Abstract
The previous chapters of this book have clearly demonstrated that contemporary western definitions of child sexual abuse cannot be easily or unproblematically applied to past societies. They have shown the dangers of looking at abuse through the lens of early twenty-first-century understandings of this issue which imply a teleology in which contemporary ideas about appropriate adult—child relationships are imposed as ‘correct’ or ‘more enlightened’ on people in the past and which have a tendency to misinterpret, and even to demonize, their attitudes to children. One needs to go no further than the opening paragraph of Lloyd deMause’s A History of Childhood1 to argue for the importance of examining historical case studies which call into question such universalist and essentialist attempts to understand what is now commonly known as child sexual abuse. In a parallel way, social anthropology has recently begun to engage with issues of child sexual abuse, looking at how it is defined, and by whom, and how, as anthropologists, it is possible for us to distinguish between indigenous cultural practices, which may appear abusive to outsiders, but are not considered so internally to a community, and those which are acknowledged as aberrant.2 The most important lesson for an anthropologist looking at the previously discussed historical case studies in this book, is the necessity of analysing and understanding child sexual abuse within its specific local or historical contexts, as well as in the broader sense of the social values and hierarchical structures prevailing in the wider society at particular times.
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Notes
The book opens with the line: ‘The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes, the lower the level of child care, the more likely children are to be killed, abandoned, beaten, terrorized, and sexually abused.’ Lloyd deMause, ‘The Evolution of Childhood’, in L. deMause (ed.), The History of Childhood (New York: Psychohistory Press, 1974), p. 1.
As Jill Korbin has pointed out, many western child-rearing practices appear abusive to non-westerners. She writes: ‘It is equally sobering to look at Western child-rearing techniques and practices through the eyes of these same non-Western cultures. Non-Western people often conclude that anthropologists, missionaries, or other Europeans with whom they come into contact do not love their children or simply do not know how to care for them properly. Practices such as isolating infants and small children in rooms or beds of their own at night, making them wait for readily available food until a schedule dictates that they can satisfy their hunger, or allowing them to cry without immediately attending to their needs or desires would be at odds with the child-rearing philosophies of most … cultures’. Jill Korbin, Child Abuse and Neglect: Cross Cultural Perspectives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), p. 4.
Gilbert Herdt, Sambia Sexual Culture: Essays from theField (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1999) p. 9.
See, for example, Pat Caplan, The Cultural Construction of Sexuality (London: Tavistock, 1987);
Carole Vance, ‘Anthropology Rediscovers Sexuality: a Theoretical Comment’, Social Science and Medicine 33 (1991): 875–84;
Gayle Rubin, ‘Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality’, in Carole Vance (ed.), Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (New York: Pandora, 1992), pp. 267–319. Further-more, modern anthropologists reject any notion of hierarchy in relation to sexuality or anything else, so that while some nineteenth-century anthro-pologists labelled ‘promiscuity’ and multiple partners in traditional societies as a sign of backwardness and primitiveness, those who work on sexuality today generally do not make value judgements about the sexual practices of others but place them in much wider discussions of ideas about the body, about procreation, gender, kinship and cosmology. Herdt has argued: The creation of a sexual culture is an epistemology, a system of know-ledge about the world, and about things in the world. Sexual culture provides for a culture its received theory of what human nature is. What is a man? What is a woman? What is manliness? What is womanliness? What is a boy? What is a girl? What is heterosexuality? What is homo-sexuality? What is sex for? What is good about sex? What is bad about sex? Those questions are all being iterated as a set of distinctions from the locally created theory of human sexual nature. This theory is then being promoted and taught to children, becomes part of their individual ontologies, and then feeds back into what we might call the collective pool of the sexual culture and its public representations for the culture as a whole. ’Examining Secrecy and Sexuality’ Semiannual Newsletter of the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, 6: 2 (1998). Taken from http://www.vanderbilt.edu/rpw_center/examine.htm
Jean La Fontaine, ‘Child Sexual Abuse and the Incest Taboo: Practical Problems and Theoretical Issues’, Man (N. S.) 23 (1986): 1–18 (p. 2).
Freud famously could not accept that the accounts of father—daughter incest he heard in his consulting rooms were descriptions of abuse or coercive sex and interpreted them instead as fantasy. For further details on this, see Jeffrey Masson, Freud, the Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory (London: Faber, 1984).
Colin Turnbull, The Forest People (New York: Touchstone Books, 1961).
Colin Turnbull, The Mountain People (London: Pimlico, 1994).
Helen Kavapalu, ‘Dealing with the Dark Side in the Ethnography of Childhood: Child Punishment in Tonga’, Oceania 63:4 (1993) pp. 313–29.
Gertrude Fraser and Philip Kilbride, ‘Child Abuse and Neglect — Rare, but Perhaps Increasing, Phenomenon among the Samia of Kenya’, Child Abuse and Neglect: The International Journal, 4(4) (1980): 227–32.
Judith Ennew, Sexual Exploitation of Children (Cambridge: Polity, 1986);
Jill Korbin, ‘Child Sexual Abuse: Implications from the Cross-Cultural Record’, in Anthropological Perspectives on the Treatment and Maltreatment of Children, ed Nancy Scheper-Hughes (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1987);
Jean La Fontaine, Child Sexual Abuse (Cambridge: Polity, 1990).
Bronislaw Malinowski, Sex and Repression in Savage Society (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1927).
Don Kulick and Margaret Willson, Taboo: Sex, Identity and Erotic Subjectivity in Anthropological Fieldwork (London: Routledge, 1995);
Fran Markowitz and Michael Ashkenazi, Sex, Sexuality and the Anthropologist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
See, for example, William Crocker and Jean Crocker, The Canela: Bonding through Kinship, Ritual and Sex (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1994);
Thomas Gregor, Anxious Pleasures (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1985);
Richard Parker, Bodies, Pleasures and Passions: Sexual Culture in Contemporary Brazil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991);
Graham Fordham, ‘Whisky, Women and Song: Alcohol and AIDS in Northern Thai-land’, Australian Journal of Anthropology 6 (1995): 154–77;
Graham Fordham, ’Northern Thai Male Culture and the Assessment of HIV Risk: Towards a New Approach’, Cross-roads 12 (1998): 77–164.
Richard Parker, Gilbert Herdt and Manuel Carballo, ‘Sexual Culture, HIV Transmission, and AIDS Research’, The Journal of Sex Research 28 (1991): 77–98 (p. 80).
was published as Jean La Fontaine, Speak of the Devil: Tales of Satanic Abuse in Contemporary England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa (London: Penguin, 1972).
Derek Freeman, The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1999).
Ibid. These beliefs are not restricted to the Mehinaku. For comparative material on beliefs about the polluting nature of vaginal or menstrual secre-tions in other societies, see Elvira Belaunde, ‘Menstruation, Birth Observances and the Couple’s Love Among the Airo-Pai of Amazonian Peru’, in Managing Reproductive Life: Cross-Cultural Themes in Fertility and Sexuality ed. Soraya Tremayne (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2001),
and Alma Gottlieb and Thomas Buckley, Blood Magic: The Anthropology of Menstruation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
Laura Rival, ‘Androgynous Parents and Guest Children: the Huaorani Couvade’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society 4 (1998): 619–42.
Gilbert Herdt, ‘Semen Transactions in Sambia Culture’, in Gilbert Herdt (ed.), Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 173.
Herdt has modified his position on this over the years, arguing, along with others, that modernization, globalization and the advent of Christianity (among other things) have led to a rapid decline in ritualized homosexuality and that as a custom it is now rare. Bruce Knauft, who worked on ritualized homosexuality in another part of Papua New Guinea, recalled the shocked and horrified reactions of contemporary young men when he described it to them; they voiced disbelief that their fathers had ever done such a thing. However, that such practices did occur in the past is not disputed even though there is some unease about the fact that they were labelled ritual-ised homosexuality, when perhaps the term ‘boy insemination’ would have proved more useful and less open to accusations of imposing false, western labels. See Bruce Knauft, ‘What Ever Happened to Ritualized Homosexuality? Modern Sexual Subjects in Melanesia and Elsewhere’, Annual Review of Sex Research, 14 (2003): 137–59.
Roger Goodman, Children of the Japanese State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Centre for the Protection of Children’s Rights, The Trafficking of Children for Prostitution in Thailand (Bangkok: Unpublished manuscript, 1991); Asia Watch, A Modern Form of Slavery: Trafficking of Burmese Women and Girls into Brothels in Thailand (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1993).
Noleen Heyzer, Working Women of Southeast Asia — Development, Subordination and Emancipation (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986);
Peter Lee-Wright, Child Slaves (London: Earthscan Publications, 1990);
Marjorie Muecke, ‘Mother Sold Food, Daughter Sells Her Body — The Cultural Continuity of Prostitution’, Social Science and Medicine 35 (1992): 891–901.
Several commentators dislike the term child prostitution, and prefer the term ‘the commercial sexual exploitation of children’, arguing that this better reflects the reality of the lives of young people working in the sex industry. See Kevin Ireland, Wish You Weren’t Here (London: Save the Children Fund, 1993). He argues that the term child prostitution implies ‘a sense of decision and control on behalf of the child. All children under the age of 18 who are in prostitution are considered, de facto, to be sexually exploited’ (p. 3). The political implications of this are clear, and quite understandable. However, ignoring the agency and control that children do have, imposes a particular view of sexual abuse on children, which many of them explicitly reject.
Heather Montgomery, Modem Babylon? Prostituting Children in Thailand (Oxford: Berghahn, 2001).
For an account of the changing economic value of children in the West, see Viviana Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: the Changing Social Value of Children (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). In it she shows how the western child changed from being economically profitable at the end of the nineteenth century to sentimentally priceless at the end of the twentieth.
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© 2007 Heather Montgomery
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Montgomery, H. (2007). Child Sexual Abuse — an Anthropological Perspective. In: Rousseau, G. (eds) Children and Sexuality. Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230590526_11
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