Inquisition 21
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Sex abuse
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Sex abuse is the latest expression of absolutism
Sex abuse - the latest expression of absolutism
Puck- William B. Essex, 1847
Sexual morality
What are we trying to do here?
We are attempting to evaluate how we think about and deal with human sexuality in epistemological terms - that is to examine the methods that we use to make our evaluations and meanings, based on the only tool available to us for this purpose, which is called epistemics, first presented by the French Canadian writer/philosopher J. Samuel Bois.
Why are we doing this? First, because we are concerned that we live in a world that is developing itself toward openness in the way we make order of what is going on. We believe that human sexuality is central to the absolutisms, which currently dominate our society. There may be no other area of social life where moral absolutism has so quickly become a process of Inquisition and criminalization, with such serious consequences for human liberty, creativity and justice.
There is also the possibility that we can go on to project this reasoning into other forms of absolutism, or its subsequent development, and come up with profiles for other expressions of extreme social behavouir. For example, the epistemic profile that follows can be applied directly to all of our main sexual concerns, including sexual activities between people, sexual orientation, sex abuse, and child pornography. We may be able to adapt it to apply to medicalization/criminalization (the concept of the unhealthy deviant), social deviancy (the 'wacky' or 'weirdo'), political correctness, and religious fundamentalism.
What determines and shapes our sexual morality
Brian Rothery
(Thanks to Gary David of Philosphere Publishersfor assistance with this)
This is an attempt to examine what determines and shapes sexual morality and, even more fundamentally, sexual tastes and inclinations. One approach is to begin with an acceptance of sexuality as an innate drive, which is conditioned and determined, to a great extent, by biological necessity, and by epistemic systems (the latter used in the ‘how we make meanings and create values’ sense). We are thus biologically determined and epistemically constrained. The biological determinants include the physical environment as well as genetics. The epistemic determinants include the ‘structured unconscious’, at-a-date, that shapes how we speak, eat, dress, value, relate to ourselves and to others, and so on. The use of the word 'determined', here is not meant in any absolute way. The old two-valued arguments of free will and determinism belong to a previous age. As Silvan Tomkins put it, "Man is neither as free as he feels nor as bound as he fears."
As humans we are constantly seeking degrees of freedom between those two infinite-valued determined realities, and the energy that fuels this search can be seen as ‘the vital surplus’. This vital surplus can be used in ways that are both beneficial and injurious. Examples of the latter can be found in the undesirable results of certain sexual practices and excesses.
Returning to the influences of the biological/affect system. There is obviously a strong biological dissmell element (in the sense of seeking to avoid something that smells 'toxic' either physically or metaphorically) in the revulsion of many if not most humans towards some forms of sexual behavouior, such as those involving faeces and bestiality, so that no amount of prohibition and publicity will lead to any significant interest in it for them. Despite this, sexual pleasure has effectively co-assembled with dissmell even in relation to faeces and bestiality in some cases.
It is necessary to make clear the distinction between a drive and an affect. A drive is location specific (if I need water, I feel it in the mouth), and cyclic in time (a drive happens periodically). Of all the drives, the sex drive is the only one that deprivation of it for a very long time does not end in death. An affect is not location specific. It happens all over the body, and it can happen at any time. Drives are weak in terms of motivation, but affect is powerful. Freud was mistaken in thinking drives were motivating. Sex as a drive is not a strong enough motivational force to make it so central in human concern. But when a drive is amplified by affect it grows in urgency. If that urgency is then magnified, it can become central. In this way ‘sex’ tends to relate more to affect and script (using memory to leverage meaning in a current experience) than it does to biology.
Some see the sexual interest in children, commonly described under the modern label of ‘paedophilia’ as involving the affect of shame. Pervasive emotional shame can be triggered when an individual's childhood emotional neediness is repeatedly turned against him in a way that was humiliating and traumatic, so that the person may remain emotionally infantile. Some see this as a key factor in the sexual use of children. But it's important not to seek causes only in individuals, but in the structure of society's languages, metaphysics, education, affective environment, and other living conditions. As Alfred Korzybski said, "Instead of a holy frenzy for 'justice', 'punishment', 'revenge', etc., we would try to improve conditions of life and education, so that a newborn individual would not be handicapped from the day of his birth."
The urgency of the sex drive may be amplified by excitement or joy (the affect system at work). It can also be amplified by anger. Here is Silvan Tomkins on the subject:
“In sadism the behavior expressing this affect becomes a necessary condition for sexual gratification. Fear, united with sexual drive pleasure, is also capable of increasing the urgency and intensity of the sex drive. This is the lure of the tabooed and the forbidden, a complex combination of primary drive pleasure and positive and negative affect amplification. Negative affect amplification is here accompanied by the positive affective response of excitement which along with sexual pleasure gives the entire complex a predominantly positive tone.”
So we can see where taboo sets up the conditions for fear and excitement to be combined with the sex drive. But, if we take into account that incest, in our structured unconscious, is destructive, mainly because of the emotionally complex and symbolic environment, then we have to take measures to protect individuals who could be affected without knowing what they're getting into.
Despite this caveat, it is clear that repression, prohibition and public obsession, can generate and fan a hitherto latent or non-existent tendency. Note how journalists now lament that we are all seeing the world through the eyes of the paedophile. The New Zealand author, Lynley Hood, also notes how many commentators employ the de rigueur disclaimer that they do not support paedophilia, whenever they attempt to examine it.
Moving from the biological/physical to the semantic (significance, meaning) environment. Here is a passage from a lecture Alfred Korzybski gave in 1937:
“Do you all understand the English word incest? Sexual intercourse within the family. Well, take the semantic environment; I can give no better example than that. In white civilization, as a matter of statistics we do not survive incest, never mind why. Wherever we have incest, even not physical but perhaps symbolic incest, we do not survive it. It always ends in prostitution, criminality, or 'mental' illness. In Egypt in the old days of the Pharaohs, incest among them was the rule and did not do any harm. Not any harm at all. Why? Semantic environment. They had a theory that incest was not harmful. Otherwise, evaluation, semantic environment; and the fact that brother was married to sister, etc., did not matter. What did not do harm in their society, in their semantic environment, is not survived in ours. You see that I speak facts. Do you begin to see what semantic environment means? Evaluational environment. Is that getting clear? That the physical facts often do not matter in comparison with semantic facts.”
This requires a great deal of reflection. The three children at the centre of the Saskatoon travesty (Country by country in menu) a brother and twin sisters, who engaged in sexual intercourse, including penetrative by the brother, from a very early age, were the offspring of deaf and dumb parents who showed little affection for them. In addition their mother was a prostitute who brought clients home. Here we have a ‘semantic environment’. Returning to Korzybski’s warning about the harm done by incest, these children wreaked havoc on innocent families and on themselves, to the point that Saskatoon is still paying the price.
The ‘semantic environment’ that accepted the love of boys in Greece and incest in Egypt now encourages society to fear the consequences of an interest in the bodies of children, to the point where some authors associate this fear with the actual naked bodies of children. From the perspective of affect-as-biology, we are being scripted to feel shame, not fear, in relation to those bodies. In general, our semantic environment embraces a civilization that is Aristotelian and shame-ignorance based, in which prejudice and disingenuousness can flourish. In particular, since the seventeenth century in the West, sexuality has become an arena of power.
What I am leading towards here, however, is to look at how repression, prohibition and public obsession, within the semantic environment, may in fact generate and fan a hitherto latent tendency - such as how the attempts to suppress lesbianism in the 1920s led to its general discovery and expansion as a fantasy within the human imagination. And how today the world has discovered child sexuality, which is now set loose within the human imagination. If an idea is let loose into the human imagination, and fanned through repetition, prohibition and obsession, and there is no biological restraint on it, might it grow and increase as a desirable 'perversion'? Michel Foucault wrote, "Power operated as a mechanism of attraction; it drew out those peculiarities over which it kept watch. Pleasure spread to the power that harried it; power anchored the pleasure it uncovered - - - . The pleasure that comes of exercising a power that questions, monitors, watches, spies, searches out, palpates, brings to light; and, on the other hand, the pleasure that kindles at having to evade this power, flee from it, fool it, or travesty it. The power that lets itself be invaded by the pleasure it is pursuing; and opposite it, power asserting itself in the pleasure of showing off, scandalizing, or resisting. Capture and seduction, confrontation and mutual reinforcement: parents and children, adults and adolescents, educator and students, doctors and patients, the psychiatrist with his hysteric and his perverts, all have played this game continually since the nineteenth century. These attractions, these evasions, these circular incitements have traced around bodies and sexes, not boundaries not to be crossed, but perpetual spirals of power and pleasure." (The History of Sexuality, P. 45)
We see the censor and policeman and prosecutor here, together with the clever individuals who try to outwit them on the Internet through encryption and other sophisticated schemes. We see the hypocrisy and disingenuousness of the former and the growing interest in taboos and forbidden thrills of the latter.
An epistemic profile of sexual morality
Here we are going to attempt to use what we have learned from epistemics as a guide to projecting an epistemic profile of sexual morality in the way it seems to be applied in our culture of today. We will try to project it in all four of its possible stages. In devising it, much help was received from Gary David of Philosphere Publishers.
Stage 1. Sexuality at Stage 1 is the actual physical act. Sexual morality is based on unquestioned 'common sense' derived from cultural taboos and superstitions expressing dissmelling affects (nose wrinkled as if 'deviant' sexual behavior smelled toxically bad - see 'Responding to shame' in section titled ''People in trouble' ' in menu for explanation of dissmell) towards those who violate those values. Or, conversely, those who deride the conventional values as deserving of the same dissmelling attitude. Shaming and shunning of those who violate the 'tribal' morality are common ways to deal with those issues.
At this stage, the world can be seen to be full of dangers and threats to our sexual morality. Deviants may lurk within our community and dangerous forces threaten from outside. Every stranger may be seen to be a threat to children, so our children must be kept indoors and not allowed to take risks outside.
Combining this with Stage 2, we have people in authority who use their expertise to tell us how to live a moral life and who claim to protect us from risk. They may employ what is now called 'political correctness' and demand this form of expression from others. They supply the labels or identifiers or designate the targets against which we can express our sense of dissmell or hatred of perversion. This greatly facilitates our identification of the perpetuators through elaborate schemes of classifications.
J. Samuel Bois describes some attributes of the ‘Breed of humankind’ at Stage 1 as follows.
1. An unconscious identification of his perceptions with 'objective facts';
2. An automatic projection of his own attitudes, purposes, and desires, by which he interprets the behavior of others;
3. A strong dose of affectivity that is taken as the measure of the 'objective truth' of what he is sure is going on;
4. A complete assurance that nothing of importance or of value is happening or has happened outside the world as he sees it.
Bois called such persons 'culturally retarded', and Korzybski called them 'unsane'.
Stage 2. Sexuality at Stage 2 is a reaction to Stage 1 reactions. The laws and legislation based on this stage attempt to restrict sex to certain defined acts and classified contexts. This form of classification is used to control an assumed base 'human nature' of Stage 1. It is another form of the dissociation of which the philosopher Lancelot Law Whyte (see Philosphere Publishers) wrote where the spontaneous was devalued in relation to the deliberate aspects of our functioning. It is true that sexual activity must be modulated in modern societies, and there must be principles to guide our behavior, but Stage 2 takes those principles to be absolute, and the last word. Sexual morality, then, is based on the keeping or violating of those principles according to religion, and law.
The established authorities and enforcers ensure the maintenance of the state of the community's morality by reference to expert guidelines. These describe the activities that are immoral and criminal, and are framed into laws. The moral standards thus enshrined in language that all can understand provide comforting clarity. Bois describes the breed we find here as 'extremely touchy people. They identify themselves with the group they belong to, be it racial, professional, religious, or political. A questioning remark about their group is taken as a personal affront'. They see the world made of opposites. In sexual morality terms for example, one cannot question certain concepts of deviancy without being seen to be an apologist for the deviancy or a practicing deviant oneself. Whitehead said that they suffered the fallacy of dogmatic finality.
To maintain the laws there are experts and an active moral police force. Qualified citizens can assist these. Powerful sanctions, including public shaming, can be used against those who break or resist the law. Criticism of the law may be seen to be anti-social. This is the stage of sexual absolutism.
Stage 3. Here writers, lawyers, and other thinkers question the assumptions of Stages 1 and 2. Here we may recognize ambiguities, and the affects underlying the assumptions that our dogmas are based upon. Here we look for the 'laws of nature' at work in any situation. We use 'scientific' methods to discover those laws through experimentation. We may look for examples in other areas of the absolutism, which appear to underlie our present assumptions about sexual morality.
Here sex is considered as one expression of inter-relationship, and not limited to the physical act. Sexual morality at Stage 3 is geared toward humanism. Whereas Stage 2 is based on principle, Stage 3 takes into account the particulars of the people and the relationships involved. It also makes use of statistics in taking the pulse of the society, and morality tends toward accepted practices. Sexual morality is justified by what is best for the society at large.
An individual dominated by Stage 3 methods will, almost by nature, think in terms of ‘how to’ as an approach to a solution. He or she may not even be aware that they are doing so – the ‘so what can I do about it?’ response. In times of crisis or faced with practical problems, this is an excellent response, but it can suffer from lack of the complexity of matching method to the situation, in other words it may be a simplistic map to cover a complex territory, which could produce an undesirable outcome.
Stage 4. Now sexuality as a term has no general meaning outside of the context in which it is used. Stage 4 sees all the previous stages as contexts that gave sexuality a meaning, but sees them as limited because they all assumed they were giving objective descriptions of sex and sexual morality. At this stage, a description of sexual morality becomes very complex, involving many factors.
But at Stage 4, a new understanding based on a greater intimacy with how the human brain is self-reflexive, a greater familiarity with the biological bases of emotion as motivation, and consciousness of abstracting will all lead one to a more complex view of the situation. It calls for methods that heighten creativity before skill (power to make things happen) which can come later. There is also an understanding that creativity is not controlled by ‘will’ or great urgency to bring about a desired result. At Stage 4 there is a greater tolerance for ambiguity and a willingness to allow what has not previously been abstracted to come to awareness by relaxing or suspending the past. This is the basis of what Bois referred to as ‘innovating’. To earlier ways of thinking, this may seem either a dangerous way of thinking, or at least 'wishy-washy'. At stage 4, though, one is not uncommitted to one's choices and the responsibilities they entail, but at the same time we are aware that our choices may change as our experience of life accumulates; that our value system may reshape itself to include what we formerly rejected; and that our methods of thinking my reach new orders of greater dimension. In The Art of Awareness, Bois wrote, "(At Stage 4) we have at last understood that our mental constructs, linguistic or mathematical, are not images of an 'objective' world, they are mirrors of ourselves looking at the world. . . Rational absolutes are crumbling. . . Reason and rationality have reached their limits, and we are aware of this; proud dogmatism has to make room for humble uncertainty; predictability becomes possibility with an unmeasurable margin of unknowns." (Emphasis added.)
These views of Stage 4 are simplified for our present purposes, and should not be substituted for the complexity of this emerging way of evaluating.
J. Samuel Bois, who incorporated ideas from Alfred Korzybski, adapted this approach, expressed also by Gaston Bachelard. Gary David, who studied under Bois, has made it more applicable to the 21st century.
For more information about epistemics and the stages and the writers responsible for their development, or about using epistemics, visit Philosphere Publishers.
Our national fascination
Patrick McCreery in a GLQ Magazine review of James Kincaid’s Erotic Innocence says that Kincaid suggests that in the United States accounts of child molestation are nothing less than a national fascination. From Woody Allen to Michael Jackson, from the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California, to the Menendez brothers in Beverly Hills, the public is shocked, horrified, titillated, and enthralled by stories of alleged sexual crimes committed against children.
And in a brilliant follow up insight he says, “His argument is akin to Michel Foucault’s ‘incitement to discourse’: the more we search for ways to identify paedophiles, the greater the implication that children are sexually attractive. As Kincaid puts it, “Eroticizing exists in symbiotic relation with sanitizing, and the veiling and the exposing exist in an encircling double-speak.”
This fits in with our own theory that because of the media we all now tend to see children ‘through the eyes of the paedophile’. Our moral panic and its accompanying prohibition have made them more sexually desirable than ever before.
A City Possessed
See it in our Bookstore
Lynley Hood’s book A City Possessed: The Christchurch Civic Creche Case can be read from a number of points of view. First it is a comprehensive review and study of the circumstances surrounding the case of Peter Ellis jailed for the sexual abuse of children in his care at the Christchurch Civic Creche, in which four women workers were also arrested and charged, and the events leading up to and following that story. Details of the story are in ‘The Peter Ellis story’ under ‘Country by country’ in the menu. The first conclusion that one may reach upon reading the book is that it is virtually impossible for truth and justice to prevail in a climate of witch-hunt or Inquisition. A reading of the book is sobering at the least, but more likely chilling, as the people who caused the Peter Ellis travesty, and still maintain it, are all around us in our Western society. Not only is there a clear connection between the first great US day care travesty, the McMartin, but a woman central to McMartin travelled to New Zealand where she also influenced the Christchurch affair.
The second point of view or level the book invokes is that we need to look with some urgency at the relationship between our judiciary and legal system and our social ideology. Child protection activists, social workers and therapists not only whipped up the fears that led to the Christchurch panic, and all of the moral panics in a string of other high profile cases, but were paid for by the state, which also offered attractive compensation to the makers of ‘disclosures’. They worked hand in hand with the police, often acting as extensions of the police, supported their own colleagues as expert witnesses, and had their fabrications accepted by judge and jury
One aspect of this serious problem is called ‘Therapeutic jurisprudence’ by UK barrister Barbara Hewson (See under Utopian egalitarian in menu). She wants the damage caused by ideologists to be examined by leaders ‘with no ties either to the family courts, or to child protection work’. At a stroke she thus indicts our absolutist society and its draconian new ideologies and laws, and its consequent attacks on traditional Anglo-American legal rights and protections, including the right to due process, to be presumed innocent until proved guilty, to be tried in public, and to confront one's accusers. As she puts it, “This has certain analogies with a Soviet-style conception of justice, which emphasises outcomes over processes, and which requires the judge to carry out social policy, rather than act as an independent arbiter.” Lynley Hood echoes this in her perception of how the courts have been misled into regarding child sex abuse as a crimen exceptum, where ordinary law must be put aside.
At another level, the Hood book reminds us that in the end of the day, we may all have to depend upon book authors for final justice. Not only did society and the system fail and convict Ellis, but, as with many of the other high profile moral panic cases around the world, his accusers and prosecutors fought to maintain the injustice, and still fight it in his case. An official enquiry produced a whitewash and has itself become the subject of another independent scathing indictment – the Harper-Christie Critique. The Ellis scandal is the only one of all the major child sex scandals involving day care centers where justice has not yet been done. In New Zealand, as with the other scandals, the Canadian Klassen-Kvello and the UK Shieldfield, the accusers fought back with state funds, while the innocent accused lost homes and jobs, so that few fought back. The few that did had the good fortune that writers came to their rescue.
Highlights of the book
First a reminder that a synopsis of the Peter Ellis story is below. To avoid repetition, references to ‘what Lynley wrote’ are omitted. Everything here relates to the contents of her book.
Learned people gave rise to and managed the 16th century Inquisitions. Some of these created such a volume of technical detail to help convict the heretics that they could be described as 'expert witnesses'. In our section on ‘Threats to liberty’ this is described as the dogmatism of Stage 2 thinking, or the ‘tainted tunnel vision’ blamed in the Canadian Saskatoon judgement.
Although a string of high profile US day care center satanic ritual abuse cases had already fallen apart in the US, the Christchurch case went ahead with most of the whole city believing in the discredited doctrine. Not only was the reality emerging from the US experience ignored, the very same tainted US doctrine was being used. As we shall see below, a child rights activist at the center of the 1983 Californian McMartin Preschool scandal, was also in Christchurch just before the crèche affair erupted.
Lynley Hood came under great pressure not to proceed with her book, the strongest argument being that it would hurt abused children and protect pedophiles. During the heights of the witch panics, as the numbers burned at the stake increased, the number of critics was reduced. Central to the creation of child abuse travesties, is the ideological conditioning which has singled out child sex abuse as the crimen exceptum, requiring that ordinary legal processes be suspended. This mindset is often expressed by the de rigeur expectation that anyone challenging the child abuse mindset must first declare that they abhor it and do not defend pedophiles.
A compensation scheme for the parents of abused children, virtually managed by social workers, was at the heart of the Christchurch affair. Payments to parents whose children made disclosures were almost automatic. Only the strongest appear to have resisted this. Years later, a similar ‘redress’ scheme advertised in Ireland has resulted in great numbers of accusers coming forward and naming alleged offenders. It is as if nothing has been learned from Christchurch. The biased TV programme in Ireland that caused a national outcry resulting in the government compensation scheme was titled States of Fear. Note the remarkable similarity between a programme claiming states of fear and Hood’s title of a city possessed.
In an ‘ongoing malaise’ (Chapter 1V), ‘the harm inflicted on innocent people by criminals and psychopaths is miniscule compared to the harm inflicted by ordinary, well-intentioned citizens going about their daily work in a spirit of duty, loyalty and service’. Ideas such as widespread and systematic child abuse spread like an infectious disease, the process requiring an infective agent – the idea itself, a means of transmission – the social workers and therapists, and a susceptible population. When these are all present, we have a sweeping pathogenic belief. While some parents supported the crèche workers after they were accused, none of them were involved in child activism: the majority of the parents whose children made accusations leading to convictions worked in child sex abuse – parents of five out of seven children. The mother whose child caused the initial crisis accused another male helper in the very next crèche her son attended. The message from Christchurch is that it is highly dangerous to work with any children whose parents are involved in child protection.
The likelihood of the mother making the first complaint is described as ‘poised, like the hands on the Doomsday Clock, at a few minutes before midnight’. One of two events that jerked the hands forward was the November 1991 arrival in Christchurch of Dr Astrid Heger to lead a sex abuse seminar. In 1983 she had caused the Californian McMartin Preschool scandal. The other event was the introduction of a cut off date for lump sum compensation awards for sex abuse victims. The first complaint was laid and ‘like a careless match tossed into the tinder-dry landscape of a Canterbury summer, it set off an inferno’.
The selection of the scapegoat for a ‘purification ritual’, and other predictable events followed but then came the explosive phase as a second mother whose child played with the first made a complaint - one exactly the same as the first about white Peter Ellis’s black penis. The hysterical meeting of parents followed, the first complaining mother making an entrance, standing in the doorway, bursting into tears, being hugged and consoled by the other women, and the possession of the city of Christchurch had begun.
Only the reading of the book will do justice to the events that follow. More social workers were assigned to sort out the crèche. They and the chief therapist involved fanned the flames. The poison spread and engulfed the women workers, including the supervisor at the crèche. The police regarded parents who would not join in the witch-hunt as ‘the ideological enemy’. The day after the women crèche workers went public in protest, they were arrested.
Over and over from around the world we are hearing criticism of defense lawyers. The two involved here, one for Ellis, one for the women, did not even meet before the trial to compare notes and assist each other. Was this another example of lazy lawyers, or those so busy making money that they don’t have time to read the files till the morning in court? Or just incompetence.
During the eleven-week hearing many of the claims of the children were so absurd that the women defendants laughed in court. The descriptions of hymen and anal damage by so-called ‘medical expert witnesses’ are a copy of similar discredited claims made in the Canadian Saskatoon case, even down to an expert giving two opposite statements about the condition of one girl’s hymen – it showed signs of penetration in September, and on re-examination in December it showed no sign of penetration. Which suggests that she became scared that a witness for the defense might get an opportunity to examine it.
As in the other high profile cases elsewhere, this kind of inconsistency and contradiction made no difference to the child activists, prosecutors and judiciary. When a child retracted an accusation, this was further proof that the initial accusation was true. Parents who claimed that their children had not been abused were ‘in denial’. Not only were due process and the other elements of the law suspended, so were commonsense and plain truth.
As in all of the other cases, it was virtually impossible to find an expert witness for the defense, as all the expert witnesses work for and are paid for by the state, and qualify thus as expert witnesses. Should they change sides and act for the defense, that will be the end of their careers. This is one of the reasons why we need writers and a dismal reminder of how bad our newspaper journalists and editors have been throughout these witch hunt years. Any sane person reading the Hood book will agree that for the Christchurch women to be have been charged with ritual sex abuse, whatever about Ellis, means that no one is safe. No one was safe in the 1990s from sex abuse accusations, and no one who has access to a PC today, is safe from child pornography accusations. When the women were finally acquitted there were shouts of “Hang the bitches!” from the back of the court.
This left the prosecutor, ‘an honest lawman in some preacher-ridden, God-forsaken southern town, (with) a gun put to his head by some very powerful people’. They want a lynch mob , so he makes a deal - one man will hang, but it must be done legal.
The children’s accusations continued to grow and spread, so even though the satanic ritual abuse fantasies dissolved with the acquittal of the women, SRA based charges still stood against Ellis.
Now we have another disgraceful similarity with cases overseas. The chief judge presiding over the cases against Ellis and the women was a friend of the main state therapist whose false ideologies fed and sustained the travesty. Her power and that of her followers was reflected in graffiti against the released women all over Christchurch.
The Ellis trial was ‘a community purification’ with him as the ceremonial scapegoat. The judge, Williamson, led the jury.
Incredibly, in what gives us hope in human nature, the tide which had run so darkly against Ellis and his women colleagues, turned at the moment of his conviction, dividing not just crèche families, but now Christchurch and New Zealand itself. Like the Klassen-Kvello case in Canada, it would soon spill over into the wider world.
Here are wonderful lines from Page 533 of the book: “By then, the case that had begun with the enigmatic comment of a three-year-old boy ( I don’t like Peter’s black penis) had been passed from hand to hand through the Christchurch City Council, the police, the Department of social Welfare, the Crown law office, and the courts like a time bomb in a macabre game of pas-the-parcel.”
If one wants the supremely illogical and unjust, one will find it in the Peter Ellis case because, when he was in prison, Zelda, the ten year old, the prime witness because of her age, who had been a visitor to the crèche not a baby in it, retracted her accusations in a moment of remorse after another mother lost her temper over a scrap between Zelda and her own daughter. She called Zelda a liar, and the poor child went home and confessed to her mother that she had lied in the Ellis case. An Ellis appeal was underway, so the mother dutifully reported this vital retraction. Zelda stuck to her guns despite repeated questioning, but, incredibly, the authorities did not believe her retraction.
If nothing else in the travesty condemns the system, what follows on its own should. The response of the appeal judges to Zelda’s retraction was “ - - - we are by no means satisfied that she did lie at the interviews although she may now genuinely think she did.”
On this note, we can forget about justice in any society ruled by moral ideologies. The sex abuse doctrines may now be waning, but the same judges that disgraced themselves in their reaction to Zelda'’ retraction are the ones who will judge us during the present and the next moral panic. They will listen to the ideological advisers of the day and will uphold their shared ideologies, not justice. No one is safe, except perhaps the true believer, for a while at least.
Peter Ellis refused parole several times, and thus escaped its accompanying ‘counselling’, as acceptance of parole would have required an admission of guilt, and so, in the year 2000, he finally emerged from prison after almost eight years. Despite a subsequent whitewash investigation, the demands for justice from a bureaucracy with a siege mentality, continue. As Lynley Hood says, the guilt or innocence of the accused child workers are no longer the main issue. ‘- - - feminism, religious fundamentalism, counselling services, child protection services, the Christchurch City Council, DSW, ACC (the compensation scheme), the police and the justice system’ are all on trial.
Like not telling the ending of a good story, the reader will have to read the book to learn how Lynley Hood eventually investigated the jurors, and the titillating information (how can one resist the delicious irony?) that a juror may have sought counselling when he found himself sexually attracted to one of the accusing children.
See Lynley's picture bottom of page.
Other authors and sources
In the Bookstore you will find a remarkable number of new and insightful books about our subjects. If you have been wondering about your own sanity in the face of seemingly inane social obsessions, these fine books will help you reaffirm your intellectual integrity and to understand the mindsets of the absolutists who are trying so hard to ruin so many lives.
The books include:
A City Possessed: The Christchurch Civic Creche Case. Lynley Hood.
Erotic Innocence. The culture of child molestation. James Kincaid.
Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex. Judith Levine.
No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times. Dorothy Rabinowitz.
Sex Abuse Hysteria - Salem Witch Trials Revisited. Gardner.
The Culture of Fear. Frank Furedi.
Paranoid Parenting. Frank Furedi.
Therapy Culture: Cultivating vulnerability in an Uncertain Age. Frank Furedi.
The True Believer. Eric Hoffer.
Ninteen Eighty Four. George Orwell.
Animal Farm. George Orwell.
Some books of Jock Sturges and David Hamilton, torn up by vigilantes in US bookstores.
All the above can be found in our Bookstore. See menu on left.
Other resources
In addition to the books, there are a small number of good web sites, hopefully growing with time.
David Steinberg interviews Jock Sturges at Sturges interview.
He writes about The fear of touch.
He reviews Judith Levine’s Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex at
But the emperor has no clothes.
and writes about Virtual abuse.
There is an excellent UK web site, and the only one on the subject, which critically examines the various UK laws relating to child pornography, and exposes contradictions, anomalies and threats to liberty.
There is another excellent UK web site dealing with censorship called Spiked.
Another of the few web sites to challange current doctrines that are based on the moral panics of sex abuse and child porn is
Logical Reality. Be warned that this site contains some nude pictures of children that could be considered to be explicit and graphic by police and censors - UK Level1.
There are also links to web sites fighting cases of individual injustice in our main stories, such as the Saskatoon and Peter Ellis stories under ‘Country by country’.
Biblis - William-Adolphe Bouguereau
What Sally said
This story concerns a small village in Ireland, where the three largest institutions are the Catholic Church, the school, which draws children for miles around, and a couple of pubs. John O’Connor was forty-five, a small farmer who had to supplement his income with a part-time job in a nearby agricultural cooperative. He was a fine, big, well educated, man, blessed with a gentle wife called Ethel and five daughters. Next door to John and Ethel was a hardware shop, owned by Billy Cartright and his wife. Billy was also a local auctioneer and an active member of the leading political party. All names have been changed in this story.
Billy Cartright and his wife have two daughters. At the time of this story one was nine year old Sally. It is very difficult for me to write in the way I must now do about Sally, because she was both attractive and highly manipulative, already with the reputation among her classroom colleagues that ‘she could get you into trouble’. Sadly also to have to relate, Sally had what some writers have found necessary, even in children, to call ‘a soliciting gaze’. Her attractive, highly inquisitive eyes, seemed to settle instantly upon every passerby, seeking interest and diversion.
The ‘Stay Safe Program’ came to the school. Social workers and teachers asked all of the children about the adults they were in contact with, including relatives and neighbours, trawling for instances of improper touching. Most children presumably said nothing that might implicate adults. This writer knows of one local man, who for a few hours each day had looked after two young brothers until their parents returned from work. This man became very worried when the boys told him that they had been quizzed about him, although he was somewhat reassured by the news that they had said that he always behaved towards them like a grandfather. He no longer wanted to look after them or any other children, but was afraid to stop in case people thought there might be a reason.
Sally Cartright, however, who was in the same class as those two boys, found the Stay Safe questions fascinating, and full of potential intrigue. Yes, she said, almost every day she visited the five girls next door in John and Ethel O’Connor’s house. Did John ever touch her? Well, that was probably the most interesting question that anyone had ever asked her.
A police woman and a police man called to see John and brought him for an interview to
the station. The following day his wife, Ethel, found him hanging by the neck in their cow shed. A blanket of silence enveloped the village, and has remained there since about
the matter. Sally’s father, Billy Cartright, took Ethel O’Connor under his wing, employing her, and will not let anyone talk with her about John’s suicide.
Once Sally Cartright was asked if there was ever improper touching from any man, there was no hope for John O’Connor, the only man she knew well apart from her father. Similarly, from the outset of most similar crises, there appears to be little or no hope for the accused.
What has brought about this state in which a minority of our population, a small censoring group, can set in motion repressive laws and even regimes? Both George Orwell and Eric Hoffer offer answers, the former in his pessimistic belief that all communities tend towards totalitarianism, the latter in his understanding of hatred. Were Orwell alive today he would look around to see what has replaced the excuse for the totalitarianism of the socialist state, and then he would smile grimly at our reenactment and reaffirmation of the totalitarian concept of thought police, engendered by the minority that creates the 'political moral imperatives' in our sexual culture.
Eric Hoffer, author of the remarkable 1950s The True Believer, might smile equally grimly at how we are using hatred as a unifying agent. As he puts it: "Whence came these unreasonable hatreds, and why their unifying effect? They are an expression of a desperate effort to suppress an awareness of our inadequacy, worthlessness, guilt, and other shortcomings of the self." He believed that they arise from our self-contempt and are transmuted into hatred for which we must find other targets. Hoffer shows how our whole tendency to escape from the terrors of our own liberty and find companionship in mass movements and mass beliefs, are seized upon both by politicians and the media in a process where proselytizing becomes both self and mass infection. No less a philosopher than Pascal said in his Pensees: "Self-contempt produces in man the most unjust and criminal passions imaginable, for he conceives a mental hatred against that truth which blames him and convinces him of his faults." Thus hatred and our guilty conscience.
Absolutism, another name for tyranny, is any system of belief that asserts the complete certainty or infallibility of human apprehension, or official presentation, of a dogma, or of any human agency. Many absolute states can simply adopt the dogma of absolutism as the excuse or reason for their own infallibility and these are generally known as totalitarian or tyrannical states, or simply lawless regimes run by bandits. For much of their existence, such states may not need to adopt or promote a dogma beyond their own infallibility, but most, sooner or later, require a unifying dogma to maintain the loyalty or compliance of their subjects. The most common such unifying agent is the identification for hatred of a ‘designated enemy’, which can be both a minority within, and a race outside of, the state.
Most of us in the West have grown up with the idea that the emergence of parliamentary democracies, as seen since the French and American revolutions, brought forth political systems which enshrined certain personal liberties, so that ‘absolutism’ or the tyranny of any one group against another group’s personal beliefs could be protected against. What, however, writers such as Orwell and Hoffer have been warning us about is that within the community psyche itself there is a tendency towards moral conformity, which requires a ‘designated outlet’ for certain internal passions that we convert into hatred. This tendency appears over and over again in our history and in societies all over the world. It becomes absolute and totalitarian when it is recognized and manipulated by the government and the media. But the tendency has the almost biological ability to spread like a virus, poisoning individuals and society as it goes, in the case of the sex abuse obsession, fanning a victim and compensation culture and destroying neighborliness and voluntary work. One of the potent mechanisms for this spread from idea to social convention to rule and finally to law and retribution is political correctness (see Threats to liberty in menu), our most extreme form of censorship.
If any one doubts that this process has been at work, they should simply read the shocking travesties of justice in the Saskatoon story (see menu on left), or in the Peter Ellis or Shieldfield stories (under Country by country). If they then respond that the satanic ritual abuse alleged in each of those cases has since been acknowledged as never existing, they should not be surprised to be told that it is back again in child porn claims. The absolutists, still in charge of our society, are hell bent on maintaining the mechanisms for witch-hunts.
The natures of the two opposing states or conditions of the ‘sacred state’ and the ‘target for hatred’ are examined more fully in the section titled ‘Relationship of hater to hated’ under the ‘Threats to liberty’ in menu.
Click ''False witness',' 'Have you been accused', 'Responding to shame' and 'Police corruption' are under 'People in trouble' in menu on left.
Sex abuse
Age of consent - Gerald's story.
A 21st century tragedy
'Speed assaults’ on children
Parents, your children are now truly at risk
The Australian inquiry
Death penalty for sex acts in Georgia
The atrocities of consensual sex
Jessie and Tyler - did the dog do it?
His art became his life
Reflections on Thomas O’Carroll
Salivating over paedophilia
Another front is opening up
God help human sexuality!
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