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A plague on both their houses
Mary Raftery
The dominant narrative
Ireland is going through an emergency of extraordinary dimensions and it is not the economic one. A hysterical moral panic seems to have swept all those commenting on it into a stampede, and this includes academics and judges. Its similarities with Salem at the height of its moral panic are striking. The Catholic Church is at its centre.
Brian Rothery
‘A plague on both their houses’ is used here in a different sense to its usual, which is a curse. It is used here in the sense that it appears to me that there is a plague on both their houses.
Just when one would have begun to believe that the abuse moral panic, which has been sweeping Ireland for two decades or more, might subside, the publication of reports into clerical and residential child abuse has set off a hysterical moral panic and accompanying witch hunt of extraordinary intensity. What may be unique about the witch hunt is that the accused are either dead or very old. Apart from the accused that are seen as the main perpetuators of the abuse, a whole past generation is also being accused for either standing idly by or not being aware of the abuse. After the most recent report on clerical sex abuse in Dublin, or one should say, inactivity by bishops who were made aware of the abuse, reading the pages of letters to the editor in the daily newspapers has been interesting. For the first week or so, the letters were one hundred percent against the Catholic Church and ‘the awful sins committed' under their guardianship. By about the third week, an occasional letter mentioned kicking a horse when it was down and one even dared use the words ‘witch-hunt’.
As with the Salem accusers, the Irish complainants are unassailable, unquestioned, believed by the public, the judges and the prosecution. Academics and other ‘expert witnesses’ support them. There is no defence against their accusations. It is dangerous to question them or try to remind them that there might be another dimension to the abuse narrative.
The Salem cases were held, not according to the written law, but to current ideological/religious/superstitious beliefs and as a response to the reigning moral panic. The ideology and the reigning moral panic were that people were being possessed by the Devil. The Irish case is that there was systematic abuse of virtually all children in residential care at the level of severe physical punishment and sexual assault or rape. Eighty two percent of the incidents reported took place before 1970, which is almost 40 years ago, while many are over 70 years old. In the case of the Dublin report the complaints are about bishops standing idly by when informed of the misdeeds of priests and even covering up for them.
In Salem at the point where no one was safe from accusation, it transpired that the people and courts had used 'spectral evidence', which was evidence that could not be seen by the jury or by the judge or by anybody except the accusers. It was assumed that an accused witch could see it but lied that she/he could not. So only the ‘victim’ (accuser) could see the 'spectral evidence'.
Let us look at some details of the perceived systemic abuse in Irish residential institutions - at the actual ‘extreme physical and sexual abuse’ that is now causing the hysterical reaction.
There are four types of abuse recorded: physical, sexual, neglect and emotional. The physical abuse includes ‘being kicked and beaten’, neglect includes ‘inadequate heating’ and emotional abuse includes ‘lack of attachment and affection’. Let us reflect on these. In the period covered by the report, physical punishment was an accepted method for correcting and chastising young people. The all-important semantic environment which reigned at the time supported the maxim of ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’. Indeed, it was a truism: virtually everyone believed that you had to beat children to make them into good citizens. Children were beaten in upper-class English boarding schools and in Catholic and Protestant homes. Almost no home had what today we regard as adequate heating – anyone who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s remembers the bitter cold of winter in homes. And as for ‘Lack of attachment and affection’: do we have more or as little of this today?
Now for the sexual abuse, which dominates the hysterical reaction to all the report. This included ‘non-contact’ forms, such as voyeurism and what the report describes as ‘inappropriate sexual talk’. ‘Inappropriate’ is one of the main a priori biased labels used in the victim culture of today. One third of all cases of ‘sexual abuse’ involved ‘inappropriate fondling and contact’. Rape allegations actually account for 12 percent of the sex abuse cases. What the report and the hysteria accompanying it have done is lessened or demeaned the real rapes by combining them with touching and voyeurism and inflated all the minor human weaknesses such as fondling into rape-level crime. 30,000 children passed through the residential system. Take just 30,000 of the many more who have lived in one parent homes since the institutions were shut down and ask if a future moral panic concerning their ‘sex abuse’ by live-in boyfriends or stepfathers were to result in another Redress-type report - would we have fewer or more victims?
In Salem accusers were rewarded for destroying the neighbours they accused. The Irish residential accusers have been rewarded with a massive 1.2 billion through the Redress Board and now the hysteria caused by the new reports is causing many more ‘to come forward and make disclosures’ and both the government and the religious orders have capitulated under the pressure. Properties are being sold at a time of extreme recession to meet the demands of the new wave of hysteria.
In Salem, there was righteousness on the side of the accusers and the public supporting them and the devil on the other side. The righteous tortured and executed the deviants possessed by the devil. There may be critics of the current moral panic in Ireland today, but they appear to have been cowed into silence, so let me reflect a little on the righteous society that is accusing a past generation today.
I am going to use two examples of what this generation has achieved and how it is treating its neighbours and I promise that, bad as the first may be, the second is truly horrifying. In the mid 1990s, just before my wife and I finally left Dublin to live in the depths of South County Wexford, I was taking one of my almost daily walks along the Blackrock-Booterstown strand. Near Booterstown station, three girls, probably about twelve, sitting on the railway wall facing the strand whispered to each other as I approached. As I drew level, one shouted, “Hey Mister, if you don’t go away, we’ll call the Guards (police)!” In the emerging semantic environment of the time it was a real assault on me, by children, and the guards would have seen it mainly from whatever version the girls might have invented. Shortly afterwards a friend who lived in a town house off Camden Street tried to remonstrate with two girls who were painting graffiti on a wall opposite his house. When they refused to stop he pulled out his mobile phone, saying, “OK I’ll call the Guards.” One responded: “You call the Guards and I’ll say you touched her.” He put his phone away and beat a retreat, defeated by two more of today’s children, products of our child-protection society.
I now move to something truly shocking. Where we live in County Wexford, there is an epidemic of male suicides. There may be more young male suicides in other parts of the country, but in our location the suicides are mainly of men from their forties up and a favourite method, perhaps because of the availability of sheds and barns, is hanging. On our road and on several adjoining roads that make up the centre of what is our church, social and sporting parish, there are more houses that have had a male commit suicide than those that have not. Up to recently, and still to an extent, most of the suicides were reported as accidents, so whatever statistics for male suicides exist must be woefully inaccurate. For the fourteen years we have been here I have been thinking, and trying in vain to talk to neighbours, about the possible reasons behind the suicides. One reason why doors close in the face of such enquiries is that widows in particular suffer deep shame after the death. But recently I have found that others also have good reason to feel shame about the ones who have gone.
There is a nasty country custom in these parts of attaching demeaning nicknames to men. I’m not sure when it begins, and am hoping that if a local historian reads this that he or she will respond with information, but the nicknames are often so cruel that I feel that they must be invented when the man reaches maturity. While men only earn nicknames, women are as ready, if not more so, to use them in denigrating the individuals thus tagged. Days before I wrote this, when I was in a local garage a young woman came in and asked the mechanic, “Where’s Fawlty?” When the owner whom she had described thus appeared, she nodded towards the mechanic, saying, “I was asking Manuel there where you were.” Using characters from a television comedy, she managed to denigrate both employer and employee, in front of each other and other customers.
The nickname chosen reflects some physical, social or emotional characteristic of the one named and is intended to reduce or him in the eyes of others and, sadly, in his own eyes, or opinion of himself. Being poor or disabled offers no escape. One unfortunate with a short leg and a slight hump on one shoulder was ‘Hippity hop’. Any attempt to better oneself, brings the rebuff of a nickname that puts one back in place. One with opinions, or who might read a book, is ‘The Prof’, while a regular mass-goer is ‘Father Ryan’.
And now for the awful event that causes me to write this. The most recent suicide here was that of an 83 year old man – a highly unusual event for someone of such an advanced age and he also chose hanging. When I asked for it, a neighbour whispered his nickname to me. It was ‘Nappydump’. Yes, this community branded him as a dump for dirty nappies, or a walking cesspool. This is the righteous Irish society now targeting ‘paedophiles’ past and present, for the moment mainly past. Imagine, the scapegoating, the shaming, the hateful branding suffered by this unfortunate man over what was probably most of his adult life. Think of the people, women and men, who lightly and laughingly used the expression every time they referred to him and think of the hundreds of other insulting expressions they use to describe almost every other man they know.
So, whence this hatred? Hatred not just of any neighbour who might try to better himself, but a hysterical hatred for a generation now branded as paedophiles or paedophile supporters or other accessories. The figures that show that most of the allegations of sexual abuse did not concern serious sexual assault are irrelevant, because it is the sexual element that is whipping up the hysteria. Why is this so?
Is it because there is massive disavowal and projection going on? Within the current righteous generation, railing at the sensuality of the previous one, the ‘accuser victims’ and their public supporters, is there a deep inner conflict in which something dark and hateful within themselves is being disavowed and projected onto a past generation of 'paedophiles'? The hatred in the faces of some of Ireland’s principle public representatives of the accuser-victims suggests that they may be uncomfortable with certain aspects of their own human sexuality. And look at the semantic environment of the present generation, at television, the general media, and the Internet. We find massive and increasing pornography and eroticization within an increasingly restrictive and criminalized society. Massive titillation on the one hand: massive repression and savage social and legal vengeance on the other.
They say that what goes around comes around. In the first inquisitions the Roman Catholic Church codified an existing human tendency to channel evil (the Devil) into Fascist moral pogroms. Many of these that followed no longer needed the Catholic Church or its doctrines, but used the powerful tendency and the device of scapegoat or heretic, Jew or deviant and whatever crimen exceptum they practiced, be it witchcraft or paedophilia. Now the monstrosity of inquisition which the Church invented has gone full circle and has devoured the Church itself, as the Catholic Church was the principle provider of the residential institutions now under attack.
What appears to be most fearsome from it all, from first Inquisition through Salem, down to present times is that we never seem to learn from the past. Think of an old man in County Wexford bearing the hateful name of ‘Nappydump’, who went into his shed, climbed onto a ladder, and hanged himself, and then ask if you are one of the righteous.
In late June 2009, we learned that the legal profession had netted 400 million Euros out of the 1.4 billion being paid to claimants under the residential redress scheme. This is the profession that trawled for 'victims to come forward and make disclosures' to obtain compensation and that orchestrated the campaign including the writing or editing of many if not most of the scripts detailing the perceived abuse.
Expert analyses
Mary Raftery was the key campaigner who began the expose of Church and residential sex abuse that led to both the Residential Redress Board, which has paid out 1.2 billion in compensation, and to the virtual destruction of the Catholic Church in Ireland. A key component in her assault on the system was an RTE programme called ‘States of Fear’, exposing decades of sex abuse in Ireland’s State/Church residential homes over decades. When the moral panic reached a new high after the publication of the Dublin diocesan report on clerical child abuse, she was given pride of place in an editorial in The Irish Times of 27 November 2009 and led off as follows:
“There is one searing, indelible image to be found in the pages of the Dublin diocesan report on clerical child abuse. It is that of Fr Noel Reynolds, who admitted sexually abusing dozens of children, towering over a small girl as he brutally inserts an object into her vagina and then her back passage.
“That object is his crucifix.”
As I felt that her choice of this example was in itself ‘searing’, I copied it and submitted it for analyses to a writer has a strong background in Freudian psychoanalyses, asking him for an assessment of the statement.
This was his response:
“There are some strikingly symptomatic statements and acts in this story, on both sides, it seems to me. From a psychoanalytic point of view, the word ‘symptom’ has a distinct and precise meaning which is radically different from its usage in medicine. Typically in medicine, ‘symptom’ means something like ‘defect’ or ‘error’, a sign that something has gone wrong with the smooth functioning of the organism. In psychoanalysis, whilst a symptom might be a nuisance, it is nonetheless an actively crafted artefact, even if the ‘crafting’ has taken place beyond the subject’s conscious awareness.
“There is, from a Freudian perspective, something irreducibly TRUE about a symptom, far more so, say, than the fictions of righteous selfhood we parade publicly. And because the symptom holds a fundamental truth, a truth which is always at odds with our more or less hypocritical public or conscious self images, we resist with all our might the work of deciphering it into to its real meaning, even if we feel tormented by its persistence.
“It would, of course, be an empty and purposeless exercise for anyone to try to psychoanalyse either Mary Raftery or the so-called ‘paedophile priests’ on the basis of newspaper reports – clinical analysis would require their free associations rather than either their preferred statements (Raftery) or the descriptions forced upon them by others (the priests). But it may be possible to analyse the belief being articulated, to track the symptom, or rather the ‘cause’, which underpins ‘it’, as opposed to individual persons: this would be an analysis of an ideology, rather than of a person. My speculation, which might appear somewhat bizarre at first sight, is that the Raftery ‘historic abuse’ story and the institution of the Catholic Church share a basic ‘cause’ in common, even if they deal with it in different ways (create different types of symptom).
“I’ve clearly got some explaining to do. Jacques Lacan went further than Freud in radically developing the psychoanalytic concept of ‘symptom’: he wrote about the ‘sinthome’. He seems to have been hinting with this concept that we are all inclined to craft a special symptom, a superordinate symptom, which has a synthesising effect – it literally holds together a self which would otherwise be besieged and torn asunder by logically mutually exclusive and incompatible impulses in the unconscious and the dictates of our most socially privileged sexual morality.
“Whereas ‘symptoms’ are ciphered truths, the ‘sinthome’ is an atom, a hard kernel, of pure, mindless, boundless ‘enjoyment’. It can sponsor reaction-formation symptoms – for example, a condemnatory over-compensating moralism. The ‘sinthome’, however, not only underpins public postures of righteousness and moralistic purity, it obscenely and secretively transgresses the very moralistic interdictions symptomatically generated to subdue it, generating ever more joyless and spiteful interdictions as a result.
“Through a huge number of books, essays and interviews, Slavoj Zizek has powerfully argued that highly coercive ideological edifices, especially when they claim to be liberal and tolerant like our own political world at present, are sustained by a series of obscene, underground practises. The Catholic Church, coercing an impossible moralism upon its subjects, a symptomatically florid hatred of homosexuality and an equally impossible disavowal of sexual expression, sustains the visible edifice of celibacy and sexual renunciation partly through allowing some of its priests to sexually harass young boys. The Mary Raftery clones amongst us coerce an impossible model of childhood innocence and asexual purity on their subjects, ferociously and shrilly (not to mention luridly) condemning the ‘paedophile’ poisoning of such innocence as the crime of crimes.
“It seems to me that the salvationist-moralists are far more socially and personally intrusive and controlling than the secretive abusers ever could be. They assume an exceptionally crude model of causality and temporality, insisting that there is no injustice or irreconcilability in applying the sexual moralism of the present to sexual acts which took place, sometimes many decades ago, in the past. Freud’s concept of ‘Nachtraglichkeit’, or retro-determination, radically undermines this simple-minded priggishness.
“The ‘meaning’ of an event comes from the future, not from the past. It is determined far more by the dominant narratives circulating in the here-and-now than by either the act itself or the time in which it arose. The innocent, pure, nonsexual child is our most pressing (and insanely unrealistic and child-abusive) dominant narrative, and it is being temporally projected, propelled backwards in time, to impose meanings on events which they simply could not have had at the time they occurred.
“So, after beating so lengthily about so many different bushes, my speculation is as follows. Insofar as there really are Catholic priests who, shielded by the secrecy of the symbolic institution of the Church, sexually abuse young boys and girls, and insofar as child salvationists campaign for the public extermination of paedophiles in the name of childhood asexual innocence, they share a ‘sinthome’ in common: the ruthless enjoyment of the defilement of the absurd fiction of the pure, innocent child. Both sides share this - one by secretly doing it, the other by openly inciting it through misery porn. This is the hidden kernel of obscene jouissance.
“The paedo-priest is, in a sense, a little less hypocritical than the salvationist: he sees such fictional purity as an invitation to defile it. The salvationist insists on purity and innocence by means of endlessly manufacturing a pious and lurid misery porn, like the little girl with a crucifix in her minge. Righteousness porn actively elicits imaginary depictions of child sexual defilement - and it reaches far more people than a handful of grubby peados sharing nasty pictures with one another (a description which is itself an effect of the misery porn I am referring to - only 'Others' find child and adolescent sensuality sublimely beautiful and erotically enchanting).
“I think righteousness porn is far more pervasive and insidiously influential than a few furtive priests groping an underage genital, and it has the direct effect of creating the most horrific connections between children and sex. What both 'sides' deny, ironically, is the reality of the sexual child, the actual, playful sexuality of real children and adolescents. As such, each ‘side, is as destructive and vicious as the other.”
Continue to:
Commentary on the dominant narrative
Created on 12/05/2009 01:48 PM by Editor
Updated on 05/26/2010 07:38 AM by Editor
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