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Chapter 30 Sacred Values, Politics, and Moral Panic: A Potent Mix Biasing the Science behind Child Sexual Abuse and Related Phenomena Bruce Rind Moral Panic Bias in Child Sexual Abuse Research: A Personal Case Study "The nature of implicit values within morality and politics has been highly variable across time and place, being based on differing and often changing sociopolitical ideologies. Science, by contrast, concerns what is objectively true in a more permanent sense, not what is currently desirable or fashionable. Nevertheless, morality, politics, and science have frequently been conflated—particularly in the social sciences—which can bias the science (Haidt, 2011). To be sure, morality and politics play important and legitimate roles—not just in society but also in the social sciences in particular. In society, morality attempts to structure behavior to enable communal living, and politics can act as a means to promote what is seen as good and ameliorate what is seen as bad. In the social sciences, morality and politics can motivate researchers to investigate important issues of societal concern. For example, research on homosexuality before the mid-1970s was motivated by its intense conflict with the morals and laws of the day, which prompted some researchers, accepting these morals and laws, to search for etiology and treatment (e.g., Bieber, 1962; Socarides, 1975), while prompting other researchers, adopting what are now called progressive values, to interrogate the psychological claims-making derived from these morals and laws (e.g., Hooker, 1957; Tripp, 1975). In these contrasting approaches, it is not the motivational aspect that was problematic—before the mid-1970s, either side might have been right given the knowledge of the day, and each of their differing motives could be seen to valid. What would have been, or was, problematic, however, was conflating moral-political motives with factual conclusions, such that the latter were constructed to fit the former rather than follow any sort of systematic empiricism accompanied by valid inference. In general, this kind of bias in the social sciences may ensue because the researcher is partisan, committed above all else to a given morality and politics, or is prone to yield to dominant moral-political pressures in order to avoid conflict (Bailey, 2019; Rind, 2019a). The problem is greater to the extent that morality and politics are more deeply intertwined with the research topic, as they have been in the area of homosexuality. In general in the social sciences, this entanglement has been most evident within the areas of sex, gender, and race (Haidt, 2011). In this chapter, I discuss some of my own sexuality research concerning “child sexual abuse” (CSA), a topic whose entanglement with moral and political interests has been especially acute since the mid-1970s, with the result that the potential for bias in research on it has been high. In the context of radically shifting cultural ideologies regarding sexual behavior in the 1970s, with some boundaries of right and wrong being moved or weakened (e.g., homosexuality) and others being fortified (e.g., sex involving minors), various researchers began delving into the nature of CSA, rejecting non-alarmist views that dominated professional opinion up to that point and replacing them with alarmist ones (Finkelhor, 1979; Jenkins, 1998). The authority provided by newly proffered alarmist professional opinion, on top of other social forces of the time, shortly sparked moral panic in the 1980s (see below), which has persisted ever since in one form or another (Angelides, 2019; Jenkins, 1998, 2006; Lancaster, 2011; Nathan & Snedeker, 1995). As argued here and in my studies (e.g., Rind, 2009), the moral panic, in turn, acted as a particularly potent form of moral-political influence on psychological research regarding all behaviors classifiable as CSA, with bias being amplified regarding factual conclusions. For making these arguments, my works have in turn been counterattacked as themselves supposedly being morally or politically biased. Clearly, then, an examination of moral-political bias regarding “knowledge” about the nature and effects of CSA is in order, and that is the mission of this chapter. [...]" He goes through (it seems) the entire history of his relevant publications! Incredible to have it all "pulled together" as he has done. Well worth a read! M. |