The anatomy of abuse
Brian Masters
EROTIC INNOCENCE
by James R. Kincaid
Duke University Press, £16.95, pp. 368 hen I was a boy 40-odd years ago, grown-up journalists exercised their grown- up imaginations with reports of children being 'interfered with'. They never explained what the interference comprised, but we all bet it must have been a great deal more serious than a grope, which we were doing gleefully every day, or men would not have been sent to prison for it (we were wrong as it turned out). Nowa- days the fashionable expression is 'child abuse', and the victims have descended in age to the pre-pubescent variety. But the new term is just as vacuous and titillating as the old 'interfered with' and frequently much more dangerous, for it can cover any- thing from sodomy (very rare) to a pat on the rump (very common) with the effect that people have been frightened out of their wits into resisting the latter in order not to be suspected of the former, and children in America are no longer touched by anyone for any reason at all.
This ludicrous panic has spawned a nasty twin-headed monster, determined on the one hand to identify 'abusers' in every corner of the land, and on the other to admit with a gulp and a snivel that we were abused as children ourselves. It is all too hysterical to be true, yet scores of books have been addressed to the subject already. At last, into this carnival of disguised pruri- ence comes a sane and sarcastic study by Professor Kincaid which should make all the abuse-freaks shut up. Should, but of course won't, for the subject is too dear to their frosty hearts; they cannot stop talking about it, since they are addicted, just as other people might be to masturbation, mirrors or morgues.
Kincaid has much fun with the lists of symptoms which the abuse-freaks parade to help us work out if we were mucked about with as kids. 'If you don't check off at least three of these symptoms', he says, 'I'd say you're a bore.' He scorns the culture, akin to Orwell's double-think, which holds that if you cannot remember any instance of being abused, that proves you certainly were, and seriously too (people do actually write such drivel); or that if there is no evi- dence of ritual satanic sacrifice of children or alien abductions of same, that shows how clever are the satanists and aliens in hiding their traces. Try introducing a spot of common sense and, oh dear, you are, poor thing, 'in denial', which does not mean you deny the veracity of the rubbish you are forced to hear, which would be fair enough, but on the contrary that you haven't the balls to see that you are wrong. 'Denial' is a modern substitute for 'heresy'.
Then there is the even more up-to-date fashion of locating the child within you (presumably in order that you may be abused all over again), which makes me, for one, want to throw up. One of these vapid self-help books approves the dictum 'It's Never Too Late to Have a Happy Childhood', prompting the comment from Kincaid, 'What about the children outside of us?' Indeed, none of the busybodies care a hoot about them; they would deflect attention from ourselves-as-victims or our- selves-as-memories. Some women prison guards did find the child inside them and peeked at male prisoners taking a shower (children certainly do that), for which they were arraigned on charges of visual rape.
So wild has this obsession become that people are advised to rear their children as if a molester were living in the neighbour- hood, and kids are being told how to stamp on toes, how to kick up a fuss (as if they didn't know), and how to tell when a touch goes on too long — in other words, how to become bloody little nuisances. One attor- ney invited his jury to think of a child they knew and imagine him or her being violat- ed. Dwell upon that for just a moment, and you will see Kincaid's idee maltresse at a stroke: it is that all this chatter has little to do with protecting children and everything to do with feeding ghastly concealed adult appetites.
This whole debate (a rather grand word for prattle) is conducted by simple-minded people who could never understand what Freud meant by 'repression', and have never even tried; who have not the sophis- tication and subtlety required to spot that nightmares emerge from sources far more complicated than memories of sex; who know nothing of Greek tragedy; who refer to children as 'the Littles'; and who revere the supremacy of intuition over demonstra- tion. They don't like knowledge, because it takes your eyes away from the 'problem'. They are fit only to be on a TV talk-show, and deserve the professor's ironic disdain.
Kincaid shows how all this talk hides sadomasochistic urges to have somebody powerful doing something to somebody powerless, and if the children of the myth decline to fit the role of victim, then they have to be squeezed into that of perpetra- tor. The fact that the United States is the only country in the world which puts juve- niles to death has, he suggests, something to do with it. Certainly those children are no longer to be protected. Better forgotten. (He cites a funny but cruel cartoon with the caption, 'No, Danny can't come out to play. Danny's on death row').
The book is too long, of course, aca- demics being notoriously undisciplined these days, but it has a quirky brightness and wit which lightens an otherwise depressing subject and reminds me of the The Spectator's own Mark Steyn. It is also full of wisdom and sanity. We must not force out of teaching those most willing and best able to teach, he says. We must stop thinking that life is 'a plod through a predestined bog'. We must see the world as `a field of opportunities, not a recovery room.' We must recognise that children do have the wit to lie, that they are interested in sex, that they do arouse proud sensual responses in their parents, that they have more intricate personalities than the family dog, and that their real struggle is to sur- vive neglect and emotional deprivation, which are far more widespread than the unseemly stuff that is reported, and to which we are wickedly indifferent.
In other words, we must grow up.
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