Feminism, child sexual abuse, and the erasure of child sexuality

This essay suggests that, despite admirable efforts to empower children and protect them from the harmful consequences of sexual abuse, they have in one particularly notable way been disempowered and disarmed by the child sexual abuse movement. I argue that the discourse of child sexual abuse has expanded at the expense of a discourse of child sexuality. [...]

As will be shown, not only does queer theory have much to offer theorizations of the relationship between analytic axes of "sexuality" and "age," but there may be an instructive methodological lesson for queer theory to glean from failed feminist attempts to hierarchize sexuality by way of a linear and sequential logic of age stratification. [...]

Nowhere is the recognition of child sexuality more apparent than in the child emancipation and sexual liberation movement of the 1970s. The widespread assumption that modern society had inherited an attitude of intolerance of sexuality led many reformers to argue for a lifting of repressive strictures and for more open and positive attitudes toward sexuality. These, it was claimed, would free society of unnecessary inhibitions, mandates, and guilt, which were themselves targeted as the causes of sexual perversions, sexual malaises, and marital troubles. Some reformers touted the benefits of family nudity, while others advanced the idea that adult sexual activity in the presence of children might have beneficial pedagogical effects. Hal M. Wells, infamous author of The Sensuous Child, argued that the traumatic effects on children of sex with adults had been exaggerated and that "children have the right to sexual pleasure." Even the incest taboo was challenged. In her book Sex without Shame the psychiatrist Alayne Yates suggested that there is "an important lesson to be learned from non-coercive father-daughter incest. Early erotic pleasure by itself does not damage the child. It can produce sexually competent and notably erotic young women. Childhood is the best time to learn, although parents may not always be the best teachers." [...]

Not only was child sexuality a palpable conceptual figure for most of the twentieth century, but it had even become an overt political issue by the 1970s. Such a position is unthinkable in the climate of pedophilia panic early in the twenty-first century. I am not suggesting that throughout the twentieth century there was a near-universal consensus regarding child sexuality or that there were not wildly competing claims concerning its existence and meaning. Of course, there were multiple constructions of childhood. Indeed, many people still believed in the notion of childhood asexuality or sexual innocence. In fact, alongside the narrative of childhood sexual precocity ran that of childhood sexual purity. [...]

If there is an underlying logic to the feminist discourse of child sexual abuse, it rests on this question of power and powerlessness. Arguments about child powerlessness and the inability of children to give informed consent have structured every influential analysis of the problem since the 1980s. In her landmark book, The Best Kept Secret, Florence Rush relies on the radical feminist redefinition of child sexual abuse as a "male abuse of sexual power." Judith Lewis Herman and Lisa Hirschman's groundbreaking studies on father-daughter incest take it for granted that child incest victims are in a position of "utter helplessness" the face of their fathers' "abuse of power and authority." The differential of power between adults and children is "an immutable biological fact." Using the analogy of "freemen and slaves," Herman and Hirschman conclude that children "are essentially a captive population, totally dependent upon their parents or other adults for their basic needs." This asymmetry ensures that "there is no way that a child can be in control or exercise free choice." [...]

Sex education, for instance, is routinely a question of adult attempts to control children's access to knowledge about sex and sexuality - that is, attempts to ensure power over knowledge. [...] Hence we continue to witness a near-hysterical outcry regarding children's access to "adult" material on the Internet. The Internet, it is feared, threatens to undermine adult control of adult sexual knowledges, meanings, and practices. [...]

[T]herapists working within the child sexual abuse discourse try to alter the child's perception of reality in the hope that a change in fantasized memory reconstruction will follow. This approach is akin to brainwashing. It relies on a linear understanding of causation, at the center of which are the omnipotent, all-controlling adult and the powerless, passive child. It also assumes, erroneously in my view, that reality and fantasy can be definitively disentangled. [...]

Since the advent of the discourse of child sexual abuse in the 1970s, for example, there has been a tendency to desexualize children and to highlight their innocence in relation to adult sexuality. But all too often sex education is framed by the oppositions of pleasure and danger, good and bad, with the former terms being the adult's reserve and the latter the child's. This approach only reproduces the problematic binary between the sexual adult and the asexual child. It also misrepresents and simplifies child sexuality, sending children the message that sexual behavior, for them, is dangerous and wrong, especially in intergenerational contexts.

[For the notes (and the whole article) see the url.]

source: Article 'Feminism, Child Sexual Abuse, and the Erasure of Child Sexuality' by Steven Angelides (La Trobe University); www.researchgate.net/profile/Steven_Angelides/publication/31403920_Feminism_Child_Sexual_Abuse_and_the_Erasure_of_Child_Sexuality/links/566df87508aea0892c528f69/Feminism-Child-Sexual-Abuse-and-the-Erasure-of-Child-Sexuality.pdf; GLQ (A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies), 10/2(2); January 2004