Menu
 |
 |
|
|
| Log In
|
|
|
|
|
| Search Web Pages
|
|
|
|
|
| Calendar
|
|
|
< September, 2010 >
| S |
M |
T |
W |
T |
F |
S |
| 29 |
30 |
31 |
01 |
02 |
03 |
04 |
| 05 |
06 |
07 |
08 |
09 |
10 |
11 |
| 12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
| 19 |
20 |
21 |
22 |
23 |
24 |
25 |
| 26 |
27 |
28 |
29 |
30 |
01 |
02 |
|
|
|
| The crimen exceptum
|
|
|
The crimen exceptum
See expanded drop down menu for this whole section on left
The crimen exceptum is central to every inquisition, whether it be heresy, witchcraft, being a Jew, a Red under the bed or today one accused of child sex abuse or accessing child pornography. The crimen exceptum requires the suspension of due process and all real processes of justice. You do not need to be tried and convicted, merely accused.
Today’s crimen exceptum of either child sex abuse or accessing child pornography are the most potent of any ever possessed by a phase of the inquisition, which is why the current inquisition is so deadly. The crimen exceptum is already expanding into more general pornography, but here we deal with sex abuse and child pornography, the second the most powerful of the two. As the population comes under more control in the totalitarian state, as in America, the crimen exceptum of inappropriate sex may change to dissent/enemy of the state (heresy).
Around the time that this was written, a judge in Ireland sent an 86 year old man to prison for sexually abusing his nieces many decades earlier. The abhorrence with which child sex abuse is regarded can be measured by this sentence, which is cruel and inhuman by most standards as to put an 86 year old man in prison is tantamount to condemning him to a miserable and humiliating death. The sentence passes judgement both on the accused and on the society which sentences him thus.
This kind of cruelty in a Western society that has also recently accepted the use of torture for the other crimen exceptum of suspected terrorism demonstrates how close we are to the earlier centuries of the Inquisition that both cruelly tortured its innocent suspects and its non-conformists and burnt them at the stake.
A tale from country life
Here is a tale from country life. A well-dressed and educated man is being driven along a country road on a beautiful summer day. At the entrance to a laneway into some fields he asks his driver to stop and gets out. Walking a short distance down the laneway, he hears the sounds of someone beyond a hedge. He reaches a timber gateway and through it he sees a girl of between ten and eleven working in the field. He stares at her for awhile and then he opens the gate and motions to her to approach him. She does so, obediently, and as she comes near he studies her carefully. She is poorly dressed in a typical country way, her costume obviously altered from one formerly owned by an older woman. Her hair is somewhat matted and her face, smeared from wiping perspiration from it, shows that she is frightened by his presence.
She awaits his instructions as he studies her carefully. He then makes his decision and moves swiftly. She cries out in fear.
It is not decency or the legality of it alone that stops me describing what today we would call her rape, the taking of her virginity. It is something much more powerful, and yet seldom understood. It is our semantic environment, which is actually more powerful than the events being described (that is more powerful than in the time they occurred). Had we lived back then, for it is medieval times I write about when such a story was commonplace, neither I, the writer, nor you the reader would have been shocked by it. The word ‘rape’ would not even have been relevant because an educated man back then could not rape a common country girl, if for no other reason than that we would all have been aware that in our semantic environment then we would have accepted as fact that such common girls are full of lust and the desire to rob gentlemen. Moreover, there was neither law nor morality to stop him ravishing her, as such taking of ‘coarse girls’ by noblemen, or even by members of her own extended family, or neighbours, carried with it no semantic representation of opprobrium in a society where it was expected that girls would experience the ending of their virginity between the ages of eight and twelve. If this seems outrageous, note that some of the most celebrated experts on sexuality in the 1950s and 1960s, such as those connected with the famous Kinsey studies advised that the earlier girls experience sex the better. Indeed, it is only in very recent times that the age of sexual consent has been raised from as low as seven in many regions such as several American states.
As recently as 1893, author Charlton Edholm in his Traffic in Girls wrote, "When a big burly man fifty years of age is brought into a court of justice and confronted by the little ten-year-old victim of his lust, if he can prove that the child, for a paper of candy, consented to an act of which her childish mind is ignorant, that jury of twelve men - probably fathers of little girls themselves - will hold the child guilty and the man guiltless." What had changed in the centuries since the earlier medieval story is that non-consensual sex with a child was becoming illegal.
By the time of the attack and burning at Waco, Texas on April 19 1993, protecting the virtue of the children inside the cult compound was of greater value than their lives. On February 27, 1993 the Waco Tribune-Herald began a 'Sinful Messiah' series of articles, alleging that the Waco cult leader was abusing children in the compound, had taken underage brides, had claimed to be entitled to any of the females in the group as his and that some of his brides were as young as twelve or thirteen years old. In the final raid of the siege of the compound involving its destruction through tanks, explosives and burning, eighty one individuals including the children were slaughtered. The writer James Kincaid suggests that the thinking behind the raid may have been that eighty-one deaths may have been outweighed by 'violated innocence'. After the fire and slaughter, the assault troops raised a victory flag.
Shortly before this was written, a senior US official responsible for national security assured citizens that in the event of a national disaster the police would know the whereabouts of all paedophiles. This was as important as dealing with the floods or radiation fallout.
The moral panic to protect children
While today’s crimen exceptum of either child sex abuse or accessing child pornography is the most potent of any ever possessed by a phase of the inquisition, that the protection of children should form the basis of a moral panic is far from new. Much thanks is due to the Swedish writer and historian Dick Wase for this section. For the information about the history of the crimen exceptum, thanks was already due to award-winning NZ author Lynley Hood. See her A City Possessed in the Bookstore (menu on left). Also what follows was influenced by the excellent books of American writer, Debbie Nathan, and others.
Protecting children from sexual activity is relatively new, but protecting them from child snatchers and witches is not. Dick Wase points out that when they started to hunt Jews in 1173 the claim was that Jews ritually killed Christian children (St William of Norwich), and witches were particularly dangerous because they lured children and then brought them to the Devil. One thinks of the recent moral panic about satanic ritual abuse, which did not exist.
Wase also points to a 'child masturbation-panic' that together with other sexually motivated ideas resulted in the burning of girls clitorises and encouraged the circumcision of boys.
The first big recent child protection from sex moral panic was the infamous nineteenth century 'White slavery panic’ that feared the seduction of working girls into sex slavery. Interestingly and resonating with the medieval tale above it was the protection of middle class white girls between ten and fourteen, not simply working class or black girls, that became of paramount importance. The feared predators before this age of the paedophile, indeed long before the invention of the label, were the slave-hunters, who were Jews, Arabs and Chinese.
The great moral panic of fear of homosexuals in the American administration started in 1947 (right after the war) with an article by Hoover stating that "The women and children of the nation can never be safe as long as the degenerated is running free".
Dick Wase also points out that as the homosexuality moral panic faded, child-pornography and child-trafficking arose as enormous phenomena, helped greatly through such books as Robin Lloyd's For Money or Love, in which he claimed that 300,000 boys between the ages of eight and sixteen were prostitutes in America (later he admitted those figures were fabricated, 'to see how society would react'). With help by Judianne Densen-Gerber and Vice-sheriff Lloyd Martin the figures quickly arise to 2.1 million prostituted kids, so that now the panic was a fact through help from newspapers and television. It was also fuelled by psychiatrists, therapists and psychologists who during the sexual liberation in the 1960s and early 1970s had to face falling numbers of patients.
Dick Wase makes comparisons here with the 1486 first edition of the Malleus Malleficarum,(coming next), suggesting that the reason it was written was that Pope Innocentius VIII found himself impotent, and blamed it on the witches, so he gave orders for a hunt for witches. It suited the Inquisition perfectly, because they were having problems finding 'heretics' to burn, but now they could use all their resources to hunt witches instead. Note that the Malleus Malleficarum also blames innocent women for men's impotency.
Wase also points out that when the latest moral-panic arose in 1976, around children and sex, the 'psycho-workers', as he calls them, and the social-workers could benefit greatly from it, and suddenly intergenerational sex was seen as the most terrible thing that could hit a child. And, he goes on to say, it still is seen as terrible, despite that for example Ney & Co 1994 showed that children themselves range sexual abuse as the least problem among abuses they have to face (for example neglect and physical abuse they find much worse, but those kind of abuses are often used among evangelical Christians to punish their sinful kids, so naturally you cant create a panic around it, and everyone knows how terrible the sin sex is anyway).
In addition, any age that sees large numbers of stepfathers or boyfriends moving in with women and their existing children also produces an increase in sexual activity of one kind or another with children within their own homes.
There are actually some studies that found a correlation between early sexual activity, including sex abuse, and positive later sexual experiences, one being 'The relation between early abuse and adult sexuality” by Meston & co 1999 (1032 students).
Such findings are so controversial that one risks censorship and worse by publishing them in any detail. Where a woman finds the courage to admit to such a possibility, she is accused of being the victim of 'sexualisation'. Thus, it is impossible in today's environment to discuss whether early sexual experiences would be positive to a woman's sexual development.
Created on 04/09/2009 08:58 AM by Editor
Updated on 05/10/2009 10:57 AM by Editor
|
|
|
|
|
