SHE ASKED FOR IT

Finally, a self-defense. In my letter, I wrote that “child abuse is always and everywhere an evil of extraordinary gravity.” Eberstadt has the gall to thank me for this “clarification.” Clarification of what? She has no, repeat no, evidence that I have ever said anything even faintly different. Her only source is a piece I wrote in the New York Times Magazine about our cultural resistance to good news. It started with an account of the discrepancy between falling crime and pregnancy rates and our continued belief that we are still somehow in cultural decline. It went on to discuss Bill Bennett’s Cultural Indicators, as well as a much-reviled study that suggested that legalizing abortion in the 1970s had reduced crime in the 1990s, and a largely ignored paper that argued that post-Vietnam suicide rates were far lower than previously thought. For good measure, I threw in the APA paper on child sexual abuse. Here’s what I wrote: “An equally sour reception greeted a study published by the American Psychological Association. Assessing data on effects of child-molestation, the paper found that lasting psychological trauma among adult survivors of abuse, particularly for men, was much less than feared. The results from 36 peer-reviewed studies and 23 dissertations showed that victims of child abuse seemed on average only slightly less well adjusted by the time they got to college than their peers. A reason for relief? Of course not. Outraged members of the religious right accused the A.P.A. of tolerating pedophilia and launched a crusade to punish the organization. The authors stressed that their findings ”do not imply that moral or legal definitions of or views on the behaviors currently classified as [child sexual abuse] should be abandoned or even altered,” but the House of Representatives voted 355-0 to condemn the article anyway. That’ll teach them to look on the bright side.” So it’s your call. Was that a subtle endorsement of pedophilia? Was it even anti-anti-pedophilia? There’s only one fair conclusion, I think. Eberstadt defiles the noble cause of opposing child-abuse by tactics outside the realm of civilized discourse. I’m sorry to go on. But the record should be set straight.