In connection with the recent pedophile scandals, it was suggested that the legislature should tighten the child protection laws. What is your personal opinion, what legal age of consent should be drawn in order to protect children from sexual abuse?

- If we really think about the healthy development of the child, then 18 years is the limit. As with alcohol, smoking and other dangerous things, we want to protect children from all kinds of harm. We have to realize that within this age the young person still has an immature personality, so he/she must be protected from himself/herself. Not only from others, from himself/herself, from those impulses that might drag him/her into this kind of situation.

Many times, young people drift into certain situations by just wanting love and acceptance.

- If I take a position from the point of view of a clinical psychologist, psychotherapist, I have to shout loudly that parents learn the critical points and vulnerable phases of a child's development. If they know these, parents will notice where the child needs to be protected. And I will not close my mouth about this. I think it is very important that we at least accept science: the psychology of development, the experience of observations. Knowledge accumulated over millions of evolutionary years and long, long centuries. Not based on a contemporary taste pattern or a fanciful opinion, but based on facts.

Here I would like to link to another topic: it is not by accident that the child protection law addresses gender ideology aimed at young children, which can seriously affect children's development, making them uncertain about their own gender identity.

- I think it is important that there should be a general agreement among those who participate in the child's upbringing in one way or another but professionally: this includes all educators, teachers, psychologists and even parents. If we can't agree on influences and danger points, on what is good and right, then everyone is arguing. I am thinking here, for example, of a kind of scientific guide. Epigenetics, for example, deals with the relationship between genetics and environmental factors. So there is a genetic potential in the tiny baby, the tiny seed contains the gifts of our ancestors, both the good and the bad, the possibilities of the future personality.

we have to consider that there are different dowries from far away, whose free self-fulfillment require a way in the development, can bring on gene potentials. There are critical (sensitive) developmental phases.

To give an example: there are genes that can be influenced and when a strong stimulus from the outside world hits, or a long-lasting, development-inhibiting, unfavorable stimulus, the chromosomes rewrite and rearrange themselves. This is called methylation. If, let’s say, the child is not given a human voice during the sensitive phase of learning to speak, he/she will never be able to learn to speak again, almost never. So there are situations when genes are specifically waiting for the key stimulations that call them to life. Therefore, in the development of children, it is especially important to set a standard that mostly corresponds to naturalness, in a way free from extreme influences. God forbid that we somehow sensitize, influence this natural process in the vulnerable stages of life.

We must also mention the phenomenon of gender dysphoria here.

- The majority- 95 percent- take the natural route and fight it out. In this regard, it is also important to note that there is a sensitive period in adolescence, when children have an intense focus primarily on their own gender. At this stage, it may happen that children whose minds have been disturbed due to certain experiences are in doubt as to whether they will become homosexual because of a traumatic experience in this direction. If we let the child go through natural experiences, 95 percent of the time he/she will still be channeled in a heterosexual direction.

I can only think about the child protection law that it really put the child in the center and not the sane desire of the adults. Now we are experiencing how the sexual need of adults breaks over without covering it and creates dilemma about law changing that creates vulnerable situations for children.

This is why there should be a public consensus that you need a father and a mother. This is the job and role obligation of the mother, and this is the role obligation of the husband, the father, he must ensure this. Or, if the father is not present, what should be substituted? What is the basic stability that the child needs? That I have a dad and I have a mom, not where this is, where that is. It is therefore necessary to ensure the completeness in which a child can unfold what is inside him.

In Hungary, many psychologists and psychiatrists have made amazing claims about the law and you have also received a lot of criticism for not sharing the opinions that are at war with science. Similarly, the world-famous Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, who was wanted to be sent to a re-education course in the past few weeks, is being attacked on the pretext of gender ideology. What is going on in the psychology profession now?

- Out of fifteen thousand Hungarian psychologists, some thousand and so turned against me. I took it for granted that they are ready to sell their spirituality, faith, and convictions in the spirit of trendiness and blindly subordinate their knowledge to something new, which is now the new direction that must be followed. They say Emőke Bagdy is backward, she is a conservative. Now a new ideology is being born, with a new nomenclature. In the Second World War and in the 1950’s, people were liquidated, or they were stigmatized or excluded, just because of a different ideology, a different kind of person.

In our European Christian culture, there is obviously a religious and moral belief system, which is uniformly laid down in the Ten Commandments of Moses, or in the teachings of Christ but also in the Torah and Talmud and also in other sacred documents: how life can be passed on, how men and women relate to each other, how they reproduce and multiply. And now there is a particular ideology that first emerged as a hidden stream and almost in an unnoticed way they spread the seed of this belief system. The community representing this now says no to everything that was valid until now. Tradition? Finished. Past things, cultural treasures? Who cares? Let's say no. The period of denial of conventional norms has come.

It's an immature adolescent ideology that says I don't care what the ancestors say. Moving in the direction of desire, they want to carry out their own hedonic ideal of happiness. The first stage of this is that they sweep aside the concepts we respect: the union of man and woman and the family. They're kicking everything apart.

I think there is a danger because someone wants to change the world order. The order of the world starts where the man and the woman are.

No matter what god they believe in, the god of this new World order is money. And we, as part of a consumer culture, are victims of this new ideology, because we don't notice that a small community has escalated so much, with big money interests behind it, that it intimidates the majority. If we look at it a little more broadly, it is a World force that wants to have power over us and make us dependent: on medicines, food, drinks, sex, behavior, devices, mobile phones. First they inveigle, then when we got it, then they take over the human soul in a tyrannical way. Once someone becomes addicted, they become a huge consumer.

At the same time, it also takes away the possibility of resistance and independence, because all the pillars of identity are overthrown by this ideology.

- Yes, this is an identity-killing attitude that is violent, wants power and condemns me if I think differently. Nevertheless, I, who am a psychologist and have sworn to help people in trouble as much as I can, who have learned a lot and given a lot of my life to get here: to me, a culture dares to say that if a child is a little is uncertain about something, then it is my duty to confirm it. Otherwise, you will be excluded from the ranks of psychologists, because you will be stigmatized and condemned. The vast majority of psychologists remain silent and allow these enormous crimes to happen because they are afraid of receiving terrible news. In Canada, for example, you won't be admitted to university or you won't be allowed to take the professional exam if, say, you don't describe gender pronouns in your thesis. The professors have also agreed to this at Western universities, because otherwise they will not receive grant money, their work will not be accepted, they will be forced to take retraining courses, or they will be pushed aside.

What can psychologists or ordinary people do about this trend?

- You also stand there and say your opinion! If a lot of us say that enough is enough, we will not be traitors to lie to the children. Even if I am judged for my position, faith will keep me, I am a believer in God. I don't want to see anything else on the throne, neither mammon, money, nor even science, if that's how it sells itself. 

(Translated by Anett Harmath)