Predators

By Crispin Sartwell

Sexual abuse of children seems to be a major theme of our culture at the moment; it faces us in the news every day. We hear commentators continually express their shock at the betrayals and their ramifications: the denial, depression, dysfunction, or sheer disappearance of the victims.

But I can't help thinking that a lot of us know a lot more about this than we pretend to. Childhood sexual abuse is extremely common. It infests every institution in which children are embedded: families, schools, churches.

The Roman Catholic bishops met in Texas last week and heard from survivors of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of the clergy.

I looked at the faces of the bishops, which were registering various states of surprise and sadness. Some held their heads in their hands. But what I was thinking was: I wonder which of those men are abusers.

Whatever happened to Elizabeth Smart, the 14-year-old girl abducted from her home in Utah, you can bet that it has something to do with sex. The perpetrator might be a stranger, or he might not be, but either way sexual abuse is likely.

R Kelly, the Grammy-award-winning R&B singer, has recently been indicted for filming his own encounters with young girls.

I was sexually hounded by my step-brother Bob from the time I was twelve to fifteen. I'm not sure whether to call myself a survivor of sexual abuse or not; certainly I have had a difficult time with sexuality in a variety of ways, starting with the realization or decision that I am a heterosexual. It was difficult for me to carve out a sexual identity.

In fact, I was approached in the same period by many men, though none ever forced me actually to have sex. But I was "chicken-hawked" on city buses, in stores, in schools. The stuff is everywhere, all the time.

I know a couple of women who work in the sex industry. One of them, a model for porn magazines and a dominatrix, underwent horrific abuse at the hands of her father. The other, an anorexic prostitute, was sexually abused by a cousin.

Indeed, it seems to me that I know about as many people who were sexually abused as children as people who were not.

The sexual abuse of girls is a horror. But the sexual abuse of boys is something we are just beginning to face.

We had better stop thinking about this, or pretending to think about it, as a small or isolated problem. The sexual predation of children is all around us.

There is an association of sex with youth in our culture that pervades advertising and pop music. And in homosexual culture and homoerotic imagery, the appreciation of youth is wide and deep.

Many of the perpetrators are sad, twisted men who can neither acknowledge nor honestly disavow their desires.

The secrecy and repression that surrounds pedophilia intensifies it, converts it into obsession. It is all around us, and just barely forbidden. And the damage that the obsessed do is incalculable, from murder and suicide to sexual and other forms of self-destruction in their victims.

We had better get honest, right now, about how much of this there is, and how deeply entrenched it is in our culture, or else there will continue to be many R Kellys, and many Elizabeths.

Now I'm raising five children, from two to fourteen. They have a wholesome home life. But I worry anyway; that's my job. And it makes me deeply sad to know that I can't protect them completely.

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Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at the Maryland Institute College of Art.