Supplement
Kinsey and Children
by John Bancroft
(Excerpt. "Alfred Kinsey's Work 50 Years Later." In Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, by Alfred Kinsey, et al. 1998 Reprint Edition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. j-n)

Allegation about Dr. Kinsey
Although controversy hounded Kinsey and his work from the start, little attention was paid to the data he presented about children until the late 1980s, when a Judith Reisman started the allegation that Kinsey, to obtain his evidence, was criminally involved in the sexual abuse of children. This allegation, in slightly modified forms, has persisted as the main plank in the case of those on the Religious Right who seek to discredit Kinsey. In recent years, when there has been anxiety bordering on hysteria about child sexual abuse, often resulting in circumstances where the accused is regarded as guilty until proved innocent, what better way to discredit someone? What are the relevant facts as far as Kinsey as concerned?

Refutation of Allegation
From my first day as Director of the Kinsey Institute in 1995, I was confronted by such allegations and the need to rebut them. Kinsey never carried out experiments on the sexual responses of children; neither did he employ or train anyone else to do so for him. However, some reasonable people were being troubled by repeated allegations that he did, particularly because some of the details seemed hard to account for. The focus of the attacks was data presented in Tables 31 through 34 in the Male volume, reporting various aspects of orgasm observed in pre-adolescent boys ranging in age from 2 months to 15 years.

Having commented on the extent to which adults had recalled orgasmic experiences from their own childhoods, Kinsey pointed out that such recall might well be vague or inaccurate, particularly of an experience which the child may not have understood at the time. He was, therefore, especially interested in information obtained from those of his interviewees who had observed orgasms occurring in children.

Whereas he had some information of this kind from parents and teachers simply observing children, he obtained more from men who had been sexually involved with young boys and who had in the process observed their orgasms. Having therefore made it clear that he was referring to adults who had been involved in illegal sexual interactions with children, he went on to say, "nine of our adult male subjects have observed such orgasm. Some of these adults are technically trained persons who have kept diaries or other records which they have put at our disposal; and from them we have secured information on 317 pre-adolescents who were either observed in self-masturbation, or were observed in contacts with other boys or older adults." 50
      50 Kinsey, A.C, Pomeroy, W.B., & Martin, C.E. (1948). Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders, p. 177.

Tables 31-34 are based on these 317 boys; Table 32 gives details of the speed of orgasm (timed with a second hand or stopwatch), whereas Tables 33 and 34 give details about multiple orgasms. Thus, an understandable concern was raised: How could such information be obtained in a sufficiently systematic manner to allow tabulation of the findings? Hence the allegations that either Kinsey or members of the Institute staff made these observations, or that they trained child molesters to make observations for them.

Source of Data in Tables 31-34
I decided to check on the sources of this information and found that, without any doubt, all of the information reported in Tables 31-34 came from the carefully documented records of one man. From 1917 until the time that Kinsey interviewed him in the mid-1940s, this man had kept notes on a vast array of sexual experiences, involving not only children but adults of both sexes.

Kinsey was clearly impressed by the systematic way he kept his records, and regarded them as of considerable scientific interest. Clearly, his description in the book of the source of this data was misleading, in that he implied that it had come from several men rather than one, although it is likely that information elsewhere in this chapter, on the descriptions of different types of orgasm, was obtained in part from some of these other nine men.

I do not know why Kinsey was unclear on this point; it was obviously not to conceal the origin of the information from criminal sexual involvement with children, because that was already quite clear. Maybe it was to conceal the single source, which otherwise might have attracted attention to this one man with possible demands for his identification (demands which have now occurred even though he is long dead). It would be typical of Kinsey to be more concerned about protecting the anonymity of his research subjects (and convincing the reader of the scientific value of the information) than protecting himself from the allegations that eventually followed.

Orgasm Data
Kinsey, with his primary interest in variability, was also intrigued by the various ways in which orgasm was experienced. In the Male volume, 51 he combines evidence provided from the above source on 196 pre-adolescent boys with descriptions obtained from adults or their partners to produce a list of six different types of orgasm.
      51 Male volume, pp. 160-161.

Two of these types involve signs which in other circumstances would be regarded as distress, such as sobbing or crying or hypersensitivity around orgasm which results in "violent attempts to avoid climax, although they derive pleasure from the situation...[and] quickly return to complete the experience, or have a second experience." 52
      52 Male volume, p. 161.

As these descriptions were applied to pre-adolescent boys as well as adults, they have been taken by some to indicate that these children were being tortured. It would never have occurred to Kinsey that responses associated with orgasm, whether in a child or an adult would be interpreted in that way, as he clearly saw the orgasm as the culmination of pleasurable stimulation.

Caution about Data in Tables 31-34
In retrospect Kinsey's judgment in not anticipating such misinterpretations, and in placing so much emphasis on this one man's evidence, can be questioned. This extremely active 'omniphile,' who may have self-justified his sexual career as 'a contribution to knowledge' by keeping such detailed records, can be likened to two other individuals in the literature: the anonymous author of My Secret Life, who, toward the end of the nineteenth century, gave detailed descriptions of numerous sexual encounters, many involving young girls; and an Australian man who kept detailed records of his sexual encounters with many hundreds of boys around the age of puberty. He was the subject of a book called The Man They Called a Monster. 53 The author, Paul Wilson, interviewed many of the men who, as boys, had previously been involved with "the Monster," and to a remarkable extent they corroborated the man's original accounts.
      53 Wilson, P. (1981). The Man They Called a Monster. North Ryde, New South Wales: Cassell Australia.

Nevertheless, such sources of information should properly be treated with great caution. Ironically, the evidence presented in Tables 31-34 leaves us with some fundamental scientific questions and, not surprisingly, there has been virtually no further evidence to answer them. We know, from the accounts of adults about their own childhoods, that a proportion of pre-adolescent children experience orgasm, though we do not know what proportion, or whether most or all children have the physiological capacity for orgasm pre-pubertally. That in itself is of considerable interest.
It is questions such as these which interested Kinsey so much in these particular findings, and encouraged him to share the information with the scientific community. However much Kinsey's scientific curiosity may have misled him, he did nothing wrong, 'criminal,' or 'fraudulent.' Some have criticized him for not reporting this man to the police. Any tendency to do such a thing, with this research subject or any other, would have been contrary to the whole ethical basis of his project, in which he persuaded people to share their sexual secrets in return for a guarantee of confidentiality.

Kinsey's Conclusions about Childhood Sexual Development
What conclusions did Kinsey reach about childhood sexual development? Physiological responses, which at a later age would be experienced as sexual, appeared to occur in a proportion of very young children. Kinsey didn't know what proportion of children were capable of such physiological responses, and we still don't know. Kinsey qualified the evidence he presented on the 317 pre-pubertal boys by emphasizing that this was a select group of "more or less uninhibited boys" and not representative of boys in general. 54
      54 Male volume, p. 177.

Kinsey 'interviewed' a number of small children from 2 to 5 years old in the presence of a parent. His method of doing this is described 55 and involved techniques widely used today by child psychologists. Kinsey never analyzed and reported the data he obtained in this way (this was to be the topic of a separate study and book), though he commented on certain observations. He concluded that "attitudes in respect to nudity, to anatomic differences between the sexes, ... to verbal references to sex ... are developed at very early ages." 56.
      55 Male volume, p. 58.
      56 Kinsey, A.C., Pomeroy, W.B., Martin, C.E., & Gebhard, P.H. (1953). Sexual Beahvior in the Human Female. Philadephia: W.B. Saunders, p. 16.

Social class differences in sexual attitudes were already apparent at these early ages, 57 and parents clearly played an important role in shaping these early attitudes, which influenced the child's later reactions to sexually relevant experiences. Sexual play between children, which was reported by a substantial proportion of his subjects, mostly occurred between the ages of 8 and 13, 58 and at those ages "children are the most frequent agents for the transmission of sexual mores." 59 Kinsey saw the changes in sexual mores and behaviors that occur in society as mainly dependent of "departures made by pre-adolescent and adolescent children from the patterns of their parents."60  
      57 Male volume, p. 441.
      58 Male volume, p. 167.
      59 Male volume, p. 445.
      60 Male volume, p. 447.

As far as sexual contacts between children and adults are concerned, Kinsey states, "There are as yet insufficient data ... for reaching general conclusions on the significance of such contacts." 61 Questions about such experiences were not routinely asked of males; of the females, 24% of the women reported such experiences, with a little less than half of them involving sexual touching of some kind. 62. This can be compared to the 17% of the women reporting "sexual touching" experiences during childhood in a recent US survey. 63 Kinsey, however, played down the consequences of such experiences. Whereas 80% of his females subjects who had reported some form of sexual encounter with adults "had been emotionally upset or frightened by their contact," only a "small portion had been seriously disturbed." 64 In the recent US survey, 65 70% of the women who had been sexually touched reported that the experience had affected their lives.
      61 Female volume, p. 120.
      62 Gebhard, P.H., & Johnson, A.B. (1979). The Kinsey Data: Marginal Tabulations of the 1938-1963 Interviews Conducted by the Institute for Sex Research. Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders.
      63 Laumann, E.O., Gagnon, J.H., Michael, R.T., & Michaels, S. (1994). The Social Organization of Sexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
      64 Female volume, p. 121.
      65 Laumann et al. (1994).

Kinsey was inclined to the view that more harm resulted from the societal reaction to the adult-child experiences, than the sexual contact per se.66 Before commenting on these conclusions of Kinsey, my own views should be made clear. Hopefully, doing so will reduce the likelihood of being accused of favoring child-adult sexual contacts. In the current climate of opinion, any statement that does not condemn all forms of child-adult sex with unqualified horror, is liable to be interpreted as being in favor of child-adult sex. I believe that all children should be protected from sexual exploitation by adults or adolescents, and any such exploitation should be against the law. The damage caused to a child by such activity varies considerably however. I would agree with Kinsey that in many cases, the reaction of the family, the social services and police to, and the legal consequences of such an event can cause the child more psychological harm than the sexual episode itself. It is therefore important that the potential for such harm is born in mind by those reacting to such episodes.
      66 Female volume, p. 121.

There is, however, an important distinction between episodes which involve relative strangers and those involving close family members, particularly parents. In the latter cases there are major additional factors involving betrayal of trust, threat to the family structure and overwhelming feelings of responsibility in the child that can cause considerable psychological havoc. Kinsey did not attempt to make such a distinction in the cases he encountered. According to Table 147 in the Kinsey Data,67 10% of the first prepubertal experiences with an adult involved parent, grandparent, uncle or in-laws. The term incest seems to have been used by Kinsey and his colleagues, in its literal sense, to refer to sexual intercourse involving family members. The only data presented with the term incest involve only post pubertal family members,68 apart from a passing reference to incestuous contacts between pre-adolescent children.69
      67 The Kinsey Data, Table 147.
      68 The Kinsey Data, Table 279.
      69 Male volume, p. 558.

The term incest does not appear in the Female volume. It is however, important to acknowledge, as Kinsey does, that at least some children experience sexual interest and pleasure during these contacts. The widespread tendency to assume that children are asexual can have two unfortunate consequences; children who do exhibit any form of sexual expression are assumed to have been sexually abused; and any child victim of sexual abuse, who actually experienced sexual pleasure at some stage of the abuse experience, may believe, when confronted with the assumed asexuality of childhood, that she or he was abnormal and perhaps therefore responsible for the abuse. This is one important mechanism leading to sexual problems later in life in childhood sexual abuse victims.

Sexual Welfare of Children
It is reasonable to conclude that Kinsey's concerns about the sexual welfare of children had more to do with the effects that negative, inhibitory, guilt-provoking influences might have on sexual well-being and happiness during adulthood than on the consequences of childhood sexual experiences per se, whether autoerotic, involving other children, or involving adults. How he would have reacted to the more recent evidence of long-term adverse sequelae of childhood sexual abuse we obviously cannot say, except to conclude, with some confidence, that if the evidence indicated that any particular type of sexual activity in childhood caused problems either at the time or later in adult sexual life, he would have been opposed to it.

The naturalness of sexual behavior
A theme to which Kinsey returns frequently is the ‘naturalness’ of sexual behavior. Here there is scope for confusion. The lower social level male’s use of the term ‘natural’ is not necessarily the same as Kinsey’s. Thus, in many respects the ‘naturalness’ of the lower level male’s sexual mores stems from an earlier era of social restrictiveness, out of which the upper level male may have progressed, at least in some respects. Thus the lower class male seeks intercourse with as many women as he can, but insists on marrying a virgin, whilst the upper level man justifies his pre-marital sex because he is ‘in love’ with the woman.42 And for oral stimulation, which is widely shunned in the lower social levels, “it is the upper level which first reverted, through a considerable sophistication, to behavior which is biologically natural and basic.”43 Although Kinsey clearly felt considerable compassion for the ‘sexual underdog’, many of whom would be from the ‘lower level’, I disagree with the view that Kinsey was more comfortable with the sexual mores of the ‘lower level’ male.
      42 Female volume, p. 323.
      43 Male volume, p. 369.

For Kinsey, ‘normal’ was not a useful concept. It smacked of the categorization of individuals that his taxonomic approach rejected. For example, when describing the distribution curve for frequency of sexual outlet he commented “No individual has a sexual frequency which differs in anything but a slight degree from the frequencies of those placed next on the curve. Such a continuous and widely spread series raises a question as to whether the terms ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ belong in a scientific vocabulary.”44 But naturalness, for him, depended on whether the particular sexual behavior is found in other non-human species. Genital touching prior to coitus occurs, we are told, in many species; oral-oral contact is also widespread. “Throughout vertebrate sexual behavior there is such a close tie-up between oral eroticism and genital stimulation that oral activity....must be accepted by the scientist as a normal aspect of sexuality.”45
      44 Male volume, p. 199.
      45 Male volume, p. 510.

In the Male volume46 he comments, on finding that oral stimulation by the male of the female genitalia is much more common than the reverse, “it is doubtful if a sufficient biologic basis could be shown for such a one-sided performance” which he therefore thought more likely to be due to cultural influences. In the Female volume,47 however, we learn that this gender difference is found in other species, and therefore fits into a theme which was developed throughout the Female volume, “the greater capacity of the male to be stimulated psychologically” (whereas both sexes respond to tactile stimulation). Oral stimulation of the female breast by the male is “the one technique in human petting behavior which is distinctively human.”48
      46 Male volume, p. 540.
      47 Female volume, p 258.
      48 Female volume, p.255.

The human male, we are told, would be ‘promiscuous’ throughout his life if there were no social restrictions. “This is the history of his anthropoid ancestors.” Homosexual activity amongst other species is common, though exclusive homosexuality is very rare. And, countering the fear that homosexuality threatens the existence of the human species, “....existent mammalian species have managed to survive in spite of their widespread homosexual activity.”49 While this comparative approach is certainly of some interest, Kinsey can be accused of oversimplifying. He implies that if a particular form of sexual behavior is observed in other species, it can be regarded as natural and hence not warranting social constraints or stigmatization. Possibly because the relevant information was scarce at that time, he does not consider the variety of ways in which sexual behavior is constrained, limited or inhibited in other species. Of the mammals, it is perhaps only the pigmy chimpanzee or bonobo where we find uninhibited expressions of sexuality, for purposes of pleasure, affiliation and appeasement. Otherwise the social structure, particularly as expressed through the dominance hierarchies of both male and female, imparts substantial control over sexual expression with social patterns that vary from one species to another. And it is perhaps with his consideration of cross-species sexual contact that he succumbs most to this ‘naturalistic’ folly. Having commented on the fact that mating occurs between closely related species resulting in inter-specific hybrids (a topic close to his heart when studying gall wasps), he sees “the real problem...in explaining why individuals do not regularly make contacts with species other than their own.” While assuming that some positive reinforcement is involved in sexual behavior, he does not consider the extent to which specific avoidance responses which are normally elicited by the close proximity of another animal, need to be selectively inhibited, particularly in the female who is about to be mounted and penetrated, if effective mating is to occur, and that selective inhibition requires complex, and presumably species-specific mechanisms to be effective. Can we really compare the sexual coupling of a farm boy with a cow to the interspecific breeding of closely related species of birds? And when we consider the variable complexity of social structure as it relates to sexual expression in other primates, is it not appropriate to allow for a much greater level of complexity in the relevant social structure of the human primate?
      49 Male volume, p. 483.

Kinsey’s mission
Kinsey has been described by some as a man with a mission, to change the pattern of sexual behavior in the United States, to bring about a ‘revolution’ in sexual values, even to undermine the social structure of the United States in such a way as to foster communism. (Kinsey was decidedly not a communist.) What is the evidence that Kinsey had a mission beyond that of the socially aware scientist who wanted his work to be of value to the society in which he lived? Although Kinsey gave many lectures, corresponded extensively and published a few papers relating to sexuality, there is no doubt that any such impact he may have had was largely the result of the two books from his great project, the Male volume and the Female volume. In discussing these claims, attention will therefore be confined to what can be found in these two volumes.

In the Male volume, the central theme relating to the need for social change concerns the striking differences in patterns of male sexual behavior between what Kinsey summarizes as the “upper and lower social levels.” This was shown in a greater tendency for “upper level” males to engage in masturbation, premarital petting and oral sex, and for ‘lower level’ males to engage in premarital intercourse (mainly in the conventional ‘missionary’ position). Kinsey further described this social class difference as reflecting an awareness, at the upper level, of what is “right or wrong” (i.e., what is moral or immoral), and at the lower level of what is ‘natural or unnatural.’ For the upper level group “all socio-sexual behavior becomes a moral issue.” “Lower social levels, on the contrary, rationalize their patterns of sexual behavior on the basis of what is natural or unnatural.”29
      29 Male volume, p. 385.

In Kinsey’s view there are two important consequences of this social class difference; first, a major lack of understanding by one class of the other, and resulting conflicts; secondly, many members of the upper social level “consider it a religious obligation to impose their code upon all other segments of the population.”30 Thus Kinsey describes how marriage counselors, most of whom come from the upper social level, impose their concepts of sexual normality on lower level couples where they don’t fit. More important, those who determine the laws come from the upper social level; thus, in Kinsey’s analysis, most of the sex laws, at the time he was writing, not only had a long background in religious doctrine, but were more consistent with the ‘sexual morality’ of the upper social levels, and inconsistent with accepted standards of ‘natural’ sexual behavior in the lower social levels.
      30 Male volume, p. 385.

A theme which kept recurring in the Male volume was the extent to which the law was out of touch with the real world. At the time Kinsey was researching, virtually all forms of non-marital sexuality were illegal, and some forms of sexual behavior within marriage (e.g. oral sex) were also illegal, at least in some states.31 “On a specific calculation of our data, it may be stated that at least 85% of the younger male population could be convicted as sex offenders if law enforcement officials were as efficient as most people expect them to be. ”32 Yet... “...only a minute fraction of one percent of the persons who are involved in sexual behavior which is contrary to the law are ever apprehended, prosecuted or convicted.....”33 and “.....the current sex laws are unenforced and unenforceable because they are too completely out of accord with the realities of human behavior.”34 Kinsey goes on to recount how such laws may nevertheless be capriciously enforced by members of the police, for a variety of often dubious reasons. And when they are enforced, individuals, guilty of some act which is commonplace, often suffer consequences which are grossly out of proportion to the damage caused by the ‘crime.’ Kinsey’s compassion for the sexual ‘underdog’ comes through time and time again as he describes the consequences of this legal state of affairs, not solely because of the impact of actual conviction, but much more frequently, the chronic effects of guilt about engaging in illegal activities which are, in Kinsey’s view, part of the normal range of human sexual experience. He also draws attention to the extent that it has been the male in society who imposes a sexual morality which has long standing roots in the ‘property status’ of women,35 leading to such inconsistencies as the impossibility of a husband being accused of raping his wife, whilst a married couple would be committing a crime by engaging in consensual oral sex.
      31 Male volume, p. 263-4.
      32 Male volume, p. 224.
      33 Female volume, p. 18.
      34 Female volume, p. 20.
      35 Female volume, p. 322.

Although Kinsey does not analyze the issue in this way, the law can be seen to have three functions in relation to sexual behavior; (i) protection of the individual, against assault and exploitation, (ii) avoidance of social disruption and (iii) a ‘declarative’ function, whereby being deemed illegal, certain behaviors are declared as undesirable.36 I have found no evidence that Kinsey had any problems with the law as used for the first two functions (see Allyn37). It was with the ‘declarative’ function, where the law is used to institutionalize standards of sexual morality that Kinsey had deep concern, and controversy over the use of the law in this way has a long history, dating back well before Kinsey.38
      36 Bancroft, J. (1989). Human Sexuality and its Problems. 2nd Edition. Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone.
      37 Allyn, D. (1996). Private Acts, Public Policy: Alfred Kinsey, The American Law Institute and the Privatization of American Sexual Morality. Journal of American Studies, 30, 405-428. In this essay, Allyn chides Kinsey for ignoring public manifestations of sexuality and, in the process, ‘privatizing’ sexual morality. There is also an interesting account of how the American Law Institute ‘re-wrote’ sex laws based on Kinsey’s reports.
      38 e.g., Mill, J.S. (1859)

Kinsey was striving for a greater understanding of the varieties of sexual expression and a resulting greater tolerance of such variability. “There is little evidence of the existence of such a thing as innate perversity.......there is an abundance of evidence that most human sexual activities would become comprehensible to most individuals, if they could know the background of each other individual’s behavior.”39 This is the statement of someone who is more concerned with understanding than condemning the vagaries of human sexuality.
      39 Male volume, p. 678.

In the female volume, the emphasis is different. Here the principal causes for concern are the differences in the sexuality of men and women, and the misunderstandings, conflicts and interpersonal tensions that result from this apparent ‘mismatch.’ Kinsey’s conclusions about some of these gender differences will be considered later, but once again we find him striving for better understanding, here not between social classes but between men and women.

However, in the Male volume, Kinsey’s ‘mission’ was not to change the way men behaved sexually, but to increase the understanding of why they behaved the way that they did, and to lessen the harmful effects of stigma that the previaling moral codes imposed. In that sense he clearly viewed much of the behavior which was deemed immoral by society as intrinsically harmless providing that it did not result in negative social repercussions. And in the Female volume, his principal ‘mission’ was to improve sexual understanding between men and women in order to enhance the quality of their sexual relationships. This contrasts with the widely disseminated view that Kinsey’s ‘mission’ was to undermine the importance of marriage and the family in American life. I agree with Robinson’s40 conclusion that Kinsey “ in the back of his mind” saw marital sexuality as “the norm in terms of which he evaluated most other sexual outlets”. Morantz41 also concludes “Kinsey was not a social revolutionary. His revolt against his society’s outmoded sexual mores did not lead him to question other aspects of the value structure. Like most of contemporaries, he had an attachment to happy stable marriage, and he expected his research to ease the majority of Americans into a permanent monogamy so satisfying that social stability would be guaranteed”.  
      40 Robinson, P. (1976). The Modernization of Sex. New York: Harper & Row, p. 78.
      41 Morantz,R.M. (1993) The Scientist as Sex Crusader: Alfred C.Kinsey and American Culture. in Procreation or Pleasure: Sexual Attitudes in American History, ed. Thomas L Althers, Malabar, Fl., Robert E.Kruger Pub. Co., p. 162.