Do people who rape children, or fantasize about sexually abusing them, deserve sympathy – because they were born with the brains of pedophiles?
That’s the question a prominent scientist and a well-known anchor at
CNN have asked in the wake of the recent Jerry Sandusky scandal.
CNN recently featured a story by James Cantor,
a homosexual psychologist and scientist at the Sexual Behaviors Clinic
of the Center for Addiction and Mental Health who serves as associate
professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto.
“It appears that one can be born with a brain predisposed to
experience sexual arousal in response to children,” he wrote in his CNN
piece.
He continued, “Cases of child molestation that involve long strings
of victims over the course of years illustrate what can happen when
someone gives in to, or outright indulges, his sexual interests,
regardless of its potential damage on others. It is those cases that
dominate headlines and provoke revulsion toward pedophiles.
“But they are rare. An untold number of cases merit sympathy.
“The science suggests that they are people who, through no fault of
their own, were born with a sex drive that they must continuously
resist, without exception, throughout their entire lives. Little if any
assistance is ever available for them.”
According to the American Psychological Association,
Cantor is passionate about the neurological underpinnings of sexual
behavior and jokes, “I feel lucky to have found a way to stimulate my
brain intellectually by indulging myself in thinking about sex all the
time.”
He has studied the brains of male pedophiles using magnetic resonance imaging. Cantor explained his findings:
“Pedophilic men have significantly less white matter, which is the
connective tissue that is responsible for communication between
different regions in the brain. Pedophiles perform more poorly on
various tests of brain function, tend to be shorter in height and are
three times more likely to be left-handed or ambidextrous
(characteristics that are observable before birth). Although
nonbiological features may yet turn up to be relevant, it is difficult,
if not impossible, to explain the research findings without there being a
strong role of biology.”
He explains, from his experience with such individuals, that
pedophiles act on their sexual urges and molest children “when they feel
the most desperate.”
“Yet, much of what society does has been to increase rather than decrease their desperation,” he wrote.
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