Someone said: “I support capital punishment for any person who sexually molests a child. One cure. One bullet.”
I said, no, that’s just fascism and, when asked for suggestions, wrote the following.
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Oh, this is a layered, subtle topic. For one thing, I’ve experienced it, so don’t say I’m not really able to speak about it. We’d have to delve into sexuality, and how it goes wrong, and why, and figure out if these people can be helped. I kind of doubt it. I think it’s akin to psychopathy and the only thing we can do is isolate them from society, at the very least from kids. Killing, though, is always murder, and wrong.
We also have to back off on the hair-trigger we have about sexuality stateside. We’re suffering from the politicization of Puritanical intolerance. We need to put people sexually attracted to children into a set of contexts, historical being one of them. Example: Childhood as we think of it today was more or less invented whole cloth in the 1800s as part of the industrial revolution to control the workforce. Go back to the Little House on the Prairie days of American expansion and basically any female past menarche was at least in theory perfectly ready to bear children, thus be married off, etc. And it happened a lot. Mothers were routinely 13 – 15 years old back then. Ask any Mormon, ahem.
So partly we’re dealing with a shift in what we consider childhood. Dickens was 12 when his father went to debtor’s prison — a barbarity the GOP wants to bring back — and was able to work and even buy himself a pint of beer for lunch; they worked children mercilessly in the Victorian age, and we vividly recall the GOP candidates spewing ugly crap about, “Why SHOULDN’T kids be put to work?” Newt, you scum, do you hear me? Drop dead.
So once you’ve stripped the very notion of a protected childhood, something that only comes from a solid and financially flush middle class, what have you left? Republicant sex slavery, republicant wage slavery for children as young as 8 or 9, and creches where the offspring of the poor are raised by abusive, likely perverted martinets the echo Dickensian “orphanages”. Remember, Fagin was a pedophile, folks, and those orphans were street urchins abandoned by a system that cared only about the 1% rich getting richer. We’re headed back that way.
So as we fold all this into the topic of child sexual abuse, you begin to see that it’s complex, layered, and very political. The old double standard of, say, a 15 year old boy “getting” to fuck his 30 year old teacher, but a 30 year old male teacher “raping” a 15 year old Lolita, is about where we left this debate, unfortunately. Sexologists and psychologists who study children and sexuality will tell you it’s a hell of a lot more complicated, and there is no one answer. Brutality in any form is not the key, though, that much seems evident.
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