Margaret Mead Japan China Religie en seks Moral panics Seks en robots De seksuele ontwikkeling van jongeren Seksualisering Leeftijdverschillen Geweld en misbruik Consent Sexting Sex trafficking Prostitutie PornografieIncididunt nisi non nisi incididunt velit cillum magna commodo proident officia enim.
Tom O'CARROLL"Considering the passions the subject generates, there are surprisingly few books on paedophilia. It may be that some 'professionals' – psychiatrists, criminologists and the like – are reluctant to express too great an interest for fear of being thought prurient, or self-interested. Their contribution tends to be confined to articles in specialist journals, or the odd page or two in huge textbooks on 'abnormal' psychology.(...) In any case the taboo against paedophilia has rendered it literally 'unspeakable' (hence 'unwriteable') except when referred to in the most denunciatory terms." [mijn nadruk] (6)
[Die opmerking maken meer onderzoekers en schrijvers over het onderwerp. Het is inderdaad opvallend: je zou toch verwachten dat een onderwerp dat zo controversieel is gebaat zou zijn bij allerlei onderzoek. Maar nee, we volgen liever ons onderbuikgevoel en doen ondanks onze onwetendheid alsof we precies weten hoe het zit. Mensen zijn altijd kwaad en agressief tegenover anderen die het er op een opener manier over willen hebben. Reputaties worden kapot gemaakt, juridische instanties vallen over mensen heen. Het verwijt is zoiets als dat de jeugd bedorven wordt door dit soort opvattingen en meer van die gemakkelijke standpunten. ]
De auteur komt er voor uit dat hij pedofiel is. 'Boy lover' zegt hij verderop.
"The fact that I have been able to do so owes much to the work, described in Part Three, Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE), a group with which I have been closely connected, which has been campaigning since its inception in 1974 for the open discussion of paedophilia, and for abolition of the laws against consensual sexual acts between children and adults."(7)
[Misschien vergelijkbaar met het Nederlandse 'Martijn', de vroegere pedofielenpartij die door de rechter ontbonden werd? "Volgens de rechtbank is dat wat Martijn doet, zegt en uitdraagt over seks tussen volwassenen en kinderen in strijd met de normen en waarden. Op de website van de vereniging staan erotische verhalen en praten pedofielen over hun gevoelens. Ook in de media laat Martijn zich geregeld horen. De secretaris van de vereniging, de in Hengelo wonende Uittenbogaard, sprak zich geregeld openlijk uit voor de legalisatie van seks tussen volwassenen en kinderen vanaf 12 jaar. Voor de rechtbank in Assen betoogde het Openbaar Ministerie dat Nederland volgens eigen en internationaal recht verplicht is de vereniging te verbieden, ter bescherming van kinderen tegen seks met volwassenen." https://www.rtvoost.nl/nieuws/146613/Rechter-verbiedt-pedofielenpartij-Martijn (woensdag 27 juni 2012, 10:21). Ik denk dat O'Carroll Nederland iets te positief inschat op dat punt. Maar het is waar: in de 80-er jaren werd er zelfs onderzoek naar gedaan door het NISSO, maar die rapporten staan niet meer op hun website bijvoorbeeld.]
" ... there are other, equally 'respectable', bodies that now support the abolition, or lowering, of the age of consent. In the Netherlands, as readers unfamiliar with developments in Europe will discover in the coming pages, even major church organisations and political parties are coming to the conclusion that the laws designed to 'protect' children from sexual experiences actually do them more harm than good."(8)
[Daar is dus weinig van over. Zelfs Japan heeft zich uiteindelijk aangepast aan de internationale wetgeving die gedomineerd wordt door allerlei Amerikaanse conservatieve / chtristelijke organisaties.]
"My qualifications for making what may appear to be an academic judgement on such a matter may he doubted. But this is not intended to be an academic work, pioneering scientific advances by means of original theory or controlled empirical studies. My contribution, rather, so far as academic considerations enter into it, is to present a paedophile's perspective on what is already known – an exercise aimed at the 'expert' and the open-minded layman alike. My approach has been personal, and committed, rather than spuriously 'scientific' and 'objective', but I have made every effort to use my sources honestly, at all times, and to treat opposing points of view with cool, calm deliberation, rather than impatient dismissal"(10)
[Ik neem aan zoals ook Brongersma het oppakt, met wie hij ook contact heeeft gehad over de tekst. Ik hoop alleen dat hij waarmaakt wat hij zegt en het ook over meisjes heeft. Bij Brongersma is dat niet zo het geval. Ik heb geen zin in weer een eenzijdig verhaal waarin de wereld alleen uit mannen bestaat.]
"It has always been hard for me to believe that there are children, boys or girls, who actually like erotic involvement with people much older than themselves. Harder for me, probably, than for a lot of those who so violently denounce paedophilia."(24)
"It appals me now to think of the embarrassed, slightly old-fashioned, schoolmasterly way in which I have rejected children's sexual curiosity (and sometimes more than curiosity) in the past, simply because I couldn't believe the evidence of my ears and eyes that the children really wanted to involve me in any way in their sex lives."(27)
"The belief that such things could happen has come only very slowly to me, as time and experience – and learning about the freer sexual expression of children at other times and in other cultures of the world – have eroded the notion that all children are 'innocent', and that there is no place for paedophile love."(30)
"People do not turn to paedophilia to avoid the responsibilities of an adult relationship, as some would have it believed – it seems to me that the responsibilities of a relationship with a child are in any case more onerous than one with an adult, not less." [mijn nadruk] (49)
"It is more than half a century since Freud began to shock polite society by his revelations on infant and child sexuality. Time enough, one might have thought, to absorb the shock, even for those who least wanted to face the facts. Yet there are those who still insist that children are 'innocent', in the sense of being asexual creatures."(51)
"Things haven't changed a lot since then. It is now medically recognised that masturbation, for instance, is entirely harmless, but most parents and teachers still steer children away from it and from any other expression of sexuality. They still behave as though they would like children to be non-sexual, as though there is some mental block, some resistance, to them recognising the child's sexual feelings." [mijn nadruk] (52)
" ... for most people, the only sensual response which can properly be called sexual is one directly associated with the genitals, tending towards orgasm. When I talk about children's sexuality in this chapter, it is this specifically genital, orgasmic, aspect that I mean."(52)
Volgen voorbeelden van Kinsey en zo die illustreren dat kinderen zichzelf vaak tot een orgasme brengen. Dus ja, seksualiteit bestaat ook bij kinderen.
"Unlike the pattern for boys, the sex play of girls tends to tail off rapidly in the years immediately before adolescence, and Kinsey felt this could be clearly attributed to cultural factors"(57)
"Although large population surveys like Kinsey's have not been undertaken in such cultures, there is now nonetheless a great deal of anthropological data to back up this claim – data which, despite the publication of such classic works as Clellan S. Ford's and Frank A. Beach's Patterns of sexual Behaviour, have failed as yet to make the impact they deserve on the popular imagination."(59)
"In a sexually restrictive society, in which it is not the done thing to talk about sexual techniques, and there is no way of finding out about them, it is no good expecting the adult to 'do what comes naturally' when he is married. It won't come naturally: she or he is likely to be sexually ignorant and incompetent. Whereas if the learning process is set in motion in childhood by a gradual introduction to sex, either by older children or by adults, there is far less likelihood of the embarrassed crashing of gears involved in trying to get it all together in one go."(66)
"The fact that a proportion of even quite young children are highly sexed is incontestable – and it is now accepted in the medical profession that among them are those whose sexuality is directed towards adults. This was recognised as early as 1912 by Moll, and in numerous studies since then the phenomenon of the 'seductive child' has been acknowledged, more often dubbed 'the participating victim' of paedophilic so-called 'offences'."(73)
Vaak wordt seksueel gedrag van kinderen door anderen getherapeutiseerd: ze doen het omdat ze een probleem hebben met hun ouders of anderszins, niet omdat ze het zelf willen omdat ze het lekker vinden. Het is dan dus niet normaal dat kinderen seks willen.
"Speculative insights into the child's mind, such as this, may or may not have some truth in them. But it is highly significant that not a word is said in all this as to the possibility that the child, having discovered sexual pleasure, may, in addition to any 'political' factors involved, have wanted sex simply for its own sake, because she enjoyed it! Not a word is said about the quality of her relationship with the adult, either in a sexual or a general sense. Nor, amazingly, is it thought to be a subject on which her views should be elicited. Instead, all the thinking, all the questioning, is concentrated with a sort of Freudian myopia solely on the child's relationship with its parents. One wonders what 'political' motives Weiss would have come up with to explain Virginia's sex play with a dog, without twigging the simple possibility that it turned her on!"(81)
"What is in greater doubt, and may make many people still hesitate about accepting that most children are 'really' sexual, is the proportion of children who are so highly sexed that they appear to need a continuous sexual outlet, either in masturbation or socio-sexually. It may be speculated, for instance, that a certain amount of the sexual behaviour described by Johnston and Deisher, or by Malinowski, is merely imitative of parental behaviour, or else exploratory in nature."(82)
[Ja, er zijn inderdaad vele manieren om te ontkennen dat kinderen zelf behoefte hebben aan seks. Ze doen het alleen maar na. Ze hebben waarschijnlijk een Minimal Brain Dysfunction. Of wat ook. Alles om maar niet te erkennen dat er kinderen zijn die van seks houden, klaar willen komen, het leuk vinden om met anderen seks te hebben, en zo verder.]
"Alternatively, the restlessness and hyperactivity in highly sexed children may well be attributable to the sheer sexual frustration they encounter when psychiatrists and others try to deprive them of sexual outlets."(83)
"The development of sexual behaviour in girls, like that of grown women, appears to be far more susceptible to cultural factors than that of boys. Women, as remarked earlier, can much more easily than men go through the whole of their life without discovering their capacity for orgasm; but once having discovered that capacity, and enjoyed it, a psychological basis is established for wanting to continue the pleasure.
Just as this happens to a proportion of women, in their marital and other relationships, so it also happens to some girls before puberty. A small proportion, in our society, of course: but there is evidence, in the 'victim' studies, that of those who become involved in sex with adults, a substantial proportion play an active, positive role, even though most of the studies are based on cases brought before the courts, and are heavily biased towards including a high proportion of genuine child molestation as opposed to consensual child-adult sexual activity."(87)
"I realise that, where girls are concerned, there are those who will think it far more significant that, according to the record, 83.6 percent (100 per cent less 16.4 per cent) had not encouraged the offender, i.e. they were molested. I can only emphasize that it is not my intention to pretend that child molestation does not exist, nor to suggest that it is an unimportant problem: I simply want to establish that molestation does not account for all child-adult sexual relations even when the child is quite young and even when the study in question has an inbuilt methodological bias towards producing figures which make the proportion of molestations look artificially high."(89)
"There are many aspects to the sexual freedom of children, including the freedom of access to their own bodies in masturbation, freedom to engage in sex with their peers, and freedom to have sex with adults. These freedoms are to a great extent bound up with each other. The kind of society which has a total taboo on child-adult sex is also likely to be anti-sexual in other ways, particularly in frowning on children's sexuality."(91)
"It is sometimes pointed out that behaviour which adults call 'sexual' may not have the same meaning for the child.(...) People are accordingly sceptical about the phenomenon of the 'seductive' child. Might not the 'sexual' behaviour of such a child be unwitting?"(99)
[Eigenlijk een onzinnige kwestie. Kinderen hebben voor zoveel dingen niet het taalgebruik van volwassenen, maar dat betekent vanzelfsprekend niet dat ze de gevoelens en zo niet hebben die bij dat taalgebruik horen. Denk aan een klein kind dat 'boos' of 'eigenwijs' of 'stout' is voordat het zelfs maar kan praten. Wij als ouderen benoemen de gedragingen en op een gegeven moment weet het kind dat bij een bepaald gedrag een bepaald woord hoort en kan het zeggen 'ik ben boos'. Waarom geldt zo'n proces ineens niet voor verleidelijke gedragingen en seksuele verlangens? Kinderen kunnen aandacht vragen, kunnen het op een manier doen die ze gezien hebben en die volwassenen als verleidelijk beschrijven, kunnen uit zijn op knuffelen en andere lekkere lichamelijke gevoelens, kunnen nieuwsgierig zijn naar het lichaam van anderen en willen verkennen, vinden het leuk om spannende spelletjes te spelen. En waarom zou dat allemaal ineens stoppen wanneer de ander een volwassene is?]
"Nevertheless, as I say, the potential for a mismatching of sexual 'meanings' is usually cited as an argument against paedophilia, and indeed against viewing children as sexual beings at all; there are those who feel that any admission of their sexuality is likely to give encouragement to those who might leap to wrong conclusions. That there are men – particularly men – in our society who are presumptuous in matters of sex is all too obvious: nearly every woman is familiar with having to run an uncomfortable gauntlet of male presumptions, from wolf-whistling and 'flashing' to bum smacking and, for an unfortunate few, rape. As feminists have pointed out, some of this behaviour may spring not just from false presumptions as to what is acceptable to women, but from utter indifference to what is acceptable, or even from outright hostility.
At any rate, the fact is that we do live in a sexist society. Men are encouraged by their social and sexual upbringing towards exactly the attitudes of arrogant, aggressive, flesh-consumerism of which they stand accused. What's more, in accordance with what might be expected in such a society, it is a plain fact that some children are aggressively molested.
What I hope to show, however, is that there is much in consensual paedophilia, as opposed to child molesting, that presupposes a gentle, almost feminine type of sexual expression, rather than one which conforms to the masculine stereotype of dominance and aggression. Many people do not realise that there are consensual paedophilic acts, precisely because society makes no distinction between these acts and aggressively imposed ones." [mijn nadruk] (101-102)
"The vast majority of sexual acts between children and adults are not aggressively imposed, any more than are those between adults ... "(102)
"So far, I have related facts largely about the overall known pattern of sexual acts between adults and children. Within this pattern, there is a crucial distinction to be made between those adults who actually prefer children as sexual partners and those who do not. There is reason to believe that, characteristically, the aggressive, 'sexist' use of girls as sex objects is attributable very largely to men with a predominantly ordinary, adult heterosexual orientation. These offenders tend to have a high level of criminality in non-sexual areas. They are often drunk at the time of the offence and simply use the child as an available, though to them inferior, substitute for the adult partner they would prefer. By no means all of the non-aggressive offenders prefer children either: they include a lot of men under stress when their marriage has broken up, and drink plays a large part in their offences too – usually followed by a 'hangover' which includes intense feelings of guilt." [mijn nadruk] (108)
[Precies: het meeste misbruik van kinderen komt helemaal niet van de kant van pedofielen, maar van 'normale' agressieve vervelende mannen die helemaal niet van kinderen houden.]
"Which brings us to what exactly is meant when we talk of 'paedophilia' – for just as adults can misconstrue 'sexual' behaviour in children, so can non-paedophile adults misconstrue the 'sexual' intentions of paedophiles." [mijn nadruk] (110)
"Children are far more likely to reach sexual excitement if they are relaxed and happy in the paedophile's company than if they are being intimidated. The paedophile is virtually bound to seek their confidence in order to win their co-operation. This being the case, in addition to the strong possibility that he actually likes children, he has another powerful reason for wanting to relate well to them."(112)
"More general anxieties on behalf of 'the victim', particularly the question of whether she or he will suffer psychological damage as a result of the experiences in question, are at least partly derived from the imposition of the very term 'victim' onto all child-adult sex relations, irrespective of whether they are forceful or gentle, unacceptable or acceptable to the child. The ultimate absurdity in clinging to the false distinction between 'molester' and 'victim' is to be found in a term encountered earlier, that of the 'participant victim'. Those researchers who adopted this curious term presumably felt they had to make some concession to orthodox thinking: society could not all at once be expected to understand the idea of child-adult sex in which there was no victimisation.
Perhaps because 'men' are assumed to be the victimisers, I find that women are more apt to cling to the image of the child as a victim. Yet, ironically, it is two women researchers who have done much to dispel this myth." [mijn nadruk] (116)
"Typically, the harm begins to make itself felt in the often hysterical initial reaction of the parents. Father Michael Ingram, a Roman Catholic priest and child counsellor, has described the process in all its misery, from the moment of parental discovery to the retribution exacted by the courts ..." [mijn nadruk] (121)
"Strange, isn't it, that society professes a concern for the child and obsessively keeps her/him away from adult sexuality as an expression of this concern, yet when – for whatever reasons – sexual contacts are found to have occurred, the child's real interests fly out of the window. She or he may then be harangued by parents and the police, subjected to medical examination, dragged through the courts and debarred from seeing the adult friend in question. Some concern!" [mijn nadruk] (128)
"I should explain that I feel on much stronger ground in describing and selecting anecdotes relating to those between men and boys than others."(140)
[Vreemde opmerking, je hoeft toch niet alleen uit eigen ervaring te putten, neem ik aan. Ik hoop niet dat hij zich daartoe beperkt om de reden die hij zelf geeft: pedofiele relaties met jongens verschillen erg met die van meisjes:]
"The distinction is in fact of considerable importance in our culture: sex-role stereotyping is such that, even by the age of eight or nine, many girls have already taken on board the idea that their role in life is to please men, and the validity of any consent they may give is by the same token more questionable than that of boys, who are under no such compunction; in fact, their conditioning against being 'sissy' or 'poof' or 'queer' is so strong that it might be thought amazing that any of them become voluntarily involved." [mijn nadruk] (141)
"To me, what this particular story most clearly illustrates is the remarkable tendency people have to find things acceptable in particular which they reject in general. For here is a man who can find nothing to object to in the particular paedophilic relationship he has experienced; nevertheless, probably because at the back of his mind he feels there must be something wrong with paedophilia if only because society makes so much fuss about it, he has no hesitation in condemning the relationships of others, about which, so far as we can tell, he has no knowledge." [mijn nadruk] (144)
"Her comments go a long way to explaining why female paedophilia, like lesbianism, is largely invisible in our society. Women have a licence to be intimate with children, and their motives for doing so are invariably interpreted as non-sexual, in all but undeniably sexual situations, chiefly coitus. Thus occasionally a woman appears before the courts if she has allowed or encouraged boys to have intercourse with her." [mijn nadruk] (177)
Over het idee dat seks en seksuele relaties kinderen zouden belemmeren in hun ontwikkeling van allerlei andere zaken.
"Why then do otherwise sophisticated people choose to rely on such quaint notions when the question of children's sexuality crops up? There is no evidence that children are more incapacitated by sex than are adults. What it boils down to is simply a gut feeling that sex in childhood is wrong, or dangerous, and it doesn't matter what kind of 'argument' is pressed into service against it: the approach seems to be 'Never mind the argument, feel the conclusion.'" [mijn nadruk] (189)
"While I agree that no one should impose his sexuality on another, I see no reason for the disavowal of mutually pleasurable acts. Like Money, I see the positive harmfulness of doing so, for the failure in childhood to develop a positive attitude to sexual pleasure is responsible for untold misery. In this regard I refer not only to that minority of children who chance upon a paedophilic relationship, but to all children. The attitudes which make for the condemnation of mutually pleasurable child-adult sex are part of the anti-sexual culture with which all our children have to cope." [mijn nadruk] (192)
"Dr Yates says children need to be given sexual confidence by their parents; sexual dysfunction is nearly always attributable to the failure of parents to take a positive attitude to their child's capacity for sexual pleasure."(197)
" ... the sex/aggression link, if there is any, obviously deserves some comment."(209)
"Firstly, such a link admittedly corresponds to what we know on a 'common-sense' level. Sexual competitiveness appears to be responsible for such familiar happenings as dance-floor brawls: most species engage in fighting or threatening behaviour to establish mating privileges and humans are no exception." [mijn nadruk] (209)
[Ik geloof er geen bal van en ben het daar niet mee eens. Mensen zijn geen dieren. Volgens mij zijn zaken als competitie en jaloezie allemaal cultureel en aangeleerd. De conclusie is dan ook:]
"None of the above factors does anything to suggest to me that a pro-sexual society will inevitably be a selfish, grabbing, violent one. Such a response presupposes that humans behave in society, where restraint is expected of them, in the same way as they do in laboratory experiments, where it is not. It also presupposes a deterministic role for biologic factors way in excess of that which is justified in the case of human beings; unlike other species, the behaviour patterns of humans are not completely coded in their genes: they are highly subject to social influences, particularly in relation to the early years of development, when the broad foundations of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour are learnt."(210-211)
"I want to show that what we in PIE have to say is not just a lot of indulgent theory that would never work , but that we have our feet except in impossible conditions of an ideal societyfirmly on the ground."(218)
"Before turning to these proposals, it will be helpful to put them in the context of other attempts to mitigate the more crudely harmful effects of the law on the sexually-involved child."(218)
"The PIE proposals would:
(a) maintain protection to the community by keeping the criminal law in use for those cases where it is clearly appropriate;
(b) avoid the necessity for police or criminal court involvement in a great many cases;
(c) make good use of the professional skills of social workers;
(d) in an unpatronizing way, give the child a say in the proceedings;
(e) avoid, in most cases where it is likely to be a factor, the possibility of moral blackmail against the accused.
These are big claims, especially as the core proposal – abolition of the age of consent – seems at first sight so radical that we might be thought quite mad to suppose it could be taken at all seriously. Yet it is worth noting that exactly such a proposal is being taken very seriously in one European country – Holland – and not just by 'radicals' either."(226)
[Tja, toen misschien even in overweging, maar de beweging ging weer de andere kant uit in de richting van verpreutsing en de 'bescherming van het kind'. Alles voor de stemmen, nietwaar.]
" ... indeed, some feel that an adult, just by virtue of his size and maturity, carries so much authority in relation to a child that the latter may have insufficient chance to say 'no' to sexual suggestions, and his consent can never therefore be wholly valid."(227)
"Briefly, in common with the Sexual Law Reform Society, PIE believes that there should be a general freedom, upheld by the law, for individuals to engage in any sexual activities that they freely choose."(228)
"PIE also accepts, in common with the Sexual Law Reform society, that it should be an offence to indulge in any sexual activity or display where it could be observed by others and causes them annoyance."(228)
[Dat lijkt me een twijfelachtige opvatting waar meer kanten aan zitten dan zo op het eerste gezicht lijkt.]
"Whereas we believe that children of any age are capable of considering a sexual act pleasurable or not pleasurable, the extent to which this information, and therefore the consent, can be communicated to other persons varies." [mijn nadruk] (230)
Hier worden leeftijdsgroepen onderscheiden: 0-3, 4-9, 10-17 jaar.
[Alles in relatie tot het geven van 'consent' - dat is hier het criterium voor wel of geen seks met jongeren, niet puur de leeftijd. Hier draait het weer om de 'agency' van kinderen. Conservatieven willen kinderen 'beschermen' omdat ze er vanuit gaan dat jongeren niet in staat zijn tot nadenken en beslissen over alles waarmee ze te maken hebben dan wel in ieder geval niet op het terrein van seks. Mensen die vertrouwen hebben in het vermogen van kinderen om na te denken en te beslissen en toestemming te geven geven kinderen veel meer verantwoordelijkheid. Er is dus sprake van twee heel verschillende kindbeelden. Ik denk niet dat de mensen die die verschillende kindbeelden hebben het ooit met elkaar eens zullen worden. Het vervelende is alleen dat vertegenwoordigers van het eerste kindbeeld - de conservatieven, de preutsen, de in-en-in-fatsoenlijken - overal de dienst uitmaken. Kinderen worden door die mensen maar beperkt serieus genomen en zeker niet op het vlak van seks.]
"Stated in full, as they are above, these proposals may appear to be more complicated than they really are, especially by virtue of including no fewer than six brackets of age groups to which different provisions apply! At least the present heterosexual age of consent for girls, at sixteen, however arbitrary it may be, has the virtue of being simple and clear to everyone. The man who goes to bed with a fifteen-year-old girl knows he is playing with fire, and can have no excuses. Shouldn't any replacement law be at least as clear?"(235)
"There is of course another factor relating to the consent of children, especially very young children and babies, which is perhaps the major stumbling block for most people. This can be summed up in the phrase 'They don't know what they are doing,' or 'They don't know/understand what they are letting themselves in for/what the consequences will be.' This objection applies, and has to be countered, even if the infant or child did appear to give some sort of consent." [mijn nadruk] (243)
[Weer dat negatieve kindbeeld.]
"The third, and most important point, is that by considering the development of children, and their ability to communicate consent at a variety of stages, one is paying due regard to the fact that children do develop; that a one-year-old is very different to a fifteen-year-old is perfectly obvious, but the present law accords the fact virtually no significance. PIE's proposals do. The more one can discriminate between different ages, without creating an administrative nightmare, the more sensitively one can take action appropriate to a child's age." [mijn nadruk] (246)
"A far more important criticism lies in the fact that no clear distinction is made between different types of sexual activity. Whereas it may be felt harmless enough physically for a child to consent to masturbation with an adult, whether actively, passively, or both, or to oral sex (though there might be some argument about this), the same might not be felt in relation to coitus or anal intercourse."(248)
"Should there be an age of consent, then, geared specifically to a child receiving (but not giving) penetration? On balance, I feel there is a need for this, although in saying so I am departing from the PIE 'party line' that I have espoused for the last four years."(250)
"Given that around 95 per cent of non-aggressive paedophilic sex with children under twelve is non-penetrative anyway, I believe that such a restriction would be respected by paedophiles."(251)
"The legislation would not be patronizing and 'protective', on the Israeli or De Francis models, but would be philosophically based in the notion that children have rights, including sexual rights. The background to this philosophical claim is discussed in the next chapter."(258)
"The idea that children can have rights in any matter, never mind the contentious area of sexuality, is a new one, and at this stage in history it is still considered incumbent on those who talk of 'children's rights' to provide some philosophical justification of their position.
The main reason that this should be so lies in the conventional wisdom that children are inexperienced and irrational beings; that they may not know the implications of any decisions they may make. They are likely to make choices which are against their own best interests. In these circumstances it appears to be absurd, and against the true interests of children, to give them meaningless freedoms, meaningless 'rights'.
This conventional wisdom begs the question of what is meant by 'children's rights', or rather its sting is against a particular conception of such rights – against a conception which is based on the autonomous decision-making power of the child." [mijn nadruk] (269)
"This paternalistic conception of children's rights represents what is now entrenched, traditional thinking, at least in the Western democracies. It is to be seen most clearly set out in the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child, which has its origin in a League of Nations declaration of 1924. The UN Declaration, adopted by the General Assembly in 1959, is concerned almost entirely with the protection of children, not with the expression of their individual will."(270)
"Neither English nor American law has any tradition of thinking of children as having 'rights'.(...) The law's concern with children has been largely confined to those occasions when the state may limit parental control in the interest of necessary protection or justifiable punishment of the child. The theory has been that in general the parents are the proper source of control of the child, and that the state should intervene only as a matter of last resort."(274)
"However, one should not fall into the trap of assuming that the best way to control the arbitrary and capricious exercise of bureaucratic power is by strengthening the rights of parents. To do so is to make a false equation between the interests of the child and the interests of the parents. For what happens when, for one reason or another, neither the state nor the parents manage to get things right?
Far from being a rarity, this is a situation that appears to arise frequently, and with tragic results. One could give plenty of examples from the sexual sphere, but instances of another type may be better recognized and more persuasive: notably in the case of 'battered' children." [mijn nadruk] (276)
"The extreme cases of parental cruelty, and the bureaucratic ineptitude of the state, throw into sharp focus the need of the child to have an independent voice; to have recognition of her or his existence as a separate person with natural rights before the law."(278)
"The process of deciding that children are to be participants in their own destiny, rather than passive recipients of a destiny laid out for them, is one that could and should start at the earliest possible age, Farson believes. And if children are really to have a say in their own destiny, there has to be a genuine choice for children, for all children at all stages of their upbringing, as to how, and with whom, they are brought up. Children need to be able to choose their own parents, not just in cases of inadequacy so gross that even the state can recognize them, but in all cases.
Such an idea may seem far-fetched to a society in which the small, self-contained nuclear family is the norm, but it is to some degree a realistic possibility in various forms of communal upbringing." [mijn nadruk] (291)
"I must admit it: letting children do what they want makes me nervous. I'm scared of anarchy. I used to like a reasonably orderly classroom, full of well-behaved children who put their hand up to ask questions one at a time, who paid attention to what I told them and didn't give too much trouble. Even now, if I'm chatting to children who don't know who I am, even if I'm being friendly and relaxed and informal, I tend to give the impression, despite myself, that I'm a schoolteacher. I don't boss children around, but just in small things – like suggesting that they put their lollipop wrappers in a waste bin – I automatically find myself modelling their behaviour.
This being the case, I find the romantic freedoms of the counter-culture completely hair-raising and devoutly to be avoided. On the other hand the freedom of A.S. Neill's Summerhill is a different matter. This is somehow freedom under control. It is middle-class. It remains within the Establishment." [mijn nadruk] (297)
[Hm, erg persoonlijk, maar daarom nog niet de goede keuze. ]
"Assumptions regarding girls are rather different. At all ages it is taken for granted that it is acceptable for men, providing they are not complete strangers, to 'make a fuss of them', in an automatic, sexist assumption which foreshadows the way in which so many men treat women. Although this often stays at the level of hugging and kissing it may be that overtly sexual acts of men towards young girls – particularly the avuncular cuddle that just happens to result in a hand straying into naughty places – can be passed off to the child as an ordinary way of expressing affection, and one which the child is not expected to refuse."(314)
"It has been seen that there are philosophical grounds for according sexual rights to children, including not only the right to sex information, but also the freedom to engage in desired sexual activity, i.e. the right to say 'yes'. Does such a right impede what Farson properly acknowledged as equally fundamental, the right to say 'no'? Can children ever be considered capable of consent based on true freedom of choice? Basic elements constituting freedom of choice arguably include:
(i) a full knowledge of all the short- and long-term consequences to which participation in a sexual act could lead;
(ii) a developed notion of which sexual activities (and partners) are exciting and desirable;
(iii) control over the situation, so that withdrawal from it can be made at any point, if so wished."(329)
[Dat eerste punt heeft niemand, ook volwassenen kunnen nooit alle mogelijke gevolgen van hun (seksuele) handelingen te voren bedenken. Bijvoorbeeld dat iemand instemt met seks en dan later ineens spijt heeft. Hoe zou je zoiets ooit kunnen voorzien? Het tweede punt is ook onzin. Veel mannen en vrouwen weten even weinig van seks als kinderen. Bijvoorbeeld: seks is neuken. Of vrouwen die nooit gemasturbeerd hebben en niet weten wat ze lekker vinden en maar gewoon meegaan in wat mannen doen. En weten van opwindende partners? Serieus? Misschien weten kinderen wel beter dan volwassenen wie ze aardig vinden en wat ze lekker vinden. Het laatste punt is denk ik waar het om gaat. Iedereen moet altijd nee kunnen zeggen en kunnen stoppen met de seks, ook kinderen. Maar ook veel volwassenen zitten niet in situaties dat ze nee kunnen zeggen (en zeggen dan dat ze hoofdpijn hebben of zo). Machtsverhoudingen, daar draait het om.]
"Giving it a moment's more thought, however, a problem arises: even adults, in embarking on a sexual encounter or relationship, cannot be sure 'where it will all end'; nor do most people enter adulthood with a fixed idea as to the activities, and people, that might turn them on – the scope for experiment and discovery is a lifelong one. Only the third factor, that of control over the situation, appears to maintain its crucial importance when viewed in an adult context."(329)
[Precies, we zijn het eens.]
"What there most definitely needs to be, is the child's willingness to take part in the activity in question; whatever social or legal rules are operated, they must not be such as to allow unwilling children to be subjected to sexual acts."(330)
"A child's control of sexual situations can be enhanced, as we saw in the last chapter, by the openness with which sexuality is treated in society as a whole."(332)
"The possibility that adults may tend to 'engineer' the willingness of children, that they may 'manipulate' their consent, gives rise to a great deal of unease, and needs to be considered at some length. It might be suggested, for instance, that no matter how precocious a young child's sex education has been, there has to be a first time for all her/his experiences, and at this point the child is not in a position critically to evaluate whatever an adult partner says an experience will be like, or what it will lead to." [mijn nadruk] (334)
[Dat speelt ook bij volwassenen - het hele thema ' flirten, verleiding' draait tenslotte om iemand welwillend en verlangend maken. Heel dat idee manipulatie is zo aanvechtbaar, ook in de metoo-gevallen. Kinderen worden door anderen de hele tijd 'gemanipuleerd', alleen noemen we het dan opvoeding.]
"Even though this is an important issue, adults are free to fill a child's mind with any prejudice or bigotry they like, without any danger of facing a sentence for corrupting a minor, assault on a child's mind, or anything else. Children are seen as fair game for the imposition of any religious belief or value system that the adult, particularly the parents, cares to impose. (...) Religious manipulation is assumed to be good and is positively encouraged; sexual manipulation (or 'guidance', 'showing how', etc.) is assumed to be bad and is stamped upon with maximal force."(336)
[Zo is het. ]
"Much disquiet about paedophilia derives from the fact that child-adult relationships are between unequal parties. Adults are almost invariably much bigger and stronger than children; by definition, they are older, and their vastly greater skills and knowledge, their status in society – including the relative power and independence afforded by their earning power – and their experience of human relationships, may appear to lend them so much authority in the eyes of children as to give them an 'unfair advantage'. This disparity of size and power must inevitably, it may be thought, create a potential for dominance and exploitation: a potential which some feminists have anxiously compared with the exploitation of women by men in our society." [mijn nadruk] (361)
[Ook weer zoiets. Jane Gale wordt geciteerd. Die schrijft: ]
"'If a relationship should be deemed unacceptable because of the unequal distribution of power, then most heterosexual adult relationships are unacceptable.'"(361)
[Daar ben ik het erg mee eens.]
"Despite the inappropriateness of trying to measure up paedophilia against an idealized model of 'equal lovers', the arguments relating to power and equality remain immensely important, and it is necessary to examine them in some depth." [mijn nadruk] (365)
"To engage in an erotic act does not, as already noted, involve decisions of this order. The quality of predictive wisdom is not needed. All the child in such a relationship needs to think about – and she or he is capable of doing so – is whether the act is pleasurable. It is a myth that a pleasant experience will lead to a lifetime of consequences that the child doesn't know about. It is a myth that the enticements of an ensnaring adult will commit a child to the unknown, to some dark bourn from which she or he cannot return. There is no formal commitment (though there may be an emotional one): the adult doesn't ask the child to marry him. The younger partner, and the elder, remain free from obligations enforceable at law." [mijn nadruk] (371)
"But if we look specifically at what happened in terms of the balance of power within the relationship, we can see that the shallow denunciations of the adult's supposedly automatic power simply do not hold water." [mijn nadruk] (390)
[Ook met dat laatste ben ik het erg eens.]
"As Parker Rossman has pointed out, sexual acts between children and adults, by their very nature, bring the participant children to see themselves in an entirely new, more potent, more important, relationship to adults than the one they are used to."(393)
"Whereas a paedophilic relationship may depend for its existence simply on sexual and emotional ties between the child and adult involved, both pornography and prostitution appear to have their primary raison d'être in the pursuit of money. Sometimes the child makes money on his own account, sometimes it finds its way into the hands of parents, almost always porn producers are motivated by profit. Either way, people feel that the performance of sexual acts for money, rather than for sexual pleasure alone, or as part of a loving relationship, is bound to be degrading and exploitative. I don't think this is universally true."(398-399)
"What really matters is that the involvement of money can result in children submitting to sex acts with which they are unhappy, or being forced into them by parents and others who want to cash in. Exploitation of this sort is essentially a problem associated with poverty, such as that in Victorian England and many parts of the Third World today. The answer accordingly lies more in the elimination of poverty than in law enforcement. But it should also be realized that prostitution is to a great extent rooted in sexual restriction, not in sexual freedom: as Engels said, the price paid by Victorian society for its official code of strict monogamy was that prostitution flourished alongside it. By the same token, a sexually free society has less need of prostitution: given the choice, people generally seek relationships in which they are wanted for themselves, not for their money." [mijn nadruk] (400)
Vervolgens gaat het over kinderporno waarbij de media en conservatieven zo'n negatieve en hypocriete rol spelen.
"In considering the merits of erotica, we need to separate out a few of the chief objections to it, and to child erotica in particular. For the purposes of this discussion there are two main categories of objections:
(a) those that concern themselves with the effects, if any, on the consumer (Is the person who buys erotica going to be 'depraved and corrupted'? Is it more likely that after seeing it he will commit sex offences?); and
(b) those that concern themselves with the effects on the producers, particularly with those who actually take part in the sex acts depicted."(408)
[Uiteraard zijn beide 'gevolgen' nauwelijks aan te tonen.]
"They [Eysenck-Nias] conclude:
'The amount of overt sex in such films may not differ in any way from that shown in our hypothetical Fanny Hill film; what is important in marking the difference is the context, which is pro-love, pro-sex, and pro-women, in the one case, but anti-women, anti-love, and even anti-sex (in the sense of gentle, pleasant, co-operative sex) in the other.'
As I see it, providing one accepts the premise that children's sexuality is not in itself to be discouraged, exactly the same conclusions are applicable to child erotica and pornography: gentle, pleasant, cooperative depictions of children in sex encourage a gentle, pleasant, cooperative attitude in the viewer. Nasty depictions would encourage the opposite response, especially among those whose personality, for whatever reason, disposes them to a 'nasty' approach to sexual expression."(413)
"I would, however, agree with Brownmiller that pornography and erotica alike share one undeniable quality: they both tend to 'objectify'. The person depicted in the erotic image is not 'real', is seen in a sexual dimension only, and is therefore capable of being considered only as an object of sexual attraction, not as a whole person. This is not a problem one can attribute to the mind of the consumer: it is inherent in the sheer fact of encapsulating just one aspect of a person in a photographic or cinematic image."(430)
"Feminists and other critics of child erotica really need to know a little more about how paedophiles think and fantasize about children."(434)
"... it is no accident that those in the forefront of the campaign against child erotica are also predominantly anti-gay, anti-heterosex-before-marriage, anti what they derisively call 'permissive' attitudes generally. They are people who in a wider context believe in an authoritarian society, in which Church and State between them call all the shots, in which dissidence of all sorts is severely punished. They are the people who, in their anxiety to promote the 'moral' welfare of others, overlook the misery, the frustration, and the violence engendered by sexual ignorance and repression. For they feel that people, especially children, must be kept sexually ignorant and repressed to free them from the 'corrupting' effect of their own feelings."(443)
Voornamelijk over de ontwikkeling en de acties van PIE.
"Neither of these essential activities of a 'self-help' group – the holding of small, informal meetings, and the putting of members in touch with each other – is presently a simple matter for PIE: meetings have been infiltrated by a hostile press and the contact ads have resulted in a prosecution, in that their publication has allegedly involved a 'conspiracy to corrupt public morals'. Such basic functions would present no problems at all for most organizations. Nor would they probably have become that much of a problem for PIE, if we were not also a vigorous and controversial campaigning group." [mijn nadruk] (461)
"If we had looked at history, what would we have found? That whenever really new, heretical ideas are propounded, ideas which threaten to rock the society in which they are put forward, they inevitably encounter a vicious and forceful opposition.(...) We knew that we would be hitting a particularly sensitive nerve among practically every section of society. To isolate ourselves as a focus for universal hostility was indeed irrational, even downright crazy, and yet we still felt we had to do it."(475)
"Our real mistake, however, was at a much deeper level than this. We could see 'the enemy' only where it was most obviously manifest. We knew the Whitehouse lobby had a broad populist appeal among the nation's churchgoers and was not without power and influence. We knew that most ordinary people had deep, gut feelings about the protection of children, and that many of them would see red about PIE so forcefully that they couldn't begin to give any rational consideration to our ideas. We knew that the popular press would play on simple fear and prejudice, given half a chance. We knew that even amongst the most educated classes there were intransigently conservative elements who would share, and perhaps very effectively endorse, the gut reaction of the man in the street. Having recognized all these enemies, we mistakenly supposed that in other areas we might find, if not friends, then at least rational, liberally-minded people, who would be open to ideas. We didn't expect The Guardian newspaper to react in the same way as the News of the World. Yet to our astonishment and disgust, there has been precious little to choose between them, and this just about typifies the reaction of the liberal intellectual establishment across the land.
What we had failed to see was that normally intelligent, broad-minded people were just as capable of giving way to their initial, emotional sense of revulsion as anyone else: in making an appeal to their brains, to their education, we put too much faith in these factors. We were quite wrong in supposing that only religious maniacs and splenetic judges are ruled by factors outside the intellect. Of course, had we been preaching any one of dozens of other doctrines, our supposition would have been correct: there is no shortage of liberals who are prepared to take a sympathetic view of the Provisional IRA, despite their revulsion against the barbarity of kneecappings and the suffering of children who get in the way of the bullets and bombs and hatred.
Apparently violence, in the pursuit of a political end like nationalism, is somehow acceptable, no matter how horrific it may be. Yet for some reason that I cannot fathom, the non-violent love of children is regarded as more horrific, not less so." [mijn nadruk] (479)
[Ja, zo is het, sterker nog: ook allerlei andere vormen van agressie en geweld worden zonder meer aanvaard.]
De ontwikkelingen in de USA en Nederland.
"On the face of it, the United States might be thought infertile ground in which to nourish sexual change in the coming years: while in the UK we have only one Mary Whitehouse, the Americans have two – Anita 'Save Our Children' Bryant and Judianne 'Child Porn' Densen-Gerber – plus a formidable supporting cast of moral crusaders,; backed by mainstream news media, often as prurient and sensationalistic as the News of the World."(513)
Afgezien van af en toe een lichtpuntje zijn de ontwikkelingen in de VS en Canada bescheiden. En wat betreft Nederland:
"Historical accident may have helped the Dutch paedophile cause. Whereas PIE stuck its neck out in an era of conservative reaction and became an isolated target, progress in Holland has been promoted by a large and prestigious umbrella organization, the NVSH, (Netherlands Association for Sexual Reform). The early work of NVSH was in the field of family planning, but it gradually took a variety of sexual liberation causes under its wing, including the campaign for children's sexual rights and, in 1971, paedophilia. A popular organization, it reached a maximum membership of nearly a quarter of a million a few years ago and has had a strong influence on public attitudes towards sex. There are now paedophile groups under the auspices of NVSH in a dozen Dutch towns." [mijn nadruk] (525)
"My guess is that paedophilia will never be accepted, in Holland or elsewhere, by any society in which paedophiles are singled out as a minority – a minority which, like the homosexual minority, cannot help but seem bizarre and alien to even the most understanding onlookers, when the focus of attention is on the peculiar sexual orientation of the 'problem' group involved.
Ultimately, it is no use fighting for paedophile liberation, though this is a stage which has to be worked through. Sexual liberation can only mean something valuable to most people in the context of their own lives, and the lives of their own children, not the lives of some minority group with whom they are asked to sympathize." [mijn nadruk] (533)
"This wider revival of conservative values, in which there has been a central emphasis in the rhetoric of the major political parties on 'the family', may be seen as a reaction against the 'Jenkinsite' view of society that flourished in the reforming 1960s, (which saw the liberalization of the abortion laws and the abolition of hanging, as well as the reform of the law against homosexuality)."(536)
"What of the higher aspirations? What of the achievement of a society in which children are genuinely treated as human beings, with rights, including sexual rights; in which it is fully accepted that they are not mere chattels, at the arbitrary disposal of their parents; in which people of all ages and both sexes have full self-determination to engage in consensual sexual activity; in which there is no oppression of any sexual minorities, providing that they do not infringe the rights of others; in which, for that matter, love and peace at last gain the elusive ascendancy over perversion and war for which all people of good will pray, in their own fashion? All these things are plainly ideals rather than completely attainable targets. But the fact that they are not easily realized is no reason for relinquishing the perpetual struggle to do so – for failure to at least define and pursue an ideal can lead only to cynicism and despair." [mijn nadruk] (540)