't go on to dominate their lives. This is especially true of people who only have a brush with it rather than a daily, repeating, unending torment.

Honestly, people will try to take this out of context, but if he had come out in righteous condemnation you'd probably see them criticizing him for capitalizing on an event, for being vague or not genuinely having suffered it, or such. You can't win.

I also do understand that when we tell people that so-and-so is so bad that it must ruin your life, that it helps to ruin your life, rather than help you overcome it and see it within context. Contextualizing a trauma, while that sounds harsh, does help you gain some measure of command over it. But sometimes it doesn't matter what anyone else says, supportive or whatever, it'll still be traumatic. Children are so vulnerable!

I'm glad Dawkins got through this event without carrying it with him, but that's a very personal opinion. I don't think we really NEED to learn to take a nuanced stance against child abuse, even if that's a logical and reasonable thing to do. I respect his choice not to call out the teacher, but honestly, don't we believe we can be judged by our actions? Abusing children is a monstrous thing to do. If he had called this man out, it may have seemed unnecessary, but it wouldn't have sounded unfair or unjustified. I also don't think there's a lack of sympathy for the abused. If he had wanted to dip his cup into the well for a little sympathy, I think he would find it well stocked. No victim is going to reach out and find us unsympathetic, I would think.

I don't think any of us need to criticize him for not feeling the "right" way about his abuse. It's fine, it's just the way he feels. I'm really touchy about the way I was bullied as a kid, but it's not like I was only bullied for 30 seconds. I think that just about any 30 second encounter with horrible is the sort of thing you could get over, even if you certainly have no imperative to.

One thing I think we need to do is learn that we can be unemotional about something while still being legitimately wronged. I see, a lot, that people don't take the idea of "harm" seriously unless the person seems emotionally compromised. I wonder if Dawkins feels that the only way he can articulate a no-foolin' level of outrage is by getting a bit riled up? Or that doing it without being riled up just sounds fake or snarky?

I'm not sure. But I do know that people seem to go "That person is totally milking that tragedy" if they're getting mad and not crying about it. It might be related to some feeling that re-engaging with that event requires some emotional connection, and an emotional re-engagement with the event is naturally quite distasteful. The whole, "I've moved on, I'm not going to go back and deal with that now," thing. Most people would be happy to get repaid in terms of money by a company that stiffed them pretty bad. If your car simply fell apart one day, I'm fairly certain you'd be willing to deal with a bit of shit to get your 10,000 dollars back. Maybe it just seems unnecessary, or devoid of "value," when its emotional experience only? I'm rambling.

Anyway. His experience, his reaction. I feel better about the guy for being able to be so calm about it, but my own opinion is that we have an equal degree of responsibility to (as a public) ignore the concept of 'degrees' when it comes to abuse of children. This is an element of herd immunity here. He might not think what he suffered was so bad, but if this teacher was still teaching, he'd have a responsibility to call the guy out.