**THE SCIENCE** actually differs. More and better research is always a trump card.
Freund is a pioneering source on this type of research, but also a difficult source to be drawing on as this was an initial exploratory study.
Ray Blanchard, who was trained by Freund and is a major researcher in this area, performed a much larger and more involved study in 2012 (with nearly 2300 participants over nine years, against less than 500 participants over less than 12 months in the 1992 Freund/Wilson study). He found that there was no statistical difference in rates of pedophilic attraction between heterosexuals and homosexuals:
Full study is available online:
Sexual Attraction to Others: A Comparison of Two Models of Alloerotic Responding in Men
It's not like Blanchard is some lefty liberal professor either. He's been a consistent ally (sometimes active, sometimes tacit) to various right wing groups with agendas around homosexuality, transsexuality, gender identity dysphoria and even race and eugenics. Even going so far as to write for various hard right/alt right fringe publications. He's the sort of guy that gets quoted by the Family Research Council, VDARE and TERFs.
Then there are other studies that find the opposite to Freund (even using similar calculation methodologies). Jenny et al (1992) found about 1% of child sex abusers were homosexual - although there are issues with that study as well (mostly population size and selection criteria). A follow up study (
Jenny et al 1994) found no more than 3% of child sex abusers were homosexual. Again though, there a caveats about data accuracy.
I'll also note there are MANY challenges to the methodology Freund/Wilson used and the conclusions drawn in the paper. A big one is that there is an assumption that adult male on adolescent male sexual abuse and/or arousal means that the perpetrator was homosexual. It's not that clean or simple.
Quoting from the 1993 National Academies Press study '
Understanding Child Abuse and Neglect': "
The distinction between homosexual and heterosexual child molesters relies on the premise that male molesters of male victims are homosexual in orientation. Most molesters of boys do not report sexual interest in adult men, however" (National Research Council, 1993, p. 143).
There's also an overlap between male-male and male-female abusers that wasn't covered by Freund. Willis et al (1993) report many offenders offend against both male and female children, defying strict classification on the basis of sexual orientation.
Wilson, one of the two authors of the study, wrote this in response to it being mis-used in such a way.
"
These articles have frequently been cited by fundamentalist lobbyists as proof-positive that homosexuals are more inclined to molest children. This was not a finding of our research, period. What we found was that, among men with a sexual preference for children, there was an over-representation of men with a same-sex preference. To reiterate, among men with a sexual preference for children, as diagnosed using Dr. Freund's phallometric test, there was a higher relative incidence of homosexuality. In all other research we conducted, we never found that androphilic (i.e., a preference for male adults) men had any greater relative erotic interest in children than did their gynephilic (i.e., a preference for female adults) peers. Dr. Freund was and would continue to be greatly distressed that any of his research would contribute to the persecution of any group of people.”
Humans sexuality, is messy, complicated and defiant of our neat attempts at classification. Simply tarring one group of people in such a way is gross and smacks of bigotry.
