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the relativism question
Oct. 26th, 2023 11:43 am[trigger warning: sometimes-graphic descriptions and discussion of CSA and CSA apologia, racism, colonialism]
(this is a rough draft of an essay I am trying to write.)
—
As a survivor who comes from one of those “non-Western backgrounds with Different Cultural Values” which get thrown around in discourse for tokenizing points, the dominant discourses on CSA are very frustrating to me. Anti-CSA activism of the mainstream is mostly led by white people, who have the greatest amount of power in influencing the direction of discourse and having their voices heard and respected. Although even white children are still severely oppressed for being children and white survivors are still not believed or respected much, they do have an advantage over children and survivors of color. Likewise, cishet men of color have advantages over us (both wrt domestic authoritarianism and in antifeminist/adultist public discourses). This trap is familiar—much more has been written about the intersection of racism and misogyny/queerphobia and its particular impacts on women and queers of color, and the difficulties set by the seeming dichotomy between “liberated white Western feminist women/queers” and “repressive misogynistic queerphobic nonwestern cishet men.” But the effects of pervasive gaslighting and erasure are even more severe when it comes to children, and children and child abuse survivors have far less theorizing wrt coloniality written on their issues. This is a major problem considering how a crucial component of CSA apologist politics involves white anthropology, sexology, biologists and evolutionary psychologists and so on claiming that CSA is an inherent feature of “Other cultures” and only modernizing colonialism/imperialism stopped some CSA, thus being anti-CSA is a “white” thing and indicative of sexual repression/Western sensibilities and culturally imperialist. I haven’t seen a lot of anti-c’s willing to tackle this in theory, and most of those who’ve written about it go from an angle which is also racist (e.g. the Armstrong quote above).
I cannot speak to the experience of being raised on CSA-apologist values argued from cultural relativism (on our side) specifically; my experience and analysis of my life history is mainly with regards to nonsexual child abuse; all of us (survivors here) know that our abusers like to tell us it is uniquely ok to [abuse] us because “lax”/“gentle” parenting or pedagogy is a “Western thing” (USAmerican, in my case specifically), a problem of modernity, cultural hysteria, and Our traditional valuesTM are better than that. Common tropes for various different non-white cultures are different but have key similarities throughout, and this is what I will focus on addressing here. It’s an overwhelming trend for people to assume that white adults are less abusive to their children on average and non-white adults are overwhelmingly abusive (“because of the culture”) and survivors will often say “well yeah I was abused my parents were of [X] culture and it’s kind of, part of that culture”—an explanation is not an excuse, of course, but this concerns me all the same because we do not see white survivors saying “I was abused because they were white and white people/white culture is fundamentally abusive” (although that’s pretty true). As usual, whiteness is permitted more variation/diversity w/in people’s opinions, perceptions, etc., more individuality and nuance because of their privilege. Even when it comes to violence/abuse/ethical wrongs. Survivor memoirs, interviews/discussion, etc. also tend to implicitly naturalize abuse as a feature of ~their culture~ and far less of those survivors are militant/radical/leftist/anarchist—many of us are, but not a lot in mainstream outlets.
This pervasive gaslighting really does a number to your head when you’re going through trauma and trying to think against the grain but there doesn’t seem to be anyone irl near you who’s willing to interrogate the common assumptions and they repeat them, those abuse myths, again and again and again, casual conversation and discussion, even in venting—nowhere is safe—just retreat and ignore and hide away from everyone because if you expressed disagreement you’d be called a killjoy. Nobody ever said to you, out loud irl in words that your perceptions and feelings are valid and right and they’re wrong to do this and wrong to claim it’s culture. and even radical, feminist white survivors/activists will throw you under the bus (“savage” children are children too, Louise. They wouldn’t deserve it either). And I have very few friends, even now, even online, with similar experiences I can relate to and discuss with. This is one of those topics I still feel very, very nervous to touch, especially out loud and especially in public. Oppression/abuse has you internalizing the view and the gaze of the oppressor/abuser because you need to, to survive, and to understand/predict; we split our perceptions between ourselves and how we think they might be seeing us; I feel this following me around even when it is not immediately relevant/necessary to deflect a particular danger and i still feel a looming sense that if I speak about the abuse especially in this context some terrible retribution will befall me / I will be doing something immoral (violation of family privacy or cultural autonomy) and will be hurt for that. I also did not feel comfortable writing the following about CSA for a long while, and only starting saying my thoughts out loud in private later this year and otherwise in scattered mastodon posts and threads. It helps a lot that we’ve successfully begun to wrest back the contact discourse arena this year and challenged Newgon and other pro-c’s to free up the ability to be anti-c openly and more fully.
This confluence of counterinsurgent forces function to prevent us from forming class consciousness and organizing towards the destruction of the systems which oppress us; they constrain our pain and anger and our ability to express them and act on them in productive ways; we need to fight them as much as possible, whenever and wherever possible.
Here I will try to outline my general theory of the CSA–race intersection; these are just sketches and I’ve written a lot more of my thoughts in private (e.g. my server, and DMs with some others) but I hope I will be able to transfer those insights to a more neat and readable format here later. This will focus on CSA mostly but it applies to child abuse in general too.
- The white supremacist theory of the biodetermined developmental telos is wrong; humans are neither “programmed” to be patriarchal nor to be non-patriarchal based on biology, nor is either more of a “developed,” “advanced,” etc. form of social organization than the other, or necessarily correlating to other biological features. Patriarchy and egalitarianism are neither evolutionarily adaptive nor maladaptive characteristics. Patriarchal nonwestern societies are not so because they lack Western-style “enlightenment”/capitalist development/liberal modernity.
- Both “more Civilized = no CSA = good because CSA is bad” and “more Civilized = no CSA = bad because CSA is good” rely on the equation of civilizedness with no CSA, which is colonialist regardless of how you interpret your conclusion.
- Sexual liberation requires maximizing autonomy. This means eliminating constraints on harmless and private or consensual sexual expression, but also eliminating sexual violence and oppression.
- White European societies were highly patriarchal, violent, oppressive, child-abusing, CSA-enabling, and CSA-accepting at the time of beginning their colonial projects, and they are now too. Pro-CSA ideology is also built into liberal democracy and capitalism.
- Many nonwestern societies were patriarchal pre-colonization, and many were not. Egalitarian societies were not necessarily so because of a lack of awareness of the possibility of oppression as a thing; some had already experienced oppression, either internally or externally, or actively guarded against the arising of oppression through various leveling mechanisms. (My view of the mechanisms through which any patriarchy arises generally align with the hypotheses of materialist feminism.)
- The center of feminist and youth liberationist revolution should be the third world, not the West. This includes struggle against both internal and externally imposed adultist and misogynistic oppressions. Contrary to liberal arguments that because white people have more power or more formal connection to e.g. NGOs, then they can use that more and therefore the rest of us don’t matter/should wait for them first.
- It is okay and right to be angry at and/or fight back against your abuser even if they are also from a marginalized culture, or any other marginalized background. You are not hindering anti-racist solidarity. This does not mean you think non-white abusers are worse or more powerful than white abusers/adultists.
- The primary victim of any genuine attempts to resolve a CSA culture or abusive situation among nonwesterners by appealing to white people in power / attempting to leverage imperialist resources will always ultimately be the victimized nonwestern children themselves. Adult privilege applies universally. (Likewise when it’s about misogyny instead.)
- If adult-child sexual or romantic involvement is wrong and abusive now because of universal features of human childhood then it is wrong and abusive in all cultures, time periods, and geographical contexts which have human children and adults. Trauma will happen regardless of what you’re taught to think about it. Holding inaccurate/internalized abuse-apologist beliefs only make the trauma more difficult to identify, process, and protect and heal from.
- Western imperialism imported patriarchal values into some previously egalitarian cultures and incentivized the reshuffling of the form of patriarchy in others. This did not occur through mere introduction/informational exchange or persuasion but through material violence, imposition of different structures and altered incentives. This also includes CSA.
- A key feature of Western imperialism has also been CSA itself. Racists from all sides like to forget about the scenario of white adults abusing children of color because that really tends to throw off their arguments with very limited premises. This was used as a weapon of colonizing and control itself but also as part of the aforementioned reorganization of age/gender structures.
- Pro-c’s claiming that “other cultures” do CSA therefore CSA is okay are being racist and promoting the interests of Western imperialism. When they accuse opponents of being “the real racists” they are wrong and they are also being racist.
- Hegemonic interests collude as much as possible to make it seem like if we resist child abuse then we must necessarily be leveraging the power or authority of white people/whiteness. This appearance is not natural, inherent to youthlib struggles, or accurate to what we actually think or experience or do. It also won’t matter whether we point this out or not because they’re not coming to this conversation in good faith in the first place; they’re doing it on purpose.
- Pro-c’s of this variety are generally more likely to be racist in other aspects too apart from this. It’s why it’s incorrect to claim that, Newgon for example, is “anti-white” just because it on the surface decries white imperialism sometimes. Newgon is a particularly clear example, blatantly and unashamedly white supremacist in its behavior elsewhere, but this dynamic is replicated among other relativists too.
- Likewise, it is hegemonically incentivized for nonwesterners to represent their societies/cultural values in ways which conform to the dominant racist, “otherizing” assumptions and align with the values of patriarchy and patriarchal interests. Thus the loudest voices are adults, or cis men in particular, who argue in favor of CSA and even claim that it is in fact a part of their culture to do CSA and if someone disagrees with their CSA they’re being racist. This does not make those claims unbiased or inaccurate.
- Racists (of the demonizing variety) already disproportionately and inaccurately believe that “other” cultures are far more prone to CSA and uncontrolled/uncontrollable and ontologically evil. These views have filtered into many people’s perceptions, both pro-c and anti-c, and should be interrogated, not uncritically accepted. Even nonwestern CSA cultures (and CSA culture is always wrong, of course) =/= the demonizing racist portrayal of inexplicable and extreme violent excess as a function of biological deviance (even when they’re bad, they’re often not as bad as the West thinks, or at least are much more mundane in how it plays out). At the very least, one should recognize that when a racist feigns concern for women/children to advocate white imperialist paternalism, he is not anti-patriarchal or anti-abuse in any actual, coherent, meaningful way. Their problems are with deviance and perceived theft of authority/right-to-rule from white patriarchs, not with the fates of women/children themselves or with genuinely liberatory values.
- On the other hand, there are also some paternalistic impulses to claim that a given culture does not have any problems with CSA at all even when there are, to make it seem better. This is not good either and should also be resisted; as always, the children/youth themselves should have the primary voice on portrayals of their conditions.
- The treatment of gender, age, and race have many similarities, even analogous ones with regards to CSA. Both “noble savage” tropes and the ideal of pure, innocent, unfettered, carefree Childhood mirror each other and draw on similar frames. Misogyny is analogous and draws on a lot of similar tropes i.e. the young girl being “innocent” and “carefree,” not burdened by the cares of the world, work, bitterness/cynicism, an understanding of the brutality of the world, or domestic responsibilities, and not tending to refuse or say no, while adult women, especially older women, are portrayed as “dried-up” “hags,” “frigid,” have their innocence and thus appeal gone, etc. Like how abusers/predators often say that they would pick teenage girls/children instead of women to target because women are more likely to avoid them or resist their control (i.e. have developed a better understanding of red flags and more life experience, often from having been abused themselves). The age trajectory of “development” is mapped onto a trajectory of “innocence” and of lack of CSA trauma—seeing that older youth, or adults, will retroactively “regret a positive experience” is often explained by the fact that children apparently have fewer thoughts, ability to feel/experience/independently interpret so they wouldn’t be hurt initially, but “development” ruins/spoils the previous innocence. Likewise racist pro-c’s argue that indigenous peoples had no trauma from CSA before Western interference introduced x ideas for the first time, “interfered” with a secluded, more “innocent” state analogous to romantic notions of naive childhood; i would argue that today’s common discourses of “iatrogenic harm” were likely developed with overtly colonialist origin points. Likewise with how some liberal feminists argue about why some previously gender-egalitarian indigenous societies began to have problems with misogyny and domestic abuse after colonization.
- The nature essentialism/“should return to Wild Natural Human Nature With No Constraints” (and its biologized and racialized form) are also especially relevant because of the association of childhood and indigeneity and lack of civilizational, educated, industrialized, modernized, biologically sophisticated Development with animality (thus “savagery”) and how this has played out with the trend of pro-c’s arguing from primatological examples for their stance; nonhuman animal relatives are viewed as an earlier “origin point” wrt biological development (likewise for children with chronology and indigenous peoples who are dehumanized by colonialist biological assumptions); more about this should be studied with specific thought into how speciesism functions.
- Both “innocence” views are wrong because children and colonized peoples are structurally oppressed and experience worse lives, more hardships and traumatization, not less, than adults/white people. In tandem with the “innocence” construct exists also stereotypes of non-innocent, malicious children / nonwesterners who wish to ruin/corrupt the innocence of the morally righteous adult world / the West, and “innocent” children in practice are mainly those who are white and bourgeois, like “innocent,” idealized women in practice are mainly cis, while underclassed children and trans people are sacrificed and both denied autonomy and un“protected.”
- Patterns of gender- and age-based social organization are not stagnant or shifting along a linear trajectory anywhere. In some places and contexts, abuse is getting worse/more prevalent, and in some it’s decreasing. But we can always fight for a better world.
[1] I agree that pedophilia is not a mental disorder, obviously. (Nor is CSA.) But my reasoning is very different from the reasonings of most of the academics arguing for this stance in that 2002 ASB discussion (i.e., their whole “CSA is/was normal and/or ethical therefore it’s not pathological behavior therefore pedophilia is not a pathological orientation”). My view on the matter instead concurs with that expressed by Moser’s commentary there.
(this is a rough draft of an essay I am trying to write.)
Emil Ng, from China, shows the politeness and the preference for nuances of his country’s culture. Doing so, he gives a cross-cultural view on the phenomena, putting narrow Western views into a broader perspective. Chinese literature does not ascribe any mental or medical diagnosis of pedophilia or homosexuality to “romantic affairs” between children or between adults and children, although they are not difficult to find in that tradition. Since ages, people marry quite young in China.
His comments on the Western ways of thinking and acting are quite incisive. The Western discussion about consent and traumas is “hypocritical,” he says. Only in sexual matters western adults worry about consent and traumas, not in all other matters, from baptizing the child after birth until its education ends with a diploma.
- Ipce, “‘Is pedophilia a mental disorder?’: Discussion in Archives of Sexual Behavior: Report by Frans Gieles”[1]
- [screenshot]June 9, 2023- NAMBLA, “Zeitgeist”
Quite a number of research papers concerning child sexual abuse (CSA) come across our desk. This current focus on sex is disturbing because it simply puts aside horrendous physical abuse as well as mostly hidden and immensely potent emotional abuse and limits itself almost exclusively to sex. This particular paper found physical and emotional abuse universally unacceptable to various culture but not for neglect and sex. The research into CSA (and some does certainly occur as does all other sorts of human depravity) would not in itself disturb us if most of it was not demonstrably biased.
Before we present our brief analysis of the research linked below, see if you can spot it on your own.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S014521342300251X
You can probably ignore the jargon that gives this “research” an air of learned science and obfuscates its bias.
Right from the start, the authors label all the behaviors they are researching as “child maltreatment” (CM). They include in CM neglect and sex along with the horrendous ones we cited but found cultural acceptance in only the first two. The stench of cultural superiority could not be any stronger. In many cultures, especially where poverty exists, children early on learn to be self-reliant. They know their parents work hard to provide for them and thus exhibit their love. It is no surprise that such incorrectly labeled neglect in many cultures is culturally acceptable and even beneficial to self-reliance. Even in the United States, in years past, latchkey kids, the children of working parents, were left alone for a good part of the day. Today, such parents are often unfairly subject to criminal charges of child neglect.
Of course, unwanted sexual imposition of any human being on another is unacceptable under any circumstances. But again, cultural imperialism inserts its judgmental nose into those cultures who see sexual feelings and their caring expressions as normal and of immense emotional benefit at any age.
From Jamaica, Panama, Philippines, Ghana, Japan - Imperialism
Westernized Legislation
An imperialistic trend has been on the rise, with increased pressure on less hysterical countries (mostly in the global south) to enact more extreme legislation. A new bill in Jamaica would not only criminalize child pornography, but “anything that advocates using children for sexual activities,” including audio recordings.
Panama has recently come under criticism as well: “Only 50 percent of Panamanians will tell the authorities that a minor has been sexually exploited by an adult according to a joint study of the International Labor Organization (ILO) and the International Program for the Eradication of Children Labor. […] One of the most shocking findings is that the number of people denouncing criminals who commit sexual crimes against children has diminished over the last four years.”
Westernized Media
Countries in the global south are beginning to report events in a similar manner to the west:
[…]
[article: “The number of defilement cases in Ghana appears to be increasing, with a reported incident of forced sexual intercourse with a minor appearing almost daily in the media. […]”]
- Newgon, Uncommon Sense, Edition 2
quoted article: “Japan raises age of consent [from 13 to 16] and [legally] redefines rape [to include coercion]”
Newgon member, 2023, PCMA (Matrix): “The East has fallen”
[2021-2022 Newgon meme, now deleted after pressure (an extremely rare occurrence—they now claim they can’t/won’t take down any memes or graphics for being bigoted). The meme depicted a crying boy labeled “Indian rational thinkers” saying, “Science proves that adult-minor sexual relations are natural and exists [sic] among animals as well, our grandparents did it too. It is a White man’s taboo.” Another boy, drawn with a malicious/jeering expression and labeled “Indians with slave mentality,” points at him and says, “Are you trying to justify pedophilia ? Kids can’t legally consent, you are sick.” A much taller woman, wearing a dress, handbag, and heels labeled “white master race” is behind the second boy, with her tongue as a long leash extending all the way through his own mouth as well, implying that his words are actually hers speaking for him. It was claimed on the grapevine and by Newgon members on the pediverse that this meme was made by a PCMA member who is Indian themself.]- NewgonWiki
“Is it tacky to say—you were my father?”- Louise Armstrong, Kiss Daddy Goodnight, 1979
“Oh, look. I told you at the time it was perfectly natural. Besides, look it up. Use your brain. You’ll find it’s perfectly natural in nature. And some native cultures certainly encourage it.”
“Since when do we emulate animals and savages?”
Research: Nonwestern Intergenerational Relationships- NewgonWiki
Most societies which have not been influenced by the west have less, no or different sexual taboos. It is worth mentioning that absent modern western influence, anthropologists and historians have found far more societies where homosexuality is prohibited than societies in which pedosexuality suffers similar censure. Many encourage intergenerational sex for various reasons. Due to ongoing westernisation, much of what is listed here may already be consigned to history (see, for example, Nieto (2004), for an anthropological review).Burger, G.C. (Date unknown). The Sexual Mistake of the West.
“Enamored of travel, he went to a different country every year, and, that year, he visited the Philippines. Not wanting to stay in the capital, he had taken the bus in order to get closer to the population. He thus found himself next to a mother who had reserved only one seat for herself and her eight-year-old daughter. […] when he noticed that the mother began masturbating the child, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. You can imagine him blushing, asking himself what he should do, looking all around him to see how the other passengers would react, feeling that he would be accused of complicity in incest. But all the neighbors watched with big calm smiles, as if it were obvious, and worthy of the greatest discretion. […]”
I only read up until the first chapter because it’s insufferable and there’s obviously a lot wrong with it but as someone who lives in the Philippines the bit where they say “oh adults masturbating young children in public transport is just their culture” is baffling- a comrade—NNIA, 2023
These specific types of “muh natural human nature” arguments always have something to say about the Strange Yet EnlightenedTM ways of us third-world countries ~divorced from Western modernism~ or however they wanna put it
It is naïve to believe that the police, a violent, militaristic, and intrinsically patriarchal organ of the state, could be genuinely committed to eradicating violence against women. It is even more naïve to think that Israeli police, a law-enforcement tool for the occupation, would be determined to abolish violence against indigenous Palestinian women unless it is under immense pressure to do so. The stories of Palestinian women who complained to the Israeli police about threats by their family members—only to be turned down by the police and later killed by their family members—are too many to recount. For instance, few months ago in Rahat, the largest Palestinian city in the Naqab, A young woman approached the social service office and reportedly informed the police that she feared for her life. Police officers reportedly told her to go back home, assuring her that she would be safe. Almost 24 hours later, she was found dead.The latest incident occurred on 21 May, 2013: Two girls, aged three and five, were strangled to death in their home in Fura’a, an unrecognised Palestinian village in the Naqab. The girls’ mother had approached the police station in the nearby Jewish colony of Arad and said that her husband threatened to kill the girls, but her plea was ignored. These horrific events demonstrate marriage between the state—a patriarchal, masculinist entity—and the conservative patriarchal elements in the community.The Israeli police treat domestic violence among the Palestinian minority as a “private affair” that should be left for the clan and its leaders to solve. It is much more comfortable for the police to link domestic violence against Palestinian women to “family honour” and thus absolve themselves of the responsibility to intervene under the pretext of respecting “cultural sensitivity.” Using this pretext to justify lack of enforcement of women rights stems from Israel’s racist presumption that the abuse and oppression of women are intrinsically tied to Palestinian culture and tradition. It also stems from Israel’s double standards in respecting and protecting multiculturalism.On the one hand, Israel claims to respect the principle of multiculturalism to buttress and sustain the oppression of women. On the other hand, Israel shows little respect to multiculturalism when it comes to the recognition of minority rights: The ostensible status of Arabic as an official language is solely ink on paper; Palestinian culture, history, narrative, and political literature are intentionally snuffed out of school curricula; and collective memory is targeted through constant attempts of Israelification. In addition, the same Israeli police that evades its duty to protect women from domestic violence because it is a “family” affair is, in the end, has no such concern for “Palestinian family affairs” when its forces demolish homes and displace entire families on a regular basis in the Naqab.Not only is protection desperately scarce in all of this, but so is accountability. The majority of cases involving violence against women are closed either for lack of evidence or lack of public interest. Although Israel, unlike many Arab states, does not have a provision in its criminal law that mitigates punishment for so-called “honor crimes,” women’s rights organisations repeatedly accuse the police of not investing enough effort in the attempts to find the killers and hold them accountable. Some of the worst cases of violence against women occur in Lydd, Ramleh and the Naqab. Those places also happen to boast some of the highest poverty and unemployment rates; they are also subjected to a targeted Israeli policy of extreme discrimination, denial of basic rights and services, and constant threats of eviction and home demolitions. Add to that the inaccessibility of the Israeli justice system for Palestinian and under-privileged women, and the social retribution that women face for approaching the police and complaining about their family members, and it should be no surprise, then, that Palestinian women do not trust the state to protect them.
- Budour Hassan, “Palestinian women: Trapped between occupation and patriarchy”
Afary and Anderson go on to point out, again to the chagrin of some, that while the dualism in Foucault’s work centred around the modern and the pre-modern, his descriptions of “premodern” were often Eastern and a “counter-discourse that appropriated oriental lore in opposition to Western strategies of control.” Foucault’s counter-discourse, they allege, reifies the oriental (presented as the pre-modern), in stark opposition to the traditional orientalists who denigrated the barbarism and uncivilised “otherness” of Eastern thought. It is thus a final and complete reversion of its modern predecessor. Having laid the philosophical foundations of Foucault’s thought, Afary and Anderson transpose on the presented philosophical landscape, the historical event that is the subject of the treatise. Hence, the cataclysmic reaction between the anti-modern philosophy of Foucault and the anti-modern but unassailably theocratic movement precipitated by Ayatollah Khomeini is exculpated. On the one hand is a philosopher whose world view is a scathing and seething reaction against the modern world; on the other, a theocratic leader whose rallying cry managed to appropriate the unifying rhetoric of anti-imperialism to institute a draconian and repressive order in Iran.- Rafia Zakaria, “The ‘other’ Orientalism” (book review)
[…]
In tracing the transformation of traditionally significant epithets of Shia Islam, Afary and Anderson bring attention to the question of whether the “pre-modern” East truly exists outside the philosophic imagination of the Western Left represented here by Foucault.
[…]
Anderson and Afary’s endeavour casts critical light on these very questions. In the quest for understanding, is the post-modern glorification of the “other” a valuable corrective to the repressive orientalist discourses that preceded it? Does either do justice to the reality of engaging the “other” devoid of predeterminations? Foucault’s Iranian escapade seems particularly to raise these questions. As Anderson and Afary illustrate, the very notion of pre-modernity itself is a glorified fiction motivated possibly by the post-modern dissatisfaction with their own world, a world that takes for granted the advances of modernity in terms of individual freedom. Their thesis exposes the limits of cultural relativism in its inability to give credence to real desires for freedom and liberation that may be stymied by culture traditions reified for their apparent pre-modernity or “otherness” in relation to modernity. In essence, Afary and Anderson expose the “other” orientalism, a phenomenon perhaps as dangerous and disconcerting in its passive encouragement of fictive and retrogressive notions; their value is coined not in the cultures where they exist but in that of a West that nostalgically laments their loss.
The Enlightenment had its critics, of course, and given the centrality of childhood to European thought many of these critics sought to reconceptualizing the figure of the child. While it appears on the surface that a sense of dignity was being associated with childhood itself, the figure of the child was not removed from its conceptualization as the tragic antithesis of the emerging modern condition. In general, childhood animality became the object of nostalgia and fetishization rather than overt disdain: “Children’s essential animality has sometimes been viewed as problematic; at other times the animal nature of children has been idealized. The equation of child with animal remains.” Resisting what they considered a stifling culture of rationalism and a political fixation on a utopian political future based on reason, Romantic writers valorized the child’s free, spontaneous and creative way of being as indicative of humanity’s paradise lost. The inherent superiority of mature modes of modern freedom and agency were not fundamentally challenged. Modernity is characterized by the loss of childhood innocence, natural freedom, and connection to nature, but the loss is inevitable and indeed necessary for moral progress towards the political freedom realized in the constitution of civil and political society. The romanticized child is thus the centre of a tragic story of lost human authenticity and our alienation from the world.- Toby Rollo, “Feral children: settler-colonialism, progress, and the figure of the child”
These themes were most famously explored in the work of J.J. Rousseau. In Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, for example, Rousseau claims that children and parents would, in the state of nature, have no relationship of mutual responsibility. Accordingly, we learn in The Social Contract that despite its flaws, modern society is essential for moral improvement and the highest forms of human freedom and sociality. Likewise, Rousseau’s celebrated work on children, Emile, was not intended to be an education manual but rather a lament on the impossibility of raising children to be both free and functional within modern society. In civilizational terms, Man’s original freedom—his childhood—must be sacrificed in order to pursue education. The child’s courageous and impulsive state of playful being is simply incongruent with what bourgeois artists and intellectuals saw as constraining yet inevitable strictures of modern civilization. If a child somehow goes without education they are left in a feral or natural state of being that is identical in many ways to that of the “Indian.” Sankar Muthu observes that Rousseau at times “manages to equate savages (understood as the earliest purely natural individuals of his conjectural history), the ‘Savage Nations’ of the New World, and feral children (such as the ‘little savage of Hanover’) as ‘natural creatures.’”
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As a survivor who comes from one of those “non-Western backgrounds with Different Cultural Values” which get thrown around in discourse for tokenizing points, the dominant discourses on CSA are very frustrating to me. Anti-CSA activism of the mainstream is mostly led by white people, who have the greatest amount of power in influencing the direction of discourse and having their voices heard and respected. Although even white children are still severely oppressed for being children and white survivors are still not believed or respected much, they do have an advantage over children and survivors of color. Likewise, cishet men of color have advantages over us (both wrt domestic authoritarianism and in antifeminist/adultist public discourses). This trap is familiar—much more has been written about the intersection of racism and misogyny/queerphobia and its particular impacts on women and queers of color, and the difficulties set by the seeming dichotomy between “liberated white Western feminist women/queers” and “repressive misogynistic queerphobic nonwestern cishet men.” But the effects of pervasive gaslighting and erasure are even more severe when it comes to children, and children and child abuse survivors have far less theorizing wrt coloniality written on their issues. This is a major problem considering how a crucial component of CSA apologist politics involves white anthropology, sexology, biologists and evolutionary psychologists and so on claiming that CSA is an inherent feature of “Other cultures” and only modernizing colonialism/imperialism stopped some CSA, thus being anti-CSA is a “white” thing and indicative of sexual repression/Western sensibilities and culturally imperialist. I haven’t seen a lot of anti-c’s willing to tackle this in theory, and most of those who’ve written about it go from an angle which is also racist (e.g. the Armstrong quote above).
I cannot speak to the experience of being raised on CSA-apologist values argued from cultural relativism (on our side) specifically; my experience and analysis of my life history is mainly with regards to nonsexual child abuse; all of us (survivors here) know that our abusers like to tell us it is uniquely ok to [abuse] us because “lax”/“gentle” parenting or pedagogy is a “Western thing” (USAmerican, in my case specifically), a problem of modernity, cultural hysteria, and Our traditional valuesTM are better than that. Common tropes for various different non-white cultures are different but have key similarities throughout, and this is what I will focus on addressing here. It’s an overwhelming trend for people to assume that white adults are less abusive to their children on average and non-white adults are overwhelmingly abusive (“because of the culture”) and survivors will often say “well yeah I was abused my parents were of [X] culture and it’s kind of, part of that culture”—an explanation is not an excuse, of course, but this concerns me all the same because we do not see white survivors saying “I was abused because they were white and white people/white culture is fundamentally abusive” (although that’s pretty true). As usual, whiteness is permitted more variation/diversity w/in people’s opinions, perceptions, etc., more individuality and nuance because of their privilege. Even when it comes to violence/abuse/ethical wrongs. Survivor memoirs, interviews/discussion, etc. also tend to implicitly naturalize abuse as a feature of ~their culture~ and far less of those survivors are militant/radical/leftist/anarchist—many of us are, but not a lot in mainstream outlets.
This pervasive gaslighting really does a number to your head when you’re going through trauma and trying to think against the grain but there doesn’t seem to be anyone irl near you who’s willing to interrogate the common assumptions and they repeat them, those abuse myths, again and again and again, casual conversation and discussion, even in venting—nowhere is safe—just retreat and ignore and hide away from everyone because if you expressed disagreement you’d be called a killjoy. Nobody ever said to you, out loud irl in words that your perceptions and feelings are valid and right and they’re wrong to do this and wrong to claim it’s culture. and even radical, feminist white survivors/activists will throw you under the bus (“savage” children are children too, Louise. They wouldn’t deserve it either). And I have very few friends, even now, even online, with similar experiences I can relate to and discuss with. This is one of those topics I still feel very, very nervous to touch, especially out loud and especially in public. Oppression/abuse has you internalizing the view and the gaze of the oppressor/abuser because you need to, to survive, and to understand/predict; we split our perceptions between ourselves and how we think they might be seeing us; I feel this following me around even when it is not immediately relevant/necessary to deflect a particular danger and i still feel a looming sense that if I speak about the abuse especially in this context some terrible retribution will befall me / I will be doing something immoral (violation of family privacy or cultural autonomy) and will be hurt for that. I also did not feel comfortable writing the following about CSA for a long while, and only starting saying my thoughts out loud in private later this year and otherwise in scattered mastodon posts and threads. It helps a lot that we’ve successfully begun to wrest back the contact discourse arena this year and challenged Newgon and other pro-c’s to free up the ability to be anti-c openly and more fully.
This confluence of counterinsurgent forces function to prevent us from forming class consciousness and organizing towards the destruction of the systems which oppress us; they constrain our pain and anger and our ability to express them and act on them in productive ways; we need to fight them as much as possible, whenever and wherever possible.
Here I will try to outline my general theory of the CSA–race intersection; these are just sketches and I’ve written a lot more of my thoughts in private (e.g. my server, and DMs with some others) but I hope I will be able to transfer those insights to a more neat and readable format here later. This will focus on CSA mostly but it applies to child abuse in general too.
- The white supremacist theory of the biodetermined developmental telos is wrong; humans are neither “programmed” to be patriarchal nor to be non-patriarchal based on biology, nor is either more of a “developed,” “advanced,” etc. form of social organization than the other, or necessarily correlating to other biological features. Patriarchy and egalitarianism are neither evolutionarily adaptive nor maladaptive characteristics. Patriarchal nonwestern societies are not so because they lack Western-style “enlightenment”/capitalist development/liberal modernity.
- Both “more Civilized = no CSA = good because CSA is bad” and “more Civilized = no CSA = bad because CSA is good” rely on the equation of civilizedness with no CSA, which is colonialist regardless of how you interpret your conclusion.
- Sexual liberation requires maximizing autonomy. This means eliminating constraints on harmless and private or consensual sexual expression, but also eliminating sexual violence and oppression.
- White European societies were highly patriarchal, violent, oppressive, child-abusing, CSA-enabling, and CSA-accepting at the time of beginning their colonial projects, and they are now too. Pro-CSA ideology is also built into liberal democracy and capitalism.
- Many nonwestern societies were patriarchal pre-colonization, and many were not. Egalitarian societies were not necessarily so because of a lack of awareness of the possibility of oppression as a thing; some had already experienced oppression, either internally or externally, or actively guarded against the arising of oppression through various leveling mechanisms. (My view of the mechanisms through which any patriarchy arises generally align with the hypotheses of materialist feminism.)
- The center of feminist and youth liberationist revolution should be the third world, not the West. This includes struggle against both internal and externally imposed adultist and misogynistic oppressions. Contrary to liberal arguments that because white people have more power or more formal connection to e.g. NGOs, then they can use that more and therefore the rest of us don’t matter/should wait for them first.
- It is okay and right to be angry at and/or fight back against your abuser even if they are also from a marginalized culture, or any other marginalized background. You are not hindering anti-racist solidarity. This does not mean you think non-white abusers are worse or more powerful than white abusers/adultists.
- The primary victim of any genuine attempts to resolve a CSA culture or abusive situation among nonwesterners by appealing to white people in power / attempting to leverage imperialist resources will always ultimately be the victimized nonwestern children themselves. Adult privilege applies universally. (Likewise when it’s about misogyny instead.)
- If adult-child sexual or romantic involvement is wrong and abusive now because of universal features of human childhood then it is wrong and abusive in all cultures, time periods, and geographical contexts which have human children and adults. Trauma will happen regardless of what you’re taught to think about it. Holding inaccurate/internalized abuse-apologist beliefs only make the trauma more difficult to identify, process, and protect and heal from.
- Western imperialism imported patriarchal values into some previously egalitarian cultures and incentivized the reshuffling of the form of patriarchy in others. This did not occur through mere introduction/informational exchange or persuasion but through material violence, imposition of different structures and altered incentives. This also includes CSA.
- A key feature of Western imperialism has also been CSA itself. Racists from all sides like to forget about the scenario of white adults abusing children of color because that really tends to throw off their arguments with very limited premises. This was used as a weapon of colonizing and control itself but also as part of the aforementioned reorganization of age/gender structures.
- Pro-c’s claiming that “other cultures” do CSA therefore CSA is okay are being racist and promoting the interests of Western imperialism. When they accuse opponents of being “the real racists” they are wrong and they are also being racist.
- Hegemonic interests collude as much as possible to make it seem like if we resist child abuse then we must necessarily be leveraging the power or authority of white people/whiteness. This appearance is not natural, inherent to youthlib struggles, or accurate to what we actually think or experience or do. It also won’t matter whether we point this out or not because they’re not coming to this conversation in good faith in the first place; they’re doing it on purpose.
- Pro-c’s of this variety are generally more likely to be racist in other aspects too apart from this. It’s why it’s incorrect to claim that, Newgon for example, is “anti-white” just because it on the surface decries white imperialism sometimes. Newgon is a particularly clear example, blatantly and unashamedly white supremacist in its behavior elsewhere, but this dynamic is replicated among other relativists too.
- Likewise, it is hegemonically incentivized for nonwesterners to represent their societies/cultural values in ways which conform to the dominant racist, “otherizing” assumptions and align with the values of patriarchy and patriarchal interests. Thus the loudest voices are adults, or cis men in particular, who argue in favor of CSA and even claim that it is in fact a part of their culture to do CSA and if someone disagrees with their CSA they’re being racist. This does not make those claims unbiased or inaccurate.
- Racists (of the demonizing variety) already disproportionately and inaccurately believe that “other” cultures are far more prone to CSA and uncontrolled/uncontrollable and ontologically evil. These views have filtered into many people’s perceptions, both pro-c and anti-c, and should be interrogated, not uncritically accepted. Even nonwestern CSA cultures (and CSA culture is always wrong, of course) =/= the demonizing racist portrayal of inexplicable and extreme violent excess as a function of biological deviance (even when they’re bad, they’re often not as bad as the West thinks, or at least are much more mundane in how it plays out). At the very least, one should recognize that when a racist feigns concern for women/children to advocate white imperialist paternalism, he is not anti-patriarchal or anti-abuse in any actual, coherent, meaningful way. Their problems are with deviance and perceived theft of authority/right-to-rule from white patriarchs, not with the fates of women/children themselves or with genuinely liberatory values.
- On the other hand, there are also some paternalistic impulses to claim that a given culture does not have any problems with CSA at all even when there are, to make it seem better. This is not good either and should also be resisted; as always, the children/youth themselves should have the primary voice on portrayals of their conditions.
- The treatment of gender, age, and race have many similarities, even analogous ones with regards to CSA. Both “noble savage” tropes and the ideal of pure, innocent, unfettered, carefree Childhood mirror each other and draw on similar frames. Misogyny is analogous and draws on a lot of similar tropes i.e. the young girl being “innocent” and “carefree,” not burdened by the cares of the world, work, bitterness/cynicism, an understanding of the brutality of the world, or domestic responsibilities, and not tending to refuse or say no, while adult women, especially older women, are portrayed as “dried-up” “hags,” “frigid,” have their innocence and thus appeal gone, etc. Like how abusers/predators often say that they would pick teenage girls/children instead of women to target because women are more likely to avoid them or resist their control (i.e. have developed a better understanding of red flags and more life experience, often from having been abused themselves). The age trajectory of “development” is mapped onto a trajectory of “innocence” and of lack of CSA trauma—seeing that older youth, or adults, will retroactively “regret a positive experience” is often explained by the fact that children apparently have fewer thoughts, ability to feel/experience/independently interpret so they wouldn’t be hurt initially, but “development” ruins/spoils the previous innocence. Likewise racist pro-c’s argue that indigenous peoples had no trauma from CSA before Western interference introduced x ideas for the first time, “interfered” with a secluded, more “innocent” state analogous to romantic notions of naive childhood; i would argue that today’s common discourses of “iatrogenic harm” were likely developed with overtly colonialist origin points. Likewise with how some liberal feminists argue about why some previously gender-egalitarian indigenous societies began to have problems with misogyny and domestic abuse after colonization.
- The nature essentialism/“should return to Wild Natural Human Nature With No Constraints” (and its biologized and racialized form) are also especially relevant because of the association of childhood and indigeneity and lack of civilizational, educated, industrialized, modernized, biologically sophisticated Development with animality (thus “savagery”) and how this has played out with the trend of pro-c’s arguing from primatological examples for their stance; nonhuman animal relatives are viewed as an earlier “origin point” wrt biological development (likewise for children with chronology and indigenous peoples who are dehumanized by colonialist biological assumptions); more about this should be studied with specific thought into how speciesism functions.
- Both “innocence” views are wrong because children and colonized peoples are structurally oppressed and experience worse lives, more hardships and traumatization, not less, than adults/white people. In tandem with the “innocence” construct exists also stereotypes of non-innocent, malicious children / nonwesterners who wish to ruin/corrupt the innocence of the morally righteous adult world / the West, and “innocent” children in practice are mainly those who are white and bourgeois, like “innocent,” idealized women in practice are mainly cis, while underclassed children and trans people are sacrificed and both denied autonomy and un“protected.”
- Patterns of gender- and age-based social organization are not stagnant or shifting along a linear trajectory anywhere. In some places and contexts, abuse is getting worse/more prevalent, and in some it’s decreasing. But we can always fight for a better world.
[1] I agree that pedophilia is not a mental disorder, obviously. (Nor is CSA.) But my reasoning is very different from the reasonings of most of the academics arguing for this stance in that 2002 ASB discussion (i.e., their whole “CSA is/was normal and/or ethical therefore it’s not pathological behavior therefore pedophilia is not a pathological orientation”). My view on the matter instead concurs with that expressed by Moser’s commentary there.
