Do Any Studies Claim To Show That Homosexuals Are More Likely To Molest Children?
One individual has claimed to have data that prove homosexuals to be child molesters at a higher rate than heterosexuals. That person is
Paul Cameron. As detailed elsewhere on this site,
Cameron’s survey data are subject to so many methodological flaws as to be virtually meaningless. Even so, his assertions are often quoted by antigay organizations in their attempts to link homosexuality with child sexual abuse.
In a 1985 article published in
Psychological Reports, Cameron purported to review published data to answer the question, “Do those who commit homosexual acts disproportionately incorporate children into their sexual practices?” (p. 1227). He concluded that “at least one-third of the sexual attacks upon youth are homosexual” (p. 1228) and that “those who are bi- to homosexual are proportionately much more apt to molest youth” than are heterosexuals (p. 1231).
Cameron’s claims hinge on the fallacious assumption that all male-male molestations are committed by homosexuals. Moreover, a careful reading of Cameron’s paper reveals several false statements about the literature he claimed to have reviewed.
For example, he cited the Groth and Birnbaum (1978) study mentioned previously as evidencing a 3:2 ratio of “heterosexual” (i.e., female victim) to “homosexual” (i.e., male victim) molestations, and he noted that “54% of all the molestations in this study were performed by bisexual or homosexual practitioners” (p. 1231). However, Groth and Birnbaum reported that
none of the men in their sample had an exclusively homosexual adult sexual orientation, and that
none of the 22 bisexual men were more attracted to adult males than to adult females. The “54%” statistic reported by Cameron doesn’t appear anywhere in the Groth and Birnbaum (1978) article, nor does Cameron explain its derivation.
It also is noteworthy that, although Cameron assumed that the perpetrators of male-male molestations were all homosexual, he assumed that not all male-female molestations were committed by heterosexuals. **He incorporated a “bisexual correction” into his data manipulations to increase further his estimate of the risk posed to children by homosexual/bisexual men. **
In the latter half of his paper, Cameron considered whether “homosexual teachers have more frequent sexual interaction with their pupils” (p. 1231). Based on 30 instances of sexual contact between a teacher and pupil reported in ten different sources published between 1920 and 1982, Cameron concluded that “a pupil would appear about 90 times more likely to be sexually assaulted by a homosexual practitioner” (p. 1232); the ratio rose to 100 times when Cameron added his bisexual correction.
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A subsequent paper by Cameron and others (Cameron, Proctor, Coburn, Forde, Larson, & Cameron, 1986) described data collected in a door-to-door survey in seven U.S. cities and towns, and generally repeated the conclusions reached in Cameron (1985). Even Cameron himself has admitted that his conclusions in this study are “based upon small numbers of data points” (Cameron, 2005, p. 230). As before, male-male sexual assaults were referred to as “homosexual” molestations (e.g., Abstract, p.327) and the perpetrators’ sexual orientation apparently was not assessed. This study also suffers from fatal methodological problems, which are detailed
elsewhere on this site.
