Butterfly Kisses: Researching Female Pedophilia

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Interview: Martha Vicinus
Martha Vicinus is Professor of Enghsh Literature and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and is an editor of Feminist Studies.
She has edited and introduced several collections of writings, notably Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age (1972) and A Widening Sphere: Charging Roles of Victorian Women (1977). Her latest work is a collection of articles, edited with Martin Duberman and George Chauncey Jr., Hiddenfrom History, Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (1989).
Knowing her work on girls in boarding schools and her radical ideas on this topic, we traveled to Denmark, where she was on tour, to interview her.
The interview is enriched with quotes from her chapter "Women's Colleges, an Independent Intellectual Life," in Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women 1850-1920 (1985).

It can hardly be called a disease unless it reaches a feverish and inflamed condition. Unfortunately this is nearly always brought about by the clumsy fingers of the unloving, which, in school, as well as outside, must always interfere with what they do not understand. In truth the world has always been afraid of love, and until it can be made to realize that here is the one thing that is right and beautiful in all its shapes, persecution followed by distortion is bound to carry on its work.1

Martha Vicinus: The English upper-classes have always sent their children away to school for varying lengths of time. Historians have long noted the strong homosocial bonds created among "Old Boys" from such famous public schools as Eton, Harrow and Rugby; as adults they have loyally supported each other, whether in the military, foreign service, politics, or the professions. For many Englishmen, the emotional bonds formed as children in school have remained their strongest and happiest relationships; marriage has paled in comparison with these friendships.

Traditionally, girls were sent away later and for a shorter period of time. Nevertheless it is well worth looking at boarding-school experiences as a source of information about crossgenerational love between women and girls. During the second half of the nineteenth century, reformers founded new schools which rejected the family model of an earlier age, when a small number of girls of all ages lived and studied together under the close supervision of one or two women. These new institutions were larger, divided pupils by age-specific grades, and taught an academically demanding curriculum. Older, domestic ideals continued, but the new woman teacher and the girl student were both expected to take a broader view of their responsibilities, and to combine school loyalty, public service, and study.

Within these schools we find a new kind of passionate homosocial relationship between teachers and students. A study of the elite boarding schools—those most influential in defining girls' education for late Victorian England—reveals a closed world that encompassed a heady mixture of intellectual opportunities, emotional growth, and personal development. Like the better-known boys' schools, intense homosocial bonds were the backbone of corporate life. Young adolescent girls, freed for the first time from immediate family constraints, were encouraged—within limits—to lavish their affections on an older student or teacher. The admired, unmarried teacher, sometimes herself involved in a long term relationship with another teacher, was expected to nurture the moral and emotional life of the young girl.

Often, intense friendships developed between teacher and student. Inevitable tensions also arose: the girl's mother might be jealous of the teacher, the teacher hurt by the capriciousness of the girl, and the girl herself baffled and disoriented by the conflicting emotions she had aroused both within herself and those she loved. Late Victorians viewed these friendships, whether between two students or a student and a teacher, as a natural prelude to marriage. They were a kind of education of the senses which prepared a girl for entry into heterosexual love. As one etiquette writer explained, "...perhaps not even her acceptance of a first lover is a more important era in the life of a young girl than her first serious choice of a friend."2

Marjan Sax and Sjuul Deckwitz: Your book deals with the Victorian and late Victorian era. How would you describe the attitudes towards love between women and girls during this period?

Ideas about "love" between women were certainly different from what they are nowadays. Not only were "Boston marriages" between mature unmarried adult women tolerated, but cross-age relations were an accepted part of growing up. Their danger came only from excess. Aside from the pioneering sexologists, such as Havelock Ellis, lesbianism was classified with prostitution, as a sexual deviancy that befell the lower classes. Nevertheless, if you define an emotion as valuable only as long as you don't go too far, you face the difficulty of defining what is "too far." The Victorians were often uneasy about excessively intimate relationships between middle-class women.

In my book, Independent Women, I suggested that both the girl and the teacher admired selfcontrol as a means of intensifying their love for each other. In effect, self-control became the ideal solution to the much-debated problem of emotional excess.

At the end of the nineteenth century, educated women were especially eager to prove that they were able to control their feelings, that they were not irrational. This generation of teachers, who were more educated and had chosen a career in education, wanted to prove that women were capable of using their minds and of being selfcontrolled. They were reacting against the emotionalism, the excessive maternalism, of the old style family-based schools and also against the popular notion that a woman could only think with her feelings. The girls were repeatedly encouraged to subsume their personal desires to the greater good of the school, for the cause of women's education, or for England's role as a world leader.

Emotional self-control taught you how to be a better woman. The reward was an intensification of your own feelings and a sense of becoming a better, more effective woman in the world. It was almost as if love were defined as a special treat that could not be consumed lest it be lost. Yet, by savoring one's feelings, indeed, exploring them verbally—through the exchange of letters and private conversations, that love would become even more intense, more pleasurable. There's a passage in a letter I found by the devout Evangelical, Constance Maynard, that really captures this combination of love and self-discipline, of satisfaction through the suppression of desire, that characterized the period. The "her" she is referring to is one of her students:

I told her how the capacity for loving always meant the capacity for suffering, & how I should expect the utmost self-control from her; I should expect it continuously, I said, & never say "Thank you," for I belonged to the cause, the object, not the individual, & all students must be alike to me.
And then, coming closer yet, I told her that self-control was not needed for the sake of appearances only, but for our own two selves, for real love, "the best thing in the world," could be a terribly weakening power... We both agreed that a denial such as this, enforced upon a part of our nature, was a sort of genuine satisfaction to another part, to the love of order, of justice, of doing something great & public.'

What was the reaction of the young girls to this kind of advice?

The students would sometimes take the initiative. The interesting thing is that what the Victorians called a "rave" or a "pash"—for passion—began with a series of services, often secret, on the part of a student who hoped the beloved teacher would eventually reciprocate. The girl would bring her beloved flowers, clean the blackboard for her, remember her favorite books. Now, obviously, such small acts of homage were rarely sufficient to satisfy a young girl who was, in the slang of the day, "gone on" a teacher. When her feelings became more than just admiration, what would happen next?

I think we can assume that the admiration sometimes translated into something more, into sexual gestures, but we don't really know. There were relatively few opportunities for a sexual relationship. The girls were always in large dormitories, though of course that doesn't mean that a girl couldn't steal into a teacher's room. I think some of them did.

There was also a good deal of mutual surveillance among the pupils. Quite frequently, particular teachers were singled out for admiration by several girls; they would spend delicious hours discussing their favorite's clothes, mannerisms and habits: a kind of sharing of one's rave, saying "isn't she wonderful," and then they would all talk about what she wore and what she did, did she look at me, that sort of thing.

The girls openly discussed their feelings, as, I think, a way of gaining attention. By bragging about how much they were in love, they gained status among their peers, who were also in the process of discovering their erotic desires. But something was also held back, perhaps as a form of self control: the secret kiss or the special look when you gave her flowers. Falling in love, you want to tell the whole world, but you also want to keep some things to yourself.

There were also holidays, which were a setting away from school where teachers and pupils could nonetheless be together. I know of an occasional case of a girl going on vacation alone with a teacher, but she was usually part of a small group—a tour of France to improve your French or to see the cathedrals. Here too there would be group control, but common sense tells you that where there is a will, there's a way—provided both sides are willing. A lot of girls also begged their raves to write to them during the holidays, to give them advice while they were away from school and in the midst of numerous worldly temptations.

This balance between closeness and distance took other forms. Private talks between the teacher and student could offer intimacy without loss of distance. The teacher, or an older student who sometimes taught a younger girl, retained her privileged position of moral instructor. Minor sins, school infractions, and spiritual struggles could be discussed at great length, encouraging a self-examination that became fertile ground for further intimacies, confessions, and avowals to do better. Passion was transferred to a spiritual realm, which made it more accessible, more manageable, and somehow more satisfying.

In these women-girl relationships, was the distance that you are describing always maintained?

It's an interesting question, but there isn't much evidence about what would happen if the love of the younger girl was reciprocated by the older woman. Everyone then, as now, assumed that a crush was a temporary stage for the girl. She was an object of concern: not that she would become fixated on a particular teacher, but rather that she would start on the downward path to lesbianism. You know, what if they continued in that relationship into adulthood?

The teacher was always regarded as the powerful figure in the setting. But my theory is that as soon as the woman in any way capitulates, the power then moves to the younger partner. This comes about I think because the younger partner is the explorer. She is changing, moving between different worlds; she is about to enter society, and leave school behind. And, of course, any sign from the beloved teacher is a victory for the young girl; she has won because her admiration has been rewarded.

The consequences for the teacher seem more obvious. As the experienced adult, she was expected to understand the waywardness of the young, and to use her love to guide the girl during her brief infatuation. But she was clearly taking risks in opening herself to the young girl. Probably most teachers did so very rarely. A woman might already be involved with a fellow teacher, or be engaged to a man. Perhaps she enjoyed the admiration, but avoided any sexual contact. I haven't met a teacher yet who doesn't want to be admired! Whatever the case, the teacher had to be prepared for rejection, for the brutal callousness of the young.

How did the woman deal then with the attentions of the young girl?

They very often spiritualized it. Constance Maynard, whom I used as an example before, became deeply involved in the spiritual life of her favorite student, Mary Tait. Mary was an adolescent who found her life at home distasteful and boring. She hated her family obligations. Maynard wrote to her encouraging her to develop greater self-discipline, to be more self-sacrificing. Their correspondence gives a sense of moving out of the mundane into the rarefied atmosphere of spiritual strivings. just before the end of the Christmas holidays, Mary wrote back to her teacher to tell her how thrilled she was with her teacher's approval:

You can't think how delicious it is to know you are pleased. It is awfully severe sometimes to do what is right, but I always think of you & it becomes quite easy to do it.4

Maynard, the Evangelical, prayed for Mary. She carried Mary's letters with her and felt, as she described it, "a secret unaccountable gladness of heart." Mary however, began to wilt under the pressures exerted by her teacher. After Constance reprimanded her for a poor effort on her drawing class exam, Mary wrote back:

I was not aware that drawing was a subject of such extreme importance... I AM indifferent to everything except that you should not take everything I do so much to heart.5

Constance was heartbroken, interpreting her rejection not as stemming from the fickleness of an admittedly spoiled girl, but instead as involving the loss of a soul. Maynard then wrote in her diary:

Oh Mary, Mary, I loved you, love—do you know what that means?... Oh my child my child, are you lost to me indeed? and I was the link through which you were dimly feeling after a higher life—are you lost to that too?6

I think this is an important example of what went on in woman-girl relationships. Mary wanted to overturn the discipline of her family life. Of course, she was naturally reluctant to embrace the discipline Constance's love offered her. She escaped into her circle of adolescent friends, leaving Constance as forlorn as any rejected mother or lover. Idealized self-control and spiritual seeking could not be very satisfying to Mary, but that's precisely what Maynard was basing her emotional life on.

Now, what would happen if the girl were a disturbing force who interrupted a happy relationship?

The teachers may have encouraged self-control, but their pupils may not have obeyed! The accounts I know of that describe such a situation—a kind of classic love triangle—are all from the perspective of the young, naive girl. Then too, they date from the twentieth century, and present the situation negatively. For example, Dorothy Strachey Bussy's famous tale of a tragic adolescent crush, Olivia, written in 1933, ends in the suicide of one of the teachers and the breakup of the school. It is not clear from the text whether Olivia is the cause of the breakup between the adored headmistress and the unstable MIle. Cara, or whether she is the precipitating factor in the breakup of an already precarious relationship. The intriguing question is why Bussy distorted her actual experience at a French boarding school around the turn of the century, so as to create a tragic conclusion that did not actually occur. In the following quote, the head mistress equates victory with self-control, and defeat with starting a "forbidden" relationship.

It has been a struggle all my life—but I have always been victorious—I was proud of my victory." And then her voice changed, broke, deepened, softened, became a murmur: I wonder now whether defeat wouldn't have been better for us all—as well as sweeter." Another long pause. She turned now and looked at me and smiled. "You, Olivia, will never be victorious, but if you are defeated"—how she looked at me! "When you are defeated"—she looked at me in a way that made my heart stand still and the blood rush to my face, to my forehead, till I seemed wrapped in flame.7

You describe the boarding schools as a threat to the nuclear family around the turn of the century. As you wrote in your book:

The schoolgirl-teacher friendship fell under attack for numerous reasons. It was . . . deeply threatening to the nuclear family, for it fostered a very different kind of relationship from the traditional one a girl had with her mother or a wife with her husband.

The schools failed to replicate the family atmosphere they praised because the self-control they advocated was not equivalent to the suppression of self recommended by mothers. The latter was an unconscious sacrificing of personal wishes and desires to the ambitions and goals of husbands and families. But self-control implies a conscious control of impulses that have reached awareness through an atmosphere conducive to self-examination. The result of this process was self-knowledge and self-development.

As you yourself summarize this process:

Put simply, these single-sex homoerotic friendships undercut the family. The heightened self-knowledge implied by such a relationship pointed in the direction of personal autonomy and independence, an independence that few heterosexual relationships ... could sustain.8

Were the homosocial relationships between teachers and pupils the only threatening force to the nuclear family?

We know so much about life within the walls of girls' boarding schools because they were very visible, upper-class institutions at the end of the nineteenth century. There were very few other places where women could have so much power, as rulers of an all-female world. They were a training ground for women. Of course the etiquette books that warned girls about "pashes", mentioned Sunday School teachers, aunts, cousins or friends, and later, Girl Guides. But the elite schools were supposed to be training girls to become wives of England's elite—and civic or philanthropic leaders. Thus, their potential danger as an attractive alternative to heterosexuality was taken quite seriously.

There is another aspect I want to ask about, and that is the adult woman's perspective. You wrote:

On the surface it might have seemed to the Victorians that adult women's homoerotic friendships were, as they have been labelled by psychoanalysts, immature. Rather, they should be seen as an effort to balance three problematic areas: sexuality, spirituality, and power. All three existed in highly disguised forms for a Victorian single woman.9

Could you also describe for us how the same attitudes might have changed, or not have changed, in the twentieth century?

Homosocial relationships between women probably increased in the twentieth century, at least through World War II, because the number of opportunities grew dramatically. Adolescent girls were channelled into high schools, the Girl Guides, sports teams, etc. More girls and young women were spending time away from their families, in women's organizations, where they might meet an admirable older woman. Cross generational bonds were becoming more visible at the same time that women were demanding a larger public role and the new theories of Kraffit Ebing, Havelock Ellis, and Siginund Freud were being popularized.

The so-called advanced novelists of the twentieth century, like D.H. Lawrence, were subjecting the cross-age pash to a Freudian interpretation. In Lawrence's novel, The Rainbow, published in 1915, he describes the heroine's "sick" relationship with a school teacher, and her feeling of freedom when she casts the woman off, and finds a man. He even gives her a number of false heterosexual starts, as if he were trying to document the variety of sexual experience a modem woman could have before finding her real self. That is a self, however, whose deepest identity is dependent upon sexuality.

You might also say that Lawrence's negative view of the teacher-pupil relationship was a kind of discrediting of the admiration/love complex. But Lawrence wasn't alone in trying to discredit it, there was a lot of outside pressure about this, not only by novelists and psychologists, but also at a more popular level, through the press. This occurred, we must remember, during the years of the militant suffrage movement. No wonder commentators were frightened! I think that the spinster school teacher was especially powerful, but also especially vulnerable at this time—she was economically independent, and her private life did not depend upon heterosexuality. Thus, anyone trying to shore up the family and fight the demands of the suffragettes would see her as dangerous. One journalist decried the fact that the influence of mothers has been largely superseded by what he called "female celibate pedagogues."10

We have to be careful, though, not to put the whole blame on so-called "outside forces," on politics, psychoanalysis, the media, for distorting and redefining teacher-student relations. The evidence is much more conflicting than that kind of simple interpretation. Leila Rupp and Verta Taylor, for example, have done some very interesting work on the American Women's Party, a very small group that carried the feminist torch in the forties and fifties. They found in the Party's archives letters from women to the leaders of the Party using practically the same language as the nineteenth century girls in my study."

And the present?

Things are surely different now, though I assume teenagers still have crushes. But both England and the United States encourage co-educational activities from a very early age. The danger now, as these societies see it, is not premature heterosexual activity, but homosexuality. The way to insure against it is to have boys and girls together all the time. Although England was much slower than other countries to become coeducational, recreational activities became much more coeducational following World War II. And there has been the heterosexualizing of girls through advertisements, the media and a variety of popular images throughout European and American cultures. Girls don't have a period any more in which they are not relating to boys, so the homosocial surroundings are disappearing. Homosocial networks are relatively few—indeed, even the Girl Guides organization is more frightened by homosexuality than by heterosexuality. In the US, all the scouts' organizations have become coeducational. To me this is a very conscious effort to stop these relations.

I don't want to sound nostalgic, but schooling in the late nineteenth century can be seen as a historical period in which homosocial bonds could flourish in a very simplified world—and we will never return to that anymore!


Notes:
1. Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Cornmunity for Single Women 1850-1920 (London: Virago Press, 1985), p. 194.
2. Matilda Pullen, in: ibid, p. 188.
3. Ibid. p. 197.
4. Constance Maynard, unpublished diary, 1879, in ibid, p. 196.
5. Ibid. p. 196.
6. Ibid. p. 196.
7. Dorothy Strachey Bussy, Olivia (London: Hogarth Press, 1949).
8. Vicinus, op cit., p.208.
9. Ibid. p. 200.
10. Ethel Colquhoun, quoted in Vicinus, 1985, p. 206.
11. Leilaj. Rupp and Verta Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women's Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987)

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Mindless Sexual Taboos
by Joel Featherstone
Posted in Anarchy: a journal of desire armed. #38, Fall 1993


Writing in the Winter 1993 issue, W.B. from Edgewood, IA. states, "Radicals need to take social construction seriously. Where there is social power, there are distortions that can hardly be undone by the individual, alone, no matter how strong and competent. And all of the above has bearing on child-adult sex. The selfish individual of individualist anarchy apparently can legitimize adult-child sex as a mutual (domination free) relationship irrespective of existing social consciousness: the way current mores contribute to guilt, lost esteem, etc....We all are continuously being socially distorted by the dominant consciousness. It prompts us to seek individual gain over others and nature. How can a child, suddenly cast into this adult arena of competitive self-seeking individuals and narrow moralism, still be expected to avoid serious injury?"

W.B. raises a valid point in his letter. (I assume W.B. is a "he" due to his dogmatic, abstract style of argument.) All relationships do take place in a social context and this does have bearing on adult-child sex. A child may find a sexual relationship with an adult both pleasant and delightful, yet may be "consenting" to a risk s/he does not understand. She risks emotional trauma should she later encounter society's horrific view of the relationship. It is not obvious to young children that their loving relationship with an adult will suddenly become problematic for others when it begins to involve sexual pleasure. The hysterical response when such a relationship is discovered definitely causes harm to at least some children. Examples abound, including a couple of case histories cited in my article ("Positive Child-Adult Sex: The Evidence," Anarchy Summer, 1992). As W.B. wisely points out, these mindless sexual taboos hurt children. It would follow then, that such hurtful influences which threaten children engaged in otherwise harmless, pleasurable behaviors should be scrutinized, challenged, questioned. But apparently, this is where W.B. draws the line. He gives no indication that the "existing social consciousness" and "current mores" invoked in his argument can be changed, or indeed that they should be. By this omission, W.B.'s position accepts the moralism of the prevailing culture as a "given," a fixed, unchangeable constant to which everyone's desires and mutual behaviors must conform. Ultimately, this type of reasoning reduces to a circular argument. "Consensual child-adult sex should be taboo because it is harmful. Why is it harmful? Because it is taboo!" W.B.'s argument is a tautology.

Where in W.B.'s view is there room for rebellion, for experimentation, for subjectivity? Where is there room for liberation of desire in general? I agree with W.B. that radicals need to take social construction seriously, but would add that radicals also need to take radicalism seriously. Otherwise, all of the subversive potential of relationships which cross sociological demarcations of power is lost. Writing in Daniel Tsang's anthology, The Age Taboo, lesbian feminist sex radical Pat Califia observes, "Our society is made up of class systems and runs on arbitrarily assigned privilege. Loving relationships are one way to cross barriers, forge alliances and redistribute power. Granted, they are no substitute for full-scale social change. But we cannot forego all intimacy until these iniquities are abolished. There is nothing wrong with a more privileged adult offering a young person money, privacy, freedom of movement, new ideas and sexual pleasure."

Since whites hold most of the power in this society, W.B.'s analysis forbids all sex between blacks and whites due to inevitable "distortions that can hardly be undone by the individual alone." Since people with money have more power than people without it, equalitarian sexual relationships which cross class lines are also forbidden because "we all are continuously being socially distorted by the dominant consciousness." Since men have more political and economic power than women, every woman/man relationship is oppressive, according to W.B.'s theory, because of the societal construction of gender roles, and should be stamped out by "radicals" who "take social construction seriously." By the way, sexual activity between children of the same age also involves risk of "guilt, lost esteem, etc." if discovered. Thus, we can assume that W.B. works hard to prevent this kind of behavior as well.

When not applied in an atmosphere of respect for individual freedom and subjectivity, social constructionist theories such as W.B.'s quickly collapse into defenses of the status quo. W.B. reduces living, breathing human beings to abstract social categories ("adult," "child") and passes judgment on the validity of specific people's specific relationships solely by examining the interplay of his abstractions. He writes as if no tender, equalitarian relationship could ever exist between living, breathing, desiring, individuals who have the misfortune of being members of societal groups which, as groups, relate in hierarchical terms. A multitude of personal and social factors converge upon any relationship. How all of these factors interact is unique to each relationship. Hence, each relationship must be evaluated on its own merits or lack thereof. To treat relationships existing in unique circumstances between unique individuals as unique is not "selfish individualist anarchy." It is just pragmatic realism, that's all. There simply isn't any other way to find out what is really going on between two people except to find out. We need to listen to them, not lecture them from the outset about how their relationship must be oppressive because of the disparate sociological categories to which each of them belongs.

W.B. asks rhetorically how a child engaged in a sexual relationship with an adult can "be expected to avoid serious injury?" If W.B. believes he can prove all sexual contacts between adults and children injurious, then he is more than welcome to try where all others have failed. W.B. can begin by explaining away each and every one of the case histories cited in my article., as well as the many others where these came from. The research literature is so full of this type of evidence that mainstream child abuse professionals long ago gave up trying to prove all child adult sex harmful or negatively experienced by the child. Since the late '70s the prevailing doctrine is that such relationships should be viewed in moral rather than empirical terms. In other words, even when a relationship is admittedly harmless and mutually desired by both child and adult, they say it should be destroyed because it is "immoral." It is here, among the elite academics of the child abuse industry, that W.B. will find the "adult arena of competitive self-seeking individualism and narrow moralism" which he projects onto all child /adult erotic relationships. These mandarins of the psychiatry/social worker/police axis intervene to destroy relationships which they tacitly admit are harmless and consensual, and justify this by invoking a higher morality to excuse any subsequent emotional damage sustained by the child as a result of such intervention. Breaking up harmless, consensual relationships between adults and children is a form of child abuse, whether the ideological rationale stems from "morality" or from "social construction."

X.M. from San Diego notes that male adults outnumber female adults in the case histories cited in the articles. She then concludes, without further evidence, that "male dominance/patriarchy" lies at the root of adult/child relationships. However, there is nothing intrinsically "male" about sexual response to children. As Pat Califia noted in her previously cited essay, "it is possible that more sex occurs between mothers and other women and children than between men and children. Women have more access to kids, and there are fewer taboos on women handling young people's bodies. Granted, given feminine conditioning, the women who have erotic contact with young people probably don't think of it as sex, but this is hypocrisy, not liberation." She adds, "Why is there no discussion of the frustrating and tragic situation of young girls who know they are lesbians in grade school, junior high school or high school?... Why are lesbians willing to cooperate with the patriarchal conspiracy to silence the truth about the intensity and diversity of female sexuality? This attempt to define pedophilia as a male issue simply alienates and estranges women whose lesbian experiences include cross-generational contact."

Women in feminist CR groups who attempt to share childhood memories of positive sexual experiences with women typically find themselves shouted down. Lesbian girl-lovers are deeply closeted due to the intolerant PC ideology of so many of their sisters. A recent setback to this ongoing battle to suppress all evidence of woman/child sexual desire has come in the form of the Special Women's Issue (#8) of Paidika: The Journal of Pedophilia (Postbus 15463, 1001 ML Amsterdam, The Netherlands). The editorial board of this journal includes such notorious patriarchs as Dutch feminist writer and poet, Sjuul Deckwitz; University of Amsterdam Gay Studies Lecturer, Gert Hekma; feminist political scientist and sex activist, Marjan Sax; and economist Jan Schuijer. The women's issue includes articles by Nora de Ronde, Gloria Wekker, Pat Califia, Marion De Ras, and Beth Kelly, and interviews with Gisela Bleitreu-Ehrenberg, Martha Vicinus, Kate Millet, and four other women who preferred to remain anonymous. This issue also includes "There Can Be No Emancipation of Women Without the Emancipation of Children: The Kanalratten Manifesto," written in 1989 by "The Canal Rats," an anarchist women's and children's commune in W. Germany. The opening words of their manifesto read, "We define female pedophilia as love between girls and adult women which is voluntary and includes sexual satisfaction; it is not a form of domination over other people since it is a form of life in which we have no need to dominate or possess children." Further on in this document, they state, "Almost all women who have tender and sexual feelings for children are afraid to pursue their wishes and needs and to respond to those of children, because these relationships are legally prosecuted and their social therapeutic nature is destroyed. The current campaigns which are supposedly directed against "sexual abuse" underscore the tightening of conventional morality, the suppression of our sexuality and the control of children."

A couple of readers have speculated, without evidence, that the North American Man Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) might be a kiddie pimping operation, a child kidnapping ring, and so forth. There is no excuse for writing such scurrilous letters without taking the time to find out what kind of organization NAMBLA really is.

NAMBLA can be reached at POB 174, Midtown Station, N.Y., NY. 10018. Or if you prefer, give them a call at (212) 807-8578. If you forget this number, just look it up in the NYC phone book under "NAMBLA." Infiltrating NAMBLA is as easy as writing out a check for $25 and sending it to the above address. As one of NAMBLA's 1200+ members, you will receive their monthly 32 page Bulletin, and will be entitled to attend local and annual meetings to see with your own eyes how much pornography, pimping, kidnapping, sexual slavery and rape NAMBLA coordinates: NONE! If you want to hobnob with the "inner circle" of NAMBLA, simply volunteer to do some work for the national office. The hard-core of activist burnouts who put out the Bulletin each month will be delighted to welcome a volunteer keen on sharing their workload. The FBI, Postal Inspection Service, NYC police, and other law enforcement agencies have been "investigating" NAMBLA since its inception in the 1970s, hoping to link it with something, anything, of an illegal nature. After all these years the cops have had no luck. NAMBLA is an above-ground, scrupulously legal, educational organization which, while not "anarchist," does take quite a few very libertarian positions on children's issues, most of them unrelated to sex. It does not deserve to be hounded in print by irresponsible so-called "radicals" who won't bother to learn before launching diatribes revealing only their own ignorance.

[RoosterDance]

Teaching Sexualities
by Debbie Epstein and Richard Johnson

Chapter extracted from Debbie Epstein and Richard Johnson (in press) Schooling Sexualities. Buckingham: Open University Press and given by Debbie Epstein as a paper at the Australian Association for Research in Education Conference, Brisbane 30 November 4 December 1997


I drew my teacher very traditionally with glasses, conservative clothing, in front of a chalkboard, a woman. I don't think I was thinking about myself as a teacher but more what many of my elementary school teachers looked like. What a stereotype! ... t's funny how many of the pictures drawn by my classmates resembled mine. _(Renee, student teacher, quoted in Weber & Mitchell, 1995. Emphasis added by Weber and Mitchell)_ Surveillance, survival and teaching.

In chapter five, we drew together public discourses around schooling and sexuality with a discussion of the school as an institution in which sexualities are shaped and actively produced by participants in schooling. This chapter will focus more narrowly on teachers both in relation to their own sexualities in the school context and with regard to their interactions with students and (potential) impacts on student sexualities. In Part One of the book, we traced the ways the sexualities are shaped through discourses of, for example family, (male) desire, marriage, love and romance, deployed in the 'public' spheres of the popular media, politics and the state. We pointed out the ways that sexualities are policed, often through the deployment of 'scandal', with normative forms of heterosexuality rewarded and other forms of sexuality, from single parenthood to same sex desire and identity, punished more or less severely. We have also shown how discourses of 'childhood innocence' come into play, particularly in relation to schooling, to produce moral panics around sexuality and schooling.

The surveillance of teachers (and schools) with regard to the 'academic achievement' of their pupils has reached unprecedented heights in the UK during the late 1980s and the 1990s and teachers in the Anglophone world generally have been at the sharp end of what Jane Kenway _(1987)_ has called 'discourses of derision' _(see also, Ball, 1990)_. These discourses, combined with those around sexuality and schooling, means that the surveillance of teachers in relation to sexuality is particularly strong. This is a process which disciplines all teachers (or teaches them to discipline themselves by punishing some), but is gendered and racialized and bears particularly heavily on teachers identifying as lesbian and gay.

This was graphically illustrated in the case of Jane Brown, the head teacher of Kingsmead School in Hackney, whose refusal of subsidised tickets to take her pupils to see the ballet of Romeo and Juliet reached the headlines in the across the Anglophone world. We have discussed this case in somewhat more detail in chapter four. Here we wish only to point out that the fact that she was 'outed' by the press in this way led to her experiencing what amounted to a siege: she had to go into hiding with her partner and her partner's children for a while; she has been beaten up by young men as she left the school after a parents' evening; her every move has been under intense scrutiny. Of course, like other stories, Jane Brown's is not only about persecution, but also about support and doing significantly better than just 'surviving'. The massive attacks on her led to the mobilising of support, from other lesbians and gay men, from Hackney National Union of Teachers (NUT) and, most significantly, from the parents of children at her school. In March 1995 the report by the OFSTED (Office for Standards in Education) inspection team on her school was exceptionally positive. The relief felt at this is not so much a vindication of inspection of this kind per se, but illustrative of the fact that, as a lesbian, she needed to be exceptional to be seen as being 'acceptable'. A year later, she underwent the training to become an OFSTED inspector herself, passed the course and was offered a post, only to have the offer withdrawn as a result of further media 'outrage'.


Teaching as seduction

Jane Miller _(1996)_ shows that the feminization of teaching since the mid-nineteenth century has involved, among other things, significant efforts to control the sexuality of women teachers. There was a long period, for example, when women teachers were not allowed to be married, but rather had to occupy the positions of desexualizied spinsters. So there is a long history of wariness about teachers' sexualities, which works together with the historical specificities of the present moment to produce the kind of punitive surveillance which we have described in earlier chapters.

It is, no doubt, partly because of the level of surveillance of and moral panic around schooling and sexuality that, as we have already pointed out in chapter five, teachers are generally de-sexualized, in very gendered ways, through their clothing and other aspects of their self-presentations as well as through the institutions of schooling themselves. As Renee notes in the quote heading this chapter, the stereotypical teacher of the Anglophone world is not only a woman but usually imagined as 'conservative', 'with glasses', which, as we know from Dorothy Parker, is, in and of itself, de-eroticizing. The ways in which teachers work to desexualize themselves within the context of their daily professional practice form a kind of protection in a potentially dangerous area of their lives. Teachers are not supposed to engage in sexual relationships with their students (quite rightly, in our view, given the power relations involved and the potential for abuse). Neither, as we have seen in earlier chapters, are they supposed to admit to their students that sexuality might constitute a significant part of their lived experience. Insofar as sexuality is legitimately speakable by teachers in the school context, it is domesticated and oblique (for example, through mention of a partner, preferably a spouse, of the opposite sex), within the ghetto of sex education (which will be discussed in chapter eight), in the context of rebuking a student (especially a girl student) for sexualized behaviour, or within a pastoral situation where the teacher is dealing with the results of sexual behaviour by or towards a student (a situation in which the teacher's options are limited by statute).

There are many senses in which teachers' sexualities remain closeted, regardless of how they identify or the kinds of lives they lead. If, as Eve Sedgwick _(1990)_ has argued persuasively, the closet can be seen as an iconographic metaphor for the late 20th century, this is even more so in relation to education. Not only are teachers' sexualities (gay or straight), so to speak, 'in the closet', the whole of formal education (at school and university level) in Anglophone countries can be read in this way. Yet, as we suggested at the end of the previous chapter, teaching can also be seen as a process of seduction. In using the term 'seduction', of course we do not mean that teachers literally seduce their pupils in a sexual sense though this does happen from time to time, usually between male teachers and female pupils, notwithstanding the greater publicity given to seductions of boys by woman teachers (see chapter four). Rather, we are seeking a metaphor to describe the kind of thrill and pleasure which can be produced by the best teaching, the kind of intensity of feeling, akin to love that can pass between teachers and taught. This has been written about (and written off) in terms of students, especially girls, having 'crushes' on their teachers, but the importance of such feelings to pupils construction of self can be seen in stories like Peter Redman's memory of 'Mr Lefevre' _(Redman & Mac an Ghaill, 1997)_ which we quoted in chapter one.

Jane Miller _(1990)_ in her book Seductions uses this word as a metaphor for the kind of attraction which women (even feminists) may feel towards even very sexist ideas. She uses 'seduction' in order to imply the ways that sexuality spills, sometimes messily, often ambiguously, into women's lives, 'into their thought, their work and into the reports they have been able in one way or another to give of themselves' _(Miller, 1990: 2)_. She makes the point that using the metaphor of seduction helps us to understand the ways that power is experienced in contexts of inequality, defining seductions as:

all those ways in which women learn who they are in cultures which simultaneously include and exclude them, take their presence for granted while denying it, and entice them finally into narratives which may reduce them by exalting them. (ibid)

As we have already pointed out, schools are structured in inequality, primarily through age relations, always as inflected by other inequalities such as those of class, ethnicity and gender. Children and young people who attend them as pupils/students are engaged in the important work of 'learn[ing] who they are' in a cultural institution which both includes and excludes them and in which their presence is essential (just as the presence of women is essential to society) but also, paradoxically, denied in some important senses. It could, indeed, be argued that those young people (and adults) who are the most successful in negotiating the education system, those high achievers who end up as university undergraduates and maybe even doctoral students, are the ones for whom the metaphorical seduction, by ideas and by teachers, has been most successful. And teachers, themselves, having previously been seduced re-enter the arena of schooling to perform, again, the act of seducing the minds and energies of their students. As Simon commented when we interviewed him:

we all have special people in our lives, my House Master at [my grammar school] was mine. Yeah, he made me into a teacher, not made me, but made me into a teacher, and he developed my political ideas. Mmm, he was a very strong influence on my life, very much so, indeed, and I'm glad he's become very successful, cos he deserved it.

Similarly, June Levinson, _(1994: 14)_ in a strongly evocative passage, recalls how:

When my gaze fell upon the new fourth year English teacher, ... it was a falling in love with a future vision of myself fiercely academic yet thoroughly approachable, teacherly but sensual. She allowed us glimpses into her life which cast her family as solid, ordinary, working-class Mancunians and herself as surprisingly exotic. In the slides she showed us of her Indian trek, her normally tightly bound hair was flowing down her back, and she looked carefree and joyful in the embrace of her dark-skinned, Indian boyfriend _(quoted in Miller, 1996)_.

Both of these excerpts vividly capture the influence that the loved teacher can have on a pupil. Simon's stressed 'he made me into a teacher' and June Levinson's 'falling in love with a future vision of myself' bespeak an intensity of feeling normally reserved for one's most significant relationships, and, indeed, demonstrates the significance of relationships between students and much-loved teachers. For students, this can express itself in a love of a particular subject which might stay with them for life, a frequent topic in the Guardian's regular column about successful people's favourite teachers. For teachers, on the other hand, one of the great rewards of teaching is the buzz of pleasure obtained when students respond positively to one's teaching. The second quote shows, too, the way these dynamics are racialized and classed. June Levinson's teacher was seductive because of the combination of the familiar ('solid, ordinary, working class Mancunian') and 'exotic'. Her 'Indian trek' and her 'dark-skinned, Indian boyfriend' added to her attractions and the 'gaze' which 'fell upon' this particular teacher was a complex combination of colonial, maybe Orientalist, gaze and the desire to be, as well as to be with. And while the aspects of her life shared with her pupils offered a seductive combination, the very act of allowing them these 'glimpses' added to the seduction a process which we shall discuss in more detail below, when we come to the story of 'Mr Stuart'.

Successful teaching, as Gillian Spraggs _(1994: 181)_ has argued, is 'a kind of performative art' in which '[as] with all artists, your basic material is yourself and your experience'. In other words, successful teachers have to put enough of themselves into their performances, allow enough glimpses into their own lives, to fire the imaginations of their students. For all teachers, this is a process which can be difficult since it demands a performance which is both revealing (enough to be seductive) and masking (because of the required de-sexualization of teachers). Furthermore, as well as the requisite fascinating glimpses of the teacher's life, the seductiveness of successful teachers is predicated on the fantasies which their students/pupils develop about them. These fantasies may be overtly sexual, but more often they involve the kind of identification described by Simon and by June Levinson where the desire is to be like, or to be, the teacher. There are also more generalised (and gendered) cultural fantasies within the public sphere, and amongst teachers themselves about what it means to be the ideal or perfect teacher. These fantasies range from the teacher-as-mother figure, so common in infant and primary schools, to discourses about discipline on the one hand and charisma on the other. Jenny Shaw _(1995)_ argues that these shared fantasies are productive of anxieties, many of them (particularly, she claims, in the context of debates about single sex schooling) about sexuality. Shaw asserts that the long-running debates around single-sex and coeducational schooling:

serve as a defence mechanism which aims to suppress the subversive potential of sexuality. ... Once it is seen as a discourse that serves a defensive purpose it is easier to see that it is not really about academic performance but about fears and fantasies which have become attached to schooling, sexuality, separation and merging. _(Shaw, 1995: 129-139)_

Virtually everyone been to school and has had teachers whom s/he either loved or feared, sometimes both. Our fantasies and fears relate to these earlier experiences of schooling, and taken together with the seductiveness of ideas, with the erotic charge of successful teaching, and with all the transferences and counter-transferences involved in relationships between teachers and taught are also deeply implicated in what seems like an almost obsessive drive to desexualize schools.

The extreme nature of the wish to erase sexuality from schools is revealed, especially, in moral panics about sexuality and schooling (discussed in chapter four) and also in some of the parliamentary debates about schooling, sexuality and sex education (see chapters three and eight).

However, this drive is, as we show in this book, largely unsuccessful. Not only is sexuality part of the coinage of relations amongst pupils/students, it is also a major factor in many interactions between teachers and students, and is, as we argued in chapter five, one of the major resources for resistance to schooling on which pupils draw _(see, also, Kehily, 1993)_. Teachers, it seems from our evidence and those of other researchers _(see for example Rogers, 1994)_, frequently use sexual taunts to enforce their control, especially of boys. 'Don't be such a Nancy-boy' was a frequently cited example, used particularly when boys were unwilling to perform particular versions of masculinity during, for instance, physical education. Similarly, in the stories young people told us and others working on the Sexuality and Education Research Project about the ways they resisted schooling, sexuality featured strongly. Many of these stories, such as the 'Christmas Kiss' story discussed in chapter five, featured a kind of sexualised play which challenged the authority of the teacher. For straight teachers, this is complicated enough. For those who identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual, such 'games' are fraught with danger _(see, also, Spraggs, 1994)_.

Some lesbian teachers try to 'heterosexualize' their performances in order to fit in to schools and escape identification as lesbians. Gillian Spraggs, for example, talks about teaching her subject (English) 'in a mode of rigid and safe academicism' _(1994: 181)_. Sarah O'Flynn _(1996: 86)_, in her examination of the many different ways in which lesbian teachers teach and survive in schools, argues that some:

seek to establish a sense in which we are the same. It involves minimising difference and literally working psychically to create that sense of similarity with the heterosexual majority. Nevertheless, having success at this needs maintenance. It involves investments of time and energy and achieving success at it in one location, doesn't necessarily mean one will be able to repeat the process elsewhere. There is a sense in which one is confined in one's job. Conversely, being completely out can also result in this.

Technologies of the self: dressing not to impress

On a different note, Didi Khayyat writes about the way that she handled herself as a secondary school teacher:

One of my students that summer, a young woman of about nineteen, took it upon herself to 'expose' my sexual preference. I knew that her intentions were not malicious but that she was acting out her attraction to me. ... The more she goaded me about my sexuality, the more I ignored her and the more she made her accusations publicly. Because my other students liked and respected me, their response was to silence her, to disbelieve and discredit her intimations that I was a lesbian. To them, I was a teacher they liked; therefore I could not be a lesbian. _(Khayyat, 1992: 1-2)_

Here we see simultaneously the presumption of heterosexuality and the erotic charge involved in a relationship between a successful and charismatic teacher and her students. Indeed, the (usually homo-erotic) 'crush' which the adolescent girl has on her favourite teacher is commonplace, famously in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie _(Spark, 1969/first edition 1961)_, and within the school story genre more generally, but also in many adult women's memories. But these crushes are meant to be a phase and their very ubiquity perhaps contributes to the notion which frequently meets lesbian and gay identified people when they come out, that they will 'grow out of it'. The frequency of homo-eroticism within the teacher-pupil/student relationship may also make the performance of heterosexuality a feature of much teaching, but perhaps particularly salient for lesbian or gay teachers.


Of course, it is not only lesbian and gay teachers whose sexuality is disciplined and for whom the performance of conventionally gendered heterosexuality is a requirement. The teacher's 'uniforms' discussed in the previous chapter are, indeed, heterosexually desexualized! And for women teachers, particularly, this is complicated by issues of age and appearance. Jane Miller _(1996)_ points out that:

Brains, looks and clothes become interchangeable terms in the covert regulation of women teachers and their potentially wayward sexuality. Some of us asked in the early seventies if we might wear trousers to work. To do so was regarded as brazen, unprofessional and political. So several already 'naturally' trousered persons gave much judicious thought to the issue. The decision eventually went our way, but was relayed to us with a list of caveats evincing a positively unseemly interest in anatomy and current fashion. Trousers could only be worn as part of what was known then as a 'trouser suit'. Bums must not be seen. And there was also a list of the kinds of trousers we might absolutely not wear: ones made of denim or jersey, for instance, and ones which were either tight or flared. It was not, of course, that any of the women who availed themselves of these new liberties bothered much with the detail. But we yielded to the convention which lets men wear what they like, so long as it includes trousers, while exercising what is allowed as control over female dress in the interests of professionalism.

This may seen unimportant. It stands in, however, for some central ambiguities. The possible sexual provocations of a young woman teacher may be used to cancel her professional competence and judgement. Just as the absence of sexual provocations in an older woman teacher may exile her from the human altogether. Both are assessed not as workers but as more or less desirable women and as more or less well adjusted to a small number of fundamentally sexual roles. _(Miller, 1996: 16)_

In some ways, Jane Miller's account of 1970s discussion of the wearing of trousers may seem quaintly anachronistic in the 1990s. However, its continuing relevance is evidenced not only by the teacher uniforms we saw in our school observation, with denim, for example, still seeming almost unwearable by women teachers. It is also striking that mid-1990s panics about violence in schools have been accompanied by comments about the deleterious effects to children's values if teachers do not dress appropriately and even the suggestion from some Conservative MPs that teachers should be compelled by law to dress 'smartly'. Our observation would indicate that such legislation would be an unnecessary addition to teachers' disciplining of themselves through their dress. For women teachers, dressing 'neutrally', in ways which de-eroticize their bodies, may be an important strategy for trying to avoid sexual harassment from male staff and students which, as Valerie Walkerdine _(1981)_ has shown can take place with boys as young as three. For them to wear clothes which drew attention to 'their potentially wayward sexuality' runs the risk of attracting the male gaze on themselves as heterosexual objects.

Both male and female teachers are expected to display an acceptable face of heterosexuality. But it seems from our research that heterosexual male teachers are less likely than either gay male or women teachers to suffer severe consequences for behaviours which are deemed inappropriate. For example, Julie King, a senior teacher in one of the schools where we did our research, recalled how:

There were like and still are like two members of staff and without exception each year group complained that these two male members of staff continually invaded their personal space and they found it uncomfortable and unpleasant and it made them feel very uneasy. And in fact it was reported to the head about these two members of staff and I know with one of them there had been several incidents of, more than just harassment really, quite sort of reported cases of things like going off with a girl after being at the pub for lunch and then bringing her back couple of hours later, that kind of thing, and the head did investigate several of these cases with the union, but nothing, it was very difficult to prove, in fact impossible to prove and the head couldn't take any action because of it being I mean the other person's like the union rep, he's the union rep whose very clever on sort of union issues and just could never be brought to task for it. And the other one, the other person mentioned by these girls is ... the head of [lower] school and I reported that he was, um, that the girls were complaining about him invading their personal space and to try and respect their personal space in the future, but he does still contravene it on occasions. I mean, um, but it's nothing that, it's just sort of you know, get into a class or sort of making sexual innuendoes that make them feel very uncomfortable. With the other member of staff, for the last couple of years it's all been quiet on the western front, I think the last case, because there was a complaint, a parent made quite a serious complaint about him kissing a girl. But again he denied it and the union were in and there was no, it's a very serious allegation as you know and you've got to be able to conclusively prove it.

It is virtually impossible to imagine a similar result in respect of an equivalent parental complaint about either a women teacher kissing a boy or a teacher of either sex kissing a pupil of the same sex, both because they would be less likely to be offered adequate union support _(Bartell, 1994; Spraggs, 1994)_ and because of the high possibility, even likelihood, that their case, with or without conclusive proof, would end up being spread across the tabloid press. It would seem, then, that while the sexualities of all teachers are policed, the disciplinary process is more likely to take a coercive turn in the case of those who depart from the norm of the (white) heterosexual male.

In this chapter, we have been concerned to explore 'Teaching Sexualities' by examining the experiences of lesbian and gay identified teachers. As we have seen, the particular patterns of self-discipline in their case, engendered by the panoptical gaze of, among others, students, parents, the popular media and politics, can tell us much about the ways that sexuality is played out in the school system. The seductiveness of successful teaching may produce anxieties which produce and feed upon scandalous stories in the popular press, particularly in relation to gay and lesbian teachers who are, it seems, automatically assumed to be dangerously attractive to their pupils. The act of teaching seduction is a delicate, complex one, vulnerable to the crudity of the disciplinary processes attendant on the surveillance of teachers. Even to discuss these issues may raise the hackles of some. We fully expect this book (and in particular this chapter) to cause a scandal about 'trendy educationists' who say that teachers should seduce children!

[RoosterDance]

"Girl, It's Boobies You're Getting, No?"
Creole Women in Surinam and Erotic Relationships with Children and Adolescents: Some Impressions

by Gloria Wekker
For Maggy


Riding in the bus with Misi Juliette, my 84 year-old landlady, our attention is caught by a three year old sitting next to her mother in the scat in front of us. Perfectly in tune with the beat of the kaseko, reggae, and bobbling music that is crashing through the bus, the girl is writhing, shaking, and moving. Misi Juliette looks at her intently and sighs audibly. I think I understand why, but occasions like these are perfect to check on preconceived notions, so, as the "eternal asker-of-the-obvious," I prod my companion to tell me why she is sighing. Patiently she explains. Children with such strong sexual feelings get themselves and adults in trouble by their tempting behavior. I must realize that children, from their earliest days on, are sexual beings through and through. It does not show so clearly in all children, nor is the feeling equally strong in all children, but they all have a firi dati, "that sexual feeling." It is not taught to them, they are born with it. Once, Misi Juliette had an experience in which a six-year-old girl, lying on a couch, her legs up and far apart, made inviting movements in her direction. As it happens, Misi Juliette does not have predilections in this area, but according to her there are enough women who do.

I have been able to connect the idea that children have distinct sexual feelings to a notion of reincarnation, also prevalent among the Creole working class population. In the Afro-American folk religion, Winti, there is no absolute boundary between the world of the living and of the dead.' It is believed that children can possess the "spirit of a person who has died. So, for example, when a little girl is acutely sexually interested and inclined, it is thought that she is actually someone who has inherited the "spirit" of a person who has died. She has all the deceased person's experiences at her disposal, including the sexual ones. According to the way people perceive her-as a mature person or as a child they will judge how to react to her sexual overtures. Most of my informants strongly rejected such contacts with children, which are illegal under Surinam. law. Only one woman indicated that she had obliged a seven year old girl who propositioned her.

It has been over a year now that I have resided in the country where I was born, Surinam, to do my doctoral dissertation research concerning self-conceptions; and survival strategies of working-class Creole women. Having left Surinam when I was only one year old, I returned only three times in the intervening years for vacations and family visits before I went to do my research. My stay was a fascinating journey into the realities of women, but more so, it often seems, into my own realities. And so it should be with anthropological research: a continuing dialogue between one's self and the other.

How do I broach this subject of "eroticism" between women and children/adolescents, without ending up in a endlessly reflecting hall of mirrors? Let me name just a few of the difficulties involved: here is a Caribbean country that comprises many different, co-existing ethnic groups each of which seems to experience its own special brand of eroticism. Let me resolve this particular issue immediately by stating that I will concern myself here only with the Creole group, the urban descendants of the slaves. What it is that sexually excites Maroons, Amerindians, Hindustani, Javanese, Lebanese, Chinese, and other groups, will have to await further investigation.

The next issue is both thornier and more fundamental: can I assume a priori that what I, with my predominantly Western viewpoint, find erotic among the Creole population is also experienced as such by the people themselves? Eroticism is a terribly evasive concept to discuss in an Afro-Surinamese context. Sex is something concrete, and, in a different way, love as well. Could it be that eroticism is a Western invention, initially needed to bridge the gap between that which is desired and that which is allowed in judeo-Christian cultures that do not take kindly to the easy and quick gratification of sexual needs? Sublimation, as maintained in Western theory, for example by Freud, can lead to artful and powerful cultural edifices, but what if a culture condones the easy gratification of needs? In general in Surinam, there is an attitude of doing one's thing, but not bothering others with it and certainly not talking about it.

This question is further complicated by the fact that neither in Sranan Tongo, the language of the Creoles and the lingua franca of Surinam, nor in Surinarnese Dutch, a local variety of Dutch, is there a single concept that covers the same meaning as what we in the West normally understand by "eroticism." I am referring here to the concept, eroticism, in a very broad sense, as used by Audre Lorde, who states that eroticism is that which affirms the energy of women, the embodiment of everything that is love, the capacity to experience joy.2 It seems safe to assume that the erotic domain in Afto-Surinarn does not look the same as in the Netherlands, and this can be called an understatement.

On deeper probing, I discovered that working class Creole women do have a language to talk, in depth even, about sex. The subject of eroticism between adults and children is quite different matter. What several informants have told me holds true: Lobi na wan tiri sani, "love is a silent thing." Words, certainly Dutch words, are too harsh to contain so much tenderness. In embarking on this endeavor, I find myself confronted with a clash of two worlds: the "privileged" text, the Western written word, crushing the "unprivileged" text, the Caribbean oral tradition. As if an oral form could be pushed into a square mould. As if bougainvillea, without artifice, could thrive on Dutch soil.

There is a further important reason for caution when writing about Creole women's eroticism with children. I left the Netherlands recently enough that I remain acutely aware of the deeply ingrained racist prejudices that surround black women: how warm, erotic, hot, and uninhibited they are. Unfortunately, this way of thinking enjoys a currency beyond the circles of racist political parties and their followers. It must be made clear that it is not my intention to fuel existing prejudices by discussing my impressions. With all these caveats in mind, let us proceed to see what is knowable about female Creole eroticism and children/adolescents.


Comparative Proxemics

Let me start to paint a picture of the local scenery using the broadest possible brush. Certain fundamental things in life-small, trivial, but so vital for the quality of one's existence-one knows. Not necessarily because you have done research into the matter, but simply because you have experienced it by living. As far as I know, for example, there has never been comparative proxemic research done between the Netherlands, the United States, and Surinam. Proxemics is, among other things, concerned with the normative distances people must observe in social interaction, e.g. in public transport and elevators. Even without such research I know that, with my mental well-being in mind, I would do best to live in Surinam. In public transport, aggravated by a chronic parts shortage and thus available buses, we are heaped on top of each other. But apart from that, there is in general a lot of proximity, of body contact, of touching between people. It is rare that people will excuse themselves for inadvertent touching: that would be a lot of work. I am not maintaining that this bodily contact is always pleasant-let's be frank about it-but in general I do not complain.

Certainly not all body contact in Surinam is welcomed. It is the prerogative of older Creole women, for example, to teasingly touch the breasts of younger women. It is widely believed that with a young girl the women are able to feel whether she is still a virgin. Thus, I have frequently seen Misi Juliette, when in a good mood, touch the young, doe-like breasts of her twelve year old granddaughter, Lucia. To Lucia's great distress, she accompanied this gesture with the rhetorical question: "Meisje, na bobi i'e kisi, no? A no poisi"? "Girl, it's boobies you're getting, no? You're sure they're not pimples?" This prerogative of older women is not limited to the very young; witness the fact that I myself have been subjected to it. On one of these occasions, when she commented loudly on her own gesture to one of her neighbors - "Ee-hee, m'e fas'en bobi!!' "Hey, I'm touching her breasts!!", it became clear to me that her joking was a public, not a private, intimate moment. Asked whether she would tease her sons or grandsons in comparable fashion, Misi Juliette responded indignantly to such an unspeakable suggestion.


Charting the Afro-Surinamese Linguistic Landscape

As I stated before, even though there is no single concept in Sranan Tongo that covers the same meaning as Western eroticism, there is a wide array of interpersonal linguistic expressions that bespeak a lively cultural interest in the sexual area. Language mirrors a culture, and the extensiveness, the finesse, and the nuance of linguistic categories in particular domains of a language show its cultural preoccupations. The well-worn example of the Eskimo and the many Merent words they have for snow, comes to mind here, as well as the less well known cultural preoccupation of Afro-Americans, in the broadest sense, with hair and skin color.3 Sranan, like other creoles, is a language in which verbs, not nouns, predominate. Its universe thereby immediately takes on a much more active image. Linguistically charting die Afro-Surinamese domain, in which "pursuit of the other" is structured, can very literally be compared to charting a landscape. I am not yet capable of definitively demonstrating the contours of that landscape, nor the precise location of mountains, lakes, tropical forests, or oases within it. What I can do is give a handful of expressions, out of the multitude, that indicate the linguistic and cultural preoccupation of Afro-Surinamese with the erotic.

There are various idioms that express a sweet, tender, horny feeling for somebody:

• Korkori wan sma. To please somebody, to cuddle somebody. Also used for children, but without any sexual option implied.
• Prey nanga wan srna. To fondle somebody, to pet somebody. With sexual option.
• Suku wan sma. To be after someone; to try to seduce someone.
• Firi switigi wan sma. To be sweet on someone.
• Tyallans wan srna. To be after somebody persistently.
• Mekmekigi wan sma. To spoil, pamper someone.
• Koti pangi gi wan sma. To go out of your way for someone, to show very clearly that the person is special.
• Tyari sma ede gwe. Literally: to carry someone's head away.
• Drai sma ede. Literally: To turn someone's head scandalously.
• Go gi wan srna. To go for someone.
• Mi skin e tek'i. My body takes you.
• Mijeje e tek'i. My spirit takes you.
• Poti wan sma. Literally: satisfying somebody completely.
• Especially in mati circles, the scene of women who also love women, there is a characteristic flavor to the expressions:
• Mefir' wan gril na yu tapu. Literally: I am feeling capricious towards you; I want to make love to you.
• M'efir'wan lichtiegebruik. Literally: I am feeling horny, wet.'

The latter two indicate a measure of sexual stirring; speaker feels that her pants are already getting wet.


Eroticism, Afro-Surinamese Style

In discussing eroticism between Creole women and children or adolescents, I have in mind bodily contacts that both parties find enjoyable. But eroticism actually covers more; while touching is possible, it is not necessary. Looking only can be very erotic. I know a woman who intensely enjoys looking at the bodies of her two adolescent daughters, their long legs, their breasts, and their buttocks that rise like the dark islands in the upper Surinam River. Certainly this is what Audre Lorde is describing as the "energy of women, the embodiment of everything that is love, the capacity to experience joy." In this vein, I find very erotic the care that Creole women bestow on their own and their children's appearances. Sometimes, when a woman is very poor, that care can only consist of keeping her whole family well washed, starched, and ironed, and without holes and rents in their clothing. Other women love to dress up their little girls like miniatures of themselves, complete with puffed sleeves, belts, and a big bow in the hair. There is a lot of ironing, sewing, polishing, straightening, relaxing, pomading, adorning with artful head-dresses, squeezing into narrow shoes, laying on of accessories, and gold inlaying going on. All of this is done in a collective endeavor to please oneself and others. Presentation of self in an Afro-Surinarnese universe starts and ends with a well-attended appearance, with special emphasis on the hair.

The role that food and drink play in a budding love affair also is not without erotic content. The moment a woman offers a plate of food to the person who is seeking her out, is significant and symbolizes her wish to be further pursued, and that the attentions are appreciated. Within an existing relationship, whether it is between lovers or in a mother-child relationship, the serving of food is a sign of continuing love. When, one bad day, the beloved has to serve her/himself, there is storm on the horizon.

It is also erotic to me when I am watching a walkathon with my friend Humbert, six years old, and he tries to get my attention by softly touching my breasts. He feels that I am talking too much to his mother and so he knocks on my front door. His mother starts cursing him right away: "Soso handtammigheid!!" having something of the meaning that he has gotten pretty forward to go around pawing a woman. Together with another ancient Dutch noun vrijpostigheid, boldness, sauciness, these are two key concepts in describing, from an adult point of view, "mature" behavior of children. Handtammigheid and vrijpostigheid strongly, though not exclusively, imply sexuality. The younger the child, the softer the implication inherent in the use of the terms. But when the words are used in connection with children who have passed the age when they can freely and without punishment express themselves sexually, then the connotation is harsher. According to most of my informants, that age is about six years, when the child has started primary school: a watershed for the tolerance with which the child's sexual utterances are treated.


The Mati Work

There are two well known odo's, "proverbs," that allude to situations where there is a considerable age difference between two partners. One is: "Yongu kaw e tzjan owru grasi, " "The young cow is eating old grass. " And, "Ouru kaka e bor' krakti supu," "An old cock boils strong soup." As far as I have been able to ascertain, these proverbs are used for adults who are involved with other adults (though of a much younger age), or adults involved with adolescents. I have not heard them used in connection with adults and children. Relationships with large age differences are common both in a heterosexual context, an older man with a young woman and, somewhat less frequently, a mature woman with a young man, and in the mati world, both male and female.5

Mati are women who have sexual relationships with women, but they do not necessarily limit themselves to women. Surinam is unique in the openness with which the institution of mati-ism is displayed in its own environment-the Creole working class-and in the apparent frequency of these relationships. Mati-ism has been documented in the literature since the beginning of this century. Mati cannot be equated with (black) lesbians, because the former are part of a different, Afrocentric world view and come predominantly from a working class background.6 A typical mati will have children, and often has relationships with men. Men are necessary in their lives, because they beget children and are deemed more desirable economic partners than women. This is especially true in the childbearing years. There is often a marked gender division in a female couple, where one will act as if she were "the male" and the other as "the female." The equivalent literal terms are used in Surinam, man nanga uma, man and woman. A true male-identified mati absolutely never can play the female part, but the "female" partner can, if need be, take the male role in another relationship. It is important that it should be known at the outset of a relationship who is to be whom; sometimes negotiations have to take place. Leaving all frills aside, according to the insiders, the essence of being ',the male" is that she is the one who lies on top.

Many mati have been initiated into "a wroko," the mati work, at age 14 or 15 by women in their forties or sometimes even older. To the older woman-let's assume she plays the male part-there is the advantage that she can mold the girl to her own wishes. This pertains both to the transfer of sexual knowledge, for example the different popular positions, and to the behavior of the girl, at home and when they are out together in public. It is vital that, especially in public, the girl treats her with the respect usually due an older person. She will want to be addressed, for example, not just by her first name, but as tant' Coba or s'a Mina, i.e., aunt Coba or sis Mina. When the older woman is well-off economically, either because she has grown children who support her or because she has a profitable job of her own, she will typically spoil the young girl, often with clothes and gold jewelry. On the other hand, she will demand strict fidelity, while she may not herself obey the same rules.

The younger partner in this relationship is typically indicated as the older woman's yong' doifi or yong' fowru, "young dove" or "young chicken." One informant, Orsy (age 43), in hindsight, explained her preference for older women in this way:

I really did not see much in girls my own age when I was fifteen years old. Problems with men and jealousy all the time. I saw how girls would try to take each other's boy-friends away and would always want to have what you had. I loved older women. You did not have to tell them anything, they knew everything already and taught you. They also helped you get stuff for your house, and when you did not have any money.7

In Orsy's circle, this pattern is still perpetuated: women of her age now transfer "the work" to the younger generation. When the learning process has ended, the young mati may find a partner or partners of her own age. There are also women who prefer to remain with a much older woman. It is not at all unusual to find women in their twenties having relationships with women in their sixties. Women of the oldest generation of mati, those in their seventies and eighties, explain that when they were young it was an unwritten rule that an older woman should not deflower a young girl. This activity was reserved for the first man she was to have sex with. To many, having sex with women was, pure pleasure, without worries about pregnancy. "Sporting," as it is called in Sranan, was engaged in with passion.


By Way of Conclusion

As we have seen, it is common to presuppose age-old sexual knowledge in children within an Afto-Surinamese universe. This notion corresponds very well with another set of observations.

Responsibility, volition, insight, and motivation are often attributed to very young children. It is a maturity that does not correspond to their real capabilities. If the universe shows itself in a garment, where children, from a very young age, are believed to have their own sexual desires, to have maturity, insight, and volition, then one could expect a favorable climate for sexual contacts between women and children/adolescents. This might be so, whether it bears a name or not. Words are often too hard, too angular to contain so much tenderness.

August 1991.



Editors' Note:
Gloria Wekker is a PhD. candidate in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Calftornia at Los Angeles. For her doctoral dissertation she has been living for more than a year in Surinam doing field research on survival-strategies of working class Creole women.


Acknowledgements:
The research that formed the basis for this article was made possible by grants from the Institute of American Cultures (UCLA) and from the Inter-American Foundation (Washington, D. C).

Copyright 0 1991 by Gloria Wekker.



Notes:

1. See C. Wooding, Winti. Een Afro-Amerikaanse Godsdienst In Suriname (Meppel: Krips Repro, 1972).
2. Audre Lorde, 'The erotic as power," in: Sister Outsider (New York: The Crossing Press, 1984).
3. See G. Wekker and H. Wekker, "Corning In From The Cold: The Translation of Black English Vernacular Literary Texts into Surinamese Dutch," in Babel: Revue Internationale de la Traduction, Gent, 1991.
4. For the Sranan Tongo expressions I thank Misi Juliette, Edje van der Hilst, Maggy, Siene, Jetje and Dr. Hein Eersel.
5. See G. Wekker, "On Mati-ism and Black Lesbianism: Two Idealtypical Expressions of Female Homosexuality in Black Communities of the Diaspora," in Journal of Homosexuality (Binghampton, N.Y.: The Haworth Press, forthcoming).
6. The word mati is the generic term for friend in Sranan, both in a heterosexual and a homosexual context. Within the homosexual sphere it pertains both to men and women. The term matisma, literally "mad people," refers to homosexually involved women only.
7. For tbis and other material see my forthcoming dissertation, working title: Mi Na Af Sensi, No Wan Man Kan Broko Mi: I Am Ma!fA Cent, No Man Can Break Me. Gender Consciousness and Survival Strategies of Creole Working Class Women (UCLA, Los Angeles, expected date: Winter 1992).

[RoosterDance]

Bringing up Children Sexually
by Lonnie Garfield Barbach Ph.D.


Many women in the groups were concerned about what they could do so that their children, particularly their daughters, would not grow up with the same inhibitions and misconceptions about sex that had taken so much energy to reverse in themselves. Few good books have been written about the sexual education of children. Material is available carefully detailing how to explain reproductive matters and at what age information is appropriate, but very little has been researched or written about how to deal with children's natural curiosity about sexual matters. However, three books have been recently written by Dr. Wardell Pomeroy on the subject: Girls and Sex (New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1969), Boys and Sex (New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1968), and Your Child and Sex: A Guide to Parents (New York: Delecorate Press, 1974).

Self-exploration is a natural part of the developmental process, and this includes a child's exploration of bodies — the mother's body, the father's body, friends' bodies, and child's own body.

How would we have liked to have been brought up sexually so that we were less inhibited and more sensual and sexual? How can we change things so our children can have a better experience? Child-rearing is an individual matter and something with which each mother and father has to struggle. Perhaps this discussion will present a few options for you to explore further in your family.

All too frequently, children have been treated as innocent asexual beings. But children most certainly are not asexual. All the sexual organs capable of providing pleasure are present, and children are sexual creatures, from birth. Theirs is not the same sexuality we know as adults, but it is nonetheless sexuality. The baby playing with your breast is at least sensual if not sexual. The two-year-old who seductively crawls into bed between Mommy and Daddy is sexual, although not with the same explicit sexual intent of an adult. The five-year-old girl, who dresses up and sits on her father's lap kissing him and asking him if he will marry her when she grows up, is sexual. The seven-year-old who is masturbating, possibly even to orgasm, is sexual. The eight-year-old prancing around without any clothes on is sexual. These are children passing through learning stages on the way to becoming adult sexual beings. Some of their behavior represents a mimicking of Mommy or Daddy and some results from natural bodily curiosity but it is all sexual though not necessarily with the adult's awareness of what sexuality means.

A major problem in dealing with sexuality in children has been the adult's own embarrassment and discomfort with sex. There has been a tendency to ignore children's sexual questions and gestures, a tendency to believe that an adult doesn't have to answer sexual questions because the child couldn't possibly know what she is asking. This denies the child's sexuality because of the adult's own uneasiness. The result, of course, is that the child gets the message that she is asking improper questions that her mother doesn't like to hear, so the child's tendency is to stop risking her mother's anger, keep quiet, and wonder silently to herself. Meanwhile, the child feels embarrassment, shame, and remains ignorant about sex, and many reach adulthood to experience excessive sexual inhibitions, the absence of orgasm, or the experience of an unwanted pregnancy.

A number of my colleagues, informed in the area of sex and child-rearing, advocate open, honest, direct dealing with sexual questions or sexual curiosity in children. They feel this is the best method. The child should be given information, with the parent frequently asking questions to determine if the child understood, if she has any further questions, if the information disturbed or upset her, so the parent can correct misconceptions from the beginning.

The biggest obstacle is dealing with issues that are not resolved in the parent's own mind, while still trying to be honest. One mother accepted masturbation intellectually, but found the old fears and feelings of disgust or shame were evoked when her son played with his penis. She did not want to alarm him by forbidding him to touch himself, but she knew he would detect her discomfort if she told him that what he was doing was fine, while she was feeling otherwise. Children pick up mixed messages quickly and respond with confusion. They realize something is wrong, although they may not be quite sure exactly what. A parent's attempt to inform the child of more than one prevailing intellectual opinion while also directly expressing personal discomfort may be one way of dealing with unsettled issues. In that way at least the child knows exactly why a parent is uncomfortable. This particular woman said, "I know it feels good to play with your penis and it's OK, but it makes me uncomfortable when you do it here in the living room. I would feel much better if you would go in to your bedroom where you can have privacy."

It is important for children to know that touching one's sexual organs is supposed to feel good — that other people touch themselves and have similar sensations and the response is not abnormal or shameful; that sometimes a special feeling called orgasm can occur, but it doesn't always so they shouldn't feel abnormal when it happens, or ignorant if it doesn't. It might be a good idea to say that the feelings are good feelings and should be enjoyed but possibly only in the privacy of one's own room, and when others aren't around. There are special rooms for many activities (kitchen, bathroom, etc.). Children are able to understand this.

The issue is a touchy one — to be able to give your children positive sex messages and open the home to sexual questions when you don't feel totally comfortable about it yourself. To give one's children experiences different from one's own, however, is a valid goal.

Physical contact is essential for children. Studies show that children in orphanages who received adequate nourishment but were not held, cuddled, kissed, and caressed would often become ill.1 But in our culture it is frequently customary to discontinue physical contact as the child grows older, especially with sons. Then after marriage, miraculously, the two people who have been denied physical contact for years are supposed to be able to respond physically and emotionally without inhibitions — which was natural for them as a child, but was trained out of them as they grew older. Many of us grew up in families where touching was prohibited and so we tend to maintain a distance from our children. Others of us may find ourselves sexually turned on by our children, and these impulses may frighten us so much that we maintain physical distance in an effort to avoid the unacceptable sexual feelings and possibly even to protect our children from being the object of our sexual fantasies.

Sexual feelings for our children begin early. It is important to realize that sexual fantasies about one's children are normal. Many mothers in the groups reported having some such fantasies at least occasionally. Children are sexual, warm, cuddly human beings — we can feel turned on and have the fantasies but we don't have to act them out. Acting them out can be detrimental to the child, while just having the fantasy is perfectly harmless.

One of the group members, Samantha, had sexual fantasies about her five-year-old step-daughter who was going through a very seductive stage. Samantha was afraid she might actually try to seduce the child and as a result picked fights with her to keep them physically apart, hoping this would prevent her from acting out her worst fears. Their relationship was getting worse and worse. Another woman in the group announced that she, too, had had sexual fantasies which included her four-year-old daughter. She would use the fantasies during masturbation and found that after about two months her fantasies began naturally to include activities and people other than her daughter. So it was suggested that Samantha allow herself to have the fantasies, to exaggerate them, and carry them, still in fantasy, to the greatest possible extreme. Samantha returned the next week to say that she had followed our advice and actively fantasized sexual situations which included her step-daughter; she found that not only did she not act on them, but she felt closer to her step-daughter and could allow herself to be more affectionate and caring with the child. To her amazement she tired of the fantasies and soon replaced them with more interesting ones. She also found that she wasn't jealous of the daughter's seductive behavior toward the child's father any more.

Accurate information is important to curious youngsters. If your relationship is a close and caring one, and your child trusts you and feels comfortable with you, she will look to you for guidance and answers — especially in the early years. During adolescence things may change because of the adolescent's intense need for privacy and rebellion in order to establish herself as her own person. But if your relationship has been open until then, she should have received the necessary and important information about sexuality before this difficult and conflicted time.

Information need not exceed the limits of the child's question. A child asks a question, but we may not be aware of exactly what it is she wishes to have explained. Seeing the world through a child's eyes, and knowing exactly what she wants to know, can be very hard for an adult. A good way to find out precisely what is confusing the child, which in turn will make it far easier to answer her question, is to ask what she thinks about it or how she thinks it works. This can radically simplify a seemingly all-encompassing question. For example, one three-and-a-half-year-old asked Diane, "How does a car work?" Diane's mind immdiately raced to all the complexities of a combustion engine, most of which she really didn't understand herself. But before she jumped in over both their heads, Diane asked, "How do you think it works?" "Well, I don't think you push it with your feet," the child answered. This greatly simplified Diane's problem as she explained the absolute rudiments of a motor attached to the wheels which causes the car to move. If the child wants more information, she will usually ask further questions. Generally, children hear only as much as they are prepared to hear at a particular point in time and walk away when they become anxious or burdened with information they cannot handle. Always asking if the child understands or has further questions or is upset by something you have said can help weed out the child's misconceptions and keep disturbing information from festering within.

Using diagrams and pictures can sometimes clarify things, or just using words that a child will not misinterpret. A friend of mine was told at the age of five that babies came from an egg in Mommy's tummy that Daddy fertilized. For years she carried around the mental image of Daddy shoveling manure on a chicken egg sitting on Mommy's tummy.

Information about sex is generally met by children with embarrassment and giggles — especially at the beginning. Their reaction may make it even more difficult for us to sensitively answer their questions if we feel they are not serious or are ridiculing us, especially when we are already experiencing discomfort and yet are trying to deal with the issue. It is important to remember that children may pick up our discomfort or may already be aware that this is a private subject and feel awkward and uneasy discussing it even though they are starved for accurate information. However, as you begin to address their questions, children will generally quiet down and listen attentively.

There is no reason to keep children from knowing that sex is an enjoyable, pleasurable activity; that sex is for fun first and for babies second. It makes no sense to hide the physical side of a loving relationship. It is important for children to see their parents embrace, kiss, cuddle, and in general act affectionately toward one another. However, in our culture, this does not mean making love with the children as spectators or participants, though two- to four-year-olds have a fantastic ability to open unlocked doors at precisely the wrong moments. It might be good to let your child know that you and paddy make love in the privacy of your bedroom; that during that time you don't like to be disturbed and any questions and problems can generally wait until afterward. To treat sex with dignity and love rather than to shroud it in awkward and unspeakable mystery is an excellent way of instilling a child with a healthy attitude toward sex.

The pleasure sex provides can be acknowledged rather than ignored. Young girls and boys can be told about a girl's clitoris just as they are told about a boy's penis, so that when they accidentally discover this tiny but pleasurable organ, they don't feel like freaks. Alix Shulman wrote a lovely dialogue about explaining the difference between boys and girls:


Children are innocent and curious. They know no guilt until others instill it in them and sometimes it happens without parents even noticing. Sarah walked in on her four-and-a-half-year-old daughter while she was masturbating and the child began to cry hysterically. She hated herself because she did this and didn't want her mother to see and made her mother promise not to tell anyone. Sarah had no idea how her daughter got these negative feelings at such a young age. She could not remember ever telling her child that it was bad to touch herself.

This illustration makes it only too clear how little control we actually have over what a child hears and sees outside the home. Unless given permission and positive messages about sex from their parents, society, religion, schools, friends, and relatives all too quickly instill negative sex messages. Positive and accepting statements about sex, as opposed to the old oppressive messages, might ultimately improve the child's attitude and approach to sex. Landis et al. found that catching a child in the act of masturbation or making threatening statements about the act induces guilt, but has no effect on the frequency of masturbation. The child will continue to masturbate, but will also feel guilty about it.3 Also, Kinsey's research indicates that a better sexual-orgasmic adjustment to marriage is more probable if the girl has experienced orgasm, by whatever means, prior to marriage.4 These are good reasons not to discourage a child's masturbation.

Children's sexual exploration is like all other areas of exploration. For the child it is a way of learning about her environment and how to make a place for herself within it. Exploration includes urinating while standing up like a boy, wearing make-up like mother, playing doctor with other boys and girls down the street, and exploring sexual feelings with a girlfriend. Physical and loving relationships between two or more girls or two or more boys is a very common and natural part of the growing up process. It does not mean that the child is heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. Each child will have the chance to choose a sexual orientation later on in life. This experimentation is a part of the development process for many children and not a cause for alarm or worry. One should try not to have the child feel abnormal or ashamed about the expression of budding sexual feelings.

Perhaps the most important source of feelings toward sexuality and about a girl's own body comes from messages from her mother. If a mother approaches life positively and freely shares her enthusiasm and love, if she holds aspirations for her daughters which move beyond the confines of traditional roles, then it is likely that the child will develop in a less inhibited, more optimistic, self-sufficient, and independent way.


Footnotes:
1. Ribble, M. "The Infantile Experience in Relation to Personality Development," Personality and the Behavior Disorders. Hunt, J. McV., Ed. New York: Ronald Press, 1944, pp. 621-51.
2. Shulman, Alix. "Organs and Orgasms," Woman in Sexist Society. Gornick, Vivian and Moran, Barbara K., Eds. New York: Signet, New American Library, 1971, p. 293
3. Landis (1940), p. 210.
4. Kinsey, Alfred C., Pomeroy, Wardell B. Martin, Clyde E., and Gebhard, Paul H. Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. New York: Pocket Book, Simon & Schuster, 1953, p. 172

[RoosterDance]

The Pedophile Panic
by Judith Levine


“MONSTROUS” shouted the banner of the Boston Herald on October 4, 1997. For once, the paper’s notoriously hyperbolic headline writers had struck the right tone.1 Three days earlier, ten-year-old Jeffrey Curley of Cambridge had disappeared in the middle of the afternoon while washing his dog outside his grandmother’s house. Now he was dead.

Jeffrey’s neighbor Salvatore Sicari, twenty-one, and Charles Jaynes, twenty-two, of Brockton, had reportedly lured the child into Jaynes’s Cadillac with the promise of a new bike. Sicari, according to his own confession, drove the car while Jaynes wrestled with Jeffrey in the back seat, trying to force him to have sex. For many minutes, the 80-pound boy fought off the 250-plus-pound man; finally, Jeffrey succumbed to the burning suffocation of the gasoline-soaked rag held over his face.

The men loaded the body into the trunk and made their way to a Manchester, New Hampshire, apartment that Jaynes had rented and decorated with children’s posters. In the early hours of the morning, again according to Sicari, Jaynes laid the corpse on the kitchen floor and raped and sodomized it. After that, the men mixed cement in a fifty-gallon storage container, stuffed Jeffrey’s body into it, sprinkled lime on his face to speed decomposition, and traveled north to a bridge in South Berwick, Maine, where they hefted the plastic coffin into the river.

In separate murder trials a year later, each man blamed the other. Sicari was convicted of kidnapping and first-degree murder, for which he received a sentence of life without parole. Jaynes was found guilty of second-degree murder, because the jury could not positively place him at the crime scene. No sex charges were brought. Jaynes protested his innocence to the end, even shouting out during the prosecutor’s final arguments that he had not hurt Jeffrey. His first parole hearing would come after twenty-three years’ incarceration.

The story was terrifying enough to inject freon into the veins of any parent. But terror begs for reason, and while the Curley family struggled to find spiritual lessons in their child’s demise, other parents watched their own kids pedal down the street on their bikes and looked desperately to the authorities to do, to say...something. Everyone wanted to understand how two men could commit such an atrocity against the affable, gap-toothed little guy in a Little League cap who smiled from the front page every day.

Sicari, according to his neighbors, was a menacing punk. He’d been picked up loitering near a schoolyard with cocaine on him, allegedly to sell, and been convicted of punching and kicking the twenty-year-old mother of his then one-year-old son. One of his favorite means of scaring up cash was to steal little kids’ bicycles. Jaynes, who, unlike his accomplice, was employed, nevertheless had a rap sheet and a trail of seventy-five unanswered warrants, mostly for passing bad checks and coaxing other people’s money out of ATMs.

Yet these ordinary criminal pedigrees held no warning of the cruelty the men would inflict on Jeffrey. They surely failed to supply the meaning the Curley family and an increasingly restive community longed for. It did not seem sufficient to call Jeffrey’s murder what it was: an event utterly without sense, a ghastly aberration of high psychopathology, a crime of such rarity as to be, statistically, almost nonexistent. This inexplicable tragedy needed an explanation.

No one needed to look far. Both the media and its audience were adept at fitting any happening—an election, a new food product, a child’s murder—into some sociological “trend,” and every mother and father in America had heard of this one. Experts were on hand to supply analyses, newspaper databases were searched for crimes and criminals similar, or similar enough, to this one. The monsters needed a name, and they got one, in the first phrase of the Boston Herald’s first article on the apprehension of the suspects: “A pair of sexual predators smothered a 10-year-old Cambridge boy....”

How could such a vile event have occurred? It occurred because of the kind of people Salvatore Sicari and Charles Jaynes were: they were sexual predators, “pedophiles.” From hundreds of other articles and television reports, readers already knew that kind of person and were sure these two were not alone in the world.2 Indeed, the men’s photographs, reproduced scores of times atop the hundreds of columns of newsprint the story would command over the next year, suggested a crowd of compatriots, an army of murderers compelled by perverse desire.


The Pedophile: The Myth

Hear the word pedophile and images and ideas flood to mind. Pedophiles are predatory and violent; the criminal codes call their acts sexual attacks and sexual assaults.3 Pedophiles look like Everyman or any man—”a teacher, a doctor, a lawyer, a judge, a scout leader, a police officer, an athletic coach, a religious counselor”4—but their sexuality makes them different from the rest of us, sick: pedophilia is listed in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the canon of psychopathology.5 Pedophiles are insatiable and incurable. ”Statistics show that 95% of the time, anyone who molests a child will likely do it again,” declared an Indiana senator proposing community notification laws for former sex offenders.6 “The only molesters who can be considered permanently cured are those who have been surgically castrated,” Ann Landers once wrote.7

Pedophiles abduct and murder children, and people who abduct and murder children are likely to be pedophiles. “The pedophile who kidnapped Adam from a mall and killed him in 1981....” began a feature on molesters by Boston Herald reporter J. M. Lawrence, following Jeffrey’s killing. He was referring to the still unsolved abduction-murder of six-year-old Adam Walsh, whose case helped spur the creation of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and (some say) the career of his father, John, now the host of The FBI’s Most Wanted. Even if a child survives a liaison with a pedophile, we believe, he will inevitably suffer great harm. “The predatory pedophile is as dangerous as cancer. He works as quietly, and his presence becomes known only by the horrendous damage he leaves,” stated the children’s lawyer and sex-thriller writer Andrew Vachss.

And pedophiles are legion, well-organized, and cunning in eluding detection. ”I believe that we’re dealing with a conspiracy, an organized operation of child predators designed to prevent detection,” Kee MacFarlane, director of the Children’s Institute International in Los Angeles and a premier architect of the satanic-ritual-abuse scare of the 1980s, told Congress in 1984.8 “If such an operation involves child pornography or the selling of children, as is frequently alleged, it may have greater financial, legal, and community resources at its disposal than those attempting to expose it.”9 Ten years later, after a far-reaching national network of state and federal agents had been put in place to track them down, pedophiles were still strangely invisible. “There really aren’t any figures. It’s a hidden offense that often doesn’t come to the surface,” said Debra Whitcomb, director of Massachusetts’ Educational Development Center Inc. In 1994, referring to the “child sexual exploitation” on the Net that her organization had just received a $250,000 government grant to combat.10

Perhaps it is no wonder that in a Mayo Clinic study of anxieties reported to pediatricians, three-quarters of parents were afraid their children would be abducted; a third said it was a “frequent worry,” more frequent than fretting over sports injuries, car accidents, or drugs.11 And no wonder Jeffrey Curley’s murder, the crest of a wave of highly publicized criminal brutality, revived the crusade for capital punishment in Massachusetts, or that it was in this movement, as a spokesman for state-administered revenge, that his father, a firehouse mechanic named Bob, briefly found voice for his unutterable grief.12


The Facts

The problem with all this information about pedophiles is that most of it is not true or is so qualified as to be useless as generalization. First of all, the streets and computer chat rooms are not crawling with child molesters, kidnappers, and murderers. According to police files, 95 percent of allegedly abducted children turn out to be “runaways and throwaways” from home or kids snatched by one of their own parents in divorce custody disputes.13 Studies commissioned under the Missing Children’s Assistance Act of 1984 estimate that between 52 and 158 children will be abducted and murdered by nonfamily members each year.14 Extrapolating from other FBI statistics, those odds come out between 1 in 364,000 and fewer than 1 in 1 million.15 A child’s risk of dying in a car accident is twenty-five to seventy-five times greater.

Fortunately, pedophilic butcheries are even rarer than abduction-murders. For instance, in 1992, the year a paroled New Jersey sex offender raped and killed Megan Kanka, the seven-year-old after whom community-notification statutes were named, nine children under age twelve were the victims of similar crimes, out of over forty-five million in that age group.16 As for Adam Walsh, invoked by the Boston Herald as the victim of molestation murder, no defendant was ever indicted in his disappearance. According to detectives in Hollywood, Florida, where the crime occurred, Adam’s father spread the rumor that the abductor was a pedophile, most prominently in a much-quoted book about child molesters, although there was neither suspicion nor evidence of sex in the case.17

Molestations, abductions, and murders of children by strangers are rare. And, say the FBI and social scientists, such crimes are not on the rise.18 Some researchers even believe that some forms of molestation, such as exhibitionism, might be declining.19

There are, moreover, few so-called pedophiles in the population, though it is hard to say how few. “I write `1, 5, 21, 50' on the board and ask my students, `Which is the percentage of pedophiles in the country?’” said Paul Okami, in the University of California at Los Angeles psychology department, who has analyzed the data on pedophilia in America. “The answer is all of them.” That’s because a “pedophile,” depending on the legal statute, the perception of the psychologist, or the biases of the journalist, can be anything from a college freshman who has once masturbated with a fantasy of a twelve-year-old in mind to an adult who has had sexual contact with an infant.20

As for the “pure” clinical species, Okami believes that the proportion of Americans whose primary erotic focus is prepubescent children hovers around 1 percent. Estimating from lists of so-called pedophile rings, arrest records, and his own experience, David Techter, the former editor of the Chicago-based pedophile newsletter Wonderland, put the number at “maybe 100,000.”21 Criminal records do not indicate there are large or growing numbers of pedophiles. Even as the age of consent has risen and arrests for lower-level sex crimes have increased dramatically,22 arrests for rape and other sex offenses, including those against children, still constituted only about 1 percent of all arrests in 1993.23

Pedophiles are not generally violent, unless you are using the term sexual violence against children in a moral, rather than a literal, way. Its perpetrators very rarely use force or cause physical injury in a youngster.24 In fact, what most pedophiles do with children could not be further from Charles Jaynes’s alleged necrophilic abominations. Bringing themselves down to the maturity level of children rather than trying to drag the child up toward an adult level, many men who engage in sex with children tend toward kissing, mutual masturbation, or “hands-off” encounters such as voyeurism and exhibitionism.25

Indeed, say some psychologists, there may be no such thing as a “typical” pedophile, if there is such a thing as a pedophile at all. Qualities by which social scientists and the police have marked him, such as his purported shyness or childhood sexual trauma, do not bear out with statistical significance.26 More important, sexual contact with a child does not a pedophile make. “The majority of reported acts of sexual abuse of children are not committed by pedophiles,” but by men in relationships with adult women and men, said John Money, of Johns Hopkins, a preeminent expert on sexual abnormalities.27 They are men like Charles Jaynes, who wrote in his journal about a fast crush on a “beautiful boy” with “a lovely tan and crystal-blue eyes” and in whose car police found literature from the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) but who had an adult girlfriend and was rumored to be lovers with Sicari, who also had a girlfriend.28

In other words, there may be nothing fundamental about a person that makes him a “pedophile.” So-called pedophiles do not have some genetic, or incurable, disease. Men who desire children can change their behavior to conform with the norms of a society that reviles it. Pedophilia can be renounced; in the medical language we now use to describe this sexual proclivity, it can be “cured.” Indeed, contrary to politicians’ claims, the recidivism rates of child sex offenders are among the lowest in the criminal population. Analyses of thousands of subjects in hundreds of studies in the United States and Canada have found that about 13 percent of sex offenders are rearrested, compared with 74 percent of all prisoners.29 With treatment, the numbers are even better. The state of Vermont, for example, reported in 1995 that its reoffense rates after treatment were only 7 percent for pedophiles, 3 percent for incest perpetrators, and 3 percent for those who had committed “hands-off” crimes such as exhibitionism.30


The Enemy Is Us

All this rational talk may mean nothing to a parent. Nine in forty five million children are raped and murdered: slim odds, sure, but if it happens to your baby, who cares about the statistics? Still, most parents manage to put irrational fears in perspective. Why, in spite of all information to the contrary, do Americans insist on believing that pedophiles are a major peril to their children? What do people fear so formidably?

Our culture fears the pedophile, say some social critics, not because he is a deviant, but because he is ordinary. And I don’t mean because he is the ice-cream man or Father Patrick. No, we fear him because he is us. In his elegant study of “the culture of child molesting,” the literary critic James Kincaid traced this terror back to the middle of the nineteenth century. Then, he said, Anglo-American culture conjured childhood innocence, defining it as a desireless subjectivity, at the same time as it constructed a new ideal of the sexually desirable object. The two had identical attributes—softness, cuteness, docility, passivity—and this simultaneous cultural invention has presented us with a wicked psychosocial problem ever since. We relish our erotic attraction to children, says Kincaid (witness the child beauty pageants in which JonBenét Ramsey was entered). But we also find that attraction abhorrent (witness the public shock and disgust at JonBenét’s “sexualization” in those pageants). So we project that eroticized desire outward, creating a monster to hate, hunt down, and punish.31

In her classic 1981 study, Father-Daughter Incest, feminist-psychologist Judith Lewis Herman suggested another source of self-revulsion that might lead us to project outward. Child abuse, she said, is close to home, built into the structure of the “normal,” “traditional” family. Take the family’s paternal authority enforced through violence, along with its feminine and child submission, its prohibitions against sexual talk and touch, and its privacy sanctified and inviolable, she said. Add repressed desire, and the potential of incest festers, waiting to happen.32

Herman’s work was at the front edge of a horrifying suspicion, the truth of which is now firmly established. Even if child-sex crimes against strangers are rare, incest is not. Like pedophilia, it’s hard to say how common it is, since incest figures are almost as muddied as those of adult-child sex outside the family. On one hand, child abuse statistics are notoriously unreliable; for example, of the 319,000 reports of sexual abuse of children in 1993, two-thirds were unsubstantiated.33 The expansion of the definitions of family members, the ages of people considered children, and the types of interactions labeled abuse have jacked up incest figures. So has the popular suspicion of incest as an invisible source of later psychological distress, especially among women. Since the 1980s, self-help authors have claimed that you don’t even have to remember a sexual event to know it occurred. “If you think you were abused and your life shows the symptoms, then you were,” wrote Ellen Bass in The Courage to Heal.34 The symptoms of past molestation listed in such books range from asthma to neglect of one’s teeth.35

On the other hand, professionals under the influence of Freud have denied the existence of incest for decades, interpreting children’s reports of real seductions as oedipal fantasies, and still may count only cases involving physical coercion, discounting the inestimable pressures on children to yield to a parent’s sexual advances out of dependency, fear, loyalty, or love.

At any rate, reliable sources show that more than half, and some say almost all, of sexual abuse is visited upon children by their own family members or parental substitutes.36 The federal government recorded over 217,000 cases in 1993 (fewer than the media hysteria would indicate, but still plenty).37 Research confirms what is intuitively clear: that the worst devastation is wrought not by sex per se but by the betrayal of the child’s fundamental trust. And the closer the relation, the more forced or intimate the sex acts, and the longer and later in a child’s life they persist, the more hurtful is the immediate trauma and longer-lasting the harm of incest. Incest is a qualitatively different experience from sex with a nonfamily adult; almost inevitably, the former is a lot worse.38 Even those who don’t buy Kincaid’s claim that the cultural “we” are drooling over the prepubescent Macaulay Culkin cavorting through Home Alone in his underpants or Herman’s metaphor of the family as incest incubator might be surprised to find that their own secret yearnings could be illegal. The vast majority of so-called pedophiles do not go out and ravage small children. So-called criminals are most often caught not touching but looking at something called child pornography (which I will get to in a moment). And their desired objects are not “children” but adolescents, about the age of the model Kate Moss at the start of her modeling career.39 “The clients are usually white, suburban, married businessmen who want a blow job from a teenage boy but don’t consider themselves gay, and heterosexual men who seek out young girls,” said Edith Springer, who worked for many years with teenage prostitutes in New York’s Times Square. “I have never in all my years of therapy and counseling come across what the media advertise as a ‘pedophile.’”

Psychologists and law enforcers call the man who loves teenagers a hebophile. That’s a psychiatric term, denoting pathological sexual deviance. But if we were to diagnose every American man for whom Miss (or Mr.) Teenage America was the optimal sex object, we’d have to call ourselves a nation of perverts. If the teenage body were not the culture’s ideal of sexiness, junior high school girls probably would not start starving themselves as soon as they notice a secondary sex characteristic, and the leading lady (on-screen or in life) would not customarily be twenty to forty years younger than the leading man. I asked Meg Kaplan, a widely respected clinician who treats sex offenders at the New York State Psychiatric Institute’s Sexual Behavior Clinic, about the medicalization and criminalization of the taste for adolescent flesh. “Show me a heterosexual male who’s not attracted to teenagers,” she snorted. “Puh-leeze.”

Rather than indict our Monday night football buddies, rather than indict the family, though, we circle the wagons and project danger outward. “Screen out anyone who might be damaging to your child. Whenever possible, assume childcare responsibilities,” the FBI’s Kenneth Lanning advised the readers of Life. “Tell your kids that if an adult seems too good to be true, maybe he is.”40


Genealogy of a Monster

Days after Jeffrey Curley’s murder, the Boston Herald was fulfilling its public duty to provide sound-bite cultural analysis. “sexually oriented Internet chat rooms, the proliferation of sexual situations on TV, and easy access to hard-core pornography are creating more damaged children and possibly the next generation of pedophiles,” opined one “expert.” Another blamed welfare reform, which sent single mothers to work, leaving their kids to fend on their own. “And there are always child molesters looking for these kids.”41

Dire assessments of a morally anarchic world are not new. But they tend to crop up in times of social transformation, when the economy trembles or when social institutions crumble and many people feel they’re losing control of their jobs, their futures, or their children’s lives. At times like these, the childmolesting monster can be counted on to creep from the rubble.

He first showed his grizzly face in modern Anglo-American history at the height of industrialization, in the late nineteenth century. In the cities and mill towns, poor and working-class children and adolescents left their homes and went out to work, where they met with new opportunities for sexual pleasure and new sources of sexual and economic pain. The young working girl’s pleasures—to dance, flirt, or engage in casual prostitution to augment her meager wages—offended Victorian and religious morals. Her pains—exploitation and harassment in the factories, rape, disease, and unwed motherhood—outraged feminists and socioeconomic reformers. The English writer Henry Worsley called the factory a “school of iniquity” producing in the child an unseemly “precocity” about “the adult world and its pleasures.”42 The press, eager to heat up these simmering sensitivities, ”discovered” in the gutters a marketplace in which venal capitalism fornicated with sexual license. This commerce was called white slavery.

In 1885, the popular tabloid Pall Mall Gazette introduced London’s readers to the “white slaver.” Its sensationalist series “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,” one of the most successful “exposés” in journalistic history, told of a black market in which virgin girls were sold by their hapless mothers to wicked neighborhood procuresses, who in turn prostituted them to eager, amoral “gentlemen.” The articles ignited one of the greatest moral panics in modern British history.43

When a similar panic took hold in America a decade or so later, it had literally a different complexion. Waves of immigrants from China, southern Europe, and Ireland, as well as blacks from the South, were pouring into the cities. And while African chattel slavery had been abolished, racism was hardly dead. “White slavery” was so named to denote that its alleged victims were of northern European descent (the institutionalized rape of African slaves would not be acknowledged until a century later). Meanwhile, the sexual salesmen described in almost all accounts of “white slavery” were swarthy-sinister almost by definition-Jews, Italians, and Greeks.44

Although adult prostitution did flourish in the new industrial cities, the trade in children on either side of the Atlantic was virtually an invention.45 The Gazette’s editor, it turned out, had engineered the abduction of the “five-pound virgin” (referring to her price, not her weight) around whom his expose was built;45 “the throngs of child prostitutes” claimed by London’s anti-white-slavery campaigners were “imaginary products of sensational journalism intended to capture the attention of a prurient Victorian public,” according to the historian Judith Walkowitz.47 Rates of American prostitution were also hugely inflated: one figure reported in the New York suffragist press was multiplied tenfold from probable reality.48 Nevertheless, both moral campaigns led to a spate of sex restrictive legislation. Following the “Maiden Tribute” articles, the British age of consent rose from thirteen to sixteen.49 In America, between 1886 and 1895, twenty-nine states raised theirs from as low as seven to as high as eighteen.50 Some of the laws, like the British criminalization of homosexuality, stayed on the books into the late twentieth century.

As the twentieth century progressed, the sex monster went into hibernation. He was briefly roused during the Depression, when widespread financial failure threatened an epidemic of foundering masculine confidence and sparked suspicions of a compensatory “hypermasculinity” that would burst out in pathological desires for young bodies.51 The child molester slumbered again, however, when World War II gave America a real enemy, and no little debauchery was tolerated both stateside, between the women and high schoolers left to run the factories, and near the front, where single and married fighting men took sexual R&R with the residents of the war’s scarred cities.52

When the war ended, however, it was time to get gender and the family back to "normal." Men had to resume the breadwinning and women the bread baking. The homosexual culture that had seen its first sparks in the barracks and soldiers’ bars had to be extinguished.53 And teenagers, who had enjoyed a taste of adult wage earning and adult sexual license during the wars and the Depression, had to be dispatched back to childhood. Lingering resistance required an antidote: a social menace to make the renewed old order more attractive. And before FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and Senator Joseph McCarthy began painting that menace red, they set their sites on pink: the first targets of their inquests were homosexuals in the State Department. The hounded homosexuals in high places stood as a public example of (and to) perverts allegedly on the loose everywhere. The photomontage running beside Hoover’s famous 1947 article "How Safe Is Your Daughter?" announced the return of the sex monster: three white girls in fluffy dresses and ankle socks fleeing from a huge, hovering masculine hand. "The nation’s women and children will never be secure," the caption read, inserting a heart-stopping ellipsis "... so long as degenerates run wild."54

During this time, psychology was establishing itself as a profession, the apex of a centuries-long process by which the management of social deviance shifted from the purview of preachers to that of clinicians. Modern case books gave the monster a new name: the "sexual psychopath," compelled to molest children by "uncontrolled and uncontrollable desires."55 By the mid-1950s, prewar anxieties about masculinity had zeroed in on sex between men, and in both the academy and the public imagination the psychopath took on the stereotypic characteristics of the homosexual, and vice versa. Boys were alerted never to enter public toilets alone. And after every grisly crime against a child, the gay bars were sure to be raided.56 As they had a half century earlier, the headlines rang out alarms of a crime wave against children: "Kindergarten Girl Accosted by Man," "9 Charges against Molester of Girls," "What Shall We Do about Sex Offenders?"57 But also like the panic of that earlier era, this one reflected no actual increase in violent sex crimes against children. Nevertheless, commissions were empaneled, new laws were passed, and arrests increased. Whereas most of these, like most arrests today, were for minor offenses such as flashing or consensual homosexual sex,58 a few highly publicized violent crimes drew a clangor of public demand for dragnets, vigilante squads, life imprisonment, indefinite incarceration in mental institutions, castration, and execution of the psycho killers,59 all of which were revived in the 1980s and 1990s.

During the 1960s and 1970s, sex panic gave way to sexual liberation, including, for a brief moment, the notion that children had a right to sexual expression. "Sex is a natural appetite," wrote Heidi Handman and Peter Brennan in 1974, in Sex Handbook: Information and Help for Minors. "If you’re old enough to want to have sex, you’re old enough to have it."60 But as women’s and children’s sexual options were proclaimed, their experiences of coercion were also thrown into relief. Feminists started speaking out against sexual violence under the cloak of family and romantic intimacy; suspicion grew that child sexual abuse was epidemic. An industry of therapists specializing in unearthing past abuse and curing its purported effects began to prosper.

The cold war was melting into detente; for the first time in living memory, Americans were bereft of national enemies and native subversives. The new political-therapeutic alliance unearthed the same old nemesis to children’s sexual innocence and safety. But, in the age of media, the old white slaver-child molester wore a modern hat. Now, besides kidnapping and ravishing children, he was taking their pictures and selling them for profit. The pedophile had taken up a sideline as a pornographer.



The Modern Monster

The child pornographer, when he first came to public light in 1976, was a feeble beast and an even worse businessman. In fact, he was almost bankrupt. Raids aimed at cleaning up Times Square for the Democratic Convention uncovered only a minuscule cache of kiddie porn.61 But those few stacks of dusty, decades-old black-and-white rags, already illegal, were enough to launch a crusade. It was led by a team that would epitomize the anti-child-porn forces: a child psychiatrist, Judianne Densen-Gerber, who founded the drug-rehabilitation empire Odyssey House in New York, and a vice cop, Sergeant Lloyd Martin, of the Los Angeles Police Department.

The two careened from sea to sea, stoking outsized claims. Before a congressional committee in 1977, Densen-Gerber estimated that 1.2 million children were victims of child prostitution and pornography, including "snuff" films in which they were killed for viewers’ titillation.62 Martin traveled the country orating speeches of evangelical fervor, warning America on one Christian television show, for instance, that "pedophiles actually wait for babies to be born so that, just minutes after birth, they can grab the post-fetuses and sexually victimize them."63 At that 1977 congressional committee, he declared that the sexual exploitation of children was "worse than homicide."64

Within a few years, police testified that child porn had never been more than a boutique business even in its modest heyday in the late 1960s. The first law wiped out what little kiddie porn remained on the street, and by the early 1980s, the head of the New York Police Department’s Public Morals Division proclaimed the stuff "as rare as the Dead Sea Scrolls."65 The 1.2 million figure, which Densen-Gerber subsequently doubled,66 was revealed to be the arbitrarily quadrupled estimate of an unsubstantiated number one author said he’d "thrown out" to get a reaction from the law enforcement community.67 Densen-Gerber would soon slip from the public eye under suspicions of embezzling public monies and employing coercive and humiliating methods at Odyssey House.68 Martin would later be removed from his post at the LAPD for harassing witnesses and falsifying evidence.69

But their work had been accomplished. The press continued to broadcast their bogus statistics. And hardly a year after Densen-Gerber’s first press conference, Congress passed the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation Act of 1977, prohibiting the production and commercial distribution of obscene depictions of children younger than sixteen. One of the first casualties was Show Me!, a sex education book for prepubescent children featuring explicit photographs of children, from around six to their early teens, engaged in sex play. When it was published in 1970, the book was showered with awards. Under the new restrictions on "child pornography," it became illegal to publish, distribute, and, eventually, even to own anywhere in the United States.

Then, in 1979, a six-year-old middle-class white boy named Etan Patz turned the corner on his way to school in lower Manhattan and was never seen again. Two years later, six-year-old Adam Walsh’s head was found floating in a Florida canal. Federal and private money began funneling toward a newly named victim, the Missing and Exploited Child. Soon, hundreds of "missing children" were beseeching would-be rescuers from the containers of that quintessentially maternal food, milk. Local police departments set up child-finding units, which distributed pamphlets and dispatched trainers and speakers. Parents and teachers were getting the message: the molester-kidnapper was everywhere.

Most frightening, he was lurking where the most vulnerable children were sent for nurture and safekeeping: nursery school. And he had joined up with an omnipotent ally: none other than Satan. In 1984, the media started following breathlessly as the trial unfolded in southern California of Peggy Buckey, the elderly proprietor of the McMartin Preschool, and her son Ray, a beloved teacher. The two had been accused by three-year-olds of bizarre tortures—anal rape with knives and pencils, animal mutilation, oral sex performed on clowns—"satanic ritual abuse" allegedly carried out in broad daylight in open-door classrooms, where parents and other teachers could walk in at any time.

No child had volunteered any such story until being interviewed by Kee MacFarlane and her team of social workers at the Children’s Institute International in Los Angeles, and the videotapes of these interviews revealed bewildered and resistant babies being hectored into assenting to the narratives fed them by their interrogators. Indeed, by the end of the longest and most expensive criminal trial in U.S. history, it was the tapes themselves that exonerated the Buckeys. But eerily identical tales began to surface in schools across the nation.70 In 1994, the U.S. government’s National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect reported on its five-year survey of eleven thousand psychiatric and police workers nationwide, covering the more than twelve thousand accusations of satanic ritual abuse. The investigation found "not a single case where there was clear corroborating evidence," not a single snapshot or negative of the alleged rolls and rolls of child pornography produced by the deviants.71 But new accusations, all unsupported, kept coming. The latest were in Wenatchee, Washington, in 1995, where forty-three people were accused of some twenty-nine thousand counts of sexual abuse involving sixty children, all without a shred of evidence.72 At the beginning of the new millennium, many innocents are still behind bars.73

Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker argued in Satan’s Silence that the day-care abuse scares tapped popular anxieties about women working outside the home and leaving their children with others. But these fears were given shape and heft by a certain world view, which was attached to a certain political agenda. It was that of the religious Right (who believed that Satan literally walked the earth), with the cautious endorsement of feminist sexual conservatives—the same bedfellows who would lie down together in the 1986 Meese commission.

As anthropologist Carole S. Vance pointed out, the Meese commission was not inclined to recommend any policies that feminists would champion, such as aid to women who wanted to leave abusive men or legal protections of sex workers from violence and economic exploitation. Rather, it erected a broad federal network to chase and prosecute symbolic assaults on its own ideas of morality, that is, on smut peddlers. But its offensive against adult pornography failed to generate heartfelt support in the heartland. Several municipal antipornography ordinances crafted by its prime feminist confederates, Catharine McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, had already fallen to constitutional challenge. Prosecutors backed off bringing obscenity cases against "adult" material, which were almost impossible to win.

Right-wing organizations that had long fought for censorship of erotica were determined to stay the course. Shrewdly, they abandoned their old maiden in distress, "decency," and took up the cause of "families and children." Citizens for Decency Through Law (founded in 1957 by that paragon of decency through law, savings-and-loan swindler Charles Keating) became the Children’s Legal Foundation, which metamorphosed into the National Family Legal Foundation. Reverend Donald Wildmon’s National Federation for Decency became the American Family Association, and the National Coalition Against Pornography (N-CAP) spun off the National Law Center for Children and Families. The Justice Department’s National Obscenity Enforcement Unit, set up after the Meese commission, was rechristened the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section. The wide, fat enemy "pornography" began to fade from view. Now both antiporn feminist and conservative propaganda aimed at the sleaker "hard-core," the scarier "child pornography."

And where was this new pornographer? Densen-Gerber and Martin had been unable to run him down on the urban streets. He’d eluded capture in the suburban childcare centers. Now, said his pursuers, the fugitive had found his way to everywhere and nowhere. He was on the Internet, where he had joined a vast club that zipped pictures of copulating kids among them, sidled up to children in chat rooms, and enticed them into real-world motels and malls. With the family room connected by a mere modem to the wild open cyberspaces, even the home was no longer safe. As the cover of one "family-values" magazine blared, "CYBERPORN STEALS HOME."



Snared in the Web

In spite of proud FBI claims, many lawyers and journalists, including me, suspect that the child pornographer is the same penny-ante presence online as he was in Times Square. Bruce Selcraig, a government investigator of child pornography during the 1980s who went online in 1996 as a journalist to review the situation, concluded the same. In the cyberspeech debate, he said, the dissemination of child porn amounted to "a tuna-sized red herring."74

Aficionados and vice cops concede that practically all the sexually explicit images of children circulating cybernetically are the same stack of yellowing pages found at the back of those X-rated shops, only digitized. These pictures tend to be twenty to fifty years old, made overseas, badly re-reproduced, and for the most part pretty chaste. That may be why federal agents almost never show journalists the contraband. But when I got a peek at a stash downloaded by Don Huycke, the national program manager for child pornography at the U.S. Customs Service, in 1995, I was underwhelmed. Losing count after fifty photos, I’d put aside three that could be called pornographic: a couple of shots of adolescents masturbating and one half-dressed twelve-year-old spreading her legs in a position more like a gymnast’s split than split beaver. The rest tended to be like the fifteen-year-old with a 1950s bob and an Ipana grin, sitting up straight, naked but demure, or the two towheaded six-year olds in underpants, astride their bikes.

So when these old pictures show up on the Net, who’s putting them there? Attorney Lawrence Stanley, who published in the Benjamin A. Cardozo Law Review what is widely considered the most thorough research of child pornography in the 1980s, concluded that the pornographers were almost exclusively cops. In 1990 at a southern California police seminar, the LAPD’s R. P. "Toby" Tyler proudly announced as much. The government had shellacked the competition, he said; now law enforcement agencies were the sole reproducers and distributors of child pornography.75 Virtually all advertising, distribution, and sales to people considered potential lawbreakers were done by the federal government, in sting operations against people who have demonstrated (through, for instance, membership in NAMBLA) what agents regard as a predisposition to commit a crime. These solicitations were usually numerous and did not cease until the recipient took the bait. "In other words, there was no crime until the government seduced people into committing one," Stanley wrote.76

If, as police claim, looking at child porn inspires molesters to go out and seduce living children, why were the feds doing the equivalent of distributing matches to arsonists? Their answer is: to stop the molesters before they strike again. Newspaper reports of arrests uniformly follow the same pattern: a federal agent poses as a minor online, hints at a desired meeting or agrees to one should the mark suggest it, and then arrests the would-be molester when he shows up.77 But another logical answer to the almost exclusive use of stings to arrest would-be criminals is that the government, frustrated with the paucity of the crime they claim is epidemic and around which huge networks of enforcement operations have been built, have to stir the action to justify their jobs.

The same logic can explain why the volume of anti-child-porn legislation has increased annually. From a relatively simple criminalization of production and distribution, the law eventually went after possession and then even viewing of child-erotic images at somebody else’s house. It raised the age of a "child" from sixteen to eighteen and defined as pornography pictures in which the subject is neither naked, nor doing anything sexual, nor, under the 1996 Child Pornography Prevention Act, is even an actual child. Legislation that was first justified as a protection of real children has evolved to statutes criminalizing the depiction of any person engaged in sexual activity who is intended to look like a minor. That may be a young-looking Asian adult woman lasciviously sucking a lollipop. Or she may also be a computer-generated image created by manipulating pixels until an adult morphs into a child or a child appears to be performing a sex act.78

Such bills have almost invariably been sponsored by conservative Republicans with support from right-wing and fundamentalist Christian organizations and antipornography feminists. And even while some legislators privately express doubts that they protect children, these proposals are unstoppable. "When the Senate votes on child issues, they’re all on one side," Patrick Trueman, a lobbyist for the American Family Association and former head of justice Department’s National Obscenity Enforcement Unit, told me in 1989. "We got the toughest law in 1988"—the Child Protection and Enforcement Act—"because it had the words child exploitation in it, though most of it was directed to adult pornography." So, have the government’s efforts worked to round up dangerous pedophiles?

In 1995, the FBI launched its child-pornography task force Innocent Images, which trains special agents under a congressional grant of ten million dollars to rout out pedophiles on the Net. From 1996 to 2000, the unit initiated 2,609 cases. But barely 20 percent of those generated indictments, with just 17 percent resulting in convictions.79 The FBI’s Peter Gullotta told James Kincaid that Innocent Images had achieved 439 convictions since 1995. How were these criminals found? "It’s like fishing in a pond full of hungry fish," Gullotta told Kincaid. "Every time you put a line with live bait in there, you’re going to get one."80 This might sound like inducement (especially to journalists like myself, who have talked to the fish)—the same tactics that Stanley described in the 1980s, only updated from snail mail to e-mail.81

The federal government’s biggest success to date concluded in August 2001, with the arrest of the two owners of Landslide Productions, Inc., and one hundred of their customers in Fort Worth, Texas. Landslide maintained a profitable pornography Web site that offered, in addition to adult porn, links to foreign sites that contain images considered child pornography under U.S. law. The two owners were arrested for possession and distribution, not production, of child pornography, and the subscribers were arrested for possession. While one of these customers was identified as a "registered child sex offender" and another as having been convicted of four "sex crimes" in the past, none arrested in this operation was indicted for abuse of an actual child. To draw out the child porn aficionados from among the site’s 250,000 mostly law-abiding subscribers, the government advertised sales of child-pornographic tapes and CD-ROMs under the name of the company, which it had seized in 1999. When a person placed an order, a package was sent and the buyer arrested on its delivery.

Although the shutdown of one site and the arrest of one hundred customers took four years and engaged unnumbered justice Department agents, as well as thirty federally financed local task forces nationwide, U.S. Postal Service Inspector General Kenneth Weaver claimed that Landslide was "the tip of the iceberg" in what the New York Times paraphrased as "a growing market for child pornography via the Internet."82 The story was front-page news in every market I checked, and the Times ran it in the spot reserved for the day’s most important story, the top right-hand column.

Were these customers predisposed to crime, besides the illegal act of looking at images of minors who might or might not be engaging in sex? According to the FBI’s Gullotta when he spoke to Kincaid, the typical catch has no previous criminal record. Almost no such case goes to trial; the defendants plead guilty. The government calls this more evidence of guilt.83 But, again, closer examination of such cases (in fact, of most child abuse charges) reveals that pleas are often taken under advice of counsel to eliminate the chance of a long prison sentence and also to limit the personal destruction that publicity wreaks even if the accused is exonerated.84

Unfortunately, plea bargains, because they lack the details of depositions, interrogations at trial, and the defense’s version of events, make it almost impossible to tell what the person is accused of doing, much less whether he did it. Federal statistics aren’t much help. According to Kincaid, neither the FBI nor the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children now keeps track of how many children are actually lured to danger after online assignations, the feared eventuality that motivates these operations. Journalists are frustrated by more than insufficient data, though. In 1995, while I covered the story of the first man convicted for possession of "lascivious" videotapes of minors who were neither naked nor doing anything sexual, I arrived at the justice Department in Washington, D.C., only to learn that my scheduled viewing of the evidence had been canceled because, well, the tapes were illegal. Exposing the models to my eyes, an agent told me, would criminally harm them (I later learned that portions of the tapes had aired on Court TV). I drove six hours to western Pennsylvania, where the court clerk set me up with a VCR, and I yawned through hours of badly filmed images no racier than a Bahamas tourism commercial. Similar restrictions were placed on reportage of the Landslide investigation. According to the Times, "the authorities did not release the addresses of the actual [foreign] sites" allegedly offering child-pornographic images, and the only models described were two British siblings, a girl and a boy, ages eight and six.85 But agents did not reveal whether these children were photographed engaging in sexual activity, and journalists were obviously unable to inspect the images themselves. In 1999, thirty-two-year veteran radio journalist Larry Matthews was sentenced to eighteen months in federal prison for receiving and transmitting a child-pornographic image in the process of reporting a story on child-porn chat rooms. In fact, prosecutors were alerted to his activities when he reported what he called "terrible things"—the posting by a mother apparently offering up her children for sex with adults.86

Statistics that I got from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 1996 indicated that the feared eventuality that motivates all this activity had rarely come to pass. Only twenty-three minors were enticed to malls and hotel rooms by their adult suitors between 1994 and 1996, none of these "children" was under thirteen, and most were at least a couple of years older than that. A 2001 survey conducted by the University of New Hampshire found that almost a fifth of ten- to seventeen-year-olds who went online received sexual solicitations from "strangers," an unspecified number of whom may have been adults. However, it would be hard to impute widespread harm to these experiences. Three-quarters of the youth said they were not distressed by the posts. And, wrote the researchers, "no youth in the sample was actually sexually assaulted as a result of contacts made over the Internet."87 As for pedophiles caught in the act, as far as I can gather only one such case has occurred: the infamous Orchid Club, whose members took turns having sex with a child in front of videocams that broadcast their doings to their compatriots in real time.88 This act of sexual violence was already a crime before child porn law and remains so, as it should.

Meanwhile, local authorities have dived enthusiastically into the broadening legal definitions of smut, with the result that more and more citizens are finding themselves entangled with the law for making and keeping truly innocent images. In the early 1990s, the Nebraska attorney general ordered a local policeman to burn nine thousand slides, each of an individual naked child, assembled by psychologist William Farrall to be used with the penile plethysmograph, an instrument that measures sexual arousal. Psychologists employed the pictures along with the device to assess the progress of thousands of sex offenders in treatment nationwide.89 After the passage of The Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996, Oklahoma police seized a copy of the film of Günter Grass’s Nobel Prize-winning The Tin Drum from a video rental store because of an inexplicit scene in the movie in which a man who refuses to grow out of his child’s body (to avoid participating in fascism) performs what some construed as oral sex on an adult woman. And in the 1990s, cases proliferated in which clerks in photo-developing shops, instructed to alert the police of any "suspicious" pictures, flagged such classic "bear rug" shots as moms in the tub with their babies, which led to the arrests of the photographers, and worse.90 In New York, Fotomat employees reported nude shots of a six-year-old son taken by a photography student. The father was handcuffed and taken from his home, while his children were rushed out in their pajamas to be examined for sexual abuse. No evidence of abuse was found, and the man was not brought to trial. But he was barred from his home for two months and forbidden to see his youngest daughter. Cynthia Stewart, an Oberlin, Ohio, mother, was nabbed when a photograph of her eight-year-old daughter in the bath was fingered as "pornographic" by a photo-shop clerk. Stewart escaped prosecution (and potential imprisonment) only after agreeing to state publicly that two of her pictures could be interpreted as "sexually oriented" and allowing prosecutors to destroy them; she also consented to participate in six months of anti-abuse counseling. Although she found the smarmy implications of these measures abhorrent, she complied in order to save her daughter the trauma of a trial.91



False Security​

Civil libertarians have called these laws unconstitutionally vague: a reasonable person can’t know in advance if he is breaking them. They’ve diverted millions of taxpayer dollars from real child welfare and created an atmosphere of puritanical surveillance over all U.S. citizens in the dubious name of catching a small number of people who, if left alone, might do nothing more harmful to minors than sit around and masturbate to pictures of ten-year-olds in bathing suits.

But the legislative legacy of the child-abuse panic has done more than abridge the First Amendment. For Americans convicted of any sex crime, legislation passed in the 1990s arguably constitutes cruel and unusual, and perpetual, punishment. By 1999, according to the Center for Missing and Exploited Children, all fifty states had enacted "Megan’s laws," requiring paroled sex offender registration and community notification; more stringent laws win states more federal crime-fighting funds.92 In many states, parolees are required to register regardless of the nature of their crime. In 2001, a judge in Corpus Christi, Texas, ordered twenty-one registered offenders to post "DANGER: Registered Sex Offender" notices on their homes and cars.93

Sweeping over individual differences, politicians routinely refer to the former convicts as sexual predators, a phrase connoting insatiable appetite and sharp teeth. But as the rhetoric mounted during the 1990s, even predator wasn’t scary enough. Following Kansas’s lead in 1994, "sexually violent predator" laws spread across the states, which allowed the indefinite incarceration in psychiatric facilities of sex criminals who had completed prison sentences but were deemed likely to commit another crime.94 To qualify as a sexually violent predator, the convict had to manifest a "mental abnormality" or "personality disorder," diagnoses about as exact as "a real fruitcake" and as common as compulsive eating. They were also remarkably reminiscent of the "uncontrollable desires" of the 1950s.95

Those who work with sex offenders have warned that such policies might do no good and even could do harm. For one thing, former sex offenders are at far lower risk of committing new crimes than those released from prison after serving time for other crimes.96 Nevertheless, rage against sex criminals is often far greater, and community notification laws serve to focus that rage. Since their inception, such programs have fueled harassment and vigilantism,97 which further isolate and unnerve the parolee, leading to the exact opposite of the law’s intended effect. "You ban somebody from the community, he has no friends, he feels bad about himself, and you reinforce the very problems that contribute to the sex abuse behavior in the first place," Robert Freeman-Longo, former director of the Safer Society Program and president of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, told me. "You make him a better sex offender."

Some criminal-justice practices, moreover, seem to have no other intent but to keep the public on the edge of its seats. During the summer of 1997, California’s Justice Department set up a sort of side-show booth at state fairs featuring an LED screen that endlessly scrolled the names of the state’s registered sex offenders, along with their addresses-sixty-four thousand in all. What the shocked viewers did not know was that because registration in that state covered crimes committed as far back as the 1940s, many of the "predators" on the list had been arrested for victimless misdemeanors like soliciting a prostitute or cruising a man in a gay bar.98 Tom Masters, program director of correctional treatment services at Oregon State Hospital, described such policymaking succinctly: "A lot of crime legislation is a function of politics, and not of rehabilitation or community safety."

Nor, I would add, is it a function of community sanity. In 1984, at the beginning of the sex-lawmaking frenzy, the authors of the final report on U.S. Senator William V. Roth’s Child Pornography and Pedophilia hearings noted what they called a paradox. "Good laws often lead to more arrests," they wrote, "thus making it appear that more new laws are needed to curb what the public perceives as an increase in crime."99 Nevertheless, the commissioners recommended more laws, which led to more bureaucracy, more agents, more investigations, and more arrests. And that, said Eric Lotke of the National Center for Institutions and Alternatives, created another paradox: the public felt falsely safer and also more fearful.

Lynn Johnston, in the comic strip "For Better or For Worse," described the sadness and bafflement that can accompany these contradictory feelings. In a strip at the end of the 1990s, John, the father, amiably chats with a five-year-old at the supermarket. Her panicked mother swoops down the aisle. "VANESSA!!!" she cries. "Don’t talk to that man ... we don’t know who he is!!!" Back at home, John’s wife comforts him as he holds his own toddler in his lap. "She was just protecting her child, honey," says Elly. "I know," John answers. "It’s just that now and then I hate the world we’re living in." The reader was left to infer what about the world this archetypal baby boomer hated, the pedophiles or the paranoia.

Vanessa’s mother was doing the "right thing," according to the local police who would have spoken at her daughter’s school. But for the child’s sake, it was the wrong thing. Panic about adult-child sex, like panic about anything, prompts fewer right decisions than wrong ones, and the wrong ones can be breathtakingly wrong. Attorney General Janet Reno’s decision to lay siege to the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, was based in part on rumors of child abuse going on inside.100 In the ensuing conflagration, eighty people died, including twenty-four children.101

Trying to fortify the nuclear family by fomenting suspicion of strangers fractures the community of adults and children; it can leave children defenseless in abusive homes. Projecting sexual menace onto a cardboard monster and pouring money and energy into vanquishing him distract adults from teaching children the subtle skills of loving with both trust and discrimination. Ultimately, children are rendered more vulnerable both at home and in the world.

[RoosterDance]

Endnotes:
1. This account was constructed from articles in the Boston Herald, Boston Globe, and Cambridge Chronicle between October 1997 and December 1998; also Yvonne Abraham, “Life after Death,” Boston Phoenix, September 25, 1998, 23-30; and interviews with Boston and Cambridge residents.
2. In spite of the proliferating coverage of pedophilia and child abuse, the media frequently claim that we are inexcusably silent on the subject. “[The pedophile] is protected not only by our ignorance of his presence, but also by our unwillingness to confront the truth,” Andrew Vachss, one of the more sensationalist writers on the subject, opined in 1989, for instance.
3. Paul Okami and Amy Goldberg, “Personality Correlates of Pedophilia: Are They Reliable Indicators?” Journal of Sex Research 29, no. 3 (August 1992): 297-328; author’s review of state laws.
4. See, e.g., Andrew Vachss, “How We Can Fight Child Abuse,” Parade Magazine, August 20, 1989, 14.
5. A pedophile is defined as a person who has “recurrent intense sexual urges and arousing sexual fantasies involving sexual activity with a prepubescent child or children.” Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders III-R (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association, 1987).
6. Mike Smith, “Sex Offender Registry OK’d,” Journal Gazette (Fort Wayne, Indiana), February 20, 1996.
7. Ann Landers, “There’s One Cure for Child Molesters,” syndicated column, August 2, 1995.
8. Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker, Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making o f a Modern American Witch Hunt (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 91.
9. Tim LaHave and Beverly LaHave, Against the Tide: How to Raise Sexually Pure Kids in an “Anything-Goes” World (Colorado Springs: Multnomah Books, 1993), 189.
10. “Improving Investigations and Protecting Victims,” Boston Herald, May 4, 1994.
11. Richard Laliberte, “Missing Children: The Truth, the Hype, and What You Must Know,” Redbook, February 1998, 77.
12. The death-penalty bill was defeated by one vote at the end of the1997-98 legislative session, though the incoming Republican governor, Paul Cellucci, promised to pass it in the next term. Bob Curley, feeling used by his political handlers and used up by a life of rage, has retreated to crusade against child pornography and raise funds for child-abuse prevention programs. Abraham, “Life after Death,” 30. In 2000, the Curleys brought a civil suit against the North American Man/Boy Love Association and several individuals allegedly associated with it, claiming that Jaynes was a heterosexual before reading the organization’s propaganda and that his crimes were “a direct and proximate result of [its] urging, advocacy, and promoting of pedophile activity.” Barbara Curley and Robert Curley v. North American Man Boy Love Association, Best Interest Communications Inc., Verio Inc. [and various individual defendants], U.S. District of Massachusetts (announced April 15, 2000). In April 2001, the family’s lawyers filed additional charges against NAMBLA, seeking damages under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), usually used to prosecute gangsters. The Massachusetts Chapter of the ACLU is representing NAMBLA on free-speech grounds; the Civil Liberties Union has asked the judge to dismiss the case. David Weber, “Family of Slain Cambridge Boy Wants NAMBLA Held Responsible,” BostonHerald.com, April 11, 2001.
13. Laliberte, “Missing Children,” 77.
14. J. M. Lawrence, “Molesters Hide Evil behind Image of the Normal Guy,” Boston Herald, October 12, 1997, 30.
15. According to the FBI, “classic” abductions, in which a child is taken by a nonfamily member more than fifty miles from home, held overnight, and ransomed or murdered, number two hundred to three hundred annually, or 1 child in every 230,000 (as of 1997).
16. FBI statistics, phone interview, summer 1993.
17. Lieutenant Bill D’Heron points out that the case is still open. Phone interview with the lieutenant, of the Hollywood (Florida) Police Department detectives unit, December 15, 1998.
18. Laliberte, “Missing Children,” 78.
19. Anna C. Salter, “Epidemiology of Child Sexual Abuse,” in The Sexual Abuse of Children: Theory and Research, vol. 1, ed. William O’Donoghue and James H. Geer (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1992), 129-130.
20. See Paul Okami, “‘Slippage’ in Research on Child Sexual Abuse: Science as Social Advocacy,” in The Handbook of Forensic Sexology: Biomedical and Criminological Perspectives, ed. James J. Krivacska and John Money (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1994), 559-75.
21. Quoted in Bruce Selcraig, “Chasing Computer Perverts,” Penthouse, February 1996, 51.
22. More than eight times more people were incarcerated for low-level sex offenses in 1992 than in 1980. Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Correctional Populations in the United States,” report, Washington, D.C., 1992, 53.
23. Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Uniform Crime Reports: Crime in the U.S.,” report, Washington, D.C., 1993, 217.
24. Okami and Goldberg, “Personality Correlates,” 317-20. The article is an excellent review of the literature.
25. In one study, fewer than a fifth of pedophiles interviewed said they desired genital sex, whereas another fifth wanted “non-sexual, platonic friendships.” Glenn D. Wilson and David N. Cox, The Child-Lovers: A Study of Paedophiles in Society (London: Peter Owen), 35.
26. Okami and Goldberg, “Personality Correlates,” 297-328. A study of the members of a British pedophile organization found that “the majority [of subjects] showed no sign of clinically significant psychopathy or thought disorder.” Wilson and Cox, The Child Lovers, 122-23. Even the commonly held belief that a molested child will grow up to be a molester is exaggerated: studies find that about a third do, which means that as many as two-thirds do not. Joan Kaufman and Edward Zigler, “Do Abused Children Become Abusive Parents?” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 57, no. 2 (1987): 186-92. The degree of social anxiety that pedophiles exhibit may be a result, not a cause, of the intense hatred and ostracism they experience, say a number of observers, including psychologists Theo Sandfort and Larry Constantine.
27. Wilson and Cox (The Child-Lovers) add a caveat to Money’s comment about erotophobia in the families of paraphilics. They note that just about everyone describes his or her parents as repressive about sex.
28. There was no proof of a sexual relationship between the two men. Nor was there any of a general propensity toward child molesting in the Sicari family, although police inferred one from the conviction of Salvi’s sixteen-year-old brother in a sexual encounter with a ten-year-old boy. The gay historian Allan Bérubé suggested that the crime fit another stereotype and piqued another fear: that the child molester’s prey is not only a boybut a white boy (author conversation with Bérubé).
29. Margaret A. Alexander, “Quasi-Meta-Analysis II, Oshkosh Correctional Institution,” State of Wisconsin Department of Corrections/ Oshkosh Correctional Institution report, Oshkosh, 1994; Lita Furby et al., “Sex Offender Recidivism: A Review,” Psychological Bulletin 3 (1989); R. Karl Hanson and Monique T. BussiPre, “Predictors of Sexual Offender Recidivism: A Meta-Analysis,” Department of Solicitor General of Canada, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 66, no. 2 (1996).
30. These numbers are inflated by reoffenses by adult rapists. In her metanalysis of seventy-nine studies encompassing almost eleven thousand subjects, Oshkosh (Wisconsin) Correctional Institution clinical director Margaret Alexander reconfirmed the fact that men who rape adult women are the most intransigent, with about a fifth striking again whether they undergo a treatment program in prison or not. But men arrested for having sex with children are usually overcome with shame and remorse; they want to stop. For them, good treatment has made a great difference: Since 1943, an average of 11 percent of “child molesters” who were treated in jails, hospitals, and outpatient clinics found their way back to prison, compared with 32 percent of those who took part in no treatment. Margaret A. Alexander, “Sexual Offender Treatment Efficacy Revisited,” State of Wisconsin Department of Corrections/Oshkosh Correctional Institution report, Oshkosh, May 1998. There’s also evidence that better treatment is increasingly successful. Before 1980, recidivism among treated sex offenders was almost 30 percent; after 1980, it dropped to 8.4 percent. Eric Lotke, “Sex Offenders: Does Treatment Work?” National Center for Institutions and Alternatives report, Washington, D.C., 1996, 5.
31. James R. Kincaid, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992); and James R. Kincaid, Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child-Molesting (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998).
32. Judith Lewis Herman, Father-Daughter Incest (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981).
33. National Incidence Studies of Child Abuse and Neglect, vol. 2 (Washington, D.C.: Department of Health and Human Services, 1993).
34. Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (New York: Harper Perennial, 1988): 22.
35. Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters, Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, and Sexual Hysteria (New York: Scribner’s, 1994), 65-67. In fact, any catalogue of symptoms is suspect. “Psychological evidence suggests that it is impossible to tease out a set of symptoms that are related to sexual abuse but are never seen in victims of other types of abuse.” Elizabeth Wilson, “Not in This House: Incest, Denial, and Doubt in the Middle-Class Family,” Yale Journal o f Criticism 8 (1995): 51. Wilson’s conclusion, drawn from examinations of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual o f Mental Disorders, is supported by a thorough review of the abuse literature by Bruce Rind at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as Paul Okami and others. Such careful work is in the minority. The complete confounding of data has led to huge inflations of the statistics, which are commonly repeated by journalists. In the 1980s, estimates of women abused as children ranged as high as 62 percent. S. D. Peters, G. E. Wyatt, and D. Finkelhor, “Prevalence,” in A Source Book on Sexual Abuse, ed. David Finkelhor (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publishers, 1986), 75-93.
36. This estimation is drawn from the hundreds of articles I’ve read in writing about child abuse.
37. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Third National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (Washington, D.C., 1993); 3-3.
38. Judith Lewis Herman, D. Russell, and K. Trocki, “Long-Term Effects of Incestuous Abuse in Childhood,” American Journal o f Psychiatry 143, no. 10 (1986): 1293-96.
39. “By far the largest group of defendants [in child pornography cases] seems to be white males between 30 and 50 who are interested in teenage boys, usually between 14 and 17,” concluded Bruce Selcraig, a government investigator of child pornography during the 1980s who went online in 1996 as a journalist to review the situation. Selcraig, “Chasing Computer Perverts,” 53. The same is true of the majority of men in jail for consensual sex with girls or boys: their partners are teenagers. I conclude this from my own surveys over the past ten years of journalism, police sources, and defense attorneys.
40. Jennifer Allen, “The Danger Years,” Life, July 1995, 48. 41. Lawrence, “Molesters Hide Evil,” 31.
42. As quoted by Harry Hendrick, “Constructions and Reconstructions of British Childhood: An Interpretive Survey, 1800 to the Present,” in Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood, ed. Allison James and Alan Prout (London: Falmer Press, 1990), 42.
43. Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
44. The reports of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, for instance, frequently described the alleged exploiters of children in vicious and often confused ethnic stereotypes. Italian “padrones” who traffic variously in child labor, entertainment, and flesh are ubiquitous. A “rabbi” who runs a beer-bottle and cigarette-strewn gambling den behind a bogus “bird store” is characterized, incongruously, by his “little Chinese ways of enticement.” Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, Sixteenth Annual Report (New York, 1891), 23.
45. See, e.g., Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight; Ellen Carol DuBois and Linda Gordon, “Seeking Ecstasy on the Battlefield,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole Vance (London: Pandora Press, 1989); Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987); Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1987); and Ruth C. Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900-1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), for a fuller picture of turn-of-the-century urban prostitution.
46. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 81-120.
47. Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980): 17.
48. DuBois and Gordon, “Seeking Ecstasy on the Battlefield,” 33.
49. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 82.
50. John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History o f Sexuality in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 153.
51. Estelle Freedman, “‘Uncontrolled Desires’: The Response to the Sexual Psychopath, 1920-1960,” Journal of American History 71, no. 1 (1987): 83-106.
52. D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 260-61.
53. Allan Bérubé, Coming Out under Fire: The History o f Gay Men and Women in World War II (New York: Macmillan, 1990).
54. As quoted by George Chauncey Jr., “The Postwar Sex Crime Panic,” in True Stories from the American Past, ed. William Graebner (New York: McGraw Hill, 1993), 162.
55. Freedman, “`Uncontrolled Desires.”’
56. Chauncey, “Postwar Sex Crimes,” 160-78.
57. Freedman, “`Uncontrolled Desires,”’ 92.
58. Freedman, “`Uncontrolled Desires,”’ 84.
59. Chauncey, “Postwar Sex Crimes,” 160-74.
60. Heidi Handman and Peter Brennan, Sex Handbook: Information and Help for Minors (New York: Putnam, 1974).
61. Lawrence Stanley, “The Child Porn Myth,” Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal 7 (1989): 295-358.
62. U.S. House Committee on the judiciary, Sexual Exploitation of Children: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Crime, 95th Congress, first session, 1977, 42-48. See also, Judianne Densen-Gerber and Stephen F. Hutchinson, “Sexual and Commercial Exploitation of Children: Legislative Responses and Treatment Challenges,” Child Abuse and Neglect 3 (1979): 61-66.
63. “‘Child Sex’ Cop Transferred,” Bay Area Reporter, March 18, 1982, 8.
64. U.S. House Judiciary Committee, Sexual Exploitation of Children, 48.
65. Stanley, “The Child Porn Myth,” 313.
66. Joel Best, “Dark Figures and Child Victims: Statistical Claims about Missing Children,” in Images of Issues: Typifying Contemporary Social Problems, ed. Joel Best (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1989), 21-37.
67. Stanley, “The Child Porn Myth,” 313.
68. Lucy Komisar, “The Mysterious Mistress of Odyssey House,” New York Magazine, November 1979, 43-50. The charges were not indictably substantiated, but they were enough to exile Densen-Gerber from Odyssey House and, for a time, social service altogether. In 1998, she was running Applied Resources Corporation in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
69. “`Child Sex’ Cop Transferred.”
70. See Nathan and Snedeker, Satan’s Silence. Nathan was for a long time the only journalist in America who published skeptical investigations of “satanic ritual abuse.” Later, she was joined by the documentarist Ofra Bikel and others, and by the early 1990s, their painstaking reporting began to turn some opinion around.
71. Daniel Goleman, “Proof Lacking in Ritual Abuse by Satanists,” New York Times, October 31, 1994.
72. The charges were brought by the adopted daughter of a zealous police chief, and, as in Salem, the people who objected to what looked to them like a widening witch-hunt, found themselves accused. The defendants were disproportionately poor, uneducated, and in several cases mentally disabled, and no defendant without a private attorney was acquitted. Kathryn Lyons, Witch Hunt: A True Story of Social Hysteria and Abused Justice (New York: Avon, 1998).
73. Documented by the Justice Committee, San Diego, Calif.; Boston Coalition for Freedom of Expression, Boston, Mass.; Nathan and Snedeker (Satan’s Silence); and others.
74. Selcraig, “Chasing Computer Perverts,” 72.
75. Seminar conducted at the University of Southern California by R. P. Tyler (reported by James R. Kincaid, author interview).
76. Lawrence A. Stanley, “The Child-Porn Myth,” Playboy, September 1988, 41.
77. The notion of predisposition informs all sting operations: police are not allowed to entice somebody into breaking the law (that would be entrapment) unless they have evidence indicating he is likely to do so on his own. Narcotics agents commonly buy from a known dealer; occasionally an undercover cop will put herself into a position to be assaulted by a rapist whose m.o. is known.
However, the establishment of predisposition in child pornography enforcement is not so straightforward, because the enforcers’ motives aren’t. If the goal is to eradicate deviance and not necessarily to prevent actual crimes, as the ACLU’s Marjorie Heins suggests, suspicion of deviance goes a long way toward legally establishing predisposition to criminality. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s manual for law enforcers suggests including in requests for search warrants a profile of what they call a “preferential child molester,” accent on preferential, since he might want to do something he’s never done.
Since the person needs to have demonstrated no greater erotic interest in children than logging onto a site where they congregate (I, in researching this chapter, could be accused of such acts), the tactic resembles setting somebody up for a drug bust not because he’s actually sold or bought drugs but because he has watched the doings of the dealer next door or because he has an “addictive personality.”
Once a “preference” for “child molestation” has been thus established, a search warrant stating this preference in the suspect alerts cops to the probability that a collection of illegal child pornography awaits their search. And the search fulfills their expectations: they find pictures and, whether they’re pornographic or not, take them to be clues to molestation. “The photograph of a fully dressed child may not be evidence of an obscenity violation, but it could be evidence of an offender’s sexual involvement with children,” says the National Center’s manual.
In 1995 I asked Raymond Smith, who heads the Postal Inspection Service’s child pornography investigations, about his estimation that PI agents find “evidence of child molestation” in 30 percent of their searches of the homes of suspected pedophiles:
”We’ll find pictures of kids-no sexual act; we don’t know where these kids come from. But you get a gut feeling ... you learn to identify it.... We’re not finding a videotape of this guy having sex with the ten-year-old girl next door. We’re not finding a picture. Just from what we see in the house and how they talk.
”When we get into these cases, many of these individuals literally confess to committing horrible acts, before they’re arrested. Sometimes that is fantasy, which is not against the law. But when you have the child pornography present, combined with the fantasy, in my opinion not only are they violating the law, they also pose a serious threat to children in the community where they live. If somebody told me this man never molested before, but, man, he loves kids and I knew he was a member of NAMBLA [the North American Man/Boy Love Association, a support group-propaganda organization], I would think that person was a threat to my child. But I have no, quote, evidence that he molested.”
78. At this writing, in 2001, a constitutional challenge to the 1996 law is on the Supreme Court’s docket.
79. “Cynthia Stewart’s Ordeal,” editorials, Nation (May 1, 2000).
80. James R. Kincaid, “Hunting Pedophiles on the Net,” salon.com, August 24, 2000.
81. A particularly harrowing account of a year-long entrapment campaign resulting in the conviction of a man who seemed to have no preexisting sexual interest in children can be found in Laura Kipnis, Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America (New York: Grove Press, 1996).
82. Christopher Marquis, “U.S. Says It Broke Pornography Ring Featuring Youths,” New York Times, August 9, 2001.
83. Kincaid, “Hunting Pedophiles on the Net.”
84. During the U.S. Postal Inspection Service’s late-1980s Project Looking Glass investigations, 5 of the 160 people indicted saved the government the effort of seeking a plea bargain by promptly committing suicide.
85. Marquis, “U.S. Says It Broke Pornography Ring Featuring Youths.”
86. Susan Lehman, “Larry Matthews’ 18-Month Sentence for Receiving and Transmitting Kiddie Porn Raises Difficult First Amendment Issues,” salon.com, March 11, 1999. The brazenness of the putative mother’s post gives it the scent of a sting operation, in my view. Frequenters of such chat rooms, and surely criminals involved in child prostitution, are meticulously secretive, understanding that they are under constant surveillance. In the mid-1990s, lawyer Lawrence Stanley was also indicted (though not convicted) for receiving alleged child-pornographic images through the mail. He had received the pictures from a client for whom he was acting as defense counsel; they were the indictable items in the client’s case, and Stanley was challenging the prosecutor’s claims that the images were indeed legally pornographic.
87. Kimberly J. Mitchell, David Finkelhor, and Janis Wolak, “Risk Factors for and Impact of Online Sexual Solicitation of Youth,” Journal of the American Medical Association 285 (June 20, 2001): 3011-14 (unpaginated online). Commenting on the study, Harrison M. Rainie, the director of a more comprehensive study called “Teenage Life Online,” by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, said, “Virtually every kid we talked to knows there are some really bad things and bad people in the online world, and know that there are some good things and good people. When they get down to weighing the pluses and minuses, most kids will say the pluses pile up and the minuses are manageable.” John Schwartz, “Studies Detail Solicitation of Children for Sex Online,” New York Times, June 20, 2001.
88. Ron Martz, “Internet Spreading Child Porn, Investigators Say,” Sunday Rutland Herald, June 28, 1998, A8.
89. “Bonfire of the Knuckleheads,” Contemporary Sexuality 28 (April 1994): 1.
90. James Kincaid documented a dozen or so with newspaper articles, but my researches would suggest there are many more that don’t make the papers. James Kincaid, “Is This Child Pornography?” salon.com, January 31, 2000.
91. Katha Pollitt, “Subject to Debate,” Nation (December 13, 1999); “Cynthia Stewart’s Ordeal”; and Cynthia Stewart and David Perrotta, “Thank You, Nation Family,” letters, Nation (May 1, 2000).
92. Matt Golec, “Bill Would Expand Sex Offender Notification Law,” Burlington Free Press, January 30, 2000, Al.
93. Ross E. Milloy, “Texas Judge Orders Notices Warning of Sex Offenders,” New York Times, May 29, 2001.
94. In 1997, the first subject of the Kansas law, who had no record of violence, but rather a rap sheet of exhibitionism and mild fondling, brought his case to the U.S. Supreme Court and lost. The law was upheld. By that year, Washington, Arizona, California, Minnesota, and Wisconsin had passed similar laws.
95. Bill Andriette, “America’s Sex Gulags,” Guide (August 1997) (reprint): 1-3.
96. A 1996 review of the data by the National Center for Institutions and Alternatives concluded that only 13 percent of former sex offenders are arrested for subsequent sex crimes. This compares with a recidivism rate of 74 percent for all criminal offenders. The NCIA estimated at this time that of 250,000 potential compliers with community registration statutes, 217,000 were “ex-offenders” or people who were not destined to commit additional crimes. National Center for Institutions and Alternatives, “Community Notification and Setting the Record Straight on Recidivism,” Community Notification/NCIA/info@ncianet.org, November 8, 1996.
97. In Corpus Christi, several of the men who posted warning signs immediately had their property vandalized, two were evicted from their homes, and one attempted suicide. An intruder threatened the life of the father of one of the men, who had been arrested for indecency with a child in 1999 “after a night of drinking ended with an encounter with a fifteen-year-old girl.” Milloy, “Texas Judge Orders Notices.”
98. Todd Purdum, “Registry Laws Tar Sex-Crimes Convicts with Broad Brush,” New York Times, July 1, 1997. Later that year, California excised the names of men convicted of consensual homosexuality from the list. “Gay Exception Made to Registration Law,” New York Times, November 11, 1997.
99. U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, “Child Pornography and Pedophilia,” Report 99-537, October 6, 1986, 3.
100. Evidence suggests that statutory rape, or sex with minors, did occur at Waco. David Koresh did so with the parents’ consent, because his followers believed it “was his religious duty to father 24 children by virgin mothers.” Because the parents cooperated, the state did not bring charges. Dick J. Reavis, The Ashes of Waco: An Investigation (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1998).
101. The number of fatalities, including the number of children among them, is hard to pin down. On James Tabor and Eugene Gallagher’s “Why Waco?” Web site, a list of Branch Davidians counts seventy-two dead, including twenty-three children. The New York Times, reporting on the FBI’s belated admission that it had fired pyrotechnic gas canisters at the compound, noted on August 26, 1999, that “about 80 people, including 24 children, were found dead after the fire.” The following day, a subsequent story said “about 80 people, including 25 children.” David Stout, “FBI Backs Away from Flat Denial in Waco Cult Fire,” New York Times, August 26, 1999, Al; Stephen Labaton “Reno Admits Credibility Hurt in Waco Case,” New York Times, August 27, 1999, Al. The Justice Department’s report directly following the events said “the medical examiner found the remains of 75 individuals” but did not specify how many were children. Edward S. G. Dennis Jr., “Evaluation of the Handling of the Branch Davidian Stand-Off in Waco, Texas, February 28 to April 19, 1993,” U.S. Department of justice report, Washington, D.C., October 8, 1993.

[RoosterDance]

Interview: Monica Pieterse

Monica Pieterse is the author of two works on paedophilia: "Pedofilie", Leiden, 1978, her Ph.D. thesis; and "Pedofielen over Pedofilie Zeist, 1982. She is a Jurist, that is, she has completed all the course work for a law degree. She has worked for the National Ombudsman Service and is at present working with the Auditing Division of the Dutch government in The Hague. After her university studies she was awarded a year and a half government grant for research on paedophilia. She said she did this research because she thought "the law was wrong, that society had a misunderstanding of these contacts, and that perhaps society and the paedophile could come closer together." This interview was conducted in English.

Paidika: You published a work in Dutch, "Pedofielen over pedofilie", in 1982. As most Of our readers would not be familiar with that research, could you briefly summarize the research and your conclusions?

Monica Pieterse: I sent out about 300 questionaires, and I got back 148. They answered the questions very openly. Some were very long, stories of their lives. I put all these answers in a computer. Then I did interviews with eighteen: eleven men, two women, four parents and one man who had a pedophile relationship as a child.

How did you find your sample of three hundred?

I put an advertisement in Sekstant, and two ads in the newspaper, and one ad in the WSH bulletin.

Were the respondents self-chosen? Did they contact you?

Yes. I also went to a lot of congresses on paedophilia. People got to know me and told each other. It was like that.

The eleven men and two women you chose to interview in depth, how were they selected?

I knew them by name and got to know them at congresses. They were the more open and active ones. I tried to make the selection a cross section of adults. This was very difficult.

Why did you do this particular project on paedophilia?

I thought it was important for society to listen to paedophiles; to hear and understand why they had sexual contacts with children, what they feel about children. I hoped society and paedophiles would come closer to each other and so the happiness of children, paedophiles and parents would increase. Parents often react panicky when they know their children have had sexual contacts with an adult. And their reaction is very bad for the child. I hoped they would react in a better way, when they knew more about paedophilia. So, I wanted to make visible a large group of paedophiles and see what things they had in common. I made a questionaire and had the interviews. The interviews were useful because they gave a background to the answers in the questionaire. They put the answers in the right perspective. Also, I wanted to give a juridical solution to the problem of paedophilia, with a focus on the child. I thought that paedophilia being a criminal offense was a bad solution for all the parties involved. The most important one in the relationship, the most vulnerable member of the relationship is the child. But I thought that if the paedophile didn't do anything bad, why forbid it? I thought that making a criminal act of it was, and still is, a very bad solution.

The conclusions you reached, can you briefly outline them for our readers?

The last thing I mentioned, about the juridical, is the most important. You have to get rid of references to paedophilia in the penal code because it doesn't do any good and there are more than enough laws in Holland to protect the child. For example, the law forbids someone to threaten another to have sex, to do things someone doesn't want to do, and parents can have the judge forbid someone to get in touch with their child. So there are more than enough laws and solutions already if you don't want your child to have a contact with a paedophile.

Have you continued to update the research, stay in touch with these individuals or enlarge your sample?

No. I thought I knew enough about paedophilia. The thing was clear for me. I wanted to do some other things.

Have you encountered any new factors since your research to cause you to change your conclusions?

No.

In the last four years there have been major changes in attitudes, particularly in English speaking countries, but also perhaps in the Netherlands, regarding paedophilia. Do you think the attitude is worse now than when you published your work?

It's about the same in Holland, although there is more ado about incest.

Accusations have appeared in the foreign press that Amsterdam is an awful place with child slave auctions in Dam Square. Do these kind of foreign press reports affect Dutch attitudes?

No. This has been in the papers, but it's also been in the paper that Holland isn't the source of child pornography. The average person in the Netherlands hasn't changed their attitudes in spite of what has been in the newspapers.

What is the Dutch attitude towards paedophilia?

Paedophilia is something that is there. it's not regarded as a good thing. Parents feel that paedophiles ought to leave their child alone. If it happens in a family people will start screaming and panic. I think that's bad. Maybe there's a small difference in the last ten or fifteen years. There are more publications, and articles in women's magazines, so perhaps people will be just a small bit better about this, and will think first. Then they'll start screaming. But, sexual things are easier now so perhaps there's a difference. An improvement. If slight. Now at least people say, if it's other parents and other children, lob, paedophilia isn't so bad", but if it's their child they'll react very badly.

Is there more awareness in the Netherlands of paedophilia now?

There is more awareness. And there is one big difference with ten years ago, though this difference is with the prosecutors. They won't prosecute so quickly now. Unless there is harm and no consent, a nasty smell about it: pornography or money. But for a relationship or maybe one contact, there won't likely be prosecution, and that's an improvement. I think the police have improved their behavior towards paedophiles. And twenty years ago when there was a sexual contact the police would ask the child what was done and how was it done. The child would get very nervous and upset. But nowadays the police do it in another way. They ask for a social worker or teacher. They won't react so exaggeratedly. I think that's a real improvement.

What has caused the improvement, though the society in general hasn't changed?

I think it's because sexuality in general is more in the open. And more education, more explanations of things, studies about it, research. The police are better informed about it and they know it's not alright to upset the child. It will do more harm to the child than the sexual contact.

Your study of paedophilia seems to be unique in the variations it covers: men with boys; men with girls; women with girls. This last group have been almost unstudied. It has been the official line of the American feminist movement that women cannot be paedophiles, that such people don't exist. Yet in your sample you have two women who are willing to talk about their paedophile feelings. As you looked at these different kinds of relationships, what differences did you see between, for example, men who were interested in boys, men interested in girls, and women paedophiles?

To start with the group of men. I don't think there's much difference between men with boys and men with girls. The biggest group in my study, 80%, was men with boys; 12% men with boys and girls; and about 10% men with girls. The men with girls, or with boys and girls, tended to look for somewhat younger girls than boys, so that's a small difference. As for the relationship on its own, I don't see much difference. There is a difference between men and women. But my sample contained only a very small group of women, so it's hard to judge. The questionaire was actually answered by four women. Two of the women hadn't had a relationship. One woman I think had had a relationship, but it was all very theoretical. For the men the sex was very, very important. But for the women it wasn't. They talked more about warmth, affection, love. But for the men it was focused on sex.

The focus on sex-was this true for both the men with boys and the men with girls?

Yes.

Did you study the results of sex on the children?

No. It was nearly impossible to get in touch with the children. Also, Theo Sandfort had done such interviews with the children. So I thought his work was enough. (Sandfort's research has been published in Dutch under the title Het seksuele aspekt van pedofiele relaties: Ervaringen van jongens by the Sociological Institute, State University, Utrecht, 1981, and in English as The Sexual Aspect of Paedophile Relations: The experience of twenty-five boys by Pan/Spartacus, Amsterdam, 1982: ed.)

Did you notice any differences in the way these groups established relationships? For example, men interested in boys can often meet the boys at sports events and such but it's harder for a man to initiate a relationship with a girl. Is there a difference in that area?

I think there's a difference, because the girls tend to be a bit younger and it's harder to get in touch with a girl of nine or ten than boys of twelve or thirteen, because they are more with adults and the boys are going out more on their own. But that was all.

Does society react differently to these groups, because men with boys share something of homosexuality? Are man-boy relationships condemned more, do you think, because there is a double prejudice against same sex relationships, as well as intergenerational relationships?

People think homosexual relationships are bad. But also, the thought of such a small girl with a grown man with a big penis-that's very bad to people too.

Isn't it very unusual to find women who are willing to talk about their paedophile relationships? Outside of the four in yours sample, have you found any others?

I didn't find any others. These four were in the NVSH. Their groups talk a lot about sex and women don't like that, so most of the women stay away. How can you trace them? I'm sure there are other women.

Could you tell us more about how the women's attitudes differed from the men's?

These four women could have sex with other women, or with men, so there wasn't a need to have a sexual contact with the child. They could do it with an adult. But the men couldn't do it with an adult, so they had to have sex with the child. For these women there was always an escape. They were more omni-sexual. Because sex wasn't so important to the women these contacts with children were more "normal". Society wouldn't even call them paedophile. It was just "lovely feelings". So, perhaps there are lots of women who have these kinds of feelings towards children but if it's not sexually expressed, it's hard to trace or see. When you see a woman kissing a child it's "normal", but a man kissing a boy on the street-well!

We've spoken of the negative attitudes even in the Netherlands on the part of society about paedophilia. From the interviews or the questionaire, how did these negative attitudes affect the paedophiles' understanding of themselves? How did they react to it? Were they, as a group, more self-condemning? Were they more militant?

The younger were more militant, proud of it. On the whole, ten years ago they were more afraid and felt bad about it. It was on their conscience. Nowadays, they are more militant. It's like the line homosexuality is taking.

One of the frequent attacks made on paedophilia is that there are unequal power balances in the relationships. From your interviews or the questionaire, how did you find power was experienced and felt by each of the parties?

As for the child's attitude, I only spoke with one adult who had had a relationship when he was a child. He was very ambivalent about the sexual part. He loved and trusted the paedophile. He could speak about anything with him. But he was very uneasy about the sex. He was afraid of it, to give himself. But he had a religious upbringing, and that was twenty years ago. Sex was something to exchange. He got love and affection, and so on. He gave sex. But, otherwise, he liked it but he didn't dare to like it. So it was a problem. Well, that was twenty years ago and today people are more relaxed about sex. So, perhaps the situation has changed, though I think it still might be like that in quite a few relationships. The child wants to have love and affection in the first place. He will give in to the sexual part because he knows that the paedophile loves it and it gives the child some grip on the paedophile. Also, there are lots of boys in puberty who love to do sexual things with men, and they feel the adult loves to do that. So, I think that the power is divided, both parties have some cards. Of course, the adult knows clearly what he wants, and the child frequently just feels it or dimly knows it.

You had also interviewed the parents in four families where the children were involved with paedophiles. Did you hear from them Of any feelings of powerlessness on the part of the children ?

No, I didn't hear about that. The children were very closed about the sexual part. It was a very private thing. Also, there wasn't sexual activity in every relationship. What I think though is that the power is divided. The adult knows what he is doing and is gradually working towards sex. But the children don't know exactly what the paedophile wants. They know he wants something so they try it out. The child knows he has something to give with sex. In that situation there are always children who blackmail the paedophile who is in need of sex. And there are paedophiles who blackmail the child who is in need of love and affection. These, of course, are very bad situations. But on the whole the power is divided. just as it is in most relationships.

How conscious of their power were the paedophiles themselves? Did they talk about the realization of power they held in a child's life and their responsibility for it?

Yes. They felt very responsible for that part of the relationship. They spoke a lot about it. But I don't know in practice, in the relationship or in making the contacts, if they always are so responsible. But they speak a lot about it.

Many attacks on paedophiles claim they aren't even aware of this, that they simply wield power unthinkingly. It's good to hear from your research that the community is aware of this.

Yes, it's like that in the Netherlands.

We're curious about the child saying 'no' - about the child's ability to say no to sex. Were the paedophiles creating an atmosphere in the relationship where the child could say 'no'? Were there situations where the child couldn't say 'no'?

That's more a question for Theo Sandfort. But I found, yes, the child could say 'no' in these situations. I don't think the paedophiles I talked to would do harm to the child. They sincerely loved the child. Especially having sex with the child but they wouldn't do any harm. So, the child could say 'no'. Or just stay away and not come back. The child has a lot of power in that way. And because he can speak to his parents, or to his friends.

Could you clarify one thing: in your sample do you think the parents always knew about the sexual relationship with the child?

No. Some knew and some didn't. 1 asked the question but it was hard to get clear answers because some paedophiles had many many relationships.

In Dutch the word "relatie" can be translated as "contacts", implying just sexual encounters, or "relationships ", which implies in English an ongoing commitment. How many paedophiles were carrying on relationships as opposed simply to contacts, and in the course of your research did you notice any differences in the kinds of persons who carry on relationships as opposed to those who just seek contacts? Any qualitative differences?

That I don't know. Some had hundreds of contacts; some were very occupied with sex and not relationships. But that was only a small group. And other paedophiles search for real relationships.

You had earlier stated that children would be better off if the laws stigmatizing sexual contacts between paedophiles and children were eliminated. How did this conclusion grow from your research?

I didn't arrive at that conclusion from my research. But my doctoral thesis was a bibliographical study on paedophilia. I had read all the research too, and that tended in the direction that making paedophilia a criminal offense was not good.

How many paedophiles in your sample, both the interview sample and the general sample, had had legal problems because of their paedophilia?

Let's see, my research says 43% were in touch with the police and a judge. Perhaps those paedophiles who have been in touch with the law are more open about it, they don't have anything to lose.

We notice that you don't deal with incest cases, and there seems to be a lot of confusion in society between paedophilia and incest. How do you see incest as related to and different from paedophilia? Both of them involve sexual contacts with children, but how do they differ?

I don't think there's a relationship between the two. They are totally different things. Paedophiles focus on the child. They love the child. But in incest relationships the men and women who have the incestuous contacts aren't attracted especially to children. They normally have sexual contacts with adults, but the situation in their families makes them have sex with someone in the family: the child, because that is the easiest. They aren't focused on children, as the paedophile is. Also, the child can't say no in incest situations. It's the family setting, the adult not focused on children, it's a totally sexual act. There is no relationship. It's an easy thing to do. These are a few important differences.

How should these differences be reflected by the laws dealing with each? If the laws stigmatizing paedophilia were removed, would it still be necessary to have incest laws?

There are such laws in the Netherlands already. If the children are in your care, in your power, if you are a teacher let's say, you can't have sex with the children, if you're already in a power situation with them. That's the way it works in Dutch law. I think it has to stay like that.

One of the differences then that you see is this area of consent: that the child cannot say 'no' in an incest situation. We did speak of consent earlier. But now: what do you see consent to be for a child in a paedophile relationship?

It's a difficult question. If there is a real possibility that the child can say 'no' - if the child has the ability to say no and still keeps the contact with the man - then he is consenting.

So, to clarify your criterion, it is that if the possibility to say 'no' is there, and not even necessarily the ability to say an informed 'Yes', then there is consent.

Yes, I would agree with that.

Is there a difference between informed consent and just consent?

Yes. There was a commission here in the Netherlands, the Melai Commission, that tried to make that distinction. You know, that for true consent in a paedophile relationship the child has to sign on the dotted line, something like that. But why should the sexual relationship harm, do harm to the child twenty years later? That was the kind of harm they were trying to say must be guarded against. If your parents eat your pet rabbit, that will do a lot of harm too. I think it is very difficult to trace harm. There are so many children who have lousy parents and don't get any affection. That's very bad when you are a child. The society only seems concerned about the sexual part. Why is that the most important thing? I don't know.

A number of the attacks on changing the age of consent laws come from English-speaking feminists who talk about the fact that the male is so sexually aggressive-which is one of the things, by the way, that is shown in your research-and the need to protect female children from male sexual aggression. Do you have any response to that real bad cases there is the law, and if the law keeps concern? if we remove all the laws against paedophile behavior will it give free rein to all those men with girls? No, it's nonsense. Those women don't know any thing about it. As for real aggression there are enough laws to protect the child. Parents haven't studied paedophile behavior either, otherwise they would be more careful in their behavior toward their children. In terms of changing the law, removing the stigma against paedophilia-do you have any suggestions how this can be done?

By information. Articles in women's magazines. Changing the public perceptions. The same direction taken by homosexuals in changing the laws.

Will the AIDS crisis affect the public perception Of paedophilia?

I don't know, but I don't think so. Paedophilia is such a small group. Perhaps it will change the attitude towards sexuality in general, but not specifically to paedophilia.

Regarding parents' reactions: you described earlier how there would be a big ado. Do you think there would be an option after that-for it to calm down and the parents to have an acceptance of paedophilia?

It's more possible now than ten years ago for there to be something after the hysteria. But it depends on the people involved.

There is a proposal for the change of the law here in the Netherlands, proposed by COG for the Minister of justice, to decriminalize consenting sexual acts with boys 12 and over. Do you think this has a chance of passing?

I think, with all this talk about incest, that this is not such a good time for changes, or that the changes have such a good chance. I think there's a small chance, but a very small chance. But, even if it's twenty years for changes to come, it's the prosecutors that matter. And that is better already. So, the law will be a dead letter. And for being applied as it is now applied, well, it won't be so bad then.

Some final questions. From your interviews could you distinguish qualities that would make for good or healthy paedophile relationships? First, what do you define as a good or healthy relationship, and then, how can paedophiles arrive at that?

It's like a normal relationship. The paedophile has to accept his sexuality, that sex is not the most important thing in the relationship, but that the person is the most important thing. It's the same in all relationships. The paedophile has to focus on the child and not on the genital part. He has to focus on the personhood of the child. Also, this kind of sexuality is better in the open. The paedophile needs to have friends and to discuss this. Also, it's better if the parents know. If a paedophile behaves like that, it's an improvement. There is a group of young paedophiles who are like that now. I spoke with a few of them. They are the more militant ones.

Again, from your studies, was there any specific advice you would give paedophiles as to how they should create these healthy relationships, and healthy attitudes for themselves.

Yes. Don't hide your sexuality. Try to let it happen in the open. Speak to the parents. Not the first week; maybe three months later, I don't know exactly. Try to be friendly with the parents. You don't have to tell them the sex part on the first time. Go to the parents and talk with them and when they have accepted you as a person then it's easier for them to accept you as a paedophile. Don't focus so much on the sexual side. It's not so necessary now. Twenty years ago this part was a very big problem and so a lot of paedophiles focused on sex. If you start with a focus on the relationship, and think about the person of the child, it will be alright.

What should the paedophile keep in mind about society?

II think that in the U. S. if a small girl is loved it is the same thing as a small girl being raped. There's no difference there. But here in Holland, if someone is paedophile the prosecutor says to go join the WSH paedophile work-group. And that is healthier, a healthier environment. But you know, I don't always think paedophiles are acting so wisely. They are acting too militantly and they don't want to understand society. It's not so good, this. You have to try to understand, to have a little understanding of society's attitudes about this, to be wise.

[RoosterDance]

Lesbian Lolitas: High-School Girls Want to Be Gay-ish
by Deirdre Dolan


Sophie and Anna were aware of one another—they were both sophomores at the same private school in Brooklyn—but had never actually met until a mutual friend invited them both to go snowboarding upstate at her country house last winter. They stayed up talking after everyone else went to sleep.

"We spent the whole entire night finding out how we were in love with the same books and music," said Sophie, who has long, dirty-blond hair and heavy-lidded eyes that are never completely open. "She was new and she was pretty and mysterious, with her dark hair—all the guys flocked to her."

The following Friday night, they went to Anna’s house, raided her parents’ liquor cabinet, and ended up walking up and down lower Broadway, talking to strangers and giggling. They were holding hands and hugging, and at one point, Anna was leaning up against a store window when Sophie put her arms around her neck and kissed her.

"She put her hands around my neck and kissed me back, and that was it," said Sophie.

They hailed a cab to take them to a friend’s party in Brooklyn and made out the whole ride there.

"A lot of kisses are meaningless," said Anna, who looks like a less sweet version of Katie Holmes. "But there are those few that really just fill you up and make you feel warm and happy."

Sophie and Anna (their names have been changed) arrived at their friend’s brownstone and joined everyone in the den, sitting down on either side of a guy Anna had a crush on.

"We were kissing each other across him, and then we both started kissing him," said Sophie.

"We were being quite outward about it," said Anna. "It was kind of obnoxious. But there’s this thing about enjoying it—and doing it for attention. And it was both."

After that, Anna and Sophie continued to spend all their time together—but even now that they were physically involved, they never thought of themselves as lesbians. They both knew that their romance would probably come to an end if either one of them met a guy she wanted to date.

While many New York girls may act like lesbians to both mock and attract young men, there is a definite group of young women who are finding something in a sexualized female bond that they don’t get from the attentions of the average high-school boy. While "L.U.G.’s" (lesbians until graduation) became a term of derision in the 1990’s—applied to college women who slept with women on campus but would immediately link up with socially appropriate males once they left college—the trend seems to have worked its way into a younger crowd. (At least among girls. Boys interested in publicly experimenting with other boys would find themselves in a far less "glamorous" subgroup.)

"Day-long, week-long, month-long: There are many types of lesbians at my school," said "Tina," a junior at a private school on the Upper East Side. Tina first experienced kissing her girlfriends in seventh grade, at sleepover parties.

"The girls in junior high are more experimenting with a partner that they think is safe," she said. "It’s like practicing for guys. But girls who are in high school do it more for novelty purposes. A lot of popular girls do it. They just figure out that it’s something guys think is hot, and they use that to their advantage. It’s totally O.K. to be a real lesbian, but poser lesbians are usually a kind of insecure girl who feels like she’s not really special for any reason—and I know I kind of sound like Dr. Phil."

"It’s not really that big a deal," said Tanya Lewaller, the president of Perspective, a club that deals with gender and sexuality issues, at Hunter College High School on the Upper East Side. "I know girls who are really lesbian—that’s their sexual preference—and I’ve met girls who do both. It’s cool that people can experiment with it, and in high school they can try to find out what they feel about it and what’s their orientation. And it’s good that this is a society that’s open about it. It feels normal at Hunter, but once you go outside of New York City, it’s not normal."

"I think it’s more accepted in the city than the country, because there are more alternative types around," said Tina. "It sounds cheesy, but it’s true. Last summer at camp, all the little suburban girls would call me a lesbian if I undressed in front of them in our bunk."

Anna and Sophie admit they’d enjoyed the attention that came with being a girl-girl couple in high school.

"At school, they said I was this wannabe-lesbian straight girl trying to be really cool," said Anna. "And maybe, you know, I was. People put on the front so much at our age that it’s fantastic to be fluid—but then everybody still has the same reservations we’ve always had."

"There’s still a big thrill that you get from being that girl, the girl that does that," said Sophie. "Even when everyone around you is trashing you."

"The pop-culture terrain about sexuality has changed, and I think it’s a lot more permissible to be gay-ish than it used to be," said Jennifer Baumgardner, co-author of Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism and the Future. "Not permanently gay, but gay-ish. So I think young people are trying these things on. If you ever go to Ani DiFranco concerts, they’re filled with girl-girl couples between the ages of 12 and 20, and I’m sure a lot of them are not going to end up gay."

Girl-girl love scenes are increasingly unremarkable in movies like 1999’s Cruel Intentions (in which Selma Blair and Sarah Michelle Gellar’s characters share a slow and deliberate French kiss) and the current Femme Fatale, in which Rebecca Romijn-Stamos’ character seduces Rie Rasmussen.

"I think teenagers always want to go to the edge," said Judith Ruskay Rabinor, Ph.D. "When I was a teenager, the place to go to was Europe. Now that’s old hat, and they want to go to Katmandu. We’re living in a sexually permissive time, and girls feel empowered enough and want to experiment. And a lot of girls are wary of commitments to guys. Girls often give up their power when they start dating. I think girls are so much more relational, and when a girl gets involved with a girl, the girl isn’t just a big ‘Duh.’ The girl talks and cares and listens. It’s not about rebellion—it’s about exploration, and it’s natural."

Ms. Baumgardner said she believes the more freedom there is to figure out sexuality, the better.

"There has been progress if they feel that they have more options and choices. Maybe there’s a dynamic of sexual inequality at their school—where girls feel like they never have the upper hand, or that they’re going to be a slut if they have sex. Or they don’t know that having a sexual and romantic relationship with their sexual equals is healthy and liberating. In some ways you can even imagine, when you’re making out with a girlfriend, what these things that are so amped up in the culture—like breasts and soft skin—are like. You get to objectify someone the same way you’re objectified by men."

On a recent Saturday night, about a year after Sophie and Anna met at the ski house, Sophie, Anna, Anna’s boyfriend Thomas and a girl named Eliza—now all juniors at the same private high school—were clustered on the floor of Sophie’s bedroom in her parents’ Gramercy Park apartment. Sophie was straddling Eliza, one of her best friends, giving her a back rub and fiddling with her straight blond hair. Anna was lying with her head on Thomas’ legs.

"I’m not about straight and gay," said Anna, "I think that if you see something special in a person, that’s all that matters. I’ve generally found those special things in guys, but Sophie and I were utterly and completely dependent on each other, and I really loved her."

"I spent every single day of my life with Anna," said Sophie. "And I treated her like I treated a guy. When she wouldn’t call me, I’d be like, ‘Why isn’t she calling?’ I was pretty much obsessed."

"I think where sexuality becomes malleable is where people are happier," said Sophie. "People realize that if this huge thing isn’t so serious, and if we can go from being with a girl to being with a guy to back to a girl with fluidity, then everything becomes more fluid. Whenever I hook up with girls, I feel very empowered. And when I hook up with guys, I feel they have more power than me.

"You can just feel it," she continued. "Ten years ago, girls our age would be embarrassed if they ever got caught, but now many girls take advantage of it, as a situation to be seen as a total sex bomb. There are girls who are gay, there are girls who want attention, and there are girls like me, who just find people I’ve been attracted to and hook up with them. I mean, look at my friends—they’re so pretty. Obviously you’re attracted to them, because you spend so much time with them."

Sophie slipped into her closet to change her outfit for the fourth time. She emerged wearing a pair of skin-tight jeans and flopped down on her bed.

"I think girls who kiss each other to turn on the guys generally aren’t attracted to each other," she said. "I see how they react to each other—they spend a lot of their time putting on lip gloss and push-up bras and all that jazz. The girls that go to my high school want to be the picture-perfect image of a girly-girl, because that’s what guys are most attracted to—girls who are virginal and overflowing with femininity. They don’t really like girls who speak their mind."

Sophie said she’s sure she’ll always fool around with girls, even when she’s an adult, but that she has no interest in identifying herself as lesbian.

"I can pretty much assume that the girls who are gay in our school are very secretive about it," she said. "I know a girl in 10th grade who would never mention it to anyone—because they would believe her. I think for us, people just suspend their disbelief."

Anna and Sophie’s physical relationship ended last spring, around the time Sophie met a guy she wanted to be her boyfriend. Anna started dating a guy in her grade a few months later. But the two remain best friends.

[RoosterDance]

A Crush on My Girl-Scout Leader
Nora de Ronde


When I was about fourteen, I had a crush on my scout leader. Her scout name was Ramita. For a whole school year I was under the spell of a woman twenty years older than I. Even though we lived only five minutes from each other, we wrote lengthy letters, at first at least one a day. She picked me up from school, organized her family life (she was married and had children) so that we could go out and walk along the beach, and went dancing with me.

I joined the scouts because my classmate, Judith, took me with her once to a meeting. During summer camp Judith and I turned out to be good scouts. Our troop's tent, with six scouts in it, was always tidy. The sink and table-top stove in our kitchen were solidly lashed down with rope and posts as thick as your wrist. They didn't collapse as in other kitchens. We checked everything every day.

We were well disciplined. We kept the fire burning under the huge kettle all day so there was always warm water for everybody; especially our leader. We managed to use the right knot to tie the guy rope to the tent peg. When walking through camp we picked up candy wrappers and loose objects: pieces of rope, tent pegs, tin mugs, and stored them away. We did whatever needed to be done. We didn't like simple, silly songs with no harmony line, like “She'll be Coming 'Round the Mountain” but were fond of complex German rounds like “A lies ist eitel, du aberbleibst.” We wanted to be good scouts: pure in thought, Word, and deed. We wanted to earn our camping merit badge, but more importantly, we wanted Ramita to see us and pay us compliments. After all, she saw everything, didn't she, even when we thought that nobody was noticing.

There was always a lot to talk about in our troop of twenty infatuated and fretful thirteen-fourteen- and fifteen-year-old girls. Some had had their first period, others hadn't. Some were rich, some poor. Some girls were college prep students, some attended vocational trade schools. Some were from strict Protestant families, others had atheist parents.

Despite the disparities, we shared one common fascination. As if spellbound, we discussed the intimate friendship between our two leaders, Ramita and Orion. There was a lot for us to fantasize about. They never let on that there was much more between them than an especially close friendship. Yes, we knew they sometimes sat up all night talking. But what else did they do besides talk?

Judith and I didn't hang around with each other all the time, and like everybody else we added in our own way to the miracle of turning a motley bunch into a coherent, summer camp community in ten days' time. What was it that inspired us, not just Judith and me, but the other scouts as well? It was the “magnificent, unsurpassed” Ramita, as she was called in one of the log books. We were building-blocks in Ramita's hands. She it was who cemented us into a close-knit structure. She knew how to create a special atmosphere with little things. At night, when it was dark and we were in our tents, she and Orion sang us quiet, peaceful songs. When they prepared a nice dinner for us and someone asked her what ingredients she had used, Ramita replied, “It was made with love.”

Even though Ramita was twenty years older, she was much more our equal than our school teachers. Whatever she taught us, she taught with great enthusiasm, whether folk dancing or braiding a lanyard for a whistle. When dealing with a serious issue, like the morning service (something that should never be taken casually), or when talking to us about insensitive behavior towards each other, she was always sincere and wise, convinced of the values she instilled in us.

Ramita was someone we liked to listen to. She talked to us in a different way than did our teachers and parents. She made us feel that we could discuss anything with her. One of the ways to gain her complete attention was to have a “problem.” Having a problem provided you with the opportunity to be alone with her, to go for a walk outside the campsite. You could win this special privilege by remaining silent for a long time, staring pensively into nothing, hoping against hope that she would ask, “What's troubling you?” That was the ultimate in intimacy!

She expected a lot from us, but, unlike our other educators who just nagged us, she challenged us to fulfill the expectations she had of us. We ran around doing anything for her. She energized us. There's nothing as highly charged as a bunch of adolescents looking for a way to get rid of their tension.

As the camp days wore on, I became more and more obsessed with being a good scout in order to win a special place in Ramita's heart. Moreover, she was my Manitou. At the beginning of camp everybody drew a name by secret lot and then that person became your Manitou. You had to keep an eye on her and do nice things for her. At the beginning of the ten long days of summer camp I didn't know quite what I was expected to do. But half way through I got the hang of it: Does Ramita want another mug of tea? I had poured it before she even realized that she wanted it. Is she warm enough? Does she want to wear my sweater? (My sweater against her body, that's what I wanted!) Does she look worried? If I thought she did then I could ask her if anything was wrong. That was how I became intimate with her, how I got to see her in the morning when I served Orion and her their breakfast in their tent. She whispered to me to be very quiet because Orion was still sleeping.

They had been talking well into the night.

During the last campfire evening everybody had to guess who their Manitou had been, and then sit down next to her. So Ramita sat down next to me. The whole evening! The whole troop was being so sentimental. ft was so terrible that camp was nearly over. Besides, it was also Ramita's final evening. This camp would be her last: she was leaving scouting. We all knew how hard it must be for her to part from us. She was addicted to us. At the end of the campfire it all became too much, and I burst into tears. Then sweet comfort, she put her arm around me and pulled me tight against her. I was already sharing her blanket, because I was cold.

When camp was over I felt desperate. We had had such a good time together, had managed to make this camp into a little piece of heaven on earth. Ramita had given us so much. It wasn't just Judith and I who wanted to hold on to the camp atmosphere and talk about Ramita and Orion. During the last week of summer holidays, we campers kept looking each other up. We went for walks on the beach at six o'clock in the morning, until we couldn't walk any further. We paid nervous little visits to Ramita, and went biking in the woods with her and her small children. The only ray of hope to us was that in the end Ramita would somehow remain the leader of our scout troop.

By the time I had to return to school in September, I was suffering from loss and even feigning illness. While my mother cleaned out my closet and while my classmates were learning French, I was in bed writing letters to Ramita. Because of my illness, of course it was impossible for me to look her up. She just had to know everything about me, but where to begin? “Dearest Ramita”—no, that was no good. For me, in the past, everything dearest was stupid and sentimental, not how I felt about Ramita. “Dear” was completely impossible, and a simple, “Hello” was much too lighthearted.

I finally decided on “Dearest” and then told her everything—why animals were my best friends and how that happened. Until then I had told everything to my pony, stabled in a nearby, run-down barn. I told Ratmta how I felt about life, how unreliable people were, about my time at camp, and my feelings there.

It was at camp that I began to think about myself, maybe provoked by all the talking and singing the campers did together. Had my spiritual deepening come through the scout ceremonies? For the first time in my life I felt awakening in me a consciousness of something deeper. I wanted to tell her all about it: she was the one who had started the whole process. All day I thought about her; carried on imaginary conversations with her. The vague emotions I felt were so intense that I simply didn't understand what was coming over me. For the first time in my life I needed another person to whom I could express my feelings. A human reaction to what I am going through—her reaction—was now to me indispensable. Weakened by passion, I yearned for her support, needed her to balance the crises in my school life: homework, bad grades, peer pressure, wearing nylons, attending dance classes. Everything was a crisis only she could solve.

I also started to write letters to the other scouts who were attending the same school, and they to me. Our hidden purpose was to imitate Orion and Ramita, who wrote letters to each other all the time. My letters were a subterfuge for discussing her. The letter-writing mania began to infect girls in my class who were not even scouts. The letters, sometimes written on test paper, sometimes in our school note book, were mostly composed during class. We didn't mail them— that took too much time for an answer—but hand-delivered the letters to each other during breaks. Ranita also preferred to hand her letters to me in person. Her secret words thrilled me, “I took this letter back home again because you were not around and I did not feel like handing it to your sister. Not everybody needs to know that we write to each other.” The whole affair was exhausting me.

Of all my other scout friends, I was most in touch with Gonnie, not because we were really friends—in fact I thought she was quite detestable—but because she was trying to get involved with Orion the way I was with Ramita. I could think of nothing except Ramita and certainly could not concentrate on school and homework. At the end of the school year, I knew I would be kept back. I wrote the following advice to Gonnie, who suffered the same problems with Orion: “It's terribly annoying to have to constantly think of Orion. It makes you an outsider in class, because your mind is so busy on something they can't understand, because they have never experienced anything like it. They can't understand that you can love somebody so much that it almost drives you crazy. (Of course I experience the same with Ramita). There is nothing to talk about with your classmates and you keep your distance from them. I'm almost over it now, at least when I am at school, but at home it's impossible to keep my thoughts together. I can't even do my homework. You really have to try to put Orion out of your mind and think of something else. I know it's incredibly hard, but I'm sure you will manage, otherwise you will end up all cut about it.”

I longed for the intimate friendship with Ramita that she had with Orion. I was in love with their friendship, the intimacy I sensed at camp that they had together. That was my goal: to take Orion's place. I dressed like her, went to Amsterdam to buy the same unfashionable orthopedic shoes she wore, tried to find the exact same skirt, even imitated her handwriting.

The letters we scouts wrote to each other touched on all kinds of superficial subjects: the French lessons I was taking, the latest record by Françoise Hardy, “Dis moi que tu as.” In my letters to Ramita I set myself a different standard: not to drivel on. I dared to touch on more subjects in writing than I was willing to share in her presence. The tone of her letters to me was a mixture of seduction and scout leadership. Distance only increased the tension, required countless drafts. On the back of an envelope, which had contained one of her letters, I wrote an a clear hand: “Oh Ramita, how I long to tell you everything, but I am not sure how. You are so terribly sweet. If only you knew how much I love you, and how incredibly much I appreciate you.” I never had the courage to send it.

As soon as one of her letters arrived I read her closing. At first she simply wrote “love,” followed soon by “lots of love” and then “lots and lots of love,” or “'bye, little darling, all my love.”

We devised plans to meet each other outside our daily exchanges, for instance by attending a song-fest weekend with the whole scout troop. I corresponded with her about where she wanted to sleep and was beside myself with joy when she wrote, “I want a bed next to you.” I wrote her name on all the pages of my notebook. I lived for the moments I could see her or receive one of her letters. Often, on my way from school, I joined her for tea and handed her that day's letter. Every now and then she picked me up from school, with one of her small children seated on the back and one on the front of her bike. I held the handlebar and when her hand closed over mine I felt violent shocks. Perhaps what I felt was the same as what Carla, a classmate, felt when Hans, a twelfth grade student she went steady with, touched her. I could hear myself telling her, “I know what that feeling is you're having with Hans. I feel the same when Ramita touches me.” And the feeling was getting stronger all the time.

Saturday afternoons I visited the church community center where Ratnita ran a folk-dancing group. She had insisted that I join the group. We danced the polka together a zillion times. She grabbed me firmly around the waist and made me float all over the tiny dance floor. We spun around and around and I was perfectly happy. I looked deeply into her eyes, in an agony. Later, at home, I couldn't do anything except gaze aimlessly for hours trying to recapture the slowly waning electricity of the moment.

Then, quite suddenly, in mid-October, after a month and a half of feeling this way, the situation changed quite dramatically. Ramita informed us that we should no longer write or visit her, but she continued to correspond occasionally with a few of us scouts, and with me daily. I was more convinced than ever that she had something special with me. In early October she had even written that she missed me terribly when I wasn't at a scout meeting. “Sometimes I just miss you. Then I am inclined to look you up and ask you to do I-don't-know-what with me.” I remember clearly, it was a Monday evening. She had picked me up from my confirmation class. She told me that, for the time being, she was renouncing all contact with us. Suddenly too, there I was, all lumped together with the other scouts. “All of you,” she said devastatingly.

I thought I had enough to distract me. Besides homework and tests, I was busy preparing for the school musical revue. It involved half of my classmates and almost all the scouts in the school. But I missed Ramita terribly. I went to our front door twenty times a day to check the doormat for any white envelopes, and ran as many times to my room to hide my disappointment from the rest of the family.

Judith had to run an errand to Ramita's house and I told her to give Ramita a note saying to get in touch with me. One evening Ramita picked me up at my confirmation class and handed me a letter. It was stem, “It is indeed the right decision to break off visits and letters with all of you. I hope you feel about this the same way I do. In every respect it's better to put a stop to this highly emotional behavior and all this clinging to each other.” She went on then, treating me like an adult, sharing with me the emotional confusion between her and Orion: “Sadly, I have hardly seen Orion, and the times I really could and had the time to, Gonnie was there. All of midterm break she sat there clinging tooth and nail to Orion.” At least her letter gave me the chance of answering, and so our correspondence started again, but not as frequently as before.

In November Ramita kept completely aloof. The school revue was claiming all my attention. Everyone in the musical was so worked up about it: the cheering crowds, the lights, the costumes, the make-up. I could rid myself of all that weighty, sentimental business!

When I saw Ramita in church I was the one who was now aloof, even surly. She couldn't stand that. Just after Christmas I received two letters in one envelope. One was so sweet it was almost too much so, but the other was frank, “There must be something wrong. I want to know the truth. You act as though you no longer appreciate my company. I think this is terrible and I can't bear it any longer. i've been laying awake all night thinking about it. What have I done to hurt you?” In my reply I kept my distance. I didn't feel any more like carrying on. I didn't have the stomach, or cruel streak, to hurt her.

But the old fire flared up in me again. Where did she stand? What attitude should I adopt? It was time to call her by her first name, not her scout name, I thought. So, I wrote a passionate letter to explain it all to her.

During Christmas holidays, Ramita and Orion went off on a trip together. When they got back, Ramita confessed to me that she had never informed Orion about our friendship or correspondence. “I had no special reason to tell her,” she wrote by way of excuse. I had my own theory, that she was afraid that Orion would be jealous of the intensity or our friendship. About a month later, when she and I were making plans to bicycle to summer camp together, she asked me not to tell Orion about our plans. Their friendship was tough going again. I knew it was. But, when I saw Ramita and Orion dancing together at the festivities on Baden-Powell day, I was madly jealous. She never paid any attention to me at all. Afterwards, she wrote lamely, “Darling, I know it's little or no use to explain. I know what it feels like from bitter experience. You shouldn't be jealous of Orion. Please try to get over it. Don't ever forget that I love you very much and wouldn't let you down for 30 Orions!”

By March, however, our letters were gradually becoming more level-headed. Ramita was becoming less superior, less the adult writing to the adolescent, less tense. She writes, “I feel that our relationship is steady enough now for us not to slide back into the foolishness of September and October. Our friendship is real now, much less sentimental. You've seen enough of my follies to know that I am just a human being, with all the accompanying faults and failings.”

That summer bike trip we spent endless moments fantasizing about is suddenly canceled. She is pregnant, constantly busy with her pregnancy. She keeps telling me how happy her husband and she are about it. I don't want to hear anything about it. Last year my mother had played the same trick on me. You just can't do that to a girl in puberty. Our relationship begins to trail off.

* * *

Now, more than twenty years later, I am amazed that we never had sex together, or even kissed. It might have relieved the intensity. In a way though, writing about it here, and thinking it over, I am also glad that we did not. I felt confused enough as it was. I felt that I had gained insight into her life, but to what avail? It had only left me impotent, jealous, filled with yearning, filled with obscure but nonetheless intense emotions. Hadn't our relationship been erotic enough already? Would I have been able to deal with adult sexuality? To me even kissing seemed frightening, dirty. My erotic fantasies about boys did not go far. A little walking hand in hand with a boy down a busy street was enough to excite me. I knew about sex though. My friend Judith's family subscribed to one of the Dutch sexological magazines and there were articles about fucking. I loathed the idea that my parents had actually done something like that, or, even worse, still did it.

My desires were certainly sexual; sexuality must have been one of the motives for doing everything for her, why I waited so expectantly for every meeting and every letter. I don't think that I then had the slightest idea of how I could have fulfilled those desires.

In a certain way, not having sex made things clear. She was married and had children and a busy social life. I had to adjust to the facts. My rights in the friendship were not so clearly defined. Without sex I was not in the position to claim anything from her. All I could do was confront her with my expectations, as for instance when I asked her why she had danced with Orion and not with me. She pulled the strings. set the limits, had the upper hand.

My view of those scouting years has changed. In the seventies, when I first hung out in women's cafes, having been a scout appeared to be an advantage. Some of the best feminists had also once earned their merit badges. Now I suddenly understood the hot-blooded atmosphere at the camps, the constant longing to see each other afterwards. Without ever having been there I experienced the sensation of the women's camps at Femo, where women fell in love with each other in huge numbers. In those days we feminists put everything into a lesbian perspective.

I looked back upon my scouting years and all of a sudden I noticed all kinds of crushes. Many of us were in love with Ramita, especially me; but Judith and I were in love with each other, and Connie with Orion. Ramita was a lesbian woman who was channeling her desires. She had had her favorites before. There had been, in the years prior to my knowing her, two scouts who were always circling around her, even outside of scouting. They were referred to as her paladins. I was now convinced that she and Orion had had an affair. My infatuation with Ramita acquired a clarity and a label that it had not had before: my first lesbian experience.

But now, after another fifteen years have passed and I have had the chance to reread the letters, I doubt whether it ever occurred to her that making love to another female person was even possible. Did she merely enjoy our adoration? Was she a lesbian who didn't know it herself? Did scouting provide her only with an opportunity to spend time away from her husband and children? Or was it that, as she herself told me, that she felt more comfortable with female companionship? And about her affection for Orion she once said, “I know there are people who get annoyed, and more than annoyed, at Orion and me. We just ignore it. We have a special kind of affection many people don't understand.”

Nora de Ronde (1953) is a journalist. She is a co-founder of various feminist and lesbian magazines. Translated by Gertjan Cobelens.