Long-range Effects of Child and Adolescent Sexual Experiences

Myths, Mores, and Menaces

Allie C. Kilpatrick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780805809138
• eBook ISBN: 9781317824657
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Clinical Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Making a unique contribution of placing the current sexual exploitation of children and adolescents firmly in its historical context, this book looks at the family's and society's roles in child and adolescent sex abuse. Unlike most previous studies, this study allows a range of responses from negative to positive and avoids the methodological problems inherent in many other studies. Most studies combine the age groups of children and adolescents, whereas this study separates these different age groups and compares the nature and outcome of sexual experiences of children with those of adolescents. Utilizing sophisticated analytical measures, the author's findings repudiate many commonly held assumptions and serve to calm current hysteria regarding sexual abuse of minors.

Written to disseminate findings that could be helpful in realistically confronting the phenomenon of human sexuality, the results presented in this book dispel many current myths about early sexuality, including ethnic differences. The author wanted to separate scientific inquiry from the perpetration of pervading mores or social norms, and identify the real menaces to healthy adult functioning.

	I
	CONTEXTS AND ISSUES IN STUDYING CHILD AND ADOLESCENT SEXUAL EXPERIENCES

	1
	CHILDHOOD/ADOLESCENT SEXUAL EXPERIENCES IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Folklore, informal sanctions, religious laws, legal controls, and scientific research concerning childhood and adolescence provide the historical context within which to place the current debate on effects of these experiences. Folklore and informal sanctions serve as helpful beacons guiding us to the humanistic center of debates. Religious laws and legal controls reveal much about our taboos, and, although incest is an ancient and widespread taboo, the taboo against using children as sex objects is only a few hundred years old (Schultz, 1980). Professionals and social scientists have chosen to buttress existing norms or mores, to challenge them, or to provide new ways of viewing them.

FOLKLORE

Folktales often incorporate historical data, and some may be the product of centuries of revision and embroidery in the telling of an actual clinical case history (Goodwin, 1988). Thompson's (1955–1958) Motif Index of Folk Literatur. lists more than 20 categories of incest folktales including incest punished, misshapen child from brother-sister incest, child of incest exposed, flight of a maiden to escape marriage to father, suicide to prevent brother-sister marriage, loss of magic powers after incest, God born from incestuous union, incest unwittingly committed, girl got with child by intoxicated father, lustful stepmother, and aunt seduces nephew.

Some incest myths suggest that formal rules against incest are necessary primarily because incest is such a tempting solution to universal conflicts. An example of this is the Navajo Moth-Way Chant (Goodwin, 1988). In this story:

the Moth-People are delighted when they realize that if they marry their daughters to their sons, families will never have to part or change and they can be together forever. The Moth-People become so excited at this discovery that they all fly into the flames and perish. (p. 26)

Goodwin observed how economically this story describes the intolerance of separation, change, and aging that characterizes some incest families as well as associated tendencies toward immaturity and impulsive self-destructiveness.

Some folklore data provide numerous illustrations of extreme symptoms in incest victims and support the concept that the incest taboo developed because of the interpersonal stresses that surround the incestuous act. Runaways, hysterical symptoms, and suicidal acts are still major clinical problems among incest victims. Clinicians who are treating families that are entangled in intrafamilial child or adolescent sexual abuse may find much in these incest motifs that they recognize. Also, when anthropologists witness incest, the problems of family isolation and deviance are described in terms remarkably similar to those used by clinical observers (Wilson, 1961).

INFORMAL SANCTIONS

A millennium before the Hebrews wrote their first Bible and the Greeks their Iliad and Odysse, a rich literature existed in the cuneiform system of writing, which was inscribed on clay tablets. These tablets give us the myths, lamentations, epic tales, proverbs, and laws of the ancient civilizations of Sumer, ancestor to our own modern culture. One table relates the story of a Sumerian who, vehemently disapproving of child marriage, declared, “I will not marry a wife who is only three years old as a donkey does!” (Rush, 1980, p. 17).

Each culture's system of informal sanctions may serve to enforce legal or formal sanctions regarding incest and other sexual behavior or to divert them to more workable solutions. Goodwin (1988, 1982) gave several examples of these. The Navajo maintain their very strict prohibition of incest through a series of informal sanctions. Incest participants are said to fall into fires (a common accident in hogans), to have seizures, and to become witches. Even today these sanctions are powerful enough to create serious difficulties for Navajo epileptics, who are automatically assumed to have committed incest and to be a risk for becoming a witch. English Puritans affixed to the offending father a sign describing his sexual misbehavior, a practice similar to the punishment for adultery described in The Scarlet Letter. In Africa, such an offense was reported to the woman's society that then gathered at the man's hut and sang loudly all night about the details of his misbehavior. The story of Manekine, Princess of Hungary, illustrates the healing potential of informal sanctions for the victim that emphasizes public confession and apology by the offender. Upon hearing both her father and her husband express remorse for having abused her, the battered heroine miraculously regains both her severed arm and her dead child that their abuse had caused.

In other cultures where the extreme severity of formal rules—usually death and exile—punished both partners without regard for power differentials between partners, there has been a tendency for informal patterns to develop that divert the majority of cases into more workable pathways. For example, in India where the formal punishment for incest is exile, reinforced by folkloric predictions of earthquakes, leprosy, blindness, and sterility, what actually happens is that the accused father “eats his way back” into the community by giving a feast (Elwin, 1939).

In current clinical practice, conflict between professionals attached to formal sanctions such as the criminal justice system and professionals attached to more informal treatment centers often occurs. The problem with the informal system is that it requires unified action by a functioning community, and it requires an offender capable first of feeling shame or guilt and second of using that feeling to modify aggressive and sexual behavior. It is difficult for communities to meet these two requirements and to also protect and provide healing potential for abused children and adolescents.

RELIGIOUS LAWS

The religious laws most relevant to our culture are those in the Judeo-Christian tradition. These laws are particularly relevant to the current debate regarding sex abuse of children and adolescents.

Jewish Law

The history as recorded in the Bible and the Talmud leads us to believe that sex between men and very young girls was encouraged in ancient times through marriage, concubinage, and slavery. The Talmud held that a female child of “three years and one day,” with her father's permission, could be betrothed by sexual intercourse. Intercourse with a younger child was not a crime but was invalid. If a prospective groom would penetrate the child just once more after her third birthday, he could legitimately claim her as his promised bride (Rush, 1980). The law as translated by Epstein, read “Mishna [the law]: a girl of the age of three years and one day may be betrothed subject to her father's permission by sexual intercourse” (Nezikin, 1935, p. 376). The age of 3 years and 1 day for betrothal or marriage grew out of an old Semitic tradition and cannot be dismissed as myth, nor is it simply a Talmudic academic exercise (Rush, 1980).

Moses Maimonides, the sophisticated 12th-century physician, philosopher, and Talmudist, reaffirmed that the age given was the correct translation of the law (Maimonides, 1972). By the 12th century, age was certainly reckoned as it is today. Rush (1980) stated that this striking lack of concern for the female child could be better understood if one remembers that the Biblical female, no matter what her age, was a property and was stripped of all human attributes. When God commanded, “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house; thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, not his ox, not his maidservant nor anything that is thy neighbor's,” he categorized a man's wife with his house and ox. Because the female was a sexual property, all heterosexual relationships were defined as financial transactions. Marriage was the purchase of a daughter from her father, prostitution was a selling and reselling of a female by her master for sexual service, and rape was the theft of a girl's virginity that could be compensated for by payment to her father. Where the Bible was vague regarding the age of the females involved in these transactions, the Talmud was explicit.

Hebrew law is not unique in its treatment of females. Judaic codes were derived from those of earlier nations. The Bible and the Talmud are very similar to the Assyrian and Babylonian codes. Although many other Judiac laws were altered, basic sexual decrees and customs remained unchanged under Christianity and related primarily to female sexuality (Rush, 1980).

Christian Law

Whereas in the Hebrew tradition, sex with a child under 3 was invalid, in the Christian tradition sex with a child under 7 was invalid (Fulton, 1883). Sex between men and children was debated not out of concern for a child but out of regard for the technical violation of the impediment of affinity (or incest) to all her kin. No reference is made to male children because they were not implicated in affinity. Hence, if a man had sexual relations with a child 7 years of age or older, he was in a state of “affinity” to all her kin, and marriage to her mother or sister, for example, was forbidden. If a man had copulated with the child befor. the child was 7, he did not violate the impediment of affinity and was therefore free to marry her mother or sister. This was true because, as in the Hebrew tradition where sex with a child under 3 was invalid, so under Christianity was sex with a child under 7 invalid. In fact, sex with a child under 7 was inconsequential (Ayrinhac, 1919). This canon law was based on the “one flesh” principle of the New Testament: “A man shall leave his father and mother and shall cleave to his wife, and the twain shall be one flesh” (Matthew 19:5).

Therefore, we see that early Christian law did not focus on whether a man di. copulate with a child but rather whe. he copulated with her. An example is the Prince of Norway in the 12th century as given by Rush (1980).

He became the subject of legal discussion when the woman he was to marry was known to have had carnal relations with the Prince's uncle. The uncle was betrothed to this woman when she was under age seven and he had, by common knowledge and a deposition of witnesses, slept with her. Since all this took place before the child's seventh birthday, the Pope declared both betrothal and sexual relations null and void and the Prince was permitted to marry the woman in question. But soon after this decision, the Pope received additional information. The uncle, now dead, had traveled during the time of his betrothal, but when he returned he married the child after her seventh birthday. Since the uncle had had full marital relations with her after she was seven, the Pope was compelled to revoke his earlier decision. If the Prince married her, he would violate the “impediment of affinity.” The marriage did not take place. (p. 34)

The clergy enjoyed even greater sexual privileges than ordinary citizens. Even the most humble cleric had the power necessary to exact sexual submission. Women, children, others' wives, daughters, and penitents on a pilgrimage or in the confessional were all violated by their spiritual fathers. In fact, the confessional was so conducive to lechery that Rome issued edicts calling for the punishment of sexual solicitors. However, the church had little enthusiasm for imperiling its own authority (Rush, 1980). Convents controlled by ministers and prelates became the dumping grounds for unmarried, unwanted female children. In the early 18th century the prioress of the convent of St. Caterian di Pisola openly declared that monks and confessors alike treated nuns and young novitiates as wives, but their victim's mouths were sealed by the dread of excommunication threatened by their spiritual fathers (Rush, 1980).

ENGLISH LAW

Civil law was separated from church law in England under the statutes of Westminster in the 13th century. The need for some form of child protection law was felt in the early 1500s. A law was passed in 1548 protecting boys from sodomy and in 1576 protecting girls under 10 from forcible rape, with both offenses carrying the death penalty (Radzinowicz, 1948). So, although Christianity may have recognized childhood innocence and the need to protect and preserve it in earlier times, secular law did not reflect this as a state interest until the 1500 to 1600 period.

The delineation between childhood and adulthood was raised from age 7 to age 10 in 1576. Sex with a child below age 10 was considered invalid, but it was not illegal. Ten became the legal age at which a female child could consent to sex, and 12 remained the legal age at which she could consent to marriage. Carnal knowledge of a nonconsenting woman child below age 10 became a felony, whereas carnal knowledge of a consenting woman child between the ages of 10 and 12 was a misdemeanor (Hale, 1847). Thus, the crime of statutory rape evolved. However, proof of a child's age had to be offered for the charge of felonious rape to be upheld. This was during a time when few records were kept (Rush, 1980). As late as 1832, a man was freed of the charge of felonious rape in England because the child's baptismal certificate indicated that on the day the rape took place, she was 2 days beyond her 10th birthday (Hale, 1847). Although the new law recognized the act of child rape, child welfare was still being sacrificed to a legal technicality.

The book of Gerson in 1706 indicated that children should be responsible for protecting themselves from sexual abuse and parents should induce guilt when discovering children masturbating. About the same time, Pascal, the prominent educator, offered parents advice for controlling sexual molestation (deMause, 1974). He warned parents to supervise children at all times, to prevent their nudity near adults, to never let them be alone with servants, and to enforce sexual modesty in the home. Schultz (1980) observed that these simple rules may be the first concrete help parents received in controlling sexual abuse. However, children's innocence was to be enforced not just where adults were involved but where the child showed any sexual precocity. For example, parents were instructed to keep candles burning in children's sleeping areas at night so the parents could check for masturbation or self-stimulation (Aries, 1962). Children could experience up to 1,000 enemas during their early years to assist in the removal of “evil” from their bodies (deMause, 1974). Schultz (1980) observed that children were now considered sexually dangerous, with innocence and asexuality to be enforced, which foretold of the coming attacks on children's sexual integrity by a “well-meaning” society.

Schultz (1980) stated that the period up to about 1800 was characterized as a dark time period in which it was normal that children and minors were indis-criminantly used as sexual objects by various adults in a child's social space. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Part I Contexts and Issues in Studying Child and Adolescent Sexual Experiences
• Part II Nature and Consequences of Child and Adolescent Sexual Experiences—A Research Study
• Appendix A: Analysis of Studies
• Appendix B: Questionnaire Package
• Appendix C: Consent Form
• Appendix D: Sexual Involvement Rating Scale
• Appendix E: Significant Variables Within Sets
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index