Science or Propaganda? An Examination of Rind, Tromovitch and Bauserman (1998)

SUMMARY

An article, “A Meta-analytic” Examination of Assumed Properties of Child Sexual Abuse Using College Samples, published in the July 1998 edition of the Psychological Bulletin resulted in an unprecedented amount of media attention and became the first scientific article to be formally denounced by the United States House of Representatives. The study's authors analyzed the findings of 59 earlier studies on child sexual abuse (CSA) and concluded that mental health researchers have greatly overstated CSA's harmful potential. They recommended that a willing encounter with positive reactions would no longer be considered to be sexual abuse; instead, it would simply be labeled adult-child sex. The study's conclusions and recommendations spawned a debate in both the popular and scholarly press. A number of commentators suggested that the study is pedophile propaganda masquerading as science. Others claimed that the authors are victims of a moralistic witch-hunt and that scientific freedom is being threatened. After a careful examination of the evidence, it is concluded that Rind et al. can best be described as an advocacy article that inappropriately uses science in an attempt to legitimize its findings.