Suffer the Children
Having considered child
abuse and its attendant ills from all sorts of angles--alleged Satanists,
celebrity molesters, recovered memories, day-care witch trials--James Kincaid,
a professor of English at the University of Southern California, has concluded
that at its root the problem is a matter of genre. The thing is, child abuse as
currently conceived is hopelessly Gothic. Stories about child molesting are
populated by evil monsters and helpless innocents (rather than flawed or
unfortunate humans), and they languish in a miasma of sinister eroticism. Child
molesting is thought to be so evil, so far outside the bounds of civilization,
that no means of exorcism can be considered too harsh or prone to error.
At the
same time, though, the evil is elusive and invincible. How can we prevent
molesters from molesting? We can't--molesters are monsters, and they'll
continue to molest, no matter what the penalty. (Never mind that the recidivism
rate for child molesting is less than half the reported burglary rate and lower
than that of many major felonies.) How can we catch them before they start? We
can't--anyone could be a molester. How can we be sure children are telling the
truth about abuse? We can't--children are imaginative and easily influenced by
suggestion. How can we tell whether "recovered memories" are accurate? We
can't. How can we make sure trials convict molesters and acquit the falsely
accused? We can't. Child abuse is horrible; child abuse is inevitable.
Molesters are monsters; monsters are everywhere.
The consequence of this conceptual impasse, according to
Kincaid, is endless, repetitive talking. Both sides of the recovered memory
debate--those who "believe the children" and those who are skeptical--rehearse
the same script over and over again, claiming all the while to be "breaking the
silence." Their monsters differ (Satanic pornographers and incestuous rapists
on the one hand, megalomaniac therapists on the other), as do their helpless
innocents (wounded children vs. day-care Dreyfuses). Both make demons out of
Freud and the media, but neither steps outside the demonology to question why
we're so obsessed with child abuse in the first place. The story line--the
threat, the urgency, the need to expose, the extremist language--is the
same.
Strangely,
though--and this is the second half of Kincaid's thesis--this repetitiveness is
in some nasty little way exactly what we want. It's pleasurable. The more we
exclaim how horrified we are by child molestation, the more we can permit
ourselves to linger, in a way that's not far from lascivious, over images of
childish bodies. (Little tummies! Little bottoms! Little feet!) The more we
condemn the perversity of child beauty pageants, the more we get to watch
luscious little JonBenet Ramsey bat her baby eyelashes and to imagine her gory
death. But there's more. Talking about abuse not only permits guiltless
voyeurism--it also gives shape to inchoate feelings of childhood hurt, it tells
us why we are the way we are and gives us someone to blame, and it deflects a
sense of cultural or moral decline onto a group of particular individuals. In
short, Kincaid concludes, not without a certain glee, "Eroticizing exists in
symbiotic relation with sanitizing, and the veiling and the exposing exist in
an encircling doublespeak."
This particular brand of sexual doublespeak has
been remarked upon before, most famously by the late French historian Michel
Foucault, who, in his History of Sexuality (published in English in
1978), put forth his unexpected "repressive hypothesis": Those supposedly
tight-lipped Victorians, in the course of devising rules to regulate sex and
the sciences that investigate its perversions, in fact talked and wrote more
about sex than anyone before them.
The
people enmeshed in this culture of sex could no more escape or stand outside
it, Foucault held, than they could stand outside their own language. Kincaid is
nothing if not an optimist, though, and he believes that if what's wrong with
the way we talk about child molesting is genre--we're telling the wrong kinds
of stories--well, then we should just start telling different ones. How? First
of all by acknowledging, rather than suppressing in a panic, the erotic
feelings we have about children: We should realize that finding children
seductive does not compel us to fondle them "in a yucky way," as the day-care
prosecutors so nicely put it. And then we should follow the series of steps
that Kincaid lays out--steps such as "1. Stop looking for monsters and their
victims"; "2. Stop listening to simpleminded stories"; and "6. Stop tracing
everything backward, looking always to the past for sources, explanations, and
excuses." Those who have trouble with the first stage of the process, Kincaid
advises thus: "If you find yourself getting too excited, going too far, wanting
to incite or not to stop--then stop."
It's possible to dismiss such prescriptions as naive, but
in the context of the quasideterministic Foucauldianism from which Kincaid's
brand of cultural criticism emerges, they're refreshing--even startling. When
was the last time a Foucauldian offered a step-by-step cure for cultural
malaise? Kincaid's eccentric combination of suspicious narrative analysis and
self-help, can-do enthusiasm may be just the Dale Carnegie twist these old
ideas need. No, the problem with his analysis is not the prescriptions, nor is
it his occasional failure to restrain himself in the silly jokes department
("Innocence is a lot like the air in your tires: There's not a lot you can do
with it but lose it"). It's that Kincaid can't help himself. He's starry-eyed
about children, too.
According to Kincaid, the
real problem with our obsession with child sexual abuse is that it distracts us
from other kinds of abuse that affect far more children than molesting does:
boring, unsensational kinds of abuse such as poverty, neglect, and bad schools.
The question, though, is why these things should be considered child
abuse--why they should be considered more evil when visited upon children than
upon adults. Kincaid believes we should hold on to the sweet, nonerotic
dimensions of the Romantic child cult. We should still adore the child as the
angelic innocent Blake and Wordsworth wrote about. But it's precisely this
sacred little creature that generates the Manichaean stories he's complaining
about.
After all, as long as abusing
children is considered somehow much worse than abusing adults, child
abusers--sexual or otherwise--will be thought of as monsters. Idealized
children short-circuit politics, because where they are concerned, people tend
to say things like "even one child abused (or hurt or hungry or killed) is
unacceptable"; whereas politics needs to be able to weigh risks to some people
against risks to others. Ian Hacking, a philosopher who has written acutely
about child abuse, has observed that America seems to be the only country with
abuse legislation specific to children. Our zeal in defending children is not
universal and not to be taken for granted. Why do we have special charities
devoted to children? Why do we consider the Oklahoma bombing especially vile
because it killed children? Why do we decide custody cases according to the
best interests of the child, as opposed to the parents' interests? This
is the stuff Gothic narratives are made of.
