George ROUSSEAU e.a.Dit boek van cultuurhistoricus George Rousseau en zijn medeauteurs gaat over kinderen en de vormen van seksualiteit die zich bij kinderen kunnen voordoen. Ik beperk me tot een paar thema's.
De auteurs wijzen erop dat onderzoek naar dit thema — in dit geval voornamelijk historisch onderzoek —, gefrustreerd wordt door het taboe rondom kinderen en seksualiteit.
"Childhood sexuality lies on the border of taboo and the frontier of suspicion despite decades of psychiatric investigation from the time of Freud and Melanie Klein; even the ulterior motives of those researching these topics are suspect. Provided the approach is ‘clinical’ (scientific, medical, prescriptive), there has been little impediment to the discussion of childhood sexuality past or present. But as soon as the discussion turns to ethical, moral, legal and legislative aspects, the discourse becomes fraught, sometimes too explosive to pursue calmly.(...) If, as we are being told at conferences and in journals, the history of childhood is now a burgeoning field with already well-developed tentacles extending in many directions, especially in the media, it cannot claim to be so in the sexual domain. So far sexuality has eluded its grip apart from its pathological dimensions. Even an historian of sexuality as influential as the late Michel Foucault treaded delicately when discussing intergenerational sexual relations in the Ancient world." [mijn nadruk] (xiii)
Het is dezelfde conclusie die allerlei andere auteurs trekken. Onderzoek naar de normale seksuele ontwikkeling van kinderen wordt tegengewerkt, omdat conservatieven tegen alle feiten in blijven beweren dat kinderen onschuldig — lees: aseksueel — zijn. Onderzoekers worden zelfs verdacht gemaakt.
Dat is zeker zo bij cultuurhistorisch onderzoek waarbij het historische materiaal bestaat uit beelden. Een voorbeeld dat de auteurs geven is illustratief:
"In 1972 two English collaborators, painter Graham Ovenden and writer Robert Melville, published an extraordinary book called Victorian Children. Issued by Academy Editions in London and St Martin’s Press in New York, the latter an international publishing house affiliated with Macmillan, this unpaginated book consists of 149 images of little girls. Many are strikingly nude and shown in postures not even Germaine Greer would have included in her recent ‘candid’ study of the other sex: ‘boys’. The language used to describe them is now adjudged to be offensive: not merely unacceptable but legally actionable. Perhaps this is why the book has not been reprinted in our time. If we had reproduced any of the illustrations here, Children and Sexuality could not have been published, and if somehow printed, our readers would be shocked by images we consider inappropriate. Yet in 1972 the authors described these images as ‘the most exquisite’ photographs of nude children ever to have been found. How can such change have occurred in just one generation?" [mijn nadruk] (4-5)
In hoofdstuk 8 een ander voorbeeld van Lindsay Smith. Dat hoofdstuk gaat over Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, beter bekend als de auteur Lewis Carroll die tussen 1856-1880 enthousiast de nieuwe technische mogelijkheden van fotografie ontwikkelde en uitprobeerde. Net als vele anderen in die tijd gebruikte hij kinderen als onderwerp. Hij had een voorkeur voor meisjes van wie hij ook naaktfoto's maakte, allemaal in overleg met en met toestemming van ouders. Er bestaan zo'n 3000 negatieven. Ik denk niet dat dat historische materiaal tegenwoordig nog toegankelijk is, laat staan gepubliceerd wordt.
"The fact is we live now in Western societies whose children cannot be photographed at all – by anyone – without their parent’s permission. So far has the public mood altered from pastoral appreciation of just thirty years ago." [mijn nadruk] (7-8)
Dat is nog tot daar aan toe. Maar de conservatieve reactie kan nog veel verder gaan. Als je niet oppast wordt je als onderzoeker meteen beschuldigd van het bezitten van kinderporno.
Onderzoek wordt nog lastiger als het accent zoals in dit boek ligt op intergenerationele contacten: op seksuele contacten tussen kinderen en volwassenen, zeg maar.
"No discourse has been available to discuss the histories of intergenerational sexuality.(3)"
Dat verbaast me niets.
Er bestaat bij conservatieven — zoals ook andere auteurs constateren — een sterke neiging om kinderen te beschermen tegen kennis van of ervaringen met seksualiteit. Onderzoek zou die benadering doorkruisen.
"According to Western mindsets embedding Judeo-Christian belief systems, many of our children today are being sexually abused. This book expends energy to demonstrate that while there is nothing new in the fact of abuse (if anything it appears to have diminished statistically) our contemporary forms of surveillance have intensified: never before have the bodies of children been so heavily managed and policed. Policed for their size and shape, policed from making copies or images of it, policed from predators wanting to watch, touch or assault it. Anthropologist Heather Montgomery demonstrates that other cultures police their children so differently from ours that the idea of equivalence for concepts of Western ‘sexual abuse’ is problematic. The category itself requires reinterpretation." [mijn nadruk] (16)
Hoofdstuk 11 Child Sexual Abuse - an Anthropological Perspective van Heather Montgomery vind ik met name erg boeiend. Ze maakt duidelijk hoe gevaarlijk het is om hedendaagse Westerse definities van wat 'seksueel misbruik van kinderen' is zomaar toe te passen / te projecteren op samenlevingen in het verleden of op andere culturen. Dat projecteren van westerse waarden en normen op anderen wordt essentialisme of universalisme genoemd, een benadering waarbij de historische of culturele context over het hoofd wordt gezien, uiteraard met het doel te kunnen zeggen dat de westerse waarden en normen superieur zijn en als maatstaf voor iedereen gebruikt moeten worden.
"The discovery of all forms of child abuse has very recent history; it was only in 1962, that Professor Henry Kempe first used the phrase ‘battered child syndrome’, to explain the non-accidental injuries in children seen by doctors and the idea that child sexual abuse was not only rife, but occurred most frequently within the home, was equally problematic and took a long time to gain acceptance. It was only in the early 1970s when feminist writers began to challenge the silence over rape and sexual abuse and adult ‘survivors’ of abuse began to publish their memoirs that child sexual abuse began to be acknowledged as a serious social problem, with profound consequences for the individuals involved. Despite this, however, most people, and the media in particular, remain much more comfortable focusing on ‘stranger danger’ and the relatively rare cases of abuse by strangers than they do on the children abused in their own homes, by those supposed to be caring for them." [mijn nadruk] (321)
"The more anthropologists have examined sexual practices and ideas about sexualities, the more it has become clear that sexual acts and behaviour do not carry the same meanings cross culturally, that the idea of a universal ‘sex drive’ is false and that rather than culture being the ‘added extra’ which might explain the odd variation in sexual practice, in fact it lies at the heart of understanding the different forms and types of sexualities."(323)
Montgomery kijkt onder andere naar leeftijdsverschillen tussen degenen met seksuele contacten. Dat is als het ware een taboe in een taboe.
"The issue of child sexual abuse is particularly fraught in contemporary western society and the idea that the worst, and most inappropriate, form of sex for teenagers and children is with someone significantly older is widespread. This is, by some definitions, inherently abusive, as the power differentials between an adult and child are so great that it can never be sanctioned as an appropriate form of sexuality. Yet this is not universally understood or applicable and there are both ethnographic and historical cases in which children and teenagers are encouraged, and expected, to have sex with those very much older than themselves." [mijn nadruk] (324-325)
"It is an unfortunate gap in much anthropological writing on the subject, that children’s own perspectives are rarely canvassed, and it is only in relatively recent studies, such as the one which concludes this chapter, that children’s own opinions are asked."(331)
Ze deed zelf onderzoek bij de Canela (Baan Nua), een volk waar 'seks voor geld' tussen kinderen en volwassenen een heel andere rol speelt dan Westerlingen zouden denken. Ze sprak ook met die kinderen / jongeren en liep hard tegen haar westerse vooroordelen aan.
"I soon discovered that ‘prostitute’ was not a definition that the children ever used about themselves and that it had nothing to do with their sense of identity. While it was common for children or their parents to say they ‘went out for fun with foreigners’, ‘caught foreigners’ or even ‘had guests’, I never heard anyone refer to themselves as a child prostitute. (...) While some clients were customers who simply bought sex, these sorts of relationships were disliked and rarely talked about. What they preferred to discuss were the men who were ‘friends’ and who consequently had reciprocal obligations with the children and their families. They consciously downplayed the importance of the money to them. They never set a price for sexual acts; money that was given to them after sex was referred to as a gift or as a token of appreciation. Money was not the end-point of the exchange but a way of expressing affection." [mijn nadruk] (339)
"Betraying family members, failing to provide for parents or cheating on spouses or boyfriends was roundly condemned, but exchanging sex for money, especially when that money was used for moral ends, was not blameworthy. Ideas about sexual abuse, especially those based on western ideas of inevitable psychological damage, played limited parts in their understandings of what they did." [mijn nadruk] (340)
Voor universalistisch denkende mensen bestaat er geen andere weg dan het ontkennen van dit soort feiten. Meteen worden dan alle slechte argumenten van stal gehaald: zonder het te weten zijn die kinderen slachtoffers, ze maken zichzelf alleen maar wijs dat dat niet zo is, onbewust lopen ze met trauma's rond, en zo meer.
"It is easy to claim that these children were misguided or that they suffered from a form of false consciousness. Simply because a child did not recognise sexual exploitation, it does not necessarily mean that it did not occur or that selling sex did not in some ways damage their sense of identity and self. However, the children explicitly rejected such ideas and denied the status of victim. They tried to form reciprocal arrangements with their clients and their rejection of labels such as prostitute was not simply a denial of reality, but also a way of manipulating that reality. They recognised the structural power their clients had over them and did their best to direct it to their benefit." [mijn nadruk] (341)
Haar uiteindelijke conclusie past ook goed bij de strekking van het hele boek:
"However, the study of Baan Nua does illuminate that even those issues that to modern western sensibilities are most important – the inviolable body of the child, the sexual innocence that is seen as the right of all children – are not natural, unshakable, universal facts, or even unquestionable human rights. They are challenged and contested in other places by peoples who have very different understandings of children, their bodies, their sexualities and indeed their families and societies." [mijn nadruk] (342)
Dit is een boeiend boek, omdat het vanzelfsprekendheden bekritiseert en vragen oproept. Ik vind niet elk artikel even interessant, maar wel de kernzaak van de hele tekst zoals goed geformuleerd in dat laatste citaat van Montgomery. Je vraagt je af waarom conservatieven het zo nodig vinden om hun preutse opvattingen over kinderen en seksualiteit aan iedereen op te leggen. Niet omdat ze zo van kinderen houden in ieder geval.