#23: Fear and Protection
The multi-faceted problem of abuse is too important to be left to the opportunists.
Today’s post covers grooming and the sexual exploitation of children.
From my experience, conspiracy thrives when curious people feel distant from sources of power. I’m wary of the ways some people I know can be very dismissive of those who are, for instance, anti-vax or vaccine sceptic or such: medicine’s history, including very recently, is intertwined with state and domestic control, where reproductive rights, psychiatry and treatment is concerned. I’ve had my covid vaccine, and two booster shots, despite being aware of the Tuskegee Syphilis Trials; I’ve had two smear tests despite my intimate knowledge of the ways Black women and girls have been used as gynaecological fodder and the ongoing difficulties that brings. But I also exercise a degree of agency and autonomy that’s been facilitated by an elite education and spending most of my life being encouraged to believe I could be somebody — that it was within my reach to do important work when I grew up that could help people, if I so wished. I also have met and know people who work in and around the Westminster bubble, so am less inclined to think that the machine is as totalising and efficient as many conspiracies would put the big decision makers to be.
As many have noted, we are in the grips of an acute fear about the abuse and exploitation of children and young people. Fear is like stress: an unavoidable part of the human experience and sometimes a valuable one. But when these emotions are improperly harnessed, they can wreak psychic, physical, social and political havoc.
Earlier on this month, I recommended two essays from robust and reputable publishers on historic child sex abuse. I say ‘historic’ but I think they both speak to the mid-century moment of post-war social change. Andrew Hagan’s LRB essay Light Entertainment considers the way the BBC’s idiosyncratic relationship to its audience, combined with the rise of mass media celebrity, provided safe cover for more than one children’s presenter — and certainly before Jimmy Savile got his break. Savile got the Netflix documentary treatment this year, in a mercifully tight two-parter (lessons hopefully learned from the sprawling, baggy Epstein series I never finished) which prompted international audiences to ask: did these Brits seriously not know something was severely wrong with this man?
Meanwhile, Rachel Aviv’s essay in the New Yorker, The German Experiment that Placed Foster Children with Paedophiles. In that ‘Saturday Magazine’ entry from a couple of weeks ago, I described it as being ‘instructive on the vivid course correction that took place in the immediate aftermath of the atrocities of the Second World War.’ Germany, along with much of Western Europe and North America, was deeply concerned to prevent something like the Holocaust, in its totalising, ruthlessly efficient pursuit of degradation and genocide from happening again. Will people always follow orders, no matter how cruel those instructions might be? Stanley Milgram ran his deeply flawed experiments in obedience and authority in 1961, as Adolf Eichmann stood trial for his crimes. Did German authoritarian parenting provide a national sympathy for the fascism of Hitler and the Nazis? Helmut Kentler, an esteemed sociologist, presented an alternative model of childrearing from his own. Aviv provides us with some details:
Kentler’s career was framed by his belief in the damage wrought by dominant fathers. An early memory was of walking in the forest on a spring day and running to keep up with his father. “I had only one wish: that he should take my hand and hold it in his,” Kentler wrote in a parenting magazine in 1983. But his father, a lieutenant in the First World War, believed in a “rod and baton pedagogy,” as Kentler put it. Kentler’s parents followed the teachings of Daniel Gottlob Moritz Schreber, a best-selling German authority on child care who has been described as a “spiritual precursor of Nazism.” Schreber outlined principles of child rearing that would create a stronger race of men, ridding them of cowardice, laziness, and unwanted displays of vulnerability and desire. “Suppress everything in the child,” Schreber wrote, in 1858. “Emotions must be suffocated in their seed right away.”
And so, with the full knowledge and approval of the German state, and in keeping with a belief that sexual repression was a key aspect of the profiles of concentration camp officers and other facilitators of the Holocaust, Kentler placed boys in the homes of foster fathers with known and established attraction to children. Marco, whose story is the central narrative of the essay, didn’t leave his foster placement until he was 21 — in 2003.
Meanwhile, in the UK, in the 1970s, legitimate civil liberties groups were infiltrated by those whose interests moved away from equalising the age of consent and decriminalising abortion, including the Paedophile Information Exchange. There’s a decent overview of this in an Observer article from 2014. I bring this up with trepidation, as I am aware the pendulum is swinging in a direction I do not like, as evidenced by the BBC Mary Whitehouse documentary that aired this year, who featured Louise Perry as one of Whitehouse’s defenders. Perry, author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, could be found tweeting in the days and weeks following Giorgia Meloni’s election as Italian Prime Minister, things that suggested the idea Meloni’s politics could be described as particularly conservative, let alone fascist, was absurd.
But I think the trepidation is in part what fuels the conspiracy thinking, which has encouraged the well-meaning (those who viscerally hate the idea that children might be harmed) to join forces with the nefarious: take a look at the discussion around drag storytime, the use of the word ‘grooming’ (similar tones to ‘degeneracy’) and the far-right plots to enact violence on those performers and their supporters. The abuse of children is a deeply disturbing prospect, and with good reason. But, despite the fact the topic is everywhere (A Little Life getting the Ivo Van Hove treatment in two languages; crime shows such as Unforgotten and Waking the Dead featuring it; the fallout from Savile’s death and the lingering fear that there are still high profile figures out there who have yet to have had their comeuppance), we’re not good at dealing with it.
Examples include the story of Tortoise’s podcast Hoaxed about a satanic panic in Hampstead, but also the ways in which there remains a deep resistance to accept that not everyone will be close to their families. I am particularly conscious of this at Christmas. To quote myself from last year: ‘it’s unpleasant to think about how some children are born into homes that will not support or provide for them in the ways we might like’ but we still have to do it. And it’s not just homes, of course, but other institutions that hold power: hospitals, the police, schools. Around the same time Nick Timothy and Policy Exchange were mounting their riposte to the Serial Trojan Horse podcast (last week), Timothy tweeted:
which is curious, given his avowed commitment to safeguarding in schools. What is adultification and why might Hackney Council be ensuring its teachers are aware of it? Perhaps the training is being run as a direct consequence of the publicising of the Child Q case, where a 15 year-old Black girl was strip searched by police officers in her Hackney school in 2020. She was taken out of an exam and was searched while she was on her period as there were suspicions she had cannabis on her. She did not. The way in which she was treated has since been acknowledged by the council to be linked to her race — black children are treated like adults, and therefore as having criminal responsibility as well as less forgiveness granted to them, at a younger age than their white counterparts where authority figures are concerned.
The response to the case was extremely strong, and with good reason, but some of it I found difficult. Over the past year or so, due to being in a financial position to afford physiotherapy and talking therapy (mainly EMDR), I am currently working through the ways in which I was overly medicalised, scrutinised and considered far older than my age from about the age of eight. The consequences of it have been longlasting in ways I don’t have the space to get into in this essay, which fundamentally is not a piece of memoir. However, I do think that the idea I might be ‘permanently damaged’ by my experiences likely meant I didn’t bring them up with anyone until I was around 30. When we consider harm and marginalisation to be the primary way we experience the world or are defined by others to establish skin in the game or the dreaded authenticity, we encourage an incredibly rigid timeline. BT/AT: Before Trauma; After Trauma. I have to believe things are more porous than that. Time lost by not being able to articulate my experiences and find adequate support has been, in some aspects, time lost, but my life overall does not amount to time wasted, despite a current cultural moment that, for all its purported liberation, is still desperately frightened of the ‘frigid woman.’
You can see this in the conversation Maggie has with the older sexual health clinic nurse in tv fictionalisation of Everything I Know About Love. Maggie is clearly on the verge of having her friends and family set up an intervention for her, on account of her painful, but well-rendered, relationship to men and partying, but the advice she gets and the messages around her in 2012, when Tinder first launched, is that her sexual freedom is a ‘use it or lose it’ deal, and you would be mad to waste the opportunities for flings and casual relationships while she’s ‘in her prime’ (i.e. not yet haggard and 30). It’s a different kind of biological clock that I think many young women have felt in the throes of.
We are so messed up around the messages we want to send around sexual harm and abuse. People still make jokes about baby girls ‘flirting’ with adult male family friends that they don’t with women of the equivalent kinship relationship and yet Q Anon provoked a panic and wariness about Wayfair.
And, in theatre, it’s clear processes are not sufficiently robust to protect those who have suffered at the hands of abusers and criminals, nor to advise against well-meaning interventions that I think many outside the industry could have predicted would have backfired, or be improved upon before going live. In the latter category, I am thinking about The Family Sex Show which did not tour as planned this year and comprised a team of sincere, sound people who did not deserve the level of criticism, attention and harassment that they experienced. I just wish the commissioning partners on the project had suggested titling the project The Family Sex Education Show instead, for a start, and going over the resources attached to the performance aspect of the work: that they maybe didn’t speaks to a lack of resource to make new work that I’ve been fretting about for a good while now.
And with respect to protecting those who worked closely with abusers, I am thinking about Chris Goode, and the fallout since his death by suicide in 2021, not long after the theatremaker had been charged for the possession of indecent images of children. There have been a few responses to the case this year, which I suspect didn’t reach far outside of the British theatre-verse: two long articles in The Face and The Stage, as well as a series of blogs by multiple authors hosted by Maddy Costa who wrote about Everything Everywhere All At Once this Critmas. These aren’t easy reads, but there is much to digest and reflect upon held within them and I must admit being soothed by the introspection and clarity of reporting and documenting compared to the immediate aftermath last year. I found it hard, to be honest, bits of theatre twitter in 2021. The pursuit of what I guess we could describe as radical empathy meant that people were sharing a crowdfunder link to support just one person, although admittedly the person most closely affected by Goode’s sudden death, and used as a kind of ‘hook’ that the Metropolitan Police had indicated or suggested that Goode’s collection of indecent images was amongst the largest they had ever captured. I just don’t think you can tweet that and not also publicly commit to supporting collective survivors’ groups or charities, but I felt like I was going insane for finding discomfort in the rhetoric.
I could talk about this for a very long time, because the people I most want to hear from about this — intelligent, curious, sceptical, considered people — are largely absent from the populist conversation about protection of children, one which is dominated by opportunists. This is a real shame, because it means we are likely to repeat instances where people skilled in articulating intellectual or academic-adjacent arguments for tearing up the present rulebook use that as cover to establish pillars of power for themselves that are difficult to question without seeming ‘dumb’ or insufficiently progressive. Not all of the fears we see circling around us are entirely justified, but many are; without a collective effort to categorise them, we will end up with a set of protections that do not, in fact, protect.
Related pieces by me:
we are not so fixed — from me at the start of 2019, in defence of being able to start new things and not always being defined by what we’ve previously done, or had done to us.
Note: be not afeard — I will be ending Critmas tomorrow on a jollier note.