THROW-BACK THURSDAY: ADOLESCENCE OF A SEXUAL ABUSE SURVIVOR

Throw-Back Thursday: Six photos from age 12 to age 18.

In the first of these, at age 12 [1967, 7th grade, Dilley], my molestation had stopped but could recur at any point. I took steps that autumn to remove myself from his reach by siding with my father against my mother and demanding we take a job offer in Brazil. I was still wondering if I could have gotten pregnant. The dress I am wearing here represents a class shame I simply cannot write about.

The next one [9th grade, 1969], after our return from Brasil, was in Stoneburg where I experienced my first real freedom.

The third, at age 15 [10th grade, 1970, Stoneburg -- I made the dress I'm wearing], was when I was falling in love for the first time with a girl.

The fourth [age 16, junior year, 1971, Stoneburg] was after I'd started being mistreated by that first love (of course whom I chose turned out to be a sexual predator of children -- not long after this, she later raped my little brother).

In the fifth one [age 17, senior year, 1972, Stoneburg], I had just become lovers with someone new, five years my elder and very controlling.

In the sixth, my second year of college [1974, age 19, Denton], I was still emerging from a nervous breakdown brought on by poverty, shame, and being cheated on by my second lover with my first. Feminism was just arriving in my personal world to help me make sense of it all.

 These are hard memories and tough years. Recovery was a long way off and 2000 miles away.

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ABOUT CHILD ABUSE

(Postcard by Hayden Kay)

From GenerationFIVE:

Our goal of ending child sexual abuse cannot be realized while other systems of oppression are allowed to continue. In fact, systems of oppression and child sexual abuse have an interdependent relationship: a power-over system that benefits some at the expense of others and uses violence, creates the conditions for child sexual abuse (i.e. gender inequality, class exploitation, racism, violence and threat for difference), while in turn the prevalence of child sexual abuse fosters behaviors (obedience to authority, silence, disempowerment, shame) that prevent people from organizing effectively to work for liberation, healing and change systemic forms of violence.

'Radical simply means grasping things at the root.' ~Angela Davis.

Generation FIVE works at the roots of child sexual abuse and holds a vision of liberation, justice and sustainability for all of our futures.

It is estimated that 1 in 3 girls and 1 in six boys is sexually abused before the age of 18. For each of these children, there is an offender and the affected family and community surrounding them. For each circumstance of abuse, there is also circle of people who can play a part in allowing or preventing abuse.

It is estimated that only 10-20% of CSA gets reported through our public systems. Still, in Public Health terms these numbers are epidemic. This means they are impacting the general population in such high numbers that it is a major pubic health issue. When we look at the number of children and families affected and the number of offenders, we have to start asking different questions. There are not just a few 'bad' people sexually abusing children, the behavior is wide-spread. This is not solely individual mental health issue. We need to ask questions that go beyond the individual to our communities and broader society to find both the causes and solutions to child sexual abuse.

To address child sexual abuse, we need to look at the bigger picture…the social norms in which it is happening. By social norms we mean the beliefs and practices regarding power, sexuality, the ideas about children and ownership, etc. and then the institutions that perpetuate these ideas and practices. We need both an individual and systemic understanding of CSA to be effective in our response and prevention strategies.

Here are some new questions for us to consider:

What do the high numbers of victim/survivors and offenders of CSA tell us about our family and community beliefs and practices? What do we pass on that let's child sexual abuse continue generation to generation?

What is it in our social norms and institutions that creates this many offenders, survivors and bystanders to child sexual abuse?

What are our public systems and institutions missing- so that child sexual abuse rates are not decreasing? What mistakes are we repeating?

We are living in a broader social context that teaches power-over relations, private ownership (parents/family) of children, a dismissal of children's accounts (legal), mixed messages and little education about human sexuality (it is bad, shame based, and it is used to sell us everything from cars to deodorant), and the ongoing mixing of sex and violence. We are not taught to address pain and trauma deeply, but rather mask symptoms or blame the individual for their distress. Child sexual abuse is about having power over another person and using that power sexually. The norms that allow for this behavior are sadly, ever-present in our society.

To this I will add:

1. Those who abuse children in any fashion were themselves abused as children. It's a learned behavior, not innate to human beings.
2. Abuse takes many forms: The ownership of children by adults; gender conditioning; racist conditioning; poverty or denial of basic needs for class reasons; teaching children g*d will send them to hell for any reason; neglect; ridicule; as well as what we traditionally call abuse.
3. To stop abuse we will need to redefine how we raise children and create family on a fundamental level. We cannot allow the Right's definitions to continue to damage further generations.
4. The numbers mean we are all in close contact with child abuse: Our own families, our friends. and/or children we know are contending with it right now. Overwhelmingly it is done by people who claim to love or actually do love that child and are in close, regular contact with her/him. Strangers are not the problem.
5. The overwhelming risk of abuse for any child comes from a man or boy close to them. This is NOT because men and boys are inherently abusive -- it is a direct result of male gender conditioning which demands emotional dissociation, demial of healing outlets, and the right/mandate to project upset onto others perceived as lesser status. Masculinity is an incomplete version of inhumanity that fosters abuse: Not maleness, but the rigid, culturally created concept of masculinity. To rehabilitate this concept to the point where it is no longer toxic will mean restoring to it all the humanity which renders it indistinguishable from femininity. Ergo, it has no future in a free and equal world.
6. People can and do heal from child abuse. All the time, no matter how bad it was.
7. Breaking silence is always a first step. The corollary to that is bearing witness helps repair the world.

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WHEN JOHNNY COMES MARCHING HOME AGAIN

The more eloquent soldiers being interviewed for The War are able to convey how they changed from being an ordinary man into someone who could kill easily. Several of them have spoken of the point at which they realized they were "expendable". Of course, the ones we're hearing from are the ones who survived, not just physically but also mentally. America's entry into the war was marked by failures and close calls because our troops were not "ready", which in some instances is code for "the ones who couldn't become killers had not yet been weeded out".

As Joan Baez once said, "If it's natural to kill, how come men have to go into training to learn how?"

There are a lot of figures being floated around about the cost of our current war, as another supplemental comes up for vote. Progressives include the cost of caring for our wounded, not just over there but back home with rehabilitation, mental health services, and disability pensions. But even those figures are inadequate because, again, they deal with those who are concretely, measurably injured.

The fact is, though, the aftermath of World War II saw a number of social changes that were all a direct result of sending 12% of the population into inhuman conditions, then bringing them home to resume normal life without any sort of organized, effective emotional processing. "When the boys came home", they demanded (and were given) the best-paying jobs (if they were white), college loans, housing loans, and a violent shove backwards for women and non-whites. The post-war repression led directly to the near-revolution of the 1960s. My generation are the children of those returned soldiers, and while they deserve respect for their sacrifice -- the whole nation deserves respect for its effort -- that doesn't mean I'm going to pretend they weren't seriously fucked up by how they spent their adolescence and young adult years.


Especially the men. The cult of masculinity that feminism addressed and is now waxing again arose as a result of male conditioning during and after World War II. Masculinity is an incomplete version of humanity, a carefully carved-out portion -- in precisely the same way that "white identity" is divorced from the actual reality of being alive on this multihued planet, and carrying the same degree of illusion and disease.

I personally believe that masculinity has offered everything it possibly could to humanity, and it's time to retire this bastard notion, thank you very much. (Along with femininity, but you don't find the same worship of it these days.) We can do better, and if we don't, the planet is going to die from "masculine" approaches to our problems.

Which has nothing at all to do with being male, or female. If you don't understand the difference, this essay is not for you.

"Happy Days" existed only for white boys with enough to eat. For the rest of the population, the majority, the post-war period sent people into depression, into ghettoes, into subservience, into shame -- and into the arts trying to find a means of expressing themselves. At least a third, and perhaps as much as 50%, of the children raised in those post-war families were the victims of sexual abuse. We'd be stupid to deny a connection behind the dehumanizing training of battle and the failure to see children as anything more than objects. Child abuse and sexualization has been with us for millenia, but we don't have the statistics to prove it didn't take a big spike after 1945.

The numbers returning from Iraq (when and if that occurs) will be far less, only about 1% of the population, but in some respects far more damaged. These folks will have spent years on end in urban settings, viewing civilians (not just other soldiers) as their chief threat, including children. They will be aware they were lied into this war, and it's only human nature to feel ashamed of having been duped, even if you were clearly part of the majority. Further, most of them are working class, people who turned to military service as a means of economic survival or advancement. There's a working class ethic against therapy, and having been royally screwed by the authority who sent them to Iraq, it's easy to guess many of them won't trust "professionals" who seek to help them. If help is even offered.

Masculinity stripped of civilized veneer, taught how to kill in urban settings, isolated and devalued economically once they're back home. What will "support for the troops" look like then? It will get dumped back onto their communities of origin, is my guess.

I want to see us, as progressives, getting ready to address this problem. It will mean recognizing the sources and making sure to neither blame nor idealize the victim. Naming and draining the cesspool of male conditioning is what will make everybody safe, including women and children.

Outside of academic enclaves, where creating deconstructed theories are what earn income and advancement rather than having to adjust to a brutally conforming corporate structure, and small self-selecting queer communities with rigid strictures on what is said and believed, the conditions for women as fully-recognized human beings are deteriorating. Indirectly, the heavy-handed emphasis on masculinity and "boi"-ness even within allegedly feminist communities proves this trend. For example, drag kings select only certain kinds of masculinity to perform -- that of the sexually dimorphic working class stereotype. Much of the overwhelming classism of these shows arises from the wedding of male-conditioned incoherence, numbness and narcissism to power-based sexuality, thus conditioning yet another generation of young women to project their own humanity onto the inexplicably romanticized icon of selfish meathead.

But those of us who exist in real communities with working class men know they are being eviscerated by these standards of masculinity, driven to substance abuse, distanced from their own families, chewed up and dying young. It's most definitely not "hot". And -- they're not the ones in charge of the decisions being made about who goes to war, who gets the big salaries, who has control of their own bodies. It's the "other" masculinity, the "non-sexy" version, who are really fucking us all.

You know, it's not just Barbie who doesn't resemble any living woman. GI Joe doesn't look like a single soldier in any of that World War II footage, either.

This time, instead of "buying bonds", let's stop buying the lies. Judy Grahn said "What you will do matters. All you need to do is to do it." Here they come: Are you ready?

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THE ILLUSION OF HOME AS SANCTUARY FOR CHILDREN

(Graphic from Steve Audio)

Tonight's Austin evening news was full of a story about a 5-year-old boy who was assaulted in a public swimming pool restroom by a man in his 50s. The little boy was punched in the stomach and forced to perform oral sex on the man. The locale, Lakeway, is one of the most affluent neighborhoods in Austin, and the parents interviewed on TV were in disbelief that this could have occurred to one of "their" children.


Yesterday's national news cycle had a CBS story about how "over the last 60 years, at least 5,100 adult leaders were kicked out of the Boy Scouts because of allegations of sexual abuse". The lightweight and sensationalist story did not mention how many of those accused were married and heterosexual, although that's a natural enough question given the Boy Scouts overt homophobia toward gay scout leaders.

And, of course, the current "big shocker" story out there is about Senator Larry Craig (R, Idaho) tapping feet in the stall next to him at a Minneapolis airport men's room. I can (and will at some point) write in a traitorous way about how, gay rights aside, I'm fucking sick of male sexuality intruding on public spaces, especially bathrooms. I'm really not going to be interested in gender-neutral public facilities until those places have been made completely safe for children to go potty without male predation OR male sexual behavior in the environment, whatever the sexuality involved. Last night Letterman, a big old homophobe, said "As far as I'm concerned, if you spend more than two minutes in a men's bathroom, you've already crossed the line" and I had to agree with him on a basic level: It's for crapping and pissing, then washing your hands and getting the hell out.

Yeah, I know, gay oppression has driven people to desperate circumstances. But when the lurking you're doing is linked with body evacuation and pedophiles, you might want to rethink what territory you seek to defend.

But, where my mind has wandered tonight is how far off the mark all these stories are. Yes, Republicans should never again, under any circumstances, be allowed to call themselves a party of morality or family values. And clearly, as TRex at FireDogLake said, they're all secret pansies.

Yet, the real circumstances of child sexual assault and male predation is not about bathrooms or even the Boy Scouts. It's about what is going on in the average American home.

I did the math. The current report rate of child sexual assault (which is likely far below actual incidence, but we'll go with what we can say with certainty), averaged over both genders, indicates that about 30% of people will be sexually abused in some way before they are 18 years of age. The 2000 census for Austin listed a population of 656,562 people, of which 22.5% (or 118,181 people) were under the age of 18. If, over the period of 18 years, 30% of those young folks are sexually abused, that averages out to 1969 a year, or 5.4 kids per day.

Imagine a news show that covered this every day, as they give us allergy reports and endless stupid trivia about sports. It would, at least 90% of the time, be a report about 5 or 6 children each day who were molested by a member of their family or a very close friend of the family, 98% of the time a heterosexual male. Imagine having that reality being reflected back to us on a daily basis, and what changes you'd start demanding.

I don't agree that America is sex-phobic. Sexual content permeates everything around us, including our children's lives. But it's sexual dishonesty, conflated with power games.

Susie Bright has a good essay up right now that I want to quote from, Is There a Republican Senator Who's NOT Having Bathroom Sex?

"From now on, as far as I'm concerned, every single Republican legislator is a Reeking Freak Closet Case until proven innocent.

"These men wouldn't know 'safe, sane, and consensual' if you tied it to their weener with a red flag. I won't call them 'gay' or 'kinky' because that would be an insult to the healthy spectrum of human sexuality. Instead, they're the worst face of sexual repression, because they don't care who they hurt, or how many lies they tell. Their whole life is a SHAM.

"The GOP Narcissists aren't the exception to the rule— they ARE the rule. They personify the very sexuality they campaign against. If they vote against gays, we know they're queer. If they're hopped up about "child porn," we can guess their internet habits. If they hold up monogamous marriage as a Christian ideal, we know they're adulterous, blasphemous fools.

"Here's what they all have in common; They pretend it didn't happen. They try to buy people off to shut them up. They cry that they've been victimized. And then they continue to persecute everyone else by:
* Voting YES on constitutional ban of same-sex marriage.
* Voting NO on adding sexual orientation to definition of hate crimes.
* Voting NO on expanding hate crimes to include sexual orientation.
* Voting YES on prohibiting same-sex marriage.
* Voting NO on prohibiting job discrimination by sexual orientation."


But, to address the issue more comprehensively, I'm going to reprint an essay I sent out via private e-mail last October, when the Mark Foley scandal fill the news cycle.

Okay, let's take a look at The Reality of Child Sexual Abuse.

The overwhelming majority of people who have a sexual interest in children and teenagers do not fit the classic definition of a 'pedophile'. They are, statistically, interested stimulated sexually by a variety of triggers, only some of which are young people; they are (around 98%) male; they are heterosexual; they are married or in strong relationship with another adult; and they would not identify their feelings as pedophilia.

The perception of those much younger than us as sexually arousing is completely interwoven into our culture. It is why we simultaneously, as a culture, support such things as child beauty pageants and also get upset when we see the actual photos of Jon-Benet Ramsey. It is the foundation of a high percentage of advertising strategy. It is why we have cheerleaders and Disney characters and the WB. It is part of the nuclear family dynamic.

As a culture, it is almost impossible for us to name desire without imagining it as occurring between two individuals who are "different" in a way that includes a power imbalance. Male desire, in particular, is taught to boys as being dependent on the greater helplessness, receptivity, and "softness" of their partners.

Sexual desire is imprinted on us in our culture while we are still children -- it's impossible to know at what age it would naturally occur, because we have no escape from sex as a commodity, so we have no control group. And this definition of desire is imprinted on children who will then learn to view those around them -- other children and teenagers -- as their first objects of longing. Some of us, many of us, never outgrow those first impressions and remain fixated on children and teenagers.

The child pornography industry is so voluminous that, even taking into account the reality that most consumers may be repeat consumers, more than half of adult American males are taking a dip in this world. It is the norm, rather than the aberration. It will remain the norm until we find another definition for desire, one that does not in any way include a power imbalance. A few people -- feminists of a certain stripe, mostly -- have begun the work of finding that definition for themselves without simultaneously embracing any ethic which declares sex "bad".

Neverthless, this effort has been persistently called "anti-sex". It is, definitely, an effort away from the Western male definition of desire and sex. And it takes a lot of hard work. The kind of work that most people find too disheartening to undertake, even if they understand and agree with its value.

So, the broader definition of pedophile includes more than half the population. The more focused definition -- those who have these desires and choose to act on them, either with physical contact or, as is far more common, with suggestive but non-physical interactions between themselves and those younger than them or as voyeurs and exhibitionists -- are a smaller but still significant category, perhaps 10 to 25% of the population. For these people, pedophile is a sexual orientation, in the same way that heterosexual or homosexual is a sexual orientation. It is compelling, it feels like a core identity, and suppressing it is difficult.

The majority of pedophiles (over 80%) identify as heterosexual and most (at least 90%) prey on children in their own families and friendship networks, Approximately two-thirds of repeat predators select girls when they are able, and about one-third choose boys. But access and proximity are far more relevant to this statistic than a gender preference. The one-third percentage for boys likely reflects the fact that boys are not as closely watched as girls, especially within family or close community settings. The identification of pedophilia as something that "gay people" do is erroneous and leaves children at grave risk.

At least 25% of women and 17% of men self-identify as having been sexually abused in some form as children. This statistic is undoubtedly much higher, considering how many people have a hard time making this self-identification. It is even more difficult to extrapolate from this how many active pedophiles there are in the general population, since the average number of victims per pedophile before he is stopped is around 100. (For pedophiles who act out on boys, the number is around 125 victims; for those who act out on girls, the number is around 85.)

At least 95% of pedophiles who have been caught say they were themselves molested as children. Most of these men (over half) claim their early molestation was not really harmful or was in some sense consensual. These same percentage claim the children they victimize are not really harmed and that the children likewise "consent". Most child predation is not violent; it is coercive, persuasive, and often does not involve frank acts of penetration. This confusion about the nature of consent is, likewise, woven into the fabric of our culture.

Clearly, then, pedophile as a sexual orientation is learned. The ability to undo this orientation depends on whether the pedophile also has other orientations equally strong, how early he is caught (repeated predation intensifies the orientation), what kind of reparative therapy is used, and probably other factors not yet clearly understood. Most of the methods used to deal with pedophiles are highly ineffective.

I personally believe that all sexual preferences and proclivities are learned. We pick it up from the adults around us as we go along, and we make a decision about ourselves based on the best information we have at the moment. All of the studies to date which claim to demonstrate a gay brain or a gay gene have serious scientific flaws. None of them demonstrate a shared biology between gay men and lesbians, and none of them demonstrate a biology that does not also occur in heterosexuals.

It is clear, at this point, that with our enormously plastic brains, behavior does a great deal to re-shape the brains we were both with. Conditioning remains the best-proven explanation for why we are who we are. And if you have a feminist understanding of the confusion of sex with power and the identification of women as the "abnormal" gender, then sexual preferences as choices (made so early they don't feel like a choice) becomes sensible.

The current scandal regarding Mark Foley is exposing all sorts of interesting things about our culture. The Right, desperate to reduce political fall-out, is now trying to claim Foley was not exposed as a predator because they were unwilling to out a gay man without proof. (If you fall that for that argument, from the same folks who consistently declare gays to be the number one problem in American, then I've got a Congress Street Bridge to sell you.)

The failure of Republican leadership to not only go public with the predation in their midst (and if you read all the instant messages and e-mails, it's clear it was predation of a virulent nature), but to also fail to even try to stop him, seems to be the most startling piece of the story. Except not for me, because I assume these Republican men in positions of leadership to have their own background with and preference for confused sex-power dynamics and desire based on power imbalance. He was one of their own, and not just politically.

Likewise, the reaction of Matt Drudge (a closeted Right-wing pundit) that these teenagers were someone "egging on" Matt Foley and are equally culpable, and the dismissal of the predation by Tony Snow, Bush's press secretary, as "naughty e-mails" reflect their comfort with this reality, not just their attempt to excuse any behavior by the party to which they have sworn unthinking allegience. Congressional pages are the bottom cogs in an intense hierarchy that uses servitude not far removed from slavery as a means of teaching and reinforcing the hierarchy. Of course they are perceived as fair game in that kind of setting.

So, then, this will consume the news cycle for a while to come. If it would give people information and an honest opportunity to re-examine their own conditioning and our larger culture, it would be a grand thing. I have no illusions that it will, except for those of us who are already doing such work. And in the meantime, the loss of the basic human rights first set out in the Magna Carta, the despicable war ravaging hopes for world harmony, the demonization of immigrants, the dismantling of liberation gains made in the past for women and people of color, the destruction of our economy and our environment -- all of these will recede to later in the news cycle, if they are covered at all.

Because sex sells. And that's the problem, right there. Anything you can do to not buy, do it.

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