Aggression Against Pedophiles - E.Brongersma[link]
Posted: Tue Jul 23, 2024 5:15 pm
Aggression Against Pedophiles
Edward Brongersma
1994
[NOTES: "homophile" is a European alternative for "homosexual", and "boutade" is "a sudden outburst or outbreak" --Manny]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
International Journal of Law and Psychiatry. Vol. 7, pp. 79-97, 1994
Printed in the U.S.A. All rights reserved.
0160-2527194 $3.00 + .00
Copyright © 1984 Pergamon Press Ltd
Aggression Against Pedophiles
Edward Brongersma*
Slightly over a century ago, a new and hitherto unknown kind of aggression began to arise in Western society: the aggression against people who love children and want to express their feelings for them with bodily tenderness.
For men more than women, the situation had always been awkward. In ancient Greece, Rome, China, and Japan, men loved boys and were held in high esteem for this, as they are still in high esteem today with numbers of people who live close to nature. [1] In other cultures, like the Arab or the Indian, officially they might be frowned upon, but their doings were mostly considered a peccadillo.[2] Where Christians came into power, however, boy-lovers were killed. But – and this is the important point to stress – not because they had chosen a young partner. The boy wasn’t considered a victim; he was punished as well as the adult. For he was guilty as well of a heinous crime: homosexuality.[3]
Circumstances were better, but not always sunny, for men who loved girls. In itself there was nothing against having sex with a girl, but the girl was the property of her father, and this property was damaged if she was no longer a virgin. Thus, the father could sue for compensation. Moreover, the honour of the family was at stake (if the family had any!) and fathers and brothers might take revenge on the man who had seduced a daughter or sister. Questions of rank and social standing were of utmost importance in medieval society and long thereafter. Therefore, much depended on the position of the seducer. A man of lower rank than the girl – a servant or teacher – was punished or fined; a man of equal or higher status was left in peace. But – I must emphasize it again – whatever difficulties a man might meet after having sex with a girl, the reason lay never with the fact that she was still so young.[4]
* Doctor of Law, Doctor Edward Brongersma Foundation, Overveen, Tetterodewoeg 2, 2051 EE, The Netherlands.
1 H. Licht, Sittengeschichte Griechealands (1926); F. Buffiere, Eros adolescent (1980); K. J. Dover,
Greek Homosexuality (1976); F. Karsch-Haack, Das gleichgeschlechtliche Leben der Ostasiaten (1906);
I. Saikaku, The Temple of Pederasty (1970); F. Karsch-Haack, Das gleichgeschlechtliche Leben der
Naturvolker (1911); T. O’Carroll, Paedophilia - The Radical Case (1980).
2 R. F. Burton, Terminal Essay in: The Book of the Thousand Nights and A Night (1886); A. Al-
Tifachi, Les délices des coeurs (1971); N. Nair, Narayana (1968); R. Schmidt, Beiträge zur indischen
Erotik (1922)
3 E. Brongersma, Homosexualiteit en strafrecht, in: Psych. Jur. Gezelschap, Homosexualiteit (1971).
4 The whole situation and its evolution is excellently set forth by M. Killias: Jugend und Sexualstrafrecht
(1979).
Women who had sex with boys passed unnoticed, unless they were punished for adultery. No mention is ever made of women having sex with girls.
Children weren’t seen as a separate category. The genitals of children were openly fondled by parents and friends and nurses, as children evidently liked this. Children, indeed, were seen as sexual beings and therefore as interested in sex. Erections in small boys were amusing spectacles. Medieval folklore is full of allusions that boys and girls should have sex as soon as they matured. Boys and girls married when they were 11 years old and had “carnal knowledge” of each other. No one took offense at Dante’s love for nine-year-old Beatrice. The City Fathers of Ulm, in Germany, had to make regulations to stem the flow of 12-14 year old boys to the brothels.
The famous humanist Erasmus wrote a treatise on sexual pleasure, in the shape of a conversation between a young man and a prostitute, and dedicated it to the six-year-old son of a friend. In my native town of Haarlem, the famous painter and scholar Carel van Mander (who died in 1606) taught his pupils, 12-year-old boys, to have sex in order to avoid headaches and to better concentrate on their studies.
And in England, at the same time, 13-year-old Elisabeth Ramsbotham complained officially about the fact that her 11-year-old husband John Bridge had not yet deflowered her.[5]
The idea that sex, with a friend of the same age or with an older person, in itself could harm a child was as absent in European culture as it is still
absent today – according to ethnologists – in many other cultures.[6] Penal law was therefore silent on this matter. Children were, on equal footing with
adults, protected against rape, violence, and abuse of authority, but never against sex as such.
This was, for instance, the situation of penal law in the Netherlands up until 1886. Less than a century ago, consensual sex with children, boys or
girls, whether heterosexual or homosexual, constituted no offence in this country.[7] This changed in the Victorian Age.
How did this change come about? How was it prepared? Historians could offer long, and necessarily complicated explanations.[8] Let us point out only two factors:
First: a considerable increase in knowledge and technology, demanding an increase in instruction; second: the rise to power of an industrious bourgeoisie, which was bent on accumulating riches by diligence and thrift.
The increase of knowledge and technology increased automatically the length of the period needed for instruction and apprenticeship. A boy of 14 could not any longer be a teacher, a commander in the army, a ship’s captain or a cardinal of the Roman Church, as he had been in former times.[9] He couldn’t
5 J. M. W. van Ussel, Geschiedenis van het seksuele probleem (1968); L. Dasberg, Grootbrengen
door Kleinhouden (1975); E. Fuchs, Illustrierte Sittengeschichte – Renaissance (1909); J. H. van den
Berg, Metabletica (1956).
6 C. S. Ford & F. A. Beach, Patterns of Sexual Behavior (1951).
7 H. J. Smidt, Geschiedenis van het Wetboek van Strafrecht (1891); E. Brongersma, Sex en Straf
(1976); id., De rechispositie van de pedofiel in: Psych Jur. Gezelschap, De rechtspositie van de deviante
mens (1978).
8 Van Ussel and Dasberg, see note 5 to M. Taylor, Sex in History (1959); E. Scherer, Emile perverti
(1974); J. P. Arony & R. Kempf, La penis et la démoralisation de l’occident (1978).
9 Van Ussel and Dasberg, see note 5.
be a husband or a father because he wasn’t able to earn the livelihood for a family. He had to learn. The age of majority and the mean age of marriage crept upward.[10]
In modern industrial society, more and more years elapsed between reaching physical maturity and being able to marry. In these years the sexuality of boys and girls was of no use – superfluous.
One could even say that in those days nearly every expression of sexuality became superfluous and suspicious. Sex is disturbing; it keeps people from
working. It requires, on average, over two hundred copulations for every birth, and every single time the male produces hundreds of millions of spermatozoa.[11]
Just to produce one baby! What a dreadful squandering of energy! How antagonistic to the economical principles of virtuous bourgeoisie! Isn’t sex a bad, base, dirty habit, below human dignity?
These two rather prosaic factors together engendered a fairy tale. Society had – as I said – no use for a child’s sexuality; so it simply declared that a
child didn’t have any. And so emerged the fairy tale, depicting the child as asexual, pure, innocent: pure because the child was not contaminated by such a dirty thing as sex, and innocent, because the child was not sharing the guilt of adults who committed this sinful activity.[12]
Woe now to the criminal, who dared to soil this pure being, to destroy its innocence! It was unthinkable that any child could ever have anything to do
with sex, spontaneously, out of his or her own free will. If something happened, only the evil adult could be at fault, the initiative could only be his. And so we see, during the 19th century, one penal code after another being extended with a brand new, hitherto unheard of provision: a section against indecent behaviour with children.[13]
In the Netherlands, it was not until 1886 that such a section was included, fixing the age of consent at 16.[14] Over the Western and Westernized world, there is an incredible variety in the range of the ages of consent. In one country it is 12[15], in another it is 21[16], which shows how clumsy and arbitrary legislators deal with this unfamiliar subject.
Under the impact of laws which made it criminal to show sexual tenderness and love to a child, and firmly believing in the fairy tale about the child’s
asexuality, innocence and purity (such as it was spread by pedagogues and moralists), public opinion was incited to a frenzy of fierce hatred against pedophiles, and its natural aggression found a new outlet in claiming that these criminals should be put in jail for life, should be shot, should be castrated. “If it had been my own child that he’d touched, I could have strangled him with my own hands!” a well-known television personality exclaimed, and he was vigorously applauded. That children were battered to death or severely injured by their own parents, killed or maimed for life by drunken drivers, never raised half so strong a fury.
10 Report of the Committee on the Age of Majority (1967)
11 R. S. Hotchkiss, Fertility in Man (1944).
12 Scherer, see note 8.
13 Killias, see note 4.
14 See note 7.
15 Penal Code of the Philippines, 1977 edition, for all sexual activities.
16 Sexual Offenses Act, 1956 (England) for homosexual activities. A survey of many legislations is
given by Killias, see note 4.
Every contrary opinion met with savage opposition. No part of Sigmund Freud’s doctrine enraged people so much as his findings that children were full of sexual feelings and desires, his destruction of the fairy tale. Decades went by without anyone questioning the theory that children suffered frightful
harm if sexually approached by an adult person. It wasn’t until 1934 that a Norwegian psychiatrist, Augusta Rasmussen, began follow-up research on
victims of rape and indecent assault. The conclusion was surprising: no evidence whatever of lasting damage. [17] Rasmussen was followed by Landis in the United States[18], by Lempp in Germany[19], by Burton[20] and the Dominican Friar Ingram in England21, by Bernard[21] and Corstjens in the Netherlands[23], by Tindall again in the United States.[24] There were many others. I mention only the best known.
Summing up the evidence of these researches, Professor Schorsch[25] and Professor Kerscher[26] in West Germany, Doctor Hauptmann[27] in Austria, Professor Graven[28] in Switzerland, the Government Committee, presided over by Judge Kjellin[29] in Sweden, agreed unanimously: there’s no proof whatever that children who have consensual sexual relations with adults suffer any lasting damage from the sexual experience itself. If there is any damage that these children suffer, it is always secondary, caused by the reactions of upset parents on discovery of the facts, or caused by police examinations. Storzer mentions that among [33] such children afterwards seen by psychologists or psychiatrists, not less than [31] showed evidence of traumatisation by police questioning, the effects running from a display of self-importance to attempted suicide.[30]
It seems evident from these facts, that there is only one reasonable solution to the problem: to divide sexual behaviour of adults towards children into
17 A Rasmussen Die Bedeutung sexueller Attentäte auf Kinder unter 14 Jahren für die Entwicklung
von Geisteskrankhkiten und Charakteranomalien, 9 Acta Psychiatrica (København) 351 (1934).
18 J T. Landis, Experiences of 500 Children With Adult Sexual Deviation, 30 Psychiatric Quarterly
Supplement 91 (1956).
19 R. Lempp, Seelische Schädigung von Kindem als Opfer von gewaltlosen Sittlichkeitsdelikten, Neue
Jurist&he Wochenschrift 21 (1968).
20 L. Burton, Vulnerable Children (1968).
21 M. Ingram O. P., Reaction to Paedophile Acts, Libertarian Education 2 (1977); id., The Participating
Victim: a Study of Sexual Offences Against Prepubertal Boys, in: M. Cook & G. Wilson, Love and
Attraction (1979).
22 F Bernard, De gevolgen voor het kind, in: P. van Eeten (ed.), Sex met kinderen (1972).
23 J. M. H. Corstjens, Opvoeding en pedofilie (1975).
24 R H Tindall, The Male Adolescent Involved with a Pederast Becomes an Adult, 3 Journal of
Homosexuality 4 (1978).
25 E Schorsch, Liberalitat reicht nicht, Betrifft: Erziehung 4 (1974).
26 K..-H. I. Kerscher, Zur Schädlichkeit nichgewaltsamer sexueller Handlungen mit Kindem, Neue
Praxis 2 (1973); id,, Unzucht mit Kindem, Sexualmedizin 11 (1974); id., Emanzipatorische Sexualpädagogik
und Strafrecht (1973).
27 W. Hauptmann, Gewaltlose Unzucht mit Kindem (1975).
28 Ph Graven, La pudeur enfantine (art. 191 CP), in: Recueil offert au Tribunal Fédéral (1975).
29 Sexualbrottsutredningen, Sexuella overgrepp (1976).
30 A large number of authors could be quoted to substantiate this opinion. I’ll limit myself here to:
H. U. Störzer, Sittlichkeitsprozess und junges Opfer, in: Hess-Störzer-Streng, Sexualität und soziale
Kontrolle (1978); D. J. West, A Commentary to E. Brongersma’s paper The Meaning of “Indecency”
With Respect to Moral Offences Involving Children, 20 British Journal of Criminology 1 (1980).
three categories. Category one: the child is subjected to violence, threats or abuse of authority. Against such aggression it should be protected with the full force of the law. Category two: the child is put into a position which it more or less strongly dislikes, which gives it the creeps or which it thinks odd, funny, queer. The child runs away, shuddering with disgust or sniggering.
Of course society should try to prevent such things from happening. If they have happened nevertheless, parents or others should take care of the child and see to its problems, if any, just as if it had witnessed a nasty road accident or other unpleasant spectacle. But it is not in the interest of the child to make a tragedy out of it, to ram the events into its mind, to render things which otherwise are quickly passing by so frightfully important and unforgettable by using it as a witness in a criminal procedure. Criminal proceedings, therefore, should be avoided. Category three. The child likes the adult and the sexual relationship. Penal law, with its blunt weapons, should abstain completely.
Civil law should empower parents to stop the relationship effectively if they’re convinced that the adult in question has morally or psychologically a bad influence on their son or daughter. The judge, of course, should pay utmost importance to the opinion of the child itself. This – as I have said – would be a reasonable solution. But as soon as sexuality enters the picture, society usually doesn’t behave in a reasonable way.
Let’s take a nonsensical example.
Suppose a competent and serious researcher suddenly stands up, declaring that careful investigation has now proved convincingly and without doubt that the fear of radiation sickness resulting from production of nuclear energy is completely unfounded, that people may be exposed to the strongest radiation for weeks on end without suffering the slightest harm, and that all the bad effects, hitherto attributed to radiation, were in reality produced by other agents, easily eliminated. Wouldn’t there be rejoicing everywhere? Wouldn’t we all be happy?
Of course this is nonsense. But it is no nonsense that competent and serious researchers have established that the bad effects of sexual confrontation, supposedly inflicted upon children, are quite imaginary, and that traumatisation is only secondary, due to the reactions of upset parents and policemen. When this was published, there was no rejoicing at all. It passed by nearly unnoticed.
People clung stubbornly to their former beliefs, even if they couldn’t deny that the effects of these beliefs – the examinations, the criminal procedures were highly harmful to their cherished children.
Why this unwillingness to accept the good tidings? Why do we want to stay in anguish, in perpetual panic? Why do we cling to our indignation, our
aggression, our desire to punish, to castrate, or to kill the malefactor, even at the expense of the children’s well-being?
May I propose a hypothesis? It is a well-known fact that no person shows such an intense hatred of homosexuality as the man who has a strong, repressed, maybe unconscious inclination toward his own sex. Let me quote a distinguished criminologist, Professor West of Cambridge:
Wilhelm Stekel, one of the fathers of psychoanalysis, wrote in 1922:
It would take hours and hours to give a complete analysis of the discussion, as it goes on and on. Allow me to summarize it in the form of a “boutade.”
Once upon a time, long, long ago, it was customary for men to sleep with boys and girls and have sexual relations with them. All the men did this, but the real pedophiles among them did it with even greater joy than the others.[35]
Then the Christians appeared on the scene and told everyone that it was a very great sin to sleep with boys. And from that moment on, whenever people managed to get hold of them, boy-lovers were burned alive, strangled, drowned or beheaded.[36]
31 D. J. West, Homosexuality Re-examined (1977).
32 The report Pedofilie en Samenleving of the Dutch National Centre for Public Mental Health (1976)
adopted this definition; also L. Rouweler-Wuts, Pedofielen in contact of conflict met de samenleving?
(1976)
33 W. Stekel, Psychosexueller Infantilismus (1922).
34 Quoted by B. Bendig, Pädophile Sexualdelinquenten als politisch Verfolgte? (1980).
35 See note 1.
36 See note 3.
That went on until the French Revolution, when a new breed of philosophers began to say that penal law should be used only to protect society and prevent individuals from being illegally harmed and not to enforce morality.[37]
The boy-lovers began to take heart. They slept with their young friends again and weren’t disturbed.
But soon people began to preach that this was enormously harmful. For children were pure, innocent creatures who knew nothing about such a dirty
phenomenon as sex.[38]
Once again boy- lovers and other pedophiles were hunted down, and when the authorities got hold of them they perished in prison.
Then came Freud and his followers who affirmed that children weren’t asexual creatures at all; he even went so far as to call them “polymorphously
perverse.”[39]
The pedophiles, who had known this for centuries, again began to take heart.
But along came the medical doctors, the same ones who had been busy telling everyone that masturbation caused horrible illness and brought on premature death.[40]
They said that any boy who had sex with men would invariably be turned into a homophile himself and would remain one for the rest of his
life. Legislators listened to these expert opinions and they made the laws much tougher. Now men were sent to prison for having sex with adolescents
and even young men.[41]
Then came some psychiatrists – among them Professor Zeegers – who demonstrated that this was all nonsense and gave rise only to misery and injustice.[42]
In several countries the old harsh laws were repealed.[43]
But now came another group of scientists, maintaining that it may very well be that children were sexual from head to toe and it may be quite healthy
for them to have sexual play among themselves, but this by no means proved that they wanted to play in the same way with adults.44 Children had not matured enough for that. So the pedophiles whom the police managed to catch stayed in their prison cells. Moreover, as the aggression of society grew stronger and science progressed, they were now subjected to torture by brain surgery and aversion therapy.[45]
Then a group of researchers came forward with many examples of children who wanted to establish intimate relationships with adults, because adults
37 De Montesquieu, De L’esprit des lois (1748).
38 Van Ussel, see note 5; Scherer and Aron & Kempf, see note 8.
39 S. Freud, Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (1905).
40 Tissot, De L’onanisme, dissertation sur les maladies produites par la masturbation (1758); A. Lorulot,
La veritable éducation sexuelle (1928), quoted by J. de Brethmas, Détoumement de majeur (1980).
41 G. Laroche, La puberté (1938); F. J. Tolsma, Homosexualiteit en homoerotiek, adhered firmly to
this theory in the first edition (1948), repudiated it completely in the second edition (1963). The Dutch
Minister of Justice Regout appealed to this theory in his defence of the introduction of section 248bis
in the Penal Code (1911).
42 Gezondheidsraad Advies inzake homoseksuele relaties met minderjarigen, bijlage bij de memorie
van toelichting bij weisontwerp 10. 347 (1969).
43 Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, France.
44 Adviescommissie Zedelijkheidswetgeving, Eindrapport (1980).
45 V. Sigusch Medizinische Experimente am Menschen (1977); D. J. West, Homosexuality re-examined
(1977).
could give them a feeling of security and protection, which friends of their own age simply couldn’t.[46]
Once again the pedophiles began to take heart.
But the traditional psychiatrists and psychologist raised the objection that in this kind of relationship the partners weren’t equal; the adults dominated the children.[47] There was, of course, nothing wrong with dominating children as long as it was used to teach them their lessons, to make them go to church, to discipline them and bring them up properly, but where sex was involved it was absolutely impermissible. So the pedophiles caught by the authorities continued to go to prison.
Then one psychologist came up with the crazy idea that even this self-evident concept of the pedophile dominating the child in all love/sex relations
needed to be investigated. He studied in detail a number of such relationships and how the balance of power actually was held. And in none of these relationships did he find any evidence that the pedophile dominated the child.
On the contrary, in several instances it was the child that dominated the adult! In each case, the child wholeheartedly agreed to the relationship, including all of its sexual aspects.[48]
Pedophiles once again began to take heart.
But then a traditional psychiatrist explained, that when children in such relations say “yes,” they really mean to say “no.”[49]
“And when they say ‘no’?” the pedophiles asked hopefully.
“Then they also mean ‘no’!” replied this psychiatrist.
So when the police managed to catch pedophiles; they still went to prison and stayed there for long, long periods of time. And the universities began to enlarge their medical faculties enormously, for wasn’t it evident that, in the future, every child had to be provided with his own individual psychiatrist? Otherwise, who could tell his parents, teachers, and pedagogues what he really meant when he said “yes” and what he really meant when he said “no”?
But then a group of scientists came along, doing follow-up reports on individuals who, as children, had consented to sexual activity with adults. These
researchers agreed that they could find no trace, even after 15 years, of damage resulting from these youthful sexual experiences.[50]
Once again the pedophiles began to take heart, but almost immediately the psychiatrists answered that the lasting damage done by early sex with adults might well show up more than 15 years later.[51]
The pedophiles shrugged their shoulders and asked for proof. And, lo and behold, along came a physician who shouted triumphantly: “It’s not up to us to prove there is damage; it’s up to you to prove there isn’t!”[52]
46 E. Brongersma, “Pedofilie” als verzamelnaam voor ongelijksoortig gedrag, 21 Tijdschrift voor
Criminologie 7/8 (1979).
47 S. van der Kwast, Seksuele criminaliteit (1968).
48 Th. Sandfort, Het seksuele aspekt van pedotiele relaties (1981).
49 Letter from Bestuur van de Sectie Kinder – en Jeugdpsychiatrie van de Ned. Vereniging voor Psychiatric
aan de Regeringsadviescommissie-zedelijkheidswetgeving (1980).
50 See notes 17 to 29.
51 D. H. Schomerus, Der Pädophile und sein Opfer, in: F. G. von Stockert, Das sexuell gefährdete
Kind (1965).
52 H. Musaph in a lecture, quoted by Sandfort, 125 Ned. Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde 475 (1981).
Now this threw the pedophiles into considerable confusion. No researcher had ever been able to prove that sexual relations with a child were harmless, nor had it ever been satisfactorily established that sexual relations with anyone were harmless, nor, for that matter, that traveling in a train was harmless, nor the eating of green peas. And we all know that under penal law every man is guilty until acquitted, and that in this world everything is forbidden, unless one’s government specifically permits it.
The situation became even more confused when another psychiatrist suggested that one should totally disregard every piece of data and all arguments developed by people who recognized within themselves an element of pedophiliac response.[53]
The principle in itself seemed sound. Only bachelors should be allowed to write treatises on marriage; all books about sex should be compiled by scholars utterly devoid of sexual feeling. Never listen to the man with personal experience! Never listen to the man who comes to the defence of something you don’t like! For isn’t that the essence of mental health?
The problem with this proposal, however, was that sexologists had long ago established that there was a bit, and sometimes more than a bit, of pedophilia in every human adult; thus, all discussion of child love would have to cease immediately. How, then, could you send pedophiles to prison if you couldn’t even talk about what they did? So this idea ultimately gained little acceptance.
For a brief moment pedophiles thought they again saw some light at the end of the tunnel when a few psychiatrists declared that any kind of sex in which a child willingly engaged was, in itself, completely benign. But then their hopes were dashed when these men of science added: “Such activity,
however, brings the child into conflict with the standards of his environment and the society in which he lives, and that is most harmful.”[54]
So the pedophiles, half-crushed already, surrendered. They were well aware of how powerful the standards of society were. In Hitler’s Third Reich a Jewish girl was in deep trouble if an Aryan became enamoured of her; in South Africa a black youth is lost if a white woman takes him as a lover. So the pedophiles run weeping to the psychiatrists, begging for help, for it isn’t only in Soviet Russia that psychiatrists are called upon to adapt people to the standards of society.
But the children didn’t give in. They continued to seduce nice adults and called those who reproached them for this “silly fools.” And in the meantime they had learned a bit about psychoanalysis too.
They said: “For every objection they were forced to abandon, these funny ladies and gentlemen immediately produced another. Could it be, that they were really only unconsciously hiding the secrets of their own inner souls? Isn’t it just that they are a little bit afraid of sex itself?”
But nobody bothered to listen to what they said, for how could truth ever be heard from the mouths of children?
53 M. Fraser, The Child, in: B. Taylor (ed.), Perspectives on Paedophilia (1981).
54 J. van Ladee-Levy in a discussion on paedophilia with W. Sengers, A. X. van Naerssen and E.
Brongersma at Erasmus University, Rotterdam, April 1, 1981.
----------------------------------------------------------------
For hundreds of years, one by one they've been coming up with excuses for saying what we do is wrong, and for making what we do illegal.
Since this was published in 1994, they've come up with yet ANOTHER (invalid) excuse to try to prohibit intergenerational sexual activity. "Children cannot consent!" they scream. Which is, of course, complete bullshit.
SEE:
https://wiki.yesmap.net/wiki/Consent
AND:
https://wiki.yesmap.net/wiki/images/Mad ... onsent.pdf
So, any comments or criticisms about what you have read in this article?
What has he left out? I can think of a few things. Can you?
What do YOU think?
M.
SOURCE:
Aggression Against Pedophiles
Edward Brongersma
1994
https://pismin.com/10.1016/0160-2527(84)90007-4
Edward Brongersma
1994
[NOTES: "homophile" is a European alternative for "homosexual", and "boutade" is "a sudden outburst or outbreak" --Manny]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
International Journal of Law and Psychiatry. Vol. 7, pp. 79-97, 1994
Printed in the U.S.A. All rights reserved.
0160-2527194 $3.00 + .00
Copyright © 1984 Pergamon Press Ltd
Aggression Against Pedophiles
Edward Brongersma*
Slightly over a century ago, a new and hitherto unknown kind of aggression began to arise in Western society: the aggression against people who love children and want to express their feelings for them with bodily tenderness.
For men more than women, the situation had always been awkward. In ancient Greece, Rome, China, and Japan, men loved boys and were held in high esteem for this, as they are still in high esteem today with numbers of people who live close to nature. [1] In other cultures, like the Arab or the Indian, officially they might be frowned upon, but their doings were mostly considered a peccadillo.[2] Where Christians came into power, however, boy-lovers were killed. But – and this is the important point to stress – not because they had chosen a young partner. The boy wasn’t considered a victim; he was punished as well as the adult. For he was guilty as well of a heinous crime: homosexuality.[3]
Circumstances were better, but not always sunny, for men who loved girls. In itself there was nothing against having sex with a girl, but the girl was the property of her father, and this property was damaged if she was no longer a virgin. Thus, the father could sue for compensation. Moreover, the honour of the family was at stake (if the family had any!) and fathers and brothers might take revenge on the man who had seduced a daughter or sister. Questions of rank and social standing were of utmost importance in medieval society and long thereafter. Therefore, much depended on the position of the seducer. A man of lower rank than the girl – a servant or teacher – was punished or fined; a man of equal or higher status was left in peace. But – I must emphasize it again – whatever difficulties a man might meet after having sex with a girl, the reason lay never with the fact that she was still so young.[4]
* Doctor of Law, Doctor Edward Brongersma Foundation, Overveen, Tetterodewoeg 2, 2051 EE, The Netherlands.
1 H. Licht, Sittengeschichte Griechealands (1926); F. Buffiere, Eros adolescent (1980); K. J. Dover,
Greek Homosexuality (1976); F. Karsch-Haack, Das gleichgeschlechtliche Leben der Ostasiaten (1906);
I. Saikaku, The Temple of Pederasty (1970); F. Karsch-Haack, Das gleichgeschlechtliche Leben der
Naturvolker (1911); T. O’Carroll, Paedophilia - The Radical Case (1980).
2 R. F. Burton, Terminal Essay in: The Book of the Thousand Nights and A Night (1886); A. Al-
Tifachi, Les délices des coeurs (1971); N. Nair, Narayana (1968); R. Schmidt, Beiträge zur indischen
Erotik (1922)
3 E. Brongersma, Homosexualiteit en strafrecht, in: Psych. Jur. Gezelschap, Homosexualiteit (1971).
4 The whole situation and its evolution is excellently set forth by M. Killias: Jugend und Sexualstrafrecht
(1979).
Women who had sex with boys passed unnoticed, unless they were punished for adultery. No mention is ever made of women having sex with girls.
Children weren’t seen as a separate category. The genitals of children were openly fondled by parents and friends and nurses, as children evidently liked this. Children, indeed, were seen as sexual beings and therefore as interested in sex. Erections in small boys were amusing spectacles. Medieval folklore is full of allusions that boys and girls should have sex as soon as they matured. Boys and girls married when they were 11 years old and had “carnal knowledge” of each other. No one took offense at Dante’s love for nine-year-old Beatrice. The City Fathers of Ulm, in Germany, had to make regulations to stem the flow of 12-14 year old boys to the brothels.
The famous humanist Erasmus wrote a treatise on sexual pleasure, in the shape of a conversation between a young man and a prostitute, and dedicated it to the six-year-old son of a friend. In my native town of Haarlem, the famous painter and scholar Carel van Mander (who died in 1606) taught his pupils, 12-year-old boys, to have sex in order to avoid headaches and to better concentrate on their studies.
And in England, at the same time, 13-year-old Elisabeth Ramsbotham complained officially about the fact that her 11-year-old husband John Bridge had not yet deflowered her.[5]
The idea that sex, with a friend of the same age or with an older person, in itself could harm a child was as absent in European culture as it is still
absent today – according to ethnologists – in many other cultures.[6] Penal law was therefore silent on this matter. Children were, on equal footing with
adults, protected against rape, violence, and abuse of authority, but never against sex as such.
This was, for instance, the situation of penal law in the Netherlands up until 1886. Less than a century ago, consensual sex with children, boys or
girls, whether heterosexual or homosexual, constituted no offence in this country.[7] This changed in the Victorian Age.
How did this change come about? How was it prepared? Historians could offer long, and necessarily complicated explanations.[8] Let us point out only two factors:
First: a considerable increase in knowledge and technology, demanding an increase in instruction; second: the rise to power of an industrious bourgeoisie, which was bent on accumulating riches by diligence and thrift.
The increase of knowledge and technology increased automatically the length of the period needed for instruction and apprenticeship. A boy of 14 could not any longer be a teacher, a commander in the army, a ship’s captain or a cardinal of the Roman Church, as he had been in former times.[9] He couldn’t
5 J. M. W. van Ussel, Geschiedenis van het seksuele probleem (1968); L. Dasberg, Grootbrengen
door Kleinhouden (1975); E. Fuchs, Illustrierte Sittengeschichte – Renaissance (1909); J. H. van den
Berg, Metabletica (1956).
6 C. S. Ford & F. A. Beach, Patterns of Sexual Behavior (1951).
7 H. J. Smidt, Geschiedenis van het Wetboek van Strafrecht (1891); E. Brongersma, Sex en Straf
(1976); id., De rechispositie van de pedofiel in: Psych Jur. Gezelschap, De rechtspositie van de deviante
mens (1978).
8 Van Ussel and Dasberg, see note 5 to M. Taylor, Sex in History (1959); E. Scherer, Emile perverti
(1974); J. P. Arony & R. Kempf, La penis et la démoralisation de l’occident (1978).
9 Van Ussel and Dasberg, see note 5.
be a husband or a father because he wasn’t able to earn the livelihood for a family. He had to learn. The age of majority and the mean age of marriage crept upward.[10]
In modern industrial society, more and more years elapsed between reaching physical maturity and being able to marry. In these years the sexuality of boys and girls was of no use – superfluous.
One could even say that in those days nearly every expression of sexuality became superfluous and suspicious. Sex is disturbing; it keeps people from
working. It requires, on average, over two hundred copulations for every birth, and every single time the male produces hundreds of millions of spermatozoa.[11]
Just to produce one baby! What a dreadful squandering of energy! How antagonistic to the economical principles of virtuous bourgeoisie! Isn’t sex a bad, base, dirty habit, below human dignity?
These two rather prosaic factors together engendered a fairy tale. Society had – as I said – no use for a child’s sexuality; so it simply declared that a
child didn’t have any. And so emerged the fairy tale, depicting the child as asexual, pure, innocent: pure because the child was not contaminated by such a dirty thing as sex, and innocent, because the child was not sharing the guilt of adults who committed this sinful activity.[12]
Woe now to the criminal, who dared to soil this pure being, to destroy its innocence! It was unthinkable that any child could ever have anything to do
with sex, spontaneously, out of his or her own free will. If something happened, only the evil adult could be at fault, the initiative could only be his. And so we see, during the 19th century, one penal code after another being extended with a brand new, hitherto unheard of provision: a section against indecent behaviour with children.[13]
In the Netherlands, it was not until 1886 that such a section was included, fixing the age of consent at 16.[14] Over the Western and Westernized world, there is an incredible variety in the range of the ages of consent. In one country it is 12[15], in another it is 21[16], which shows how clumsy and arbitrary legislators deal with this unfamiliar subject.
Under the impact of laws which made it criminal to show sexual tenderness and love to a child, and firmly believing in the fairy tale about the child’s
asexuality, innocence and purity (such as it was spread by pedagogues and moralists), public opinion was incited to a frenzy of fierce hatred against pedophiles, and its natural aggression found a new outlet in claiming that these criminals should be put in jail for life, should be shot, should be castrated. “If it had been my own child that he’d touched, I could have strangled him with my own hands!” a well-known television personality exclaimed, and he was vigorously applauded. That children were battered to death or severely injured by their own parents, killed or maimed for life by drunken drivers, never raised half so strong a fury.
10 Report of the Committee on the Age of Majority (1967)
11 R. S. Hotchkiss, Fertility in Man (1944).
12 Scherer, see note 8.
13 Killias, see note 4.
14 See note 7.
15 Penal Code of the Philippines, 1977 edition, for all sexual activities.
16 Sexual Offenses Act, 1956 (England) for homosexual activities. A survey of many legislations is
given by Killias, see note 4.
Every contrary opinion met with savage opposition. No part of Sigmund Freud’s doctrine enraged people so much as his findings that children were full of sexual feelings and desires, his destruction of the fairy tale. Decades went by without anyone questioning the theory that children suffered frightful
harm if sexually approached by an adult person. It wasn’t until 1934 that a Norwegian psychiatrist, Augusta Rasmussen, began follow-up research on
victims of rape and indecent assault. The conclusion was surprising: no evidence whatever of lasting damage. [17] Rasmussen was followed by Landis in the United States[18], by Lempp in Germany[19], by Burton[20] and the Dominican Friar Ingram in England21, by Bernard[21] and Corstjens in the Netherlands[23], by Tindall again in the United States.[24] There were many others. I mention only the best known.
Summing up the evidence of these researches, Professor Schorsch[25] and Professor Kerscher[26] in West Germany, Doctor Hauptmann[27] in Austria, Professor Graven[28] in Switzerland, the Government Committee, presided over by Judge Kjellin[29] in Sweden, agreed unanimously: there’s no proof whatever that children who have consensual sexual relations with adults suffer any lasting damage from the sexual experience itself. If there is any damage that these children suffer, it is always secondary, caused by the reactions of upset parents on discovery of the facts, or caused by police examinations. Storzer mentions that among [33] such children afterwards seen by psychologists or psychiatrists, not less than [31] showed evidence of traumatisation by police questioning, the effects running from a display of self-importance to attempted suicide.[30]
It seems evident from these facts, that there is only one reasonable solution to the problem: to divide sexual behaviour of adults towards children into
17 A Rasmussen Die Bedeutung sexueller Attentäte auf Kinder unter 14 Jahren für die Entwicklung
von Geisteskrankhkiten und Charakteranomalien, 9 Acta Psychiatrica (København) 351 (1934).
18 J T. Landis, Experiences of 500 Children With Adult Sexual Deviation, 30 Psychiatric Quarterly
Supplement 91 (1956).
19 R. Lempp, Seelische Schädigung von Kindem als Opfer von gewaltlosen Sittlichkeitsdelikten, Neue
Jurist&he Wochenschrift 21 (1968).
20 L. Burton, Vulnerable Children (1968).
21 M. Ingram O. P., Reaction to Paedophile Acts, Libertarian Education 2 (1977); id., The Participating
Victim: a Study of Sexual Offences Against Prepubertal Boys, in: M. Cook & G. Wilson, Love and
Attraction (1979).
22 F Bernard, De gevolgen voor het kind, in: P. van Eeten (ed.), Sex met kinderen (1972).
23 J. M. H. Corstjens, Opvoeding en pedofilie (1975).
24 R H Tindall, The Male Adolescent Involved with a Pederast Becomes an Adult, 3 Journal of
Homosexuality 4 (1978).
25 E Schorsch, Liberalitat reicht nicht, Betrifft: Erziehung 4 (1974).
26 K..-H. I. Kerscher, Zur Schädlichkeit nichgewaltsamer sexueller Handlungen mit Kindem, Neue
Praxis 2 (1973); id,, Unzucht mit Kindem, Sexualmedizin 11 (1974); id., Emanzipatorische Sexualpädagogik
und Strafrecht (1973).
27 W. Hauptmann, Gewaltlose Unzucht mit Kindem (1975).
28 Ph Graven, La pudeur enfantine (art. 191 CP), in: Recueil offert au Tribunal Fédéral (1975).
29 Sexualbrottsutredningen, Sexuella overgrepp (1976).
30 A large number of authors could be quoted to substantiate this opinion. I’ll limit myself here to:
H. U. Störzer, Sittlichkeitsprozess und junges Opfer, in: Hess-Störzer-Streng, Sexualität und soziale
Kontrolle (1978); D. J. West, A Commentary to E. Brongersma’s paper The Meaning of “Indecency”
With Respect to Moral Offences Involving Children, 20 British Journal of Criminology 1 (1980).
three categories. Category one: the child is subjected to violence, threats or abuse of authority. Against such aggression it should be protected with the full force of the law. Category two: the child is put into a position which it more or less strongly dislikes, which gives it the creeps or which it thinks odd, funny, queer. The child runs away, shuddering with disgust or sniggering.
Of course society should try to prevent such things from happening. If they have happened nevertheless, parents or others should take care of the child and see to its problems, if any, just as if it had witnessed a nasty road accident or other unpleasant spectacle. But it is not in the interest of the child to make a tragedy out of it, to ram the events into its mind, to render things which otherwise are quickly passing by so frightfully important and unforgettable by using it as a witness in a criminal procedure. Criminal proceedings, therefore, should be avoided. Category three. The child likes the adult and the sexual relationship. Penal law, with its blunt weapons, should abstain completely.
Civil law should empower parents to stop the relationship effectively if they’re convinced that the adult in question has morally or psychologically a bad influence on their son or daughter. The judge, of course, should pay utmost importance to the opinion of the child itself. This – as I have said – would be a reasonable solution. But as soon as sexuality enters the picture, society usually doesn’t behave in a reasonable way.
Let’s take a nonsensical example.
Suppose a competent and serious researcher suddenly stands up, declaring that careful investigation has now proved convincingly and without doubt that the fear of radiation sickness resulting from production of nuclear energy is completely unfounded, that people may be exposed to the strongest radiation for weeks on end without suffering the slightest harm, and that all the bad effects, hitherto attributed to radiation, were in reality produced by other agents, easily eliminated. Wouldn’t there be rejoicing everywhere? Wouldn’t we all be happy?
Of course this is nonsense. But it is no nonsense that competent and serious researchers have established that the bad effects of sexual confrontation, supposedly inflicted upon children, are quite imaginary, and that traumatisation is only secondary, due to the reactions of upset parents and policemen. When this was published, there was no rejoicing at all. It passed by nearly unnoticed.
People clung stubbornly to their former beliefs, even if they couldn’t deny that the effects of these beliefs – the examinations, the criminal procedures were highly harmful to their cherished children.
Why this unwillingness to accept the good tidings? Why do we want to stay in anguish, in perpetual panic? Why do we cling to our indignation, our
aggression, our desire to punish, to castrate, or to kill the malefactor, even at the expense of the children’s well-being?
May I propose a hypothesis? It is a well-known fact that no person shows such an intense hatred of homosexuality as the man who has a strong, repressed, maybe unconscious inclination toward his own sex. Let me quote a distinguished criminologist, Professor West of Cambridge:
It is my conviction, and not only mine but that of more qualified authors, too, that there is a percentage of pedophile tendencies in every man and every woman. We all love children, more or less, fortunately. In some, this tendency may be very strong, dominating the personality, colouring his or her life, permeating everything; we call them “pedophiles.”[32] In other individuals it is weaker, less conscious. In present-day Western culture its expressions have to be repressed, but the feeling is there, nevertheless.Placed in a situation that threatens to excite their own unwanted homosexual thoughts, [people] overreact with panic or anger. Repressed
homosexuality may sometimes be the explanation why men of intelligence and judgment, who would never express themselves so crudely on other topics, indulge in wildly inaccurate and absurdly emotional pronouncements about homosexuality. In advocating castration or the gas chamber for sexual corruption of youths, they betray a need to compensate for their own inner guilt by vigorous denunciation of sin in others.[31]
Wilhelm Stekel, one of the fathers of psychoanalysis, wrote in 1922:
Nearly sixty years after Stekel, Professor Sigusch wrote that adult people who did not desire to have tender sexual relations with a child, were, to his eyes,According to my experience, pedophilia constitutes a nearly normal component of the sexual impulse. Nearly everybody may, at times, detect such thoughts in himself. But they will be rejected, disclaimed and condemned with all the emotionality of moral indignation. Many people of high intellectual standing admitted to me, that sinful thoughts had surprised them when they were looking at children. We fail to appreciate the immense degree to which pedophilia is prevalent among women and men.[33]
But our present day culture doesn’t tolerate this. It has put a big taboo on sex with children; such feelings have to be suppressed. The difficulties caused by this repression in their innermost beings make individuals violent in their rejection of pedophiles, suspiciously emotional, strongly committed to their prejudices.“problematic personalities.”[34]
It would take hours and hours to give a complete analysis of the discussion, as it goes on and on. Allow me to summarize it in the form of a “boutade.”
Once upon a time, long, long ago, it was customary for men to sleep with boys and girls and have sexual relations with them. All the men did this, but the real pedophiles among them did it with even greater joy than the others.[35]
Then the Christians appeared on the scene and told everyone that it was a very great sin to sleep with boys. And from that moment on, whenever people managed to get hold of them, boy-lovers were burned alive, strangled, drowned or beheaded.[36]
31 D. J. West, Homosexuality Re-examined (1977).
32 The report Pedofilie en Samenleving of the Dutch National Centre for Public Mental Health (1976)
adopted this definition; also L. Rouweler-Wuts, Pedofielen in contact of conflict met de samenleving?
(1976)
33 W. Stekel, Psychosexueller Infantilismus (1922).
34 Quoted by B. Bendig, Pädophile Sexualdelinquenten als politisch Verfolgte? (1980).
35 See note 1.
36 See note 3.
That went on until the French Revolution, when a new breed of philosophers began to say that penal law should be used only to protect society and prevent individuals from being illegally harmed and not to enforce morality.[37]
The boy-lovers began to take heart. They slept with their young friends again and weren’t disturbed.
But soon people began to preach that this was enormously harmful. For children were pure, innocent creatures who knew nothing about such a dirty
phenomenon as sex.[38]
Once again boy- lovers and other pedophiles were hunted down, and when the authorities got hold of them they perished in prison.
Then came Freud and his followers who affirmed that children weren’t asexual creatures at all; he even went so far as to call them “polymorphously
perverse.”[39]
The pedophiles, who had known this for centuries, again began to take heart.
But along came the medical doctors, the same ones who had been busy telling everyone that masturbation caused horrible illness and brought on premature death.[40]
They said that any boy who had sex with men would invariably be turned into a homophile himself and would remain one for the rest of his
life. Legislators listened to these expert opinions and they made the laws much tougher. Now men were sent to prison for having sex with adolescents
and even young men.[41]
Then came some psychiatrists – among them Professor Zeegers – who demonstrated that this was all nonsense and gave rise only to misery and injustice.[42]
In several countries the old harsh laws were repealed.[43]
But now came another group of scientists, maintaining that it may very well be that children were sexual from head to toe and it may be quite healthy
for them to have sexual play among themselves, but this by no means proved that they wanted to play in the same way with adults.44 Children had not matured enough for that. So the pedophiles whom the police managed to catch stayed in their prison cells. Moreover, as the aggression of society grew stronger and science progressed, they were now subjected to torture by brain surgery and aversion therapy.[45]
Then a group of researchers came forward with many examples of children who wanted to establish intimate relationships with adults, because adults
37 De Montesquieu, De L’esprit des lois (1748).
38 Van Ussel, see note 5; Scherer and Aron & Kempf, see note 8.
39 S. Freud, Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (1905).
40 Tissot, De L’onanisme, dissertation sur les maladies produites par la masturbation (1758); A. Lorulot,
La veritable éducation sexuelle (1928), quoted by J. de Brethmas, Détoumement de majeur (1980).
41 G. Laroche, La puberté (1938); F. J. Tolsma, Homosexualiteit en homoerotiek, adhered firmly to
this theory in the first edition (1948), repudiated it completely in the second edition (1963). The Dutch
Minister of Justice Regout appealed to this theory in his defence of the introduction of section 248bis
in the Penal Code (1911).
42 Gezondheidsraad Advies inzake homoseksuele relaties met minderjarigen, bijlage bij de memorie
van toelichting bij weisontwerp 10. 347 (1969).
43 Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, France.
44 Adviescommissie Zedelijkheidswetgeving, Eindrapport (1980).
45 V. Sigusch Medizinische Experimente am Menschen (1977); D. J. West, Homosexuality re-examined
(1977).
could give them a feeling of security and protection, which friends of their own age simply couldn’t.[46]
Once again the pedophiles began to take heart.
But the traditional psychiatrists and psychologist raised the objection that in this kind of relationship the partners weren’t equal; the adults dominated the children.[47] There was, of course, nothing wrong with dominating children as long as it was used to teach them their lessons, to make them go to church, to discipline them and bring them up properly, but where sex was involved it was absolutely impermissible. So the pedophiles caught by the authorities continued to go to prison.
Then one psychologist came up with the crazy idea that even this self-evident concept of the pedophile dominating the child in all love/sex relations
needed to be investigated. He studied in detail a number of such relationships and how the balance of power actually was held. And in none of these relationships did he find any evidence that the pedophile dominated the child.
On the contrary, in several instances it was the child that dominated the adult! In each case, the child wholeheartedly agreed to the relationship, including all of its sexual aspects.[48]
Pedophiles once again began to take heart.
But then a traditional psychiatrist explained, that when children in such relations say “yes,” they really mean to say “no.”[49]
“And when they say ‘no’?” the pedophiles asked hopefully.
“Then they also mean ‘no’!” replied this psychiatrist.
So when the police managed to catch pedophiles; they still went to prison and stayed there for long, long periods of time. And the universities began to enlarge their medical faculties enormously, for wasn’t it evident that, in the future, every child had to be provided with his own individual psychiatrist? Otherwise, who could tell his parents, teachers, and pedagogues what he really meant when he said “yes” and what he really meant when he said “no”?
But then a group of scientists came along, doing follow-up reports on individuals who, as children, had consented to sexual activity with adults. These
researchers agreed that they could find no trace, even after 15 years, of damage resulting from these youthful sexual experiences.[50]
Once again the pedophiles began to take heart, but almost immediately the psychiatrists answered that the lasting damage done by early sex with adults might well show up more than 15 years later.[51]
The pedophiles shrugged their shoulders and asked for proof. And, lo and behold, along came a physician who shouted triumphantly: “It’s not up to us to prove there is damage; it’s up to you to prove there isn’t!”[52]
46 E. Brongersma, “Pedofilie” als verzamelnaam voor ongelijksoortig gedrag, 21 Tijdschrift voor
Criminologie 7/8 (1979).
47 S. van der Kwast, Seksuele criminaliteit (1968).
48 Th. Sandfort, Het seksuele aspekt van pedotiele relaties (1981).
49 Letter from Bestuur van de Sectie Kinder – en Jeugdpsychiatrie van de Ned. Vereniging voor Psychiatric
aan de Regeringsadviescommissie-zedelijkheidswetgeving (1980).
50 See notes 17 to 29.
51 D. H. Schomerus, Der Pädophile und sein Opfer, in: F. G. von Stockert, Das sexuell gefährdete
Kind (1965).
52 H. Musaph in a lecture, quoted by Sandfort, 125 Ned. Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde 475 (1981).
Now this threw the pedophiles into considerable confusion. No researcher had ever been able to prove that sexual relations with a child were harmless, nor had it ever been satisfactorily established that sexual relations with anyone were harmless, nor, for that matter, that traveling in a train was harmless, nor the eating of green peas. And we all know that under penal law every man is guilty until acquitted, and that in this world everything is forbidden, unless one’s government specifically permits it.
The situation became even more confused when another psychiatrist suggested that one should totally disregard every piece of data and all arguments developed by people who recognized within themselves an element of pedophiliac response.[53]
The principle in itself seemed sound. Only bachelors should be allowed to write treatises on marriage; all books about sex should be compiled by scholars utterly devoid of sexual feeling. Never listen to the man with personal experience! Never listen to the man who comes to the defence of something you don’t like! For isn’t that the essence of mental health?
The problem with this proposal, however, was that sexologists had long ago established that there was a bit, and sometimes more than a bit, of pedophilia in every human adult; thus, all discussion of child love would have to cease immediately. How, then, could you send pedophiles to prison if you couldn’t even talk about what they did? So this idea ultimately gained little acceptance.
For a brief moment pedophiles thought they again saw some light at the end of the tunnel when a few psychiatrists declared that any kind of sex in which a child willingly engaged was, in itself, completely benign. But then their hopes were dashed when these men of science added: “Such activity,
however, brings the child into conflict with the standards of his environment and the society in which he lives, and that is most harmful.”[54]
So the pedophiles, half-crushed already, surrendered. They were well aware of how powerful the standards of society were. In Hitler’s Third Reich a Jewish girl was in deep trouble if an Aryan became enamoured of her; in South Africa a black youth is lost if a white woman takes him as a lover. So the pedophiles run weeping to the psychiatrists, begging for help, for it isn’t only in Soviet Russia that psychiatrists are called upon to adapt people to the standards of society.
But the children didn’t give in. They continued to seduce nice adults and called those who reproached them for this “silly fools.” And in the meantime they had learned a bit about psychoanalysis too.
They said: “For every objection they were forced to abandon, these funny ladies and gentlemen immediately produced another. Could it be, that they were really only unconsciously hiding the secrets of their own inner souls? Isn’t it just that they are a little bit afraid of sex itself?”
But nobody bothered to listen to what they said, for how could truth ever be heard from the mouths of children?
53 M. Fraser, The Child, in: B. Taylor (ed.), Perspectives on Paedophilia (1981).
54 J. van Ladee-Levy in a discussion on paedophilia with W. Sengers, A. X. van Naerssen and E.
Brongersma at Erasmus University, Rotterdam, April 1, 1981.
----------------------------------------------------------------
For hundreds of years, one by one they've been coming up with excuses for saying what we do is wrong, and for making what we do illegal.
Since this was published in 1994, they've come up with yet ANOTHER (invalid) excuse to try to prohibit intergenerational sexual activity. "Children cannot consent!" they scream. Which is, of course, complete bullshit.
SEE:
https://wiki.yesmap.net/wiki/Consent
AND:
https://wiki.yesmap.net/wiki/images/Mad ... onsent.pdf
So, any comments or criticisms about what you have read in this article?
What has he left out? I can think of a few things. Can you?
What do YOU think?
M.
SOURCE:
Aggression Against Pedophiles
Edward Brongersma
1994
https://pismin.com/10.1016/0160-2527(84)90007-4