Incest couple John and Jenny Deaves's first child died
Father and daugher admit incestuous relationship
Their first child died from congenital heart disease
Ask for understanding and respect
THE ex-wife of a man in an incestuous relationship with his daughter has rubbished claims he had not seen his daughter for 30 years.
On March 20, John Deaves and his daughter Jenny were sentenced to a three-year good behaviour bond after pleading guilty to two counts of performing an act of incest.
The couple now have a nine-month-old daughter.
Mr Deaves' ex-wife Dorothy, 69, who he married long after splitting with Jenny's mother, told ninemsn that when she married John Deaves in 1984, the then 15-year-old Jenny stayed with them for a week.
Jenny stayed with them four times before their marriage broke down in 2000 after the father and daughter took a trip to Dubbo together, she said.
"It was hard to face for a long time," Mrs Deaves said.
"It's one of those things everyone's so upset about."
The first child of the father and daughter died from congenital heart disease days after birth, court documents have shown.
Their second child, nine-month-old daughter Celeste, appeared fit and healthy on television last night.
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What do you think about this? Tell us below.
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Mr Millsteed said at the time he took concerns about the health of children born from incestuous relationships into consideration while deciding a sentence.
“Relevant factors include: the need to prevent the high risk of congenital defects of children born of incestuous relationships; and to prevent children, who are brought up in a family unit founded on an incestuous relationship, suffering psychological harm and social stigmatisation,” he said.
'Agreed not to have sex'
Mr Millsteed also said the couple had agreed to not have sex with each other again.
“You both say that you accept your sexual relationship must end, but hope that you will be able to continue to support one another and the children.”
The Mount Gambier pair reunited 30 years after Mr Deaves separated from Jenny's mother.
Jenny was 31 and just two weeks after meeting, father and daughter had sex.
"John and I are in this relationship as consenting adults," Mrs Deaves told the Nine Network's 60 Minutes program last night.
"We are just asking for a little bit of respect and understanding."
Second child appears healthy
Their second child, nine-month-old daughter Celeste, appeared fit and healthy on television last night.
Mrs Deaves said soon after reuniting with her father she began to see him as a man first and her father second.
"I was looking at him, sort of going, oh, he's not too bad," she said.
"Like you might look at a man across the bar at a nightclub."
Mrs Deaves brought two children, Samantha and Alex, into the relationship after splitting from her former partner.
Mr Deaves admitted that he "initially" thought having sex with his daughter was wrong.
"Emotions take over, as people no doubt realise, there are times during your life where emotions do rule the heart, it rules the head," he said.
Dad knew it was illegal
"I knew it was illegal, of course I knew it was illegal but you know, so what."
Mrs Deaves said the physical relationship with her father was like "a sexual relationship with any other man".
For Mr Deaves the sexual relationship was "absolutely fantastic".
A US psychologist told 60 Minutes the Deaves's relationship was an example of "Genetic Sexual Attraction".
He said the phenomenon was not rare, and society would be surprised at how prevalent it was.
The Deaves's relationship is deemed by Australian authorities as incestuous and therefore illegal.
A South Australian police media spokesman said "the couple was being monitored".
With AAP
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23494953-2,00.html
giovedì 28 agosto 2008
An Australian man and his daughter have asked for understanding after revealing on national TV they have an incestuous relationship
An Australian man and his daughter have asked for understanding after revealing on national TV they have an incestuous relationship, and have a daughter.
Australia incest pair in TV plea
An Australian man and his daughter have asked for understanding after revealing on national TV they have an incestuous relationship, and have a daughter.
John Deaves, 61, appeared on the TV show 60 Minutes with daughter Jenny, 39, and nine-month-old Celeste - to whom he is both father and grandfather.
Last month a judge banned them from having sex with each other and revealed they had a child in 2001 who died.
But they insisted on the programme that they were "normal intellectual adults".
Mr Deaves said they both "had careers, had a normal life like everybody else".
He added: "But [we have] fallen in love with each other when we are biologically related, when we've discovered each other later in life."
Mr Deaves had left the family home when his daughter Jenny was a baby, and did not see her again for 30 years.
When the couple met, in 2000, they began a sexual relationship.
Ms Deaves told 60 Minutes she began to see John as a man first and a father second.
"I was looking at him, sort of going, oh, he's not too bad. Like you might look at a man across the bar at a nightclub," she said.
"John and I are in this relationship as consenting adults. We are just asking for a little bit of respect and understanding."
The couple each pleaded guilty to two charges of incest last month and were banned from having sex with each other.
According to the judge's ruling in the case, the couple had a child in 2001 who died from congenital heart disease shortly after birth.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/7334649.stm
Published: 2008/04/07 14:52:51 GMT
© BBC MMVIII
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7334649.stm
Australia incest pair in TV plea
An Australian man and his daughter have asked for understanding after revealing on national TV they have an incestuous relationship, and have a daughter.
John Deaves, 61, appeared on the TV show 60 Minutes with daughter Jenny, 39, and nine-month-old Celeste - to whom he is both father and grandfather.
Last month a judge banned them from having sex with each other and revealed they had a child in 2001 who died.
But they insisted on the programme that they were "normal intellectual adults".
Mr Deaves said they both "had careers, had a normal life like everybody else".
He added: "But [we have] fallen in love with each other when we are biologically related, when we've discovered each other later in life."
Mr Deaves had left the family home when his daughter Jenny was a baby, and did not see her again for 30 years.
When the couple met, in 2000, they began a sexual relationship.
Ms Deaves told 60 Minutes she began to see John as a man first and a father second.
"I was looking at him, sort of going, oh, he's not too bad. Like you might look at a man across the bar at a nightclub," she said.
"John and I are in this relationship as consenting adults. We are just asking for a little bit of respect and understanding."
The couple each pleaded guilty to two charges of incest last month and were banned from having sex with each other.
According to the judge's ruling in the case, the couple had a child in 2001 who died from congenital heart disease shortly after birth.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/7334649.stm
Published: 2008/04/07 14:52:51 GMT
© BBC MMVIII
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7334649.stm
domenica 9 marzo 2008
HELP CHILDREN-S.O.S-HORROR-GERMAN GOVERNMENTS RECOMMENDS INCEST AND PEDOPHILIA !
HORROR-HORROR-HORROR-GERMAN GOVERNMENTS RECOMMENDS INCEST AND PEDOPHILIA !!!
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July 31st, 2007 by Aurora.This needs no comment from me. I’m appalled and nauseated:BERLIN, July 30, 2007 - Booklets from a subsidiary of the German government’s Ministry for Family Affairs encourage parents to sexually massage their children as young as 1 to 3 years of age. Two 40-page booklets entitled “Love, Body and Playing Doctor” by the German Federal Health Education Center (Bundeszentrale für gesundheitliche Aufklärung - BZgA) are aimed at parents - the first addressing children from 1-3 and the other children from 4-6 years of age.“Fathers do not devote enough attention to the clitoris and vagina of their daughters. Their caresses too seldom pertain to these regions, while this is the only way the girls can develop a sense of pride in their sex,” reads the booklet regarding 1-3 year olds. The authors rationalize, “The child touches all parts of their father’s body, sometimes arousing him. The father should do the same.”HAT TIP: Conservative ThoughtsUpdate: BERLIN, July 31, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - After severe criticism from German and Polish parents, medical and psychological experts the German government's Ministry for Family Affairs has pulled two booklets aimed at parents of toddlers and young children which advocated parent-child sexual massage. In addition to encouraging fathers to massage their infant daughter's private parts, the documents encourage unlimited masturbation.Link:Thanks to Crow in comments.
Posted by KG at 6:34 AM
Comments (22)
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Nonsensical comments and trolling will result in something you may not expect.
They pulled it: http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2007...l/07073105.htmlCrow 08.01.07 - 8:44 am #
"Fathers do not devote enough attention to the clitoris and vagina of their daughters. Their caresses too seldom pertain to these regions, while this is the only way the girls can develop a sense of pride in their sex..."A sense of pride in their sex?Why then is it that so many disturbed women turn out to have been molested by their fathers or other male relatives? I consider myself pretty broad-minded, and after my time in NSW Police, I am probably harder to shock than the average person, but this disgusts me in several ways.Phil Stephenson 08.01.07 - 3:56 pm #
You know Phil, i'd like to turn the vermin that dreamt this stuff up over to you and some fellow coppers to 're-educate' in the back of a paddy wagon.I'm sure you blokes would be able to use some old-school methods to get them back on the right track. MK Homepage 08.01.07 - 4:22 pm #
Nah MK, send them over hereCops are not allowed to go as far as the would need to and I have no qualms about doing the most horrendous and obscene things to the human filth who are responsible for this.Like Phil said - I too am pretty open minded and hard to offend but this...I am pretty much lost for words about how disgusted I amTiberius Homepage 08.01.07 - 4:39 pm #
I never said anything about what they're allowed to do or not to, didn't say anything about not allowing you to join in either.In fact, if they are squeamish, they can keep watch while you conduct those most important stress tests on the various parts of the human body.MK Homepage 08.01.07 - 4:54 pm #
You need an expert in um...coercive techniques.Will work for beer. kg Homepage 08.01.07 - 5:09 pm #
"Fathers do not devote enough attention to the clitoris and vagina of their daughters. Their caresses too seldom pertain to these regions, while this is the only way the girls can develop a sense of pride in their sex..."Dear God in heaven. . .I have two (young) daughters. I'd kill anyone who went anywhere near them with this shit on their minds (let alone me).Grotesque. . .James Ozark Homepage 08.02.07 - 1:03 am #
Disgusting!I too, shock less easily than most (I used to work in a sex offender's prison wing)These subhuman scum need gassing- but try mentioning THAT in Germany!Oswald Bastable Homepage 08.02.07 - 6:23 am #
"These subhuman scum need gassing- but try mentioning THAT in Germany!"Um, no.Crow 08.02.07 - 9:02 am #
I'm with you OB, gas their ass.MK Homepage 08.02.07 - 9:25 am #
WTF?AD 08.02.07 - 10:15 am #
KG wanted me to comment here. Can't say much. Certainly not a policy I would endorse or take part in.KG, do you hold me somehow responsible for this just because you call me a "leftist"? Perhaps you think I have connections with comrades in the Ministry or something. What is your point?Damian Homepage 08.02.07 - 12:18 pm #
"Certainly not a policy I would endorse or take part in."Whoo! That's some powerful condemnation from the Lefty!ar 08.02.07 - 1:26 pm #
But only after being pushed and cajoled into it AR.MK Homepage 08.02.07 - 2:24 pm #
"KG wanted me to comment here. Can't say much. Certainly not a policy I would endorse or take part in."No I didn't--I merely observed that you hadn't.You need some remedial comprehension instruction there, Damian.kg Homepage 08.02.07 - 3:41 pm #
"Perhaps you think I have connections with comrades..."The only connections you have with comrades would be genital-to-anus and you can spare us the details.kg Homepage 08.02.07 - 3:43 pm #
If they can fix the moral compass, the rest will take care of itself.MK Homepage 08.02.07 - 4:52 pm #
This just sick beyond words.BetsyinAmerica 08.03.07 - 4:56 am #
Sorry, AR. How's this?"This is AN OUTRAGE! I am DISGUSTED! I am going to vent my spleen on countless blogs just to show how much I really care!"Better?KG, you are once again displaying the laughable childishness that has me coming back for more. In stitches.Damian Homepage 08.03.07 - 8:29 pm #
PS KG, there are hundreds of posts I have not commented on. OMFG!Damian Homepage 08.03.07 - 8:41 pm #
What's with the "F" in "OMFG"?And you talk about tasteless...Panday Homepage 08.03.07 - 9:57 pm #
He's a lefty Panday--they're tasteless and ignorant by necessity, since they lack the equipment to be otherwise.My guess is little Damian is either a student or engaged in some utterly non-productive occupation, which allows him (if "him" is quite the right term for a testicle-free lefty dweeb) to float through life untouched by reality.Sad, really....kg Homepage 08.04.07 - 6:19 am #http://awesternheart.blogspot.com/2007/08/german-government-recommends-incest-and.html
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
July 31st, 2007 by Aurora.This needs no comment from me. I’m appalled and nauseated:BERLIN, July 30, 2007 - Booklets from a subsidiary of the German government’s Ministry for Family Affairs encourage parents to sexually massage their children as young as 1 to 3 years of age. Two 40-page booklets entitled “Love, Body and Playing Doctor” by the German Federal Health Education Center (Bundeszentrale für gesundheitliche Aufklärung - BZgA) are aimed at parents - the first addressing children from 1-3 and the other children from 4-6 years of age.“Fathers do not devote enough attention to the clitoris and vagina of their daughters. Their caresses too seldom pertain to these regions, while this is the only way the girls can develop a sense of pride in their sex,” reads the booklet regarding 1-3 year olds. The authors rationalize, “The child touches all parts of their father’s body, sometimes arousing him. The father should do the same.”HAT TIP: Conservative ThoughtsUpdate: BERLIN, July 31, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - After severe criticism from German and Polish parents, medical and psychological experts the German government's Ministry for Family Affairs has pulled two booklets aimed at parents of toddlers and young children which advocated parent-child sexual massage. In addition to encouraging fathers to massage their infant daughter's private parts, the documents encourage unlimited masturbation.Link:Thanks to Crow in comments.
Posted by KG at 6:34 AM
Comments (22)
postCountTB('2837912090996182051');
Trackback (0)
function emo_pop() {window.open('http://www.haloscan.com/commenthelp.php','Help','width=200,height=360,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes');}
Nonsensical comments and trolling will result in something you may not expect.
They pulled it: http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2007...l/07073105.htmlCrow 08.01.07 - 8:44 am #
"Fathers do not devote enough attention to the clitoris and vagina of their daughters. Their caresses too seldom pertain to these regions, while this is the only way the girls can develop a sense of pride in their sex..."A sense of pride in their sex?Why then is it that so many disturbed women turn out to have been molested by their fathers or other male relatives? I consider myself pretty broad-minded, and after my time in NSW Police, I am probably harder to shock than the average person, but this disgusts me in several ways.Phil Stephenson 08.01.07 - 3:56 pm #
You know Phil, i'd like to turn the vermin that dreamt this stuff up over to you and some fellow coppers to 're-educate' in the back of a paddy wagon.I'm sure you blokes would be able to use some old-school methods to get them back on the right track. MK Homepage 08.01.07 - 4:22 pm #
Nah MK, send them over hereCops are not allowed to go as far as the would need to and I have no qualms about doing the most horrendous and obscene things to the human filth who are responsible for this.Like Phil said - I too am pretty open minded and hard to offend but this...I am pretty much lost for words about how disgusted I amTiberius Homepage 08.01.07 - 4:39 pm #
I never said anything about what they're allowed to do or not to, didn't say anything about not allowing you to join in either.In fact, if they are squeamish, they can keep watch while you conduct those most important stress tests on the various parts of the human body.MK Homepage 08.01.07 - 4:54 pm #
You need an expert in um...coercive techniques.Will work for beer. kg Homepage 08.01.07 - 5:09 pm #
"Fathers do not devote enough attention to the clitoris and vagina of their daughters. Their caresses too seldom pertain to these regions, while this is the only way the girls can develop a sense of pride in their sex..."Dear God in heaven. . .I have two (young) daughters. I'd kill anyone who went anywhere near them with this shit on their minds (let alone me).Grotesque. . .James Ozark Homepage 08.02.07 - 1:03 am #
Disgusting!I too, shock less easily than most (I used to work in a sex offender's prison wing)These subhuman scum need gassing- but try mentioning THAT in Germany!Oswald Bastable Homepage 08.02.07 - 6:23 am #
"These subhuman scum need gassing- but try mentioning THAT in Germany!"Um, no.Crow 08.02.07 - 9:02 am #
I'm with you OB, gas their ass.MK Homepage 08.02.07 - 9:25 am #
WTF?AD 08.02.07 - 10:15 am #
KG wanted me to comment here. Can't say much. Certainly not a policy I would endorse or take part in.KG, do you hold me somehow responsible for this just because you call me a "leftist"? Perhaps you think I have connections with comrades in the Ministry or something. What is your point?Damian Homepage 08.02.07 - 12:18 pm #
"Certainly not a policy I would endorse or take part in."Whoo! That's some powerful condemnation from the Lefty!ar 08.02.07 - 1:26 pm #
But only after being pushed and cajoled into it AR.MK Homepage 08.02.07 - 2:24 pm #
"KG wanted me to comment here. Can't say much. Certainly not a policy I would endorse or take part in."No I didn't--I merely observed that you hadn't.You need some remedial comprehension instruction there, Damian.kg Homepage 08.02.07 - 3:41 pm #
"Perhaps you think I have connections with comrades..."The only connections you have with comrades would be genital-to-anus and you can spare us the details.kg Homepage 08.02.07 - 3:43 pm #
If they can fix the moral compass, the rest will take care of itself.MK Homepage 08.02.07 - 4:52 pm #
This just sick beyond words.BetsyinAmerica 08.03.07 - 4:56 am #
Sorry, AR. How's this?"This is AN OUTRAGE! I am DISGUSTED! I am going to vent my spleen on countless blogs just to show how much I really care!"Better?KG, you are once again displaying the laughable childishness that has me coming back for more. In stitches.Damian Homepage 08.03.07 - 8:29 pm #
PS KG, there are hundreds of posts I have not commented on. OMFG!Damian Homepage 08.03.07 - 8:41 pm #
What's with the "F" in "OMFG"?And you talk about tasteless...Panday Homepage 08.03.07 - 9:57 pm #
He's a lefty Panday--they're tasteless and ignorant by necessity, since they lack the equipment to be otherwise.My guess is little Damian is either a student or engaged in some utterly non-productive occupation, which allows him (if "him" is quite the right term for a testicle-free lefty dweeb) to float through life untouched by reality.Sad, really....kg Homepage 08.04.07 - 6:19 am #http://awesternheart.blogspot.com/2007/08/german-government-recommends-incest-and.html
domenica 2 marzo 2008
CZECH REPUBLIC : CHILD PROSTITUTION
Child Prostitution
The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children
Czech Republic
[ Country-by-Country Reports ]
The Czech Republic [map], located in central Europe, is bordered by Slovakia (E), Austria (S), Germany (W), and Poland (N). Prague is its capital and largest city. The Czech Republic is one of the most stable and prosperous of the post-Communist states of Central and Eastern Europe. Growth in 2000-04 was supported by exports to the EU, primarily to Germany, and a strong recovery of foreign and domestic investment.
CAUTION: The following links and accompanying text have been culled from the web to illuminate the situation in Czech Republic. Some of these links may lead to websites that present allegations that are unsubstantiated, misleading or even false. No attempt has been made to validate their authenticity or to verify their content.
ECPAT – On-line form for reporting child prostitution and other sexual offences against children
Quick Search for Missing Children - Select Gender, Czech Republic, and Years Missing
UNICEF - Country Statistics
National Plan of Action
U.S. Dept of Labor Bureau of International Labor Affairs
GOVERNMENT POLICIES AND PROGRAMS TO ELIMINATE THE WORST FORMS OF CHILD LABOR - The Government adopted the National Plan Combating Commercial Sexual Abuse in July 2000, and the Interior Ministry’s Crime Prevention Division launched a national media campaign on the dangers of trafficking, and a school-based awareness program for children aged 13 to 14 years.
INCIDENCE AND NATURE OF CHILD LABOR - The popular press and government reports indicate that commercial sexual exploitation, including the involvement of children in sex tourism, is a problem. There are some reports of internal trafficking of Czech children from areas of low employment near border regions with Germany and Austria. In addition, girls from the former Soviet Union, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East are trafficked to the Czech Republic for sexual exploitation
Bur of Democracy, Human Rights & Labor - Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - 2005
CHILDREN - Children were engaged in prostitution for survival without third party involvement. NGOs have reported that many teenage prostitutes were either runaways or products of orphanages and the foster care system. Some NGOs asserted that orphanages did not prepare young teens adequately to be self‑sufficient upon reaching legal adulthood. A special police team was formed in 2004 specifically to deal with the sexual exploitation of children in Cheb, a town on the German border where sex tourism was a problem.
Male adolescents, some as young as 13 years old, engaged in prostitution for survival. NGOs that worked with these children attributed the problem to a dysfunctional foster care system that failed to provide adequate job skills for a modern economy while preventing unwanted children from being adopted by capable parents.
Concluding Observations of the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) - 2003
[60] The Committee welcomes:
(a) The establishment in spring of 2002 of a trilateral Czech-German-Polish working group to address, inter alia, trafficking in human beings, in particular the sexual exploitation of children for prostitution occurring in these areas;
(b) The information contained in the State party’s report (paras. 334 and 335) on social, preventive and re-socialization programs for victims of sexual exploitation, as well as the adoption in July 2000 of the National Plan to Fight Commercial Sexual Abuse of Children and amendments to the Criminal Code and Code of Criminal Procedure made in 2002;
(c) The significant work done by NGOs in this field.
The squalid truth about call girl lit
When Aneta was offered a job across the border from her Czech village, she jumped at the chance. The pretty 17-year-old was to be a nanny for a rich family. Petr, the handsome man who recruited her, promised she would travel with them to London, America even. "You'll get to practise your English," he joked. The next day Aneta, along with ten other local girls, met Petr on the edge of their village, handed over their passports and climbed into a waiting people carrier. It was to be the longest journey of their lives.
Hours later when the van came to a juddering halt, instead of a family, a group of rough-looking men were waiting. They had guns and dogs, which they used to bundle the girls, some as young as 14, out of the van and into a dank cellar where they ordered them to strip naked and stand in line. The men moved along the line grabbing the women roughly, inspecting their teeth, their breasts and between their legs. The girls were crying. "We were just horseflesh," Aneta recalls. Each was dragged from the room at gunpoint and gang raped. Within days they were smuggled across Europe to work in brothels.
Joint East West Research on Trafficking in Children for Sexual Purposes in Europe: The Sending Countries [PDF]
[page 33] A phenomenon in the Czech Republic, described by the NGO ENYA, is the so-called "gayfriendly family houses", where sex tourists can rent rooms and along with the room they get a prostituted minor boy. Many young boys also travel abroad for short periods with tourists from Austria, Germany, Greece and other places. Clients are described in the report as mostly ‘normal’ citizens, average men, from all social classes, but mainly middle class. There is a special group of clients who are paedophiles, and they come from all over the world, but are mostly German. The Czech Vice Squad says that ‘very high’ prices are paid by paedophiles for prostitutes who are less than 15 years of age. The purchase of very young children for €20,000 is mentioned in the research. But some children are paid with sweets or toys.
Clients get information from the Internet, and from personal contact. Children who are used in prostitution are also used for the making of pornography. Many paedophiles film their sexual intercourse with minors, and then distribute it on the Internet.
ECPAT: Fifth Report on implementation of the Agenda for Action [DOC]
[B] COUNTRY UPDATES – CZECH REPUBLIC – In July 2000, the Czech Government approved the National Plan for the Fight Against Commercial Child Sex Abuse, as developed by the Ministry of Interior-Prevention of Criminality Department. The plan has four main objectives and each one lists proposed measures, implementing institutions and expected results. The objectives are: improving the legislative framework; improving cooperation in the areas of education and prevention (law enforcers, educational institutions, etc.); enhancing the effectiveness of criminal prosecution and reinforcing the protection of victims and witnesses and the process of victim re-socialisation.
Report by Special Rapporteur - 2003
[37] In July 2002, amendments were made to the Penal Code to bring Czech law concerning trafficking of children and child pornography into line with European law and the OP/SOC, which is expected to be ratified soon. The procurement of children for prostitution, or the profit from child prostitution is punishable under the Penal Code, and the phenomenon is particularly problematic in large urban areas and in the regions bordering Germany and Austria. Children do not incur liability for their involvement in these offences, except where a child, from the age of 15, procures another child for prostitution, or disseminates child pornography.
Children Still at Risk - 2005
In Germany, UNICEF and ECPAT criticize the authorities for not keeping the promises made in November 2003. After the publication of the original KARO report.
UNICEF Stirs Controversy With Claims Of Widespread Child Prostitution - 2003 Report
For 12-year-old Karel, it was poverty that drove him into prostitution. "Before, I used to beg from the Germans in their cars. We have no money at home," he told social workers. "Then I just drove away with them." Karel is just one of a growing number of boys and girls living off prostitution in the Czech-German border area, according to a report released yesterday by the UN International Children's Education Fund (UNICEF) and ECPAT, an international children's rights organization.
Child-Prostitution Claims Disputed but UNICEF Stands by its Report
In late October the German branch of UNICEF released a report by the German social-work agency KARO asserting that the borderlands are home to widespread pedophilia and child prostitution. Czech officials said that KARO is home to a self-promoting writer seeking to exploit the issue for publicity purposes.
Tourist Authority, Police Target Sex Tourists
Months after an explosive report portrayed Czech border towns as havens for underage sex, the Czech Tourist Authority (CTA) and police have begun a campaign that puts pay-for-sex pedophiles on notice and attempts to steer them toward the country's more wholesome attractions.
Czech Challenge To Child Prostitution
Details have been emerging of a new plan drawn up by the Czech Republic to combat child prostitution. The plan follows criticism by Germany, which has accused the Czechs of not doing enough to co-operate in the fight against sex tourism. The Czech Republic is considered to be one of the biggest centers for pedophile activity in Europe. The government plan calls for the issue of child prostitution to be included in sex education in schools. A spokesman said the idea was to make children more aware of the problem.
German Campaign Against Child Prostitution In The Czech Republic
The German government has launched a campaign to fight child prostitution in the Czech Republic, with leaflets and posters warning of the harsh sentences that await those who have sex with children either in Germany or the Czech Republic.
Up To Ten Thousand Czech Children Go Missing Every Year
Although most missing children are found, in the short time they spend out on the streets, they are at a very high risk of being abused. Most of them are street children without any money or food and they are prepared to accept any offer in order to survive even to be in a pornographic video tape or be clients of pedophiles."
Pedophilia in the Czech Republic
The town of Cheb in the Czech Republic is well known as a beautiful place, its old town square full of pastel-washed houses dating back to the eleventh century. But in recent years, it's gained a different reputation - as a centre for child prostitution. Reporters working undercover for the Today program were offered girls of 9 and 11 for sex when they posed as German tourists.
http://gvnet.com/childprostitution/CzechRepublic.htm
The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children
Czech Republic
[ Country-by-Country Reports ]
The Czech Republic [map], located in central Europe, is bordered by Slovakia (E), Austria (S), Germany (W), and Poland (N). Prague is its capital and largest city. The Czech Republic is one of the most stable and prosperous of the post-Communist states of Central and Eastern Europe. Growth in 2000-04 was supported by exports to the EU, primarily to Germany, and a strong recovery of foreign and domestic investment.
CAUTION: The following links and accompanying text have been culled from the web to illuminate the situation in Czech Republic. Some of these links may lead to websites that present allegations that are unsubstantiated, misleading or even false. No attempt has been made to validate their authenticity or to verify their content.
ECPAT – On-line form for reporting child prostitution and other sexual offences against children
Quick Search for Missing Children - Select Gender, Czech Republic, and Years Missing
UNICEF - Country Statistics
National Plan of Action
U.S. Dept of Labor Bureau of International Labor Affairs
GOVERNMENT POLICIES AND PROGRAMS TO ELIMINATE THE WORST FORMS OF CHILD LABOR - The Government adopted the National Plan Combating Commercial Sexual Abuse in July 2000, and the Interior Ministry’s Crime Prevention Division launched a national media campaign on the dangers of trafficking, and a school-based awareness program for children aged 13 to 14 years.
INCIDENCE AND NATURE OF CHILD LABOR - The popular press and government reports indicate that commercial sexual exploitation, including the involvement of children in sex tourism, is a problem. There are some reports of internal trafficking of Czech children from areas of low employment near border regions with Germany and Austria. In addition, girls from the former Soviet Union, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East are trafficked to the Czech Republic for sexual exploitation
Bur of Democracy, Human Rights & Labor - Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - 2005
CHILDREN - Children were engaged in prostitution for survival without third party involvement. NGOs have reported that many teenage prostitutes were either runaways or products of orphanages and the foster care system. Some NGOs asserted that orphanages did not prepare young teens adequately to be self‑sufficient upon reaching legal adulthood. A special police team was formed in 2004 specifically to deal with the sexual exploitation of children in Cheb, a town on the German border where sex tourism was a problem.
Male adolescents, some as young as 13 years old, engaged in prostitution for survival. NGOs that worked with these children attributed the problem to a dysfunctional foster care system that failed to provide adequate job skills for a modern economy while preventing unwanted children from being adopted by capable parents.
Concluding Observations of the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) - 2003
[60] The Committee welcomes:
(a) The establishment in spring of 2002 of a trilateral Czech-German-Polish working group to address, inter alia, trafficking in human beings, in particular the sexual exploitation of children for prostitution occurring in these areas;
(b) The information contained in the State party’s report (paras. 334 and 335) on social, preventive and re-socialization programs for victims of sexual exploitation, as well as the adoption in July 2000 of the National Plan to Fight Commercial Sexual Abuse of Children and amendments to the Criminal Code and Code of Criminal Procedure made in 2002;
(c) The significant work done by NGOs in this field.
The squalid truth about call girl lit
When Aneta was offered a job across the border from her Czech village, she jumped at the chance. The pretty 17-year-old was to be a nanny for a rich family. Petr, the handsome man who recruited her, promised she would travel with them to London, America even. "You'll get to practise your English," he joked. The next day Aneta, along with ten other local girls, met Petr on the edge of their village, handed over their passports and climbed into a waiting people carrier. It was to be the longest journey of their lives.
Hours later when the van came to a juddering halt, instead of a family, a group of rough-looking men were waiting. They had guns and dogs, which they used to bundle the girls, some as young as 14, out of the van and into a dank cellar where they ordered them to strip naked and stand in line. The men moved along the line grabbing the women roughly, inspecting their teeth, their breasts and between their legs. The girls were crying. "We were just horseflesh," Aneta recalls. Each was dragged from the room at gunpoint and gang raped. Within days they were smuggled across Europe to work in brothels.
Joint East West Research on Trafficking in Children for Sexual Purposes in Europe: The Sending Countries [PDF]
[page 33] A phenomenon in the Czech Republic, described by the NGO ENYA, is the so-called "gayfriendly family houses", where sex tourists can rent rooms and along with the room they get a prostituted minor boy. Many young boys also travel abroad for short periods with tourists from Austria, Germany, Greece and other places. Clients are described in the report as mostly ‘normal’ citizens, average men, from all social classes, but mainly middle class. There is a special group of clients who are paedophiles, and they come from all over the world, but are mostly German. The Czech Vice Squad says that ‘very high’ prices are paid by paedophiles for prostitutes who are less than 15 years of age. The purchase of very young children for €20,000 is mentioned in the research. But some children are paid with sweets or toys.
Clients get information from the Internet, and from personal contact. Children who are used in prostitution are also used for the making of pornography. Many paedophiles film their sexual intercourse with minors, and then distribute it on the Internet.
ECPAT: Fifth Report on implementation of the Agenda for Action [DOC]
[B] COUNTRY UPDATES – CZECH REPUBLIC – In July 2000, the Czech Government approved the National Plan for the Fight Against Commercial Child Sex Abuse, as developed by the Ministry of Interior-Prevention of Criminality Department. The plan has four main objectives and each one lists proposed measures, implementing institutions and expected results. The objectives are: improving the legislative framework; improving cooperation in the areas of education and prevention (law enforcers, educational institutions, etc.); enhancing the effectiveness of criminal prosecution and reinforcing the protection of victims and witnesses and the process of victim re-socialisation.
Report by Special Rapporteur - 2003
[37] In July 2002, amendments were made to the Penal Code to bring Czech law concerning trafficking of children and child pornography into line with European law and the OP/SOC, which is expected to be ratified soon. The procurement of children for prostitution, or the profit from child prostitution is punishable under the Penal Code, and the phenomenon is particularly problematic in large urban areas and in the regions bordering Germany and Austria. Children do not incur liability for their involvement in these offences, except where a child, from the age of 15, procures another child for prostitution, or disseminates child pornography.
Children Still at Risk - 2005
In Germany, UNICEF and ECPAT criticize the authorities for not keeping the promises made in November 2003. After the publication of the original KARO report.
UNICEF Stirs Controversy With Claims Of Widespread Child Prostitution - 2003 Report
For 12-year-old Karel, it was poverty that drove him into prostitution. "Before, I used to beg from the Germans in their cars. We have no money at home," he told social workers. "Then I just drove away with them." Karel is just one of a growing number of boys and girls living off prostitution in the Czech-German border area, according to a report released yesterday by the UN International Children's Education Fund (UNICEF) and ECPAT, an international children's rights organization.
Child-Prostitution Claims Disputed but UNICEF Stands by its Report
In late October the German branch of UNICEF released a report by the German social-work agency KARO asserting that the borderlands are home to widespread pedophilia and child prostitution. Czech officials said that KARO is home to a self-promoting writer seeking to exploit the issue for publicity purposes.
Tourist Authority, Police Target Sex Tourists
Months after an explosive report portrayed Czech border towns as havens for underage sex, the Czech Tourist Authority (CTA) and police have begun a campaign that puts pay-for-sex pedophiles on notice and attempts to steer them toward the country's more wholesome attractions.
Czech Challenge To Child Prostitution
Details have been emerging of a new plan drawn up by the Czech Republic to combat child prostitution. The plan follows criticism by Germany, which has accused the Czechs of not doing enough to co-operate in the fight against sex tourism. The Czech Republic is considered to be one of the biggest centers for pedophile activity in Europe. The government plan calls for the issue of child prostitution to be included in sex education in schools. A spokesman said the idea was to make children more aware of the problem.
German Campaign Against Child Prostitution In The Czech Republic
The German government has launched a campaign to fight child prostitution in the Czech Republic, with leaflets and posters warning of the harsh sentences that await those who have sex with children either in Germany or the Czech Republic.
Up To Ten Thousand Czech Children Go Missing Every Year
Although most missing children are found, in the short time they spend out on the streets, they are at a very high risk of being abused. Most of them are street children without any money or food and they are prepared to accept any offer in order to survive even to be in a pornographic video tape or be clients of pedophiles."
Pedophilia in the Czech Republic
The town of Cheb in the Czech Republic is well known as a beautiful place, its old town square full of pastel-washed houses dating back to the eleventh century. But in recent years, it's gained a different reputation - as a centre for child prostitution. Reporters working undercover for the Today program were offered girls of 9 and 11 for sex when they posed as German tourists.
http://gvnet.com/childprostitution/CzechRepublic.htm
PAEDOPHILIA IN CZECH REPUBLIC
Paedophilia in the Czech Republic
by Today reporter Sanchia Berg.
The town of Cheb in the Czech Republic is well known as a beautiful place, its old town square full of pastel-washed houses dating back to the eleventh century. But in recent years, it's gained a different reputation - as a centre for child prostitution. Reporters working undercover for the Today programme were offered girls of 9 and 11 for sex when they posed as German tourists. And the head of a German charity claims she has seen with her own eyes babies being handed into german cars "obviously for customers". Katrin Schauer has been working with prostitutes in Cheb for nearly eight years. She says the majority of children offering sex are young teenagers, but she and her colleagues have seen far younger children standing by the side of the street, accompanied by adults who signal to passing German cars. She believes the town now attracts paedophiles from across Western Europe. She has been told of "customers" from Holland, Austria and Switzerland, as well as Germany. She says in the past, there would be clear signals in houses where children were being offered -- a child's shoe in the window of an apartment for example. But now that prostitution is more established, the customers seem to know exactly where to go. A German journalist, Rudiger Rossig, posed as a sex tourist for the Today programme, secretly recording his conversations. He didn't even need to go into one of the scores of brothels in the small town. As he walked along a quiet city centre street, at 11pm, accompanied by a colleague based in Prague, he was approached by a small, dark man, with a teenage girl by his side. He who asked in German whether he would be interested in "something". Rossig suggested his colleague might be interested in younger girls. The man said he could provide two girls of 9 and 11 for €180 Euros (about £120),and suggested the two men accompany him to an apartment. Rossig asked whether the girls could instead be brought to an Irish bar, on the street where they were talking. To his surprise the man agreed, but insisted payment would have to be made, whether Rossig took the girls or not. At this point, Rossig decided to make his excuses and leave, but the pimp and his associates started to threaten him. Rossig and his colleague made a token payment and managed to sprint out of the bar. The following morning I recounted the episode to the town mayor, Jan Svoboda. He said that this was a common confidence trick, and he doubted any child would have been provided. He said that the problem of child prostitution had been "overplayed". He said that it was a difficult issue to tackle because "girls of 13, 14 they're pretty much grown up...so the question is, what age are you talking about?" The legal age of consent in the Czech republic is 15. The pimp had told Rossig that there was "no problem" with the police in Cheb, and even the interior ministry in Prague do not see prostitution as a priority, according to Superintendent John Mottram, currently working as an advisor to the Czech govenrment on organised crime. "Unfortunately", he told me ,"they're not devoting the kind of attention to it which I think they should". Superintendent Mottram believes that in the long term, Czech membership of the European Union will end the problem of child prostitution. But in the shorter term, Katrin Schauer is more apprehensive. She worries that as border controls are relaxed, sex tourists will be able to take children out of the Czech republic to their home states - and maybe even traffic them on from there. LINKS Czech GovernmentPlease Note:The BBC is not responsible for the content of external websites
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/reports/archive/international/czech_paedophilia.shtml
by Today reporter Sanchia Berg.
The town of Cheb in the Czech Republic is well known as a beautiful place, its old town square full of pastel-washed houses dating back to the eleventh century. But in recent years, it's gained a different reputation - as a centre for child prostitution. Reporters working undercover for the Today programme were offered girls of 9 and 11 for sex when they posed as German tourists. And the head of a German charity claims she has seen with her own eyes babies being handed into german cars "obviously for customers". Katrin Schauer has been working with prostitutes in Cheb for nearly eight years. She says the majority of children offering sex are young teenagers, but she and her colleagues have seen far younger children standing by the side of the street, accompanied by adults who signal to passing German cars. She believes the town now attracts paedophiles from across Western Europe. She has been told of "customers" from Holland, Austria and Switzerland, as well as Germany. She says in the past, there would be clear signals in houses where children were being offered -- a child's shoe in the window of an apartment for example. But now that prostitution is more established, the customers seem to know exactly where to go. A German journalist, Rudiger Rossig, posed as a sex tourist for the Today programme, secretly recording his conversations. He didn't even need to go into one of the scores of brothels in the small town. As he walked along a quiet city centre street, at 11pm, accompanied by a colleague based in Prague, he was approached by a small, dark man, with a teenage girl by his side. He who asked in German whether he would be interested in "something". Rossig suggested his colleague might be interested in younger girls. The man said he could provide two girls of 9 and 11 for €180 Euros (about £120),and suggested the two men accompany him to an apartment. Rossig asked whether the girls could instead be brought to an Irish bar, on the street where they were talking. To his surprise the man agreed, but insisted payment would have to be made, whether Rossig took the girls or not. At this point, Rossig decided to make his excuses and leave, but the pimp and his associates started to threaten him. Rossig and his colleague made a token payment and managed to sprint out of the bar. The following morning I recounted the episode to the town mayor, Jan Svoboda. He said that this was a common confidence trick, and he doubted any child would have been provided. He said that the problem of child prostitution had been "overplayed". He said that it was a difficult issue to tackle because "girls of 13, 14 they're pretty much grown up...so the question is, what age are you talking about?" The legal age of consent in the Czech republic is 15. The pimp had told Rossig that there was "no problem" with the police in Cheb, and even the interior ministry in Prague do not see prostitution as a priority, according to Superintendent John Mottram, currently working as an advisor to the Czech govenrment on organised crime. "Unfortunately", he told me ,"they're not devoting the kind of attention to it which I think they should". Superintendent Mottram believes that in the long term, Czech membership of the European Union will end the problem of child prostitution. But in the shorter term, Katrin Schauer is more apprehensive. She worries that as border controls are relaxed, sex tourists will be able to take children out of the Czech republic to their home states - and maybe even traffic them on from there. LINKS Czech GovernmentPlease Note:The BBC is not responsible for the content of external websites
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/reports/archive/international/czech_paedophilia.shtml
ISRAELI PEDOPHILE : YOSEF SAGIV
Israeli diplomat arrested on suspicion of pedophiliaFollowing undercover investigation, Israeli who works for Consulate in Atlanta arrested and charged with computer offences and exploitation of childrenYitzhak Benhorin
WASHINGTON– An Israeli diplomat, Yosef Sagiv, was arrested Friday in the American city of Atlanta on suspicion of computer related offences linked to pornography and the sexual exploitation of children.
Captain Steve Morris, of the Columbia District Police in Georgia, told Ynet that the arrestee was a worker in the Israeli Consulate. He was arrested upon leaving his home and transferred into custody at a distance from Atlanta.
Daniel Craig, the District Attorney of Augusta, in the state of Georgia, announced that Sagiv used the internet and email in order to persuade a child to carry out illegal acts such as sodomy and severe sexual abuse.
The investigation has been going on for a considerable time by the Sherriff's Department of the Columbia district in Georgia, as well as other government agencies such as the FBI. With that, the suspect was arrested only on Thursday after an indictment was approved. According to the decree, a search of the suspect's home was also carried out.
The Foreign Ministry said in response that they were aware of the episode and were looking into details. It was also said that the suspect holds a diplomatic license but is not an employee of the Foreign Ministry.
This is not the first time that the Foreign Ministry has had to deal with embarrassing episodes: Three years ago the Israeli Consul in Sao Paolo, Aryeh Sher, was arrested due to suspicions that his computer held pornographic material.
Roee Nahmias contributed to this report
http://www.ynetnews.com/Ext/Comp/ArticleLayout/CdaArticlePrintPreview/1,2506,L-3298274,00.html
WASHINGTON– An Israeli diplomat, Yosef Sagiv, was arrested Friday in the American city of Atlanta on suspicion of computer related offences linked to pornography and the sexual exploitation of children.
Captain Steve Morris, of the Columbia District Police in Georgia, told Ynet that the arrestee was a worker in the Israeli Consulate. He was arrested upon leaving his home and transferred into custody at a distance from Atlanta.
Daniel Craig, the District Attorney of Augusta, in the state of Georgia, announced that Sagiv used the internet and email in order to persuade a child to carry out illegal acts such as sodomy and severe sexual abuse.
The investigation has been going on for a considerable time by the Sherriff's Department of the Columbia district in Georgia, as well as other government agencies such as the FBI. With that, the suspect was arrested only on Thursday after an indictment was approved. According to the decree, a search of the suspect's home was also carried out.
The Foreign Ministry said in response that they were aware of the episode and were looking into details. It was also said that the suspect holds a diplomatic license but is not an employee of the Foreign Ministry.
This is not the first time that the Foreign Ministry has had to deal with embarrassing episodes: Three years ago the Israeli Consul in Sao Paolo, Aryeh Sher, was arrested due to suspicions that his computer held pornographic material.
Roee Nahmias contributed to this report
http://www.ynetnews.com/Ext/Comp/ArticleLayout/CdaArticlePrintPreview/1,2506,L-3298274,00.html
DOZENS OF ISRAELIS ACROSS THE COUNTRY ARE DISTRIBUTING PEDOPHILIC CONTENT OVER THE WORLD WIDE
European intelligence leads to arrest of Israeli pedophilesInterpol tip-off leads to arrest of four men from northern Israel accused of distributing pedophilic content online. Rise in reports of Israelis dealing in explicit material involving minors grew over past few weeks Sharon Roffe-Ofir
Dozens of Israelis across the country are distributing pedophilic content over the World Wide Web, so indicate reports coming from Germany and Spain via the international police organization Interpol.
These reports ultimately reached the Israeli Police Department’s Northern District Fraud Unit, who arrested four suspects in this internet pedophilia ring. The four were questioned, and quickly confessed to distributing the illicit material. “This is obviously a sick and unnatural phenomena, and whoever engages in such activities probably does so due to disturbing events in his or her past,” said Northern Fraud Unit Director, Superintendent Aharon Gal-Or.
Over the past few weeks there have been many reports of Israeli citizens distributing photos and movie of a sexual nature involving minors over the internet. “The system in place today is highly sophisticated. As soon as someone logs into the World Wide Web, a little flag pops up next to his user name indicating the country from where the illicit material is being sent,” noted Gal-Or. “That is how we can track down individuals who distribute this type of child pornography.”
Four suspects in this case were arrested Sunday after internet service providers divulged their names and addresses to police.
Two of the suspects, aged 34 and 40 respectively, are residents of Haifa. Another suspect is a 48-year-old Galilee resident, married and father to several children. A final suspect is a professional military man from the northern valley region.
“One of the suspects confessed that he was sexually abused as a child. I assume that whoever engages in such activities has a rather troubled past,” said Gal-Or. The four suspects will be arraigned Sunday.
http://www.ynet.co.il/english/Ext/Comp/ArticleLayout/CdaArticlePrintPreview/1,2506,L-3483143,00.html
Dozens of Israelis across the country are distributing pedophilic content over the World Wide Web, so indicate reports coming from Germany and Spain via the international police organization Interpol.
These reports ultimately reached the Israeli Police Department’s Northern District Fraud Unit, who arrested four suspects in this internet pedophilia ring. The four were questioned, and quickly confessed to distributing the illicit material. “This is obviously a sick and unnatural phenomena, and whoever engages in such activities probably does so due to disturbing events in his or her past,” said Northern Fraud Unit Director, Superintendent Aharon Gal-Or.
Over the past few weeks there have been many reports of Israeli citizens distributing photos and movie of a sexual nature involving minors over the internet. “The system in place today is highly sophisticated. As soon as someone logs into the World Wide Web, a little flag pops up next to his user name indicating the country from where the illicit material is being sent,” noted Gal-Or. “That is how we can track down individuals who distribute this type of child pornography.”
Four suspects in this case were arrested Sunday after internet service providers divulged their names and addresses to police.
Two of the suspects, aged 34 and 40 respectively, are residents of Haifa. Another suspect is a 48-year-old Galilee resident, married and father to several children. A final suspect is a professional military man from the northern valley region.
“One of the suspects confessed that he was sexually abused as a child. I assume that whoever engages in such activities has a rather troubled past,” said Gal-Or. The four suspects will be arraigned Sunday.
http://www.ynet.co.il/english/Ext/Comp/ArticleLayout/CdaArticlePrintPreview/1,2506,L-3483143,00.html
PEDOPHILIA :ABRAHAM MONDROWITZ
Court okays extradition of haredi suspected of pedophilia Abraham Mondrowitz, 60, was arrested in Jerusalem in November for allegedly abusing dozens of children at his unlicensed private clinic at his Brooklyn home during the 80s Associated Press
An Israeli court on Sunday approved extradition to the US of an American Orthodox Jew wanted on suspicion of multiple sexual attacks two decades ago, the Justice Ministry said.
Abraham Mondrowitz, 60, a member of the Gur Hasidic Jewish sect, was arrested in Jerusalem in November for allegedly abusing dozens of children at his unlicensed private clinic at his Brooklyn, New York home during the 1980s. He fled to Israel in 1985 as police were investigating charges against him.
Israeli Justice Ministry spokesman Moshe Cohen said the Jerusalem District Court approved the extradition order, but Mondrowitz has the right to appeal. Court spokeswoman Tal Rosner said the state would make the final decision about whether to extradite Mondrowitz, who could appeal to the Israeli Supreme Court against Sunday's ruling.
Last September, the United States resubmitted an extradition request first made in 1985, months after Mondrowitz fled Brooklyn for Israel.
The renewed US request came after Israel and the United States amended their extradition treaty to include all crimes whose punishment is more than one year imprisonment, according to the Israeli state prosecutor's office. Before the change that took effect a year ago, the extradition treaty between Israel and the United States did not include sodomy.
http://www.ynet.co.il/english/Ext/Comp/ArticleLayout/CdaArticlePrintPreview/1,2506,L-3505162,00.html
An Israeli court on Sunday approved extradition to the US of an American Orthodox Jew wanted on suspicion of multiple sexual attacks two decades ago, the Justice Ministry said.
Abraham Mondrowitz, 60, a member of the Gur Hasidic Jewish sect, was arrested in Jerusalem in November for allegedly abusing dozens of children at his unlicensed private clinic at his Brooklyn, New York home during the 1980s. He fled to Israel in 1985 as police were investigating charges against him.
Israeli Justice Ministry spokesman Moshe Cohen said the Jerusalem District Court approved the extradition order, but Mondrowitz has the right to appeal. Court spokeswoman Tal Rosner said the state would make the final decision about whether to extradite Mondrowitz, who could appeal to the Israeli Supreme Court against Sunday's ruling.
Last September, the United States resubmitted an extradition request first made in 1985, months after Mondrowitz fled Brooklyn for Israel.
The renewed US request came after Israel and the United States amended their extradition treaty to include all crimes whose punishment is more than one year imprisonment, according to the Israeli state prosecutor's office. Before the change that took effect a year ago, the extradition treaty between Israel and the United States did not include sodomy.
http://www.ynet.co.il/english/Ext/Comp/ArticleLayout/CdaArticlePrintPreview/1,2506,L-3505162,00.html
ISRAELI POLITICS :WHY THE LENIENCY FOR PEDOPHILES?
Why the leniency for pedophiles?Filed under Israeli politics, Crime, News, Children, Sex industry on 2/13/2008 By: .
According to data disclosed at this week's Beersheba Conference on Child Welfare, some 2,500 complaints are filed annually in Israel regarding sexual assaults against minors under 14. Dr. Yitzhak Kadman, executive director of the National Council for the Child, paints a darker picture yet, estimating that over the past several years no fewer than 100,000 of this country's children have suffered some degree of sexual molestation. Most cases never reach the courts and most offenders aren't brought to justice. Yet in those that are, sentences meted out to pedophiles tend to be exceptionally lenient. Even hardcore repeat offenders are hardly supervised after they are released back to society. Legislation adopted to keep track of them remains largely unimplemented. Studies conducted recently for the council, Kadman reported, indicated that not only do judges sometimes impose ludicrously mild punishments for pedophilia but they often fail to impose even the minimum stipulated by law. Incomprehensibly, punishment for offenses against children tends to be significantly lighter than for offenses against adults. The lightest penalties are reserved for crimes within the family. The greatest leniency appears in plea bargains. While judges sometimes criticize such bargains, they nevertheless (in 99% of the cases, according to Kadman) acquiesce to them. This despite the fact that legislation enacted a decade ago fixed minimum sentences for certain sex crimes. Moreover, the law demands a clear explanation in cases where the minimum is disregarded. Yet council research found only two cases in the past three years in which judges bothered to account for extra lenient sentencing. One of the cases cited was of a teacher who molested his 13-year-old female student. He was given six months community service and another 14 months' probationary sentence. By law he could have been imprisoned for up to seven years. But the judges' lapses aren't the only problem. The entire system seems to make a mockery of the law. Some 300 convicted sex offenders, most of them pedophiles, are released from prison each year and, despite existing legislation, aren't supervised. Most are repeat offenders. Of the 300, two-thirds are judged as "seriously dangerous." A 2006 law which mandated careful evaluation of each sex offender eligible for release, and close supervision following said release, essentially remains on paper only. The cause: budgetary constraints. Health Ministry psychiatrists complain that a lack of manpower limits evaluations. When these are made, they are completed late, after the offender has been set loose. The ministry reported to the Knesset Law Committee recently that even when evaluations meet deadlines, the prosecution does not apply for court-ordered supervision and closes cases of some dangerous offenders. Thus the authorities have no way of gauging how many menaces they release into the vulnerable population. Of Israel's currently imprisoned 1,200 sex offenders, some 50 are behind bars for the sixth time or more. About 25 percent are thought likely to strike again, though that is almost certainly an underestimate: the highest recidivism rates are among pedophiles. Although the 2006 law has yet to be applied, complimentary legislation is being piled on. The Knesset recently approved a bill by Shelly Yacimovich forbidding the employment of sex offender ex-cons in schools and institutions for the disabled. Michael Eitan's pending bill would regulate rehabilitation services for ex-cons, while another legislative initiative, by Eli Aflalo, would set up a nationwide offender register, accessible to members of the public to forewarn them of past offenders in their vicinity. The latter two bills still have a long legislative route ahead before they are ratified. But what then? A law that decorates our legal codes but isn't put into effect is a dead letter. It fails to protect those most in need, and becomes a demoralizing travesty that further corrodes the citizenry's trust in the system - especially when those who disrespect legal strictures include the judges themselves. "The Knesset," as Kadman put it, "insisted on minimum sentences because it perceived the existing situation as too lax and as lacking any real deterrent or protection value. But the judiciary seems to be telling the legislature that 'you can stipulate what you wish but we will do as we please.' Judges abhor guidelines." It is not just the police who are charged with protecting children from sexual predators, but the entire judicial system. If judges do not want more guidelines, they had better do a better job of enforcing the law themselves.
Jerusalem Post
http://www.israelenews.com/web/view_printer.asp?ID=1045
According to data disclosed at this week's Beersheba Conference on Child Welfare, some 2,500 complaints are filed annually in Israel regarding sexual assaults against minors under 14. Dr. Yitzhak Kadman, executive director of the National Council for the Child, paints a darker picture yet, estimating that over the past several years no fewer than 100,000 of this country's children have suffered some degree of sexual molestation. Most cases never reach the courts and most offenders aren't brought to justice. Yet in those that are, sentences meted out to pedophiles tend to be exceptionally lenient. Even hardcore repeat offenders are hardly supervised after they are released back to society. Legislation adopted to keep track of them remains largely unimplemented. Studies conducted recently for the council, Kadman reported, indicated that not only do judges sometimes impose ludicrously mild punishments for pedophilia but they often fail to impose even the minimum stipulated by law. Incomprehensibly, punishment for offenses against children tends to be significantly lighter than for offenses against adults. The lightest penalties are reserved for crimes within the family. The greatest leniency appears in plea bargains. While judges sometimes criticize such bargains, they nevertheless (in 99% of the cases, according to Kadman) acquiesce to them. This despite the fact that legislation enacted a decade ago fixed minimum sentences for certain sex crimes. Moreover, the law demands a clear explanation in cases where the minimum is disregarded. Yet council research found only two cases in the past three years in which judges bothered to account for extra lenient sentencing. One of the cases cited was of a teacher who molested his 13-year-old female student. He was given six months community service and another 14 months' probationary sentence. By law he could have been imprisoned for up to seven years. But the judges' lapses aren't the only problem. The entire system seems to make a mockery of the law. Some 300 convicted sex offenders, most of them pedophiles, are released from prison each year and, despite existing legislation, aren't supervised. Most are repeat offenders. Of the 300, two-thirds are judged as "seriously dangerous." A 2006 law which mandated careful evaluation of each sex offender eligible for release, and close supervision following said release, essentially remains on paper only. The cause: budgetary constraints. Health Ministry psychiatrists complain that a lack of manpower limits evaluations. When these are made, they are completed late, after the offender has been set loose. The ministry reported to the Knesset Law Committee recently that even when evaluations meet deadlines, the prosecution does not apply for court-ordered supervision and closes cases of some dangerous offenders. Thus the authorities have no way of gauging how many menaces they release into the vulnerable population. Of Israel's currently imprisoned 1,200 sex offenders, some 50 are behind bars for the sixth time or more. About 25 percent are thought likely to strike again, though that is almost certainly an underestimate: the highest recidivism rates are among pedophiles. Although the 2006 law has yet to be applied, complimentary legislation is being piled on. The Knesset recently approved a bill by Shelly Yacimovich forbidding the employment of sex offender ex-cons in schools and institutions for the disabled. Michael Eitan's pending bill would regulate rehabilitation services for ex-cons, while another legislative initiative, by Eli Aflalo, would set up a nationwide offender register, accessible to members of the public to forewarn them of past offenders in their vicinity. The latter two bills still have a long legislative route ahead before they are ratified. But what then? A law that decorates our legal codes but isn't put into effect is a dead letter. It fails to protect those most in need, and becomes a demoralizing travesty that further corrodes the citizenry's trust in the system - especially when those who disrespect legal strictures include the judges themselves. "The Knesset," as Kadman put it, "insisted on minimum sentences because it perceived the existing situation as too lax and as lacking any real deterrent or protection value. But the judiciary seems to be telling the legislature that 'you can stipulate what you wish but we will do as we please.' Judges abhor guidelines." It is not just the police who are charged with protecting children from sexual predators, but the entire judicial system. If judges do not want more guidelines, they had better do a better job of enforcing the law themselves.
Jerusalem Post
http://www.israelenews.com/web/view_printer.asp?ID=1045
sabato 1 marzo 2008
SOUTH ASIA INDIA'HIDDEN INCEST
Friday, January 22, 1999 Published at 13:34
GMT World: South AsiaIndia's hidden incest By South Asia Correspondent Daniel Lak
Close-knit family life in India masks an alarming amount of sexual abuse of children and teenage girls by family members, a new report suggests.
Daniel Lak speaks to women from the report who have suffered rape at the hands of male relativesDelhi organisation RAHI said 76% of respondents to its survey had been abused when they were children - 40% of those by a family member.
The report suggests that disbelief, denial and cover-up to preserve the family reputation is often put before the individual child.
Women who gave evidence to RAHI spoke of the nightmare of abuse that haunts them still.
"Every time my parents went out to a party the bastard used to do it," said one.
Another said: "When I told people in my family about the abuse there was hostility, contempt and anger targeted at me - I became an outcast."
RAHI founder Anjua Gupta said she set up the organisation because she believed sexual abuse was rampant in Indian families and no one was doing anything about it.
"When I started working in this area people used to say 'Where are the Indian statistics?'. It was thought of as a Western phenomenon.
"One of the reasons there hasn't been any data collection is because it is not considered to be an Indian problem."
The report, Voices from the Silent Zone, suggests that nearly three-quarters of upper and middle class Indian women are abused by a family member - more than often an uncle, a cousin or an elder brother.
Disbelief, denial and cover-up
Incest and child sexual abuse occurs everywhere.
Psychiatrist Achal Baghat says the particular problem in India is that the concept of family is almost sacred, and abuse, if it happens, is met with disbelief.
"I think there is a great myth about Indian family systems being supportive," he says.
"What do you do if you're the mother in a family where the child is being abused? You do not have that much power to do anything about the abuse.
"Generally there is this thing about harming the name of the family. This need to prevent the family being laughed at leads to a lot of cover-ups."
Women on a pedestal
Activists in the field say the position of women in India is another problem. Society puts them on a pedestal as mothers and wives, but doesn't allow for their protection from domestic abuse.
Voices from the Silent Zone pinpoints another problem facing victims of abuse in India - the complete absence of any structure outside the family to help with abuse.
Achal Baghat says he often faces the grimmest of choices when considering how to help the victim.
"What is there if not the family? Where are the other support systems? There aren't any. There might be a few NGOs working in India - but can they really cope?
"The juvenile homes, the social support system is so lacking and so insensitive to the children, that I wouldn't be sure what is worse - to stay with an abusive family, or the environment the system would put them in."
Changing the law
In India, there is no specific law covering sexual abuse of children by strangers, let alone by family members. The legal definition of rape calls for proof that the rapist actually penetrated a victim, even a young child.
Judges have even said that it is impossible for fathers to rape their daughters, despite evidence to the contrary.
In the end, all Indian counsellors and activists can do to help victims of abuse is convince them that nothing has been their fault; that they are a survivor of a damaging, but not necessarily fatal experience, and they can continue to live life - never forgetting what happened to them, but getting on with it.
Everyone who works with victims and survivors of abuse agrees that awareness begins in the schoolyard. But in a profoundly conservative society like India, raising such sensitive issues in school would be controversial.
The chances that more than half of India's schoolgirls have experienced or will experience sexual abuse remain very high.
Family facts of the abused
68% were living in nuclear families
16% in semi-joint families (nuclear and grandparents)
15% in joint families (extended)
Mothers of the abused
Despite common perception that the mothers of abused children were working, the report said that of those surveyed who said they were abused, 60% of mothers were housewives and 40% were employed.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/259959.stm
GMT World: South AsiaIndia's hidden incest By South Asia Correspondent Daniel Lak
Close-knit family life in India masks an alarming amount of sexual abuse of children and teenage girls by family members, a new report suggests.
Daniel Lak speaks to women from the report who have suffered rape at the hands of male relativesDelhi organisation RAHI said 76% of respondents to its survey had been abused when they were children - 40% of those by a family member.
The report suggests that disbelief, denial and cover-up to preserve the family reputation is often put before the individual child.
Women who gave evidence to RAHI spoke of the nightmare of abuse that haunts them still.
"Every time my parents went out to a party the bastard used to do it," said one.
Another said: "When I told people in my family about the abuse there was hostility, contempt and anger targeted at me - I became an outcast."
RAHI founder Anjua Gupta said she set up the organisation because she believed sexual abuse was rampant in Indian families and no one was doing anything about it.
"When I started working in this area people used to say 'Where are the Indian statistics?'. It was thought of as a Western phenomenon.
"One of the reasons there hasn't been any data collection is because it is not considered to be an Indian problem."
The report, Voices from the Silent Zone, suggests that nearly three-quarters of upper and middle class Indian women are abused by a family member - more than often an uncle, a cousin or an elder brother.
Disbelief, denial and cover-up
Incest and child sexual abuse occurs everywhere.
Psychiatrist Achal Baghat says the particular problem in India is that the concept of family is almost sacred, and abuse, if it happens, is met with disbelief.
"I think there is a great myth about Indian family systems being supportive," he says.
"What do you do if you're the mother in a family where the child is being abused? You do not have that much power to do anything about the abuse.
"Generally there is this thing about harming the name of the family. This need to prevent the family being laughed at leads to a lot of cover-ups."
Women on a pedestal
Activists in the field say the position of women in India is another problem. Society puts them on a pedestal as mothers and wives, but doesn't allow for their protection from domestic abuse.
Voices from the Silent Zone pinpoints another problem facing victims of abuse in India - the complete absence of any structure outside the family to help with abuse.
Achal Baghat says he often faces the grimmest of choices when considering how to help the victim.
"What is there if not the family? Where are the other support systems? There aren't any. There might be a few NGOs working in India - but can they really cope?
"The juvenile homes, the social support system is so lacking and so insensitive to the children, that I wouldn't be sure what is worse - to stay with an abusive family, or the environment the system would put them in."
Changing the law
In India, there is no specific law covering sexual abuse of children by strangers, let alone by family members. The legal definition of rape calls for proof that the rapist actually penetrated a victim, even a young child.
Judges have even said that it is impossible for fathers to rape their daughters, despite evidence to the contrary.
In the end, all Indian counsellors and activists can do to help victims of abuse is convince them that nothing has been their fault; that they are a survivor of a damaging, but not necessarily fatal experience, and they can continue to live life - never forgetting what happened to them, but getting on with it.
Everyone who works with victims and survivors of abuse agrees that awareness begins in the schoolyard. But in a profoundly conservative society like India, raising such sensitive issues in school would be controversial.
The chances that more than half of India's schoolgirls have experienced or will experience sexual abuse remain very high.
Family facts of the abused
68% were living in nuclear families
16% in semi-joint families (nuclear and grandparents)
15% in joint families (extended)
Mothers of the abused
Despite common perception that the mothers of abused children were working, the report said that of those surveyed who said they were abused, 60% of mothers were housewives and 40% were employed.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/259959.stm
INCEST:SISTER AND BROTHER
Brother And Sister Want To Get Married
They have four children, the court has convicted them of incest, but they are still fighting for the legalization of their relationship.
Susan (22) and Patrick (29) live together and have four children. They are brother and sister and have been fighting for the legalization of incest for a long time.
Patrick has already spent more than two years in prison because he had sexual relations with his sister, which is forbidden by law, and is a heavy form of incest, and according to his lawyer, another trip to prison is very possible.
“This is denying sexual freedom”
Susan and Patrick will not give up and are planning to appeal to the German constitutional court, written by BBC. Their argument is – they are being denied their sexual freedom.
They met when Patrick was searching for his biological mother
They did not grow up together. Patrick was adopted by a family in Postdam, whilst his sister grew up with his mother. But when he became an adult, he wanted to meet his biological parents.
He found his mother and then he met Susan. Six months later their mother died and Patrick moved in with his sister.
Susan was only 16 when she had her first child
Their son, Eric, was born in 2001 when Susan was only 16, and Patrick was 23. The boy was later taken away from them and adopted by another family. The other children were also, by the force of the law, taken away.
In the period between 2003 and 2005, they had three more children. In 2005, when their last child was born, they were charged with incest.
Patrick was charged with two and a half years in prison, while his sister, who was 21 then, was looked after by the social establishment for young people.
According to the diary of Spiegel, whilst Patrick was in prison, Susan had a fifth child, but with another man.
As the lawyer Endrik Wilhelm said, the brother and sister are living together again and plan on sending an appeal. In the next six months they will try to make their case active, in the hope that the constitutional court will legalize it.
Published: February 21, 2007 22:29h
http://www.javno.com/pr.php?id=22200&l=en
They have four children, the court has convicted them of incest, but they are still fighting for the legalization of their relationship.
Susan (22) and Patrick (29) live together and have four children. They are brother and sister and have been fighting for the legalization of incest for a long time.
Patrick has already spent more than two years in prison because he had sexual relations with his sister, which is forbidden by law, and is a heavy form of incest, and according to his lawyer, another trip to prison is very possible.
“This is denying sexual freedom”
Susan and Patrick will not give up and are planning to appeal to the German constitutional court, written by BBC. Their argument is – they are being denied their sexual freedom.
They met when Patrick was searching for his biological mother
They did not grow up together. Patrick was adopted by a family in Postdam, whilst his sister grew up with his mother. But when he became an adult, he wanted to meet his biological parents.
He found his mother and then he met Susan. Six months later their mother died and Patrick moved in with his sister.
Susan was only 16 when she had her first child
Their son, Eric, was born in 2001 when Susan was only 16, and Patrick was 23. The boy was later taken away from them and adopted by another family. The other children were also, by the force of the law, taken away.
In the period between 2003 and 2005, they had three more children. In 2005, when their last child was born, they were charged with incest.
Patrick was charged with two and a half years in prison, while his sister, who was 21 then, was looked after by the social establishment for young people.
According to the diary of Spiegel, whilst Patrick was in prison, Susan had a fifth child, but with another man.
As the lawyer Endrik Wilhelm said, the brother and sister are living together again and plan on sending an appeal. In the next six months they will try to make their case active, in the hope that the constitutional court will legalize it.
Published: February 21, 2007 22:29h
http://www.javno.com/pr.php?id=22200&l=en
mercoledì 27 febbraio 2008
HORROR-LAWFUL INCEST MAY BE ON ITS WAY
JEFF JACOBY
Lawful incest may be on its way
By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist May 2, 2007
WHEN THE BBC invited me onto one of its talk shows recently to talk about the day's hot topic -- legalizing adult incest -- I thought of Rick Santorum.
Back in 2003, as the Supreme Court was preparing to rule in Lawrence v. Texas, a case challenging the constitutionality of laws criminalizing homosexual sodomy, then-Senator Santorum caught holy hell for warning that if the law were struck down, there would be no avoiding the slippery slope.
"If the Supreme Court says you have the right to consensual sex within your home," he told a reporter, "then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything."
It was a common-sensical observation, though you wouldn't have known it from the nail-spitting it triggered in some quarters. When the justices, voting 6-3, did in fact declare it unconstitutional for any state to punish consensual gay sex, the dissenters echoed Santorum's point. "State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are . . . called into question by today's decision," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the minority. Now, Time magazine acknowledges: "It turns out the critics were right."
Time's attention, like the BBC's, has been caught by the legal battles underway to decriminalize incest between consenting adults. An article last month by Time reporter Michael Lindenberger titled "Should Incest Be Legal?" highlights the case of Paul Lowe, an Ohio man convicted of incest for having sex with his 22-year-old stepdaughter. Lowe has appealed his conviction to the Supreme Court, making Lawrence the basis of his argument. In Lawrence, the court had ruled that people "are entitled to respect for their private lives" and that under the 14th Amendment, "the state cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime." If that was true for the adult homosexual behavior in Lawrence, why not for the adult incestuous behavior in the Ohio case?
The BBC program focused on the case of Patrick and Susan Stubing, a German brother and sister who live as a couple and have had four children together. Incest is a criminal offense in Germany, and Patrick has already spent more than two years in prison for having sex with his sister. The two of them are asking Germany's highest court to abolish the law that makes incest illegal.
" We've done nothing wrong," Patrick told the BBC. "We are like normal lovers. We want to have a family." They dismiss the conventional argument that incest should be banned because the children of close relatives have a higher risk of genetic defects. After all, they point out, other couples with known genetic risks aren't punished for having sex. In any event, Patrick has had himself sterilized so that he cannot father any more children.
Some years back, I'd written about a similar case in Wisconsin -- that of Allen and Patricia Muth, a brother and sister who fell in love as adults, had several children together, and were prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned as a result. Following the Supreme Court's decision in Lawrence, they appealed their conviction and lost in the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Lowe will probably lose too.
But the next Lowe or Muth to come along, or the one after that, may not lose. In Lawrence, it is worth remembering, the Supreme Court didn't just invalidate all state laws making homosexual sodomy a crime. It also overruled its own decision just 17 years earlier (Bowers v. Hardwick, 1986) upholding such laws. If the court meant what it said in Lawrence -- that states are barred from "making . . . private sexual conduct a crime" -- it will not take that long for laws criminalizing incest to go by the board as well. Impossible? That's what they used to say about normalizing homosexuality and legalizing same-sex marriage.
In Germany, the Green Party is openly supporting the Stubings in their bid to decriminalize incest. According to the BBC, incest is no longer a criminal offense in Belgium, Holland, and France. Sweden already permits half-siblings to marry.
Your reaction to the prospect of lawful incest may be "Ugh, gross." But personal repugnance is no replacement for moral standards. For more than 3,000 years, a code of conduct stretching back to Sinai has kept incest unconditionally beyond the pale. If sexual morality is jettisoned as a legitimate basis for legislation, personal opinion and cultural fashion are all that will remain. "Should Incest Be Legal?" Time asks. Expect more and more people to answer yes.
Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/05/02/lawful_incest_may_be_on_its_way?mode=PF
Lawful incest may be on its way
By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist May 2, 2007
WHEN THE BBC invited me onto one of its talk shows recently to talk about the day's hot topic -- legalizing adult incest -- I thought of Rick Santorum.
Back in 2003, as the Supreme Court was preparing to rule in Lawrence v. Texas, a case challenging the constitutionality of laws criminalizing homosexual sodomy, then-Senator Santorum caught holy hell for warning that if the law were struck down, there would be no avoiding the slippery slope.
"If the Supreme Court says you have the right to consensual sex within your home," he told a reporter, "then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything."
It was a common-sensical observation, though you wouldn't have known it from the nail-spitting it triggered in some quarters. When the justices, voting 6-3, did in fact declare it unconstitutional for any state to punish consensual gay sex, the dissenters echoed Santorum's point. "State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are . . . called into question by today's decision," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the minority. Now, Time magazine acknowledges: "It turns out the critics were right."
Time's attention, like the BBC's, has been caught by the legal battles underway to decriminalize incest between consenting adults. An article last month by Time reporter Michael Lindenberger titled "Should Incest Be Legal?" highlights the case of Paul Lowe, an Ohio man convicted of incest for having sex with his 22-year-old stepdaughter. Lowe has appealed his conviction to the Supreme Court, making Lawrence the basis of his argument. In Lawrence, the court had ruled that people "are entitled to respect for their private lives" and that under the 14th Amendment, "the state cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime." If that was true for the adult homosexual behavior in Lawrence, why not for the adult incestuous behavior in the Ohio case?
The BBC program focused on the case of Patrick and Susan Stubing, a German brother and sister who live as a couple and have had four children together. Incest is a criminal offense in Germany, and Patrick has already spent more than two years in prison for having sex with his sister. The two of them are asking Germany's highest court to abolish the law that makes incest illegal.
" We've done nothing wrong," Patrick told the BBC. "We are like normal lovers. We want to have a family." They dismiss the conventional argument that incest should be banned because the children of close relatives have a higher risk of genetic defects. After all, they point out, other couples with known genetic risks aren't punished for having sex. In any event, Patrick has had himself sterilized so that he cannot father any more children.
Some years back, I'd written about a similar case in Wisconsin -- that of Allen and Patricia Muth, a brother and sister who fell in love as adults, had several children together, and were prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned as a result. Following the Supreme Court's decision in Lawrence, they appealed their conviction and lost in the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Lowe will probably lose too.
But the next Lowe or Muth to come along, or the one after that, may not lose. In Lawrence, it is worth remembering, the Supreme Court didn't just invalidate all state laws making homosexual sodomy a crime. It also overruled its own decision just 17 years earlier (Bowers v. Hardwick, 1986) upholding such laws. If the court meant what it said in Lawrence -- that states are barred from "making . . . private sexual conduct a crime" -- it will not take that long for laws criminalizing incest to go by the board as well. Impossible? That's what they used to say about normalizing homosexuality and legalizing same-sex marriage.
In Germany, the Green Party is openly supporting the Stubings in their bid to decriminalize incest. According to the BBC, incest is no longer a criminal offense in Belgium, Holland, and France. Sweden already permits half-siblings to marry.
Your reaction to the prospect of lawful incest may be "Ugh, gross." But personal repugnance is no replacement for moral standards. For more than 3,000 years, a code of conduct stretching back to Sinai has kept incest unconditionally beyond the pale. If sexual morality is jettisoned as a legitimate basis for legislation, personal opinion and cultural fashion are all that will remain. "Should Incest Be Legal?" Time asks. Expect more and more people to answer yes.
Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/05/02/lawful_incest_may_be_on_its_way?mode=PF
MIKE S.ADAMS
Mike S. Adams was born in Columbus, Mississippi on October 30, 1964. While a student at Clear Lake High School in Houston, TX, his team won the state 5A soccer championship. He graduated from C.L.H.S. in 1983 with a 1.8 GPA. He was ranked 734 among a class of 740, largely as a result of flunking English all four years of high school. After obtaining an Associate’s degree in psychology from San Jacinto College, he moved on to Mississippi State University where he joined the Sigma Chi Fraternity. While living in the fraternity house, his GPA rose to 3.4, allowing him to finish his B.A., and then to pursue a Master’s in Psychology. In 1990, he turned down a chance to pursue a PhD in psychology from the University of Georgia, opting instead to remain at Mississippi State to study Sociology/Criminology. This decision was made entirely on the basis of his reluctance to quit his night job as member of a musical duo. Playing music in bars and at fraternity parties and weddings financed his education. He also played for free beer.
Upon getting his doctorate in 1993, Adams, then an atheist and a Democrat, was hired by UNC-Wilmington to teach in the criminal justice program. A few years later, Adams abandoned his atheism and also became a Republican. He also nearly abandoned teaching when he took a one-year leave of absence to study law at UNC-Chapel Hill in 1998. After returning to teach at UNC-Wilmington, Adams won the Faculty Member of the Year award (issued by the Office of the Dean of Students) for the second time in 2000.
After his involvement in a well publicized free speech controversy in the wake of the 911 terror attacks, Adams became a vocal critic of the diversity movement in academia. After making appearances on shows like Hannity and Colmes, the O’Reilly Factor, and Scarborough Country, Adams was asked to write a column for Townhall.com.
Today he enjoys the privilege of expressing himself both as a teacher and a writer. He is also an avid hunter and reader of classic literature. He published his first book, Welcome to the Ivory Tower of Babel, in 2004. His second book, Feminists Say the Darnedest Things, will be published in 2008.http://www.townhall.com/columnists/MikeSAdams
Upon getting his doctorate in 1993, Adams, then an atheist and a Democrat, was hired by UNC-Wilmington to teach in the criminal justice program. A few years later, Adams abandoned his atheism and also became a Republican. He also nearly abandoned teaching when he took a one-year leave of absence to study law at UNC-Chapel Hill in 1998. After returning to teach at UNC-Wilmington, Adams won the Faculty Member of the Year award (issued by the Office of the Dean of Students) for the second time in 2000.
After his involvement in a well publicized free speech controversy in the wake of the 911 terror attacks, Adams became a vocal critic of the diversity movement in academia. After making appearances on shows like Hannity and Colmes, the O’Reilly Factor, and Scarborough Country, Adams was asked to write a column for Townhall.com.
Today he enjoys the privilege of expressing himself both as a teacher and a writer. He is also an avid hunter and reader of classic literature. He published his first book, Welcome to the Ivory Tower of Babel, in 2004. His second book, Feminists Say the Darnedest Things, will be published in 2008.http://www.townhall.com/columnists/MikeSAdams
HORROR-REPUGNANCE!!! MIKE S. ADAMS ON LEGALIZE INCEST
Incest is Best When Kept in the FamilyBy Mike S. Adams
Thursday, July 5, 2007
Lately, I’ve been going through a period of re-evaluation concerning some of my most deeply held beliefs. After years of teaching in the UNC system, I’ve decided that moral relativism is not as bad as I had previously judged it to be. In fact, on the heels of my recent decision to support the repeal of statutory rape laws, I’ve decided that progress demands we do the same with regard to incest.
My decision to support the legalization of incest is a direct result of hate mail I received last week from some Clinton supporters angry about a spoof quote I recently published. Some thought the quote suggested that Bill Clinton actually fondled his daughter’s backside at a restaurant in Washington, D.C. And, needless to say, I always listen to Clinton supporters when they offer moral condemnation. I really think I’m a better man for it. (I also take Hillary’s advice on investment opportunities whenever she’s in the mood to talk).
Some would respond to the accusation that I accused Clinton of incest by asking whether a man’s decision to fondle his daughter’s fanny actually constitutes incest. But I have a much more penetrating question: What is a liberal’s basis for condemning incest, or, for that matter, anything else as immoral?
Because so many of my colleagues in the UNC system are atheists, I have decided to reject any and all laws that are included in the Bible unless, of course, the atheists can articulate some objective standard outside of their personal moral qualms with a given behavior. I want to avoid violating the Separation of Church and State Clause that is written so clearly in the opening lines of the First Amendment. I also want to avoid living in a country in which people push their personal views about morality upon others.
By making incest legal we have a golden opportunity to create the kind of society that Margaret Mead argued could be established when she wrote about sexual mores in Samoa in the 1920s. By removing restrictions on sexual behavior we can remove all the guilt that goes along with it since such guilt is merely a socially constructed reality. Some would be quick to point out that Mead’s research was based on certain flaws and fabrications. But none of those considerations are relevant so long as our long term goals are laudable.
The case of Lawrence v. Texas, decided by the Supreme Court in 2003, may be one vehicle we can use to hasten the process of abolishing incest laws across the nation. Some legislators in backwards states might be unwilling to suffer the potential political consequences of a move to legislatively abolish incest laws. This is where the courts can step in and take care of things with one stroke of the pen – or, more accurately, five strokes of the pen. The Lawrence case did not say that incest is a constitutional right but, clearly, it can be seen as a move in the direction of allowing adults to engage in consensual incest so long as it is done within the confines of the home.
Given the increasing willingness of our Justices to ignore our slave-owning Founding Fathers and instead look to other nations to interpret our Constitution there is more reason for optimism. After all, France has no laws prohibiting incest unless one of the participants is a child.
But I envision a day when this country goes even further than France in its willingness to tolerate incest. By disallowing incest when one participant is a child we are certainly engaging in a form of age discrimination. Have you ever heard of an incest case in which authorities prosecuted the child rather than the adult after the incest was discovered? Case closed.
Finally, it should be pointed out that the way we currently enforce incest laws is ageist. How dare we send the message that an adult somehow “chose” to consent to a particular behavior but that a child was “coerced” and unable to consent to that very same act? In New Hampshire, children are allowed to consent to abortions without their parents’ guidance or even knowledge. The whole country needs to recognize and foster the ability of children to make independent decisions in even the most important of matters. Both the D.A. and the D.A.D. need to mind their own business.
My plan to legalize incest will help satisfy the Democrats’ desire to avoid moral judgment. It will also satisfy the Libertarians’ desire to avoid unnecessary government intrusion. Finally, it will satisfy the Republicans’ desire to bring families closer together.
I think I’ve devised a political initiative in which everyone can feel included. And I believe that’s all that really matters.
Mike Adams is a criminology professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and author of Feminists Say the Darndest Things: A Politically Incorrect Professor Confronts "Womyn" On Campus.
http://www.townhall.com/Common/Print.aspx
Thursday, July 5, 2007
Lately, I’ve been going through a period of re-evaluation concerning some of my most deeply held beliefs. After years of teaching in the UNC system, I’ve decided that moral relativism is not as bad as I had previously judged it to be. In fact, on the heels of my recent decision to support the repeal of statutory rape laws, I’ve decided that progress demands we do the same with regard to incest.
My decision to support the legalization of incest is a direct result of hate mail I received last week from some Clinton supporters angry about a spoof quote I recently published. Some thought the quote suggested that Bill Clinton actually fondled his daughter’s backside at a restaurant in Washington, D.C. And, needless to say, I always listen to Clinton supporters when they offer moral condemnation. I really think I’m a better man for it. (I also take Hillary’s advice on investment opportunities whenever she’s in the mood to talk).
Some would respond to the accusation that I accused Clinton of incest by asking whether a man’s decision to fondle his daughter’s fanny actually constitutes incest. But I have a much more penetrating question: What is a liberal’s basis for condemning incest, or, for that matter, anything else as immoral?
Because so many of my colleagues in the UNC system are atheists, I have decided to reject any and all laws that are included in the Bible unless, of course, the atheists can articulate some objective standard outside of their personal moral qualms with a given behavior. I want to avoid violating the Separation of Church and State Clause that is written so clearly in the opening lines of the First Amendment. I also want to avoid living in a country in which people push their personal views about morality upon others.
By making incest legal we have a golden opportunity to create the kind of society that Margaret Mead argued could be established when she wrote about sexual mores in Samoa in the 1920s. By removing restrictions on sexual behavior we can remove all the guilt that goes along with it since such guilt is merely a socially constructed reality. Some would be quick to point out that Mead’s research was based on certain flaws and fabrications. But none of those considerations are relevant so long as our long term goals are laudable.
The case of Lawrence v. Texas, decided by the Supreme Court in 2003, may be one vehicle we can use to hasten the process of abolishing incest laws across the nation. Some legislators in backwards states might be unwilling to suffer the potential political consequences of a move to legislatively abolish incest laws. This is where the courts can step in and take care of things with one stroke of the pen – or, more accurately, five strokes of the pen. The Lawrence case did not say that incest is a constitutional right but, clearly, it can be seen as a move in the direction of allowing adults to engage in consensual incest so long as it is done within the confines of the home.
Given the increasing willingness of our Justices to ignore our slave-owning Founding Fathers and instead look to other nations to interpret our Constitution there is more reason for optimism. After all, France has no laws prohibiting incest unless one of the participants is a child.
But I envision a day when this country goes even further than France in its willingness to tolerate incest. By disallowing incest when one participant is a child we are certainly engaging in a form of age discrimination. Have you ever heard of an incest case in which authorities prosecuted the child rather than the adult after the incest was discovered? Case closed.
Finally, it should be pointed out that the way we currently enforce incest laws is ageist. How dare we send the message that an adult somehow “chose” to consent to a particular behavior but that a child was “coerced” and unable to consent to that very same act? In New Hampshire, children are allowed to consent to abortions without their parents’ guidance or even knowledge. The whole country needs to recognize and foster the ability of children to make independent decisions in even the most important of matters. Both the D.A. and the D.A.D. need to mind their own business.
My plan to legalize incest will help satisfy the Democrats’ desire to avoid moral judgment. It will also satisfy the Libertarians’ desire to avoid unnecessary government intrusion. Finally, it will satisfy the Republicans’ desire to bring families closer together.
I think I’ve devised a political initiative in which everyone can feel included. And I believe that’s all that really matters.
Mike Adams is a criminology professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and author of Feminists Say the Darndest Things: A Politically Incorrect Professor Confronts "Womyn" On Campus.
http://www.townhall.com/Common/Print.aspx
INCEST: VICTORIAN LITERATURE
Feb 27, 2008
Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism
Incest in Victorian Literature
Introduction
Incest in Victorian Literature
The complex human reaction to incest and its prohibition have taken a central position in psychological and sociological scholarship from these disciplines' early twentieth-century beginnings up through today. The taboo of incest in the physical, emotional, and moral senses, especially in father-daughter and brother-sister relationships, was a familiar and persistent theme in literature during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early-twentieth centuries, and consequently has been a popular focus of modern critical discussion.
INTRODUCTION
Anthropologists and psychologists focused heavily on the study of incest in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Considered a universally prohibited act by most Victorians, it took center-stage when Sigmund Freud gave the wish for incest and its repression or sublimation a central role in human psychological growth and development. In contrast to this fairly recent anthropological and psychological interest, the significance of incest has long been acknowledged in literature; the theme gained special treatment in Jacobean Drama, the eighteenth-century novel, the novels of the American South, and in Romantic Poetry. Literary critics contend that, especially for the Romantic Poets, the incest theme is at the heart of writing about sibling relationships. The Romantics emphasized shared childhood experiences between brothers and sisters, basing the perfection of their union upon the mutual associations built during an idyllic childhood. Critics view this interpretation and representation of brother-sister relationships as being closely related to the Romantic valorization of childhood, where the familial bond is so strong that it survives and is more powerful than anything either adult sibling can feel for someone else. In the eighteenth-century novel, by contrast, brothers and sisters are usually separated at birth and form an attraction to each other during the course of the story. This mutual appeal is a result of the nature versus nurture conflict and is used to illustrate the intuitive attraction of a blood tie.
Most incestuous relationships, including those idealized by the Romantic poets, end in tragedy. Freud saw this tragic culmination as equivalent to the standard punishment for incest in primitive times—death. He interpreted the relationships featured even in such works as The White Doe of Rylstone (1815), where the brother and sister do not share a sexual relationship but are remarkably close and share a common fate, as implicitly incestuous. But there were numerous other overtly incestuous relationships depicted in Romantic poetry and writing, including Lord Byron's Manfred (1817) and Shelley's Laon and Cythna (1818), all of which culminate in tragedy. For the Romantic poets in particular, incest represented a facet of extreme self-love, in addition to the potentially purest form of love. Although it was incorrect in society's eyes, this very mixture of social defiance and self-degradation made the theme of incest attractive to many writers. Variations on the sibling relationship theme as developed by the Romantics exist in Victorian literature as well, although not as explicitly. Two compelling examples of the Victorian manifestation of incest in literature that are often cited by critics are The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Wuthering Heights (1847).
While the incest theme dates back to classical literature, there is a lack of agreement among sociologists and anthropologists regarding the incest taboo and its origins. This inconsistency, in fact, has led many scholars to believe that the taboo derives not from some inherent moral code, but from our self-imposed need to separate ourselves from the animal world where all sexual activity is indeterminate. The derivation of the word “incest”, which means incestum or “unchaste” in Latin, supports this interpretation. Incest has been treated as both a taboo and a special privilege in different eras. The Adam and Eve story, say some critics, posits incest as the very foundation of humankind. Many scholars contend that the controversy regarding the “incest taboo as a result of innate revulsion” has been effectively refuted, especially since there is a long history of stringent laws and punishments against incest. For many of these scholars, the incest taboo is a representation of our most fundamental attempt at social order. According to this theory, the family unit is the most basic representation of social order. Incest represents a serious violation of that order and is therefore disruptive and animalistic.
By 1490 B.C.E. restrictions against incest were firmly established. Sociologists theorize that the world population had increased to the point where the introduction of restrictions on sexual mating was in fact necessary. From this point on, the punishment for incest was consistent throughout differing cultures and ages, though definitions of incest vary according to time and place. Significant legal measures against incest in England coincided with two major literary periods—the Elizabethan and the Victorian. In 1583 Queen Elizabeth I began penalizing incest and created a court of high commission to address crimes associated with it. The next major legal act regarding incest did not become reality until 1908, when the Punishment of Incest Act was passed. Although there were concerns that legal strictures would call attention to the offense and lead to increased frequencies of occurrence, the act simply resulted in more cases being brought to court. And while sociological data provides a valuable context for the recurrence of the incest theme at various times in literature, most critics acknowledge the lack of correspondence between life and literature.
What is consistent between life and literature, however, is that the most common incestuous relationship occurs between fathers and daughters. Precipitating causes for these relationships in real life mirror those represented in literature—an absent mother, a nubile daughter, and/or a radical polarization in the family. Critics also agree that most literature of incest presents a paternalistic culture, where feminine desire for masculine approval is cultivated. By the nineteenth century, the growing cultural repression of purely incestuous impulses made it increasingly difficult to detect acts of incest in literature as they began to be more symptomatically expressed. With the development of Freudian analysis in the early twentieth-century, discussion of incest and its emotional, moral impetus was brought out in the open. The fundamental components of psychoanalytic literary criticism were in place and all literature could now be analyzed in light of incestuous relationships, real or inferred, in search of a deeper understanding of both the work and ourselves.
http://www.enotes.com/nineteenth-century-criticism/incest-victorian-literature/introduction?print=1
Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism
Incest in Victorian Literature
Introduction
Incest in Victorian Literature
The complex human reaction to incest and its prohibition have taken a central position in psychological and sociological scholarship from these disciplines' early twentieth-century beginnings up through today. The taboo of incest in the physical, emotional, and moral senses, especially in father-daughter and brother-sister relationships, was a familiar and persistent theme in literature during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early-twentieth centuries, and consequently has been a popular focus of modern critical discussion.
INTRODUCTION
Anthropologists and psychologists focused heavily on the study of incest in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Considered a universally prohibited act by most Victorians, it took center-stage when Sigmund Freud gave the wish for incest and its repression or sublimation a central role in human psychological growth and development. In contrast to this fairly recent anthropological and psychological interest, the significance of incest has long been acknowledged in literature; the theme gained special treatment in Jacobean Drama, the eighteenth-century novel, the novels of the American South, and in Romantic Poetry. Literary critics contend that, especially for the Romantic Poets, the incest theme is at the heart of writing about sibling relationships. The Romantics emphasized shared childhood experiences between brothers and sisters, basing the perfection of their union upon the mutual associations built during an idyllic childhood. Critics view this interpretation and representation of brother-sister relationships as being closely related to the Romantic valorization of childhood, where the familial bond is so strong that it survives and is more powerful than anything either adult sibling can feel for someone else. In the eighteenth-century novel, by contrast, brothers and sisters are usually separated at birth and form an attraction to each other during the course of the story. This mutual appeal is a result of the nature versus nurture conflict and is used to illustrate the intuitive attraction of a blood tie.
Most incestuous relationships, including those idealized by the Romantic poets, end in tragedy. Freud saw this tragic culmination as equivalent to the standard punishment for incest in primitive times—death. He interpreted the relationships featured even in such works as The White Doe of Rylstone (1815), where the brother and sister do not share a sexual relationship but are remarkably close and share a common fate, as implicitly incestuous. But there were numerous other overtly incestuous relationships depicted in Romantic poetry and writing, including Lord Byron's Manfred (1817) and Shelley's Laon and Cythna (1818), all of which culminate in tragedy. For the Romantic poets in particular, incest represented a facet of extreme self-love, in addition to the potentially purest form of love. Although it was incorrect in society's eyes, this very mixture of social defiance and self-degradation made the theme of incest attractive to many writers. Variations on the sibling relationship theme as developed by the Romantics exist in Victorian literature as well, although not as explicitly. Two compelling examples of the Victorian manifestation of incest in literature that are often cited by critics are The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Wuthering Heights (1847).
While the incest theme dates back to classical literature, there is a lack of agreement among sociologists and anthropologists regarding the incest taboo and its origins. This inconsistency, in fact, has led many scholars to believe that the taboo derives not from some inherent moral code, but from our self-imposed need to separate ourselves from the animal world where all sexual activity is indeterminate. The derivation of the word “incest”, which means incestum or “unchaste” in Latin, supports this interpretation. Incest has been treated as both a taboo and a special privilege in different eras. The Adam and Eve story, say some critics, posits incest as the very foundation of humankind. Many scholars contend that the controversy regarding the “incest taboo as a result of innate revulsion” has been effectively refuted, especially since there is a long history of stringent laws and punishments against incest. For many of these scholars, the incest taboo is a representation of our most fundamental attempt at social order. According to this theory, the family unit is the most basic representation of social order. Incest represents a serious violation of that order and is therefore disruptive and animalistic.
By 1490 B.C.E. restrictions against incest were firmly established. Sociologists theorize that the world population had increased to the point where the introduction of restrictions on sexual mating was in fact necessary. From this point on, the punishment for incest was consistent throughout differing cultures and ages, though definitions of incest vary according to time and place. Significant legal measures against incest in England coincided with two major literary periods—the Elizabethan and the Victorian. In 1583 Queen Elizabeth I began penalizing incest and created a court of high commission to address crimes associated with it. The next major legal act regarding incest did not become reality until 1908, when the Punishment of Incest Act was passed. Although there were concerns that legal strictures would call attention to the offense and lead to increased frequencies of occurrence, the act simply resulted in more cases being brought to court. And while sociological data provides a valuable context for the recurrence of the incest theme at various times in literature, most critics acknowledge the lack of correspondence between life and literature.
What is consistent between life and literature, however, is that the most common incestuous relationship occurs between fathers and daughters. Precipitating causes for these relationships in real life mirror those represented in literature—an absent mother, a nubile daughter, and/or a radical polarization in the family. Critics also agree that most literature of incest presents a paternalistic culture, where feminine desire for masculine approval is cultivated. By the nineteenth century, the growing cultural repression of purely incestuous impulses made it increasingly difficult to detect acts of incest in literature as they began to be more symptomatically expressed. With the development of Freudian analysis in the early twentieth-century, discussion of incest and its emotional, moral impetus was brought out in the open. The fundamental components of psychoanalytic literary criticism were in place and all literature could now be analyzed in light of incestuous relationships, real or inferred, in search of a deeper understanding of both the work and ourselves.
http://www.enotes.com/nineteenth-century-criticism/incest-victorian-literature/introduction?print=1
WIKIPEDIA : RELIGIOUS VIEWS ON INCEST
Religious views on incest
[edit] Judeo-Christian
Main article: Biblical References to Incest
In the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Book of Genesis in the Bible, Lot's two daughters have sex with him to carry on their lineage.
Later, the Book of Leviticus lists prohibitions against sexual relations between various pairs of family members. Father and daughter, mother and son, and other pairs are forbidden, on pain of death, to have sexual relations. (Father–daughter incest is covered by a prohibition on sexual relationships between a man and any daughter born to any woman he has had sexual relationships with, thereby prohibiting his incest not only with his own daughters but also with women who could be his stepdaughters by marriage.)
[edit] Islam
The Quran mentions incest which prohibits a man from having sexual relationships with his mother, daughter, sister, paternal aunt, maternal aunt or niece. However, Islam allows for marriage with cousins and other more distant relatives. Only in case of marriage does Islam allow sexual relations between cousins and other distant relatives.
[edit] Hinduism
Hinduism speaks of incest in highly abhorrent terms. Hindus were greatly fearful of the bad effects of incest and thus practice to date strict rules of both endogamy and exogamy, that is, marriage in the same caste (varna) but not in the same family tree (gotra) or bloodline (Parivara). Marriages within the gotra ("swagotra" marriages) are banned under the rule of exogamy in the traditional matrimonial system. People within the gotra are regarded as kin and marrying such a person would be thought of as incest.
In some South Indian communities, where gotra membership passed from father to children, marriages were allowed between uncle and niece, while such marriages were forbidden in matrilineal communities, like Malayalis and Tuluvas, where gotra membership was passed down from the mother. A much more common characteristic of south Indian Hindu society is permission of marriage between cross-cousins (children of brother and sister). Thus, a man is allowed to marry his maternal uncle's daughter or his paternal aunt's daughter but is not allowed to marry his paternal uncle's daughter, a parallel cousin, who is treated as a sister.
North Indian Hindu society not only follows rules of gotra for marriages, but also has many regulations which go beyond the basic definition of gotra which result in few occurrences of similarly incestuous relationships.
[edit] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incest
[edit] Judeo-Christian
Main article: Biblical References to Incest
In the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Book of Genesis in the Bible, Lot's two daughters have sex with him to carry on their lineage.
Later, the Book of Leviticus lists prohibitions against sexual relations between various pairs of family members. Father and daughter, mother and son, and other pairs are forbidden, on pain of death, to have sexual relations. (Father–daughter incest is covered by a prohibition on sexual relationships between a man and any daughter born to any woman he has had sexual relationships with, thereby prohibiting his incest not only with his own daughters but also with women who could be his stepdaughters by marriage.)
[edit] Islam
The Quran mentions incest which prohibits a man from having sexual relationships with his mother, daughter, sister, paternal aunt, maternal aunt or niece. However, Islam allows for marriage with cousins and other more distant relatives. Only in case of marriage does Islam allow sexual relations between cousins and other distant relatives.
[edit] Hinduism
Hinduism speaks of incest in highly abhorrent terms. Hindus were greatly fearful of the bad effects of incest and thus practice to date strict rules of both endogamy and exogamy, that is, marriage in the same caste (varna) but not in the same family tree (gotra) or bloodline (Parivara). Marriages within the gotra ("swagotra" marriages) are banned under the rule of exogamy in the traditional matrimonial system. People within the gotra are regarded as kin and marrying such a person would be thought of as incest.
In some South Indian communities, where gotra membership passed from father to children, marriages were allowed between uncle and niece, while such marriages were forbidden in matrilineal communities, like Malayalis and Tuluvas, where gotra membership was passed down from the mother. A much more common characteristic of south Indian Hindu society is permission of marriage between cross-cousins (children of brother and sister). Thus, a man is allowed to marry his maternal uncle's daughter or his paternal aunt's daughter but is not allowed to marry his paternal uncle's daughter, a parallel cousin, who is treated as a sister.
North Indian Hindu society not only follows rules of gotra for marriages, but also has many regulations which go beyond the basic definition of gotra which result in few occurrences of similarly incestuous relationships.
[edit] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incest
LLIOYD DE MAUSE :THE UNIVERSALITY OF INCEST
The Universality of IncestLloyd DeMause
The Journal of Psychohistory, Fall 1991, Vol. 19, No. 2
"A new motto: What has been done to you, poor child?"-Sigmund Freud, letter to Wilhelm Fliess, Dec.22, 1897, citing Goethe, after relating his patient's memoryof having been raped by her father at age two.
Ever since the Greek historians first wrote about the customs of other nations, scholars have compared the habits of different cultures, hoping to discover meaningful regularities in human behavior.
Yet the only universal trait that Contemporary social scientists and historians agree has been found in every known culture is the prohibition of incest. As one standard text puts it, "The taboo on incest within the immediate family is one of the few known cultural universals."(1) Kroeber stated, "If ten anthropologists were asked to designate one universal institution, nine would likely name the incest prohibition; some have expressly named it as the only universal one."(2) That "no known tribe has ever permitted incest"(3) has been a truism for cross-cultural studies ever since Durkheim and Westermarck's early books on the subject.(4)
Furthermore, the same authors go on to state that the universal prohibitions on incest are virtually always effective, so that incest itself is rarely found in any society. Even when societies are found that approve of incest, they only "serve rather to emphasize than to disprove the universality of intra-family incest taboos," according to George Murdock.(5) Incestuous societies simply cannot exist, since, according to Talcott Parscins, the effective prohibition of incest is "linked with the functioning of every society."(6) The abolition of incest was accomplished at the beginning of human culture, Leslie White says, since without it "social evolution could have gone no further on the human level than among the anthropoids."(7) As Levi-Strauss concluded, "the prohibition of incest can be found at the dawn of culture... [It] is culture itself." (8)
The certainty with which the effective prohibition of incest has been declared leads one to look for the evidence these authors might have for their assertions. Yet such a search soon proves quite fruitless. Most of them cite no evidence at all, or at most refer to a single cross cultural survey by Murdock in his book, Social Structure. Murdock's study, however, turns out not to be about incest at all, if by incest one means actual sexual relations between family members other than spouses. What Murdock studied was marriage rules. Yet authors continue to assume Murdock proved that a universal prohibition on incest itself exists, not just a prohibition on intra-farnily marriage.(9)
Indeed, rather than examining the actual occurrence of incest in either historical or contemporary groups, the voluminous literature on the subject instead speculates on why incest supposedly doesn't occur. Many explanations have been proposed: the biological impairments attendant upon inbreeding, the utility of social alliances, the collapse of the family if sexual rivalry is allowed, even boredom with family members. When exceptions have been acknowledged-royal incest in dozens of societies,(10) sibling incest among the general population in others,(11) widespread pederasty in still others,(12) - discussion has continued to focus on why incest is supposedly rare, not on whether it really is.
One begins to realize how odd this is when it is compared, say, with the study of other deviant acts, such as homicide. Although effective laws against murder long preceded laws against incest - and were far more often enforced rather than winked at - no one thinks of writing hundreds of studies on why mankind has a "universal homicide taboo."(13)
This essay is intended to consider the evidence for the opposite hypothesis: That it is incest itself - and not the absence of incest - that has been universal for most people in most places at most times. Further-more, the earlier in history one searches, the more evidence there is of universal incest, just as there is more evidence of other forms of child abuse."(14)
Two kinds of incest will be considered: direct incest, overt sexual ac-tivity between family members other than spouses; and indirect incest, the providing of children by their parents to others in order for them to be sexually molested.
There are two reasons why I believe indirect incest must be included in any definition of incestuous activity. First of all, arranging for children to have sex with other household members or neighbors is usually motivated by the incestuous wishes of the parent; and, in any case, it is usually perceived by the child to be similar to direct incest. Secondly, clinical studies show that contemporary sexual abuse usually involves a parent or guardian, who, if not the direct perpetrator, covertly brings about the incident in order to satisfy their own incestuous wishes.(15)
PSYCHOANALYTIC VIEWS ON THE REALITY OF INCEST
When Sigmund Freud discovered that eighteen of his hysterical pa-tients had conscious memories of childhood sexual seductions, mostly by family members, he faced a theoretical impasse.(16) Since he believed only repressed memories could produce hysterical symptoms, the easily accessible detailed memories of his patients could not be the real cause of their hysteria. He therefore concluded that there must in each case have been an earlier seduction, the memory of which was repressed, generally occurring between the ages of two and five and never later than eight. These early scenes had to be reconstructed from fantasies and dreams, and even when Freud pieced them together for the patient, he admitted, "they have no feeling of remembering the scenes."(17)
These earlier infantile reconstructions, Freud quite correctly decided in 1897, were "scenes of seduction [that] had never taken place. ..they were only phantasies which my patients had made up or which I myself had perhaps forced on them."(18) But the clear memories of seduction in later childhood and adolescence that his patients had spontaneously reported to him and about which they had strong reality feelings, he never doubted - contrary to the assertions of critics like Masson and Miller, who claim Freud lost his courage and denied that any incest had actually taken place.(19) The particular theory of hysteria which he admitted "broke down under the weight of its own improbability" (20) was the infantile seduction theory and did not imply any doubting of his patients' memories of real incest.
For the rest of his life, in fact, Freud reiterated his belief that these clear memories of incestuous attacks were real. In 1905 he wrote, "I can-not admit that in my paper on 'The Aetiology of Hysteria' I exaggerated the frequency or importance of.. the effects of seduction, which treats a child as a sexual object prematurely..." (21) Later, he repeatedly wrote such statements as that "the sexual abuse of children is found with uncanny frequency among school teachers and child attendants.. and phantasies of being seduced are of particular interest, because so often they are not phantasies but real memories." (22) Furthermore, he considered the incestuous memories of such patients as Katharina, Rosalia H., Elisabeth von R. and the Wolf Man as reality, not fantasy, saying of such traumatic child abuse "You must not suppose.. that sexual abuse of a child by its nearest male relatives belongs entirely to the realm of phan-tasy. Most analysts will have treated cases in which such events were real and could be unimpeachably established..."(23) He even called his own memories "genuine" of having been sexually molested as a little boy by his nurse, who had not only forced him to perform sexually and, he reported, "complained because I was clumsy," but also, he said, washed him in water that contained her own menstrual blood. (24)
Therefore, regardless of all that has been written about the subject, an unbiased reading of Freud's works shows that whenever he confronted clear evidence of sexual molestation, he called it seduction, not fantasy. There was no "great reversal," no "suppression of seduction," no "betrayal of the child," no "assault on truth."
Freud's courage in acknowledging the extent of childhood sexual molestation was not shared by the majority of his colleagues. Most, like Jung, simply avoided the topic. Others, who noted that large numbers of their patients had clear memories of incestuous rape, blamed the victim, saying, like Abraham, that the molestation "was desired by the child unconsciously [because of an] abnormal psycho-sexual constitution..." (25)
Analysts since Freud have routinely reported memories of seduction as unconscious wishes, while analysts of children regularly neglected to ask their patients whether their reports were real or not.(26) Psychoanalytic in-stitutes have often taught that all memories of incest were wishes. One analyst recalls, "I was taught in my... early years in psychiatry, as most of us were, to look very skeptically upon the incestuous sexual material described by my patients.. Any inclination on my part, or that of my colleagues in the training situation, to look upon these productions of the patient as having some reality basis was scoffed at and was seen as evidence of our naivete... "(27)
Even when analysts were presented with evidence of childhood sexual and physical abuse so overwhelming they could not disbelieve it, they usually paid little attention to it in their case histories. For instance, Otto Kemberg rarely reports on child abuse in his extensive studies on his borderline patients. When he was personally told by a researcher that many recent studies of borderlines showed extremely high rates of sexual and physical abuse as children, he admitted that while this was true of his borderline patients as well, "it is hard to know what to make of it."(28)
Freud's view of the reality of childhood seduction was not, however, wholly missing from earlier psychoanalytic literature. Ferenczi not only found that many of his patients had clear memories of late childhood seduction but also described how many of his adult patients confessed to having sexual relations with children, concluding: "The real rape of girls who have hardly grown out of the age of infants, similar sexual acts of mature women with boys, and also enforced homosexual acts, are more frequent occurrences than has hitherto been assumed."(29) Many women analysts, such as Bonaparte, Jacobson, Greenacre and Reich, (30) were able to empathize with their female patients and admit the reality of their memories of incestuous abuse. Rheingold reported encountering surprisingly frequent cases of real incest in his patients, including a great deal of overt maternal masturbation of young children, fathers orgastically flagellating their daughters, parents forcing children to handle the parents' genitals, mothers encouraging uncles to rape their children, and so on, wondering why "scant attention" had been given to such material by others.(31) Robert Fliess, after a lifetime of psychoanalytic experience in the removal of amnesia from early memories, regularly found real sexual molestation of his patients at the core of their problems, and concluded that "no one is ever made sick by his fantasies. Only traumatic memories in repression can cause the neurosis."(32)
In the past decade, with the growing realization by the public of how widespread childhood sexual abuse is in contemporary society, psychoanalysts have begun to report on the therapeutic necessity of acknowledging early sexual seduction, They have even wondered if the analyst's denial might have prevented cure in those cases where reanalysis discovered incestuous abuse that the first analyst had denied. (33) In a recent study connecting borderline personality disorders and childhood sexual abuse, Herman and her colleagues report that "such patients may show remarkable improvement when the connection between symptom and trauma is recognized."(34)
In recent years, psychoanalysts have begun to report uncovering considerable early sexual abuse that had gone previously unrecognized. One analyst described the analysis of a woman who had been raped at four years of age, saying "it took eighteen years of weekly sessions before there was a complete remission of symptoms...Would not an earlier recognition of the actual childhood rape have saved us many hours of analysis?" (35) Even the conservative Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association recently concluded a review of the question of the reality of incest by asking "Have thousands of analyses and clinical studies not yet resolved the question of whether adult hysterics had been assaulted or seduced in infancy and childhood? The answer is that they have not."(36)
CHILDHOOD SEXUAL ABUSE IN CONTEMPORARY WESTERN SOCIETIES
In determining the actual incidence of childhood sexual abuse in modern societies, the main problem is that one must rely upon witnesses who have enormous emotional difficulties in reporting what they find - far more so than with any other psychohistorical subject I have encountered.
For one thing, most writers on the subject have themselves usually been advocates of pedophilia. Ever since the early studies of such sexologists as Symonds and Eglinton,(37) most writing on incest has been by scholars hoping to justify sexual relations with children by showing how widespread the practice has been. Many openly state, as do Allen Edwardes and R. E. L. Masters, that "there is no shame in being a ... pederast or a rapist if one is satisfied," (38) or claim that incest can be a positive, healthy experience," as does social worker LeRoy Schultz, who writes extensively on childhood sexuality. (39) Even Kinsey wrote: "It is difficult to understand why a child, except for its cultural conditioning, should be disturbed at having its genitalia touched," (40) while his coauthor in the Kinsey studies, Wardell Pomeroy, wrote that "incest between adults and younger children can.. be a satisfying and enriching experience..."(41)
One must use the research of such scholars with extreme caution, since their main motive is to deny the coercion involved when adults seduce lonely, unloved children. Yet the task of digging through the truly staggering amount of literature on sexuality in past and present societies (42) (there are over sixty journals alone with regular articles on the subject) is so overwhelming that, in order to locate the rare primary sources that are available, the researcher cannot avoid consulting the life work of pedophilia advocates.
Statistical studies on the incidence of child sexual molestation in the United States go back to 1929,(43) but these early works were generally ignored by a public accustomed to disbelieving children's accusations and to the lack of punishment for the occasional molesters who were apprehended. The official incidence figures from the American Humane Association, working from reports from child protective agencies, estimated only 7,000 incidents in the U.S. for 1976. Although the AMA estimates rose steadily to 113,000 incidents for 1985,(44) even these larger figures represented under one percent of American children. Kinsey was surprised to find that 24 percent of his female subjects easily recalled sexual advances by adult males when they were children, but he downplayed their importance since most, he said, were non-contact approaches that he thought unimportant. (45) Except for a single study by Landis in 1956 reporting a third of his sample of 1,800 college students recalling childhood sexual molestation, (46) it was not until the late 197Os and early 1980s that careful studies began to be reported with samples large enough to warrant careful statistical analysis.
Although these two dozen studies have had somewhat differing definitions of sexual molestation and of the age criteria, their results can be made comparable (47) by eliminating noncontact abuse (such as exhibitionism) from the definition and by requiring either evidence of force or an age discrepancy of at least five years when the victim is over 12. When these adjustments are made, the studies report childhood memories of contact sexual molestation at rates ranging from 6 to 45 percent for women and from 3 to 30 percent for men.
The lower incidence figures in these studies turn out to be due to the method used in compiling them, As one moves from the lower to the higher figures, one discovers that the interview techniques begin to acknowledge the resistances of the respondents to such emotional questions. The lower figures are in response to written questionnaires or brief telephone calls, contacts that were considered intrusive by the respondent, while the higher figures, such as those of Wyatt and Russell (48) were the result of carefully structured face-to-face interviews lasting from one to eight hours.(49) Obviously it takes a good bit of trust before respondents begin to relate memories of childhood seduction to strangers. Using these two studies, then, as the most accurate we have to date, one finds that either 38 percent (Russell) or 45 percent (Wyatt) of women interviewed reported memories of familial and/or extrafamilial sexual abuse during their childhood, almost half of which was directly incestuous.
Figures as accurate as these for men's memories of seduction are more difficult to obtain. The highest figure reported to date, that of Landis, is 30 percent. Other studies report lower figures because they are from brief questionnaires. Although most comparisons of male and female victimization show molestation of boys only about a third the rate of girls, (50) there is evidence that males are far more reluctant to reveal their molestation, partly because it usually occurs earlier for boys than for girls and partly because victimization may be even more difficult for boys to recall and report than for girls. Because it was conducted by interviews, the 30 percent rate of Landis' study undoubtedly is the most reliable we have for boys. Therefore, the best estimates for memories of childhood sexual abuse we now have for the United States are 40 percent for girls and 30 percent for boys, almost half directly incestuous for girls and about a quarter directly incestuous for boys. (51)
Yet even these astonishingly high figures are only a portion of the hid-den true incidence rates. Four additional factors raise the actual rates even higher:
The groups interviewed do not include many people in the American population who have far higher than average sexual molestation experiences, including institutionalized criminals, prostitutes, juveniles in shelters and psychotics (52),
the studies only count admissions to the interviewer of abuse, and it is unlikely that no conscious memories were ever suppressed during the interviews,
a large percent of each study refused to be interviewed, and these may have been the most victimized of all,(53) and
most importantly, these studies include only clear conscious memories of events-unconscious memories, which are usually only uncovered during psychotherapy, would increase these rates.
It is possible to correct the incidence rates statistically for these factors, Although only 11 percent of Russell's respondents recalled being victimized before the age of five, another study shows the most common age of sexual abuse reported to authorities is four years, while other studies report that from 21 to 50 percent of reported sexual abuse victims involve children under five.(54) Since few people consciously recall traumatic events of any kind before the age of five, and since the graph for sexual abuse distribution by age runs roughly level from ages two to sixteen,(55) the incidence figures stated above should be increased by at least an additional 50 percent(56) to account for these three factors, Therefore, the corrected incidence rates are at least 60 percent for Girls and 45 percent for boys. Until someone is courageous enough to directly question the children themselves whether they have been molested - a simple procedure that has never been done in any published study to date - 60 and 45 percent should be considered as the most reliable national incidence rates we now have available for the U.S.
These reports of childhood seduction are considered by researchers to be real memories, not fantasies. Not only do most researchers conclude, like Russell, that "underdisciosure was a significant problem... not fabrication of experiences," (57) but another study of 53 women that attempted to independently confirm memories of childhood incest found 74 percent could be positively confirmed plus another 9 percent indirectly supported, while none were discovered to be just fantasies.(58)
Because of such reliability studies, reports of memories of childhood seduction need not be as distrusted as they were in Freud's time. The memories reported to these investigators were not vague images reconstructed in psychotherapy, nor were any incidents counted if they involved just exhibition of genitals to the child or other non-contact sexual approaches. Nor did any of these studies inquire about such common sexualized traumas as the constant giving of enemas or regular sexualized beating, both of which are often equivalents for the child to genital seduction.(59) These figures were limited to clear memories of oven con-tact experiences such as intercourse, fellatio, cunnilingus, mutual masturbation, anal intercourse and the kissing or sucking of the child's breasts or genitals.
The circumstances of these seductions have been documented in the large clinical literature on molestation, only a portion of which can be summarized here. Russell found that "most perpetrators lived under the same roof as their victims."(60) Most (85 percent) of the perpetrators were at least five years older than their victims.(61) Of incest cases with females, uncles accounted for 25 percent of the perpetrators, followed in frequency by fathers (15 percent), brothers (12 percent) and stepfathers (8 per-cent).(62) Women commit incest more rarely - at least in America - although the number may be larger than realized since studies of boys in early childhood are so sketchy (studies have found many mothers quite seductive toward their children even when they were being observed in a laboratory situation).(63)
Even when the actual perpetrator isn't a relation, the parent or guardian is somehow implicated in at least 80 percent of the cases.(64) The other 20 percent contain many cases where parents invite neighbors to sleep with their children, or do nothing about older brothers who molest younger siblings, or leave children with babysitters after they discover evidence of molestation, or continue to allow boyfriends to be alone with children after molestation. One must therefore conclude that the majority of cases of childhood molestation are either perpetuated by caretakers or are consciously or unconsciously set up by them.(65)
Recent studies have destroyed many myths about sexual abuse. Abuse is experienced at far younger ages than once thought - 81 percent occurring before puberty and 42 percent under age 7(66) - and involves far less mild forms than has been assumed-even for infants the majority of seductions involve oral, anal or genital penetration.(67) Seduction of younger children by teens, often previously labeled "experimentation," has now been found to be a quite serious problem, often the result of an earlier seduction of the teenager or another comparably severe traumatic experience,(68) In fact, some studies show that half of all reported cases of child molestation and 20 percent of all rapes are committed by persons under the age of 18.(69)
Contrary to the earlier notion that sexual abuse occurred mainly among the poor, there actually is no correlation between economic class and rates of abuse.(70) Most pedophiles are male, although recent research is beginning to discover more female seduction of little children than previously reported, particularly since, as Lew has pointed out, "sexual activity between older women and young boys is rarely treated as abusive." (71) In all, only about 2 percent of total incestuous abuse is ever reported, and only a tiny portion of these few are ever convicted, even today,(72) putting the notion to rest that society is as yet really much interested in stopping the practice. Finally, the number of molestation incidents per child may be fairly high; while in Russell's study 43 percent of the cases of incestuous abuse are remembered as occurring only once, another study of reported incidents found that the average duration of abuse is five years.(73)
The best evidence for the cause of pedophilia is provided by the clinical reports of the psychotherapists who have written extensively on the subject.(74) The pedophile, similar to other perverts, suffers from severe lack of love and fears of individuation in his or her early childhood, and both desires and dreads merging with the mother because of an enormous need to reinstate mother child unity. Earlier childhood abuse of pedophiles is commonly found. As an adult, the pedophile must have sex with children in order to maintain the illusion of being loved, while at the same time dominating the children as they themselves once experienced domination, repeating actively their own caretaker's sadism. The pedophile uses the child as a breast-substitute, both in the sense of using him or her for gratification and also as an object for sadistic aggression.
The pedophile's sexual activity is extraordinarily compulsive because it wards off recurring feelings of fragmentation, depression and death. This helps explain why the pedophile's sexual targets are so inter-changeable and why an active pedophile often seduces hundreds of children in his or her life. The seduction of children is a desperate defense against fears of personal disintegration. It should not be thought of - as it usually is by historians and anthropologists - as "an outbreak of instinctual sexuality." or as being due to "a lack of impulse controls" or "a weak superego." Adults who molest children have extremely powerful punitive superegos and are often highly religious. They are driven to their acts not by their sexual instincts but by their overwhelming intrapsychic anxieties. Given the seriousness of the perversion, it is not surprising that successful therapeutic methods have only recently become available.(75)
The time when one could deny that sexual seduction is extremely traumatic for children appears to have ended. The more studies that come out on the effects of childhood sexual abuse, the more severe the damage is found to be. The flood of books and articles documenting the emotional problems of victims both in childhood and in later life has to be read in detail to appreciate the profound sense of betrayal and the terrifying fears felt by the child, so that even single incidents have the power to permanently ravage their lives. Severe somatic reactions, depersonalization, self-hatred, hysterical seizures, depression, borderline personality formation, promiscuity, sexual dysfunctions, suicide, self-mutilation, night terrors and flashbacks, multiple personalities, post-traumatic stress disorders, delinquency, bulemia, and the overall stunting of feelings and capacities have all been documented - the earlier and the more often the abuse, the worse the damage.(76)
Outside the U.S., there has been only one comparably reliable study published: a thirteen-hundred-page report on face-to-face interviews of over 2,000 men and women done for the Canadian government by the Gallup organization, which concludes with incidence rates approximately the same as the U.S. studies.(77) In Latin America, anthropologists report a great deal of family sexual activity and widespread pederasty as part of macho masculine activity, though reliable statistics of incidence are not yet available. (78) In Puerto Rico, for instance, Oscar Lewis found "danger of seduction by stepfathers, sexual rivalry between sisters, between mother and daughters [and] male children erotically stimulated by their mothers and by other members of the family,"(79) E. N. Padilla reported parents and others regularly masturbating the infant's penis(80) and Romon Frendandez-Marina found Peurto Rican fathers often masturbating their boys to show off their maleness to friends." In Mexico, J. M. Carrier reported a large proportion of Mexican men had sexual relations with nephews, cousins or neighbors between the ages of 6 and 9. (82)
European countries are about two decades behind the U.S. in interview techniques, and since they still use written questionnaires they usually report sexual abuse rates of under one percent. (83) Most European studies do not attempt to study statistical frequency, though some - such as a series of studies on Scandinavian incest - report considerable public acceptance of incest in some rural areas. (84)
Even though there are no reliable statistics for most European countries, a recent flurry of books, articles and telephone "hotlines" has begun to reveal widespread sexual molestation. A recent BBC "ChildWatch" program asked its female listeners - a large though biased sample - if they remembered sexual molestation, and, of the 2,530 replies analyzed, 83 percent remembered someone touching their genitals, 62 percent of the full sample recalling actual intercourse.(85) Official estimates of German children sexually abused and raped each year now number over 300,000, and sexual abuse hot lines are becoming more widespread.(86) The establishment of Italian "SOS-infanzia" hotlines - initially much resented by the public - have begun to reveal widespread pedophile networks, baby prostitution and Boy Scout/Girl Guide molestation, as well as the widespread sexual abuse of children within famines, with a particular emphasis on the pederasty of boys. (87) Finally, the most careful European study to date is a recent unpublished German survey by the Iinstitut fuer Kindheit that for the first time anywhere dared to ask the children themselves about their sexual experiences. I have been told that these researchers found an 80 percent childhood sexual molestation rate among Berlin school children.(88) The exact details of this study will certainly be revealing when it is published. It may be that direct questioning of children rather than relying on retrospective memory may produce even higher real incidence rates of sexual molestation than our 60 percent and 45 percent estimates for the U.S.
PEDOPHILIA IN THE EAST AND MIDDLE EAST
However high the rates of childhood molestation may turn out to be in contemporary Western countries, the incidence in countries outside the West is likely to be much higher. Because they have only recently moved beyond what I have termed the infanticidal mode of chiidrearing, whereby as much as half of the children born were killed by their parents,(89) the use of children for the emotional needs of adults is far more accepted, an attitude that fosters widespread incestuous acts along with other child abuse. Although the evidence is scattered and much remains hidden, enough exists to indicate the dimensions of what eventual scholarship will probably uncover.
Childhood in much of India begins with the young child being regularly masturbated by the mother, "high caste or low caste, the girl 'to make her sleep well,' the boy 'to make him manly..."' This practice has been said to be widespread by many reliable observers, including Catherine Mayo - whose extensive investigations in India in the 1920s led to the first child marriage laws(90) - a physician,(91) an ethnologist,(92) a religious scholar (93) and a sociologist.(94) As is the case with virtually all non-Western cultures, the child sleeps in the family bed for several years and regularly observes sexual intercourse between the parents. The extent to which Indian parents go beyond this and overtly have sex with the child cannot be determined. Rampal, the sociologist who recently did interviews modeled on the Kinsey studies about contemporary Indian sexual practices, concludes that "there is a lot of incest...It is hidden along with other secrets of families and rarely gets a chance to come out, like seduction at the hands of trusted friends of the family... To arrive at even a passable estimate of incest cases would be to touch the hornet's nest.. no one will ever confess to such a deed, therefore, any attempt to collect statistics may prove to be futile at present."(95)
Boys as well as girls are reported as being masturbated and raped by the men in the family, including fathers, older brothers, uncles and cousins.(96) By the time children are four or five, they are usually taken to bed at night by others in the extended household. "A particular uncle may like her to sleep in his room, which is considered a great gesture of closeness."(97) As one girl describes it: "I hardly ever slept with my parents after I was four. I rotated almost every night between my various uncles and sometimes my grandmother. But it was difficult to have any space in her bed because all the grandsons slept in her bed.. So I prefer-red to sleep in [uncle's] bed, who was very nice and put his arms around me in winter."(98) This practice is similar to the customary sharing of their wives by brothers, who have free sexual access to each other's wives, an ancient practice still approved of in some areas in India.(99)
So acceptable is sex between close relatives in India that uncle-niece and cross-cousin marriages were preferred among certain Indian groups.(100) As the old Indian proverb has it, "For a girl to be a virgin at ten years old, she must have neither brothers nor cousin nor father." These sleeping patterns with relatives who live in common residences continue even after marriage, since husbands are often cold to wives, and sex with the husband's younger brother is covertly encouraged by the family to give the wife someone to be "close" to.(101) Grandfathers often call the little girls "my little wife," give them candy and "play the role of an old seducer," teasing them by saying "Don't you want to marry me?"(102) One observer stuns up traditional Indian sexual stimulation during childhood as follows: "The little Hindu girls are deflowered by the little boys with whom they play, and repeat together the erotic lessons which their parents have unwittingly taught them on account of the general promiscuity of family life throughout India. In all the little girls of less than ten years of age the complete hymen is wanting.. Incest is often the rule rather than the exception."(103)
In addition to direct incest by parents, the seduction of little girls who are taken in as wards or servants is quite common. Many older men, Rampal reports, "get down to seducing young girls whom they give protection at home for any reason - education, service, relationship, close friendship with father or brother. [They] take full advantage of the girl's innocence and her lack of experience in dealing with men who desire them sexually. The girls generally regret such relationships because of [the] extreme dualism of calling their secret lovers as 'uncle' or 'brother' before others and indulging in coitus in the privacy of [the] bedroom..."(104) Fathers sometimes encourage the seduction by giving a daughter to a friend to be brought up "as his own daughter" so the friend "then initiates her to incestuous coitus."(105)
The sexual use of boys and girls goes back as far as records exist and includes all cases in India. As Mayo says, "For a period so long that none knows it beginning, the Brahmin has been intensively cultivating, and with priestly authority handing on, a passion for immature girl-children in sexual use." (106) Temple prostitution of both boys and girls has a long history, and Mayo reported in 1927 that "the little boy...is likely, if physically attractive, to be drafted for the satisfaction of grown men, or to be regularly attached to a temple, in the capacity of prostitute. Neither parent as a rule sees any harm in this, but is, rather, flattered that the son has been found pleasing."(107) Both priests and visitors used the boys and girls sexually, most of the children being "of good caste." One community of temple prostitutes numbered two hundred thousand members, according to government statistics.(108)
Child marriage has been the rule in India at least as far back as 300 B.C. The rationalization for child marriage - like that for extreme seclusion of girls, purdah(110) - is that it is necessary to protect the girl from the seductive males around her. Indian mothers of higher castes admit that they are "afraid to leave their daughters of [age eleven] at home, even for one afternoon, without a mother's eye and accessible to the men of the family. Far down the social scale the same anxiety is found. The Hindu peasant villager's wife will not leave her girl child at home alone for the space of an hour, being practically sure that, if she does so, the child will be ruined." (111) Therefore, the child has traditionally been married off as early as six or seven years of age.
While child marriages are consciously excused as defenses against seduction by males, they also, of course, carry out the seduction, since child marriages have generally been consummated right away and since the groom is almost always decades older than the child bride. As the Mahabharata says, "Let the man of thirty years wed a ten-year-old wife, a nagnika (one that has not yet menstruated), or let the man of twenty-one get one seven years old."(102) Since prior to the 1929 child Marriage Restraint Act most Indian girls were married and began sexual intercourse before age 12, they moved from familial incest to sex with older men chosen by the family while they were still children.(113)
Fathers who allowed their girls to reach puberty without being married were condemned by their religion to hell. Therefore, the first child usually was born shortly after the onset of puberty, almost always dying during childbirth because of the physical immaturity of the mother.(114) When attempts to outlaw child marriage were made in 1929, nine volumes of testimony were published by the Age of Consent Committee, most of them defending child marriage. The complaint was that it was the foundation of the Indian family, since "the girl-child must 'get herself disciplined' [raped] through actual consummation of marriage 'to look upon one individual...as her lord and husband..."(115)
Mayo said most of this committee testimony was too obscene to even repeat in its insistence on the necessity for child sex. The Committee was overwhelmed by those who insisted that the children were so oversexed that by the time they were seven years old that child marriage was their only salvation. "Little children, both boys and girls, they lament, naturally develop an unnatural, perverted and exhausting precocity, under the stimulus in which they are steeped" - that is, the family incest during the first seven years. Mayo reported numerous testimonies that blamed the little girls for their rape, claiming that early marriage was an absolute necessity, since "Cupid overtakes the hearts of girls... at an early age... . A girl's desire for sexual intercourse is eight times greater than that of males.. When there is appetite, it is the best time for giving food..."(116)
The result of this early incest was a society where adult sexuality was considered extremely dangerous, where people suffered agonies of guilt every time they engaged in sex with their spouses, where all sexual intercourse between men and women was considered polluting and where popular movies still frequently need detailed rape scenes to satisfy the male audience. (117) As might be expected, Indian religion has been permeated by perverse sexual fantasies, worship of the penis and extreme fears of loss of semen, including the worship of an incestuous penis-god, Siva - where women were expected to kiss in public the genitals of naked priests. Even today in cults such as the Hindu Sakti sect incest is advocated as "a higher grade of sexual intercourse and an advanced step toward religious perfection."(118)
The Indian subcontinent provides a veritable Galapagos of psychohistorical variations of incestuous behavior, providing examples of a wide range of evolutionary stages that can be useful in comparative historical studies of other societies. In some endogamous Indian groups, such as the Baiga, actual incestuous marriage is practiced between men and their daughters, between women and their sons, between siblings, and even between grandparents and their grandchildren. (118) "My impression is that most of them have little or no innate repulsion towards incest," Says Elwin, their ethnographer, (120) the viability of their society disproving by itself all theories about the impossibility of incestuous marriage.
Variations on the fully incestuous life style of the Baiga are numerous, and regular sexual intercourse during childhood is widespread in many Indian groups. One of the best documented is the Muria, who make their young children a part of their sexual activities in the family bed. Then, when their children are five or six years old, the parents claim they are getting too old to continue to take part in family sex, so they send them to a dormitory set up by the adults for the sexual use of the children by adolescents and older men.(121) The Muria claim it is the children's fault they have to be removed from their homes and sent to the sex dormitory:
"Some children are very good and understand [why they have to be banished from the family bed], but others are stupid and insist on crowding into the parents' room..." The adults supervise and encourage all the sexual activities that take place in the dormitories. Although at times children as little as two years of age are taken to sleep in the dormitories, they are usually not required to be part of the sex activities until 5 or 6, since if they are made to have sex at 3 or 4 they often "wet their beds [and] wake up crying."(122)
When being introduced into the sex dormitory, the children are made to fag for others and are "hammered into shape" by the adolescents in charge. The young children start their sexual activities by massaging the older children, and are only then "initiated" into actual intercourse. Intercourse begins at age 5 or 6, initiated by an adolescent or adult: "A big girl teaches a little boy by letting him fondle her breasts and hug her. Then she opens and spreads her legs and makes the little boy lie on her breasts. She shows him how to open her clothes and insert the little penis with his hand."(123)
There are two types of dormitories: the classic model, where girls cannot sleep with a partner for more than three days at a time, under threat of punishment; and the "yoking" model, where partners are "married" to each other for longer periods. The children are usually assigned partners by those in charge. Although sometimes a girl can name her own partner, she cannot choose not to have sex, or she will be gang raped:
"Should a girl refuse to come when sent for, a number of young boys are dispatched to bring her by force. When she is brought, should she refuse to elect a mate, a number of older boys violate her one after the other, until she names the boy she would have for her mate."(124)
The children have intercourse in one another's presence, with certain relatives, such as younger brothers, taking over if the older brother is ab-sent for a time.(125) "Everyone belongs to everyone else" is the spirit of these dormitories; "you change from girl to girl just as you change your rings from finger to finger," lest one be "ruined by love."(126) (All these rules, of course, are set down and changed at will by the parents, not the children.) Older married men often visit the dormitories and have sex with the children, particularly when their own wives are having their period and are considered polluted.(127) The sex dormitory system of the Muria - which is similar to that of a number of other Asian and African groups(128) - been highly praised for its "enviable" positive attitudes toward sex both by the ethnologist who studied them and by other anthropologists reporting on his research.(129) The dormitories are called a "happy, exciting world," in contrast, says the ethnologist, to other Indian villages where there was more child rape than in dormitory villages.(130)
Like India, China has only recently emerged from the infanticidal mode of childrearing, but reliable research on childhood sexuality is somewhat more limited than for India. Although parents traditionally sleep with their children until they are adolescents,(131) exactly what happens in Chinese family beds has not yet been much investigated, although some observers have reported that Chinese girls, like Indian, have no trace of a hymen, supposedly because caretakers "clean the sexual organs of the little children during daily washings... so scrupulously..."(132)
Like so many early civilizations, ancient China institutionalized pederasty of boys, child concubinage, the castration of small boys so they could be used sexually as eunuchs, the marriage of young brides with a number of brothers, widespread boy and girl prostitution and the regular sexual use of child servants and slaves.(133) Under the popular ancient sim pua system of marriage, parents would adopt a girl during infancy, bring her up as a sister to their son and then force them into a marriage that must be considered as incestuous in every way except genetically. Alternatively, they could adopt a son to marry his sister.(135) Sexual use of adopted girls was said to be common.(135) Parents would send their boys to aristocratic households for sexual use - if volunteered as a eunuch, the parents would have their boys' genitals cut off, which the parents carried with them in a jar.(136) In some areas, male marriage to boys was so popular that there are records of sacrifices to patron deities of pederasty.(137)
As was also common in other early civilizations, extreme maternal symbiosis caused the Chinese to believe that women were so powerful that they depleted men of their strength by taking their semen during intercourse. The Chinese thought women ejaculated a life force (yin) during sex, which a man could absorb and gain strength from, if he could withhold ejaculation himself. Manuals were written describing methods whereby the man could hold back his semen, terminating intercourse - called "the battle" - by inhaling the breath and sucking the saliva of the woman - who is called "the enemy.(138) During adolescence, youths were instructed to have intercourse with young girls who have "undeveloped breasts," but to practice "moderation" by withholding their semen.'(139) Rulers had more life force because they absorbed more of it from their many wives and concubines. Whether this led them to believe that men could absorb the life force from their children through intercourse is not immediately apparent, although this might be indicated by the widespread practice of buying (under the rubric of "adoption") children in infancy under the popular mui tsai system - children who were then used by their "adoptive" parents both as domestic slaves and as sexual objects.(140) Boys, too, were often adopted for sexual use, and had their feet bound like girls-bound feet being considered sexually arousing.(141)Foot binding was a unique Chinese sexual mutilation practice that was performed on girls of all classes. Like other fetishists, the Chinese were so afraid of the vagina as a dangerous, castrating organ that they could only feel erotic toward the woman's foot - mainly her big toe. As a Cheng Kuan-ying described foot binding in the nineteenth century: "When a child is four or five, or seven or eight, parents speak harshly to it, and frighten it with their looks, and oppress it in every conceivable manner so that the bones of its feet may be broken and its flesh may putrefy."(142) The girl undergoes this extremely painful process for from five to ten years, crying out in pain each night as she hobbles about the house to do her tasks while holding on to the walls for support.(143) As the bones became broken and the flesh deteriorated, her foot became a perfect penis - substitute, often losing several toes as they were bent under her foot in order to emphasize the big toe sticking out.
The penis-toe then became the focus of the man's perversion and of his sexual excitement during intercourse. "It formed an essential prelude to the sex act, and its manipulation excited and stimulated... The ways of grasping the foot in one's palms were both profuse and varied; ascending the heights of ecstasy, the lover transferred the foot from palm to mouth. Play included kissing, sucking, and inserting the foot in the mouth until it filled both cheeks, either nibbling at it or chewing it vigorously, and adoringly placing it against one's cheeks, chest, knees, or virile member.(144) Thus even sex with a female could simulate homosexual intercourse for Chinese males.
Although Chinese literature has many descriptions of the screams of girls whose feet are being crushed,(145) the sources are silent as to whether the little girl herself fully understood the sexual purpose of her mutila-tion. Since she shared the family bed with her parents and presumably observed her father playing sexually with her mother's penis - foot, it is likely that the sexual aim of her painful mutilation was apparent to her.
Japan began to move beyond the infanticidal mode of childrearing at least two centuries ago.(146) Therefore, reliable accounts of traditional Japanese childhood sexual life are harder to find. Furthermore, there is currently such a taboo on talking about sexual molestation of children that current official figures report only a few hundred cases per year in all of Japan.(147) Although some recent visitors to Japan, witnessing almost everyone reading soft-core pornographic comics (manga) that feature young girls "being accosted, surprised, tied up, beaten, knifed [and] tortured,(148) wonder whether the very low official child abuse figures reported are accurate, personal letters I have written to an-thropologists, educators, psychoanalysts and others specializing in Japanese psychology have brought nothing but denial that sexual molestation exists in substantial numbers of families in Japan today.
Ancient Japan resembled both India and China in having institutionalized Greek-style pederasty of boys - by priests as well as warriors - temple prostitution of both boys and girls, and widespread child prostitution, including the ancient geisha system.(149) Japanese brothels would start girls in sexual service at S to 7 years old.(150) Pederasty (shudo) by the aristocracy and priesthood is well documented since at least the 14th century, with young boys given by their parents to be used anally by samurais and by priests in monasteries - the buggered boys sometimes having been worshipped as gods incarnate in religious cults similar to those of the cult of the Virgin in the West.(151)
One of the most endogenous societies in the world, Japan has approved of incestuous marriages in court circles even in historical times.(152) Preferred sibling, cousin, uncle-niece and aunt-nephew marriages have been so extensive that genetics experts have discovered that the inbreeding has affected their size and health.(153) How often this incestuous marriage system occurred in traditional Japan is still largely unexplored. One indication of what is likely to be found is a 1959 study by Kubo showing that there were still rural areas in Japan where fathers married their daughters when the mother had died or was incapacitated, "in accordance with feudal family traditions.(154) Kubo concluded that incest was considered "praiseworthy conduct" in many traditional rural families. In the 36 incest cases he studied in Hiroshima, he found that there was often community moral disapproval of the families who lived in open incestuous marriages, but that the participants themselves did not think of it as immoral. In fact, when the father was unavailable to head the family, his son often took over his role and had sex with his sister in order "to end confusion in the order of the home." Other members of the family accepted this incest as normal.
In traditional Japan, quite young girls were introduced into sex by older boys who visited their bedrooms at night with the complicity of the girl's parents (called night-prowling, yobai). The boys "assembled in communal huts and instructed slightly younger village males in sex approaches and techniques..." Although they recommended "gentle persuasion,"(155) there was no guarantee that all was so gentle in fact, since the parents "looked the other way" in accordance with custom while the older boys had intercourse with their young daughters.
Western observers even today often notice that Japanese mothers still masturbate their young children during the day in public and at night in the family bed - in order, they say, "to put them to sleep."(156) The average Japanese today sleeps with his or her children until the children are ten or fifteen years old,"(157) - one recent Japanese study found daughters still sleeping with their fathers over 20 percent of the time even after age sixteen.(158) Even when the home contains a dozen rooms or more, parents and grandparents feel "lonely" if they sleep apart from the children in the family, and therefore go to bed with some child every night (the mean age in one study of children sleeping alone is 12.7 years).(159) Since so many families still practice what is termed dakine co-sleeping - with the parent or grandparent sleeping while physically embracing the child, a practice said to be beneficial to the health of the adult"(160) - and since most Japanese parents still regularly have sexual in-tercourse while the child is in bed with them,(161) one wonders how scholars can continue to maintain that nothing sexual usually happens to the Japanese child in the family bed, particularly since none have yet ask-ed the children themselves about their sexual experiences.
This stone wall on information about incest in Japan has been breach-ed somewhat by four recent studies. The first is a Japanese feminist sex survey modeled on those of Shere Hite that reported one-third of the respondents having memories of being sexually abused by relatives or close friends as children, a figure considerably higher than comparable American questionnaire studies.(162) Secondly, other studies show that the majority of urban parents in 1981 reported that they had lately begun to be bothered by the thought that children with whom they slept might be aware of their intercourse - a growing guilt about incestuous activities that was increasingly common in the West in early modern times and which led for the first time to separate beds for children.(163)
Thirdly, two recent books on Japanese incest provide new insights into the subject. The first is a report of a "hotline" set up in Tokyo by a counseling service, which analyzed the hundreds of calls they received dealing with incest.(164) Since official Japanese statistics deny the occurrence of incest, they were surprised to find that their hotline was flooded with such calls. One of their major findings is that, in addition to the usual father-daughter and sibling incest found in the West, 29 percent of the Japanese calls complained about mother - son incest. This is an extremely high proportion compared to other countries, but about what could be expected considering the common frequency with which Japanese mothers sleep alone with their sons while the father is out having sex with other women - extramarital sex still being the rule for most married men in Japan.(165)
The most commonly reported incest occurs when the mother sees her son masturbate as a teenager and tells him, "It's not good to do it alone. Your IQ becomes lower. I will help you," or "You cannot study if you cannot have sex. You may use my body," or "I don't want you to get into trouble with a girl. Have sex with me instead."(166) The researchers found that Japanese mothers and sons often sleep in the same bed and have sex together, although the exact incidence in the population was not investigated. According to the phone interviews, Japanese mothers teach their sons how to masturbate, helping them to achieve first ejaculation in much the same manner as they earlier helped them with toilet training.(167) Most of the sons had no sexual experience with another woman, and became jealous of the mothers' having sex with their fathers, feeling they should have the right to monopolize the mothers - perhaps helping explain why one informant told a family planning expert: "We have no Oedipal problems in Japan - there's no competition from the father.(168) Mother recent Japanese book, based on one hundred incest reports, confirms these observations, including the unusually high rate of mother - son incest, although it, too, provides no way to determine true national incidence rates.(169)
Finally, a recent psychohistoncal study of Japanese childhood by Kitahara (170) provides a number of new details about Japanese incest, in-cluding the acceptance of sibling incest in early historic times, the routine acceptance of pederasty up until recently, the wide extent even today of co-sleeping and co-bathing, and the degree to which incest depends on co-sleeping patterns and upon the very limited contact fathers have with their families.
The sexual use of children in the remainder of the Far East follows the pattern of India and China. In Thailand, for instance, a survey in 1990 found that 75 percent of Thai men had had sex with child prostitutes, from 20 to 40 percent of them HIV-infected, so that Asia is about to become what one expert terms "the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic."(171) The rising incidence of AIDS among children around the world is just one index of how widespread their sexual use really is.
The sexual use of children in the Middle East is probably as widespread as in the Far East.(172) Historically, all the institutionalized forms of pedophilia that were customary in the Far East are extensively documented for the Middle East during its earlier infanticidal childrearmg mode, including child marriage, child concubinage, temple prostitution of both boys and girls, parent-child marriage (among the Zoroastrians), sibling marriage (among the Egyptians, among both royalty and commoners), sex slavery, ritualized pederasty, eunichism, and widespread child prostitution. Furthermore, as in India, there are parts of the Middle East where customs from earlier times have been maintained intact, so that more detail is available than is usually preserv-ed in historical documents.
In the oasis of Siwa, for instance, mothers regularly give their boys to older men for sexual use, both related and outside the family, and fathers regularly lend their young sons to each other, similar to the Central Asian Islarnic tradition of bacaboz, where most fathers trade their sons with others for sexual use.(173) Pederastic marriages and pederastic prostitution have been so widespread in Siwa until just recently that everyone is accustomed to the proposition that men normally love boys more than they do women, saying: "They will kill each other for a boy. Never for a woman."(174) Muslim holy men (imaam) regularly have boys available for sex, saying the ingestion of the imaam's semen is necessary for absorbing his spiritual powers, sometimes even extending to formal marriage with the boy.
Sex for boys in the Middle East is said to begin in infancy and continue throughout childhood. Parents and others masturbate the infant's penis in order "to increase its size and strengthen it," and older siblings have been observed playing with the genitals of babies for hours at a time.(175) As the boy gets older, mutual masturbation, fellatio and anal intercourse are said to be common among children, particularly with the older boys using the younger children as sex objects as a reaction to the over stimulation of the family bed. Pederasty of boys by the men in and near the ex-tended family is said by an Arab sociologist to be common, since "the mere sight of pretty boys is regarded.. .as disturbing and terribly tempting."(176) Moralists often find it necessary to issue warnings such as these: "A man should never spend the night in a house with beardless boys" and "Do not sit next to the sons of the rich and noble: they have faces like those of virgins and they are even more tempting than women."(177)
By the time of circumcision - a traumatic ritual(178) that is usually performed at ages 3 to 6, whose unconscious purpose is to purify the boy and cleanse him(179) of the molestation to which he has been subjected - the boy is supposed to stop wearing the dress-like shin that allows ready access to his genitals and begin wearing pants. However, since he often continues to sleep in the parental bed, to have sex with siblings and cousins, to experience sexual attacks at school and to attend nude public baths (hammam) with his mother and sisters,(180) his sexual over stimulation often continues into the 7- to 14-year-old phase. Much of the incest may occur in the baths. Bouhdiba reports: "The hammam...is a highly eroticized place - so much so indeed that the name has come to signify for the masses the sexual act itself... 'going to the hammam' quite simply means 'making love'.. .Every Muslim can relive his childhood in terms of his experience of the hammam. . notoriously a place of homosexuality, male and female.. .there the child has all the time in the world to contemplate, examine and compare sexual organs [so that] every Muslim is fixated on his mother..."(181)
As girls in the Middle East are considered worth less than boys, it may be that their incestuous use during childhood is even more prevalent. One report found that four out of five Middle Eastern women recalled having been forced into fellatio between the ages of 3 and 6 by older brothers and other relatives.(182) A female Arab physician who recently conducted an extensive study of childhood seduction reported that "most female children are exposed to.. incidents of sexual assault" during their early years by "the brother, the cousin, the paternal uncle, the maternal uncle, the grandfather or even the father. If not a family member, he may be the guardian or porter of the house, the teacher, the neighbor's son, or any other man." (183) The molestation, she says, begins with masturbation or fellatio and then proceeds to intercourse. "In most cases the girl surrenders and is afraid to complain to anyone, since, if there is any punishment to be meted out, it will always end up by being inflicted on her. It is she alone who loses her honor and virginity. The man never loses anything..." The incidents are termed "frequent, but remain hidden, stored up in the secret recesses of the female child's self, since she dare not tell anyone of what has happened to her..."
Girls are reported to be sexually assaulted at school and in the streets,(184) and child marriage has proved as difficult to stamp out in many areas as it has been in India.(185) The assaults are accompanied by severe physical and psychological damage, according to research by one group of medical experts at the Ministry of Justice in Cairo, and usually go unpunished even in those rare occasions when they are brought to the attention of authorities, "in order to avoid scandal.(186) Since the girl's hymen must be intact when she gets married, surgical repair is sometimes requested in order to conceal the loss of virginity through the assaults. As in the Far East, young servants are particularly favored sexual objects, both for men whose wives are absent, menstruating, pregnant or frigid and for adolescents who sometimes feel less guilty having sex with ser-vant girls than with their sisters.(187)
Arab women, of course, are often aware that their spouses prefer having sex with little boys and girls to having sex with them. Their retribution for the men's pedophilia comes when the girl is about age 6, when the women of the house grab her, pull her thighs apart and cut off her clitoris and sometimes her labia with a razor, thus usually ending her ability to feel sexual pleasure forever.
The custom of clitoridectomy - which is not part of any religious doc-trine and is not even mentioned in the Koran-goes back at least to pre-dynastic Egyptian times;(188) even mummies were missing their clitorises and labia.(189) Presently, many Middle Eastern and African countries continue to practice circumcision of girls. A recent survey of Egyptian girls and women showed 97 percent of uneducated families and 66 percent of educated families still practicing clitoridectomy.(190) Nor is the practice decreasing; Hosken says "more female children are mutilated today than throughout history" and estimates that there are presently 74 million mutilated females in countries where documentation exists.(191)
Often the girl's labia are cut off in addition to the clitoris - the so-called "Pharaonic circumcision" or "infibulation" - and the remaining flesh is sewn together, leaving only a small opening for urination. The vagina must of course be cut open before intercourse, and the women often also have great difficulty giving birth and have to be further cut to allow the baby to pass through. The vaginal area is then re-sewn together after the baby is born "to give the men more pleasure during intercourse" and has to be cut open again during each successive birth. During all of these mutilations the girls undergo excruciating pain, sometimes die of complications, usually hemorrhage, often pass out from the shock (since no anesthetic is used) and often suffer from tetanus, blood poisoning, chronic urinary tract infections and infertility.
The rationalization given for clitoridectomy is that little girls are naturally so sexual that it is necessary "to release them from their bondage to sex" and "to stop them from masturbating." One informant reported that "girls fell from their bicycles because of sexual overstimulation if their clitorises were not cut."(193) Since the operation usually makes the girl frigid, it can be said to achieve its stated aim of reducing girls' sexual pleasure. Men usually do not want to marry women with intact clitorises, believing they will be "oversexed" and betray them. It is the custom in some countries on the wedding night for the husband to be the one to cut his bride's vagina open with a knife, then have repeated intercourse to prevent it from closing again.
The initial mutilation of the girl's genitals is usually done by the women of the family, under the supervision of the mother. The unconscious motive seems to be revenge for the men's sexual abuse of the girl, since interviews so often reveal earlier memories of seduction. One women relates her memory of her clitoridectomy as follows:
I was six years old that night when I lay in my bed, warm and peaceful...I felt something move under the blankets, something like a huge hand, cold and rough, fumbling over my body, as though looking for something. Almost simultaneously another hand.. .was clapped over my mouth to prevent me from screaming.
They carried me to the bathroom... I remember.. a rasping metallic sound which reminded me of the butcher when he used to sharpen his knife... My blood was frozen in my veins... I realized my thighs had been pulled wide apart, and that each of my lower limbs was being held as far away from the other as possible... I felt that the rasping knife or blade was heading straight down towards my throat. Then suddenly the sharp metallic edge seemed to drop between my thighs and there cut off a piece of flesh from my body.
I screamed with pain despite the tight hand held over my mouth, for the pain was not just a pain, it was like a searing flame that went through my whole body. After a few moments, I saw a red pool of blood around my hips.
I did not know what they had cut off from my body, and did not try to find out. I just wept, and called out to my mother for help. But the worst shock of all was when I looked around and found her standing by my side. Yes, it was her, I could not be mistaken, in flesh and blood, right in the midst of these strangers, talking to them and smiling at them.(194)
Clitoridectomy - like all genital mutilations of children - is, of course, an act of incest motivated by the perversions of the adults who perform the mutilation. Although we are not used to thinking of it in this way, in fact mothers who attack their daughters' genitals with knives are as incestuous as fathers who rape them.
Since genital mutilation is one of the most widespread childrearing practices, its presence alone makes incest a universal practice-despite our habit of denying its sexual motivation by terming it a "rite of passage (it often involves no passage to a new state at all) or a "puberty rite" (it usually occurs long before puberty). Also, the sexual excitement of the adults attending the mutilation is overlooked, even when - as in Siwa - the mother masturbates the child prior to the mutilation, or when - as in Morocco - prostitutes regularly attend the mutilation ceremony in order to relieve the sexual tensions generated, or when - as in Australia - the mutilation is followed by group rape.(195)
The mutilation of children's genitals is such a important need in humans that whole religions and state systems have been founded upon the practice. Yet when scholars attempt to explain why almost everyone since the beginning of recorded history has massively assaulted the genitals of their children, they assiduously deny that it is a sexual perversion or that those who do it ever mean any harm to the children.
Arnold van Gennep calls genital mutilation a ceremony "whose essential purpose is to enable the individual to pass from one defined position to another," never wondering why parents couldn't celebrate the maturing of their children in a less harmful way."' Bruno Bettleheim claims that little boys want their genitals cut-because of an inborn "vagina envy" - and that the mutilation was so "pleasurable" to the victims that they asked adults to cut them, so they could "express their happiness."(197) Others have claimed genital mutilation was done "to enforce social cohesion" (Yehudi Cohen), "to break an excessively strong dependence upon the mother" (John Whiting), to show the child "We love you, but we must rid you of your infantilisms" (Theodor Reik), and to make the penis look like that of a kangaroo (John Cawte).(198)
There is hardly an imaginable form of genital assault that is not regularly performed on children. Girls' genitals are tattooed, cut off, sewn up, burned off, and ripped open with the fingers.(199) Boys' genitals are pierced by objects, sewn up, burned, cut off, flayed, "gashed open [so that] wedges of flesh are removed," and slashed through to the urethra so that "the penis splits open like a boiled frankfurter."(200) The topic of childhood genital mutilation is so rich in meaning that it will have to await further discussion in the next two major sections of this study, "The Cross-Cultural Study of Incest," where the universality of incest in contemporary preliterate groups is documented, and "The History of Incest," where evidence is presented for the historical stages in the evolution of Homo eroticus from incest to love.
Citations
http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/06a1_incest.html
The Journal of Psychohistory, Fall 1991, Vol. 19, No. 2
"A new motto: What has been done to you, poor child?"-Sigmund Freud, letter to Wilhelm Fliess, Dec.22, 1897, citing Goethe, after relating his patient's memoryof having been raped by her father at age two.
Ever since the Greek historians first wrote about the customs of other nations, scholars have compared the habits of different cultures, hoping to discover meaningful regularities in human behavior.
Yet the only universal trait that Contemporary social scientists and historians agree has been found in every known culture is the prohibition of incest. As one standard text puts it, "The taboo on incest within the immediate family is one of the few known cultural universals."(1) Kroeber stated, "If ten anthropologists were asked to designate one universal institution, nine would likely name the incest prohibition; some have expressly named it as the only universal one."(2) That "no known tribe has ever permitted incest"(3) has been a truism for cross-cultural studies ever since Durkheim and Westermarck's early books on the subject.(4)
Furthermore, the same authors go on to state that the universal prohibitions on incest are virtually always effective, so that incest itself is rarely found in any society. Even when societies are found that approve of incest, they only "serve rather to emphasize than to disprove the universality of intra-family incest taboos," according to George Murdock.(5) Incestuous societies simply cannot exist, since, according to Talcott Parscins, the effective prohibition of incest is "linked with the functioning of every society."(6) The abolition of incest was accomplished at the beginning of human culture, Leslie White says, since without it "social evolution could have gone no further on the human level than among the anthropoids."(7) As Levi-Strauss concluded, "the prohibition of incest can be found at the dawn of culture... [It] is culture itself." (8)
The certainty with which the effective prohibition of incest has been declared leads one to look for the evidence these authors might have for their assertions. Yet such a search soon proves quite fruitless. Most of them cite no evidence at all, or at most refer to a single cross cultural survey by Murdock in his book, Social Structure. Murdock's study, however, turns out not to be about incest at all, if by incest one means actual sexual relations between family members other than spouses. What Murdock studied was marriage rules. Yet authors continue to assume Murdock proved that a universal prohibition on incest itself exists, not just a prohibition on intra-farnily marriage.(9)
Indeed, rather than examining the actual occurrence of incest in either historical or contemporary groups, the voluminous literature on the subject instead speculates on why incest supposedly doesn't occur. Many explanations have been proposed: the biological impairments attendant upon inbreeding, the utility of social alliances, the collapse of the family if sexual rivalry is allowed, even boredom with family members. When exceptions have been acknowledged-royal incest in dozens of societies,(10) sibling incest among the general population in others,(11) widespread pederasty in still others,(12) - discussion has continued to focus on why incest is supposedly rare, not on whether it really is.
One begins to realize how odd this is when it is compared, say, with the study of other deviant acts, such as homicide. Although effective laws against murder long preceded laws against incest - and were far more often enforced rather than winked at - no one thinks of writing hundreds of studies on why mankind has a "universal homicide taboo."(13)
This essay is intended to consider the evidence for the opposite hypothesis: That it is incest itself - and not the absence of incest - that has been universal for most people in most places at most times. Further-more, the earlier in history one searches, the more evidence there is of universal incest, just as there is more evidence of other forms of child abuse."(14)
Two kinds of incest will be considered: direct incest, overt sexual ac-tivity between family members other than spouses; and indirect incest, the providing of children by their parents to others in order for them to be sexually molested.
There are two reasons why I believe indirect incest must be included in any definition of incestuous activity. First of all, arranging for children to have sex with other household members or neighbors is usually motivated by the incestuous wishes of the parent; and, in any case, it is usually perceived by the child to be similar to direct incest. Secondly, clinical studies show that contemporary sexual abuse usually involves a parent or guardian, who, if not the direct perpetrator, covertly brings about the incident in order to satisfy their own incestuous wishes.(15)
PSYCHOANALYTIC VIEWS ON THE REALITY OF INCEST
When Sigmund Freud discovered that eighteen of his hysterical pa-tients had conscious memories of childhood sexual seductions, mostly by family members, he faced a theoretical impasse.(16) Since he believed only repressed memories could produce hysterical symptoms, the easily accessible detailed memories of his patients could not be the real cause of their hysteria. He therefore concluded that there must in each case have been an earlier seduction, the memory of which was repressed, generally occurring between the ages of two and five and never later than eight. These early scenes had to be reconstructed from fantasies and dreams, and even when Freud pieced them together for the patient, he admitted, "they have no feeling of remembering the scenes."(17)
These earlier infantile reconstructions, Freud quite correctly decided in 1897, were "scenes of seduction [that] had never taken place. ..they were only phantasies which my patients had made up or which I myself had perhaps forced on them."(18) But the clear memories of seduction in later childhood and adolescence that his patients had spontaneously reported to him and about which they had strong reality feelings, he never doubted - contrary to the assertions of critics like Masson and Miller, who claim Freud lost his courage and denied that any incest had actually taken place.(19) The particular theory of hysteria which he admitted "broke down under the weight of its own improbability" (20) was the infantile seduction theory and did not imply any doubting of his patients' memories of real incest.
For the rest of his life, in fact, Freud reiterated his belief that these clear memories of incestuous attacks were real. In 1905 he wrote, "I can-not admit that in my paper on 'The Aetiology of Hysteria' I exaggerated the frequency or importance of.. the effects of seduction, which treats a child as a sexual object prematurely..." (21) Later, he repeatedly wrote such statements as that "the sexual abuse of children is found with uncanny frequency among school teachers and child attendants.. and phantasies of being seduced are of particular interest, because so often they are not phantasies but real memories." (22) Furthermore, he considered the incestuous memories of such patients as Katharina, Rosalia H., Elisabeth von R. and the Wolf Man as reality, not fantasy, saying of such traumatic child abuse "You must not suppose.. that sexual abuse of a child by its nearest male relatives belongs entirely to the realm of phan-tasy. Most analysts will have treated cases in which such events were real and could be unimpeachably established..."(23) He even called his own memories "genuine" of having been sexually molested as a little boy by his nurse, who had not only forced him to perform sexually and, he reported, "complained because I was clumsy," but also, he said, washed him in water that contained her own menstrual blood. (24)
Therefore, regardless of all that has been written about the subject, an unbiased reading of Freud's works shows that whenever he confronted clear evidence of sexual molestation, he called it seduction, not fantasy. There was no "great reversal," no "suppression of seduction," no "betrayal of the child," no "assault on truth."
Freud's courage in acknowledging the extent of childhood sexual molestation was not shared by the majority of his colleagues. Most, like Jung, simply avoided the topic. Others, who noted that large numbers of their patients had clear memories of incestuous rape, blamed the victim, saying, like Abraham, that the molestation "was desired by the child unconsciously [because of an] abnormal psycho-sexual constitution..." (25)
Analysts since Freud have routinely reported memories of seduction as unconscious wishes, while analysts of children regularly neglected to ask their patients whether their reports were real or not.(26) Psychoanalytic in-stitutes have often taught that all memories of incest were wishes. One analyst recalls, "I was taught in my... early years in psychiatry, as most of us were, to look very skeptically upon the incestuous sexual material described by my patients.. Any inclination on my part, or that of my colleagues in the training situation, to look upon these productions of the patient as having some reality basis was scoffed at and was seen as evidence of our naivete... "(27)
Even when analysts were presented with evidence of childhood sexual and physical abuse so overwhelming they could not disbelieve it, they usually paid little attention to it in their case histories. For instance, Otto Kemberg rarely reports on child abuse in his extensive studies on his borderline patients. When he was personally told by a researcher that many recent studies of borderlines showed extremely high rates of sexual and physical abuse as children, he admitted that while this was true of his borderline patients as well, "it is hard to know what to make of it."(28)
Freud's view of the reality of childhood seduction was not, however, wholly missing from earlier psychoanalytic literature. Ferenczi not only found that many of his patients had clear memories of late childhood seduction but also described how many of his adult patients confessed to having sexual relations with children, concluding: "The real rape of girls who have hardly grown out of the age of infants, similar sexual acts of mature women with boys, and also enforced homosexual acts, are more frequent occurrences than has hitherto been assumed."(29) Many women analysts, such as Bonaparte, Jacobson, Greenacre and Reich, (30) were able to empathize with their female patients and admit the reality of their memories of incestuous abuse. Rheingold reported encountering surprisingly frequent cases of real incest in his patients, including a great deal of overt maternal masturbation of young children, fathers orgastically flagellating their daughters, parents forcing children to handle the parents' genitals, mothers encouraging uncles to rape their children, and so on, wondering why "scant attention" had been given to such material by others.(31) Robert Fliess, after a lifetime of psychoanalytic experience in the removal of amnesia from early memories, regularly found real sexual molestation of his patients at the core of their problems, and concluded that "no one is ever made sick by his fantasies. Only traumatic memories in repression can cause the neurosis."(32)
In the past decade, with the growing realization by the public of how widespread childhood sexual abuse is in contemporary society, psychoanalysts have begun to report on the therapeutic necessity of acknowledging early sexual seduction, They have even wondered if the analyst's denial might have prevented cure in those cases where reanalysis discovered incestuous abuse that the first analyst had denied. (33) In a recent study connecting borderline personality disorders and childhood sexual abuse, Herman and her colleagues report that "such patients may show remarkable improvement when the connection between symptom and trauma is recognized."(34)
In recent years, psychoanalysts have begun to report uncovering considerable early sexual abuse that had gone previously unrecognized. One analyst described the analysis of a woman who had been raped at four years of age, saying "it took eighteen years of weekly sessions before there was a complete remission of symptoms...Would not an earlier recognition of the actual childhood rape have saved us many hours of analysis?" (35) Even the conservative Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association recently concluded a review of the question of the reality of incest by asking "Have thousands of analyses and clinical studies not yet resolved the question of whether adult hysterics had been assaulted or seduced in infancy and childhood? The answer is that they have not."(36)
CHILDHOOD SEXUAL ABUSE IN CONTEMPORARY WESTERN SOCIETIES
In determining the actual incidence of childhood sexual abuse in modern societies, the main problem is that one must rely upon witnesses who have enormous emotional difficulties in reporting what they find - far more so than with any other psychohistorical subject I have encountered.
For one thing, most writers on the subject have themselves usually been advocates of pedophilia. Ever since the early studies of such sexologists as Symonds and Eglinton,(37) most writing on incest has been by scholars hoping to justify sexual relations with children by showing how widespread the practice has been. Many openly state, as do Allen Edwardes and R. E. L. Masters, that "there is no shame in being a ... pederast or a rapist if one is satisfied," (38) or claim that incest can be a positive, healthy experience," as does social worker LeRoy Schultz, who writes extensively on childhood sexuality. (39) Even Kinsey wrote: "It is difficult to understand why a child, except for its cultural conditioning, should be disturbed at having its genitalia touched," (40) while his coauthor in the Kinsey studies, Wardell Pomeroy, wrote that "incest between adults and younger children can.. be a satisfying and enriching experience..."(41)
One must use the research of such scholars with extreme caution, since their main motive is to deny the coercion involved when adults seduce lonely, unloved children. Yet the task of digging through the truly staggering amount of literature on sexuality in past and present societies (42) (there are over sixty journals alone with regular articles on the subject) is so overwhelming that, in order to locate the rare primary sources that are available, the researcher cannot avoid consulting the life work of pedophilia advocates.
Statistical studies on the incidence of child sexual molestation in the United States go back to 1929,(43) but these early works were generally ignored by a public accustomed to disbelieving children's accusations and to the lack of punishment for the occasional molesters who were apprehended. The official incidence figures from the American Humane Association, working from reports from child protective agencies, estimated only 7,000 incidents in the U.S. for 1976. Although the AMA estimates rose steadily to 113,000 incidents for 1985,(44) even these larger figures represented under one percent of American children. Kinsey was surprised to find that 24 percent of his female subjects easily recalled sexual advances by adult males when they were children, but he downplayed their importance since most, he said, were non-contact approaches that he thought unimportant. (45) Except for a single study by Landis in 1956 reporting a third of his sample of 1,800 college students recalling childhood sexual molestation, (46) it was not until the late 197Os and early 1980s that careful studies began to be reported with samples large enough to warrant careful statistical analysis.
Although these two dozen studies have had somewhat differing definitions of sexual molestation and of the age criteria, their results can be made comparable (47) by eliminating noncontact abuse (such as exhibitionism) from the definition and by requiring either evidence of force or an age discrepancy of at least five years when the victim is over 12. When these adjustments are made, the studies report childhood memories of contact sexual molestation at rates ranging from 6 to 45 percent for women and from 3 to 30 percent for men.
The lower incidence figures in these studies turn out to be due to the method used in compiling them, As one moves from the lower to the higher figures, one discovers that the interview techniques begin to acknowledge the resistances of the respondents to such emotional questions. The lower figures are in response to written questionnaires or brief telephone calls, contacts that were considered intrusive by the respondent, while the higher figures, such as those of Wyatt and Russell (48) were the result of carefully structured face-to-face interviews lasting from one to eight hours.(49) Obviously it takes a good bit of trust before respondents begin to relate memories of childhood seduction to strangers. Using these two studies, then, as the most accurate we have to date, one finds that either 38 percent (Russell) or 45 percent (Wyatt) of women interviewed reported memories of familial and/or extrafamilial sexual abuse during their childhood, almost half of which was directly incestuous.
Figures as accurate as these for men's memories of seduction are more difficult to obtain. The highest figure reported to date, that of Landis, is 30 percent. Other studies report lower figures because they are from brief questionnaires. Although most comparisons of male and female victimization show molestation of boys only about a third the rate of girls, (50) there is evidence that males are far more reluctant to reveal their molestation, partly because it usually occurs earlier for boys than for girls and partly because victimization may be even more difficult for boys to recall and report than for girls. Because it was conducted by interviews, the 30 percent rate of Landis' study undoubtedly is the most reliable we have for boys. Therefore, the best estimates for memories of childhood sexual abuse we now have for the United States are 40 percent for girls and 30 percent for boys, almost half directly incestuous for girls and about a quarter directly incestuous for boys. (51)
Yet even these astonishingly high figures are only a portion of the hid-den true incidence rates. Four additional factors raise the actual rates even higher:
The groups interviewed do not include many people in the American population who have far higher than average sexual molestation experiences, including institutionalized criminals, prostitutes, juveniles in shelters and psychotics (52),
the studies only count admissions to the interviewer of abuse, and it is unlikely that no conscious memories were ever suppressed during the interviews,
a large percent of each study refused to be interviewed, and these may have been the most victimized of all,(53) and
most importantly, these studies include only clear conscious memories of events-unconscious memories, which are usually only uncovered during psychotherapy, would increase these rates.
It is possible to correct the incidence rates statistically for these factors, Although only 11 percent of Russell's respondents recalled being victimized before the age of five, another study shows the most common age of sexual abuse reported to authorities is four years, while other studies report that from 21 to 50 percent of reported sexual abuse victims involve children under five.(54) Since few people consciously recall traumatic events of any kind before the age of five, and since the graph for sexual abuse distribution by age runs roughly level from ages two to sixteen,(55) the incidence figures stated above should be increased by at least an additional 50 percent(56) to account for these three factors, Therefore, the corrected incidence rates are at least 60 percent for Girls and 45 percent for boys. Until someone is courageous enough to directly question the children themselves whether they have been molested - a simple procedure that has never been done in any published study to date - 60 and 45 percent should be considered as the most reliable national incidence rates we now have available for the U.S.
These reports of childhood seduction are considered by researchers to be real memories, not fantasies. Not only do most researchers conclude, like Russell, that "underdisciosure was a significant problem... not fabrication of experiences," (57) but another study of 53 women that attempted to independently confirm memories of childhood incest found 74 percent could be positively confirmed plus another 9 percent indirectly supported, while none were discovered to be just fantasies.(58)
Because of such reliability studies, reports of memories of childhood seduction need not be as distrusted as they were in Freud's time. The memories reported to these investigators were not vague images reconstructed in psychotherapy, nor were any incidents counted if they involved just exhibition of genitals to the child or other non-contact sexual approaches. Nor did any of these studies inquire about such common sexualized traumas as the constant giving of enemas or regular sexualized beating, both of which are often equivalents for the child to genital seduction.(59) These figures were limited to clear memories of oven con-tact experiences such as intercourse, fellatio, cunnilingus, mutual masturbation, anal intercourse and the kissing or sucking of the child's breasts or genitals.
The circumstances of these seductions have been documented in the large clinical literature on molestation, only a portion of which can be summarized here. Russell found that "most perpetrators lived under the same roof as their victims."(60) Most (85 percent) of the perpetrators were at least five years older than their victims.(61) Of incest cases with females, uncles accounted for 25 percent of the perpetrators, followed in frequency by fathers (15 percent), brothers (12 percent) and stepfathers (8 per-cent).(62) Women commit incest more rarely - at least in America - although the number may be larger than realized since studies of boys in early childhood are so sketchy (studies have found many mothers quite seductive toward their children even when they were being observed in a laboratory situation).(63)
Even when the actual perpetrator isn't a relation, the parent or guardian is somehow implicated in at least 80 percent of the cases.(64) The other 20 percent contain many cases where parents invite neighbors to sleep with their children, or do nothing about older brothers who molest younger siblings, or leave children with babysitters after they discover evidence of molestation, or continue to allow boyfriends to be alone with children after molestation. One must therefore conclude that the majority of cases of childhood molestation are either perpetuated by caretakers or are consciously or unconsciously set up by them.(65)
Recent studies have destroyed many myths about sexual abuse. Abuse is experienced at far younger ages than once thought - 81 percent occurring before puberty and 42 percent under age 7(66) - and involves far less mild forms than has been assumed-even for infants the majority of seductions involve oral, anal or genital penetration.(67) Seduction of younger children by teens, often previously labeled "experimentation," has now been found to be a quite serious problem, often the result of an earlier seduction of the teenager or another comparably severe traumatic experience,(68) In fact, some studies show that half of all reported cases of child molestation and 20 percent of all rapes are committed by persons under the age of 18.(69)
Contrary to the earlier notion that sexual abuse occurred mainly among the poor, there actually is no correlation between economic class and rates of abuse.(70) Most pedophiles are male, although recent research is beginning to discover more female seduction of little children than previously reported, particularly since, as Lew has pointed out, "sexual activity between older women and young boys is rarely treated as abusive." (71) In all, only about 2 percent of total incestuous abuse is ever reported, and only a tiny portion of these few are ever convicted, even today,(72) putting the notion to rest that society is as yet really much interested in stopping the practice. Finally, the number of molestation incidents per child may be fairly high; while in Russell's study 43 percent of the cases of incestuous abuse are remembered as occurring only once, another study of reported incidents found that the average duration of abuse is five years.(73)
The best evidence for the cause of pedophilia is provided by the clinical reports of the psychotherapists who have written extensively on the subject.(74) The pedophile, similar to other perverts, suffers from severe lack of love and fears of individuation in his or her early childhood, and both desires and dreads merging with the mother because of an enormous need to reinstate mother child unity. Earlier childhood abuse of pedophiles is commonly found. As an adult, the pedophile must have sex with children in order to maintain the illusion of being loved, while at the same time dominating the children as they themselves once experienced domination, repeating actively their own caretaker's sadism. The pedophile uses the child as a breast-substitute, both in the sense of using him or her for gratification and also as an object for sadistic aggression.
The pedophile's sexual activity is extraordinarily compulsive because it wards off recurring feelings of fragmentation, depression and death. This helps explain why the pedophile's sexual targets are so inter-changeable and why an active pedophile often seduces hundreds of children in his or her life. The seduction of children is a desperate defense against fears of personal disintegration. It should not be thought of - as it usually is by historians and anthropologists - as "an outbreak of instinctual sexuality." or as being due to "a lack of impulse controls" or "a weak superego." Adults who molest children have extremely powerful punitive superegos and are often highly religious. They are driven to their acts not by their sexual instincts but by their overwhelming intrapsychic anxieties. Given the seriousness of the perversion, it is not surprising that successful therapeutic methods have only recently become available.(75)
The time when one could deny that sexual seduction is extremely traumatic for children appears to have ended. The more studies that come out on the effects of childhood sexual abuse, the more severe the damage is found to be. The flood of books and articles documenting the emotional problems of victims both in childhood and in later life has to be read in detail to appreciate the profound sense of betrayal and the terrifying fears felt by the child, so that even single incidents have the power to permanently ravage their lives. Severe somatic reactions, depersonalization, self-hatred, hysterical seizures, depression, borderline personality formation, promiscuity, sexual dysfunctions, suicide, self-mutilation, night terrors and flashbacks, multiple personalities, post-traumatic stress disorders, delinquency, bulemia, and the overall stunting of feelings and capacities have all been documented - the earlier and the more often the abuse, the worse the damage.(76)
Outside the U.S., there has been only one comparably reliable study published: a thirteen-hundred-page report on face-to-face interviews of over 2,000 men and women done for the Canadian government by the Gallup organization, which concludes with incidence rates approximately the same as the U.S. studies.(77) In Latin America, anthropologists report a great deal of family sexual activity and widespread pederasty as part of macho masculine activity, though reliable statistics of incidence are not yet available. (78) In Puerto Rico, for instance, Oscar Lewis found "danger of seduction by stepfathers, sexual rivalry between sisters, between mother and daughters [and] male children erotically stimulated by their mothers and by other members of the family,"(79) E. N. Padilla reported parents and others regularly masturbating the infant's penis(80) and Romon Frendandez-Marina found Peurto Rican fathers often masturbating their boys to show off their maleness to friends." In Mexico, J. M. Carrier reported a large proportion of Mexican men had sexual relations with nephews, cousins or neighbors between the ages of 6 and 9. (82)
European countries are about two decades behind the U.S. in interview techniques, and since they still use written questionnaires they usually report sexual abuse rates of under one percent. (83) Most European studies do not attempt to study statistical frequency, though some - such as a series of studies on Scandinavian incest - report considerable public acceptance of incest in some rural areas. (84)
Even though there are no reliable statistics for most European countries, a recent flurry of books, articles and telephone "hotlines" has begun to reveal widespread sexual molestation. A recent BBC "ChildWatch" program asked its female listeners - a large though biased sample - if they remembered sexual molestation, and, of the 2,530 replies analyzed, 83 percent remembered someone touching their genitals, 62 percent of the full sample recalling actual intercourse.(85) Official estimates of German children sexually abused and raped each year now number over 300,000, and sexual abuse hot lines are becoming more widespread.(86) The establishment of Italian "SOS-infanzia" hotlines - initially much resented by the public - have begun to reveal widespread pedophile networks, baby prostitution and Boy Scout/Girl Guide molestation, as well as the widespread sexual abuse of children within famines, with a particular emphasis on the pederasty of boys. (87) Finally, the most careful European study to date is a recent unpublished German survey by the Iinstitut fuer Kindheit that for the first time anywhere dared to ask the children themselves about their sexual experiences. I have been told that these researchers found an 80 percent childhood sexual molestation rate among Berlin school children.(88) The exact details of this study will certainly be revealing when it is published. It may be that direct questioning of children rather than relying on retrospective memory may produce even higher real incidence rates of sexual molestation than our 60 percent and 45 percent estimates for the U.S.
PEDOPHILIA IN THE EAST AND MIDDLE EAST
However high the rates of childhood molestation may turn out to be in contemporary Western countries, the incidence in countries outside the West is likely to be much higher. Because they have only recently moved beyond what I have termed the infanticidal mode of chiidrearing, whereby as much as half of the children born were killed by their parents,(89) the use of children for the emotional needs of adults is far more accepted, an attitude that fosters widespread incestuous acts along with other child abuse. Although the evidence is scattered and much remains hidden, enough exists to indicate the dimensions of what eventual scholarship will probably uncover.
Childhood in much of India begins with the young child being regularly masturbated by the mother, "high caste or low caste, the girl 'to make her sleep well,' the boy 'to make him manly..."' This practice has been said to be widespread by many reliable observers, including Catherine Mayo - whose extensive investigations in India in the 1920s led to the first child marriage laws(90) - a physician,(91) an ethnologist,(92) a religious scholar (93) and a sociologist.(94) As is the case with virtually all non-Western cultures, the child sleeps in the family bed for several years and regularly observes sexual intercourse between the parents. The extent to which Indian parents go beyond this and overtly have sex with the child cannot be determined. Rampal, the sociologist who recently did interviews modeled on the Kinsey studies about contemporary Indian sexual practices, concludes that "there is a lot of incest...It is hidden along with other secrets of families and rarely gets a chance to come out, like seduction at the hands of trusted friends of the family... To arrive at even a passable estimate of incest cases would be to touch the hornet's nest.. no one will ever confess to such a deed, therefore, any attempt to collect statistics may prove to be futile at present."(95)
Boys as well as girls are reported as being masturbated and raped by the men in the family, including fathers, older brothers, uncles and cousins.(96) By the time children are four or five, they are usually taken to bed at night by others in the extended household. "A particular uncle may like her to sleep in his room, which is considered a great gesture of closeness."(97) As one girl describes it: "I hardly ever slept with my parents after I was four. I rotated almost every night between my various uncles and sometimes my grandmother. But it was difficult to have any space in her bed because all the grandsons slept in her bed.. So I prefer-red to sleep in [uncle's] bed, who was very nice and put his arms around me in winter."(98) This practice is similar to the customary sharing of their wives by brothers, who have free sexual access to each other's wives, an ancient practice still approved of in some areas in India.(99)
So acceptable is sex between close relatives in India that uncle-niece and cross-cousin marriages were preferred among certain Indian groups.(100) As the old Indian proverb has it, "For a girl to be a virgin at ten years old, she must have neither brothers nor cousin nor father." These sleeping patterns with relatives who live in common residences continue even after marriage, since husbands are often cold to wives, and sex with the husband's younger brother is covertly encouraged by the family to give the wife someone to be "close" to.(101) Grandfathers often call the little girls "my little wife," give them candy and "play the role of an old seducer," teasing them by saying "Don't you want to marry me?"(102) One observer stuns up traditional Indian sexual stimulation during childhood as follows: "The little Hindu girls are deflowered by the little boys with whom they play, and repeat together the erotic lessons which their parents have unwittingly taught them on account of the general promiscuity of family life throughout India. In all the little girls of less than ten years of age the complete hymen is wanting.. Incest is often the rule rather than the exception."(103)
In addition to direct incest by parents, the seduction of little girls who are taken in as wards or servants is quite common. Many older men, Rampal reports, "get down to seducing young girls whom they give protection at home for any reason - education, service, relationship, close friendship with father or brother. [They] take full advantage of the girl's innocence and her lack of experience in dealing with men who desire them sexually. The girls generally regret such relationships because of [the] extreme dualism of calling their secret lovers as 'uncle' or 'brother' before others and indulging in coitus in the privacy of [the] bedroom..."(104) Fathers sometimes encourage the seduction by giving a daughter to a friend to be brought up "as his own daughter" so the friend "then initiates her to incestuous coitus."(105)
The sexual use of boys and girls goes back as far as records exist and includes all cases in India. As Mayo says, "For a period so long that none knows it beginning, the Brahmin has been intensively cultivating, and with priestly authority handing on, a passion for immature girl-children in sexual use." (106) Temple prostitution of both boys and girls has a long history, and Mayo reported in 1927 that "the little boy...is likely, if physically attractive, to be drafted for the satisfaction of grown men, or to be regularly attached to a temple, in the capacity of prostitute. Neither parent as a rule sees any harm in this, but is, rather, flattered that the son has been found pleasing."(107) Both priests and visitors used the boys and girls sexually, most of the children being "of good caste." One community of temple prostitutes numbered two hundred thousand members, according to government statistics.(108)
Child marriage has been the rule in India at least as far back as 300 B.C. The rationalization for child marriage - like that for extreme seclusion of girls, purdah(110) - is that it is necessary to protect the girl from the seductive males around her. Indian mothers of higher castes admit that they are "afraid to leave their daughters of [age eleven] at home, even for one afternoon, without a mother's eye and accessible to the men of the family. Far down the social scale the same anxiety is found. The Hindu peasant villager's wife will not leave her girl child at home alone for the space of an hour, being practically sure that, if she does so, the child will be ruined." (111) Therefore, the child has traditionally been married off as early as six or seven years of age.
While child marriages are consciously excused as defenses against seduction by males, they also, of course, carry out the seduction, since child marriages have generally been consummated right away and since the groom is almost always decades older than the child bride. As the Mahabharata says, "Let the man of thirty years wed a ten-year-old wife, a nagnika (one that has not yet menstruated), or let the man of twenty-one get one seven years old."(102) Since prior to the 1929 child Marriage Restraint Act most Indian girls were married and began sexual intercourse before age 12, they moved from familial incest to sex with older men chosen by the family while they were still children.(113)
Fathers who allowed their girls to reach puberty without being married were condemned by their religion to hell. Therefore, the first child usually was born shortly after the onset of puberty, almost always dying during childbirth because of the physical immaturity of the mother.(114) When attempts to outlaw child marriage were made in 1929, nine volumes of testimony were published by the Age of Consent Committee, most of them defending child marriage. The complaint was that it was the foundation of the Indian family, since "the girl-child must 'get herself disciplined' [raped] through actual consummation of marriage 'to look upon one individual...as her lord and husband..."(115)
Mayo said most of this committee testimony was too obscene to even repeat in its insistence on the necessity for child sex. The Committee was overwhelmed by those who insisted that the children were so oversexed that by the time they were seven years old that child marriage was their only salvation. "Little children, both boys and girls, they lament, naturally develop an unnatural, perverted and exhausting precocity, under the stimulus in which they are steeped" - that is, the family incest during the first seven years. Mayo reported numerous testimonies that blamed the little girls for their rape, claiming that early marriage was an absolute necessity, since "Cupid overtakes the hearts of girls... at an early age... . A girl's desire for sexual intercourse is eight times greater than that of males.. When there is appetite, it is the best time for giving food..."(116)
The result of this early incest was a society where adult sexuality was considered extremely dangerous, where people suffered agonies of guilt every time they engaged in sex with their spouses, where all sexual intercourse between men and women was considered polluting and where popular movies still frequently need detailed rape scenes to satisfy the male audience. (117) As might be expected, Indian religion has been permeated by perverse sexual fantasies, worship of the penis and extreme fears of loss of semen, including the worship of an incestuous penis-god, Siva - where women were expected to kiss in public the genitals of naked priests. Even today in cults such as the Hindu Sakti sect incest is advocated as "a higher grade of sexual intercourse and an advanced step toward religious perfection."(118)
The Indian subcontinent provides a veritable Galapagos of psychohistorical variations of incestuous behavior, providing examples of a wide range of evolutionary stages that can be useful in comparative historical studies of other societies. In some endogamous Indian groups, such as the Baiga, actual incestuous marriage is practiced between men and their daughters, between women and their sons, between siblings, and even between grandparents and their grandchildren. (118) "My impression is that most of them have little or no innate repulsion towards incest," Says Elwin, their ethnographer, (120) the viability of their society disproving by itself all theories about the impossibility of incestuous marriage.
Variations on the fully incestuous life style of the Baiga are numerous, and regular sexual intercourse during childhood is widespread in many Indian groups. One of the best documented is the Muria, who make their young children a part of their sexual activities in the family bed. Then, when their children are five or six years old, the parents claim they are getting too old to continue to take part in family sex, so they send them to a dormitory set up by the adults for the sexual use of the children by adolescents and older men.(121) The Muria claim it is the children's fault they have to be removed from their homes and sent to the sex dormitory:
"Some children are very good and understand [why they have to be banished from the family bed], but others are stupid and insist on crowding into the parents' room..." The adults supervise and encourage all the sexual activities that take place in the dormitories. Although at times children as little as two years of age are taken to sleep in the dormitories, they are usually not required to be part of the sex activities until 5 or 6, since if they are made to have sex at 3 or 4 they often "wet their beds [and] wake up crying."(122)
When being introduced into the sex dormitory, the children are made to fag for others and are "hammered into shape" by the adolescents in charge. The young children start their sexual activities by massaging the older children, and are only then "initiated" into actual intercourse. Intercourse begins at age 5 or 6, initiated by an adolescent or adult: "A big girl teaches a little boy by letting him fondle her breasts and hug her. Then she opens and spreads her legs and makes the little boy lie on her breasts. She shows him how to open her clothes and insert the little penis with his hand."(123)
There are two types of dormitories: the classic model, where girls cannot sleep with a partner for more than three days at a time, under threat of punishment; and the "yoking" model, where partners are "married" to each other for longer periods. The children are usually assigned partners by those in charge. Although sometimes a girl can name her own partner, she cannot choose not to have sex, or she will be gang raped:
"Should a girl refuse to come when sent for, a number of young boys are dispatched to bring her by force. When she is brought, should she refuse to elect a mate, a number of older boys violate her one after the other, until she names the boy she would have for her mate."(124)
The children have intercourse in one another's presence, with certain relatives, such as younger brothers, taking over if the older brother is ab-sent for a time.(125) "Everyone belongs to everyone else" is the spirit of these dormitories; "you change from girl to girl just as you change your rings from finger to finger," lest one be "ruined by love."(126) (All these rules, of course, are set down and changed at will by the parents, not the children.) Older married men often visit the dormitories and have sex with the children, particularly when their own wives are having their period and are considered polluted.(127) The sex dormitory system of the Muria - which is similar to that of a number of other Asian and African groups(128) - been highly praised for its "enviable" positive attitudes toward sex both by the ethnologist who studied them and by other anthropologists reporting on his research.(129) The dormitories are called a "happy, exciting world," in contrast, says the ethnologist, to other Indian villages where there was more child rape than in dormitory villages.(130)
Like India, China has only recently emerged from the infanticidal mode of childrearing, but reliable research on childhood sexuality is somewhat more limited than for India. Although parents traditionally sleep with their children until they are adolescents,(131) exactly what happens in Chinese family beds has not yet been much investigated, although some observers have reported that Chinese girls, like Indian, have no trace of a hymen, supposedly because caretakers "clean the sexual organs of the little children during daily washings... so scrupulously..."(132)
Like so many early civilizations, ancient China institutionalized pederasty of boys, child concubinage, the castration of small boys so they could be used sexually as eunuchs, the marriage of young brides with a number of brothers, widespread boy and girl prostitution and the regular sexual use of child servants and slaves.(133) Under the popular ancient sim pua system of marriage, parents would adopt a girl during infancy, bring her up as a sister to their son and then force them into a marriage that must be considered as incestuous in every way except genetically. Alternatively, they could adopt a son to marry his sister.(135) Sexual use of adopted girls was said to be common.(135) Parents would send their boys to aristocratic households for sexual use - if volunteered as a eunuch, the parents would have their boys' genitals cut off, which the parents carried with them in a jar.(136) In some areas, male marriage to boys was so popular that there are records of sacrifices to patron deities of pederasty.(137)
As was also common in other early civilizations, extreme maternal symbiosis caused the Chinese to believe that women were so powerful that they depleted men of their strength by taking their semen during intercourse. The Chinese thought women ejaculated a life force (yin) during sex, which a man could absorb and gain strength from, if he could withhold ejaculation himself. Manuals were written describing methods whereby the man could hold back his semen, terminating intercourse - called "the battle" - by inhaling the breath and sucking the saliva of the woman - who is called "the enemy.(138) During adolescence, youths were instructed to have intercourse with young girls who have "undeveloped breasts," but to practice "moderation" by withholding their semen.'(139) Rulers had more life force because they absorbed more of it from their many wives and concubines. Whether this led them to believe that men could absorb the life force from their children through intercourse is not immediately apparent, although this might be indicated by the widespread practice of buying (under the rubric of "adoption") children in infancy under the popular mui tsai system - children who were then used by their "adoptive" parents both as domestic slaves and as sexual objects.(140) Boys, too, were often adopted for sexual use, and had their feet bound like girls-bound feet being considered sexually arousing.(141)Foot binding was a unique Chinese sexual mutilation practice that was performed on girls of all classes. Like other fetishists, the Chinese were so afraid of the vagina as a dangerous, castrating organ that they could only feel erotic toward the woman's foot - mainly her big toe. As a Cheng Kuan-ying described foot binding in the nineteenth century: "When a child is four or five, or seven or eight, parents speak harshly to it, and frighten it with their looks, and oppress it in every conceivable manner so that the bones of its feet may be broken and its flesh may putrefy."(142) The girl undergoes this extremely painful process for from five to ten years, crying out in pain each night as she hobbles about the house to do her tasks while holding on to the walls for support.(143) As the bones became broken and the flesh deteriorated, her foot became a perfect penis - substitute, often losing several toes as they were bent under her foot in order to emphasize the big toe sticking out.
The penis-toe then became the focus of the man's perversion and of his sexual excitement during intercourse. "It formed an essential prelude to the sex act, and its manipulation excited and stimulated... The ways of grasping the foot in one's palms were both profuse and varied; ascending the heights of ecstasy, the lover transferred the foot from palm to mouth. Play included kissing, sucking, and inserting the foot in the mouth until it filled both cheeks, either nibbling at it or chewing it vigorously, and adoringly placing it against one's cheeks, chest, knees, or virile member.(144) Thus even sex with a female could simulate homosexual intercourse for Chinese males.
Although Chinese literature has many descriptions of the screams of girls whose feet are being crushed,(145) the sources are silent as to whether the little girl herself fully understood the sexual purpose of her mutila-tion. Since she shared the family bed with her parents and presumably observed her father playing sexually with her mother's penis - foot, it is likely that the sexual aim of her painful mutilation was apparent to her.
Japan began to move beyond the infanticidal mode of childrearing at least two centuries ago.(146) Therefore, reliable accounts of traditional Japanese childhood sexual life are harder to find. Furthermore, there is currently such a taboo on talking about sexual molestation of children that current official figures report only a few hundred cases per year in all of Japan.(147) Although some recent visitors to Japan, witnessing almost everyone reading soft-core pornographic comics (manga) that feature young girls "being accosted, surprised, tied up, beaten, knifed [and] tortured,(148) wonder whether the very low official child abuse figures reported are accurate, personal letters I have written to an-thropologists, educators, psychoanalysts and others specializing in Japanese psychology have brought nothing but denial that sexual molestation exists in substantial numbers of families in Japan today.
Ancient Japan resembled both India and China in having institutionalized Greek-style pederasty of boys - by priests as well as warriors - temple prostitution of both boys and girls, and widespread child prostitution, including the ancient geisha system.(149) Japanese brothels would start girls in sexual service at S to 7 years old.(150) Pederasty (shudo) by the aristocracy and priesthood is well documented since at least the 14th century, with young boys given by their parents to be used anally by samurais and by priests in monasteries - the buggered boys sometimes having been worshipped as gods incarnate in religious cults similar to those of the cult of the Virgin in the West.(151)
One of the most endogenous societies in the world, Japan has approved of incestuous marriages in court circles even in historical times.(152) Preferred sibling, cousin, uncle-niece and aunt-nephew marriages have been so extensive that genetics experts have discovered that the inbreeding has affected their size and health.(153) How often this incestuous marriage system occurred in traditional Japan is still largely unexplored. One indication of what is likely to be found is a 1959 study by Kubo showing that there were still rural areas in Japan where fathers married their daughters when the mother had died or was incapacitated, "in accordance with feudal family traditions.(154) Kubo concluded that incest was considered "praiseworthy conduct" in many traditional rural families. In the 36 incest cases he studied in Hiroshima, he found that there was often community moral disapproval of the families who lived in open incestuous marriages, but that the participants themselves did not think of it as immoral. In fact, when the father was unavailable to head the family, his son often took over his role and had sex with his sister in order "to end confusion in the order of the home." Other members of the family accepted this incest as normal.
In traditional Japan, quite young girls were introduced into sex by older boys who visited their bedrooms at night with the complicity of the girl's parents (called night-prowling, yobai). The boys "assembled in communal huts and instructed slightly younger village males in sex approaches and techniques..." Although they recommended "gentle persuasion,"(155) there was no guarantee that all was so gentle in fact, since the parents "looked the other way" in accordance with custom while the older boys had intercourse with their young daughters.
Western observers even today often notice that Japanese mothers still masturbate their young children during the day in public and at night in the family bed - in order, they say, "to put them to sleep."(156) The average Japanese today sleeps with his or her children until the children are ten or fifteen years old,"(157) - one recent Japanese study found daughters still sleeping with their fathers over 20 percent of the time even after age sixteen.(158) Even when the home contains a dozen rooms or more, parents and grandparents feel "lonely" if they sleep apart from the children in the family, and therefore go to bed with some child every night (the mean age in one study of children sleeping alone is 12.7 years).(159) Since so many families still practice what is termed dakine co-sleeping - with the parent or grandparent sleeping while physically embracing the child, a practice said to be beneficial to the health of the adult"(160) - and since most Japanese parents still regularly have sexual in-tercourse while the child is in bed with them,(161) one wonders how scholars can continue to maintain that nothing sexual usually happens to the Japanese child in the family bed, particularly since none have yet ask-ed the children themselves about their sexual experiences.
This stone wall on information about incest in Japan has been breach-ed somewhat by four recent studies. The first is a Japanese feminist sex survey modeled on those of Shere Hite that reported one-third of the respondents having memories of being sexually abused by relatives or close friends as children, a figure considerably higher than comparable American questionnaire studies.(162) Secondly, other studies show that the majority of urban parents in 1981 reported that they had lately begun to be bothered by the thought that children with whom they slept might be aware of their intercourse - a growing guilt about incestuous activities that was increasingly common in the West in early modern times and which led for the first time to separate beds for children.(163)
Thirdly, two recent books on Japanese incest provide new insights into the subject. The first is a report of a "hotline" set up in Tokyo by a counseling service, which analyzed the hundreds of calls they received dealing with incest.(164) Since official Japanese statistics deny the occurrence of incest, they were surprised to find that their hotline was flooded with such calls. One of their major findings is that, in addition to the usual father-daughter and sibling incest found in the West, 29 percent of the Japanese calls complained about mother - son incest. This is an extremely high proportion compared to other countries, but about what could be expected considering the common frequency with which Japanese mothers sleep alone with their sons while the father is out having sex with other women - extramarital sex still being the rule for most married men in Japan.(165)
The most commonly reported incest occurs when the mother sees her son masturbate as a teenager and tells him, "It's not good to do it alone. Your IQ becomes lower. I will help you," or "You cannot study if you cannot have sex. You may use my body," or "I don't want you to get into trouble with a girl. Have sex with me instead."(166) The researchers found that Japanese mothers and sons often sleep in the same bed and have sex together, although the exact incidence in the population was not investigated. According to the phone interviews, Japanese mothers teach their sons how to masturbate, helping them to achieve first ejaculation in much the same manner as they earlier helped them with toilet training.(167) Most of the sons had no sexual experience with another woman, and became jealous of the mothers' having sex with their fathers, feeling they should have the right to monopolize the mothers - perhaps helping explain why one informant told a family planning expert: "We have no Oedipal problems in Japan - there's no competition from the father.(168) Mother recent Japanese book, based on one hundred incest reports, confirms these observations, including the unusually high rate of mother - son incest, although it, too, provides no way to determine true national incidence rates.(169)
Finally, a recent psychohistoncal study of Japanese childhood by Kitahara (170) provides a number of new details about Japanese incest, in-cluding the acceptance of sibling incest in early historic times, the routine acceptance of pederasty up until recently, the wide extent even today of co-sleeping and co-bathing, and the degree to which incest depends on co-sleeping patterns and upon the very limited contact fathers have with their families.
The sexual use of children in the remainder of the Far East follows the pattern of India and China. In Thailand, for instance, a survey in 1990 found that 75 percent of Thai men had had sex with child prostitutes, from 20 to 40 percent of them HIV-infected, so that Asia is about to become what one expert terms "the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic."(171) The rising incidence of AIDS among children around the world is just one index of how widespread their sexual use really is.
The sexual use of children in the Middle East is probably as widespread as in the Far East.(172) Historically, all the institutionalized forms of pedophilia that were customary in the Far East are extensively documented for the Middle East during its earlier infanticidal childrearmg mode, including child marriage, child concubinage, temple prostitution of both boys and girls, parent-child marriage (among the Zoroastrians), sibling marriage (among the Egyptians, among both royalty and commoners), sex slavery, ritualized pederasty, eunichism, and widespread child prostitution. Furthermore, as in India, there are parts of the Middle East where customs from earlier times have been maintained intact, so that more detail is available than is usually preserv-ed in historical documents.
In the oasis of Siwa, for instance, mothers regularly give their boys to older men for sexual use, both related and outside the family, and fathers regularly lend their young sons to each other, similar to the Central Asian Islarnic tradition of bacaboz, where most fathers trade their sons with others for sexual use.(173) Pederastic marriages and pederastic prostitution have been so widespread in Siwa until just recently that everyone is accustomed to the proposition that men normally love boys more than they do women, saying: "They will kill each other for a boy. Never for a woman."(174) Muslim holy men (imaam) regularly have boys available for sex, saying the ingestion of the imaam's semen is necessary for absorbing his spiritual powers, sometimes even extending to formal marriage with the boy.
Sex for boys in the Middle East is said to begin in infancy and continue throughout childhood. Parents and others masturbate the infant's penis in order "to increase its size and strengthen it," and older siblings have been observed playing with the genitals of babies for hours at a time.(175) As the boy gets older, mutual masturbation, fellatio and anal intercourse are said to be common among children, particularly with the older boys using the younger children as sex objects as a reaction to the over stimulation of the family bed. Pederasty of boys by the men in and near the ex-tended family is said by an Arab sociologist to be common, since "the mere sight of pretty boys is regarded.. .as disturbing and terribly tempting."(176) Moralists often find it necessary to issue warnings such as these: "A man should never spend the night in a house with beardless boys" and "Do not sit next to the sons of the rich and noble: they have faces like those of virgins and they are even more tempting than women."(177)
By the time of circumcision - a traumatic ritual(178) that is usually performed at ages 3 to 6, whose unconscious purpose is to purify the boy and cleanse him(179) of the molestation to which he has been subjected - the boy is supposed to stop wearing the dress-like shin that allows ready access to his genitals and begin wearing pants. However, since he often continues to sleep in the parental bed, to have sex with siblings and cousins, to experience sexual attacks at school and to attend nude public baths (hammam) with his mother and sisters,(180) his sexual over stimulation often continues into the 7- to 14-year-old phase. Much of the incest may occur in the baths. Bouhdiba reports: "The hammam...is a highly eroticized place - so much so indeed that the name has come to signify for the masses the sexual act itself... 'going to the hammam' quite simply means 'making love'.. .Every Muslim can relive his childhood in terms of his experience of the hammam. . notoriously a place of homosexuality, male and female.. .there the child has all the time in the world to contemplate, examine and compare sexual organs [so that] every Muslim is fixated on his mother..."(181)
As girls in the Middle East are considered worth less than boys, it may be that their incestuous use during childhood is even more prevalent. One report found that four out of five Middle Eastern women recalled having been forced into fellatio between the ages of 3 and 6 by older brothers and other relatives.(182) A female Arab physician who recently conducted an extensive study of childhood seduction reported that "most female children are exposed to.. incidents of sexual assault" during their early years by "the brother, the cousin, the paternal uncle, the maternal uncle, the grandfather or even the father. If not a family member, he may be the guardian or porter of the house, the teacher, the neighbor's son, or any other man." (183) The molestation, she says, begins with masturbation or fellatio and then proceeds to intercourse. "In most cases the girl surrenders and is afraid to complain to anyone, since, if there is any punishment to be meted out, it will always end up by being inflicted on her. It is she alone who loses her honor and virginity. The man never loses anything..." The incidents are termed "frequent, but remain hidden, stored up in the secret recesses of the female child's self, since she dare not tell anyone of what has happened to her..."
Girls are reported to be sexually assaulted at school and in the streets,(184) and child marriage has proved as difficult to stamp out in many areas as it has been in India.(185) The assaults are accompanied by severe physical and psychological damage, according to research by one group of medical experts at the Ministry of Justice in Cairo, and usually go unpunished even in those rare occasions when they are brought to the attention of authorities, "in order to avoid scandal.(186) Since the girl's hymen must be intact when she gets married, surgical repair is sometimes requested in order to conceal the loss of virginity through the assaults. As in the Far East, young servants are particularly favored sexual objects, both for men whose wives are absent, menstruating, pregnant or frigid and for adolescents who sometimes feel less guilty having sex with ser-vant girls than with their sisters.(187)
Arab women, of course, are often aware that their spouses prefer having sex with little boys and girls to having sex with them. Their retribution for the men's pedophilia comes when the girl is about age 6, when the women of the house grab her, pull her thighs apart and cut off her clitoris and sometimes her labia with a razor, thus usually ending her ability to feel sexual pleasure forever.
The custom of clitoridectomy - which is not part of any religious doc-trine and is not even mentioned in the Koran-goes back at least to pre-dynastic Egyptian times;(188) even mummies were missing their clitorises and labia.(189) Presently, many Middle Eastern and African countries continue to practice circumcision of girls. A recent survey of Egyptian girls and women showed 97 percent of uneducated families and 66 percent of educated families still practicing clitoridectomy.(190) Nor is the practice decreasing; Hosken says "more female children are mutilated today than throughout history" and estimates that there are presently 74 million mutilated females in countries where documentation exists.(191)
Often the girl's labia are cut off in addition to the clitoris - the so-called "Pharaonic circumcision" or "infibulation" - and the remaining flesh is sewn together, leaving only a small opening for urination. The vagina must of course be cut open before intercourse, and the women often also have great difficulty giving birth and have to be further cut to allow the baby to pass through. The vaginal area is then re-sewn together after the baby is born "to give the men more pleasure during intercourse" and has to be cut open again during each successive birth. During all of these mutilations the girls undergo excruciating pain, sometimes die of complications, usually hemorrhage, often pass out from the shock (since no anesthetic is used) and often suffer from tetanus, blood poisoning, chronic urinary tract infections and infertility.
The rationalization given for clitoridectomy is that little girls are naturally so sexual that it is necessary "to release them from their bondage to sex" and "to stop them from masturbating." One informant reported that "girls fell from their bicycles because of sexual overstimulation if their clitorises were not cut."(193) Since the operation usually makes the girl frigid, it can be said to achieve its stated aim of reducing girls' sexual pleasure. Men usually do not want to marry women with intact clitorises, believing they will be "oversexed" and betray them. It is the custom in some countries on the wedding night for the husband to be the one to cut his bride's vagina open with a knife, then have repeated intercourse to prevent it from closing again.
The initial mutilation of the girl's genitals is usually done by the women of the family, under the supervision of the mother. The unconscious motive seems to be revenge for the men's sexual abuse of the girl, since interviews so often reveal earlier memories of seduction. One women relates her memory of her clitoridectomy as follows:
I was six years old that night when I lay in my bed, warm and peaceful...I felt something move under the blankets, something like a huge hand, cold and rough, fumbling over my body, as though looking for something. Almost simultaneously another hand.. .was clapped over my mouth to prevent me from screaming.
They carried me to the bathroom... I remember.. a rasping metallic sound which reminded me of the butcher when he used to sharpen his knife... My blood was frozen in my veins... I realized my thighs had been pulled wide apart, and that each of my lower limbs was being held as far away from the other as possible... I felt that the rasping knife or blade was heading straight down towards my throat. Then suddenly the sharp metallic edge seemed to drop between my thighs and there cut off a piece of flesh from my body.
I screamed with pain despite the tight hand held over my mouth, for the pain was not just a pain, it was like a searing flame that went through my whole body. After a few moments, I saw a red pool of blood around my hips.
I did not know what they had cut off from my body, and did not try to find out. I just wept, and called out to my mother for help. But the worst shock of all was when I looked around and found her standing by my side. Yes, it was her, I could not be mistaken, in flesh and blood, right in the midst of these strangers, talking to them and smiling at them.(194)
Clitoridectomy - like all genital mutilations of children - is, of course, an act of incest motivated by the perversions of the adults who perform the mutilation. Although we are not used to thinking of it in this way, in fact mothers who attack their daughters' genitals with knives are as incestuous as fathers who rape them.
Since genital mutilation is one of the most widespread childrearing practices, its presence alone makes incest a universal practice-despite our habit of denying its sexual motivation by terming it a "rite of passage (it often involves no passage to a new state at all) or a "puberty rite" (it usually occurs long before puberty). Also, the sexual excitement of the adults attending the mutilation is overlooked, even when - as in Siwa - the mother masturbates the child prior to the mutilation, or when - as in Morocco - prostitutes regularly attend the mutilation ceremony in order to relieve the sexual tensions generated, or when - as in Australia - the mutilation is followed by group rape.(195)
The mutilation of children's genitals is such a important need in humans that whole religions and state systems have been founded upon the practice. Yet when scholars attempt to explain why almost everyone since the beginning of recorded history has massively assaulted the genitals of their children, they assiduously deny that it is a sexual perversion or that those who do it ever mean any harm to the children.
Arnold van Gennep calls genital mutilation a ceremony "whose essential purpose is to enable the individual to pass from one defined position to another," never wondering why parents couldn't celebrate the maturing of their children in a less harmful way."' Bruno Bettleheim claims that little boys want their genitals cut-because of an inborn "vagina envy" - and that the mutilation was so "pleasurable" to the victims that they asked adults to cut them, so they could "express their happiness."(197) Others have claimed genital mutilation was done "to enforce social cohesion" (Yehudi Cohen), "to break an excessively strong dependence upon the mother" (John Whiting), to show the child "We love you, but we must rid you of your infantilisms" (Theodor Reik), and to make the penis look like that of a kangaroo (John Cawte).(198)
There is hardly an imaginable form of genital assault that is not regularly performed on children. Girls' genitals are tattooed, cut off, sewn up, burned off, and ripped open with the fingers.(199) Boys' genitals are pierced by objects, sewn up, burned, cut off, flayed, "gashed open [so that] wedges of flesh are removed," and slashed through to the urethra so that "the penis splits open like a boiled frankfurter."(200) The topic of childhood genital mutilation is so rich in meaning that it will have to await further discussion in the next two major sections of this study, "The Cross-Cultural Study of Incest," where the universality of incest in contemporary preliterate groups is documented, and "The History of Incest," where evidence is presented for the historical stages in the evolution of Homo eroticus from incest to love.
Citations
http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/06a1_incest.html
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