The Sexual  Exploitation of Children:  Sociology  101

                                                                   Martha K. Huggins

 

1.       The words rape, sodomy, and slavery are seldom used.  When the uninformed public, the media, and the perpetrators and facilitators who perpetrate or facilitate  criminal violence against infants and children, the specific nature of these criminal acts is seldom stated. Forced staged sex between minor infants and children or carried out by adults against infants and underage youth, is rarely discussed.  Brutal violence against infants and youth without the ability or power to resist is subsumed under the contested concept of ‘pornography,’ a leisure activity thought to be the legitimate right of consenting adults to enjoy in the privacy of their homes;

 

2.      The secrecy of  taboo.  One of the few remaining taboos in most industrialized countries seems to be that speaking about infant and child rape is bad form. The main way of acceptably transgressing the ‘do not discuss child rape taboo,’  is to neutralize its broader social implications by rendering the perpetrator a ‘unique’ kind of deviant;

3.      The perpetrator myth.  A well-educated, liberal colleague recently asserted that university administrators and faculty are not the ‘worst pervs’ who violate children sexually,’ adding that the ‘real  pervs’ are the ones to go after.  This faculty colleague’s observation shines light on her myths about those who violate children sexually:  that sexual exploiters of infants and youth, who by definition are uniquely deviant,  have social class characteristics (‘stigmata) that signal  their generalized deviance: e.g.,  poor, males with little education, and/or aggressively masculine male ‘groupies’,  and/or meek isolated loners who live with their mothers.

4.      Criminal Profiles defy the myth. Criminal perpetrators of infant and child rape and torture have been Catholic prelates and are increasingly discovered to be  male university administrators and professors and  (see, L. Handrahan, XXXX). Both sets of actors, due to their socially respected occupational and social status,  do not fit the public image of a child rapist.

 

5.      ‘Protective Denial’: My university colleague's assertion, after I  had posted Hanrahan’s data on the direct involvement of university administrators and faculty in child rape and  pornography---that academics are not ‘the worst pervs,’ there are people much worse than them--suggested her imagined continuum that placed academics at  the continuum's most ‘acceptable’ end, while at the continuum’s ‘most heinous’ end, were the “real pervs” who sexually abused children.  Apparently, in my colleague’s mind, “good” people are not regular perpetrators of child rape, while the deviant “real pervs” do it all the time.  Most important to her argument was that university people have been unfairly charged with victimizing children or with having child sexual pornography,  In any  case, she argued, children don't make good witnesses:  ‘Remember the McMaster Day Care false charges,’  she said.

6.      Organizational protection and complicity. When ‘respectable’ people are singled out by a parishioner, parent, or student,  a faculty member, the socially esteemed organization that houses the perpetrator—the local, national, and international Catholic Church  or a public or private US university and its Trustees--has a vested interest in keeping their member’s  deviance secret.  At most, the perpetrator will be classified as ‘atypical’--as happened with the Catholic Church--until mounting evidence showed the allegedly ‘atypical’ priestly perpetrators to  be acting within the organizations working norms

7.      Beyond Perpetrators:  the multiple actors in child sexual abuse.  The  rape and torture of underage youth involves multiple actors:  its direct perpetrators, their facilitators--including the organizational bureaucracy of which the perpetrator is a member--and  those facilitators who make, distribute, and purchase the visual products of perpetrators’ actions.  Just as complicitious in child rape and in the continuance of its marketed and purchased pornographic images,  are the seemingly outsider bystanders who know about child rape and torture and may even be aware of the lucrative industry that has emerged out of it.  Such bystanders, who are actually facilitators,  neither denounce child rape nor the pornography industry’s producers, videographers, distributers, sellers, and buyers;

 

8.      Impunity breeds Impunity; Impunity becomes ethos and legacy. 

ü  If  the perpetrators and facilitators who directly and indirectly  sexually victimize infants and youth keep getting away with  their criminal actions;

ü  And  if allegedly innocent bystanders are allowed inaction when knowing of  sexual and pornographic violence against  vulnerable infants and youth;

ü  And  if myths continue un-exposed about child sexual exploitation’s expansive system of actors; 

ü  And if local, state, and federal governments continue to back-stage the pursuit of  those who abuse and make money off of the torture of  infants and youth,

v  Then, in the US, sexual exploitation and physical torture of vulnerable  youth will continue to be our country’s operational cultural and institutional ethos and legacy. 

 

 

Martha K. Huggins, Professor Emerita:  Union College (Schenectady, NY) and Tulane University (New Orleans), has conducted research in Brazil for 40 years, producing 7 books from that research.  Now an investigative journalist for The Blue Paper (Key West), Huggins continues her research on police violence in Brazil, now with a comparative focus on the US as well.