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For Better or Worse Pedophile Priests Should Stop Panicking About the Ordination of Women

Fri, 2010-07-16 14:56 — figleaf

Monica Potts of TAPPED passes along word that the Vatican’s new anti-sex-abuse policies also deals with a problem they see as even more equally pernicious.

...the attempted ordination of women as a “grave crime” subject to the same set of procedures and punishments meted out for sex abuse.

Read the quote in context here.

Hey, how about a nice round of screw you to those stupid little in-denial closet pedophiles and the (hobby)horses they rode up on?

I mean, yeah, if an unseemly taste for children, an abiding distaste for women, and a misunderstanding so deep that I couldn’t understand that when given the opportunity women in authority can sexually abuse boys with no less aplomb than men, then I’d be absolutely freaked out at the prospect of women as professional peers who might blow the whistle on me. And all things considered it’s easy to imagine that’s really what the Bishops and Cardinals are most concerned about. Even though they needn’t be.

And why yes, I am in rather a bad mood about this. Oddly, their main excuse for not ordaining women into the priesthood is that Jesus chose no women Disciples. This despite the fact that to the best of our knowledge none of Jesus’s Disciples were pedophiles either. And yet they’ve never threatened to excommunicate pedophiles… or for that matter the priests who ordained them… or for that matter the bishops, cardinals, and Popes who’ve whitewashed the whole sorry sex-abuse enterprise.

And why yes, my main point would just happen to be that archaic religious conceits about gender notwithstanding, the downsides of gender equivalence demonstrate the undeniability of gender equivalence just as much as the myriad upsides do. It’s not that there are no differences between men and women — at the very least the fact that every human being who’s ever existed has been a product of the union of biological male and female gametes makes that sort of irrefutable. The question instead is whether the differences are significant enough to warrant excluding one sex and privileging another, and the answer there is also irrefutably no.

Did I mention I was in a bad mood about this?

Why I Believe MRAs Should Address Sexual Abuse of Boys As a Separate Issue

Wed, 2010-03-31 12:22 — figleaf

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.

Time for MRAs and other Men's Movement Activists to Speak Out on Catholic and Other Institutional Sexual Abuses of Boys

Tue, 2010-03-30 06:48 — figleaf

You know how pretty within minutes a feminist mentioning rape culture online a Men’s Rights Activist or other anti-feminist is going to chime in with either “but women commit rape too” or “but men get raped too?” Many of them get awesomely passionate about their real or potential or at least hypothetical experiences on the receiving end.

So… quick question: when it comes to the now-overflowing allegations of sexual assault and exploitation of boys in the Catholic Church hierarchy what is the MRA position and what, if anything, are MRAs doing about it?

I ask because I genuinely don’t know: I don’t ordinarily follow MRAs enough to be able to track the credible ones so MRAs could be all over this and I just haven’t heard. If so, though, Google is being unusually nonforthcoming about it. So I had to ask.

This is another one of those areas where society in general, and men in particular, have been freeloading off of feminist women for nearly 40 years. Who’s done the heavy lifting on issues like, oh, say, rape? Who’s done the heavy lifting on issues like, oh, say, authority-based sexual coercion and harassment and the abuse of power differentials for sex? Women have. Mostly feminist women.

And yeah, sure, inside our social narratives that makes 100% sense. And even in reality, since the vast majority of those raped, coerced, harassed, bought, sold, and otherwise leveraged are women it still makes 75-85% sense that women would have been most motivated to pull that weight.

But look at the stuff going on in the Church. I’m confident there’s another shoe out there waiting to drop on sexual abuse of girls by priests. I mean, we haven’t been hearing about it but it’s bound to turn up. But you know what? In the meantime it’s about priests sexually abusing boy, after boy, after boy, after boy after boy, after boy, after…

If ever, on the planet, there was a legitimate issue for men to get involved in you’d think it would be the issue of shocking numbers of boys and young men being molested, raped, abused and generally sexually preyed upon by, largely, other men. It ought to be a major issue particularly for men who claim simply to be attempting to organize themselves politically and socially the way women have already been doing for several generations.

Because, it’s turning out, men really do get raped too! In very large numbers. And whereas one particularly ill-organized church is in the spotlight I’m… pretty sure once people really start asking questions they’re going to start discovering lots, and lots, and lots of other denominational vectors for abuse of men and boys. Lots of secular ones too. (Not even including the nervous heh-heh-don’t-drop-the-soap prevalence of prison rape.)

And it’s not like sexual assault of boys doesn’t have profound influence on them! It’s not like trauma, ambiguity, neuroses, and sexualization doesn’t happen to boys either. (Secondary question: how different would men’s sexual behavior be if some fraction of former boys weren’t trying to regain control after loss of their own sexual autonomy? Food for thought.)

So you’d think this issue would just be tailor made for MRAs. And yet I’m really hearing nothing. (Remember, there could be lots of MRAs saying it, but if I’m not hearing it…)

At any rate, this appears to be yet another area where men are seriously getting free rides on the backs of feminist pioneers. And it seems like if the men’s movements and men’s rights movements are serious about their stated intentions this would be a very, very good time for them to begin stepping up to the plate.

Denial based on Rule of Desire #2 is no longer a valid excuse.

Pedophilia, Catholic Clergy, and Abdication of Moral Authority

Fri, 2010-03-26 11:38 — figleaf

Yeah, I think it’s time. Echidne of the Snakes asks who…

should listen to the U.S. Catholic bishops as the arbiter of morality.

She said it here.

That these are the guys (and by invocation of their own infallibility clause it’s all guys) who are standing in the way of reproductive rights for women, universal marriage, fertility treatment, and cellular-level medical research, not to mention abstinence even in marriage except for procreation, all on the basis of their own moral authority…

It’s just starting to sink in that it’s not that these would-be emperors have no clothes — there’s room and possibly even need in society for moral religious philosophy and guidance. No, what’s getting me isn’t that they have no clothes at all, it’s that they have no pants!

And just to be clear I’m not saying every male member of the Catholic hierarchy is a pedophile. I am saying, however, that the intersection between public ideology on the one hand and a genuinely, theologically well-intentioned but catastrophic institutional forgiveness of biological reality inside that hierarchy has lead almost inevitably to abetting pedophilia.

Which might have been tolerable were pedophilia a minor flaw like depression, burnout, alcoholism, or even plain old incompatibility with a particular congregation or posting. But in both the most corporeal and the most etherial senses pedophilia simply isn’t the administrative problem the church chose to treat it as, for, evidently, centuries. Instead it’s a direct refutation of nearly all the principles the Church uses to distinguish itself and its clergy from other religions and other denominations. It also directly undermines any and all claims it may ever have had to be an arbiter of morality.

The irony I should be lecturing the Catholic church on morality speaks not so much to my nominal depravity. All my talk about sex and “kink” and so on are actually part and parcel with a fairly strong and reasonably well-informed sense of morality that I’m able to express with some consistency through word and deed both publicly and privately, and so I’m actually not at all depraved. The irony, instead, is that while morality is my hobby it’s supposed to be their job!

That I can now be suspicious (with what I fear to be strong foundation) that the real reason Church leaders permit neither marriage for priests nor ordination of women as priests is out of fear that heterosexual married men and women would neither tolerate nor be tempted by pedophilia… and that I can now be suspicious that the currently embroiled Pope was elevated not despite his history of condoning pedophelia but instead because his history was well-understood within the hierarchy, is probably all that needs to be said about how little moral authority remains with them.

It needn’t be this way. It needn’t have been. But it evidently really, really is.

Statutory-Rape/Sex-Work Bleg

Tue, 2009-03-10 23:26 — figleaf

“To bleg is to write a blog entry or comment for the sole purpose of asking for something.” — Blogglossary.com

SnowdropExplodes of A Femanist View reports on another case where the sin of pedophilia is washed away by the magic of being sex for hire.

Livvy @ The English Courtesan writes about a 15 year old girl who was working as an escort. According to the news article she links, the girl’s work was discovered when a teacher searched her school bag and found condoms, lube and the card of the escort agency.

So far the only person to have faced charges in court is… the schoolgirl herself. Not the escort agency, and not the clients (both of whom have actually broken the law, whereas the schoolgirl herself, as far as I can see, hasn’t – unless she was liable to tax on her earnings).

Read the quote in context here.

Seriously, this isn’t an insolvable problem. It continues to astonish me that anyone, let alone paid professionals, are so persistently dazzled by Teh Sex Work yet so indifferent to statutory rape let alone (in the case of trafficked individuals) rape rape when sex-work is involved.

I know a number of readers are more familiar with sex work than I, from both the pro- and anti- perspectives. Any idea what the sticking point would be?

Failure to Excommunicate

Tue, 2009-03-10 18:24 — figleaf

Pam Spaulding of Pandagon passes along a Vatican statement that incestuous rapist pedophiles who impregnate their nine-year-old daughters are just fine by them.

He also said the accused stepfather would not be expelled from the church. Although the man allegedly committed “a heinous crime … the abortion – the elimination of an innocent life – was more serious”.

Read the quote in context here.

I… think they made a mistake. Politically stupid? Obviously. Morally unclean? Undoubtedly. Legally suspect? Sure. But even doctrinally it’s completely unclear to me how that’s supposed to work. It’s certainly not the way I’d want to operate an enterprise where one of the primary missions of both clergy and laity involves being trusted alone with minor children.

Yeah, I Bet They're All Feeling Really Rescued Right About Now

Tue, 2009-02-24 17:41 — figleaf

Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors says (bold emphasis Professor Bartow’s, italic emphasis mine)

The BBC News reports:

...

Officials say a 16-year-old girl who recruits children as prostitutes is being sought as a priority.

Special Agent Melissa Morrow, of Washington’s FBI, said adult prostitutes who were among those arrested tipped authorities off about the girl.

“She is currently 16 and started when she was 13,” Agent Morrow said.

“Now she is out there recruiting other juveniles as well,” she said, adding that finding her was “at the top of our list”, the Associated Press news agency reported.

The 13 to 17 year olds are recognized to be victims, but the “adult prostitutes,” anybody 18 years old or over, are arrested as criminals, rather than rescued…

Read the quote and links in context here.

Including, I’m guessing, the adult prostitutes who tipped authorities that a juvenile was recruiting other underage prostitutes.

I mean, geez gang, you don’t have to like prostitution to recognize that if child prostitution is really a concern of yours then you really want adult prostitutes on your side of the law. And the best way to get that would be, maybe, you know, not arresting them for prostitution.

(Let alone “rescuing” them by… having the cops who were shaking you down for sex last week “rescuing” them this week with… arrests, strip searches, jail time, and — if I recall correctly — zero consideration for arrangements for the often-latch-key children of “rescued” prostitutes. Beyond the standard “one phone call” thing. But I digress…)

Seems to me you can even be dead cynical about prostitution and still have the system work — legal sex workers aren’t exactly going to sit around smiling when their livelihoods are undercut by children.

And by the way, it doesn’t sound like the “rescued” children are faring much better. Here’s the LA Times, via Professor Bartow again.

“We may not be able to return their innocence but we can remove them from this cycle of abuse and violence,” said FBI Director Robert Mueller.

...

Most of the children are put into the custody of local child protection agencies.

Yeah, because juvenile holding facilities, group homes, and foster care are such bastions of compassionate intervention.

That’s not to say there aren’t numerous ways to actually, you know, rescue coerced or even self-emancipated juvenile prostitutes. But when the only hammer you’re even remotely interested in using is the criminal justice system child sex-workers no less than adults are just going to get nailed.

I mean, seriously, you go spending multiple years and millions of dollars arranging multi-state arrests, and making pious statements about lost innocence and rescue, you damn well ought to have a better idea for what to do after the rescue than putting children “into the custody of local child protection agencies.”

Just sayin’

—-

And another thing! When are we going to start seeing regular and spectacularly publicized, perp-walked-on-CNN prosecution of johns for pedophilia, statutory rape, and anything else on the books when they buy sex with children?

—-

Oh, and while I’ve been meaning to mention this in its own post, on a related note check out the embedded Cherry.tv video at Nikol Hasler’s Midwest Teen Sex Show. It’s actually chock-a-block with hints about why early sexualization doesn’t particularly do young people any favors.

Hey, Even Socrates Endorsed Real Adult Sex Over the Alternative

Thu, 2009-01-08 23:43 — figleaf

[Oops. I meant to post this months ago. Sorry about the lag. —fl]

In an anonymous comment on an Edward Feser post I mentioned back in December someone raised the same objection I have to sex with children and, very nicely, traced back to Socrates.

Anonymous was responding to Feser’s self-interested assertions that the Ancients singled out only homosexuality for prohibition rather than all expressly non-reproductive sex regardless of age or orientation**.

There is also some decent stuff on sexuality in Gregory Vlastos’ book on Socrates. Interestingly, he understands Socrates’ refusal to indulge his inclinations as rooted in the idea that to do so would harm the boys (ancient Greek homosexuality, if you aren’t aware, tends to be presented specifically as pederasty and not as a sexual relationship between grown males, though that does seem to show up in the Symposium). Since it would harm the boys, it couldn’t be virtuous, and so it would harm Socrates too.

Anonymous said it here.

It might not have occurred to Socrates, or Plato, nor evidently to Feser and his correspondents, but the same can be said of sexual relations between men or boys but adults and children of any gender: it only momentarily gratifies the adult but almost always royally, um, compromises what would otherwise be the child’s healthy sexuality. For life. Including his or her entire adult life. In other words the problem isn’t that it’s perverted (whatever that means anyway) but because it’s destructive use.

Since, however, the same can not be said of affirmative sexual relations between an autonomous, competent adult and other autonomous, competent adults. Which is why it’s hard to generate much legitimate objection to adults of any gender or orientation in sexual relationships with each other.

[** But not, incidentally, of gender — unlike today the Ancients almost universally agreed that the urges to bear children created by women’s uteruses them amorally incapable of sexual restraint. Therefore only men were considered capable of… and therefore expected to exercise… chastity, morality, or restraint.

And naturally, thanks to this ur-“no-sex” class theory, women weren’t believed to enjoy sex because they might actually, you know, enjoyed sex. See, again, the job nobody wanted. Nope, for women it was supposed to be all about Teh Children. Worth considering when assessing anything Feser might have to say on the matter of abortion. —fl]

New York's Safe Harbor for Exploited Youth Act Signed Into Law

Fri, 2008-10-17 13:18 — figleaf

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]

Another Overlooked Form of Sex-Trafficking That's Labor Trafficking As Well

Sun, 2008-06-08 19:30 — figleaf


Photo by Flickr user slopjop. Used under a Creative Commons license.

International Center for Research on Women says

There are 51 million child brides worldwide. Over the next decade, this number is expected to rise to 100 million. Child brides lack even the most fundamental human rights, and they remain largely invisible to development efforts. By combating child marriage, we will increase the effectiveness of U.S. humanitarian assistance as well as give millions of girls a better chance to stay in school and live out their own dreams.

Please take a moment to watch this 6-minute video on child marriage, with arresting images from award-winning photojournalist Stephanie Sinclair that depict the lives of girls in Afghanistan, Ethiopia and Nepal who marry as children.

Watch the video [It’s on YouTube but embedding is disabled

Read the quote in context here.

And please don’t get the idea that stuff only happens in the corners of Asia or Africa, it happens in charming pockets of the United States as well. A friend pointed out two barely pubescent “sister-wife” children not in an enclave miles from anywhere else on the Himalayan plateau but in a forlorn K-Mart/Walmart knockoff on the Colorado Plateau not too many miles from the Grand Canyon or Mesa Verde. More were found in El Dorado, Texas. And don’t even get the idea it’s only common among radical Mormons. Others can allegedly be found in communities familiar and unfamiliar throughout the U.S. and Canada.

Child marriage is an especially pernicious form of trafficking because it so often combines all three of the worst forms of trafficking: coerced domestic, agricultural, or industrial labor on behalf of the husband’s family, sex for exchange value (where the value accrues not to the victim but in the form of clout, as in the FLDS, her family or her husband’s in the form of a dowry), and of course for plain old exploitation of a child by (almost always) the adults who negotiate their own terms rather than on behalf of the child.

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