The Molester Within

How exactly do you cross-examine a three-year-old child who invokes the authority of a toy robot as evidence? Paul-Noel Chretien investigates the history of abuse trials in this interesting Wall Street Journal article.
We live now -- both as parents and as children -- in an age of suspicion. We lock our doors, always; we keep our kids out of chat rooms if we can; we eye the neighbors warily. You can trace the roots of this unease back to the mid 1980s, when a number of day care providers were charged with bizarre, improbable acts of sexual abuse against defenseless toddlers. All too often, there was little or no physical evidence to back up the accusations; yet juries, persuaded by the prevailing idea that children don't lie about such things and caught up in the outraged fervor of the moment, sent a lot of people to jail, many of whom are now thought to be innocent. Since then, clinical studies and revelations that young "victims" were coached into concocting lurid tales have disproved the "children don't lie" theory. And while alleged perpetrators like Kelly Michaels are free and vindicated, their mistaken guilt has ruined their careers and permanently tarnished their reputations.
In recent years, the frenzied determination to protect childhood innocence has moved closer to home. Increasingly, parents are coming under suspicion by hyper vigilant neighbors and others in their communities. Last November, in a scene straight out of daytime TV, detectives accosted Toni Marie Angeli, a 31-year-old Harvard photography student at a Cambridge photo lab after technicians alerted police to the potentially pornographic photos she'd taken of her 4-year-old son. One of the photographs in question, published in the Boston Phoenix, shows a grinning boy (naked, but a sideview only) whose father grips his knees, holding him aloft like a prize. Far from lascivious, the picture radiates affection and playfulness.
Even more troubling is an incident recounted in a recent New Yorker essay by Noelle Oxenhandler. After a young mother in upstate New York confessed to a stranger that she'd become aroused while breastfeeding, she was arrested for suspected child abuse and her two-year-old daughter was taken away from her for an entire year. Clearly, any admission of adult sexual feelings in response to children -- however harmless the result of those feelings may be -- is unacceptable in this neo-prudish age. Nor are we comfortable contemplating children as the sexual beings that they inevitably are, as last summer's Calvin Klein controversy reminded us. Indeed, more than exploiting the sexuality of adolescent boys (and girls, but that's nothing new), Calvin Klein translated the potent anxiety surrounding their sexuality into a furor that brought the company more media exposure than any ordinary Kate-Moss ad campaign ever could.

Tonie Marie Angeli's class assignment was titled the Innocence of a Child's Nudity. Cambridge Police didn't think it was so innocent, and handcuffed, beat and choked her in the back room of Zona Photographic Labs, according to Angeli's home page.

Breast feeding isn't sexual abuse, it's every child's birthright, according to the Radical Mother's breast feeding page. With instructions on how to increase lactation and tend sore nipples, the Radical Mother is a useful and informative resource.

After Calvin Klein, Inc. issued its official statement apologizing for its offensive campaign, the ultra-hip zine Word slyly deconstructed the document itself, using hypertext links and appropriately sassy commentary.

FEED Reader pboswell@icanect.net writes in: "I must take exception to the rhetoric of the "dirty little secret." There is nothing little about it! The situation of a CHILD caught in a situation of being betrayed and terrified by persons on whom (s)he depends is catastrophic. Adults wrongly accused have at least their maturity of perspective and internal conviction of innocence. The abused child has neither."
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This isn't to suggest that child molestation isn't a real problem in this country. For too long it was a dirty little secret whose name no one dared speak, resulting in lifetimes of silent misery for those who endured it. However, where we once erred on the side of ignoring sexual abuse, we're now a little too quick to see it everywhere we look, including our neighbor's homes and our own family photo albums.
So, how did we reach this point? A national survey conducted a few months ago by The Washington Post, Harvard University and the Kaiser Family Foundation offers some illumination. It found that every generation that has come of age since the 1950s has been more mistrusting of human nature, a transformation in the national outlook that has deeply corroded the social and political life in this country. In 1964, 54% of survey respondents agreed that "most people can be trusted"; three decades later only 35% felt the same way.
In an article reporting these findings, The Post quoted Lori Miller, 18, of Madison, Wisconsin: "There's too many people trying to hurt you financially, emotionally or physically. You never know who's the next Jeffrey Dahmer." It's striking that Miller attaches such a monstrous name to her mistrust: people aren't just out to hurt you, some want to rape you, dismember you and eat your liver -- preferably with a glass of Chianti, a la "Silence of the Lambs." It's significant, too, that Dahmer was a pedophile who molested young boys. Miller doesn't just fear for herself, but for the children she feels are surrounded by potential molesters.
Aside from such morbid mistrust, there are other reasons for the reigning paranoia about children's bodies. There's the tired, though not inapt, "backlashes against the sexual revolution" explanation, in which AIDS curtailed the orgies, wife-swapping and Erica Jong's "zipless fuck" of the early seventies and left a pervasive sexual angst in its wake. Perhaps more important, feminists shattered the cozy myth of the family home as a safe, nurturing haven for children. Instead, people began to view the home as a sort of patriarchal prison where children were terrorized and abused -- if not sexually, then emotionally -- by their fathers and sometimes even their mothers.

Prosecuted with the spirit and irrationality of the Salem witch trials, ritual sexual abuse cases have been substantiated by bizarre claims ranging from devil worship to bible burning according to the Witchunt Information Center, whose Web site extensively documents many of the allegedly wrongful convictions.
Meanwhile, the success of feminism and gay liberation, the Supreme Court decision on abortion, and the increasing visibility of pornography have inflamed the ire of social conservatives. In their book Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, authors John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman point out that by the early 1980s, a central theme was emerging in the New Right's activism over issues as diffuse as abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment, gay liberation, sex education and raunchy rock lyrics: the sexuality of youth. In fact, the authors note, conservative attacks on pornography first took shape around the issue of "kiddie-porn." Around this time, the pornography debate was also creating a bitter schism among feminists. In a bizarre alliance, radical feminists Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon joined forces with right-wing morality crusaders in a mission to outlaw most pornography in the U.S. This odd wrinkle fueled the ever-deepening ambivalence toward our hard-won sexual freedom.
Then, time and talk shows democratized child abuse and indelibly tattooed the issue on our national consciousness. According to the authors of "The Politics of Child Abuse In America" (Oxford University Press, 1996), for most of this century, child abuse was seen as primarily a problem of the poor and socially marginal -- essentially a non-issue for the rest of us. But, over the last decade, as Roseanne and an ever growing roster of prosperous and famous adult victims of such abuse shared their pain on the talk-show circuit, it has become a familiar skeleton yanked from the closet of middle class America.
Sexual abuse has even spawned a kind of literary vogue for novels and confessional memoirs about childhood incest. These include Dorothy Allison's acclaimed Bastard Out of Carolina, Jane Smiley's Pulitzer Prize-winning A Thousand Acres, and Marilyn French's Our Father, to name a few. In last November's Harper's magazine, Kate Roiphe observed: "By the early Nineties incest had swept across the literary map of America -- into Mona Simpson's California cities, Jane Smiley's flat Midwestern farmlands, Mary Gaitskill's middle class suburbs, Russell Bank's small upstate New York towns, and even E. Annie Proulx's icy Canadian islands. Incest, it would appear, is everywhere."
Indeed, the cultural vision of the American family has swung from one disturbing extreme to another. We've traded in T-birds, poodle skirts and the impossibly wholesome Ozzie-and-Harriet ideal, for the Internet, rollerblading and a much darker, though hardly more accurate, representation: the "dysfunctional" family where incest or child abuse is practically normal.
It's this creeping suspicion that any adult could be a child molester that has, in the most extreme cases, put innocent people behind bars. But for most of us, the effects are subtler. One father I know stopped photographing his toddlers cavorting nude in the backyard. Another friend confesses to feeling uncomfortable every time she washes her 18-month-old son's genitals. My husband and I have also felt this pervasive unease with our own child. This amorphous, guilt-laced dread grips much of the country now that we've lost a certain clear-eyed confidence in our sexuality and in the innocence of our children. And it's this very dread that, like Alice's looking glass, distorts any honest discussion of children's sexuality and how to deal with it. When parents must check healthy affection or forego casual snapshots, the Mad Hatter isn't the only one who has lost all sense of proportion.
(June 6, 1996)

Click here to post your responses in our Feedbag discussion area.

How exactly do you cross-examine a three-year-old child who invokes the authority of a toy robot as evidence? Paul-Noel Chretien investigates the history of abuse trials in this interesting Wall Street Journal article.	We live now -- both as parents and as children -- in an age of suspicion. We lock our doors, always; we keep our kids out of chat rooms if we can; we eye the neighbors warily. You can trace the roots of this unease back to the mid 1980s, when a number of day care providers were charged with bizarre, improbable acts of sexual abuse against defenseless toddlers. All too often, there was little or no physical evidence to back up the accusations; yet juries, persuaded by the prevailing idea that children don't lie about such things and caught up in the outraged fervor of the moment, sent a lot of people to jail, many of whom are now thought to be innocent. Since then, clinical studies and revelations that young "victims" were coached into concocting lurid tales have disproved the "children don't lie" theory. And while alleged perpetrators like Kelly Michaels are free and vindicated, their mistaken guilt has ruined their careers and permanently tarnished their reputations. In recent years, the frenzied determination to protect childhood innocence has moved closer to home. Increasingly, parents are coming under suspicion by hyper vigilant neighbors and others in their communities. Last November, in a scene straight out of daytime TV, detectives accosted Toni Marie Angeli, a 31-year-old Harvard photography student at a Cambridge photo lab after technicians alerted police to the potentially pornographic photos she'd taken of her 4-year-old son. One of the photographs in question, published in the Boston Phoenix, shows a grinning boy (naked, but a sideview only) whose father grips his knees, holding him aloft like a prize. Far from lascivious, the picture radiates affection and playfulness. Even more troubling is an incident recounted in a recent New Yorker essay by Noelle Oxenhandler. After a young mother in upstate New York confessed to a stranger that she'd become aroused while breastfeeding, she was arrested for suspected child abuse and her two-year-old daughter was taken away from her for an entire year. Clearly, any admission of adult sexual feelings in response to children -- however harmless the result of those feelings may be -- is unacceptable in this neo-prudish age. Nor are we comfortable contemplating children as the sexual beings that they inevitably are, as last summer's Calvin Klein controversy reminded us. Indeed, more than exploiting the sexuality of adolescent boys (and girls, but that's nothing new), Calvin Klein translated the potent anxiety surrounding their sexuality into a furor that brought the company more media exposure than any ordinary Kate-Moss ad campaign ever could.
Tonie Marie Angeli's class assignment was titled the Innocence of a Child's Nudity. Cambridge Police didn't think it was so innocent, and handcuffed, beat and choked her in the back room of Zona Photographic Labs, according to Angeli's home page.
Breast feeding isn't sexual abuse, it's every child's birthright, according to the Radical Mother's breast feeding page. With instructions on how to increase lactation and tend sore nipples, the Radical Mother is a useful and informative resource.
After Calvin Klein, Inc. issued its official statement apologizing for its offensive campaign, the ultra-hip zine Word slyly deconstructed the document itself, using hypertext links and appropriately sassy commentary.