Debate Over Gay Foster Parents Shines Light on a Dubious Stat

The proposed ban attracted national media attention, and several "pro- family" groups seeking to drum up support for the bill have been circulating some troubling stats about gay parents. Among the most striking, stated during a CNN program: children in foster homes with same-sex parents are 11 times as likely to be sexually abused as those with heterosexual parents.

To get on CNN, that number snaked through a twisting path, from a little-noticed Illinois study published by an antigay scientist/activist in a psychological journal, to several conservative Web sites, to, finally, the attention of a Texas activist who presented her misinterpretation of the study on national television, essentially unchallenged. It's a textbook example of how flawed numbers can gain national attention if advocates work hard enough -- especially when there aren't widely-known conflicting estimates.

I'll start at the end of the number's path and try to unravel it to the source. Cathie Adams, president of the Dallas-based Texas Eagle Forum advocacy group, appeared April 21 on CNN in a debate segment about the proposed Texas law. Her designated sparring partner was Randall Ellis, executive director of the Lesbian/Gay Rights Lobby of Texas. "We also have got to look at research that does show that children in same-sex couple homes are 11 times more likely to be abused sexually," Ms. Adams said during the live segment. "And I think that that is not an issue that can be ignored. It is a proven fact and that was a research study done in the state of Illinois that has not, as the state of Texas has not, even asked that question."

"That's a bold statement," said CNN anchor Kyra Phillips, who gave Mr.
Ellis a chance to respond. At first he called Ms. Adams's assertion "completely uncredible" and "completely absurd," but later he conceded he hadn't heard of the study before. Ms. Phillips didn't revisit the claim. 

Ms. Adams told me that her source for the claim was an article she had read on the conservative site WorldNetDaily, about a study published in February by Paul Cameron, chairman of the Colorado Springs, Colo.-based Family Research Institute, a group that says homosexuality is a major public-health threat. In the journal Psychological Reports, Dr. Cameron analyzed cases of sexual abuse committed against foster children and children in subsidized adoption homes, as reported to Illinois's Department of Children and Family Services from 1997 to 2002. There were 270 reports, and 34% of those were same-sex in nature: committed by a male adult against a male child, or a female adult against a female child. Dr. Cameron called those homosexual acts of abuse, and, citing several studies, including a joint report by the University of Michigan and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, concluded that gays make up between 1% and 3% of the adult U.S. population. "Thus, homosexual practitioners were proportionately more apt to sexually abuse foster or adoptive children," Dr. Cameron wrote.

This required several leaps of logic, some of which I'll discuss later.
The biggest is that Dr. Cameron had no data about the makeup of homes in which the Illinois children were abused; indeed, a state DCFS spokeswoman told me the agency doesn't record whether households are same-sex. It's possible that much of what Dr. Cameron calls homosexual abuse occurred in what would be considered heterosexual homes.

Yet Ms. Adams simply divided 3% into 34% to get her 11 number. When I asked her about this discrepancy between what the study found and what she said, she replied, "I believe I didn't have that articulated as well as I should have." But she also said it seems unlikely that abuse would be homosexual in nature yet committed by an apparent heterosexual. "It just requires more explanation than what you can do in soundbites," she said.

Mr. Ellis, Ms. Adams's debate opponent, told me that a brief segment on live television isn't the ideal format for fact-checking, and said he believes it's the news anchor's responsibility to ask, "Where are you getting that study?" A CNN spokeswoman told me in an e-mailed statement that "the opposing guest was given an opportunity to respond to the guest's statement in question."

Ms. Adams did get Dr. Cameron's results onto national television, but for the most part the mainstream press ignores him these days. That's because for two decades he has published studies critical of gays while openly espousing an antigay agenda. Speaking about his institute, Dr. Cameron told me, "We agree that homosexuality is one of the greatest public-health threats of our time, and that engaging in it ought to be discouraged to the same degree that we discourage illegal drug abuse."

Dr. Cameron's work deserves a closer look, for two reasons. First, overt researcher bias makes results questionable but doesn't necessarily invalidate them. And second, while the media have grown skeptical of his work, Dr. Cameron still influences political debate.
His research was cited earlier this year by a Virginia lawmaker advocating legislation to discourage gay couples from adopting children (the House of Delegates approved the bill, but a state senate committee killed the measure). And Dr. Cameron is a leading advocate of the notion that gays are more likely to sexually abuse children, which is one of the main arguments against gay marriage and adoption and has surfaced in related debates in Arkansas and New Hampshire.

Texas state Rep. Robert Talton, a Republican from Pasadena who proposed the ban on gay foster parents, didn't directly raise the issue of sexual abuse, but did say on the House floor, "It is our responsibility to make sure that we protect our most vulnerable children, and I don't think we are doing that if we allow a foster parent that is homosexual or bisexual." His office told me he wasn't available for further comment.

I ran Dr. Cameron's paper by some experts in psychology, sociology, statistics and child welfare, as well as a researcher who has in the past defended Dr. Cameron.

Besides his lack of data about same-sex couples in Illinois, researchers pointed out Dr. Cameron's flawed assumption that the gender of pedophiles' victims correlates to adult sexual attraction; that he applied nationwide data on homosexuality to a predominantly Chicago- based population of foster homes; and that he cited many of his own studies, including two previous ones that attempted to calculate the proportion of sexual abuse that is same-sex based on small sample sizes of six and 25 cases of abuse, respectively.

"The paper is not written as a competent research paper," said Paul Velleman, associate professor of social statistics at Cornell University. "This is a pretty lightweight study," said Kenneth Land, professor of sociology at Duke University and chair of the American Statistical Association's mathematical sociology section. 

Walter Schumm, professor of family studies at Kansas State, once published a paper responding to Dr. Cameron's critics, but in this case he questioned Dr. Cameron's conclusion that same-sex couples pose a special threat to children. "Since the state didn't provide him with any data on whether parents were heterosexual or gay, it's hard to make any definitive statements other than that much of the abuse seems to be same-gendered," Dr. Schumm said. "For all we know, that could all be by heterosexual parents." 

Child-welfare advocates also disputed Dr. Cameron's conclusions. Linda Spears, vice president of communications and development for the Child Welfare League of America, an advocacy organization in Washington, said, "Sexual abuse is not sex. It is a crime of control and power." The CWLA opposes a ban on gay foster parents, as does the Illinois DCFS, according to spokeswoman Diane Jackson. And Margaret Berglind, president and chief executive of the nonprofit Child Care Association of Illinois, said that the scarcity of homes for foster children should outweigh what she considered a questionable study, adding that gay couples sometimes prove most willing to accept hard-to-place children, like those who are HIV-positive. 

When I told Dr. Cameron about these criticisms, he responded, "All scientists have bias," and, "There is no perfect study." He does contend that those who commit same-sex child abuse are gay, regardless of whether they identify themselves as homosexuals. And while Dr.
Cameron said Ms. Adams's conclusion about his research might be wrong, depending on the proportion of gays among Illinois foster parents, he stood by the conclusion drawn by Ms. Adams: "Those who come into [family-services agencies] waving the homosexual banner should be excluded, because they are a much greater risk to children," Dr.
Cameron said.

I also interviewed Douglas Ammons, co-editor of Psychological Reports, the Missoula, Mont.-based journal that published Dr. Cameron. He said that the journal uses more reviewers than usual for Dr. Cameron's submissions -- from four up to as many as 21 -- but ultimately, "We don't put limits on people's creativity on how they may or may not interpret stuff." Dr. Ammons added, "We try to come down on the side of one of the basic tenets of science -- free speech for the author." He said the importance of the issue and lack of competing data merited publication. "When you are in a difficult situation without much data, it's OK to use data that's ¿ not as exact or exacting as we would like it to be," he said. Dr. Ammons invited Cameron critics to submit rebuttals to the journal and said he has published rebuttals of Dr. Cameron's prior work.

I do think it's worthwhile to study the issue further, because it is likely to keep surfacing in the debate over whether gay couples make good parents.

The best available study I could find on this subject, led over a decade ago by Brown University pediatrics professor Carole Jenny at a Denver hospital, found that only two of 269 cases of sexual abuse over a year's time could be traced to a perpetrator who was identifiably gay. (Incidentally, Dr. Jenny told me she was prompted to conduct the study after reading an article that cited Dr. Cameron's research about gay sexual abuse, which didn't square with her clinical experience.) But her study itself is hampered by several factors, including its age and limited geographical scope, and that the overall proportion of same- sex households in Denver wasn't known.

As Dr. Jenny and her co-authors wrote, a better study would track a randomly selected, large group of either children or of adults and measure incidence of sexual abuse. I asked her if she thought it would be worth conducting such a study. She replied, "Would a big, expensive research project convince folks that gay people are not an unusual threat to children? I don't know, but research hasn't done much to inform the debate on evolution."

 As always, be happy, be safe, and think pretty.
Brianna Austin  

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