Ever since the Greek historians first wrote about
the customs of other nations, scholars have compared the habits of
different cultures, hoping to discover meaningful regularities in
human behavior.
Yet the only universal trait that Contemporary social
scientists and historians agree has been found in every known culture
is the prohibition of incest. As one standard text puts it, "The
taboo on incest within the immediate family is one of the few known
cultural universals."(1) Kroeber stated, "If ten anthropologists
were asked to designate one universal institution, nine would likely
name the incest prohibition; some have expressly named it as the only
universal one."(2) That "no known tribe has ever permitted
incest"(3) has been a truism for cross-cultural studies ever
since Durkheim and Westermarck's early books on the subject.(4)
Furthermore, the same authors go on to state that
the universal prohibitions on incest are virtually always effective,
so that incest itself is rarely found in any society. Even when societies
are found that approve of incest, they only "serve rather to
emphasize than to disprove the universality of intra-family incest
taboos," according to George Murdock.(5) Incestuous societies
simply cannot exist, since, according to Talcott Parscins, the effective
prohibition of incest is "linked with the functioning of every
society."(6) The abolition of incest was accomplished at the
beginning of human culture, Leslie White says, since without it "social
evolution could have gone no further on the human level than among
the anthropoids."(7) As Levi-Strauss concluded, "the prohibition
of incest can be found at the dawn of culture... [It] is culture itself."
(8)
The certainty with which the effective prohibition
of incest has been declared leads one to look for the evidence these
authors might have for their assertions. Yet such a search soon proves
quite fruitless. Most of them cite no evidence at all, or at most
refer to a single cross cultural survey by Murdock in his book, Social
Structure. Murdock's study, however, turns out not to be about incest
at all, if by incest one means actual sexual relations between family
members other than spouses. What Murdock studied was marriage rules.
Yet authors continue to assume Murdock proved that a universal prohibition
on incest itself exists, not just a prohibition on intra-farnily marriage.(9)
Indeed, rather than examining the actual occurrence
of incest in either historical or contemporary groups, the voluminous
literature on the subject instead speculates on why incest supposedly
doesn't occur. Many explanations have been proposed: the biological
impairments attendant upon inbreeding, the utility of social alliances,
the collapse of the family if sexual rivalry is allowed, even boredom
with family members. When exceptions have been acknowledged-royal
incest in dozens of societies,(10) sibling incest among the general
population in others,(11) widespread pederasty in still others,(12)
- discussion has continued to focus on why incest is supposedly rare,
not on whether it really is.
One begins to realize how odd this is when it is compared,
say, with the study of other deviant acts, such as homicide. Although
effective laws against murder long preceded laws against incest -
and were far more often enforced rather than winked at - no one thinks
of writing hundreds of studies on why mankind has a "universal
homicide taboo."(13)
This essay is intended to consider the evidence for
the opposite hypothesis: That it is incest itself - and not the absence
of incest - that has been universal for most people in most places
at most times. Further-more, the earlier in history one searches,
the more evidence there is of universal incest, just as there is more
evidence of other forms of child abuse."(14)
Two kinds of incest will be considered: direct incest,
overt sexual ac-tivity between family members other than spouses;
and indirect incest, the providing of children by their parents to
others in order for them to be sexually molested.
There are two reasons why I believe indirect incest
must be included in any definition of incestuous activity. First of
all, arranging for children to have sex with other household members
or neighbors is usually motivated by the incestuous wishes of the
parent; and, in any case, it is usually perceived by the child to
be similar to direct incest. Secondly, clinical studies show that
contemporary sexual abuse usually involves a parent or guardian, who,
if not the direct perpetrator, covertly brings about the incident
in order to satisfy their own incestuous wishes.(15)
PSYCHOANALYTIC VIEWS ON THE REALITY OF INCEST
When Sigmund Freud discovered that eighteen of his
hysterical pa-tients had conscious memories of childhood sexual seductions,
mostly by family members, he faced a theoretical impasse.(16) Since
he believed only repressed memories could produce hysterical symptoms,
the easily accessible detailed memories of his patients could not
be the real cause of their hysteria. He therefore concluded that there
must in each case have been an earlier seduction, the memory of which
was repressed, generally occurring between the ages of two and five
and never later than eight. These early scenes had to be reconstructed
from fantasies and dreams, and even when Freud pieced them together
for the patient, he admitted, "they have no feeling of remembering
the scenes."(17)
These earlier infantile reconstructions, Freud quite
correctly decided in 1897, were "scenes of seduction [that] had
never taken place. ..they were only phantasies which my patients had
made up or which I myself had perhaps forced on them."(18) But
the clear memories of seduction in later childhood and adolescence
that his patients had spontaneously reported to him and about which
they had strong reality feelings, he never doubted - contrary to the
assertions of critics like Masson and Miller, who claim Freud lost
his courage and denied that any incest had actually taken place.(19)
The particular theory of hysteria which he admitted "broke down
under the weight of its own improbability" (20) was the infantile
seduction theory and did not imply any doubting of his patients' memories
of real incest.
For the rest of his life, in fact, Freud reiterated
his belief that these clear memories of incestuous attacks were real.
In 1905 he wrote, "I can-not admit that in my paper on 'The Aetiology
of Hysteria' I exaggerated the frequency or importance of.. the effects
of seduction, which treats a child as a sexual object prematurely..."
(21) Later, he repeatedly wrote such statements as that "the
sexual abuse of children is found with uncanny frequency among school
teachers and child attendants.. and phantasies of being seduced are
of particular interest, because so often they are not phantasies but
real memories." (22) Furthermore, he considered the incestuous
memories of such patients as Katharina, Rosalia H., Elisabeth von
R. and the Wolf Man as reality, not fantasy, saying of such traumatic
child abuse "You must not suppose.. that sexual abuse of a child
by its nearest male relatives belongs entirely to the realm of phan-tasy.
Most analysts will have treated cases in which such events were real
and could be unimpeachably established..."(23) He even called
his own memories "genuine" of having been sexually molested
as a little boy by his nurse, who had not only forced him to perform
sexually and, he reported, "complained because I was clumsy,"
but also, he said, washed him in water that contained her own menstrual
blood. (24)
Therefore, regardless of all that has been written
about the subject, an unbiased reading of Freud's works shows that
whenever he confronted clear evidence of sexual molestation, he called
it seduction, not fantasy. There was no "great reversal,"
no "suppression of seduction," no "betrayal of the
child," no "assault on truth."
Freud's courage in acknowledging the extent of childhood
sexual molestation was not shared by the majority of his colleagues.
Most, like Jung, simply avoided the topic. Others, who noted that
large numbers of their patients had clear memories of incestuous rape,
blamed the victim, saying, like Abraham, that the molestation "was
desired by the child unconsciously [because of an] abnormal psycho-sexual
constitution..." (25)
Analysts since Freud have routinely reported memories
of seduction as unconscious wishes, while analysts of children regularly
neglected to ask their patients whether their reports were real or
not.(26) Psychoanalytic in-stitutes have often taught that all memories
of incest were wishes. One analyst recalls, "I was taught in
my... early years in psychiatry, as most of us were, to look very
skeptically upon the incestuous sexual material described by my patients..
Any inclination on my part, or that of my colleagues in the training
situation, to look upon these productions of the patient as having
some reality basis was scoffed at and was seen as evidence of our
naivete... "(27)
Even when analysts were presented with evidence of
childhood sexual and physical abuse so overwhelming they could not
disbelieve it, they usually paid little attention to it in their case
histories. For instance, Otto Kemberg rarely reports on child abuse
in his extensive studies on his borderline patients. When he was personally
told by a researcher that many recent studies of borderlines showed
extremely high rates of sexual and physical abuse as children, he
admitted that while this was true of his borderline patients as well,
"it is hard to know what to make of it."(28)
Freud's view of the reality of childhood seduction
was not, however, wholly missing from earlier psychoanalytic literature.
Ferenczi not only found that many of his patients had clear memories
of late childhood seduction but also described how many of his adult
patients confessed to having sexual relations with children, concluding:
"The real rape of girls who have hardly grown out of the age
of infants, similar sexual acts of mature women with boys, and also
enforced homosexual acts, are more frequent occurrences than has hitherto
been assumed."(29) Many women analysts, such as Bonaparte, Jacobson,
Greenacre and Reich, (30) were able to empathize with their female
patients and admit the reality of their memories of incestuous abuse.
Rheingold reported encountering surprisingly frequent cases of real
incest in his patients, including a great deal of overt maternal masturbation
of young children, fathers orgastically flagellating their daughters,
parents forcing children to handle the parents' genitals, mothers
encouraging uncles to rape their children, and so on, wondering why
"scant attention" had been given to such material by others.(31)
Robert Fliess, after a lifetime of psychoanalytic experience in the
removal of amnesia from early memories, regularly found real sexual
molestation of his patients at the core of their problems, and concluded
that "no one is ever made sick by his fantasies. Only traumatic
memories in repression can cause the neurosis."(32)
In the past decade, with the growing realization by
the public of how widespread childhood sexual abuse is in contemporary
society, psychoanalysts have begun to report on the therapeutic necessity
of acknowledging early sexual seduction, They have even wondered if
the analyst's denial might have prevented cure in those cases where
reanalysis discovered incestuous abuse that the first analyst had
denied. (33) In a recent study connecting borderline personality disorders
and childhood sexual abuse, Herman and her colleagues report that
"such patients may show remarkable improvement when the connection
between symptom and trauma is recognized."(34)
In recent years, psychoanalysts have begun to report
uncovering considerable early sexual abuse that had gone previously
unrecognized. One analyst described the analysis of a woman who had
been raped at four years of age, saying "it took eighteen years
of weekly sessions before there was a complete remission of symptoms...Would
not an earlier recognition of the actual childhood rape have saved
us many hours of analysis?" (35) Even the conservative Journal
of the American Psychoanalytic Association recently concluded a review
of the question of the reality of incest by asking "Have thousands
of analyses and clinical studies not yet resolved the question of
whether adult hysterics had been assaulted or seduced in infancy and
childhood? The answer is that they have not."(36)
CHILDHOOD SEXUAL ABUSE IN CONTEMPORARY WESTERN SOCIETIES
In determining the actual incidence of childhood sexual
abuse in modern societies, the main problem is that one must rely
upon witnesses who have enormous emotional difficulties in reporting
what they find - far more so than with any other psychohistorical
subject I have encountered.
For one thing, most writers on the subject have themselves
usually been advocates of pedophilia. Ever since the early studies
of such sexologists as Symonds and Eglinton,(37) most writing on incest
has been by scholars hoping to justify sexual relations with children
by showing how widespread the practice has been. Many openly state,
as do Allen Edwardes and R. E. L. Masters, that "there is no
shame in being a ... pederast or a rapist if one is satisfied,"
(38) or claim that incest can be a positive, healthy experience,"
as does social worker LeRoy Schultz, who writes extensively on childhood
sexuality. (39) Even Kinsey wrote: "It is difficult to understand
why a child, except for its cultural conditioning, should be disturbed
at having its genitalia touched," (40) while his coauthor in
the Kinsey studies, Wardell Pomeroy, wrote that "incest between
adults and younger children can.. be a satisfying and enriching experience..."(41)
One must use the research of such scholars with extreme
caution, since their main motive is to deny the coercion involved
when adults seduce lonely, unloved children. Yet the task of digging
through the truly staggering amount of literature on sexuality in
past and present societies (42) (there are over sixty journals alone
with regular articles on the subject) is so overwhelming that, in
order to locate the rare primary sources that are available, the researcher
cannot avoid consulting the life work of pedophilia advocates.
Statistical studies on the incidence of child sexual
molestation in the United States go back to 1929,(43) but these early
works were generally ignored by a public accustomed to disbelieving
children's accusations and to the lack of punishment for the occasional
molesters who were apprehended. The official incidence figures from
the American Humane Association, working from reports from child protective
agencies, estimated only 7,000 incidents in the U.S. for 1976. Although
the AMA estimates rose steadily to 113,000 incidents for 1985,(44)
even these larger figures represented under one percent of American
children. Kinsey was surprised to find that 24 percent of his female
subjects easily recalled sexual advances by adult males when they
were children, but he downplayed their importance since most, he said,
were non-contact approaches that he thought unimportant. (45) Except
for a single study by Landis in 1956 reporting a third of his sample
of 1,800 college students recalling childhood sexual molestation,
(46) it was not until the late 197Os and early 1980s that careful
studies began to be reported with samples large enough to warrant
careful statistical analysis.
Although these two dozen studies have had somewhat
differing definitions of sexual molestation and of the age criteria,
their results can be made comparable (47) by eliminating noncontact
abuse (such as exhibitionism) from the definition and by requiring
either evidence of force or an age discrepancy of at least five years
when the victim is over 12. When these adjustments are made, the studies
report childhood memories of contact sexual molestation at rates ranging
from 6 to 45 percent for women and from 3 to 30 percent for men.
The lower incidence figures in these studies turn
out to be due to the method used in compiling them, As one moves from
the lower to the higher figures, one discovers that the interview
techniques begin to acknowledge the resistances of the respondents
to such emotional questions. The lower figures are in response to
written questionnaires or brief telephone calls, contacts that were
considered intrusive by the respondent, while the higher figures,
such as those of Wyatt and Russell (48) were the result of carefully
structured face-to-face interviews lasting from one to eight hours.(49)
Obviously it takes a good bit of trust before respondents begin to
relate memories of childhood seduction to strangers. Using these two
studies, then, as the most accurate we have to date, one finds that
either 38 percent (Russell) or 45 percent (Wyatt) of women interviewed
reported memories of familial and/or extrafamilial sexual abuse during
their childhood, almost half of which was directly incestuous.
Figures as accurate as these for men's memories of
seduction are more difficult to obtain. The highest figure reported
to date, that of Landis, is 30 percent. Other studies report lower
figures because they are from brief questionnaires. Although most
comparisons of male and female victimization show molestation of boys
only about a third the rate of girls, (50) there is evidence that
males are far more reluctant to reveal their molestation, partly because
it usually occurs earlier for boys than for girls and partly because
victimization may be even more difficult for boys to recall and report
than for girls. Because it was conducted by interviews, the 30 percent
rate of Landis' study undoubtedly is the most reliable we have for
boys. Therefore, the best estimates for memories of childhood sexual
abuse we now have for the United States are 40 percent for girls and
30 percent for boys, almost half directly incestuous for girls and
about a quarter directly incestuous for boys. (51)
Yet even these astonishingly high figures are only
a portion of the hid-den true incidence rates. Four additional factors
raise the actual rates even higher:
- The groups interviewed do not include many people
in the American population who have far higher than average sexual
molestation experiences, including institutionalized criminals,
prostitutes, juveniles in shelters and psychotics (52),
- the studies only count admissions to the interviewer
of abuse, and it is unlikely that no conscious memories were ever
suppressed during the interviews,
- a large percent of each study refused to be interviewed,
and these may have been the most victimized of all,(53) and
- most importantly, these studies include only clear
conscious memories of events-unconscious memories, which are usually
only uncovered during psychotherapy, would increase these rates.
It is possible to correct the incidence rates statistically
for these factors, Although only 11 percent of Russell's respondents
recalled being victimized before the age of five, another study shows
the most common age of sexual abuse reported to authorities is four
years, while other studies report that from 21 to 50 percent of reported
sexual abuse victims involve children under five.(54) Since few people
consciously recall traumatic events of any kind before the age of
five, and since the graph for sexual abuse distribution by age runs
roughly level from ages two to sixteen,(55) the incidence figures
stated above should be increased by at least an additional 50 percent(56)
to account for these three factors, Therefore, the corrected
incidence rates are at least 60 percent for Girls and 45 percent for
boys. Until someone is courageous enough to directly
question the children themselves whether they have been molested -
a simple procedure that has never been done in any published study
to date - 60 and 45 percent should be considered as the most reliable
national incidence rates we now have available for the U.S.
These reports of childhood seduction are considered
by researchers to be real memories, not fantasies. Not only do most
researchers conclude, like Russell, that "underdisciosure was
a significant problem... not fabrication of experiences," (57)
but another study of 53 women that attempted to independently confirm
memories of childhood incest found 74 percent could be positively
confirmed plus another 9 percent indirectly supported, while none
were discovered to be just fantasies.(58)
Because of such reliability studies, reports of memories
of childhood seduction need not be as distrusted as they were in Freud's
time. The memories reported to these investigators were not vague
images reconstructed in psychotherapy, nor were any incidents counted
if they involved just exhibition of genitals to the child or other
non-contact sexual approaches. Nor did any of these studies inquire
about such common sexualized traumas as the constant giving of enemas
or regular sexualized beating, both of which are often equivalents
for the child to genital seduction.(59) These figures were limited
to clear memories of oven con-tact experiences such as intercourse,
fellatio, cunnilingus, mutual masturbation, anal intercourse and the
kissing or sucking of the child's breasts or genitals.
The circumstances of these seductions have been documented
in the large clinical literature on molestation, only a portion of
which can be summarized here. Russell found that "most perpetrators
lived under the same roof as their victims."(60) Most (85 percent)
of the perpetrators were at least five years older than their victims.(61)
Of incest cases with females, uncles accounted for 25 percent of the
perpetrators, followed in frequency by fathers (15 percent), brothers
(12 percent) and stepfathers (8 per-cent).(62) Women commit incest
more rarely - at least in America - although the number may be larger
than realized since studies of boys in early childhood are so sketchy
(studies have found many mothers quite seductive toward their children
even when they were being observed in a laboratory situation).(63)
Even when the actual perpetrator isn't a relation,
the parent or guardian is somehow implicated in at least 80 percent
of the cases.(64) The other 20 percent contain many cases where parents
invite neighbors to sleep with their children, or do nothing about
older brothers who molest younger siblings, or leave children with
babysitters after they discover evidence of molestation, or continue
to allow boyfriends to be alone with children after molestation. One
must therefore conclude that the majority of cases of childhood molestation
are either perpetuated by caretakers or are consciously or unconsciously
set up by them.(65)
Recent studies have destroyed many myths about sexual
abuse. Abuse is experienced at far younger ages than once thought
- 81 percent occurring before puberty and 42 percent under age 7(66)
- and involves far less mild forms than has been assumed-even for
infants the majority of seductions involve oral, anal or genital penetration.(67)
Seduction of younger children by teens, often previously labeled "experimentation,"
has now been found to be a quite serious problem, often the result
of an earlier seduction of the teenager or another comparably severe
traumatic experience,(68) In fact, some studies show that half of
all reported cases of child molestation and 20 percent of all rapes
are committed by persons under the age of 18.(69)
Contrary to the earlier notion that sexual abuse occurred
mainly among the poor, there actually is no correlation between economic
class and rates of abuse.(70) Most pedophiles are male, although recent
research is beginning to discover more female seduction of little
children than previously reported, particularly since, as Lew has
pointed out, "sexual activity between older women and young boys
is rarely treated as abusive." (71) In all, only about 2 percent
of total incestuous abuse is ever reported, and only a tiny portion
of these few are ever convicted, even today,(72) putting the notion
to rest that society is as yet really much interested in stopping
the practice. Finally, the number of molestation incidents per child
may be fairly high; while in Russell's study 43 percent of the cases
of incestuous abuse are remembered as occurring only once, another
study of reported incidents found that the average duration of abuse
is five years.(73)
The best evidence for the cause of pedophilia is provided
by the clinical reports of the psychotherapists who have written extensively
on the subject.(74) The pedophile, similar to other perverts, suffers
from severe lack of love and fears of individuation in his or her
early childhood, and both desires and dreads merging with the mother
because of an enormous need to reinstate mother child unity. Earlier
childhood abuse of pedophiles is commonly found. As an adult, the
pedophile must have sex with children in order to maintain the illusion
of being loved, while at the same time dominating the children as
they themselves once experienced domination, repeating actively their
own caretaker's sadism. The pedophile uses the child as a breast-substitute,
both in the sense of using him or her for gratification and also as
an object for sadistic aggression.
The pedophile's sexual activity is extraordinarily
compulsive because it wards off recurring feelings of fragmentation,
depression and death. This helps explain why the pedophile's sexual
targets are so inter-changeable and why an active pedophile often
seduces hundreds of children in his or her life. The seduction of
children is a desperate defense against fears of personal disintegration.
It should not be thought of - as it usually is by historians and anthropologists
- as "an outbreak of instinctual sexuality." or as being
due to "a lack of impulse controls" or "a weak superego."
Adults who molest children have extremely powerful punitive superegos
and are often highly religious. They are driven to their acts not
by their sexual instincts but by their overwhelming intrapsychic anxieties.
Given the seriousness of the perversion, it is not surprising that
successful therapeutic methods have only recently become available.(75)
The time when one could deny that sexual seduction
is extremely traumatic for children appears to have ended. The more
studies that come out on the effects of childhood sexual abuse, the
more severe the damage is found to be. The flood of books and articles
documenting the emotional problems of victims both in childhood and
in later life has to be read in detail to appreciate the profound
sense of betrayal and the terrifying fears felt by the child, so that
even single incidents have the power to permanently ravage their lives.
Severe somatic reactions, depersonalization, self-hatred, hysterical
seizures, depression, borderline personality formation, promiscuity,
sexual dysfunctions, suicide, self-mutilation, night terrors and flashbacks,
multiple personalities, post-traumatic stress disorders, delinquency,
bulemia, and the overall stunting of feelings and capacities have
all been documented - the earlier and the more often the abuse, the
worse the damage.(76)
Outside the U.S., there has been only one comparably
reliable study published: a thirteen-hundred-page report on face-to-face
interviews of over 2,000 men and women done for the Canadian government
by the Gallup organization, which concludes with incidence rates approximately
the same as the U.S. studies.(77) In Latin America, anthropologists
report a great deal of family sexual activity and widespread pederasty
as part of macho masculine activity, though reliable statistics of
incidence are not yet available. (78) In Puerto Rico, for instance,
Oscar Lewis found "danger of seduction by stepfathers, sexual
rivalry between sisters, between mother and daughters [and] male children
erotically stimulated by their mothers and by other members of the
family,"(79) E. N. Padilla reported parents and others regularly
masturbating the infant's penis(80) and Romon Frendandez-Marina found
Peurto Rican fathers often masturbating their boys to show off their
maleness to friends." In Mexico, J. M. Carrier reported a large
proportion of Mexican men had sexual relations with nephews, cousins
or neighbors between the ages of 6 and 9. (82)
European countries are about two decades behind the
U.S. in interview techniques, and since they still use written questionnaires
they usually report sexual abuse rates of under one percent. (83)
Most European studies do not attempt to study statistical frequency,
though some - such as a series of studies on Scandinavian incest -
report considerable public acceptance of incest in some rural areas.
(84)
Even though there are no reliable statistics for most
European countries, a recent flurry of books, articles and telephone
"hotlines" has begun to reveal widespread sexual molestation.
A recent BBC "ChildWatch" program asked its female listeners
- a large though biased sample - if they remembered sexual molestation,
and, of the 2,530 replies analyzed, 83 percent remembered someone
touching their genitals, 62 percent of the full sample recalling actual
intercourse.(85) Official estimates of German children sexually abused
and raped each year now number over 300,000, and sexual abuse hot
lines are becoming more widespread.(86) The establishment of Italian
"SOS-infanzia" hotlines - initially much resented by the
public - have begun to reveal widespread pedophile networks, baby
prostitution and Boy Scout/Girl Guide molestation, as well as the
widespread sexual abuse of children within famines, with a particular
emphasis on the pederasty of boys. (87) Finally, the most careful
European study to date is a recent unpublished German survey by the
Iinstitut fuer Kindheit that for the first time anywhere dared to
ask the children themselves about their sexual experiences. I have
been told that these researchers found an 80 percent childhood sexual
molestation rate among Berlin school children.(88) The exact details
of this study will certainly be revealing when it is published. It
may be that direct questioning of children rather than relying on
retrospective memory may produce even higher real incidence rates
of sexual molestation than our 60 percent and 45 percent estimates
for the U.S.
PEDOPHILIA IN THE EAST AND MIDDLE EAST
However high the rates of childhood molestation may
turn out to be in contemporary Western countries, the incidence in
countries outside the West is likely to be much higher. Because they
have only recently moved beyond what I have termed the infanticidal
mode of chiidrearing, whereby as much as half of the children born
were killed by their parents,(89) the use of children for the emotional
needs of adults is far more accepted, an attitude that fosters widespread
incestuous acts along with other child abuse. Although the evidence
is scattered and much remains hidden, enough exists to indicate the
dimensions of what eventual scholarship will probably uncover.
Childhood in much of India begins with the young child
being regularly masturbated by the mother, "high caste or low
caste, the girl 'to make her sleep well,' the boy 'to make him manly..."'
This practice has been said to be widespread by many reliable observers,
including Catherine Mayo - whose extensive investigations in India
in the 1920s led to the first child marriage laws(90) - a physician,(91)
an ethnologist,(92) a religious scholar (93) and a sociologist.(94)
As is the case with virtually all non-Western cultures, the child
sleeps in the family bed for several years and regularly observes
sexual intercourse between the parents. The extent to which Indian
parents go beyond this and overtly have sex with the child cannot
be determined. Rampal, the sociologist who recently did interviews
modeled on the Kinsey studies about contemporary Indian sexual practices,
concludes that "there is a lot of incest...It is hidden along
with other secrets of families and rarely gets a chance to come out,
like seduction at the hands of trusted friends of the family... To
arrive at even a passable estimate of incest cases would be to touch
the hornet's nest.. no one will ever confess to such a deed, therefore,
any attempt to collect statistics may prove to be futile at present."(95)
Boys as well as girls are reported as being masturbated
and raped by the men in the family, including fathers, older brothers,
uncles and cousins.(96) By the time children are four or five, they
are usually taken to bed at night by others in the extended household.
"A particular uncle may like her to sleep in his room, which
is considered a great gesture of closeness."(97) As one girl
describes it: "I hardly ever slept with my parents after I was
four. I rotated almost every night between my various uncles and sometimes
my grandmother. But it was difficult to have any space in her bed
because all the grandsons slept in her bed.. So I prefer-red to sleep
in [uncle's] bed, who was very nice and put his arms around me in
winter."(98) This practice is similar to the customary sharing
of their wives by brothers, who have free sexual access to each other's
wives, an ancient practice still approved of in some areas in India.(99)
So acceptable is sex between close relatives in India
that uncle-niece and cross-cousin marriages were preferred among certain
Indian groups.(100) As the old Indian proverb has it, "For a
girl to be a virgin at ten years old, she must have neither brothers
nor cousin nor father." These sleeping patterns with relatives
who live in common residences continue even after marriage, since
husbands are often cold to wives, and sex with the husband's younger
brother is covertly encouraged by the family to give the wife someone
to be "close" to.(101) Grandfathers often call the little
girls "my little wife," give them candy and "play the
role of an old seducer," teasing them by saying "Don't you
want to marry me?"(102) One observer stuns up traditional Indian
sexual stimulation during childhood as follows: "The little Hindu
girls are deflowered by the little boys with whom they play, and repeat
together the erotic lessons which their parents have unwittingly taught
them on account of the general promiscuity of family life throughout
India. In all the little girls of less than ten years of age the complete
hymen is wanting.. Incest is often the rule rather than the exception."(103)
In addition to direct incest by parents, the seduction
of little girls who are taken in as wards or servants is quite common.
Many older men, Rampal reports, "get down to seducing young girls
whom they give protection at home for any reason - education, service,
relationship, close friendship with father or brother. [They] take
full advantage of the girl's innocence and her lack of experience
in dealing with men who desire them sexually. The girls generally
regret such relationships because of [the] extreme dualism of calling
their secret lovers as 'uncle' or 'brother' before others and indulging
in coitus in the privacy of [the] bedroom..."(104) Fathers sometimes
encourage the seduction by giving a daughter to a friend to be brought
up "as his own daughter" so the friend "then initiates
her to incestuous coitus."(105)
The sexual use of boys and girls goes back as far
as records exist and includes all cases in India. As Mayo says, "For
a period so long that none knows it beginning, the Brahmin has been
intensively cultivating, and with priestly authority handing on, a
passion for immature girl-children in sexual use." (106) Temple
prostitution of both boys and girls has a long history, and Mayo reported
in 1927 that "the little boy...is likely, if physically attractive,
to be drafted for the satisfaction of grown men, or to be regularly
attached to a temple, in the capacity of prostitute. Neither parent
as a rule sees any harm in this, but is, rather, flattered that the
son has been found pleasing."(107) Both priests and visitors
used the boys and girls sexually, most of the children being "of
good caste." One community of temple prostitutes numbered two
hundred thousand members, according to government statistics.(108)
Child marriage has been the rule in India at least
as far back as 300 B.C. The rationalization for child marriage - like
that for extreme seclusion of girls, purdah(110) - is that it is necessary
to protect the girl from the seductive males around her. Indian mothers
of higher castes admit that they are "afraid to leave their daughters
of [age eleven] at home, even for one afternoon, without a mother's
eye and accessible to the men of the family. Far down the social scale
the same anxiety is found. The Hindu peasant villager's wife will
not leave her girl child at home alone for the space of an hour, being
practically sure that, if she does so, the child will be ruined."
(111) Therefore, the child has traditionally been married off as early
as six or seven years of age.
While child marriages are consciously excused as defenses
against seduction by males, they also, of course, carry out the seduction,
since child marriages have generally been consummated right away and
since the groom is almost always decades older than the child bride.
As the Mahabharata says, "Let the man of thirty years wed a ten-year-old
wife, a nagnika (one that has not yet menstruated), or let
the man of twenty-one get one seven years old."(102) Since prior
to the 1929 child Marriage Restraint Act most Indian girls were married
and began sexual intercourse before age 12, they moved from familial
incest to sex with older men chosen by the family while they were
still children.(113)
Fathers who allowed their girls to reach puberty without
being married were condemned by their religion to hell. Therefore,
the first child usually was born shortly after the onset of puberty,
almost always dying during childbirth because of the physical immaturity
of the mother.(114) When attempts to outlaw child marriage were made
in 1929, nine volumes of testimony were published by the Age of Consent
Committee, most of them defending child marriage. The complaint was
that it was the foundation of the Indian family, since "the girl-child
must 'get herself disciplined' [raped] through actual consummation
of marriage 'to look upon one individual...as her lord and husband..."(115)
Mayo said most of this committee testimony was too
obscene to even repeat in its insistence on the necessity for child
sex. The Committee was overwhelmed by those who insisted that the
children were so oversexed that by the time they were seven years
old that child marriage was their only salvation. "Little children,
both boys and girls, they lament, naturally develop an unnatural,
perverted and exhausting precocity, under the stimulus in which they
are steeped" - that is, the family incest during the first seven
years. Mayo reported numerous testimonies that blamed the little girls
for their rape, claiming that early marriage was an absolute necessity,
since "Cupid overtakes the hearts of girls... at an early age...
. A girl's desire for sexual intercourse is eight times greater than
that of males.. When there is appetite, it is the best time for giving
food..."(116)
The result of this early incest was a society where
adult sexuality was considered extremely dangerous, where people suffered
agonies of guilt every time they engaged in sex with their spouses,
where all sexual intercourse between men and women was considered
polluting and where popular movies still frequently need detailed
rape scenes to satisfy the male audience. (117) As might be expected,
Indian religion has been permeated by perverse sexual fantasies, worship
of the penis and extreme fears of loss of semen, including the worship
of an incestuous penis-god, Siva - where women were expected to kiss
in public the genitals of naked priests. Even today in cults such
as the Hindu Sakti sect incest is advocated as "a higher grade
of sexual intercourse and an advanced step toward religious perfection."(118)
The Indian subcontinent provides a veritable Galapagos
of psychohistorical variations of incestuous behavior, providing examples
of a wide range of evolutionary stages that can be useful in comparative
historical studies of other societies. In some endogamous Indian groups,
such as the Baiga, actual incestuous marriage is practiced between
men and their daughters, between women and their sons, between siblings,
and even between grandparents and their grandchildren. (118) "My
impression is that most of them have little or no innate repulsion
towards incest," Says Elwin, their ethnographer, (120) the viability
of their society disproving by itself all theories about the impossibility
of incestuous marriage.
Variations on the fully incestuous life style of the
Baiga are numerous, and regular sexual intercourse during childhood
is widespread in many Indian groups. One of the best documented is
the Muria, who make their young children a part of their sexual activities
in the family bed. Then, when their children are five or six years
old, the parents claim they are getting too old to continue to take
part in family sex, so they send them to a dormitory set up by the
adults for the sexual use of the children by adolescents and older
men.(121) The Muria claim it is the children's fault they have to
be removed from their homes and sent to the sex dormitory:
"Some children are very good and understand
[why they have to be banished from the family bed], but others are
stupid and insist on crowding into the parents' room..." The
adults supervise and encourage all the sexual activities that take
place in the dormitories. Although at times children as little as
two years of age are taken to sleep in the dormitories, they are
usually not required to be part of the sex activities until 5 or
6, since if they are made to have sex at 3 or 4 they often "wet
their beds [and] wake up crying."(122)
When being introduced into the sex dormitory, the
children are made to fag for others and are "hammered into shape"
by the adolescents in charge. The young children start their sexual
activities by massaging the older children, and are only then "initiated"
into actual intercourse. Intercourse begins at age 5 or 6, initiated
by an adolescent or adult: "A big girl teaches a little boy by
letting him fondle her breasts and hug her. Then she opens and spreads
her legs and makes the little boy lie on her breasts. She shows him
how to open her clothes and insert the little penis with his hand."(123)
There are two types of dormitories: the classic model,
where girls cannot sleep with a partner for more than three days at
a time, under threat of punishment; and the "yoking" model,
where partners are "married" to each other for longer periods.
The children are usually assigned partners by those in charge. Although
sometimes a girl can name her own partner, she cannot choose not to
have sex, or she will be gang raped:
"Should a girl refuse to come when sent for,
a number of young boys are dispatched to bring her by force. When
she is brought, should she refuse to elect a mate, a number of older
boys violate her one after the other, until she names the boy she
would have for her mate."(124)
The children have intercourse in one another's presence,
with certain relatives, such as younger brothers, taking over if the
older brother is ab-sent for a time.(125) "Everyone belongs to
everyone else" is the spirit of these dormitories; "you
change from girl to girl just as you change your rings from finger
to finger," lest one be "ruined by love."(126) (All
these rules, of course, are set down and changed at will by the parents,
not the children.) Older married men often visit the dormitories and
have sex with the children, particularly when their own wives are
having their period and are considered polluted.(127) The sex dormitory
system of the Muria - which is similar to that of a number of other
Asian and African groups(128) - been highly praised for its "enviable"
positive attitudes toward sex both by the ethnologist who studied
them and by other anthropologists reporting on his research.(129)
The dormitories are called a "happy, exciting world," in
contrast, says the ethnologist, to other Indian villages where there
was more child rape than in dormitory villages.(130)
Like India, China has only recently emerged from the
infanticidal mode of childrearing, but reliable research on childhood
sexuality is somewhat more limited than for India. Although parents
traditionally sleep with their children until they are adolescents,(131)
exactly what happens in Chinese family beds has not yet been much
investigated, although some observers have reported that Chinese girls,
like Indian, have no trace of a hymen, supposedly because caretakers
"clean the sexual organs of the little children during daily
washings... so scrupulously..."(132)
Like so many early civilizations, ancient China institutionalized
pederasty of boys, child concubinage, the castration of small boys
so they could be used sexually as eunuchs, the marriage of young brides
with a number of brothers, widespread boy and girl prostitution and
the regular sexual use of child servants and slaves.(133) Under the
popular ancient sim pua system of marriage, parents would adopt a
girl during infancy, bring her up as a sister to their son and then
force them into a marriage that must be considered as incestuous in
every way except genetically. Alternatively, they could adopt a son
to marry his sister.(135) Sexual use of adopted girls was said to
be common.(135) Parents would send their boys to aristocratic households
for sexual use - if volunteered as a eunuch, the parents would have
their boys' genitals cut off, which the parents carried with them
in a jar.(136) In some areas, male marriage to boys was so popular
that there are records of sacrifices to patron deities of pederasty.(137)
As was also common in other early civilizations, extreme
maternal symbiosis caused the Chinese to believe that women were so
powerful that they depleted men of their strength by taking their
semen during intercourse. The Chinese thought women ejaculated a life
force (yin) during sex, which a man could absorb and gain strength
from, if he could withhold ejaculation himself. Manuals were written
describing methods whereby the man could hold back his semen, terminating
intercourse - called "the battle" - by inhaling the breath
and sucking the saliva of the woman - who is called "the enemy.(138)
During adolescence, youths were instructed to have intercourse with
young girls who have "undeveloped breasts," but to practice
"moderation" by withholding their semen.'(139) Rulers had
more life force because they absorbed more of it from their many wives
and concubines. Whether this led them to believe that men could absorb
the life force from their children through intercourse is not immediately
apparent, although this might be indicated by the widespread practice
of buying (under the rubric of "adoption") children in infancy
under the popular mui tsai system - children who were then used by
their "adoptive" parents both as domestic slaves and as
sexual objects.(140) Boys, too, were often adopted for sexual use,
and had their feet bound like girls-bound feet being considered sexually
arousing.(141)
Foot binding was a unique Chinese sexual mutilation practice that
was performed on girls of all classes. Like other fetishists, the
Chinese were so afraid of the vagina as a dangerous, castrating organ
that they could only feel erotic toward the woman's foot - mainly
her big toe. As a Cheng Kuan-ying described foot binding in the nineteenth
century: "When a child is four or five, or seven or eight, parents
speak harshly to it, and frighten it with their looks, and oppress
it in every conceivable manner so that the bones of its feet may be
broken and its flesh may putrefy."(142) The girl undergoes this
extremely painful process for from five to ten years, crying out in
pain each night as she hobbles about the house to do her tasks while
holding on to the walls for support.(143) As the bones became broken
and the flesh deteriorated, her foot became a perfect penis - substitute,
often losing several toes as they were bent under her foot in order
to emphasize the big toe sticking out.
The penis-toe then became the focus of the man's perversion
and of his sexual excitement during intercourse. "It formed an
essential prelude to the sex act, and its manipulation excited and
stimulated... The ways of grasping the foot in one's palms were both
profuse and varied; ascending the heights of ecstasy, the lover transferred
the foot from palm to mouth. Play included kissing, sucking, and inserting
the foot in the mouth until it filled both cheeks, either nibbling
at it or chewing it vigorously, and adoringly placing it against one's
cheeks, chest, knees, or virile member.(144) Thus even sex with a
female could simulate homosexual intercourse for Chinese males.
Although Chinese literature has many descriptions
of the screams of girls whose feet are being crushed,(145) the sources
are silent as to whether the little girl herself fully understood
the sexual purpose of her mutila-tion. Since she shared the family
bed with her parents and presumably observed her father playing sexually
with her mother's penis - foot, it is likely that the sexual aim of
her painful mutilation was apparent to her.
Japan began to move beyond the infanticidal mode of
childrearing at least two centuries ago.(146) Therefore, reliable
accounts of traditional Japanese childhood sexual life are harder
to find. Furthermore, there is currently such a taboo on talking about
sexual molestation of children that current official figures report
only a few hundred cases per year in all of Japan.(147) Although some
recent visitors to Japan, witnessing almost everyone reading soft-core
pornographic comics (manga) that feature young girls "being accosted,
surprised, tied up, beaten, knifed [and] tortured,(148) wonder whether
the very low official child abuse figures reported are accurate, personal
letters I have written to an-thropologists, educators, psychoanalysts
and others specializing in Japanese psychology have brought nothing
but denial that sexual molestation exists in substantial numbers of
families in Japan today.
Ancient Japan resembled both India and China in having
institutionalized Greek-style pederasty of boys - by priests as well
as warriors - temple prostitution of both boys and girls, and widespread
child prostitution, including the ancient geisha system.(149) Japanese
brothels would start girls in sexual service at S to 7 years old.(150)
Pederasty (shudo) by the aristocracy and priesthood is well documented
since at least the 14th century, with young boys given by their parents
to be used anally by samurais and by priests in monasteries - the
buggered boys sometimes having been worshipped as gods incarnate in
religious cults similar to those of the cult of the Virgin in the
West.(151)
One of the most endogenous societies in the world,
Japan has approved of incestuous marriages in court circles even in
historical times.(152) Preferred sibling, cousin, uncle-niece and
aunt-nephew marriages have been so extensive that genetics experts
have discovered that the inbreeding has affected their size and health.(153)
How often this incestuous marriage system occurred in traditional
Japan is still largely unexplored. One indication of what is likely
to be found is a 1959 study by Kubo showing that there were still
rural areas in Japan where fathers married their daughters when the
mother had died or was incapacitated, "in accordance with feudal
family traditions.(154) Kubo concluded that incest was considered
"praiseworthy conduct" in many traditional rural families.
In the 36 incest cases he studied in Hiroshima, he found that there
was often community moral disapproval of the families who lived in
open incestuous marriages, but that the participants themselves did
not think of it as immoral. In fact, when the father was unavailable
to head the family, his son often took over his role and had sex with
his sister in order "to end confusion in the order of the home."
Other members of the family accepted this incest as normal.
In traditional Japan, quite young girls were introduced
into sex by older boys who visited their bedrooms at night with the
complicity of the girl's parents (called night-prowling, yobai). The
boys "assembled in communal huts and instructed slightly younger
village males in sex approaches and techniques..." Although they
recommended "gentle persuasion,"(155) there was no guarantee
that all was so gentle in fact, since the parents "looked the
other way" in accordance with custom while the older boys had
intercourse with their young daughters.
Western observers even today often notice that Japanese
mothers still masturbate their young children during the day in public
and at night in the family bed - in order, they say, "to put
them to sleep."(156) The average Japanese today sleeps with his
or her children until the children are ten or fifteen years old,"(157)
- one recent Japanese study found daughters still sleeping with their
fathers over 20 percent of the time even after age sixteen.(158) Even
when the home contains a dozen rooms or more, parents and grandparents
feel "lonely" if they sleep apart from
the children in the family, and therefore go to bed with some child
every night (the mean age in one study of children sleeping alone
is 12.7 years).(159) Since so many families still practice what is
termed dakine co-sleeping - with the parent or grandparent sleeping
while physically embracing the child, a practice said to be beneficial
to the health of the adult"(160) - and since most Japanese parents
still regularly have sexual in-tercourse while the child is in bed
with them,(161) one wonders how scholars can continue to maintain
that nothing sexual usually happens to the Japanese child in the family
bed, particularly since none have yet ask-ed the children themselves
about their sexual experiences.
This stone wall on information about incest in Japan
has been breach-ed somewhat by four recent studies. The first is a
Japanese feminist sex survey modeled on those of Shere Hite that reported
one-third of the respondents having memories of being sexually abused
by relatives or close friends as children, a figure considerably higher
than comparable American questionnaire studies.(162) Secondly, other
studies show that the majority of urban parents in 1981 reported that
they had lately begun to be bothered by the thought that children
with whom they slept might be aware of their intercourse - a growing
guilt about incestuous activities that was increasingly common in
the West in early modern times and which led for the first time to
separate beds for children.(163)
Thirdly, two recent books on Japanese incest provide
new insights into the subject. The first is a report of a "hotline"
set up in Tokyo by a counseling service, which analyzed the hundreds
of calls they received dealing with incest.(164) Since official Japanese
statistics deny the occurrence of incest, they were surprised to find
that their hotline was flooded with such calls. One of their major
findings is that, in addition to the usual father-daughter and sibling
incest found in the West, 29 percent of the Japanese calls complained
about mother - son incest. This is an extremely high proportion compared
to other countries, but about what could be expected considering the
common frequency with which Japanese mothers sleep alone with their
sons while the father is out having sex with other women - extramarital
sex still being the rule for most married men in Japan.(165)
The most commonly reported incest occurs when the
mother sees her son masturbate as a teenager and tells him, "It's
not good to do it alone. Your IQ becomes lower. I will help you,"
or "You cannot study if you cannot have sex. You may use my body,"
or "I don't want you to get into trouble with a girl. Have sex
with me instead."(166) The researchers found that Japanese mothers
and sons often sleep in the same bed and have sex together, although
the exact incidence in the population was not investigated. According
to the phone interviews, Japanese mothers teach their sons how to
masturbate, helping them to achieve first ejaculation in much the
same manner as they earlier helped them with toilet training.(167)
Most of the sons had no sexual experience with another woman, and
became jealous of the mothers' having sex with their fathers, feeling
they should have the right to monopolize the mothers - perhaps helping
explain why one informant told a family planning expert: "We
have no Oedipal problems in Japan - there's no competition from the
father.(168) Mother recent Japanese book, based on one hundred incest
reports, confirms these observations, including the unusually high
rate of mother - son incest, although it, too, provides no way to
determine true national incidence rates.(169)
Finally, a recent psychohistoncal study of Japanese
childhood by Kitahara (170) provides a number of new details about
Japanese incest, in-cluding the acceptance of sibling incest in early
historic times, the routine acceptance of pederasty up until recently,
the wide extent even today of co-sleeping and co-bathing, and the
degree to which incest depends on co-sleeping patterns and upon the
very limited contact fathers have with their families.
The sexual use of children in the remainder of the
Far East follows the pattern of India and China. In Thailand, for
instance, a survey in 1990 found that 75 percent of Thai men had had
sex with child prostitutes, from 20 to 40 percent of them HIV-infected,
so that Asia is about to become what one expert terms "the epicenter
of the AIDS epidemic."(171) The rising incidence of AIDS among
children around the world is just one index of how widespread their
sexual use really is.
The sexual use of children in the Middle East is probably
as widespread as in the Far East.(172) Historically, all the institutionalized
forms of pedophilia that were customary in the Far East are extensively
documented for the Middle East during its earlier infanticidal childrearmg
mode, including child marriage, child concubinage, temple prostitution
of both boys and girls, parent-child marriage (among the Zoroastrians),
sibling marriage (among the Egyptians, among both royalty and commoners),
sex slavery, ritualized pederasty, eunichism, and widespread child
prostitution. Furthermore, as in India, there are parts of the Middle
East where customs from earlier times have been maintained intact,
so that more detail is available than is usually preserv-ed in historical
documents.
In the oasis of Siwa, for instance, mothers regularly
give their boys to older men for sexual use, both related and outside
the family, and fathers regularly lend their young sons to each other,
similar to the Central Asian Islarnic tradition of bacaboz, where
most fathers trade their sons with others for sexual use.(173) Pederastic
marriages and pederastic prostitution have been so widespread in Siwa
until just recently that everyone is accustomed to the proposition
that men normally love boys more than they do women, saying: "They
will kill each other for a boy. Never for a woman."(174) Muslim
holy men (imaam) regularly have boys available for sex, saying the
ingestion of the imaam's semen is necessary for absorbing his spiritual
powers, sometimes even extending to formal marriage with the boy.
Sex for boys in the Middle East is said to begin in
infancy and continue throughout childhood. Parents and others masturbate
the infant's penis in order "to increase its size and strengthen
it," and older siblings have been observed playing with the genitals
of babies for hours at a time.(175) As the boy gets older, mutual
masturbation, fellatio and anal intercourse are said to be common
among children, particularly with the older boys using the younger
children as sex objects as a reaction to the over stimulation of the
family bed. Pederasty of boys by the men in and near the ex-tended
family is said by an Arab sociologist to be common, since "the
mere sight of pretty boys is regarded.. .as disturbing and terribly
tempting."(176) Moralists often find it necessary to issue warnings
such as these: "A man should never spend the night in a house
with beardless boys" and "Do not sit next to the sons of
the rich and noble: they have faces like those of virgins and they
are even more tempting than women."(177)
By the time of circumcision - a traumatic ritual(178)
that is usually performed at ages 3 to 6, whose unconscious purpose
is to purify the boy and cleanse him(179) of the molestation to which
he has been subjected - the boy is supposed to stop wearing the dress-like
shin that allows ready access to his genitals and begin wearing pants.
However, since he often continues to sleep in the parental bed, to
have sex with siblings and cousins, to experience sexual attacks at
school and to attend nude public baths (hammam) with his mother and
sisters,(180) his sexual over stimulation often continues into the
7- to 14-year-old phase. Much of the incest may occur in the baths.
Bouhdiba reports: "The hammam...is a highly eroticized place
- so much so indeed that the name has come to signify for the masses
the sexual act itself... 'going to the hammam' quite simply means
'making love'.. .Every Muslim can relive his childhood in terms of
his experience of the hammam. . notoriously a place of homosexuality,
male and female.. .there the child has all the time in the world to
contemplate, examine and compare sexual organs [so that] every Muslim
is fixated on his mother..."(181)
As girls in the Middle East are considered worth less
than boys, it may be that their incestuous use during childhood is
even more prevalent. One report found that four out of five Middle
Eastern women recalled having been forced into fellatio between the
ages of 3 and 6 by older brothers and other relatives.(182) A female
Arab physician who recently conducted an extensive study of childhood
seduction reported that "most female children are exposed to..
incidents of sexual assault" during their early years by "the
brother, the cousin, the paternal uncle, the maternal uncle, the grandfather
or even the father. If not a family member, he may be the guardian
or porter of the house, the teacher, the neighbor's son, or any other
man." (183) The molestation, she says, begins with masturbation
or fellatio and then proceeds to intercourse. "In most cases
the girl surrenders and is afraid to complain to anyone, since, if
there is any punishment to be meted out, it will always end up by
being inflicted on her. It is she alone who loses her honor and virginity.
The man never loses anything..." The incidents are termed "frequent,
but remain hidden, stored up in the secret recesses of the female
child's self, since she dare not tell anyone of what has happened
to her..."
Girls are reported to be sexually assaulted at school
and in the streets,(184) and child marriage has proved as difficult
to stamp out in many areas as it has been in India.(185) The assaults
are accompanied by severe physical and psychological damage, according
to research by one group of medical experts at the Ministry of Justice
in Cairo, and usually go unpunished even in those rare occasions when
they are brought to the attention of authorities, "in order to
avoid scandal.(186) Since the girl's hymen must be intact when she
gets married, surgical repair is sometimes requested in order to conceal
the loss of virginity through the assaults. As in the Far East, young
servants are particularly favored sexual objects, both for men whose
wives are absent, menstruating, pregnant or frigid and for adolescents
who sometimes feel less guilty having sex with ser-vant girls than
with their sisters.(187)
Arab women, of course, are often aware that their
spouses prefer having sex with little boys and girls to having sex
with them. Their retribution for the men's pedophilia comes when the
girl is about age 6, when the women of the house grab her, pull her
thighs apart and cut off her clitoris and sometimes her labia with
a razor, thus usually ending her ability to feel sexual pleasure forever.
The custom of clitoridectomy - which is not part of
any religious doc-trine and is not even mentioned in the Koran-goes
back at least to pre-dynastic Egyptian times;(188) even mummies were
missing their clitorises and labia.(189) Presently, many Middle Eastern
and African countries continue to practice circumcision of girls.
A recent survey of Egyptian girls and women showed 97 percent of uneducated
families and 66 percent of educated families still practicing clitoridectomy.(190)
Nor is the practice decreasing; Hosken says "more female children
are mutilated today than throughout history" and estimates that
there are presently 74 million mutilated females in countries where
documentation exists.(191)
Often the girl's labia are cut off in addition to
the clitoris - the so-called "Pharaonic circumcision" or
"infibulation" - and the remaining flesh is sewn together,
leaving only a small opening for urination. The vagina must of course
be cut open before intercourse, and the women often also have great
difficulty giving birth and have to be further cut to allow the baby
to pass through. The vaginal area is then re-sewn together after the
baby is born "to give the men more pleasure during intercourse"
and has to be cut open again during each successive birth. During
all of these mutilations the girls undergo excruciating pain, sometimes
die of complications, usually hemorrhage, often pass out from the
shock (since no anesthetic is used) and often suffer from tetanus,
blood poisoning, chronic urinary tract infections and infertility.
The rationalization given for clitoridectomy is that
little girls are naturally so sexual that it is necessary "to
release them from their bondage to sex" and "to stop them
from masturbating." One informant reported that "girls fell
from their bicycles because of sexual overstimulation if their clitorises
were not cut."(193) Since the operation usually makes the girl
frigid, it can be said to achieve its stated aim of reducing girls'
sexual pleasure. Men usually do not want to marry women with intact
clitorises, believing they will be "oversexed" and betray
them. It is the custom in some countries on the wedding night for
the husband to be the one to cut his bride's vagina open with a knife,
then have repeated intercourse to prevent it from closing again.
The initial mutilation of the girl's genitals is usually
done by the women of the family, under the supervision of the mother.
The unconscious motive seems to be revenge for the men's sexual abuse
of the girl, since interviews so often reveal earlier memories of
seduction. One women relates her memory of her clitoridectomy as follows:
I was six years old that night when I lay in my
bed, warm and peaceful...I felt something move under the blankets,
something like a huge hand, cold and rough, fumbling over my body,
as though looking for something. Almost simultaneously another hand..
.was clapped over my mouth to prevent me from screaming.
They carried me to the bathroom... I remember..
a rasping metallic sound which reminded me of the butcher when he
used to sharpen his knife... My blood was frozen in my veins...
I realized my thighs had been pulled wide apart, and that each of
my lower limbs was being held as far away from the other as possible...
I felt that the rasping knife or blade was heading straight down
towards my throat. Then suddenly the sharp metallic edge seemed
to drop between my thighs and there cut off a piece of flesh from
my body.
I screamed with pain despite the tight hand held
over my mouth, for the pain was not just a pain, it was like a searing
flame that went through my whole body. After a few moments, I saw
a red pool of blood around my hips.
I did not know what they had cut off from my body,
and did not try to find out. I just wept, and called out to my mother
for help. But the worst shock of all was when I looked around and
found her standing by my side. Yes, it was her, I could not be mistaken,
in flesh and blood, right in the midst of these strangers, talking
to them and smiling at them.(194)
Clitoridectomy - like all genital mutilations of children
- is, of course, an act of incest motivated by the perversions of
the adults who perform the mutilation. Although we are not used to
thinking of it in this way, in fact mothers who attack their daughters'
genitals with knives are as incestuous as fathers who rape them.
Since genital mutilation is one of the most widespread
childrearing practices, its presence alone makes incest a universal
practice-despite our habit of denying its sexual motivation by terming
it a "rite of passage (it often involves no passage to a new
state at all) or a "puberty rite" (it usually occurs long
before puberty). Also, the sexual excitement of the adults attending
the mutilation is overlooked, even when - as in Siwa - the mother
masturbates the child prior to the mutilation, or when - as in Morocco
- prostitutes regularly attend the mutilation ceremony in order to
relieve the sexual tensions generated, or when - as in Australia -
the mutilation is followed by group rape.(195)
The mutilation of children's genitals is such a important
need in humans that whole religions and state systems have been founded
upon the practice. Yet when scholars attempt to explain why almost
everyone since the beginning of recorded history has massively assaulted
the genitals of their children, they assiduously deny that it is a
sexual perversion or that those who do it ever mean any harm to the
children.
Arnold van Gennep calls genital mutilation a ceremony
"whose essential purpose is to enable the individual to pass
from one defined position to another," never wondering why parents
couldn't celebrate the maturing of their children in a less harmful
way."' Bruno Bettleheim claims that little boys want their genitals
cut-because of an inborn "vagina envy" - and that the mutilation
was so "pleasurable" to the victims that they asked adults
to cut them, so they could "express their happiness."(197)
Others have claimed genital mutilation was done "to enforce social
cohesion" (Yehudi Cohen), "to break an excessively strong
dependence upon the mother" (John Whiting), to show the child
"We love you, but we must rid you of your infantilisms"
(Theodor Reik), and to make the penis look like that of a kangaroo
(John Cawte).(198)
There is hardly an imaginable form of genital assault
that is not regularly performed on children. Girls' genitals are tattooed,
cut off, sewn up, burned off, and ripped open with the fingers.(199)
Boys' genitals are pierced by objects, sewn up, burned, cut off, flayed,
"gashed open [so that] wedges of flesh are removed," and
slashed through to the urethra so that "the penis splits open
like a boiled frankfurter."(200) The topic of childhood genital
mutilation is so rich in meaning that it will have to await further
discussion in the next two major sections of this study, "The
Cross-Cultural Study of Incest," where the universality of incest
in contemporary preliterate groups is documented, and "The History
of Incest," where evidence is presented for the historical stages
in the evolution of Homo eroticus from incest to love.
Citations
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