FAMILY RESEARCH REPORT	Journal of the Family Research Institute Founded 1982
Are Boys Safer in Boy Scouts Than in Big Brothers?			Vol. 17 No. 8 Dec 2002

The Boy Scouts and Big Brothers both have long track records in serving our kids. But occasionally, in each, boys are homosexually molested by their leaders. To guard against this, both the Boy Scouts and Big Brothers run background checks on their leaders/mentors to exclude men with known sexual abuse histories. Notably different, however, is the way that each organization handles homosexuality. In the Boy Scouts, volunteers must subscribe in writing to a policy that explicitly prohibits homosexual leaders. By contrast, for the past two decades, the Big Brothers -- taking the lead of the National Association of Social Workers and the American Psychological Association -- has followed an explicit non-discrimination policy for those who practice homosexuality.

The practical consequence of these policies is that a parent cannot choose to have her son around a homosexual when her son joins the Boy Scouts, because the Scouts is institutionally opposed to leaders who engage in homosexuality. The documentation a potential leader signs and to which he promises allegiance assures the organization that he does not participate in homosexuality. Consequently, any homosexual leader in the Scouts has lied about his sexual desires toward the same sex.

Big Brothers, on the other hand, explicitly does not discriminate against homosexuals. It does ask about sexual preferences on its intake questionnaire for mentors. Then, if upon reviewing his qualifications, a parent notices that a proposed mentor is homosexual, she is informed of the Big Brothers’ non-discrimination policy, and can reject him for her child.1 But if there is no specific objection by the parent, homosexuals can sign up as “Big Brothers” with no problem.

Furthermore, while slightly over two-thirds of Big Brother mentors meet with their charge in the boy’s day-to-day living, under the consent and knowledge of the parents and/or supervising social workers, the other third work on-site at schools with children flagged by teachers as possibly needing mentoring. Parents (or teachers) do not know the sexual preferences of these mentors, who are selected according to Big Brothers policy. Since a mother has to ‘opt out’ of a homosexual mentor, which takes some effort, and would be unaware of whether a school-based mentor was homosexual, the playing field is tilted toward those homosexuals who want to serve as Big Brothers.

The point of this discussion is that it would seem to be easier for a man who engages in homosexuality to join the Big Brothers than the Boy Scouts. Consequently, it seems likely that there would be proportionately more homosexuals in Big Brothers than the Boy Scouts overall, and that therefore the Big Brothers ought to have a higher rate of sexual molestation of boys than the Boy Scouts. But how much an unwillingness to lie actually inhibits homosexuals from seeking to serve in the Scouts is unknown. We don’t know how many Scoutmasters simply keep their homosexuality a secret. Also, experience teaches us that a fair number of homosexuals are willing to lie to get access to boys.

Big Brothers v. Boy Scouts

The policies of the Boy Scouts and Big Brothers clearly differ regarding homosexuality. Since men who engage in homosexuality are considerably more apt to commit child molestation than non-homosexuals,2 the Big Brothers ought to perhaps have more homosexual-molestation problems. But how would you test this assertion? Is there any way to show that boys are ‘safer’ under the Boy Scouts’ policy than that of the Big Brothers?

Since both organizations have a reputation to maintain, even if they know about acts of child molestation, they are not likely to reveal them -- the recent publicity given to child molesting priests in the Catholic Church testifies to that fact. Indeed, spokesman Michael Hackman of Big Brothers-Big Sisters (BBBS) indicated recently that while the rate of molestation was low (averring that it was “0.1%”), he would not share the precise figures broken out by the sexual preference question from its application form. The national BBBS also ignored repeated requests by FRI for the precise figures in late November and early December.

There are undoubtedly many, many events of child molestation in our society which are known only to the molester and the victim. Given this reality, institutions like the Boy Scouts or Big Brothers could only possibly uncover a limited number of these illicit sexual relationships. Further, many perpetrators use their status as a Big Brother or Scout leader to see (and sexually assault) boys in places and at times other than at ‘official’ meetings. Consequently, many acts of molestation occur outside the supervised functions of either group. In these cases, the leader or the mentor uses his status to have his way with the boy when they are unsupervised.

So how are we to proceed? What would be an ‘objective’ way to gather the evidence about the Big Brothers and Boy Scouts?

There is no “definitive” way to do it. Not only is there no ‘official register’ of adult-underage sexual activity in the U.S., but institutions have all kinds of reasons for suppressing any public knowledge of molestations that occur ‘on their watch.’

Part of the problem is evident if we consider the broader question of ‘how much child sexual abuse occurs every year in America?’ No one knows. And there is no certain way to find out.

If we turn to police reports or child protection agency records there are problems aplenty. In New York, for instance, medical personnel are required to report any reasonable suspicion of sexual abuse by parents. But medical personnel are not required to report reasonable suspicions of sexual abuse by Boy Scout leaders, teachers, religious leaders, Big Brothers, etc. Each state has different rules for reporting child molestation. Further, the age of consent as well as the age at which a sexual relationship with a mentor or person in charge is considered sexually exploitive varies from state to state. So simply looking at the FBI crime statistics report for the nation -- a compilation of all police reports -- in no way assures that ‘the real’ sexual abuse rates are being examined.

The same could be said for reports based upon observations of social or child protection workers -- after all, these professionals are usually called in to deal with fairly dysfunctional families. Indeed, one of the frequent reasons they are ‘called in’ is because a child has been found to be sexually abused. As such, social work statistics are probably biased toward family-molestations -- something quite prevalent among ‘dysfunctional’ families, which tend to have a myriad of relational problems of all kinds.

Those in prison or jail are probably not a representative sample either, since ‘loners’ are less apt to get the kinds of community support (or quality of legal counsel) that might keep those who have a family or who are reasonably well-connected from being incarcerated in the first place (as opposed to getting parole or bargaining for other types of penalties). And doing a random population survey, such as what Family Research Institute did in 1983, poses problems as well. Almost always, 20-50% of potential respondents don’t cooperate with the investigators. These ‘missing respondents’ and their ‘missing information’ could skew the findings in any direction.

Even if they cooperate, reports by survey respondents can only be taken at face value by assuming that people remember, are willing to share, and want to tell the ‘objective truth’ if they report that they were sexually molested by an adult. We know that some people ‘fudge’ answers ‘just for fun’ or even out of vengeance; others refuse to answer highly sensitive questions; and still others have perspectives on abuse that do not match the legal standards for illegal contact between an adult and a child.

Bottom line: each kind of estimate -- whether from police reports, prisoner interviews, social work records, or questionnaires -- has its uses, but each has built-in limitations as well.

These problems account for some of the serious discrepancies in the various estimates of the prevalence of child molestation. For instance, the National Association of Social Workers, in conjunction with some University of Pennsylvania researchers, concluded3 that between 300,000 to 400,000 children in the U.S., “including roughly equal numbers of girls and boys, each year fall victim to some form of sexual exploitation.” On the other hand, a recent Canadian Justice Department study concluded that “seventy to 80 percent of victims are females. An increasing number of males are victims. Victims were most often under age 12 and 15 to 22 per cent were under age 5”4

A fairly standard medical textbook5 on child abuse notes that “boys typically represent about 20 to 25% and up to 40% of reported victims.... In retrospective surveys of adults and college students, about one third of child victims are male” (p. 191) In 1992,6 Freund and Watson estimated that the ratio of female to male pedophilic victims was about 2 to 1, even as the proportion of heterosexual to homosexual men is about 20 to 1. They concluded that their findings generated support for the notion that “a homosexual development notably often does not result in androphilia [sexual desire for men] but in homosexual pedophilia [desire for boys].” (p. 41)

On balance, these discrepancies in the estimates of child molestation rates are probably largely due to the different databases from which the estimates were made. Even as fundamental a question as to whether boys or girls are the more frequently molested is still not completely known.

Another Way

Despite these limitations, there is an entirely different way to record molestations. When it is discovered that a priest molests a boy, or a pastor molests a girl, it often makes the news. Similarly, if it is discovered that a Big Brother or Scoutmaster molested a boy, that too often makes the news. Of course, many molestations never get reported, and newspaper editors always have to decide whether a particular story is ‘newsworthy.’ Still, given their standing in the community, molestations by a Scout leader or a Big Brother are almost always considered ‘news.’

What if all the news stories about child molestations in the Big Brother and Boy Scout organizations for a fairly long time were tallied? Might that not provide a reasonable way to compare the two organizations? While a few such discovered molestations might get ‘missed’ or even at times ‘suppressed’ by the press, it does not seem too likely that most would be. The organization with proportionately the ‘most news stories about molestation’ might appear to be ‘the worst of the two.’ Especially if the search of newspaper stories were nationwide or even worldwide.

Of course, it is important to keep in mind that the Boy Scouts is a much larger organization than Big Brothers. According to their spokespersons, last year Big Brothers served approximately 121,000 boys in the U.S., while the Boy Scouts served approximately 3,177,000. Since the Boy Scouts serve about 26 times the number of boys as Big Brothers, the ratio of child molestation news reports -- and not the absolute number -- should be used when judging which organization’s policy is ‘the better’ at keeping homosexual predators at bay.

Newspapers Have Changed

In the not-too-distant past, newspapers were written and ‘pasted up’ in a mechanical way. If you wanted to find out if there had been a story about a Big Brother or Boy Scout leader molestation, you would have to physically read the entirety of each newspaper in each community from which you sampled. If you wanted to cover a fair number of years of publication, reading each paper for every day would be a tremendous task. And if you set yourself to do such a prodigious amount of reading -- even if you could assemble all the newspapers for a considerable portion of the U.S. -- you might ‘miss’ a story. After all, no one is a ‘perfect’ reader, turning pages is tedious enough to tire anyone, pages might stick together or be missing, and you would never be aware of your mistake. A few ‘misses’ here and there might dramatically skew the results for something that gets reported fairly rarely. How would you be sure that whatever results you got were accurate and that you covered all the relevant stories?

But the way today’s newspapers are put together makes a rough comparison of the Boy Scouts and Big Brothers possible. Over the past decade or so, all the largest newspapers have been put together utilizing computers. Indeed, every day the very largest newspapers -- all across the world -- are marked up and compiled on computers. As such, if you wanted to see if there was a story about ‘child molestation’ (the legal term for the sexual abuse of a child) involving a Big Brother or Boy Scout leader, you could perform a computerized search of any large-circulation paper for any given day, just by putting those words into the search engine. A list of the relevant stories containing those words would come out as the result of the search.

Searching the Los Angeles Times in this way gives some information not only about Los Angeles, but also quite a bit about Southern California (as well as national stories). If you also searched the San Francisco Chronicle you would get information about San Francisco and quite a bit about Northern California. If you added the San Diego Union-Tribune, you would add still further information about California. With these three newspapers you wouldn’t get ‘all the news about child molestation’ for the whole state of California -- not even ‘all the news about child molestation’ for those three cities. But you would capture a great deal of it.

Then, if you could get access to, say, a large number of the largest circulation newspapers in the world, and search each one of them day by day for a number of years, you might have a pretty good test of which organization, the Big Brothers or Boy Scouts, experienced more molestations of its boy-charges. More so if you could do this for 13 years worth of the 50 largest circulation newspapers in the world -- altogether you would have a reasonable basis upon which to test the records of these two organizations.

That is what the computerized database Academic Universe enables one to do. FRI typed in ‘Big Brother’ and ‘child molestation’ and searched the entire texts of the 50 largest newspapers in the world for the past 13 years. We did the same thing for ‘Boy Scouts’ and ‘child molestation.’ To provide some perspective, we also searched these newspapers for ‘father, stepfather, adoptive father, mother, step-mother, and adoptive mother’ along with ‘teacher,’ ‘policeman,’ ‘foster parent,’ ‘custodian,’ ‘janitor,’ and ‘child molestation.’ All of us wear many ‘hats’ of course. Even as a man may be a teacher, so he may also be a father. If a teacher who was a father molested a pupil, he was counted as a teacher-perpetrator. If the child were his own, then he was listed as a father-perpetrator. And if he molested a boy in his scout troop, he was counted as a Scout leader perpetrator. As much as was possible, the act of molestation was tied to the ‘hat’ the perpetrator was wearing at the time.

What We Found

Considering the total set of different articles in the newspapers about “child molestation,” 5,492 were found. But some of these articles were editorials or repetitious of a particular molestation (e.g., scores of stories about Michael Jackson’s molestation of a boy appeared as news stories and commentaries). So a total of only 1,731 unique stories, involving 1,981 different perpetrators and 5,253 victims, were uncovered. Even these figures may be somewhat in error. For instance, since every story did not give the name of the perpetrator and sometimes different numbers of victims were reported in different stories about the same event or series of events, there may be some over-counting.

For 1989 through 2001, these 50 major newspapers -- which cover the nation and world as well as large areas outside the cities in which they are published -- reported the following:

• 99 parents or stepparents sexually abused 144 of their children (25 [28%] of the 90 fathers and one of the 6 mothers whose sexual proclivities could be determined engaged in homosexuality; these 25 fathers sexually abused at least 30 sons and 13 daughters);
• 8 Big Brothers molested 12 boys;
• 25 Scout leaders molested 67 boys;
• 7 janitors/custodians molested 24 girls;
• 58 policemen/jailers molested 216 children (137 boys, 41 girls, and 30 of unreported sex);
• 233 teachers molested 791 pupils (those 90 male teachers who engaged in homosexuality [more than one-third of the perpetrators] molested 392 boy and 25 girl victims);
• 13 psychologists/psychiatrists/counselors molested 45 children (8 of the 10 therapists whose sexual proclivities could be determined, including one female counselor, engaged in homosexuality; they molested 35 boys and a girl);
• 22 foster parents molested 32 foster-children (3 women sexually abused 3 girls and 12 men violated 13 boys);
• 13 politicians molested 21 children (the 4 known to have engaged in homosexuality molested 9 boys),
• 9 bus drivers molested 29 children (the 5 known to have engaged in homosexuality molested 20 boys).

Interpreting the Results

How are we to interpret these figures in judging between the Big Brothers and Boy Scouts when it comes to molestation rates?

First, as noted above, very few molestations ‘make the papers.’ In our large, nationwide random urban study,7 1.2% (57 of 4,676 adults) reported that they had had, as pupils, “physical sexual contact” with at least one elementary or secondary teacher during their school career. In the 13 years of newspapers reviewed, 791 teacher-pupil sexual molestations involving 233 teachers were found. The number of pupils aged 5-14 years in the catchment areas of these 50 newspapers probably exceeded 50 million. And assuming that even as few as 0.5% of all pupils had sex with a teacher during the 13 year study-period, a quarter of a million molestations by teachers might have been discovered and thus reported by newspapers. But the newspaper stories only ‘caught’ about one one-thousandth of the ‘actual’ number of teacher-molestations.

The same was true of child-parent sexual interaction, since 34 (0.7%) of these same 4,676 respondents reported having had sex with a parent or stepparent. Yet in the newspaper stories 5 mothers had sex with 4 daughters and 10 sons; a stepmother had (along with the boy’s father) sex with a stepson; 3 adoptive fathers had sex with 3 adopted daughters; 38 fathers had sex with 64 daughters; 21 fathers had sex with 26 sons and 12 daughters; 2 fathers had sex with 2 children of unspecified sex; 24 stepfathers had sex with 27 stepdaughters; 4 stepfathers had sex with 4 stepsons and a stepdaughter; and a stepfather had sex with 3 stepchildren of unspecified sex. That is a total of 99 parents having sex with 144 children. Clearly, if the self-reports of adults in FRI’s nationwide survey were anywhere near to being “the truth,” the discovered molestations by parents were again only roughly one one-thousandth or so of the ‘actual’ number of molestations.

On a more consistent note, both the respondent-reports from our nationwide survey and the newspaper stories agreed in recording more molestations by teachers than by parents. It seems likely that proportionately fewer family molestations are discovered and make their way into the newspapers than happens with teacher molestations. After all, in ‘dysfunctional’ families, where many molestations are likely to occur, another molestation or two is not as likely to be reported or to be considered a ‘news item.’ But even in poorer neighborhoods, teachers who have sex with their pupils are ‘news.’

Secondly, it is critically important, but also very difficult, to gauge the relative risks to children of different kinds of molesters. Just counting the news stories is not enough. We also need to know how many kids were at risk in each type of situation, what we might term the base population. To get at least some crude estimates, we will concentrate on U.S. figures. The reasons for this are 1) the bulk of the 50 newspapers we searched report on areas of the U.S.; 2) not all the U.S. is covered by these papers, so we will roughly assume that the international catchment areas ‘make up’ for the missing U.S. territory; 3) we have much better base population estimates for the U.S. than for other countries.

We will also, strictly for ease of comparison, ignore the fact that the reported molestations occurred over a 13-year interval, and instead assume that all the molestations occurred last year. This allows us to speak of molestation rates in terms of people instead of person-years, which can be a bit more confusing.

Now, even if for the sake of making crude comparisons, we use the 2000 U.S. Census count and assume that there were an average of 40 million children aged 5-14 in the catchment areas of these papers, not all these children lived with a father or stepfather. Over 85% of these kids lived with at least one parent, and probably at least 70% were exposed to a father or stepfather pretty-much full-time. So it seems reasonable to assume that male parents had access to at least 28 million children aged 5-14 years, of which about 14 million were boys.

As for teachers, if we assume that every child goes to school of some sort, teachers were exposed to 40 million children aged 5-14 years old last year. Of the 40 million, about 20 million were boys. We also noted earlier that approximately 3.2 million boys were involved in Boy Scouts, and another 121,000 were involved with Big Brothers. Keeping these base populations in mind, and recognizing their limitations, we can now calculate relative molestation risks.

How Do the Rates of Molestation Compare?

• 25 fathers or stepfathers molested 30 of the 14,000,000 sons living with their male parent. That is, approximately one of every 466,700 boys was discovered to have been homosexually molested by his father or stepfather. The ratio of victims ran 3 heterosexual to 1 homosexual (i.e., 94 daughters to 30 sons). Likewise, the ratio of fathers who engaged in sex with their children was about 1 homosexual for every 3 heterosexuals (i.e., 25 homosexual to 63 heterosexual perpetrators).
• 27 Boy Scout leaders molested 67 of the 3,177,000 Boy Scouts. That is, approximately one of every 47,000 scouts was discovered to have been homosexually molested by a Scout leader.
• 90 male teachers molested 395 boy pupils of the 20 million boy students. That is, approximately one of every 50,600 boy pupils was discovered to have been homosexually molested by a teacher.
• 8 Big Brothers homosexually molested 12 of the 121,000 ‘little brothers’ in the program. That is, approximately one of every 10,000 boys was discovered to have been homosexually molested by a Big Brother.
• 23 foster parents molested 32 children. While no record is made of the precise number of children aged 5-14 years who are in foster care each year, perhaps between 350,000 to as many as half a million American children are cared for by foster parents. Even if all of these children were in the 5 to 14 age bracket, the rate of molestation by foster parents seems to be much higher than that of natural parents. Indeed, if 144 of 34,000,000 children exposed to one or both parents were molested, for a rate of about 1 of every 236,000 children, then foster children were molested at a rate of at least 32 of 500,000, or about 1 of every 15,600.

Making Sense of It All

Obviously, parents have the greatest exposure to children. Parents are with children almost every night, they see their children nude, they sometimes sleep with them, and they have access to their children when they are asleep, bathing, etc. So while there are some parents who don’t have daily contact with their child, it is fairly unusual for a parent not to see a child just about every day.

Teachers have a fair amount of exposure to children. But by far the bulk of it is in rather public settings. True, gym teachers may be around their pupils while they are nude or dressing. And teachers are sometimes one-on-one in semi-private conferences or tutoring with their pupils. Rarely however, except possibly on field trips, are teachers around sleeping children.

Boy Scout leaders and Big Brothers are around boys a lot. By policy, no Boy Scout leader is supposed to be alone with any boy while Boy Scout functions are underway. Likewise, a Big Brother must get a parent’s permission to take a boy overnight. But both systems permit access to boys in various states of dress and undress, usually when they are awake, but sometimes when they are asleep. And the status of “Scout leader” or “Big Brother” can lead to interactions with their charges outside the usual venues. So, in a number of respects, while a Big Brother or Scout leader may not see a child as often as teachers do, the child is apt to be more ‘at risk’ when he is with a Big Brother or Scout leader.

Since many foster children are placed in foster-homes for only days or weeks, rather than for their whole childhood, the risk of molestation by foster parents is undoubtedly even higher than the crude estimate computed above, likely putting the risk to children higher from foster parents than from any other of the situations that we examined. This ‘makes sense,’ since foster parents have the same access to children as natural parents, yet the children are not their own. As such, foster parents have ready access to any child that stirs their sexual interest, but not the same parental instincts to protect those children at all costs from sexual predators.

All of these factors must be considered in weighing child molestation risks: the type of caretaker, the amount of exposure to that caretaker, and the kind of exposure. Not having much of this information places significant limitations on the data compiled from the news stories. It is also undoubtedly the case that many, many more sexual assaults of boys in these five situations occurred than ‘made the paper.’ Of the 1,731 unique molestation stories over the 13 years, 679 (39%) concerned homosexual sex; of the 1,981 perpetrators in these 1,731 stories, 782 (39%) engaged in homosexuality; and of the 5,253 victims in these 1,731 stories, 3,187 (61%) were victimized by a person who engaged in homosexuality. But there is no guarantee that the same proportions would be found if ‘all’ the molestations cases had somehow been reported.

These figures should also not be taken to representative of all child molestation. We looked at specific types of molestation -- involving various sorts of caretakers and authority figures -- and each of these types was characteristically different. While sexual assaults by fathers and stepfathers, in particular, were disproportionately heterosexual, most (68%) foster-parents engaged in homosexuality with their charges. Likewise, Big Brother and Boy Scout leaders had only boys to pick on (although a male volunteer for the Girl Scouts in San Francisco managed to molest a few girls in the troop).

Only teachers fit the overall pattern rather well: 41% of the teachers engaged in homosexuality with their students and those students who were homosexually victimized accounted for 57% of all the victims.

But the initial question must still be answered: in which organization is a boy more apt to be safe from homosexual molestation? The Boy Scouts or the Big Brothers?

Clearly, a child with foster-parents has the greatest molestation risk -- by a considerable factor as compared to any of the other situations. A child in Boy Scouts is almost as apt to be sexually molested by a teacher as by his Scout leader (the difference is so small, it probably doesn’t really exist). However, he is about ten times more apt to be molested by a teacher or Scout leader as by a parent. Big Brothers appear to be approximately 5 times more risky for boys than teachers or Scout leaders. Furthermore, a Big Brother is about 50 times more ‘risky’ than a parent, but not as risky as a foster-parent.

While the ‘at risk’ exposure of boys to their Big Brother mentors is approximately the same as their ‘at risk’ exposure to Scout leaders, the Scouts’ policies on sexual abuse and homosexuality appear to provide about as much protection for boys against homosexual predation as the policies followed by school systems. This is so even though boys in the Scouts tend to be in more ‘at risk’ situations with their Scout leaders than with their teachers, generally speaking.

All in all, Big Brothers, the only organization of those studied which is explicitly ‘pro-homosexual,’ appears to have the highest rate of homosexual molestation. By no coincidence, Big Brothers works closely with social workers -- professionals who are almost always involved in choosing foster homes as well. And the National Association of Social Workers endorses the same policy of non-discrimination against homosexuals as the Big Brothers follows.

Thus, the evidence uncovered by this analysis of newspaper stories lines up in a way suggesting that the Big Brothers’ non-discrimination policy permits proportionately more homosexual molestation of boys than the Boy Scouts. The evidence also seems to indicate that policies of non-discrimination against homosexuals by social workers do not work to the advantage of children.

References:
1. Phone conversation with Michael Hackman of Big Brothers Big Sisters, 11/27/02.
2. For instance, the “best epidemiological evidence indicates that only 2-4% of men attracted to adults prefer men...; in contrast, around 25-40% of men attracted to children prefer boys.... Thus the rate of homosexual attraction is 6-20 times higher among pedophiles” Blanchard R, Barbaree HE, Bogaert AF, Dicky R, Klassen P, Kuban ME, Zucker KJ. Fraternal birth order and sexual orientation in pedophiles. Archives of Sexual Behavior 2000;29:463-478, p. 464.
3. Editorial, Houston Chronicle, 9/26/01
4. Gazette [Montreal], 2/12/93.
5. Finkel MA & DeJong AR. Medical findings in child sexual abuse. pp. 185-247, In Child abuse: medical diagnosis and management. RM Reece (editor); Philadelphia: Lea & Febiger, 1994.
6. Freund K & Watson RJ. The proportions of heterosexual and homosexual pedophiles among sex offenders against children: an exploratory study. Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy 1992;18:34-43.
7. Cameron P & Cameron K. Homosexual parents. Adolescence 1996; 31:757-776.

Corner

De-Funding the Mental Health "Faith"

At the present time, the morality of the West is being most influenced by two powerful forces. On the one hand is the traditional Christian set of standards, on the other those advanced by the mental health/social service professions. While the two worldviews don’t disagree on everything (e.g., both consider murder and rape wrong), they do disagree on a considerable number of issues, including homosexuality and whether or not a person is ‘responsible’ for his actions. Both worldviews are a matter of ‘faith.’ That is, no one has figured out a way to ‘prove’ that there is or is not a God, that people ‘ought’ or ‘ought not’ to behave a certain way (which is not to say that we don’t know the benefit to longer life of not smoking, drinking only in moderation, getting and staying married, etc.), or that where these two worldviews disagree, one side is empirically ‘better’ than the other. Both traditional beliefs and the ‘mental health’ beliefs are, as near as can be empirically determined, arbitrary. Neither side can prove that ‘science’ is on its side with absolute certainty.

The American Constitution explicitly protects religion from the state, and to a degree, the state from any given religion. But the same Constitution does not give the state the same protections from secular ‘faiths.’ Today, we find churches in charge of their ‘domain’ (e.g., churches, religious schools) and, increasingly, the institutions of higher learning being controlled by the secular faith of the mental health worldview. This worldview holds sway over many disciplines (e.g., psychology, sociology, social work, etc.), so much so that the university system is in the grip of the mental health value system (now termed ‘political correctness’).

This ought not to be. While psychologists and social workers have every right to believe anything they desire, it is unseemly that taxpayers’ money should dance to their tune. It seems to me that there is only one sensible solution: to partially de-fund the university departments founded on ‘faith’ -- those beholden to the mental health belief system. That is, while it makes perfect sense for taxpayers to fund teaching and research about physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, engineering, and so on, it is unjust to force everyone to fund the moral/ethical musings of social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, and the like. From my perspective, much of what these folk believe is ‘nuts’ and I resent having to pay taxes to pay their salaries, require students to take courses from them, and, because of their considerable numbers on the faculty, almost cede control of the university system to them.

How could such a reform be accomplished? We might start by permitting departments of religion, sociology, psychology, etc. to retain their buildings and library budgets, but require students wishing to take their course offerings pay the entire costs of their administrative, secretarial, and professorial salaries. That is, students taking ‘hard science’ courses such as math, medicine, engineering or chemistry -- courses in fields that have demonstrably made our collective life better -- would get the full subsidy they now receive, but those taking ‘faith’ courses (e.g., sociology, religion, psychiatry, social work, English) would have to pay considerably more per course to cover the costs of salaries.

In this way, the empirically-based courses would be set aside from the opinion courses in a very practical way. And students would be informed through their pocketbooks that the opinion courses were not ‘empirically based,’ and that their theories were largely speculative and unverifiable, unlike the ‘hard sciences’ or areas of mathematics.

Such a scheme would have a number of side benefits. First, probably fewer would get degrees in the opinion departments. A good thing indeed. Those getting these ‘soft’ degrees rather expect society to provide them a living commensurate with their degrees. But to generate the necessary income to feed these graduates, the older of these opinion-experts are devising ever more ‘pathologies’ that those who possess these ‘soft’ degrees can ‘treat’ (one of the latest is the notion that marital disputes are a ‘pathology’ that need to be ‘treated’ with ‘drug therapy’). The continued expansion of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association is partially accounted-for by the fact that more specially-trained ‘problem solvers’ require more ‘problems’ to fix.

Secondly, society would explicitly create a divide between the ‘real, empirically-based’ disciplines/tools and the ‘opinion-driven’ ones. Hopefully, the general public would have an easier time seeing the difference between ‘opinions’ versus ‘facts.’ Third, many of those who might have been attracted to the ‘opinion’ fields might go into engineering or science, and end up doing something that helps society. If enough additional bright people take enough science and engineering degrees, they could end up increasing the numbers of inventions and applications of empirical knowledge. Their contributions would so enrich collective life as to more than compensate for the transitory disruptions in the university system that would occur.

Family Research Report critically examines empirical data on families, sexual social policy, AIDS, drug addiction, and homosexuality, digging behind the 'headlines' and breaking new scientific ground.

FRR is published 8 times/year by the Family Research Institute.

Dr. Paul Cameron, Publisher
Dr. Kirk Cameron, Editor

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