Summary: Comments to my earlier post, Time for MRAs and other Men’s Movement Activists to Speak Out on Catholic and Other Institutional Sexual Abuses of Boys, have been cool enough, and thought-provoking enough to warrant a separate post about why sexual abuse of boys should be a specific MRA/Men’s-Movement issue.

I’m not at all suggesting in that post or anywhere else that there is or was no abuse of girls. And goodness knows there’s not just covert abuse of minor girls in other denominations but active encouragement to enter marriage (or its, um, equivalents) early. Sometimes (FLDS, Branch Davidians) egregiously early!

There are instead three other reasons I’m focusing on the currently-visible issue of sexual assault on boys.

1) Possibly because of avoidance due to bogus Rule of Desire #2, or perhaps just because boys don’t have hymens and/or hymen-related “resale” value in marriage, or maybe just from the sheer inertia of tradition the emphasis of the impact has been on anger and sense of betrayal at the perpetrators rather than consideration of the impact of sexual assault on boys. In other words the emphasis is that it’s been priests, who really shouldn’t have been committing these crimes, not on the minors who shouldn’t have been victims regardless of who the perpetrators are or were.

2) When rape of children has been addressed at all it’s tended to be addressed in a sort of dog-leg version of traditional gender divisions: children are women’s work, plus children are lumped in with women as traditional dependents of men, and so dealing with sexual assault on children has fallen to women in general, and feminists in particular. That’s actually fine in a way — women, children, and men have received blanket protection thanks to the heartfelt, sometimes aggressive, and often unwelcome-by-antifeminist efforts of feminism. The end result, however, has been to leave men off the hook — not only for taking action against predation on children but also, and very importantly in my estimation, off the hook for being out about their own current and prior roles as victims.

3) And finally the MRA issue: Over the years a number of so-called “hard core” feminists ranging from Mary Daly to Twisty Faster have expressed, um, dissatisfaction with men’s efforts to include rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment of men in feminist anti-rape discourse. (I can’t find the quote at the moment but I remember Twisty saying approximately that if men wanted to so something about male victims they should, but the issue was otherwise of no interest to her.) Beyond the asshole-ishness of the sentiment it’s a legitimate point: When one is serious about challenging gender stereotypes and destygmatizing one’s own sex you’re not really going to make it very far by focusing only on whatever wrongs, even legitimate ones, perpetrated by one’s opposite sex. The issue of (by definition, convention, and as of 1995 Papally-approved infallability) all-male Priests abusing male children, matched with the issue of male children being identified as systematic victims over decades and perhaps centuries, is just about as tailor-made an issue for anything even remotely identifiable as a men’s movement to involve itself in.

For those three reasons, even though I’m pretty sure comparable institutional abuse of girls will eventually come to light, I think it’s a good idea to draw attention to the issue as an issue by and about, men because it is therefore for men to affirmatively rather than passively address.

And, incidentally, I also happen to strongly suspect that just as boys and men have gained protection from feminist activism against rape, girls and women will similarly benefit from from men’s activism to prevent abuse of men and boys.

In the last item of a celebrity-news roundup Margaret of Jezebel quotes True Blood actor Stephen Moyer on the appeal of vampires.

“The thing about vampirism is that it taps into a female point of view – you have an old-fashioned gentleman with manners who is a fucking killer… it’s an interesting duality, because in our present society it would be an odd thing for a woman to say, ‘I want my man to be physical with me.’”

Read about it, and follow the links, here.

It’s funny, this weekend I had lunch with fellow-Seattleite-for-now Holly of The Pervocracy. Overall conclusion: she’s an awesome human being. Anyway, we were discussing various tropes in porn and pop culture and wound up dissecting the twin trends of men’s stereotypical fantasies about unrealistically young women partners as embodied in Literotica’s abundant stories about 18-year-old 8th-graders, and women’s equally stereotypical fantasies about unrealistically old men as embodied in the fantasy of 120-year-old Twilight characters with nothing better to do than sit and watch his girlfriend sleep undisturbed.

Moyer’s quote casts at least a little light on where the vampire appeal comes from. Although I’d add there’s the additional cultural reinforcement that except maybe for Sookie Stackhouse being “bad” with a vampire involves the pay-for-it slasher-movie risk getting your throat ripped out. Not a “fate worse than death,” but actual death being one way past Rule #1’s proscriptive clause.

As for the notion of men and sexually immature women I think that goes deep into Rule #2: a man with a woman who’s not yet sexually mature is sort of by-definition not going to be desirable, giving him both “permission” to apply leverage and a “what did you expect” if it doesn’t work out.

Nick Confessore, former political blogger and now of The New York Times, says

September 26, 2008

[New York] Gov. David A. Paterson on Friday signed into law a bill shielding sexually exploited girls and boys from being charged with prostitution.

The law, known as the Safe Harbor for Exploited Youth Act, will divert children under the age of 18 who have been arrested for prostitution into counseling and treatment programs, provided they agree to aid in the prosecution of their pimps.

He said it here.

[Via $pread magazine online. —fl]

The law has evidently been held up for year in the New York state legislature by law-n-order types, Senate Republicans and NYC Mayor’s office who believed it would just make it harder to “crack down on prostitution.”

The compromise bill allows charges to be reinstated for child prostitutes who refuse to cooperate with court mandates and also includes a sort of “one strike you’re in” provision where reoffenders just go to jail.**

While I’m actually, eh, sympathetic with qualms that if poorly administered the new law could just provide new avenues for gaming the system, on the other hand system-gaming-wise it’s already pretty much nickel night at the casino. So what’s wrong with attempting an approach that sidesteps that system?

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere there’s a bit of a disconnect between the standard protective impulse “OMG, here’s an underage victim who’s been conscripted into prostitution” and the standard response which is “arrest the little whore.”

Whichever way we might feel viscerally about sex work we can not be proud of the pure oxymoronics of “criminal victim.***” And on the face of it, anyway, this looks like a step away from punishing victims and towards punishing (silly me for asking, I know) the actual criminals in such cases: pimps, traffickers, and customers who buy and sell children’s bodies.****

—-

Next up, one hopes, would be diversion initiatives along Safe Housing / Safe Environments lines? The answer would appear to be… yes. According to a summary of the bill from something called the (randomly via-Google) Polaris Project Action Center there are provisions for…

Safe Houses

• Every local social services district is required to provide a short-term safe house to sexually exploited children who live in its district. In addition to secure housing, the facility should include 24-hour crisis intervention and access to various medical care and other supportive services. Existing resources, including respite beds or runaway and homeless youth programs, can be used if appropriate, and local social service districts may work together to provide these resources on a regional basis.

• The Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS) is required to contract with an appropriate agency with experience working with sexually exploited youth to provide at least one safe house for longer-term care, in a geographic area that would meet the needs of sexually exploited youth and that cannot be readily accessed by perpetrators of sexual exploitation.

Planning
Every local social services district is required to:

• Determine the needs of sexually exploited children in their respective districts;
• Include the determination of the need in the integrated county plan;
• Provide crisis intervention and community-based programs to meet the determined need; and

• Recognize and plan for the separate and distinct needs of girls, boys, and transgendered youth who have been sexually exploited.

Oh, but wouldn’t you know? Perhaps the bigger objections to the bill weren’t so much about about law ‘n order as some people not wanting to pay to do the right thing.

A recent study conducted by the state Office of Children and Families reports that counties are currently not equipped to handle the needs of this victim population. The study, New York Prevalence Study of Commercially Sexually Exploited Children, was released April 18, 2007. It examined 159 agencies from a sample of local departments of social services throughout the state, including New York City. Among its conclusions, the study details the service availability and capacity, as well as the problems preventing local departments of social services from providing the necessary services.

Hmm… should we help victims or lock them away? Yeah, “which one’s cheaper” is always a moral choice.

[** If convicted. If I’m not mistaken one of the big problems for pimped or trafficked sex workers of any age is that their pimps and traffickers a) know the ropes and b) can afford good successful lawyers. —fl]

[*** I believe I’ve mentioned elsewhere my strong preference for a different, more appropriately focused construction… like treating customers of child prostitutes as Level 1 or Level 2 lifetime-registerable child sex offenders. The act, incidentally, mainly covers children under age 16 so “chilling effect” on what really ought to be legitimate adult sex work customers? Not so much. —fl]

[*** Oops, maybe I’m not so happy: Based on Confessori’s article it looks like Bloomberg et.al. pressed for requiring cooperation against traffickers but… as usual no mention of prosecuting the customers of pimps and traffickers. —fl]