(Ed. Notes: Jim Uleman is Professor of Social Psychology, New York University, New York, NY. He received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in that field in 1966 and is Fellow of the American Psychological Association and American Psychological Society.

The Presbyterian Layman (PL), an unofficial outlet for reactionary Presbyterian opinion, remains a reliable showcase for misleading innuendo and damning distortion. One of their latest targets is the American Psychological Association (APA). The following quotes are from a posting on their website obtained 4/19/99, and a link from that site.

"Taking its marching orders from the American Psychological Association instead of Scripture, the New York Presbytery has approved a radical overture that would require repentance by people who believe homosexual activity is a sin... the overture would direct 'all agencies of the General Assembly to refrain from supporting, implementing or sponsoring therapies of ministries which attempt to alter a person's sexual orientation.'" The overture, #99-36, is supported by APA's scholarly finding that "no scientific evidence exists to support the effectiveness of any conversion therapies that try to change orientation." The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) is also quoted disapprovingly in that posting, for their position that "therapy directed specifically at changing sexual orientation is contraindicated since it can provoke guilt and anxiety while having little or no potential for achieving change in orientation." These statements by the APA and AAP are supported by the overwhelming preponderance of currently available research evidence. This is old news, as is PL's condemnation of them.

What's new is that in its effort to discredit this research and the APA, PL continues as follows: "the leading journal of the American Psychological Association recently published an article that said sex between children and adults is not harmful and, in fact, can be a positive experience for the child."

This statement is wrong or misleading in at least two ways. First, the article (by Rind, Tromovitch, and Bauserman in the 1998 Psychological Bulletin, 124, 22-53) states clearly in the abstract that "students with CSA [childhood sexual abuse] were, on average, slightly less well adjusted than controls" (p. 22); and again in the discussion that "CSA was associated with poorer psychological adjustment across the college samples" (p. 42). So the Layman's summary flatly contradicts the article.

Second, the implication of noting that the article is in "the leading journal" of the APA, right after discussing APA's official position on "conversion therapy," is that the article also represents an official APA position. However, as anyone familiar with any scientific literature knows, research articles often disagree with each other and are published by the same organization. The open contest of ideas and evidence -- apparently so foreign to the Layman -- is essential grist to the mill of scientific advance. Scientific journals routinely publish articles that challenge prior articles, as well as conventional wisdom. The only implication that can be drawn from this article's publication in "the leading journal of the" APA is that this article has survived a critical peer review of some of the leading experts in this field, and that they judged not that it is correct, but that it makes a contribution to the scientific discourse on the topic. This is a far cry from an official position of the APA. An official position is one on which there is a wide consensus of opinion, and which is supported by the overwhelming preponderance of scientific evidence. A single article cannot establish a scientific consensus.

"Then where," you might ask, "did the Layman get such a misleading characterization of this article?" The answer can be found by clicking on a link to get more details about the article. This link takes you not to the original article by Rind et al., but to an article by G. E. Veith titled "Tossing the Last Taboo," in the right-wing publication World. This article contains this same misleading characterization of the article, word for word. (Are the Layman and the World so intimately linked that they can quote from each other without quotation marks or attribution? By the evidence in these postings, they seem to be.) This article by Veith contains many more distortions and misleading innuendos. It's instructive to patiently compare them to the original APA article, point by point.

Veith notes that the "authors did not conduct any new research; rather they examined 59 other studies..." To the layperson, this probably implies that the Rind et al. article has less evidentiary value than an original piece of research. But in fact, Rind et al. use modern statistical methods of "meat-analysis" to rigorously and quantitatively combine previous research results, to obtain conclusions that are more reliable than any single study could produce. So Veith should have said that the authors used modern meta-analytic methods to rigorously and quantitatively examine 59 studies.

The major finding reported by Rind et al. is that "Basic beliefs about CSA in the general population were not supported" (p. 22). These beliefs include the idea that what is called CSA is always psychological devastating. Although there was poorer adjustment among students with CSA, as noted above, "this poorer adjustment could not be attributed to CSA because family environment (FE) was consistently confounded with CSA, [and] FE explained considerably more [about] adjustment... than CSA" (p. 22). This is a surprising finding, and certainly important enough to achieve prominence in the scientific literature.

But Veith cannot report it without distortions and innuendos. For example, in a section on students self- evaluations of their CSA experiences, Rind et al. report that "Overall, 72% of female experiences, but only 33% of male experiences, were reported to have been negative at the time. On the other hand, 37% of male experiences, but only 11% of female experiences, were reported as positive" (p. 36). Rind et al. also note that a few studies assessed participants' views of the effects on CSA on their current sex lives and attitudes. "For men, self-reported negative effects... were uncommon... 8.5%...For women... 13.1%" (pp. 36-37).

Veith reports these findings as follows. "Forty-two percent of the male college students actually viewed their abuse as 'positive' when looking back at it. Twenty-four percent to 37 percent of the men saw their abuse as having a positive influence on their current sex lives. Significantly, only 11 percent of the abused girls reported that their sexual experiences with an adult was 'positive'." These figures seem to have come from the tables in Rind et al., and they are inaccurate.

More importantly, it is Veith (not Rind et al.) who focuses on the percentage viewing CSA as "positive." Then, inaccurately insinuated that this "positive" emphasis is Rind's, Veith pounces on the straw man of his own making. He continues, "Even in their own terms, of course, such numbers are bogus: If 42 percent of abused boys thought their experience was positive, that means 58 percent did not. As for abused girls, 89 percent considered the experience negative." So he inaccurately reports Rind's findings; reports them with an emphasis that is not in the original article; and overlooks the simple fact that some participants considered the experience neither positive nor negative. Finally, he implies that Rind et al. did not believe their readers could subtract 42 or 11 from 100!

Veith's next statements are amazing. "Such numbers," he continues, "are heavily skewed toward homosexuality. If so many of the men considered their abuse to have been a good thing and 'a positive influence on their current sex lives,' this is simply more of the abundant evidence that child molesting turns its victims toward homosexuality." In fact, there is no mention of homosexuality in Rind et al. None of the 18 categories of problems or symptoms examined in these 59 studies, that might result from CSA, included homosexuality. If anything, this suggests that researchers in this field don't assess sexual orientation because they don't believe it is related to CSA. But in fact, it isn't even mentioned. Results of these studies are analyzed in terms of the child participant's sex, and there were differences (noted above). But the adult abuser's sex was coded and then never mentioned again, or compared with the child's, probably because it's a variable that has no effects on outcomes. (CSA ranged from exhibitionism to intercourse in these studies.) Veith seems to have seen homosexuals under the bed who aren't there.

Perhaps Veith assumes (probably correctly) that the adults in CSA are largely male. This would make most boys' CSA experiences "homosexual." But this would also make most CSA heterosexual, since CSA was about four times as frequent with girls as with boys in these samples. Does this show that CSA leads to heterosexuality? Of course not. But it shows nothing about homosexuality either.

Veith then goes on to distort Rind et al.'s central point. He accurately quotes them as stating that "Classifying a behavior as abuse simply because it is generally viewed as immoral or defined as illegal is problematic," but omits "because such a classification may obscure the true nature of the behavior and its actual causes and effects" (p. 45). Instead, Veith claims that the authors want us to "not be so judgmental.... Science is supposed to avoid value judgments. The great science of psychology, therefore, should stop using negative terms like 'child abuse'..."

This is not the authors' position at all. They repeatedly offer a clear distinction between a "scientific definition, consistent with findings in the current review" (p. 46), and moral and legal judgments about these behaviors. In this context, they suggest definitions that "focus on the young person's perception of his or her willingness to participate and his or her reactions to the experience. A willing encounter with positive reactions would be labeled simply adult-child sex, a value-neutral term." (p. 46) Veith quotes only this last sentence, implying that the authors morally endorse such encounters. They do not, and they go on to suggest that "If a young person felt that he or she did not freely participate in the encounter and if her or she experienced negative reactions to it, then child sexual abuse, a term that implies harm to the individual, would be valid. Moreover, the term child should be restricted to nonadolescent children" (p. 46).

Veith charges that "The desire to be 'value-neutral' about the subject is simply an attempt to rule the moral issue out of consideration... The insistence on 'value-neutral' terminology for sex abuse is not neutral at all, but advances the ideology that children are fair game for sexual predators." But far from trying to "rule moral issues out of consideration," Rind et al. address their relevance directly in their concluding paragraph.