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Chapter V:Body, Danger, and Social Order
Introduction
"The life of a child is sacred, but it can be profaned." (Urra, 2000)
I began this work by describing what I understand to be the origin of a new danger -- or to be more precise – a modern reframing of an already familiar problem. It was essentially a matter of asking ourselves about the historical context and the reasons why the problem of so-called child sexual abuse has vaulted into the public spotlight, going on to form a part of the anxieties characteristic of our era. This was what I defined as the origin and contours of the abuse danger. I noted, on the one hand, its presentation as a great truth and the tone of reproach with which it was bandied about, given the earlier blindness of which society was accused; on the other hand, its gravity and the terrible extent to which the phenomenon was said to exist was denounced. I have already questioned this sort of discourse, and shall return to it in this final chapter.
On a similar note, I am equally interested in analyzing the manner in which this way of perceiving and interpreting the problem of sexual abuse has been able to affect how we confront these acts, as much in terms of the public language as in professional intervention. For this I examined aspects such as the search for abuse, the push to report it, professional intervention, and some of the elements of the penal system along these lines. In this chapter I am going to carry my analysis further, reviewing the role that the specific issue of the sexual abuse of minors may be playing in the political and social strategies of the groups that worked together to establish this danger.
In my opinion, we can understand little about the modern sexual abuse discourse if we fail to take into account the historical construction of childhood and sexuality in the West. The problem of abuse stands at the crossroads between childhood and sexuality, a necessarily problematic mixture inasmuch as the two things refer to traditionally opposite and mutually exclusive symbols and meanings. On the one side innocent and virginal childhood; on the other, perverse and dangerous sex. And in the middle, the body. It is in that terrain where the symbols of abuse have manifested themselves and staked their places within the discourse. It is, in the end, children and their bodies which are the subjects of uneasiness, the emotional stratum from which this new danger and its dramatic handling, near the close of the 20th century, has nourished itself.
Fear and Society
As a long-term consequence of collective trauma, the West has vanquished the"named" - - which is to say, identified- - anguish, even while "fabricating" certain fears." (Delumeau, 2002 p. 33)
Upon describing the phenomenon of the sexual abuse of minors as a new [190J danger characteristic of our time, I referred to Delumeau's (2002) analysis of Western fears, and the way in which he would distinguish between spontaneous community fears and fears which, in a certain way, were induced by particular authority groups as responses to or explanations for the misfortunes that befall the populace. Human fears, as Delumeau would say, are -- in contrast to animals' -- diverse, manifold, and subject to change, due to the fact that they are products of our thinking. Every civilization has its own fears, ranging from those having to do with the forces of nature on up to those which speak to us of the "fear of being killed, raped, or even devoured by our fellow man" (citing Kochnitzky, Delurneau, 2002 p. 25). Along with this, Douglas would add that every society has its own particular dangers and ways of confronting them; anyone, she will say, who wishes to know a given society must study those fears.
As Douglas showed (1983, 1996), the sense of danger, the consciousness of it, its slight or intense presence, the types of dangers present and not present; how they correspond to cycles, customs, or transformations in the manner in which they are presented and the ways in which they are perceived and experienced, are not free-standing phenomena. To Douglas the study of the dangers of a society -- just as that of its notions of purity -- should form an integral part of cultural analysis as a whole; It is through its dangers and how they are dealt with that we are able to understand the bases of those societies. Every society has disorders which affect it more than others. If, previously, it was adultery that affected the ''water line" of traditional societies (Flaquer, 1998 p. 93), at the present time the dangers affecting childhood reflect, among other things, the modern uneasiness with this stage of life.
Therefore the danger is not an objective one. The delimiting and configuringof the meanings of that which is dangerous, and especially the way in which it is so, is culturally constructed in every society, in accordance with its own characteristics. The risks that a society determines for its individuals, the distribution of dangers menacing some and not others, and the way in which these are defined in order to be constituted as such correspond to social preoccupations and interests oriented towards maintaining its own social organization. A society's discourses and beliefs about them and their consequences, and its mechanisms for prevention or compensation once they have come to pass, act on two basiclevels socially: an instrumental one, and an expressive one (Douglas, 1991). [E108]
Instrumental because they are useful for controlling society, for regulating the conduct of its individuals:
Anthropologists will always agree that physical dangers, those which threaten childhood or one's person, are weapons utilized in the ideological struggle for domination. In no way is this a new idea. It is implicit in Michel Foucault 's critical analysis of the discourse which imposes its discipline on the body. Nowadays, it would turn out to be extraordinarily naive to conceive of a society in which the risk discourse was not politicized. (Douglas, 1991 p. 22) .
Expressive because, given their symbolic potential, they express and objectify the social [191] and moral order:
It is not difficult to see how beliefs concerning contamination can be utilized in a dialogue over the recovery and counter-recovery of a social category. But as we examine beliefs concerning contamination, we discover that the class of contacts which are regarded as dangerous also convey a symbolic meaning. This level is the most interesting one; in it, ideas about contamination are connected with social life. I believe that some contaminations are employed as analogies in order to express a general vision of the social order. For example, there are beliefs to the effect that every sexual act constitutes a danger for the other person, via contact with sexual fluids. ... I believe that many ideas about sexual dangers are better understood if they are interpreted as symbols of the relationships between different parts of society, as configurations which reflect the hierarchy or symmetry that applies to a broader social system. (Douglas, 1991, p. 30).
Instrumental because it has been and is being used as an argument in the political and ideological struggles of certain social groups, or in fights against particular individuals. Expressive because, as we have seen and shall see in greater detail as follows, the danger of the sexual abuse of minors is inscribed, in my opinion, within a broader general framework in which, as would occur with Douglas's timely example, what is in play is a certain symbolic representation of certain social groups -- men, women, and children -- and the relationships between them. It is this theoretical point of view that I should like to adopt, for the sake of argument, in order to flesh out a possible explanation for the problem.
In the introductory chapter to this work, I was quite insistent about the fact that I would not be seeking to approach the abuse issue as a crime or as a practical problem in need of solving. I am, instead, interested in approaching it as a new social phenomenon which is not totally explicable in merely pragmatic but rather in ideological and symbolic terms. If Douglas's proposal is on the mark, there is absolutely no doubt that we must take her statements concerning our subject very much into account. Therefore, I believe that the danger of child sexual abuse can and should be studied simultaneously from this dual instrumental and expressive perspective.
We now return to Delumeau and his reflections concerning the fears propagated by the Catholic church relating to the figure of Satan. In fact from the Middle Ages on, the church would come to say that the sea, wolves, hunger, or disease -- spontaneous and sufficiently generalized fears -- "are less terrible than the devil and sin, the death of the body less so than that of the soul." (Delumeau, 2002 p. 42) The struggle against the devil was, then, a liberation, given that he was, in the end, responsible for all the misfortunes which beset society at that time. To Delumeau the church, at a time of social anguish, insecurity, and crisis, did nothing but create its own scapegoats or re-employ already familiar ones -- Jews, Turks, heretics, women -- in addition to generating fear towards them, since any one of the Christians themselves might fall into their pernicious snares.
This phenomenon, fostered by the church and, in large measure, many states was, according to Delumeau, the response of an elite to what appeared to them to be a gathering threat from a part of a rural and pagan civilization which was perceived to be Satanic The fears of some vs. others -- those of the church vs. those of the general population -- are different, and reflect the coexistence of two distinct cultures. The church [192] would have sought to share its own fears with those of the populace, substituting the former for other, more "visceral" ones. But if the proliferation of the fear of Satan can be explained in terms of a certain social and institutional confluence, what is to be said about the modern danger of sexual abuse? Might it correspond to similar considerations? Is it, in short, a reflection of other crises, of social insecurities or cultural transformations? And conversely, in the same way that the presence of Satan and of sin become ever present in the medieval and renaissance west, thus transforming the configurations of its individuals and their interrelationships, we might ask ourselves about the consequences of these modern dangers for society as well as its individuals. I am referring, for example, to the problem of conflicts between the sexes and the fears which are generated there. These are questions which. I shall try to flesh out in this final chapter.
Body and Society
I t would seem that for some time now, the already common association between sexuality and childhood has been a generator of dangers. This mixture has been present throughout the history of the West, particularly in the last several centuries, beginning with the so-called anti-Onanist crusades that got their start in the 17th and 18th centuries. In a previous work, I noted what, in my opinion, was a curious resemblance between the danger of Onanism and the modern problem of abuse. (Ma1ón, 2001) At that time I pointed out that, upon analyzing the unfolding of the two phenomena we observe a series of interesting similarities, thereby raising the possibility of there being a continuity between them. From the invisible nature of both of them, which requires the mounting of searches as well as the development of new mechanisms for discovering its presence, to their evil nature, destructive of both childhood innocence and the social order, it is possible to detail distinct points of intersection. At the same time, this parallelism causes me to think that it would be worthwhile to historically and sociologically examine the abuse discourse, in the same way that others have done with masturbation. If some have characterized the Onanism-danger discourse as the reflection of a series of transformations in the bourgeois social order, the family, or childhood, it is reasonable to suppose that this new fear of abuse and its dramatic unfolding are also susceptible to a similar analysis.
And just as important as that complex tandem of sexuality and childhood is the position that sex in general has occupied in the history of the West. A habitually complicated and dangerous dimension, the object of profound interdictions and severe impositions in one sense or another; at the intersection of desires and fears, veneration and profanation, pleasures and dangers, sexuality has traditionally occupied a particularly conflicted yet intense place in our history. In fact it would be difficult to reconstruct our past -- and understand our present -- without taking into account the position and role that has been conferred upon this condition of our existence.
It would be difficult to separate the body from the social order configurations from which reality is constructed. A way of being, some would say. Corporeal existence. The body is not given to us as something that we possess; it is, rather, precisely what [193] we are. We are nothing if not a body. A particularly propitious space for regulating individuals, the body has been the object of ongoing symbolic appropriation by cultures in order to organize society as well as its individuals. A complicated, changing, manifold, adaptable, emotional, and experiential apparatus, the body has shown itself to be an exceptionally good place for cultivating the symbolization of social forms. Discourses about the body, be they under the banner of health, beauty, or liberty, have been lavishly utilized in all cultures -- to use the words of Foucault -- as power and knowledge devices. The 17th and 18th centuries ushered in a new golden age of the use of the body as a mechanism of social regulation (Foucault, 1998),
but it was not the first -- nor would it be the last --time that the body was an object of intensive social attention. The aforementioned author himself shows this in his analysis of the problematization of the body and sexuality in classical Greece and the first two centuries of our Christian era.
Mary Douglas has also referred to the body as a privileged route to the expression of social forms. In Natural Symbols, Douglas devotes herself to looking into the possibility of establishing general categories for expressing how "the image of the body is used in different ways, to reflect and advance the social experience of each person." (1978 p. 18) The apparent paradox encompassed by the title of the work -- given that all symbols are cultural by definition, not products of nature -- is overcome if, following its line of argument, we consider the fact that if it is true that social relations are the structure of a society's logical and symbolic thinking, we can imagine that there will also be a natural system of symbols common to all cultures: "The search for natural symbols is thus transformed ... into a search for natural systems of symbolization." (1978 p. 14) One of these is the human body. It therefore becomes a matter of explaining what social elements are those which remain manifest in notions about how one should understand the body and its by-products. That, in turn, would allow for the carrying out of one of Douglas's central interests: comparing primitive and modern cultures. The remainder of her work, which according to the author herself grew out of some of her ideas inPurity and Danger, essentially refers to the social conditions which facilitate notions of spirituality whereby the body appears to pass to a secondary level of importance, or is even rejected altogether.
Criticizing simplistic psychological analyses -- especially of a psychoanalytical nature -- which attempt to explain people's bodies in terms of the personal needs of individuals themselves, Douglas proposes a sociological reading of the phenomenon. In a way, by acting upon the human body, society is symbolically intervening into the body politic; the norms of conduct, the consequent risks of contamination, and the frameworks imposed upon the body in ritual processes would be some of the elements of that symbolic corporal language. The body -- human and animal -- has often been a staple of ritual processes; but it is the former which is particularly a blank slate, specifically reflecting social experiences.
The body is a model which can serve to represent any precarious frontier [194] or threatened object. The body is a complex structure. The functions of its various parts, as well as their inter-relationships, offer a font of symbols and other complex structures. We certainly cannot interpret the rites surrounding excretions, breast milk, saliva, and the rest, and not be disposed to see in the body a symbol of the society, and regard the powers and dangers which are attributed to it by the social structure as if they were reproduced, on a small scale, in the human body." (Douglas, 1991 p. 133)
The body would be, in a way, the mirror in which society itself is reflected, with its limits, its structures, its inlets and outlets, strong and weak points; the fear of impurity, different in every society and preferentially manifested in the human body, would be nothing but a symbolic mechanism for the protection of the social order (Luc de Heusch, 1975). In that way food, excretions, physical remains, the corpse and putrefaction, signs of the violation of the body, or gestures acquire importance as a language in which the culture is symbolically reflected. The body is thereby converted, in that richness of which it is comprised, into an obligatory point of reference for social expression and regulation, and therefore that of its individuals as well. And within this whole interplay of languages, some dimensions are apparently privileged as much in our culture as they are in many others. Those having to do with sexuality. The sexual body, the masculine and the feminine, the genitals, desire, contact, pleasure, penetration, menstruation, ejaculation, and masturbation are . anxieties common to many cultures, particularly our own. Via restrictions or approbations, exclusions or inclusions relating to the body in terms of its sexual dimension, society would acquire a precious resource in which questions of a different order would be reflected, thereby promoting certain esthetics, modes of identity, and conduct.