FACSAFoundation.org Shattering The Silence Tour Documentary Project February 2015 Volume 3 | Page 32

told The Sunday Telegraph last week that “what I wrote was completely wrong and
it is a matter of deep regret that it could in any way have made things more
difficult [for victims]”. He said: “The literature [scientific evidence] was so poor in
1981, people just didn’t realise what was going on. There was a lack of
understanding at the academic level.” Dr Powell said he had never been a member
of PIE.
In other academic quarters, with rather fewer excuses, that lack of understanding
appears to be reasserting itself. The Cambridge University conference, on July 4-5
last year, was about the classification of sexuality in the DSM, a standard
international psychiatric manual used by the police and courts.
After a fierce battle in the American Psychiatric Association (APA), which
produces it, a proposal to include hebephilia as a disorder in the new edition of the
manual has been defeated. The proposal arose because puberty in children has
started ever earlier in recent decades and as a result, it was argued, the current
definition of paedophilia – pre-pubertal sexual attraction – missed out too many
young people.
Ray Blanchard, professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto, who led the
APA’s working group on the subject, said that unless some other way was found of
encompassing hebephilia in the new manual, that was “tantamount to stating that
the APA’s official position is that the sexual preference for early pubertal children
is normal”.
Prof Blanchard was in turn criticised by a speaker at the Cambridge conference,
Patrick Singy, of Union College, New York, who said hebephilia would be abused
as a diagnosis to detain sex offenders as “mentally ill” under US “sexually violent
predator” laws even after they had completed their sentences.
But perhaps the most controversial presentation of all was by Philip Tromovitch, a
professor at Doshisha University in Japan, who stated in a presentation on the
“prevalence of paedophilia” that the “majority of men are probably paedophiles
and hebephiles” and that “paedophilic interest is normal and natural in human
males”.
O’Carroll, the former PIE leader, was thrilled, and described on his blog how he
joined Prof Tromovitch and a colleague for drinks after the conference. “The
conversation flowed most agreeably, along with the drinks and the beautiful River
Cam,” he said.