Morality and the Law

MORALITY AND THE LAW XLIX

By Stephen Ellis

THE MORALITY OF OUR CHANGING SEXUAL MORES

I love it when people take the time to write to me (usually via email) and express their own thoughts about things I’ve written. I do not believe I have ever had more responses to any BLOG than when I wrote about the problems that concerned me with the Adam Walsh Child Protective Act. Several responses were from people who, themselves had been victims of sexual abuse as a child. The thing that stands out most in my mind is that twenty, forty or even sixty years later, the victims are still chastising themselves because they feel they were partially to blame for what happened.

We’ve all heard the axiomatic "a child is never to blame". But is this really true?

Although our courts and fully ninety-five-percent of the writers who write about pedophilia take the position that the child is never to blame, the fact is that many people do not recognize that children are very sexual creatures. From the first time a child touches him/herself "down there" and it feels good, the child becomes aware of sexual feelings. It may be many years before they understand those feelings or know what to do about them…but it feels good.

The first time a little girl (or boy) notices that there is a difference between them and their sister or brother, there is an arising sexual curiosity. The child (assuming the parents haven’t frightened the child by telling him/her that he/she will de damned in Hell if they try to talk about it) will usually find peers in school or in their neighborhood in whom they can confide. Heaven forbid their parents should hear about it. And, of course, the information gleaned from other children is usually wildly wrong and very unsatisfying to the child. Of course, the child may have an older brother or sister with whom they can speak…assuming the older brother or sister has not been programmed by foolish parents. The problem here is that the older child may be old enough to want to start sexual experimentation and who better than a younger brother or sister that they can trust not to tell their parents.

This brings me to another point: Incest between siblings is not that uncommon. Just read the studies done by Kinsey, Masters or any of a hundred different studies done at credible universities. Actual intercourse is far less common, but sex play between siblings is widely practiced.

Which brings me to still another point: If a child feels its OK to play sex games with a sibling, although keeping it a closely guarded secret, what about sex games with parents, aunts, uncles and cousins? There is actually significantly more sexual abuse perpetrated on children by family members and close family friends than by the strangers we often refer to as the "sexual predators".

We teach our children that if a stranger offers you candy to get into his car…RUN and get away from him. Children have a natural distrust of strangers until they get a little older. But what if that person is an Uncle or a Cousin? Children absolutely trust family members! There is an innate sense in children that a family member will not hurt them…and parents rarely warn their children about family members. And what if the person placing his hands on the privates of a young girl is her father? Is the child going to object or try to run away? Extremely doubtful!

Please don’t think, even for a moment, that there are not fathers who will molest and even have intercourse with their children. The world is full of them!

I knew a girl whose father was an Evangelical Preacher who had four daughters. He had intercourse with all four usually starting at about age eight and continuing on through puberty. Was he ever arrested? Not to my knowledge. None of his children would report him to the police and the mother in the family, well aware of what was going on, believed her husband that what he was doing was a religious favor to his children. The man was highly respected as a Preacher…a man of God. When I spoke with a couple of his daughters, I wanted to report him to the police, but the girls said, "don’t". They felt that they were as much to blame as he was and told me that if I reported it, they would deny it.

Why did these girls feel that they were partially to blame? Because (a) it felt good, (b) they didn’t physically stop their father and (c) it would have felt wrong for them to remove their father from the family scene by having him arrested. The fact is, however, that if it were not for the predatory act of their father, they would not have done what they did. Or would they?

Let’s take a closer look at a female’s sexuality. Is it really the "man" who gets the most out of a sexual union? Think about this: Is it the male or the female who dresses with great detail to attract the opposite sex? Is the male or the female that uses makeup to appear more attractive? Is it the male or the female that has the most intense orgasms? Is it the male or the female who screams aloud with passion and excitement?

Please remember, throughout history…until the rise of Christianity…sex was a very open thing. In ancient Rome it was not unusual to see couples having sex on a side street or in a grassy area. Boys and men were highly valued as workers, as soldiers and statesmen…and also as sexual objects (homosexuality was not frowned upon), etc. But girls and women were thought of solely as child-bearers. It was not uncommon for a man to sell his female children (age six and older) to wealthy men for the purpose of doing scullery work until they were old enough to bear children. A girl was considered old enough to sell when she had gotten her second set of teeth. There was no stigma to giving birth without being married because there was no such thing as marriage. The first woman a man took into his home "to wife" or bear his children was considered the female head of the household.

All this changed around 330-380 AD as Christianity took over the Roman Empire. In order to gain greater control of the population the church decreed that fornication without the blessing of the church was "bad" and "sinful". And so, marriage was born. Public fornication began to disappear and the only people who were allowed to keep multiple girls in their homes were the very wealthy who could afford large donations to the church.

But this didn’t stop young females from being very sexual. The way the female is constructed, sex is very important to her. What it did do was "bury" the public exhibition of this sexuality. It gave rise to girls and women who would dedicate their lives to the church and totally abandon sex (at least publicly).

If you read Geoffrey Chaucer’s "Canterbury Tales" (written about 1375 AD) you realize that although many more petticoats had to be lifted, just as many female knees were caressed, and women were still thought of, exclusively, as sexual objects. As recently as the 1920s women were still considered subservient to men. Women who chose ignore the church’s mores gave rise to terms like "slut" and "whore". In fact, it was not until the late 1960s when women really began to come into their own sexually. Physically, women were just as "needy", but now the dogmas of the church began to dissipate and the church itself began toweaken significantly. The once powerful rules that said sex without the blessing of the church is sinful are now largely ignored. In the more civilized parts of the world it is accepted that men and women (even boys and girls) will have sexual relationships before getting married. Even single motherhood has become an accepted way of life and the stigma of being a bastard child is no longer with us.

The changes that have taken place are not "sudden". Civilized countries still have a significant portion of the older population who were raised o think "differently" and adhered more to the fundamentalist religious beliefs. This older population is slowly dying out and the acceptance of younger and younger sexual relations is becoming more accepted.

When I taught at Mt. Vernon Middle School in Los Angeles fifteen or twenty years ago, I taught two classes on sex-education to 6th, 7th and 8th grade students. In my 7th grade class, I was explaining how a baby comes down the birth canal and out the vagina into the world. I also explained the reason childbirth is so painful to a woman is that her vaginal muscles have to stretch in order to allow the baby to exit the womb. Imagine my surprise when one of the 12-year-old female students raised her hand and said, "When I had my baby, it didn’t hurt at all." Then, imagine my surprise when three or four other girls the same age nodded their heads in agreement. Out of curiosity, I prepared an anonymous sex questionnaire that I passed out to my students the following day. Among the girls it showed that 4% had borne children, and that 71% were already sexually active. That among the sexually active females almost 50% had some sexual experience with family members. Seventh grade children!

The class was overwhelmingly Latino, but Latino kids are no different than white or black kids. Maybe some households are more restrictive than others and maybe some kids simply do not feel they are ready for sex at an early age. The fear many children had when I was a child of being sent to Hell (1) for being sexually active before marriage has all but disappeared.

Our legislators (usually of the "older" generation) and our Supreme Court (also of the "older" generation) should read some of the more current studies of sexuality. Then, perhaps, our morality laws will more accurately reflect reality.