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tweet by another user: With the amount of bigots calling LGBTQ+ pedos, the rigid anti-pedophilia stance is a dogwhistle. Offenders should be punished and rehabilitated, however we must first and foremost, as Marxists, recognize that pedophilia is a mental illness and therapy is available and works.QT by Iris:
punished
rehabilitated
“pedophilia is a mental illness,” “therapy works (to cure pedophilia?)”
Lmao how is this “Marxist.” Treating CSA as a mental health issue that can be resolved by putting someone through the carceral system is peak idealism
As Marxists, you should first and foremost recognize that CSA is based in economic hierarchy and that the psych industrial complex/bourgeois propaganda would like you to believe it is only an aberrance or deviance that can be fixed by transforming ideals in offenders’ minds while not confronting material power. The problem isn’t pedophilia, or mental illness, or psychology.
As Marxists, you should first and foremost recognize that CSA is based in economic hierarchy and that the psych industrial complex/bourgeois propaganda would like you to believe it is only an aberrance or deviance that can be fixed by transforming ideals in offenders’ minds while not confronting material power. The problem isn’t pedophilia, or mental illness, or psychology.
(though one could argue that this should be expected of tankies who have generally bought into the “state rehabilitation” paradigm wrt various issues throughout history, such as labor—see: https://nnia.space/@aronarchy/111061532450902128)
(This is yet another point of evidence for “rehabilitation is carceral”—yay ig?)
.
tweet by another user: The question is whether they can be rehabilitated. That means they recognize they did something wrong and atone for it, and become a productive member of society. There’s no reason sex offenders can’t be rehabilitated like any other criminal if we actually triedQT by Iris:
become a productive member of societyWhy do people keep pretending that “rehabilitation” isn’t carceral/capitalist?
It’s literally completely openly admitted in general discussion of “rehab” by the state, policy makers, cops, members of the PIC and such that rehabilitation-punishment are two sides of the same coin with the end goal of rehab being a normative wage-earning job and so on and attaining respectability. Punishment for when one refuses and/or is deemed incapable of “contribution” and respectability. The process of Othering rape and rapists and claiming they are marginalized leads people to collapse their interests with those of addicts, poor people, unhoused people, disabled/mentally ill/pathologized people, and other societal outcasts who are oppressed this way by the State.
But most rapists and sexual abusers, in reality, are on the opposite side of structural marginalization—they are empowered, they already have jobs or are bourgeois and they are well-loved by their workplaces/communities, they enforce respectability. They don’t need rehabilitation in the first place.
Especially the conflation with disability or ill-health, the threads tying to the medical-industrial complex are obvious.
The word “rehabilitate” also happens to be used in the sense of “rehabilitating [xyz]’s reputation,” e.g. when a popular or powerful or famous person has been “canceled” for done something abusive/oppressive, their defenders try to “rehabilitate” their view among the public. I don’t mean that multiple usages of a term = those differing definitions are inherently related, but I think in this case they’re at least similar. You’ll notice that much of the “rehabilitation” discourse seems to treat it as the offender’s own personal journey, ignoring the victim’s wishes if a hypothetical victim does not accept the rehab as sufficient apology and choose forgiveness, but these people expect that the rehab as a process should be sufficient to make broad and regimented judgments about how to treat an offender. Similar to the usual psychiatric view that psych/therapy is a sort of productive machine where you input-badperson-output-goodperson, with no possibility for error or individual nuance; traditionally applied to things like conversion therapy or the coercive “fixing” of deviants, now turned the other way around. But that’s not how reality works. The psych narrative doesn’t allow for the possibility that the offender might choose to reject the offered rehabilitation. Thus both paternalism oppressing queers and mad people and the like, but also just assuming that abusers and rapists automatically Change if they go through the Rehabilitation Machine and we don’t need to plan any further than that.
The word “rehabilitate” also happens to be used in the sense of “rehabilitating [xyz]’s reputation,” e.g. when a popular or powerful or famous person has been “canceled” for done something abusive/oppressive, their defenders try to “rehabilitate” their view among the public. I don’t mean that multiple usages of a term = those differing definitions are inherently related, but I think in this case they’re at least similar. You’ll notice that much of the “rehabilitation” discourse seems to treat it as the offender’s own personal journey, ignoring the victim’s wishes if a hypothetical victim does not accept the rehab as sufficient apology and choose forgiveness, but these people expect that the rehab as a process should be sufficient to make broad and regimented judgments about how to treat an offender. Similar to the usual psychiatric view that psych/therapy is a sort of productive machine where you input-badperson-output-goodperson, with no possibility for error or individual nuance; traditionally applied to things like conversion therapy or the coercive “fixing” of deviants, now turned the other way around. But that’s not how reality works. The psych narrative doesn’t allow for the possibility that the offender might choose to reject the offered rehabilitation. Thus both paternalism oppressing queers and mad people and the like, but also just assuming that abusers and rapists automatically Change if they go through the Rehabilitation Machine and we don’t need to plan any further than that.
*I am not saying that abusers and rapists can never change—I don’t believe that—I’m saying that we need to reframe the entire discussion because the priorities are completely skewed and the carceral model is unrealistic and surprisingly many people are being gullible and incorrect about the issue.
(I really would like to theorize this more, and I want more info on the history of the rehabilitation paradigm, with an especial focus on the politics of CSA, medicalization of paraphilias, pseudoscientific biological models wrt patriarchy, ableism/saneism, and psychiatric abuse. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem very popular to think about it this way so it’s much harder to find analyses and theory and such than one would with other frameworks and topics. Also people tend to be dogmatic and accuse you of supporting [X] if you say [Y] even when you don’t.)
One of the starkest examples I’ve seen is in how anti-SW people tend to frame quitting SW and getting a legal/aboveground job as “rehabilitating” sex workers. Tied up in both paternalistic “help”/“saving”/“salvation” discourses and in more explicit coercion and labor capture. See, for example: https://event.newschool.edu/manufacturingfreedom
Note that often, marginalized groups have disproportionate statistical rates of “sex offenders” because “soliciting prostitution” is often defined as a “sex offense” and marginalized people are more often driven into underground economies and disproportionately criminalized, and that “rehabilitation” promotion (in many contexts) is often explicitly Christian fundamentalist.
(I really would like to theorize this more, and I want more info on the history of the rehabilitation paradigm, with an especial focus on the politics of CSA, medicalization of paraphilias, pseudoscientific biological models wrt patriarchy, ableism/saneism, and psychiatric abuse. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem very popular to think about it this way so it’s much harder to find analyses and theory and such than one would with other frameworks and topics. Also people tend to be dogmatic and accuse you of supporting [X] if you say [Y] even when you don’t.)
One of the starkest examples I’ve seen is in how anti-SW people tend to frame quitting SW and getting a legal/aboveground job as “rehabilitating” sex workers. Tied up in both paternalistic “help”/“saving”/“salvation” discourses and in more explicit coercion and labor capture. See, for example: https://event.newschool.edu/manufacturingfreedom
Note that often, marginalized groups have disproportionate statistical rates of “sex offenders” because “soliciting prostitution” is often defined as a “sex offense” and marginalized people are more often driven into underground economies and disproportionately criminalized, and that “rehabilitation” promotion (in many contexts) is often explicitly Christian fundamentalist.
I also remember that “violent offenders” and “criminals” who are survivors of abuse and patriarchal violence might sometimes be viewed as saveable if they begin living a respectable, normal life, are “rehabilitated” from their “crimes,” become “good” now—for one of the stories of a child abuse victim killing his father in self-defense and to free himself, the judge says yeah well not Too long a sentence because we’re confident he “understands what he did was wrong” now and can probably become a normative member of Society. No question of whether perhaps he didn’t actually do anything wrong in the first place, shouldn’t be criminalized or put under the control of a court/the State at all. This is the dual and conflicted nature of “battered woman syndrome” or “battered child syndrome” used as a criminal defense for violent resistance to abuse or for crimes committed because of the abuse motivated either by necessity or by coercion, the “criminal insanity” defense. Yes, these provisions do, technically, creates possibility of making things better for survivors in the moment, not something worse—but that’s not what abolition means, is it? Not compromise, but overthrowing the unjust power structures entirely. Not putting ourselves at the mercy of our oppressors hoping they’ll be a bit more sympathetic if we plead more, all the whole misrepresenting ourselves further.
Note how often “recidivism” for rapists/abusers is explicitly likened to “relapse” into drug or alcohol usage. How they call sexual assault prevention “relapse prevention.” And remember the long and messy history of entanglement between anti-addict ableism and domestic abuse apologia, and how common the rape myth is that rapists rape “because of” alcohol. And then remember how patriarchy assumes women must automatically generate “irresistible sexual desire” and “urges” in cishet men, blaming rape on “porn addiction” or “sex addiction,” treating women or their bodies like a “drug” that one can be “addicted” to and have to actively “resist” the “temptation” of. How rich rapists go to private “sex addiction treatment” facilities instead of taking public accountability.
[discussion of https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?params=/context/mlr/article/3685, an article titled “The Rise of Prisons and the Origins of the Rehabilitative Ideal”]
[screenshots from Louise Armstrong’s book Rocking the Cradle of Sexual Politics, especially the section on psychiatric “treatment” of sexually abusive fathers including penile plethysmography etc.]
[screenshot of her references for that section, one of which mentioned a text by Gene Abel (not the one discussed below)]
I’m not very familiar with most of these mentioned people, but I recognize the name of Gene Abel:
[screenshot from ETAY’s reading list:
I have multiple issues with the source, so I’m not going to link it directly, but it does have some useful compilations of info on the older milieu of psychiatric abusers in the CSA-prevention industry from which much of modern practice arose. See also: https://www.reddit.com/r/Prevention/comments/uv0w8zThe Stop Child Molestation Book.By Gene G. Abel and Nora Harlow, Xlibris, 2001, 364 pages.ISBN 1-4010-3481-0, $19.54 Paper
This book is included here not to endorse its point of view, but rather to illustrate the kind of thinking that is common among therapists who attempt to control children’s sexual behavior through coercion. The authors start with a laudable goal—to drastically reduce the occurrence of child molestation—but their proposed methods target the children themselves—as offenders. Claiming that one out of every twenty boys will develop pedophilia in childhood or puberty, they recommend that all parents question their sons in sixth grade about their sexual fantasies. Any boy who is suspected of having sexual thoughts involving younger children, or who has been molested by an older child or adult, is to be referred to a sex-specific therapist who will test him using Abel’s own sexual interest test, lie detectors, or a plethysmograph connected to his genitals. If the boy tests positive, treatment would include isolation from other children, constant monitoring of sexual feelings and behavior (sometimes by plethysmograph), high doses of sex drive reducing drugs, covert sensitization, and aversion therapy with ammonia. These methods could be imposed on the boy indefinitely regardless of parents’ or his own objections. Abel and Harlow show no concern for the emotional trauma and intense stigma these methods would inflict on boys, or the new class of lepers they would create—consisting, presumably, of 5% of all boys. Instead, they rationalize such abuse with the claim that protection of normal children takes precedence over the welfare of those who are deviant.]
Basically, this guy (and similar others) advocated CSA to prevent (or punish) CSA. It’s worth noting, however, that while the focus from much of these is on actual abusers/CSA perpetrators (adults or youth, respectively), from what we know of reality, perpetrators rarely actually are forced/coerced into state interventions in any meaningful way, whether into prisons or therapy, and on average can much more easily opt out of coercive psych than non-abusive marginalized people can. This goes for abusive children too, who are generally privileged compared to abused children. (But it is much easier to pathologize and criminalize children/youth’s harmless, non-victimizing experiences or expressions of sexuality, like having fantasies or attractions or having consensual sex with peers. Also often functions as [a mechanism of] adult control.)
(For an example of “aversion therapy” being used on an adult ACNOMAP in a conversion-therapy attempt to “cure” his mapness, see here.)
Meanwhile, however, we also recognize that these “penile plethysmography,” “aversion therapy,” etc. techniques… are actually quite familiar. Not wrt rapists or child molesters—but in conversion therapy for queers. This is a perspective I think neither cisfem-centric radfems like Armstrong nor the more liberal types like the aforementioned site have picked up on: that it’s mainly transphobic sexology which pioneered these techniques, applying patriarchal bioessentialism and reducing personhood and identity and traits and decisions to genitalia, and trying to torture people out of experiencing deviant sexuality, in conjunction with the rise of the pathologized “paraphili(c disorder)” paradigm. But “rapist” is not a deviant sexuality.
I think an analogy could be drawn with Armstrong’s recounting of how state intervention/incarceration/child welfare agencies were historically built to contain the marginalized and punish deviance and perpetuate class regulation, but after feminist anti-CSA activism of the 70s/80s, was turned (supposedly) to now start punishing CSA perpetrators, including middle-class or wealthy fathers. Except the discrepancy between the structural realities of carceral mechanisms and these cis men’s material power meant that, in practice, most perpetrators would still be missed, because prisons just functionally cannot “correctly” target abusers.
My point here is about how patriarchy (and other oppressive systems) simultaneously weaponize ableism/saneism to treat (oppressed) people perceived as insane/lacking in self-control as problematic for it, and to perceive (oppressive) people perceived as insane/lacking in self-control as less problematic for it. For an easy example: pathologizing victims of abuse fighting back as “crazy” and therefore to be judged for it, but excusing abusers because “he’s just mentally ill/has anger issues he can’t help it.” You also see this dynamic mirrored in psychiatric pathologization of queers vs of actual rapists/sexual abusers.tweet by undryne: if you don’t believe sex offenders aren’t in control of their urges and can’t be triggered into reoffending based on being shunned and isolated from their communities and exiled by friends while they’re trying to reintegrate, read an actual study sometimeQT by Iris: Do you not view it as insulting to sex offenders to imply they are incapable of controlling themselves and are ruled by impulses and whims? (Something something patriarchy, pathologization, …)
I can’t find the link to it at the moment, but in a thread on Mastodon from a while ago I proposed that we loosely label these “positive” vs. “negative” pathologizations, wherein the former leads to material gains for the pathologized (e.g. abusers escaping accountability because they’re perceived as not at fault because they just couldn’t control themselves) vs. losses (e.g. being locked up because you’re perceived as insane). This was in a thread with an anti-c intersex transfem CSA and other child abuse survivor and paraphiliac, who’s studied the problematic beliefs of John Money for a long time and has been discussing her research within the MAP community for several years; we dug up an old interview he did with Paidika which I think illustrates this dynamic well—“treatment” of an alleged child-molesting father which played on various transmisogynistic and adultist ideas and showed a messy relationship with paraphilia concepts both as pathologized and as promoted to varying degrees, and I took a look at one of his papers advocating for chemical castration for SOs and there was a lot to unravel wrt political ideas behind it. (I’ll try to repost if I find it)
And this also underlines the main confusion behind simultaneously claiming “[cishet] men have superior self-control [contra inferior uncontrolled women, youth, queers]” and “[cishet] men are ruled by their desires, they literally have uncontrollable sexual desires, you need to feel sorry for them because they can’t help themselves and can’t do anything.” Analogous to the fascist line of thinking, “the enemy is both strong and weak.” [Elaboration I would add now: And, of course, fascists do not mind categorizing a certain group or person as both strong and weak at the same time, because the seeming contradiction actually circles back to a deeper, consonant point in their ideology. They view themselves similarly as simultaneously strong and weak, their nation both about to be overrun and a great, all-powerful historical conqueror; and the nation, of course, is analogous to the patriarchy which constitutes it. They apply this contradiction to self-control and abuse/sexual violence and see it as coherent because for some classes of people and in some situations loss of control is “licensed” as a privilege or expected, while in others it is forbidden because it is by/for an improper subject. Also, in general, certain types of actions (i.e. abuse or sexual violence, when actually manifesting) are affirming of hegemony and thus protected, while others (i.e. resistance to the system) are punished, and any tools available (even when seeming to present a negative or inferior view of the individuals) are mobilized to protect this status quo.]
And this also underlines the main confusion behind simultaneously claiming “[cishet] men have superior self-control [contra inferior uncontrolled women, youth, queers]” and “[cishet] men are ruled by their desires, they literally have uncontrollable sexual desires, you need to feel sorry for them because they can’t help themselves and can’t do anything.” Analogous to the fascist line of thinking, “the enemy is both strong and weak.” [Elaboration I would add now: And, of course, fascists do not mind categorizing a certain group or person as both strong and weak at the same time, because the seeming contradiction actually circles back to a deeper, consonant point in their ideology. They view themselves similarly as simultaneously strong and weak, their nation both about to be overrun and a great, all-powerful historical conqueror; and the nation, of course, is analogous to the patriarchy which constitutes it. They apply this contradiction to self-control and abuse/sexual violence and see it as coherent because for some classes of people and in some situations loss of control is “licensed” as a privilege or expected, while in others it is forbidden because it is by/for an improper subject. Also, in general, certain types of actions (i.e. abuse or sexual violence, when actually manifesting) are affirming of hegemony and thus protected, while others (i.e. resistance to the system) are punished, and any tools available (even when seeming to present a negative or inferior view of the individuals) are mobilized to protect this status quo.]
Anyway, summary:
- “rehabilitation” (wrt criminality or harm) originated as and is still generally used as a Christian and carceral concept
- concepts of abusers changing for the better must be understood through the lens of material power analysis
- abolish the nuclear family.
Additional note: My analysis is also informed by my own experiences with ableist and capitalism-oriented psychiatry (that vent post doesn’t go over my experiences with therapy in particular, but many of those were also similar), where it looks pretty obvious that the fundamental orientation of the psych system/medical-industrial complex/“treatment” is corrective, to get us back into employment (or precursors on the track to employment i.e. schooling), with personal wellbeing tacked on only as a recent afterthought, but that clashes with the fundamental goals of the field which produces some interesting contradictions, attempts to cover it up, etc. I also draw from others who have added on to my commentary or who have produced their own commentary on similar experiences with ableism. These aren’t about violence or abuse perpetration or crime, but they are still relevant (of course) given how our capitalism tends to view not-working as tantamount to crime/violence/abuse in itself to varying degrees, depending on context.
I also recently started reading Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery, and I think one of her examples is very illustrative: a soldier goes into psychological trauma treatment/therapy, but it is understood among those in the profession that the goal of any such treatment is to return wounded/ill/traumatized soldiers to combat, and was proffered as an alternative to simply punishing them with threats and verbal abuse and violence. I would be interested in seeing any more expansive efforts to trace the history of psychiatry and its specific relations to capital/labor extraction. Would also appreciate anyone who’s theorized comparisons/analogies to smaller-scale interpersonal abusers who have goals of labor extraction (I can remember some examples from my own life, and this isn’t exactly uncommon, so).
Additional note:
https://sci-hub.st/10.1007/BF02685564
Up until now the ideology governing the approach to the problem of rape posed man as a sort of goat in rut whose ardor does not bear any shackling, as an unrestrained bestial being. This was a naturalist discourse, which defined man with unequaled violence and horror, and which permitted the situation where the injustice of contemporary social relationships was not posed. The male rapist had to be ascribable to nature, not at all to an oppressive society. It was preferable to propose a lobotomy[9] to reduce his “instinct to rape,” rather than to make him recognize the oppression of women in which he as a (social) man participates.
[9] A psychosurgical technique aiming at severing a part of the brain matter considered responsible for a behavior disorder. The fact that a television program on rape displayed a rapist who had been normalized by a lobotomy shows the extreme ascendancy of the naturalist ideology. It is probably considered just a sample case; doubtless few men would have to submit to a lobotomy. But ideologically the “explanation” and its practical implication are ready to hand. But it is not without interest to point out that when it is a question of rape, man is treated as a biological entity (something which is ordinarily reserved for women), and that one can even think of applying to him a “curative” (mutilating) technique that is also more particularly “reserved” for women. Cf. for example: Peter Breggin, “La lobotomie revient,” Les temps modernes, no. 321 (1973), pp. 1773-1792.
