Well, long, long ago I promised you a big and complex reply detailing my child liberationist views… And then I moved to another topics. Why? Well, because I found trying to push a whole social teaching into one forum post to be a painfully difficult endeavor. Yet I have not forgotten my intention to provide you with a good summary of my views. And then all hell broke loose at my job, and for some time I became simply devoid of spare time. And, then it ended, I went to my relatives for a prolonged visit and thus was far from my PC for may days. Then, I was busy translating some of my English-language stuff into Russian for a friend of mine who was highly interested in my opinions. So, I was able to start writing this post only recently. And, after some reflection, I understood that I cannot describe all areas in which children are denied freedom, and present arguments against such limitation of their agency. So, I decided to concentrate on, probably, the most controversial and explosive topic of all – which is also the most researched: children’s sexual rights and liberties, their freedom to pursue sexual contacts and relationships – not only with other children, but also with adults. Paradoxically, this area – intergenerational sexuality – is, if we access it in objective manner, the safest one for kids; if most people were thinking rationally, rather than passionately (unfortunately, they do not), it will be accepted and approved by society long ago. But deep fears and anxieties, lasing from the beginning of the modern epoch, prevent us from analyzing child sexuality in general, and child-adult sex in particular, in calm and critical manner.
Before we start, let’s look at one interesting chart, presented in
Robert Epstein’s article “The Myth of the Teen Brain” (p. 4 in the document). Named “Rebels with a Cause”, it demonstrated how greatly the freedom of “minors” – that is, children and adolescents, the persons under arbitrary “age of majority” – has diminished for the past 200 years. Before 19th century, it was hardly any laws enforcing age restrictions; yet since the beginning of the 19th century, such laws began to appear – initially one by one; than they were created faster, and became more multiple; and since post-World-War-2 era, legal initiatives designed to take away virtually any freedom from “minors” turned into a true avalanche, which lead us to a current situation of a fundamentally separated society, where adults are allowed to enjoy the liberties of modern democratic countries, yet kids are locked into a virtually totalitarian world, where they are forbidden not only to act on their own will and desires, but even to access information about these desires – since even information is presumed to be “harmful for minors” and therefore “adults only”. As Epstein puts it,
Just try to think about it –
TWICE AS MANY RESTRICTIONS FOR KIDS AS FOR INCARCERATED ADULT FELONS. It is no joke; an adult prisoner have more liberties under law than a child. (And what about child convicts put into “juvenile detention centers”, BTW? They lose even the last miniscule drops of freedom left for kids and are simply treated like slaves.) Yet it wasn’t always this way: the modern notion of “childhood”, with its centering on “innocence” and “protection” of this “innocence” from everything around, including even knowledge. (In fact, especially knowledge; according to modern ideas, even sheer theory on some subjects should not be allowed to kids, let alone “carnal” – read, experiential – knowledge… God forbid!!!) Before modernity, no one cared much about “protecting” children from anything; according to some good data, the very concept of childhood was largely unknown. And it is understandable, since the idea of childhood has been arising, steadily, in a very specific cultural milieu – the sex-negative, body-hating, life-rejecting ideals of Christianity; the ideals which, while ferociously castigating “lust” as the source of evil, was obsessed by it, fixated on it; the ideals from which the concept of “childhood innocence” was born. But let’s start from the beginning of this long and painful road…
Before the advent of the religions of salvation (primarily Christianity and Abrahamic religions in general, but not only them – some other faiths, such as Zoroastrianism, also qualify like that), as well as transcendental, Platonic-style ascetic philosophies, it was agreed that spirit is immanent; it is in-worldly, not out-worldly; it is life, not death; it can be directly experienced. The apparent chasm between flesh and soul, the seeming rupture between body and mind, was not yet proposed – our bodies was manifestations of our spirit, not shells in which our souls are contained. And, therefore, bodily desires were good and acceptable – not only in adults, but also in children; for why we, wishing good to our kids, should deprive them of sexual gratification which they evidently seek from birth? Why should we try to “shield” them from something which is their natural need and drive? So, in pre-Salvationist world, child – and, importantly, intergenerational – sexuality was usually accepted. Sexual relations between adults and children commonly were as normal as between children themselves, since all, kids and grown-ups alike, shared the same life, same society, same culture; there was no reason why they should be strictly separated in sexual matters. Of course, not all cultures were equally sex-positive; some were more restricted than others, in some matters, in some areas. But these restrictions usually were related to the order of mating and forming familial units; idea of sex as something fundamentally evil and thus deserving repression as and in itself, is invention of Salvationist religions and transcendentalist philosophies.
Yet, in the initial stages of its development, sex-negative, ascetic ideals of Christianity has little to do with age restrictions and separation between kids and adults. Children were not yet seen as different from adults; they were inexperienced, of course, in need of some teaching; but pedagogy as specific specialty, and child-rearing as a discrete, identifiable area of life had not yet arisen.
Things changed in the modern epoch. This change is well described by highly controversial, yet very interesting historian Philippe Aries in his
book “Centuries of Childhood”. The Christian ideal, that formed the Western culture, is purity – the separation of man from the “dirty”, tainted earthly reality, the achievement of perfect, unearthly clarity of heaven. For such transcendence of the simple liveliness, seekers of the celestial need community and reason, which will provide them with moral discipline and development, with refinement of manner and performance. So, the earthy talks and acts – especially sexual talks and acts – were forbidden in a polite adult society. Yet – which may sound shockingly to most modern people – such talks and acts were allowed in dealing with children. As Philippe Aries describes,
I highly recommend you to read the Chapter V of Aries’ book, “From Immodesty to Innocence”, but prepare to be shocked: some casual interactions with children described in the Heroard’s diary – for example, an adult woman demonstrating the child her “private parts” – would, if performed nowadays, easily qualify as “child molestation” and would cost the performer a long prison term and a life on a “Sex Offender Registry”. However, in era described by Heroard and reconstructed by Aries, it was an everyday norm, since it was considered that children, who have not yet achieved adult moral refinement and religious elevation, would not be harmed or offended by such demonstrations. Kids, unlike adults, were still creatures of natural simplicity; only later, with severe acts of discipline, might they became divinely touched, cleansed from the earthly dirtiness of sin and allowed to enter heaven.
In the epoch of modernity, with the giving up of belief in fundamental vileness of human nature and the rise of humanism, the Christian idea of earthly life as dirty and sinful was not given up; but was paradoxically inverted. Now it was assumed that all children are born innocent, devoid of any sinfulness – especially, of any sexuality; yet later they are tainted by the sinful world, depraved and corrupted by it, and have to cleanse themselves and to return to their original innocence to deserve salvation.
This idea of asexual pure child was good to think about; but it was smashed by reality of child sexuality, in its most visible form – masturbation. The view of a presumably sexually pure child committing such sinful act was a prime horror for the people of 18th and 19th centuries – horror strong enough to turn off their reasoning abilities, giving way to an unrestrained hysteria. This hysteria took a social form that mixed therapeutic practice, scientific school, moralistic movement and punitive institution – the infamous “masturbation insanity”. According to nearly all scientific, medical and social authorities of 18th and – especially – 19th centuries, child masturbation was a cause of nearly all physical and mental maladies possible, from bodily frailty to dementia; so, it has to be fought without restraint and mercy. And it was fought – by methods which they sound insanely cruel to 21st century people, such as putting pain-inflicting anti-masturbation devices on children’s genitalia – or even burning these genitalia with hot iron, permanently damaging them and thus eradicating sexual pleasure and masturbatory habits. Yet no cruelty was excessive for anti-masturbation crusaders, who were defending children from the mortal perils of “self-abuse”.
Here we must stop to reflect a bit on this usage of “abuse” term, which probably reminds of current “child sexual abuse”. Its genealogy leads us to the Latin word “abusus”, that means “to damage” and “to destroy”. Nowadays, people use such expression to interpret sexual acts between adults and children – which are, in majority’s view, invariably harmful. Yet, the masturbating child of 19th century was performing an act of
SELF-destruction; he was, simultaneously, a sexual offender and offender’s victim. He didn’t need a “paedophile” adult to be molested; his own “auto-molesting” efforts were enough. The torture which was inflicted on a masturbation kid by concerned adults were, in this sense, both “therapeutic” prevention of assumed damage and a penance for wilful transgression. The absurdity of the situation – that was invisible to the anti-masturbation crusaders – was exactly in this contradictory coexistence of offence and victimhood in a single child person: if a child was intrinsically asexual, then why he had an urge to masturbate in the first place? Nobody had any consistent answer; and nobody cared to find one. A moral panic – and the “masturbation insanity” was the one of many such panics in history – feeds on its own irrationality and perpetuate itself by passionate and emotionally appealing, yet incoherent, slogans. (As I will show later, modern “child sexual abuse” panics is as devoid of rational foundation as “masturbation insanity” ever had been.)
During the panic of masturbation, other panics arose: for example, the fear of children being “molested” by immoral, world-tainted adults (as if their cherished “innocence” hadn’t already been threatened by their own “self-abuse” impulses!). The fear of kids losing their outworldly purity lead to creation of the “age of consent” laws, which, proclaimed as the means to “defend” children from adults, in fact, defended adult prejudices and fears group around assumed children’s purity – at the expense of kid’s sexual freedom and welfare of adults who were caught “molesting” them. Initially, such “ages of consent” were pretty low by modern standards – around 10 or 11 years old. But later, feeding from the recurrent waves of adults’ moralistic hysteria, it was raised higher and higher, and by 20th century it was usually around 16. (The central – but not only – theme of these hysterias usually was “underage” prostitution and pornography; some topics raised by them were more-or-less separated from age-centered ideas and turned into fear of sex work as such. In the early 20th century, it lead to a “white slavery” moral panic, which provided an archetypical basis for later sex work-related panics, such as modern “human trafficking” one.)
The old – 19th century and first half of 20th one – ideas about “molestation”, however, had a crucial difference from their current forms: “molested” child wasn’t always a passive victim; he or she might as well be
PARTICIPATORY victim – that is, a paradoxical combination of victim and accomplice. The acceptance of such combination was based on the understanding – which was lost in later redactions of the hysteria – that children quite often do consent to the sexual actions of adults, and enjoy them; even more, sometimes – which is utterly unthinkable to modern “child protectors” – children actually
INITIATE sex with adults. Sadly, even such initiatory behavior was not accepted as justification of intergenerational sex by most people; they still insisted, contrary to factual evidence, that children are asexually innocent and therefore, such sensual seeking must be pathological and transgressive for them. Yet, it is still telling that child entering an intergenerational sexual relationship was as pathologised and criminalised as adult; only later children were turned into passive “groomed” victims hypnotised by the vile charms of the devilish “paedophile” and thus devoid of any responsibility.
The rebirth of “child sexual abuse” hysteria in its most intense and absurd form – the modern form which we are now witnessing – happened only in late 1970s; and mid-to-late 1960s and early-to-mid 1970s (in Continental Europe, even late 1970s and early 1980s) were a truly exceptional period in modern history: the period of child liberationism, when many highly intelligent and intelligent adults suddenly rediscovered children’s agency and defended providing children with all rights and liberties adults have – including sexual rights and liberties. It was a time when a proposals to legalise and normalise paedophilia were vocalised by researchers of high standing and activists of high eminence. For example, a 1977 French petition to abolish “age of consent” was signed by the very leading French intellectuals, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault (the latter was an especially staunch advocate of intergenerational sexuality). Child-adult sex was approved by leading feminist thinker Camille Paglia; by famous poet Allen Ginsberg; by legendary mystical anarchist Hakim Bey (Peter Lamborn Wilson). And, most importantly, it became a topic for a non-hostile, non-condemnatory research by scientists like Larry Constantine, Gayle Rubin, Steven Angelides, Harris Mirkin, Vern Bullough, Paul Okami, Terry Leahy, Agustin Malon, Bruce Rind, Daniel Tsang, Floyd Martinson, Horst Vogt, Glenn Wilson, Frits Bernard, Richard Yuill, Theo Sandfort and many others. In this delightfully liberated epoch, even some Christian organisations openly endorsed intergenerational sex (and not, not only Catholic ones, as you might think because of the recent infamous scandals; protestant ones, too).
Well, this blissful freedom did not last for long. After a few years of public advocacy of child and intergenerational sexuality, general public was horrified enough by prospects of liberated childhood to experience a total meltdown – which, in turn, ignited a punitive fury. In 1977, a “kiddie porn” hysteria started in the USA, which lead to the first laws specifically targeting and forbidding “child pornography”. In 1978, this wave of fervour and persecution hit British shores; around 1984, it reached Continental Europe, even the highly liberated Netherlands, accompanied by Anglophones’ accusations of producing “child porn”; by the early 1990s, even Japan was affected, and erotic anime cartoons featuring “underage” characters turned into target of repression.
But the center of this reborn anti-sexual witch-hunt was not on “pornography”, but on children themselves. The old moralistic clichés were mixed with the new ideological invention, which were produced by the counter-culture period and now became its undoing: victimology. The new, victimological edition of the old moral hunt was even more blind and unthinking than the old ones, since, according to the new dogma, children were absolute victims, completely passive and unresponsive, who never consented to the adults’ sexual acts, let alone initiated them. And if children themselves actively disagreed with their victim-status, and insisted that the sexual relations were voluntary (that, in fact, happened quite often), they were at best simply dismissed, or, at worst, assumed to be “brainwashed” by paedophile’s “grooming”. The cruel humour of situation was this: while victimologists were crying about “sexual objectification” of children, they actually “objectified” kids themselves, and in the most extreme form possible: in their models, a child was completely deprived of any agency – sexual, social or even intellectual; he or she had no desires, thoughts or acts of his or her own, but just a passive object of evil adult schemes, totally devoid of any initiative or responsibility… as long as some “paedophile” adult was nearby to put a blame on.
Yet, the problem arose: what should one do when no adult “sex offender” is present around, and children are just having sex between themselves? The answer: invent “juvenile sex offenders” – children, who, like in the “masturbating insanity” and “participatory victim” epochs, were victims and criminals in the same time. And, as well as in these older times, their criminality evidently outweighed their victimhood, since they are subjected to treatment as atrocious as adult “sex offenders” are: draconian punishments which make no difference whether participants consented or not (since, according to dogma, children are unable to consent even then children themselves think they do!), sadistic, inhuman “treatments” and “therapies” which mentally devastate “patients” in order to eradicate their “deviant” desires and thoughts; and, most cruelly, an indelible stigmatisation of being put on “sex offender registry”, which leads to a life-long ostracism in all social areas. So, child sexual games nowadays are lethally dangerous to their participants: they may lead kids to death – not a physical one, but a social one, a modern version of medieval anathema, a virtual banishment from community: a “sex offender” status.
So, this the situation which we are facing here and now – a barrage of baseless repressions of children and children-loving adults based on hidden fears and anxieties of majority of modern Western (and westernised) adult population. Since this is what “child sexual abuse”, “child porn” etc. panics are: manifestations of irrational rejection of child sexuality – and child agency. While, in fact, a lot of high-quality research: look again at the works authors I mentioned, and search for other authors – Google Scholar options which allow to find another papers quoting the original one and papers similar by their content are especially useful. These works demonstrate quite equivocally that most children are not harmed by sexual experiences that were perceived by them as consensual.
Now you will probably ask: “But what about all other works that claim that children are harmed?”. Well, like the most pre-gay liberation works that evaluated homosexuality as pathology and mental disorder, they suffer from persistent, recurrent and debilitating flaws.
The first flaw is automatic rejection of any dissimilarities between consensual and non-consensual relationships. All child-adult sexual contacts are assumed to be “sexual abuse” by definition, and analysed as a single pool of data. And, since non-consensual sex is indeed hurtful and usually traumatic, for kids as well as for adults, it is no surprise that children who had sex with adults would be, in general, more mentally disturbed than the ones who had not. Yet, if we do separate consensual encounters from non-consensual ones, we will see an entirely different picture: most kids who participated in sexual acts voluntarily are not more disturbed than children in general. Yet, the very idea that child-adult sex might be consensual is the ultimate thought-crime nowadays; so, only a few researchers dared to conduct studies which accept and analyse such differentiations.
The second flaw is overreliance on clinical and forensic samples. Most inquiries into child-adult sex are based on psychiatric and legal cases; and people who found themselves in mental asylums and criminal courts tend to have more problems than general population. But working with people engaged in child-adult sexual contacts who are not under trial or therapy (or both) has produced much more positive results – and there are a lot such people around.
The third flaw is underestimation of iatrogenic effects of “child abuse” therapies and prosecutions. There are a lot of cases when children felt themselves free and happy in their sexual relationships with adults (and other children) – until these relationships were discovered by society. Then, all hell broke loose: kids were forcefully separated from their adult lovers and put under constant severe pressure by family, therapists, prosecutors, social workers etc., all of whom treated them as “abused” and “damaged” and insist that their disagreement is a sign of “brainwashing”. Under such constant mental assault, many kids broke emotionally and experienced trauma – not by initial relationships, but by furious condemnation and enforced victimisation by “child-helping” adults. After a long period of such intense pressure, some children even start believing that they were “abused” and “brainwashed” – such as many kids forcefully interrogated by overzealous therapists during “Satanic panic” started believing that they were kidnapped, raped and tortured by Satanic cabals (while initially they had never complained about it, and had denied therapists’ suggestions – and were right, since “Satanic ritual abuse” accusations were later refuted).
And the fourth flaw is exceptionally widespread and powerful prejudice itself, which may easily distort perception of people supporting it: if something is utterly unthinkable to someone, it may become entirely unperceivable as well. We here, with parapsychology and psychic research as major forum topic, know it, don’t we? Just recall attempts to reproduce parapsychological experiments by extreme skeptics – they tend to get much more negative results than proponents and neutral researchers, and if they got positive ones (which did happen for numerous times), they used all their rhetorical skills to “explain them away”; while neutral researchers usually got as positive results as proponents do. And, in case of child-adult sex, even calm neutrality is a rarity; most people who study such sex are completely and unshakably certain that it is always harmful and never consensual, which put them at risk of severely biased assessment.
As for consent go, the insistence that children cannot consent is actually based on confusions and inconsistencies. First and foremost, all neutral-to-positive researchers agreed that child’s consent is usually a
SIMPLE one, not an informed one; that is, children may have no previous detailed knowledge of sexual acts, but they were eager and willing to learn; they liked what was done with them, and wanted to proceed further. And simple consent to sex – child’s desire and willingness to participate in it – is, I think, enough to allow them to happen; if we insist on demanding an informed consent, we must ask ourselves why we’re doing so. After all, children, especially young ones, cannot give an informed consent virtually to anything – say, to swimming in a lake. But does it mean that they should not be allowed to swim in it, with an able adult being nearby to prevent emergency? Or will we demand that children should be allowed near water only after they have undertaken an extensive theoretical “Lake Swimming: Dangers and Possibilities” course, and passed an exam? No, we won’t; children would simply learn swimming themselves, in the process of actual experience, with help of adults (and other children). What is important for the adults accompanying children during lake swimming is not to push kids forcefully into water; such coercion may frighten and emotionally hurt kids, so they should learn to swim by themselves, with adults and other kids being their supporters and companions in this process, not their commanders. The same works in the case of sex: children can and should learn sexual side of life by direct experience of sexual plays and acts with adults and with other children; and adults who participate in intergenerational sex should understand and accept their ethical responsibility for the mental and physical well-being of their younger lovers; they should not do anything to them that is against their will, and do not try anything that is harmful and dangerous. As long as these principles are followed, I can’t see anything unethical in a sexual relationship between a child and an adult.
What is most important here is to understand that sex as such does not harm kids, since they are fully sexual beings from birth. The presumption of child’s asexuality is nothing but a persistent myth, a hangover of Salvationist theological theories of decisive separation between flesh and spirit, which, in turn, gave birth of the notions of children as innocent, nearly celestial beings not yet tainted by earthly sins; a beings that have to be constantly shielded from adult dirtiness, especially a sexual one.
When we will, at last, accept both sexuality and agency in children, we will, at least, see through the veil of the centuries-old recurrent moral panic. And I sincerely hope that the day of such acceptance will come.
P.S. And, meanwhile, if you want to learn kids’ own original opinions about sex with adults, read
Theo Sandfort’s famous research “Boys on their Contacts with Men”. It contains a lot of actual interviews with boys who did had sex with adult men, but are not upset about it at all (there are similar studies concerning girls, BTW).