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Should Therapists Have to Tell the Cops if Their Clients Are Looking at Child Porn?

In California, if you tell a medical professional you've checked out underage nudes, they're required to report you to the police.
Photo via Flickr user Kuba Bożanowsk

While pedophiles might be the lowest people on the totem pole of society, we don't really know much about how many there are or what makes them tick. One reason is mandatory reporting laws that keep them from seeking psychological help: If someone who's violated a kid tells his or her therapist, that professional is legally required to report the crime to the cops—as they would when told about about any other crime. So people who have abused children and want to stop have little recourse other than turning themselves in, going to jail, and in all likelihood, getting the shit beaten out of them.

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But what about people who are attracted to kids yet have never laid a finger on one? In the United States, there's no way for a would-be pedophile to seek help before he or she acts on their urges. And in August of last year, California made it even harder for those with sexual disorders to get assistance: Assembly Bill 1775 amended the Child Abuse and Neglect Reporting Act so that therapists are now required to report any patient who has looked at kiddie porn.

Last Friday, three therapists sued the attorneys general of LA County and the state of California, claiming that the assembly bill violated patients' confidentiality rights. They say it's hurt their businesses and—perhaps paradoxically—will end up hurting kids in the long run.

"Since the law went into effect on January 1, I'm having people come in who are reluctant to talk", plaintiff Don Mathews, who heads up the Impulse Treatment Center in Walnut Creek, told me. "They say, 'Why should I talk to you if you're going to be a police officer instead of a therapist?'"

The plaintiffs make the case that not all people who seek out child porn are pedophiles. For one, they could be kids who are sexting with their boyfriends or girlfriends. By telling their therapists about this relatively normal teenage interaction, they might be setting themselves up to be branded as sex offenders for distributing illegal images.

When it comes to adults, just admitting you've looked at certain material online would make you an imminent threat in the eyes of California authorities. That doesn't really make sense, according to the complaint, because it's super easy to get child porn on the Internet, and illegal sites are increasingly just another part of the repertoire for those who use taboo images in order to get off.

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According to the complaint, these any-kind-of-sex addicts "typically have no prior criminal history, have never expressed a sexual interest toward children, and are active and voluntary participants in psychotherapy to treat their particular sexual disorder, which often involves compulsive viewing of pornography of all kinds on the internet."

Mathews points to the fact that "child porn" involves anyone under 18, but that "teen" is perhaps the most popular smutty search term in the world. He says that not only is it normal for men to be attracted to minors, but a "disturbing amount" are aroused by children of all ages. He pointed to a study in which scientists hooked men's penises up to a plethysmograph and found that around 30 percent of them were turned on by kids.

"So it's not even that uncommon to find nude pictures of children at least a little bit erotic," he says. "The real issue is do you pursue the pictures and do you hurt children. The answer there seems to be 'no.' That 30 percent is not all pedophiles."

The plaintiffs are building their cases on the gap between child-attracted people and actual offenders, but according to Michael Seto, one of the top researchers in the world on pedophilia, assessing how those populations diverge is extremely complicated. He told me that only about 1 percent of the adult male population is made up of true pedophiles, but added that researchers are typically stuck working with people who have been referred to court-ordered counseling after having already offended.

In a literature review he conducted for the journal Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment in 2010, Seto found only three studies on the topic that looked at self-reported pedophiles. Those studies found the percentages of people who both looked at child porn and had molested a kid to be 32.8 percent, 57.4 percent and 47.8 percent, respectively. While there's not a lot of data on the issue, the small amount that exists makes clear that there are at least some people who could use could psychological treatment and are now barred from seeking it under California law.

"We know therapy works," Mathews says," so why are we sabotaging therapy?"

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