Author’s note: I have changed the title of the post so that the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church is not included. Even though the majority of victims in that scandal were, as far as I know, boys, girls were also victimized, and I don’t the focus of this post inadvertently to erase that fact.
Why boys? It’s a simple enough question, and it seems to me obvious that we should be asking it, especially since reputable statistics place the number of boys who will be sexually abused before the age of sixteen at one in six. Indeed, even if this prevalence rate were one in eight, or one in twelve, the population of boys it represented would still be large enough that, if we were talking about almost any other group, one of the first questions we’d ask would be why that group was being sexually targeted in the first place. When we talk about the sexual abuse of girls, we ask and answer the corresponding question–Why girls?–as a matter of course, mostly because the sexual abuse of girl “fits” the dominant heterosexual narrative of our culture, which says that men exist sexually to pursue women and women exist sexually to be pursued by men. How we understand that narrative and its relationship to the sexual abuse of girls will likely differ depending on whether we lean politically to the left or the right, identify as feminist or not, are conscious or not that girls are also abused by women–as are boys, but more on that later–but those differences do not change the fact that, as a culture, we understand girls to be potential targets of abuse in large measure because of the dominant heterosexual narrative.
The sexual abuse of boys, on the other hand, and it doesn’t matter whether they are abused by men or women, does not fit that narrative. When a boy’s abuser is a woman, for example, many refuse even to call it abuse1, understanding it instead as a fortuitous initiation into sex (which really means into manhood). In other words, because the idea of a boy being abused by a woman just doesn’t fit our idea of what sex between males and females should be, or our idea of how male heterosexuality ought to be embodied, we impose those ideas on the abuse, assuming that the boy wanted it, that he enjoyed it, maybe even that he had somehow engineered it. Indeed, as Keith Alexander wrote in his Washington Post article, “When a Boy is Sexually Abused by a Woman ‘People Do Not Often Recognize the Harm,'” even the law enforcement officials to whom such abuse is reported will often tell the boy in so many words that he should consider himself lucky.
Christopher Mallios of Aequitas, a District-based sex-crime victim advocacy group, said during his 16 years as a Philadelphia prosecutor he had seen police and prosecutors “high-five” teenage boys who had been sexually assaulted by women, saying that the boys were “lucky.”
This rhetorical sleight of hand, obviously, hides the boy’s experience of being violated behind the veil of what we as a culture want, and what we believe he should want, his experience to have been. In this way, we can reassure ourselves that our dominant heterosexual narrative remains firmly in place, while making sure the boy knows that any problem he might have with what the woman did to him is his and his alone. We replace, in other words–or at least we attempt to replace–any sense he has of himself as having been abused with the question of whether or not he will claim the manhood that the sex he had with his abuser ostensibly represents. More to the point, if he doesn’t claim that manhood, it can only mean one thing: he must be gay, and let’s not forget that there are still places in the United States where even the suspicion that you are homosexual can get you killed. For example, in one of the cases Alexander wrote about, the situation got so bad that the boy and his family felt they had to relocate. According to the official Alexander quotes, people “were teasing him, asking if he was a ‘punk’ [homosexual], and what’s wrong with him and why he didn’t like it.” The stakes, in other words, can be very high for a boy who wants to insist on the truth of his own experience.
When boys are sexually abused by men, the specter of homosexuality is perhaps an even more potent silencing factor, whether in the form of the still popular myth that such boys will very likely become gay or the suspicion that there must have been “something gay” about them in the first place that attracted their abusers to them. If only because it so obviously does not fit our dominant heterosexual narrative, few would deny that these boys have in fact been abused, but just imagine how difficult it must be to be a boy confronting the possibility that these myths are in fact truths that who you are sexually can and will be determined by the man (or men) who violated you–and imagine as well how (perhaps even more) difficult and confusing this must be for boys who either think they might be or who already know they are gay, bisexual, trans or any combination of non-cis and non-straight characteristics.
The underlying idea of these myths is that the sexual abuse of boys by men represents a diseased male sexuality, one that somehow transmits itself from the man to the boy, despite the fact that the boy neither invited nor enjoyed the abuse. Homosexuality may have been taken out of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders almost forty years ago, in other words, but the idea that male homosexuality represents a diseased masculinity is clearly still with us. You can see this not only in the myths I discussed above, but also in most of the public health (as opposed to law enforcement) responses to the three sex abuse scandals I mentioned in the title of this post. These responses focused primarily on the problems of detection and prevention. Indeed, in a thoughtful piece called “In Plain View,” Malcolm Gladwell uses the Jerry Sandusky scandal as a jumping off point for talking about why detection and prevention are so hard:
When monsters roam free, we assume that people in positions of authority ought to be able to catch them if only they did their jobs. But that might be wishful thinking. A pedophile…is someone adept not just at preying on children but at confusing, deceiving, and charming the adults responsible for those children—which is something to keep in mind in the case of the scandal at Penn State and the conviction, earlier this year, of the former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky on child-molestation charges.
Gladwell’s use of the term “monster” is telling. We are dealing, in this formulation, with something that is not of us, that is alien and destructive, sneaky and insidious, a kind of stealth virus that will eat us away from the inside if we don’t learn how to detect and neutralize it before it does any harm. No one denies, of course, the importance of bringing perpetrators to justice, or of identifying them before they can do any harm, but an approach to the problem that ends there, that does not seek to understand the social and cultural dynamic that makes boys a target of abuse in the first place–as if we were indeed dealing with a disease, like tuberculosis or an STD–ultimately leaves intact the silencing mechanisms I discussed above.
More than that, though, this underlying medical metaphor very neatly elides the fact that the sexual of boys abuse and our responses to it comprise a set of behaviors and choices that are intimately woven into our ideas about gender and sexuality, and therefore about power and powerlessness, and that are, therefore, deeply and ineluctably political. As I suggested above, we already understand this when we talk about the rape and sexual abuse of girls and women. We even understand this when men rape men, the purpose being–whether it happens in prison or during war–to subordinate through feminization and emasculation the men who are their victims.2 We do not, however, seem to see the sexual abuse of boys as political in the same way, and I think that it’s time not just to ask why, as my title suggests, but to start to figure out what that politics might be.
I’ve been thinking about this question for a long time–because I too am a survivor–and I have, in my own small way, tried in the past and failed to start a discussion about it. One of the reasons I think those earlier discussions failed is that I tried to root the discussion too deeply in my own experience of feminism as a source of healing and people saw this as a politicization of healing, which was not what I intended. I remain committed to what I have said and written about the role feminism played and continues to play in my life as a survivor, but I also believe that healing itself should not be politicized. What matters, if you have been sexually abused, is that you find a way to get better, to live with hope and love, and as long as you are not hurting other people in the process, no one should judge you for the political or ideological or philosophical or therapeutic tools and perspectives that helped you build a meaningful life for yourself.
An apolitical approach to healing, however, does not change the fact that sexual abuse itself, as an act and as an issue, is political; nor does it change the fact that we have pretty much ignored that politics when it comes to the abuse of boys. I was reminded of this fact yet one more time, and motivated to write this post, by Kirk Johnson’s New York Times article about the decades of sexual abuse in the Boy Scouts of America that came to light last year. The article makes clear that the Scouts are essentially doing the right thing:
But even as the court fight proceeded, scouting officials were also restructuring the organization’s system of reporting abuse and promised to look back through other old files not released publicly. If evidence is found of past criminal wrongdoing by scout leaders, they say, it will be presented to law enforcement agencies. Thursday’s release followed several stories in The Los Angeles Times involving a separate cache of files that also revealed failures to protect scouts.
“We definitely fell short; for that we just have to apologize to the victims and the parents and say that we’re profoundly sorry,” Wayne Perry, the president of the Boy Scouts of America, said this week in a telephone interview. “We are sorry for any kid who suffered.”
Child protection experts say that the efforts in recent years by the Boy Scouts to better track, report and train youth leaders, and its humility in admitting failure, are all laudable steps, but that much more is needed by an organization that built its name and reputation on trust.
Part of what that “more” is is articulated by Christopher Anderson, executive director of Male Survivor, a nonprofit organization for victims of sexual abuse. “It steps in the right direction,” Kirk quotes Anderson as saying, but the “next step is that the Boy Scouts should provide support and help for all those victims and survivors who have been harmed.” On the one hand, Anderson is absolutely right; the Boy Scouts should provide the help that victims and survivors need to heal. On the other hand, though, as I read the rest of the article, which focused pretty much entirely on the problem of detection and prevention, I found myself thinking about how conveniently the privacy and confidentiality that are absolutely necessary to healing nonetheless shield the rest of us from the abused boys’ experiences. As a result, we don’t have to confront what we might learn–socially, culturally, politically–both from what they have in common with the boys who were abused by Jerry Sandusky and/or those who were abused by priests and others within the Catholic Church and what we might learn from how their experience of abuse differs from that of girls.
In 2002, I took part in Ending Male Violence – Net (EMV-N), an email-based seminar about men’s roles and responsibilities in ending gender based violence that was sponsored by the United Nations International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (UN INSTRAW). It was a remarkable experience. Men and women from all over the world–activists, academics, people from NGOs–came together over the internet to talk theory and share stories, develop strategies and even collaborate on programs, and all of it was focused on one thing: finding ways to end the violence men do to women. One of the seminar’s sessions focused specifically on male violence against women and children, a group which obviously includes boys. I have not been able to find in my email archives any of the messages that were exchanged during EMV-N, but my memory of this particular session is quite clear: every time I tried to ask a question about the specific ways that boys experience male violence, the responses of both the other participants and the session leader always tended to redirect the conversation back to women and girls, as if they assumed that whatever they said about women and girls was sufficient to account for boys as well. It was a very frustrating experience.
Given feminism’s focus on the oppression of women by men, it’s important to recognize this redirection as a feature of feminist discourse, not a flaw. The experiences and perspectives of men have for far too long been understood to account for those of women and girls as well, and one goal that all feminisms share is that this tendency should end. Indeed, it was precisely the women’s movement’s insistence, during decade after decade of (mostly women’s) activism, on putting women’s and girl’s experience at the center of the discussion about rape and sexual violence that made possible the vocabulary I have to write this post. I owe the fact that I can even try to ask the question I am trying to ask, in other words, to feminism and the women’s movement. The fact that the vocabulary itself has not had much room–though it is now better than it was–for talking about men and boys in the role of sexual victim, however, and even less for talking about women in the role of sexual abuser3, does not mean that feminism is somehow “wrong.” What it means is that the vocabulary is inadequate.
I confess to being unsure right now of where to take this discussion next, but one of the most significant lessons I learned when I was in yeshiva was that figuring out how to ask the right question is far more important that finding an answer. More than that, the rebbe who taught me this lesson said, you need to learn to love the question, because you might end up living with it for many, many years. My intuition tells me that asking Why boys? as I have tried to do here gets to the heart of how and why we value traditional manhood and masculinity the way we do from a direction that has yet to be explored and that what we learn there will make a big contribution to the fight to end sexual abuse. I wonder what you think.
Cross posted on my blog.
- In one study, 40% of the men who said they were sexually abused as children reported a female perpetrator; there is another study, the link to which I have not been able to find, in which that number is somewhere around 20%. Whichever number is more accurate, it’s still a significant percentage, and the usual caveats that apply to statistical research do not change the point I am trying to make here, which has more to do with our cultural response to boys who have been abused by women than with the prevalence of such abuse. [↩]
- I have no doubt that woman-prepetrated sexual assault also expresses a politics, but, as far as I know, that politics has not been theorized, investigated, elaborated, demonstrated to the extent that the politics of sexual violence perpetrated by men has been, and since that kind of work is beyond the scope of this post, I am, for now, leaving it aside. [↩]
- I would urge anyone who’s interested in the question of female perpetrators to take a look at Female Sex Offenders-Survivors Safe House. [↩]
Interesting post, RJN, though I am not sure I agree with your conclusion that we have a sophisticated, politicized understanding of the sexual abuse of girls. However, regarding your question “why boys?”, I would say that it would help me and perhaps others to articulate the question further – Why boys what?
Why are boys sexually abused?
Why are boys the target or preference of some sexual abusers?
Why are boys not listened to when they report sexual abuse?*
So, why boys what?
*IME as a family therapist and teacher, girls aren’t systematically listened to either, FWIW.
Elusis:
My point is not that we have a sophisticated political or politicized understanding of the sexual abuse of girls, just that we understand it politically (even if some people don’t call it that) in the sense of it being part of the larger, dominant heterosexual narrative. This perhaps is something I could have made more clear.
As to your other question, Why boys what?, I started thinking about this in terms of targeting, by which I mean, if we look at the number of boys in the aggregate who are sexually abused, shouldn’t we be thinking of boys, as a class, as a “target” in the same way we think of girls, as a class, as a target (in terms of the dominant heterosexual narrative). As I’m writing this, I am realizing that one thing I didn’t say that I probably should have is that, if we think of boys that way, we most likely need a different narrative for it to make sense, and so maybe another way of asking my question is, Into what social, cultural, political narrative does the sexual abuse of boys fit?
Oh, yes, I know how true this is from personal experience, and I hope that nothing in my post suggested that we are anywhere near where we need to be in terms of dealing with the sexual abuse of girls.
Perhaps I’m just not getting the point here, but isn’t the answer to “why boys” simply (and horribly) “why not boys?”
Boys may be male, but they’re also children, and children are in every relevant way (physically, socially, emotionally) weaker than adults. Wherever there is a power imbalance, people will take advantage of it, some of them in an abusive way. Is there any need for further explanation of “why boys”?
The question of where the abuse of boys fits in to our cultural views of gender and of power, and how it relates to feminist discourse, is a an extremely important one. But it seems to me that this question, which you are asking for most of your post, is not a “why” question, so I’m confused as to why you frame it as one.
I also don’t see this as a “why” question. I’m perceiving this as “let’s move the focus of the discussion to the POV of the male gender where it belongs.”
Umm, the site about Female Sex Offenders you link in the footnotes appears to be a MRA- type site citing nebulous studies, focussing on “women are bad too” rather than the issue of sexual violence. Is that going to be helpful in a feminist discussion?
Our cultural beliefs that heterosexual relations are shameful for women and a source of pride for men add another source of guilt and confusion for abused boys. The issue remains “how do we help abused children? How do we protect vulnerable members of our society from harm?”
Regarding Eilish’s comment on the Female Sex Offender’s site: When I first found it, I too suspected it was an MRA-like site designed more to prove that “women are also bad” than anything else, but a look through the bibliography page began to persuade me otherwise. I was finally convinced that, independently of the politics of the site’s owner(s)/writer(s), it is a useful resource by the endorsement of Dr. Jim Hopper, who is–as far as I know–a reputable researcher on the subject of sexual abuse of boys. I am happy to reconsider this opinion; I just wanted to explain why I linked back to the site.
The female-offenders bibliography has ALL (well all we can find) the research that can be found on the topic of female sex offenders and survivors. This includes research done by feminist researchers. If you read the About page on the Safehouse it might help also. The site is not about bashing women in any way. It is about raising awareness, period. There are millions of female survivors as well as male survivors so raising awareness helps both genders.
Rhiannon,
Thanks for your comment. I just saw on your blog that you were hacked and are thinking of closing the site down. I hope you won’t have to do that. It is a valuable resource.
I’ve seen a few stories about priests abusing girls and women.
I assume that the predominance of boys as victims is a matter of access– partly a matter of boys being “privileged” to have more contact with priests (no altar girls) and partly concern about leaving priests with girls and/or girls with priests.
Nancy, that was my assumption too. It doesn’t seem from the numbers as though boys are specifically targeted any more than girls (one in six is about what I’ve heard for girls who’ve been sexually abused, though that’s off the top of my head and could very well be wrong).
Nancy –
You’re not off base. Though there are altar girls now, that’s a relatively new development; when I was an altar server ~30 years ago, it was a Radical Dangerous Idea ™. So in the course of normal events, priests would have somewhat more contact with boys than with girls.
But mostly the difference has to do with basic orientation. My understanding is that pedophiles or ephebophiles tend to be straight, gay, or bisexual more or less in the same broad proportions as the population at large. Straight pedophiles are attracted to children of the opposite gender, gay pedophiles to children of the same gender, etc. Pedophilia itself may break down that distinction somewhat but it still exists; your daughter is not “safe” from the gay male pedophile, but she’s safer than your son.
Well, guess where an awful lot of closeted gays (and some not closeted) found refuge in the Church? Correct; the seminaries and monasteries chock full of other sexually repressed (and some not so repressed) men. This has gone on for centuries, though from what I gather via oral histories from priests and monks, it was more the monks than the seminarians back in the olden days.
So you have a bunch of (largely) repressed and closeted gay and bisexual men attempting to reconcile their religious and sexual practices, with varying degrees of success. Many of these men were excellent priests. And of course there were tons of straight priests too – just a lower percentage than you might expect off-hand.
So take that gayer-than-statistically-expected population, apply the usual percentage of pedophiles and ephebophiles to be found, flavor with big doses of self-pity (about celibacy, but other things too) and organizational self-preservation, apply a protective glaze of immunity from criticism and imperially non-responsive institutional hierarchy, and presto, one ugly scandal with, as you note, more boy victims than girl victims.
What many people don’t seem to get is that the unusual thing isn’t powerful institutions and powerful men doing what they want to children sexually. That is the (sickening) historical norm since, well, ever. What’s unusual is that the elements of decent moral behavior (define as you wish, but start with ‘no fucking little kids’) have grown strong enough in society that the institutions come under actual fire and sometimes people even go to jail.
A hundred years ago Joe Paterno would still have his job (well, if he was alive), his organization and fellow coaching staff would be intact, and anybody who had tried to bring anything to the attention of anybody would have been found beaten to death in an alley. Things are changing for the better. It’s slow, but it happens.
I’ve seen a few stories about priests abusing girls and women.
Abuse in the Catholic Church was never limited to boys; the abuse of boys in the Church is obviously important to discuss, but I’m concerned that conflating it with the abuse by Sandusky and by Boy Scout leaders erases those victims.
Robert, as I understand it, there was also an element of fraud. Catholics were told that priestly celibacy would lead to less (no?) interest in sex. As a result, men who were troubled by their sexuality (homosexual, bisexual, and pedophilic) would become priests, and then find out that celibacy doesn’t work like that.
Mythago:
That is a very good point. I will change the title of the post.
The more I think about Elusis and Eytan’s question about why I have framed this as a “why” question, and after reading some of the other comments, I realize just how much of the thinking behind that I did not unpack in the post. I will give some more thought to it and either comment on it here or perhaps write another post developing what I mean a little further.
KellyK: the last figures I saw put the prevalence rate of abuse among girls at 1 in 4, but I confess I do not remember when I saw them or precisely where.
Just a quick nitpick — you’ve got Sandusky spelled wrong.
Thanks, Ruchama! It’s fixed.
I think Richard’s not being very direct about the problem. Basically, the main feminist theory of rape for the last four decades has been centered around the idea of class oppression. That may have made a a great deal of sense when it was put together in the 60s and 70s; but we’ve been getting a wave of survey results suggesting rates of sexual abuse far higher than anyone would have thought in boys, and adult men, and in prisons, and in men during war. Things people thought were marginal and didn’t happen in significant numbers are turning out to be much more common and substantial. So this theory is looking a lot less credible than it used to.
Well, no. Feminist theory around rape is theorizing the rape of women by men. That is an intentional choice rather than an error. I don’t think the theorists and activists in the 1970s and 80s were not aware of prison rape or rape of men during war-time, nor of child sexual abuse.
Rape is used as a tool of oppression, and tolerated or encouraged most where it is used as such. Prison, war, childhood and gender are all systems of oppression. The lessons of feminist theory on rape can be extended to other systems of oppression that employ or condone rape as part of the system of oppression.
So I take Richard’s question to be what is the systematic context in which rape is used as a tool of oppression in the Catholic Church, the Boy Scouts and youth athletic clubs, and how is that systematic context different for the rape of boys than it is for the rape of girls.
I believe a part of the feminist refusal to pay attention to men and boys being raped was a belief that if men’s issues were permitted into the discussion, then women’s issues would be ignored. I don’t have the experience to have a strong opinion about whether those feminists were right.
I’m just reading through comments and thinking, well, it seems to me like the understanding of “why do people rape girl children/adolescents?” is something like “well they’re so fuckable!” or “vaginas are for fucking!” or “men just can’t help themselves!” So the answer to “why do people rape boy children/adolescents” is either those same things, or… some other thing?
Or maybe the question is “why is it so obvious why people rape girls and so baffling why people rape boys”?
@10:
This contradicts everything I’ve heard. According to people who have studied them, men who molest boys are no more likely to be gay (in the sense of being sexually attracted to adult males) than the general population.
You’re subscribing to the myth that rape (and that’s what this is) is about sexual attraction. In fact, rape is a sexualized exercise of power.
When a male student at a college party gets a woman drunk (or simply overpowers her) and rapes her, it’s not “poetry between people”, it’s dominance; basically, bullying: he’s getting off on his ability to do what he wants to her and her not being able to prevent him. If he were doing it to another guy, it would mean the same thing. The reason male students don’t rape other male students is because they can’t get away with it.
I don’t think it’s any different with child molesting. Adults don’t generally need to use naked force or threats of violence (though sometimes they use it anyway) because children are by nature physically, socially, and cognitively in no position to fight back.
Well, it’s not particularly baffling why you had boys sexually abused in the Boy Scouts. The BSA:
1) has a lot of young boys as members, and due to the nature of it’s activities there were a lot of opportunities to get boys alone, when they were in various states of undress, etc., and so pedophiles were attracted to the program, and
2) had inadequate youth protection policies.
So a pedophile would recognize the BSA program as a target-rich environment and would join up.
As noted in the post point #2 has been pretty well cleaned up. The problem is never going to go away, but recent news stories have been about issues stemming from back in the ’80’s, not now. Every single leader has to take Youth Protection training upon registration and every 2 years afterwards; if they don’t renew the National computer system kicks out your charter and you can’t renew it unless they take it or you strike them off the charter. Everyone knows the policies now, and people are pretty stringent in following them. If a unit is lax, someone in that unit is going to call them on it – and if it persists, will likely call the local Council. I’ve had to make the call myself, once. As it happens it was physical abuse, not sexual abuse, but the Youth Protection policies cover all that.
One note about the files – not every entry represents an example of unreported abuse that occurred in the Boy Scouts. If someone registered in the Scouts was busted for abuse that occurred in a venue and with youth completely unrelated to Scouting, they would still get entered into the system and have their registration privileges revoked. I found that out by actually reading some of the entries in the files when they were released.
I’ve been taking the BSA’s Youth Protection training every 2 or 3 years now since the mid-90’s. In it’s latest version there’s a new section. In a video showing a couple of leaders (one male and one female) discussing the BSA’s YP policies with an off-camera interlocutor, the subject of “what do you do if you catch someone in the act” comes up. The correct answer is to separate the two, call the cops, and call the local Council (or camp authorities if you are in a BSA camp) to let them know what’s happening (in that order). That’s not new.
Then the male leader makes a comment that I don’t remember precisely enough to quote, but is along the lines of “I’d like to beat him up!” At which point the off-camera interlocutor says something along the lines of “Oh shit, don’t do that!” THAT’S new. I have to wonder if this is in response to any particular occurrences.
The exquisite care with which people talk about this, from a well-intended fear of appearing homophobic, sometimes obscures basic truths. Gay men are no more likely than straight men to be age-inappropriate in their sexual inclinations, and the same is true for women. That is not the same thing as saying that gay men who engage in age-inappropriate sexual behavior show no gender preference for their victims, or that straight men who engage in such behavior show no gender preference. Of course they do.
What IS true, and what I alluded to, is that for some pedophiles, an orientation towards children in general, gender not really important, has replaced or prevented the development of, an orientation towards adults of either gender. Maybe a third, maybe half of pedophiles fall towards this camp, or in it altogether, though it is obviously difficult to nail it down with behavioral surveys and checkboxes; the activities are illicit, secretive, shameful, hidden.
I am familiar with the conventional orthodoxy of left-wing theorizing around rape; familiar enough to see considerable merit in much of the case made. (Charles makes it articulately and coherently above.) I am not beholden to the theory, however, or obliged by allegiance to it to profess belief in absurdly stupid extensions of it, like the idea that (heterosexual male) rapists would just as happily rape a man if only it were possible for one man to overpower another. Are there such people? I am sure of it. Are they normative among the population of rapists? Doubtful to the point of incredulity. That’s an extraordinary claim; show some extraordinary data to support it, please. In a former life, I transcribed case histories of sexual criminals for a prominent defense-expert-witness psychologist in the Pacific Northwest; hundreds of them. A bare handful of those people could be argued, with greater or lesser accuracy, to fall into that model of rape.
Rape isn’t primarily about sex, but rapists certainly have sexual preferences.
@22
This, and the double-talk that followed, was in response to my objection to your claiming that men molesting boys had something to do with the men being gay in some sense.
“Gay men” normally means men whose consensual sex is mostly with other men, “straight men” normally means men whose consensual sex is mostly with women. Most men who molest boys (even exclusively boys) are, by that definition, straight. (As are most men who molest girls.)
I don’t know what leads some men to molest mostly boys and others to molest mostly girls (when given the choice), and it’s obvious that you don’t, either. However, since it doesn’t actually correlate with the molester’s sexual orientation (using the usual definition), your use of the term “gay pedophile” is at best misleading.
I didn’t say “possible.” I said “get away with it,” by which I meant to include the social circumstances, not just the law. Consider how people at a wild college party are likely respond to a man forcing his attentions on a woman vs. on another man.
However, take away the power of social disapproval, like in prisons for violent felons, and you do see male-on-male rape. And it’s really obvious there that it’s dominance behavior. Note that most of the male-on-male rapists, when they get out of prison, don’t rape men. They also often have wives or girlfriends, with whom they have relationships that are what in our society passes for normal.
RonF @21: That’s partly right. The BSA didn’t merely have “inadequate” policies; in many cases the policy was to outright conceal anything that might besmirch the BSA’s reputation, even if that meant protecting abusers and enabling further abuse. Not knowing how to respond adequately, or failing to make sure an abuser can’t simply join a different group, is very different from actively burying information lest the organization have a public scandal.
As I mentioned in my previous comment, I don’t know why men choose to molest boys (I can’t even begin to speculate about women who molest), other than that it seems to be an exercise of power.
But I can’t help noting that dominance and submission are a big part of traditional male upbringing. What you learn as a boy is that if someone is above you in the pecking order, they can do to you pretty much whatever they want, and if someone is below you, you can do whatever you want to him. (Bullying helps teach this, which is why adults don’t do anything to stop it.) Exercising this right is not just a perq, it’s something you have to do on a regular basis to maintain your place. There are limits — murder or serious injury are off-limits, for instance — but humiliation, robbery, and less severe battery are OK.
This is BTW the reason why society has such a hard time stopping abusive adults. Removing an abusive teacher or priest (or parent) puts into question the right of the superior (the adult) to exercise arbitrary power over the inferior (student, child, etc.) and thus threatens the entire social order.
RonF:
I just want to say that I think that it’s awesome that any boys who can manage to appear straight enough have access to all that the BSA has to offer.
Grace
mythago:
Re-read my post, mythago. I was talking about Youth Protection policies – those used at the unit level to ensure that Scouts are not abused. Back in my father’s day there was very little formally developed policy on that and no training either offered or required. Things are different now with two-deep leadership, preservation of youth privacy (when I was a kid we all showered together with our adult leaders in a gang shower), prohibition of being along with a child, notification rules, requirements that all leaders get training and retake training every two years, etc.
I was not talking about policies executed at the National Council level on dealing with people in Scouting who were discovered to have committed abuse. Those are indefensible and brought shameful discredit on the movement. That, too, has changed.
Grace:
The National Council meeting this May is going to be considerably more interesting than they have been in the past, and will likely get a whole lot more media attention than usual.
I am reading this discussion with great interest. Thanks all! I want to try again to articulate a little more clearly what I think I meant when I asked Why boys?, but, before I do, Robert, can you point to any studies that bear out what you say about pedophiles and ephebophiles and gender preference. The last time I paid attention to that question, what I learned was pretty much what AMM said, but I also know that a good deal of research has been done in the interim. If you don’t have it handy, I will eventually go looking, but if you do, I’d appreciate it.
So, what do I mean by Why boys? Maybe a good place to start is with what I don’t mean. I’m not talking about the sexual orientation, desire or intentionality of the abuser. Looked at from that perspective, I think what Eytan said above @3 makes a lot of sense: Why not boys? They are young and vulnerable, etc. and someone inclined to abuse them will find ways of doing so. What I mean, I think, is a variation of what Charles said, or maybe it’s the same thing.
While it may be true that childhood is a system of oppression, and it may be true that children, as a class, being vulnerable, will be subject to various forms of abuse, sexual being one of them, we also have an analysis of the sexual abuse of girls that makes it (the phenomenon of the abuse) continuous with, a part of, sexual violence against women. Perhaps another way of saying this is that patriarchy does not by itself draw some kind of magical line between girls and women, saying that this group is sexually off limits, while the other is not. (That we, culturally, in the United States might draw that line is not the same thing as saying patriarchy contains the line, since, obviously, different cultures draw the line between girlhood and womanhood in very different places.) What this suggests–and I know this may be a “Duh!” obvious point, but you’ll see why I’m making it this way (I hope) in a moment–is that patriarchy needs the sexual abuse of girls in the same way that it needs sexual violence against women: the systematic oppression of women would not work, would not be systematic, would not be consistent if its violence did not intrude upon and shape girls’ lives in the same ways that it intrudes upon and shapes the lives of women.
Is sexual violence against boys similarly continuous with sexual violence against men? I’m not sure, but I don’t think so. When men rape men–and I am for the moment going to focus on male perpetrators–they do so to feminize, emasculate, subordinate their victims. Boys are not yet men; they are already subordinate and are already, in that sense, metaphorically feminized. At the same time, though, as I think the homophobia of the mechanisms by which we try to make it invisible makes clear, the sexual abuse of boys, whether committed by men or women, is clearly part of patriarchal gender and sexual arrangements. So maybe the question I am asking–and I realize this is a really abstract, theoretical way of putting it–is Why does patriarchy need the sexual abuse of boys? Given how hard we work as a culture to make it invisible, it must serve some function.
I don’t know if that makes any more sense; I’m still sort of muddling through here; and I confess I don’t even know where to begin to ask about women perpetrators within this way of seeing things.
Sure.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6512871
you can view full text at
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00926238408405945
Note please that “a big subset of pedophiles don’t really fall into straight/gay classification because they’re just interested in children” and “there are no straight or gay pedophiles, they are all just interested in children” are two radically different statements; the first one is defensible (in fact I’m the one who first said it), the second is not.
Richard Jeffrey Newman:
If women perpetrators doesn’t fit within the context (patriarchy) one has chosen to view the problem in, then one can either dismiss/minimize the existence of women perpetrators or one can re-evaluate which context one tries to fit the problem in.
Charles S
Nancy Lebovitz:
Yes, it was intentional and it wasn’t just a refusal to pay attention, it was an active erasure:
For instance Mary P. Koss in her paper Detecting the Scope of Rape : A Review of Prevalence Research Methods:
Inappropriate!
This lay a premise that unconsensual sex where a man is the one not consenting isn’t rape unless the man was penetrated (the perpetrator is most likely to be another man). This premise is then used by people like those at TheLesbianMafia to take (TRIGGER WARNING!)a male rape victim to task for calling what happened to him for rape”.
eilish:
Are you saying that female sex offenders is NOT an issue of sexual violence?
Robert,
from your reference:
“In light of these findings, it is likely that the development of partner sex preference and age preference are not independent of each other and that sex preference in pedophilia is etiologically different from the sex preference of males who prefer physically mature partners of either sex.”
So there are pedophiles who prefer boys and pedophiles who prefer girls, but pedophiles who prefer boys are not gay men (men sexually attracted to other adult men) who are resorting to raping children, they are homosexual pedophiles, a distinct sexual orientation. That study does not touch on the question of the sexual orientation relative to adults of pedophiles who are not purely pedophile in orientation. So the idea that gay men enter the priesthood and therefore rape boys is entirely unsupported by your reference.
Richard – Thank you for clarifying, I understand better what you’re getting at now. But I feel that at the basis of it is a faulty assumption, namely, that all abuse can be traced back to the patriachy. But I just don’t think that’s right. Or more specifically, I think the human propensity for abuse – sexual and other – does not arise from the patriarchy at all, though the patriarchy has definitely co-opted it to its purposes.
I’m aware that what I’m saying is reductive and an oversimplification, but nonetheless, I think it’s a fact that if you put a human in a position of power over another human, and the right circumstances hold, that power may end up being abused. That is a fact of human nature just like the fact that if you put two human beings in a situation where the right circumstances hold, they are capable of amazing feats of kindness and altruism.
You are right that the patriarchy and abuse are closely intertwined. But this is a symbiostic relationship, not a cause and effect relationship – abuse needs power imbalances, that patriarchy provides. Patriarchy needs ways of maintaining power imbalances, and abuse is one of them. But, neither is dependent on the other – and I do think your claim that “patriarchy needs the sexual abuse of girls” and that it needs sexual violence against women is a dangerous one, because it implies that if the problem of sexual violence and abuse goes away, the patriarchy will not survive. But the patriarchy has many other ways to perpetuate itself, and while tackling sexual violence is extremely important, it’s not a complete solution – but I digress; my main point is that while the partriarchy has shown itself quite happy (in an abstract sense) to take advantage of the fact that it creates a fertile ground for abuse, that doesn’t mean that it is the direct cause of abuse.
As I said above, childhood also contains a power imbalance. And I’m not talking here about the social construct of “childhood”, but of the biological fact that young human beings are both physically and mentally incapable of self-sufficiency for the first several years of their life (though not for nearly as long as Western society wishes them to be), and even when they are capable of fending for themselves, they still are smaller and weaker than fully grown healthy adults. Because childhood is predicated on biological fact to a far greater extent than patriarchy does, childhood does not “need” abuse. But it still provides the right kind of environment for abuse. So while abuse is symbiotic with the patriarchy, it is parasitic upon childhood.
Anyway, I think I’ve sort of made my point. Tl;dr version – I think the patriarchy is the wrong place for looking for the causes of the sexual abuse of boys, because while the patriarchy and abuse are closely tied, abuse can exist indpendently of the patriarchy.
Tamen:
That is certainly true, and I am not wedded to the idea that a traditional, classical feminist analysis (hence patriarchy as the context) is the best one within which to understand the abuse of boys, but just because all the pieces do not yet fit, doesn’t mean they don’t or won’t fit. I am not interested in dismissing or minimizing the existence of women perpetrators, as I hope my original post shows, but they are not the starting point of my question and so I am not yet persuaded that a feminist analysis is not the lens through which to work here.
Eytan:
That’s a fair point about the way I phrased my question using the idea of “need,” and if my question makes it sound like I think that violence originates in patriarchy, or that patriarchy causes violence, then I have clearly asked it in the wrong way, because that is not what I mean. You wrote:
I’m not interested in the “causes of the sexual abuse of boys,” because I think you’re right. I don’t think that any particular social/cultural system can cause abuse. Rather, it provides the context within which abuse can be used, can flourish, and it gives that abuse meaning, for the perpetrator, for the victim/survivor, and for society at large. Heteronormative patriarchy, in the United States at least–I keep having to remind myself that what I’m talking about is almost certainly historically and culturally bound–works awfully hard to make the sexual abuse of boys “go away,” either by rendering it invisible by defining abuse by women as something other than abuse or by hiding it by silencing boys who are abused by men with the threat of the taint of homosexuality (and that threat also exists, as I discussed in the original post, in cases where boys are abused by women). Why?
And I am going to have end there right now, with this question only partially laid out. I will be back later.
RNJ: I did not intend to accuse you of minimizing/erasing male victims of female perpetrators, but I mentioned it as an (in my view invalid) option to reconcile patriarchy theory and female perpetrators. Mary P. Koss is one example and a more recent one is the Women’s Rights Activists in India who are now protesting against the proposed new rape laws being gender neutral:
Charles –
Since I never said ‘gay men become priests and therefore rape”, the nonsupport is nontroubling.
Yes, the etiological picture is different. The etiology of you hitting me over the head with a hammer, versus me falling off a 9th floor balcony and hitting my head on the sidewalk, is also different. But either way my head is smashed in. It is not unreasonable to note that there is some type of deep, if rather inaccessible, differentiation between a male adult who wants sex with other male adults, and a male adult who wants sex with male children. Nor is it unreasonable to consider for purposes of broad group labeling, both these guys as ‘gay’, just as their opposite numbers (adult male -> adult female, adult male -> child female) are both ‘straight’.
I brought up this relatively trivial point because it has mild explanatory power towards Nancy’s question/theory about the priestly preference for boys over girls; Nancy thought it was that priests have/had more access to boys. That might be a partial explanation, but the institutional and cultural reasons for a boy-preference involve the institutional and cultural attractiveness, for non-sexual-fulfillment reasons, of a certain set of roles within the church for gay men, or sexually-male-orientated men. That’s all.
RJN @33 –
See to me, the question of “why does the patriarchy need abuse of boys” is kind of opposite of the questions you ask at the end of 33 which is “why does the patriarchy try so hard to make abuse of boys invisible?”
Invisibility can, of course, help perpetuate abuse (and therfore it might seem like invisibility exists in order to perpetuate abuse – because the system somehow “needs” this abuse). But perpetuation of abuse could also be a “side-effect” of invisibility with invisibility serving some other primary purpose.
I think this is a possibility in terms of abuse of boys because the silencing of boy victims serves so many purposes of patriarchy – the idea that it is women who are sexual objects and men who are sexual actors; the abused boy must repress/suppress the abuse to take on/access an adult male sexuality of dominance and “activeness”; reducing the sympathy/identification between adult males and female oppression (the abused boy must reject this identification to embrace his power as an adult male). You yourself have attributed your relationship with feminist theory to your history of abuse. Acknowledging abuse of boys creates more avenues for solidarity of adult men with causes that erode patriarchy. So making abuse of boys invisible creates the conditions for those abused boys to take on a “normal” adult male sexuality (which is necessary to the patriarchy) whereas open acknowledgement blurrs the lines between the sexes and thereby threatens patriarchy.
So patriarchy doesn’t need the abuse of boys so much as it needs to ignore that boys are vulnerable in the same ways that girls and women are vulnerable. To acknowledge that boys are vulnerable makes it harder for boys to become men who believe themselves to be not vulnerable to sexual assault. It creates men who have had the experience of being sexually vulnerable.
Note: I am passingly familiar with feminist theory and though I definitely identify as feminist there is a lot of radical feminist theory that is intuitively off-putting to me and I have not really been in a situation conducive to grappling with that to conclusion. Which is a long way of saying, I may or may not be expressing myself well because I don’t necessarily understand the nuances of the words and theories I’m talking about.
Emily,
Thank you! I think you have put into words something of what I have been struggling to articulate.
I have read Brownmiller and she absolutely discusses and theorises male rape, that’s where the feminization theory Richard discusses comes from.
Another Alex:
Does Brownmiller discuss and theorize male rape by female perpetrators, which makes up a significant amount of male rape according to NISVS 2010? I can’t see how feminization would fit there – in my experience it’s more often a matter of presumed stereotypical masculinity (never _not_ ready for sex) in that scenario.
If she does, could you please provide a reference as I would very much like to read it.
All I’ve come across from feminist academics on female on male rape either blatantly tries to define it away (Koss) or handwave it away with circular logic like this: people don’t perceive it as harmful hence it’s not harmful and therefore it’s different than male-on-female rape (Nicola Gavey).
The reason that rape of males by females doesn’t fit into many feminist theories is because of the tautologies** of those theories.
I don’t know if those theorists actually would disagree that male rape happens, or that it’s a valid issue. I think it’s more that the language of their chosen argument doesn’t allow for it.
**If you say that “dog bites man” is true, then you have to ask yourself what you do with the “man bites dog” occurrences. If you’re building a tautology, you can’t say “well, dog bites man, but that doesn’t cover everything. Some men bite dogs, too.” Instead, you categorize it as an extension of your own theory: “We know that dogs bite men. Therefore when men bite dogs, they’re simply acting the part of the dogs and putting the dogs in place of the men.” Unsurprisingly this approach won’t do much to help your understanding of the “man bites dog” problem.
Some feminists do the equivalent. They use language of men to describe successful women (doing otherwise would go against their core argument) and use language of women to describe unsuccessful men (doing otherwise would go against their core argument.) The goal of this language selection is to support the tautology; as with the dog argument, it’s True Scotsman writ large.
@Tamen:
I’m not eilish, but I think what eilish is getting at is that some MRAs seem interested in talking about female perpetrators ONLY as a way to say that women are bad, too (often with the corollary “…therefore there’s no reason to talk about/do anything about violence by male perpetrators”). It’s only a talking point to them, not a problem they’re interested in solving.
It occurred to me last night that maybe a relevant question is “why are we surprised that boys get raped?” or “why are we resistant to the idea that boys get raped?”
closetpuritan: I think the purpose of that question was to derail the discussion.
re: Rhiannon’s site: I prefer to know the political beliefs underpinning a site. It assists me in making judgements based on the material I read.
I think we are becoming less resistant to the horrible truth that children are abused: there are too many testimonies.
Did you see this article on recent studies of pedophelia? http://www.alternet.org/are-some-men-born-pedophiles-new-science-says-yes-sexologists-say-not-so-fast
I have noticed that sexual abuse of children (both boys and girls) and sexual assaults of adults seems to be more common in cultures that are very patriarchal, hierarchical and dominated by religions that are very strict about sexual mores and segregation of the sexes. As a North American example, take the FLDS (fundamentalist mormon) communities. ‘Mainstream’ American culture is also still heavily influenced by twisted views of sexuality and power.
In our culture’s traditional mythologies little girls get rescued, little boys overcome obstacles. And – as alluded to above in better feminist language than I have in my fingers – heterosex is ok but policed by society for adult male / young female relations, while homosex is just taboo.
Maybe I’m simplifying too much but it seems that man/ girl abuse is talked about because we police inappropriate hetsex to rescue little girls; we don’t ask ” why boys” because it’s icky and real boys harden up and learn how to fight back and become aggessors themselves without protection from societal policing.
I was looking through Autostraddle’s Youth + Family archives for resources for the parent of a gender-non-conforming boy, and came across a post that I think provides some interesting discussion on the topic of “Why Boys?” – Penn State Scandal: Everybody’s Talking About How Nobody’s Talking About Homosexuality.
Robert, was that comment destined for “best looking Attorney General in the country?” post? : )
dragon_snap, the bit in that article which rang truest and clearest for me was this bit:
Seriously. We all think, “Well, obviously you would stop the rape of a girl,” but, sadly, in actual fact that is not a given. It is tragedy layered on woe that Average Person in our culture would not be as quick to stop the rape of a boy, or might not even think of it as rape.
But as valuable as the whole discussion is, and the various angles and sub-discussions, we shouldn’t be founding any of it on, “Well, obviously you would stop the rape of a girl.” Because that foundation ain’t solid.
Grace
I just want to add that we covered sexual assault, sexual abuse, and pedophilia in my Sexuality in Counseling class last week (yeah, fun class) and my students asked “why does all the media on pedophiles focus on men who abuse boys if girls are more likely to be victims?” I wondered if it’s because, analogous to the disproportionate focus on “stranger rape” vs. “date rape,” we tend to focus on child sexual abuse by strangers rather than by family members/close friends, so the Catholic Church scandals and Sandusky episode get disproportionate focus? (What percentage of victims of priests are male vs. female, anyway?)
But I think the article linked to by dragon snap and commented on by Grace has a valuable perspective to add.
Yes. God.
Moderator, could you please move comment #47 to the Obama-called-the-AG-purty thread, and then delete it from here. Thank you.
Done, Robert.
Dragon_Snap: Thanks for the link. I will check it out as soon as I get a chance.