Critical letter nr 1

Open Letter to the UNESCO Expert Meeting, Paris, 18-19 January 1999.

16 January 1999 [No longer on the Web]

Ladies and Gentlemen, participants of the conference:

I support the struggle to win greater public consensus to support the rights of children and adolescents. I applaud the UN's fight to improve the overall quality of the lives of the young.

So it was with genuine interest, I read, on the World Wide Web, the text introducing the public to the UNESCO Expert Meeting entitled: "Sexual Abuse of Children, Child Pornography and Paedophilia on the Internet: an International Challenge."

I was disappointed, however, to read that, instead of presenting scientific analyses and clarification, in harmony with its UN mandate to educate governments and the public, the pre-conference paper for the UNESCO Expert-Meeting disseminates unscientific concepts.

Quote:

"It is always helpful to clarify terms. The meaning of the sexual abuse of children is usually self evident, until one starts to quibble between research definitions and those used in legal work and jurisprudence."

Then the UNESCO pre-conference paper on the web presents the public with superficial definitions of the term "paedophilia" without reference to the reliable and peer-reviewed scientific literature.

Quote:

"Most dictionaries define paedophilia as a sexual aberration or perversion in which the preferred sexual objects are prepubescent children, usually under the age of 13. Paedophilia is thus a synonym for the sexual abuse of children. Because this is usually understood as a psychiatric description, law enforcement agents often employ a broader definition of paedophilia to include adults who have a sexual attraction for persons legally considered children."

But paedophilia is not a "synonym for the sexual abuse of children," even if law enforcement agents, legislatures, and the mass media in some parts of the world confuse these issues.

Paedophilia is the erotic and/or sexual orientation (or preference) of adults toward children under 13 years of age (American Psychiatric Association Diagnostic and Statistical Manual [DSM] IV). Scientists and psychiatric diagnosticians widely agree on this simple definition for now.

The term "child sexual abuse" cannot be responsibly included in any UNESCO definition of paedophilia. The word "paedophilia" would then become a negatively valued expression, and couldn't be used any more by psychiatrists, anthropologists, and sexual scientists to describe and understand the phenomenon -- as intended by sexual science, which introduced this term ("Paedophilia Erotica", Krafft-Ebing) more than 100 years ago. In its pre- conference paper, the UNESCO accepts the corruption of the scientific "jargon" without justification and without the informed agreement of the world's scientific community.

In the UNESCO pre-conference paper, the authors restate:

"...the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, now adopted by 191 Member States, provides an international definition of the Child as being anyone under 18." (Article 1).

But the UNESCO pre-conference paper then misleads the reader about what the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child says. Article 34 of this Convention, which is about child sexual abuse, limits itself to unlawful sexual activity and the exploitative use of children.

Article 34 of the Convention reads:

"States Parties undertake to protect the child from all forms of sexual exploitation and sexual abuse. For these purposes, States Parties shall in particular take all appropriate national, bilateral and multilateral measures to prevent:

(a) The inducement or coercion of a child to engage in any *unlawful* sexual activity;

(b) The exploitative use of children in prostitution or other *unlawful* sexual practices;

(c) The *exploitative use of children* in pornographic performances and materials."

The age of consent is lower than 18 in most of the countries of the world. Therefore, the definition of "child", "children", and "paedophilia" cannot be accurately linked to the adolescent age of 18 in this context.

Furthermore, UNESCO paper fails to define the term "child sexual abuse". This failure, and the unscientific re-definition of the terms "pedophilia", "child", and "children", lead the Conference into extreme positions in a world context and to unbalanced and culturally insensitive action. Without formal authorization from the governments that signed the UN-Convention on the Rights of the Child, the conference seems to justify the extension of repressive governmental activities in those countries and cultures which do not accept or follow the lead of the Anglo-Saxon/American and neo-Puritan understanding of how these matters must be dealt with by government. For a conference, sponsored by a world-wide organization like UNESCO, this is unacceptable in any of its papers.

I want to state clearly that I do not advocate behaviors or activities that bring harm to the young. I condemn the exploitative use of children, and would support rational and balanced efforts by the United Nations to eliminate it.

I respectfully ask the conference to consider my concerns.

With my best wishes for a positive outcome for children and adolescents from this conference,

Somebody from Germany