We Are Our Brains (13 page)

Sexual abuse damages children and is punished, not only for reasons of atonement but also to prevent further abuse. The latter objective poses a problem, though, because how do you change behavior that has been programmed in the brain at an early stage of development? In the past, every conceivable effort has been made to change homosexual men into heterosexuals (see earlier in this chapter), without any success whatsoever. The same applies to pedophiles. Not so long ago, a court in Utrecht heard the case of a sixty-year-old heterosexual church minister charged with pedosexuality. The prosecution called for a sentence of ten months in prison, but after a great deal of deliberation he was eventually given a community sentence. How things have changed.

There was a time when an obscure mix of arguments bearing on eugenics, punishment, the protection of society, and the repression of homosexuality led to the castration of pedosexuals in the Netherlands. Between 1938 and 1968, at least four hundred sex offenders were “voluntarily” castrated. This practice wasn't laid down by law. These were offenders detained under a hospital order who were given the choice of life imprisonment or castration. They had to submit a standard letter to the minister of justice, the text of which ran, “May I humbly crave Your Excellency's permission to be castrated?” Up to 1950, 80 percent of the castrated men were pedosexuals, a situation complicated by the high legal age of sexual consent (sixteen). In Germany, the hypothalami of pedophiles were surgically lesioned in the hope that this would change their sexual orientation. These brain operations were never scientifically documented.

The incidence of chemical castrations among offenders detained under a hospital order is currently increasing. This involves suppressing the libido with a substance that diminishes the effect of testosterone. It can provide relief at being freed from sexual obsession. However, it's worrying that some of these individuals are being
chemically castrated because the authorities would otherwise deny their applications for leave. These substances certainly aren't suitable for every sex offender, and the side effects, including the development of breasts, obesity, and osteoporosis, are serious.

The pedosexual minister from Utrecht can thank his lucky stars that things have changed since the days of formal castration requests. The judge who presided over his case was worried about reoffending, and rightly so. Nevertheless, he thought that the six-week pretrial detention would have a deterrent effect and that the combination of a long conditional sentence and a community order would be more effective than lengthy imprisonment. Whether he was right we'll never know, because the judicial system has no tradition of researching the effectiveness of its punishments. And the medical world, alas, has no tradition of researching the factors in early development that could cause pedophilia. Doing away with the taboo on such research could shed light on these factors and on the best methods of checking pedophile impulses and stopping people from reoffending. This would prevent a great deal of misery for all concerned.

The same applies to female pedophiles. The idea that women can't be guilty of pedosexuality has been found to be a myth. Sexual abuse of children by women is usually perpetrated by mothers on their own offspring. For the most part, the victims are girls with an average age of around six. The mothers tend to be poor and uneducated and often have mental health problems like cognitive impairment, psychoses, or addictions.

An initiative in Canada has shown that it's possible to tackle this issue by quite simple means. There, pedosexuals are helped by a group of volunteers after their detention. The resulting social network has been shown to cut reoffending rates quite considerably. This is much better than the situation in the Netherlands, where in late 2009, a pedophile was first banned from the city of Eindhoven by its mayor, then prohibited from entering a national park in the province of Utrecht. The man now lives in his car and travels from parking lot to parking lot. That's asking for trouble. But the Netherlands
is now trying out the Canadian initiative. Another way of preventing child abuse might be to issue smart forms of fake child pornography that don't involve the abuse of real children. Milton Diamond, a renowned sexologist in Hawaii, has found considerable evidence to suggest that this works. However, it will no doubt prove difficult to convince the authorities to consider such an innovative idea.

In the 1960s and 1970s the received wisdom was that a child is born as a blank slate and that the development of both its gender identity and sexual orientation are very much determined by social conventions. This notion, one of whose leading proponents was the Philadelphia-based psychologist John Money, had terrible consequences (see the John-Joan-John case earlier in this chapter) but reflected the general thinking at that time that everything could be socially engineered, including whether you felt male or female and were heterosexual or homosexual.

When I gave my first lectures on sex differences in the brain in the 1970s at the medical faculty in Amsterdam, the broadly held views on the importance of social conditioning weren't just being trumpeted by Money and his supporters, they were also espoused by the feminist movement. Its adherents believed that all of the differences between the sexes in terms of behavior, occupation, and interest had been forced on women by a male-dominated society. In those early lectures, female students would sit in the front row of the auditorium, demonstratively knitting and crocheting. They made it abundantly clear that the subject I was discussing and my views on the matter were anathema to them. When the light was switched off so
that I could show some slides, they protested vociferously, because they couldn't see their knitting anymore. From then on I turned the lights down and showed slides throughout all classes and lectures. The ladies from the front row sent a delegation to the dean to request a lecturer who would be more sympathetic to women. Apparently none was available, because I never heard any more about it.

Our description of the first sex differences found in human hypothalami in postmortem brain tissue (Swaab and Fliers,
Science
228 [1985]: 1112–15) provoked a hostile response from feminists. At the time there was widespread denial within the feminist movement of possible biological sex differences in the human brain and behavior. Speaking about our findings in an interview with the Dutch magazine
HP
(January 17, 1987), a woman biologist by the name of Joke't Hart said, “But if I were to accept that there are differences between the sexes in such fundamental areas as the structure of our brains, I would no longer have a leg to stand on as a feminist.” Whatever the case, I never heard any more of her. Many hundreds of sex differences have subsequently been identified between the male and female brains.

After we had reported on the first difference found between the brains of homosexual and heterosexual men (later published in Swaab and Hofman,
Brain Research
537 [1990]: 141–48; see earlier in this chapter), the unexpected backlash took us by surprise. It all started in December 1988 with an article that appeared in an obscure Dutch publication called
Akademie Nieuws.
Researchers at institutes directed by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) had been asked what they were working on, so I'd talked about our brain research into sexual orientation and gender. This was picked up by Hans van Maanen, a reporter for the Dutch daily newspaper
Het Parool
, who wrote two articles entitled “Gays' Brains Are Different” and “The Brain Behind Homosexuality,” both of which presented an entirely correct picture. But they unleashed an uproar of unbelievable proportions. What exactly caused this overwhelming and emotional response—which was completely off
target—is still a mystery to me. The taboo on a biological explanation for our sexual orientation, which was very marked in an age of boundless belief in social engineering, must have played a role. One group of homosexual men made an almost religious pronouncement to the effect that all men are homosexual, but only some of them opt to come out publicly. They called coming out a political choice. I stated that I couldn't see how it was political and that the choice of sexual orientation was made for you in the womb; this only fanned the flames. Many hundreds of articles were published in the space of three weeks. COC Netherlands, a gay rights organization, pronounced itself “amazed by the study.” At that time, Rob Tielman, who held the chair of gay studies at the University of Utrecht, was one of my most vocal opponents. He demonized the study by calling it “in extraordinarily poor taste” and claimed, ludicrously, that I should first have asked his permission to carry it out and publish my findings. He later retracted his remarks in an interview in which he said, “My position in the field of gay studies is closest to Swaab's,” and “I am among those who are inclined to take the biological component very seriously.” But the editor in chief of the
Gay Krant
, Henk Krol, had meanwhile joined the fray, arguing that “a study of this kind underlines the notion of homosexuality as a disease. In turn, this promotes discrimination against gays.” Questions were asked in Parliament about my study by Peter Lankhorst (Progressive Radical Party). Those questions landed on my desk via the minister of education and science and the president of the KNAW, and my answers went by the same route in reverse. I received threatening telephone calls day and night as well as a card addressed to “the SS Doctor Mengele-Swaab,” which read, “Nazi. Saw your ugly mug on TV. We homosexuals are going to kill you. As an example. Like the leader of Iran did to the Englishman” (
fig. 12
). At the time I didn't take it seriously and commented that if their assassination skills were as bad as their written Dutch, I wasn't in very much danger. Nowadays I think I would be more concerned. I also got a card that read, “Bet you regret not having been able to work under
Mengele in Auschwitz!” (
fig. 13
). Committees scrutinized my research, and I was given bodyguards when I lectured at the Academic Medical Center. The Netherlands Institute for Brain Research became a focus for bomb scares (which I didn't take seriously either), our children were teased at school, and a demonstration took place one Sunday morning in front of our house, described in inimitable fashion by the (gay) writer Gerard Reve. It even furnished the title for his essay collection
A Carefree Sunday Morning
(1995). He wrote:

It took three weeks for the storm to die down. Then Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced a fatwa on Salman Rushdie after the publication of
The Satanic Verses
, and suddenly all attention shifted to the British-Indian writer. When the smoke of battle had cleared away and I'd emerged unscathed, the president of the KNAW, David de Wied, gave an interview in the Dutch daily newspaper
De Telegraaf
in which he backed me up and said that an affair like that should never be allowed to happen again. A pity he hadn't done so a few weeks earlier.

But I had some nice responses too, like the cartoon by Peter van Straaten (
fig. 14
) and personal ads in the prominent Dutch weekly magazine
Vrij Nederland
, like “Nice guy (37, 1.87m, 87kg, fair-haired, blue-eyed) with big hypothalamus is looking for a partner” and “Wanted: BIG suprachiasmatic nucleus, Postbox 654 Wageningen.” Incidentally, it was to be another seventeen years before the
Gay Krant
revised its take on that period with an article tellingly headed “Angry Gays Got It All Wrong.” Even after all that time, however, Rob Tielman refused to relent. His column in the same issue of the
Gay Krant
had the sour headline “Swaab Headstrong.”

FIGURE 12.
A postcard I received after publishing the first findings of a difference between the brains of homosexual and heterosexual men, in 1989. Said to be sent on behalf of the COC (gay rights) organization, the text reads, “Nazi. Saw your ugly mug on TV. We homosexuals are going to kill you. As an example. Like the leader of Iran [Khomeini] did to the Englishman. We homosexuals are insulted about our brains.”