I/F

cyborg-sevalle:

Like, this has been a recurrent cultural trend for a very very long time.

-Need to punish ex-slaves?

“They’re going to assault our children!”

-Need to deal with the immigrants whose cheap labor you no longer need?

“They’re going to assault our children!”

-Need to tighten border control to prevent more immigrants from coming in?

“They’re going to assault our children!”

-Need to culturally ban the very existence of gays from your society?

“They’re going to assault our children!”

-Don’t want trans people to be allowed to piss in public?

“They’re going to assault our children!”

Frankly, the one thing I’ve been striving to figure out is precisely when the trend became a matter of specifically sexual assault, because make no mistake, this same trend is culturally connected to earlier shit like the blood libel, the idea that Jews are going to steal your children so we can use their blood to make our evil bread. It’s not about the safety of children, it’s about the fear of what they are going to do to my children.

And that’s the thing you’ve gotta fucking understand. “Sexual deviancy” is not at the heart of why children are sexually abused, the notion of power is, specifically how children are made into a commodity-class, not-yet-humans whose fates are entirely at the behest of their elders and who are stripped of agency, autonomy, and even authority over their own experiences. The focus on how to confront and prevent child sexual abuse should not be on the “sexual”, it needs to be on the “abuse” because CSA is part of the broader trend of child abuse generally which is itself demonstrably not a set of “deviant” behaviors, but rather a culturally accepted institution which is about treating children as property and using them as such, with sexual forms of such abuse coming from the exact same conditions. Like, “pedophilia isn’t a sexuality!” is such a common phrase I hear, and it’s true, and the people who so frequently trot it out need to start thinking and acting like they actually believe that.

Keep in mind, the first of Freud’s theories to be “discredited” was that the sexual abuse of children, particularly by their parents, was a rampant cultural phenomenon in the society he lived in, and like, that was the case prior to that, and it continues to be the case today. Children are sexually abused because the didactic culture of our society (the institutions of which are rooted in pedophilia/pederasty itself as a cultural institution) believes that children cannot be granted humanity until they have been acculturated with the “knowledge” of their elders, and the forms that that take are what allow this to not only occur covertly, but be discussed and promoted overtly (e.g. brands like Pink which prime children as consumers by seeking to shape their sexuality, “can’t wait until xyz celebrity is 18!”, etc.)

Like, I’m rambling about this now because I’ve known this was going to turn out like this and I need to vent because I don’t want this trauma energy to spill fully into my home environment. I do want to lay this out more coherently and comprehensively in the future, but engaging with this topic, for me, is like trying to sort through hot coals with my bare hands. I would like to drive home the point though, inflicting shame generally or trying to codify some sort of bestiary of crypto-pedophilic behaviors has never done a thing to prevent CSA from happening, but rather has historically facilitated and justified dehumanization and systemic violence, relying almost solely on the fact that the accusation, no matter how specious, will be reliably accepted because of people’s unwillingness to engage and interrogate it (often from their own discomfort, but also frequently from the fear that trying to interrogate the accusation will have them branded with it as well.)

Until people start engaging with this as a matter of the deeply ingrained and culturally/hegemonically justified disempowerment and dehumanization of children, which is a broader issue whose various related issues deserves as much attention as child sexual abuse specifically, not only will an actually functional and effective praxis of preventing child abuse never materialize, but people will continue to play party to these same discursive trends that are used to co-opt the trauma and suffering of people like myself in order to justify violence against vulnerable populations, something that has been going on for, as much as I’ve been able to research it, literal fucking centuries.

“

Lesbian mothers raising children in lesbian-headed households also had to worry about ex-husbands using their lesbianism to take custody of the children. In 1958, Vera Martin met and fell in love with Kay, a Japanese American woman who had come to the United States at the end of the Second World War after marrying an African American serviceman. Kay had two children, and Martin had a son and daughter. The families got along well and would spend time together on the weekends. R., Vera Martin’s teenage daughter, babysat for the other children when Kay and Martin wanted to go out together. Both women feared that the authorities or their ex-husbands would take custody of their children if they found out they were in a lesbian relationship. “We knew that we had to be careful,” Vera Martin remembers, “and keep the knowledge that we had kids very quiet … very quiet.” Kay worked as a prostitute to support her family, and the two women lived in fear that someone would report them to authorities, possibly even one of the other women with whom Kay worked, in order to remove competition. They also feared that their ex-husbands would simply take their children away directly if they found out they were lesbians. Martin was an African American woman and Kay was Japanese American, and as two lesbian mothers of color, they felt particularly threatened by the courts.

Lesbian mothers who had left previous heterosexual marriages during this era lived in constant fear of discovery and exposure. One night in 1959, when Vera Martin and Kay were at the If Club, a lesbian bar in Los Angeles, a heterosexually identified man who knew Martin’s ex-husband walked up, said hello to her, and left. Terrified, Martin turned to Kay and said, “That’s someone that knew me when my husband and I were together, and they are still in touch.” Kay understood the danger immediately and said, “I think we better get out of here.” Vera Martin thought the man would use the pay phone and that her ex-husband would show up at the club or later at one of their houses. She and Kay lived in terror afterwards and did not go out in public “for a long time.” When the two of them eventually went to a dance together, they asked two men to accompany them as cover.

As parents, lesbians and gay men had no legal protections or recognition of their co-parent relationships in the 1950s and 1960s. As it would in later decades, this jeopardized their ability to maintain communication with their partner’s children. After Kay died suddenly in the winter of 1959, Vera Martin wanted very badly to take Kay’s children into her home and raise them with her own, as Kay had told her children’s caretaker she wanted before she died. However, Kay’s ex-husband, who lived across the country and had been brutally abusive to Kay, came into town with his new wife and took the children. “Oh, I wanted those kids so bad. … I was crazy about them and they were crazy about me,” Martin recalled, but she had no chance of competing for custody of the two children against an intact heterosexual nuclear family. In the era before gay and lesbian liberation movements there was no chance of legal recognition for lesbian households with children. Martin despaired when Kay’s ex-husband held an auction to sell all of Kay’s belongings. She came up with one hundred dollars to buy Kay’s address book, a potentially dangerous item in the hands of her ex-husband. In 1963, Vera Martin then married a gay man and “slammed the closet door shut behind her,” because she heard rumors that her own ex-husband suspected that she was a lesbian, and she was afraid he might try to use that to obtain custody of T., her son and youngest child.

”

– Daniel Winunwe Rivers, Radical Relations: Lesbian Mothers, Gay Fathers, and Their Children in the United States since World War II (2013), Ch. 1.
(via gaypocalypse)