[Sex radicals have often avoided or glazed over damage done by child sexual abuse. Stacie Haines, the author of a recovery manual for women who were sexually abused as children, has this to say about her experience trying to bridge the gap between the sex-radical agenda and the survivors' movement.
As a manager at Good Vibrations…I found myself caught repeatedly between two worlds: the world of survivors, hurt and at times paranoid about sex, and the world of sex-positive educators, many of whom did not want to hear about the negative uses of sex or the effects of sexual abuse.
Many in the survivors' community were afraid of sex and thought the best they could hope for would be something slightly better than just tolerating it. Survivors who liked sex and who spoke openly about it were met with mistrust and even, at times, disdain. It was assumed that they were "acting out" their sexual abuse. Pleasure was suspect. To me, it seemed to boil down to no trust in sex. Understandable, but not the recovery I hoped for.
Among sex educators, there was little talk of sexual violence or the sexual contradictions experienced by women who had been sexually violated. … I found myself educating the educators about the effects of childhood sexual abuse on adult sexuality. One colleague went so far as to suggest that incest itself wasn't the problem, that it was the cultural taboo surrounding incest that was harmful. No, no, no!
Haines is right to call on sex radicals to take a strong position against incest. An adult cannot adequately parent a child if there is also an erotic involvement, even if that activity appears to be consensual or seems to be welcomed by the child. The emotional expectations and ethical obligations of these two types of relationships, parent and lover, cannot be reconciled. You can't encourage your child to develop his or her own values around sexuality or intimate relationships if you have an agenda about justifying the incest. How could an incestuous parent respect the natural process of development, which takes a child out of the parent's world into his or her own future? Depending on what age the adult perpetrator of incest found the most attractive, there would be a tendency to either retard adolescence or anticipate it prematurely. A young person who is being incested has very little chance of receiving adequate parental support for developing good relationships with peers, dating, or exploring questions of gender and sexual identity.
This may be obvious to most readers, but it needs to be spelled out because there are still a small number of people who consider themselves to have progressive sexual politics who also believe that incest is damaging only because it is criminalized and stigmatized. There are also a handful of people who will say that they had sex with a sibling, parent, or other family member, and were not damaged by that contact. Sometimes I think the person telling me this kind of story is just in denial because their personality and relationships with others are so clearly dysfunctional. Sometimes, to be absolutely honest, I can't see any symptoms of pathology. Most of these anecdotes concern meetings between adult siblings who never knew one another as children. But this tiny minority of exceptional people is not enough, I believe, to counterbalance the enormous amount of evidence we have that incest is, the overwhelming majority of the time, injurious to its object. Similar ethical problems are raised by sexual relationships between children or teenagers and teachers, counselors, religious leaders, coaches, and other adult caretakers.
When I wrote "The Age of Consent: The Great Kiddy-Porn Panic of '77" and "The Aftermath of the Great Kiddy-Porn Panic of '77," I was naive about the developmental issues that make sex between adults and prepubescent children unacceptable, and the nature of the power dynamic between minors and their adult caretakers which make informed consent to sex problematic. Yes, prepubescent children are sensual and sexual beings who sometimes display that eroticism to adults in a way that may appear to be flirtatious and inviting. The appropriate realm for expression of that sexuality is, I now believe, via masturbation or age-appropriate exploration with peers. A child displaying his or her body or playfully soliciting adult attention for erotic behavior is not stating readiness or willingness to engage in cross-generational sex. One of the prerequisites for giving informed consent is possession of knowledge about what one is consenting to and the potential consequences or outcome of that behavior. Prepubescent children and many young teenagers are not developmentally equipped to have that knowledge; it isn't physically possible. The preening and posing that kids do is a test: "Is this part of me really okay?" and "Can I trust you to keep me safe as I grow up?" Adults who engage in sex with prepubescent children flunk that test. It is the adult's responsibility to provide the child or teenager with reassurance and unconditional positive regard, and make sure any erotic activity with self or peers is benign.
In the twenty years since these articles were published, I've become much more cynical about the ability of adults to listen to children. We are so busy, so set on having our own way, and we've forgotten what the world looks like to a person who is not as tall as the seat of our chairs. When a fetish for sex with children is added to this adult proclivity to be self-centered, you wind up with a person who sees consent where it cannot reasonably exist. "If she didn't want to have sex with me, she shouldn't have come into the living room while I was watching television," a perpetrator might say. Or, "He just has that look in his eye that says, 'Come and get me.' I can recognize it. He doesn't have to say anything."
Perhaps because I am a parent now, I am less idealistic about the possibilities for an equal adult/child relationship. When I try to describe the difference between a good or bad parent/child connection, I think more in terms of making the child's welfare a priority than of consent. Raising a child involves making all kinds of decisions that the child resents and opposes. Most children do not want to sleep in their own beds, take medicine, nap, get a shot, give up the baby bottle, get a bath, eat vegetables, learn their multiplication tables, etc. In order to avoid having every interaction turn into a pitched battle, adults condition their offspring to obey and please them. While this meets with varying degrees of success, there's never a time when the playing field is level. The parent/child paradigm is so powerful that it colors all interactions between adults and young people.
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