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PREVIOUS Underwager Article
Part II Underwager/Wakefield Interview
THE AMERICAN SITUATION
PAIDIKA:
You are speaking mostly about paedophiles in the U. S. What tack
should they take given the societal attitudes? What solutions do
you envision for their lives?
RALPH UNDERWAGER:
The solution that I'm suggesting is that paedophiles become much
more positive. They should directly attack the concept, the image,
the picture of the paedophile as an evil, wicked, and
reprehensible exploiter of children.
HOLLIDA WAKEFIELD:
The United States is really pretty schizophrenic right now in its
attitudes. On the one hand it glorifies sex in things like
underwear advertisements, or James Bond movies. On the other hand
it's very puritanical. You don't have good sex education in the
schools, just these ridiculous prevention programs.
Let me give another example. Video
recorders and video cameras are in right now. Couples are making
their own pornographic movies. The comparison is on the one hand
people running around making their own pornographic movies but on
the other hand reacting hysterically to child sexuality issues.
There was actually the case of a man who had had the nine-year-old
son of a friend spend the night at his house. He kissed him on the
neck, patted him on the rear, told him good-night, ad was later
sentenced to two years in prison for these acts. They were labeled
sexual abuse. The child later told his mother that it made him
uncomfortable when the man kissed him on the cheek.
Given this schizophrenia and these
hysterical attitudes about childhood sexuality, it's going to be
difficult for paedophiles to appear more positive, to start saying
they're not exploiters of children, that they love children, the
sexual part included, even if it's a minor part. If they made such
statements, they would be arrested.
What we see going on in the United
States is the most vitriolic and virulent anti-sexuality I know of
in our history. It may take people being arrested. Revolutionaries
have always risked arrest.
RALPH UNDERWAGER:
I was in the courtroom for the case that Holly just cited and I
actually heard the prosecution say, "No man should ever be
permitted to claim as an excuse that he was just being
affectionate when a child says they were uncomfortable." I
don't know; I don't think we can just label these attitudes
"hysteria." Perhaps "madness" is better, or
"pathology." What we see going on in the United States
is the most vitriolic and virulent anti-sexuality I know of in our
history. It may take people being arrested. Revolutionaries have
always risked arrest.
PAIDIKA: In
your book, you said that there was "a matter of national
interest and a focus of federal interest in child abuse in 1974,
but then in 1984, it seemed to suddenly shift and become more
hysterical." What reasons do you see for the outbreak of a
child abuse hysteria, or pathology, in the mid-80's America?
HOLLIDA WAKEFIELD:
I think that what we meant in that passage was that we had
personally been observing a steady progression of awareness about
actual child abuse up to around that period, 1984. We had
routinely been dealing with sex offenders and cases of incest.
Around the mid-80's, we began to see cases of false accusations to
a degree we had not seen before. it was the rise of this incidence
of false accusations that led us to use the term
"hysteria."
RALPH UNDERWAGER:
Child abuse around that time became more a matter of attention and
discussion. There had been child abuse before but the earlier
focus was on rehabilitation and treatment. In the early 80's, this
focus shifted to prosecution. As more federal money became
available, child protection teams and child molestation units were
set up in every county in the United States. As this structure was
put into place, the emphasis changed to prosecution. This is where
it is now, and as a consequence, there is very little interest in
treatment, rehabilitation, or healing. The emphasis is: punish the
bastards, put them in jail, hang them up by their toes, or other
appurtenances, get rid of them.
PAIDIKA:
You seen to be saying that the shift to prosecution, and the
sexual hysteria, are connected. Could you clarify how such a shift
might make a country pathological about sex?
RALPH UNDERWAGER:
I believe these shifts happen when the social contract in a given
country or culture breaks down. What is happening in the United
States is that the populace no longer has the sense that the
country knows what it is about. During the Second World War, when
I was about fourteen years old, it was a great time to live in
America. We stood together. Everybody knew and understood what we
were all about, what we were doing in the world. Beginning in the
60's and through the 70's into the 80's that confidence
disappeared. We became fractionalized into smaller and smaller
groups, each group fighting for its own to the point where we have
now evolved a political system of special interest groups. There's
no longer consensus politics in America.
The result of the breakdown of the
social contract is that people do not have sufficient ego to
handle or tolerate the ambiguity in their society. They don't have
the inner resources. What they must do, then, is find something
outside of themselves, something external, to give them shape and
identity. Sex throughout history has played a specific role. It
has allowed people both to define themselves and to locate an
enemy. A sexual minority becomes a scapegoat. Whenever there has
been social upheaval, whenever the social contract has
disappeared, there has always been violent anti-sexuality
outbursts.
The breakdown of the social contract
and anti-sexuality outbursts are interconnected because there is
in times of social instability, a need to say that someone else is
evil, wicked. The blame for everything gets put on the so-called
deviants, while the true American remains at home, pure, probably
mortifying the flesh, crucifying the body, being a good citizen.
The citizen becomes the knight riding off into the sunset
victorious, leaving behind him a trail of battered and beaten
people that they have judged bad. And the citizen feels justified.
In a society in turmoil, people
can't tolerate anything that is different from whatever the myth
of that society is. The society holds on to the myth, the belief.
The myth is what they must believe. There's not enough strength in
the society to deal with the facts.
PAIDIKA:
Why is sex the focus of the hysteria in that situation, why not
something else?
RALPH UNDERWAGER:
Sex has always been the penultimate answer to the ultimate
question, which is unity and wholeness. In theological terms, sex
has been the way that human beings have tried to avoid dealing
with the mystery of the Trinity, the mystery of Unity. Sex is
penultimate. This is why the root cause of sexual dysfunction is
always some form of genitalization of sexuality. Sexuality has
become, in the dysfunction, limited to genital tissue. It is not
unified.
PAIDIKA:
Would you say that the sexual hysteria is a kind of mystical or
religious dysfunction?
RALPH UNDERWAGER:
Yes, I would.
PAIDIKA:
Your scenario for the child sexuality hysteria is the breakdown of
the social contract and a religious/mystical dysfunction. Do you
recognize other causes than these?
RALPH UNDERWAGER:
I would add radical feminism, which includes a pretty hefty dose
of anti-males. I think in a very real way, these women may be
jealous that males are able to love each other, be comrades,
friends, be close, intimate, work cooperatively, function in
groups. The point where men may say that maleness can include the
intimacy and closeness of sex may make women jealous. This would
hold true for male bonding, and paedophile sex too. The woman is
jealous of the connection. She says, "Wait a minute, we're
not going to let you do that!"
HOLLIDA WAKEFIELD:
I would disagree with that one hundred percent. That women are
jealous because men have close bonds with one another doesn't seem
to me to make sense. The common wisdom, whether one agrees with it
or not, is that a man is handicapped in a divorce more than a
woman, because the woman has female friends she can talk to. Women
are socialized for relationships more than men. For women to
become close and intimate is easier than for a man. Men can't
express feelings. These are the common beliefs. And, after all,
some of the most hostile, enraged people about sexual abuse are
males. Jim Peters of the National Center for the Prosecution of
Child Abuse, for example.
I think the radical feminist
opposition to paedophilia comes out of the general perception of
men as aggressive and dominating. They use sex to dominate the
weak. The weak would be women and children. That the opposition
comes out of women's jealousy because men can have meaningful
paedophile relationships, and they wish they could, I don't agree
with it.
RALPH UNDERWAGER:
Certainly some men aid and abet the hysteria. They are
opportunists. They have opportunistic rage. What I am proposing is
that there is an aspect to femaleness that is hardly ever
discussed. I believe that women also are violent, cruel, and
hostile. Possibly more so than men. The radical feminists only
express that side of femaleness against paedophilia.
Among certain Indian tribes, the
people who did the torture were the women. A sociologist in
Milwaukee who studied the records of domestic violence found that
women are much more violent in domestic disputes than men, and
paedophilia can be thought to be a domestic matter. My argument is
that the radical feminist position arises more from women's nature
than from a politics. That has been overlooked.
HOLLIDA WAKEFIELD:
Well, I wouldn't agree with this point of view at all. All
statistics, history too, show that violent crimes are committed
more by men than by women. Violence, cruelty, hostility have been
much more male domains. THE QUESTIONING OF CHILDREN
PAIDIKA:
The main purpose of your book, it seems to me, is to devise a
method for determining the facts when there is an allegation of
child abuse. This has sometimes put you in opposition to the
official system. How much have your methods been adopted at this
point, and how much are they being opposed?
HOLLIDA WAKEFIELD:
Our main effort has been to develop methods that avoid suggestive
questioning, that lead the child on. It's becoming increasingly
apparent that what we are proposing is the right way to go. what
we have suggested, other people are also suggesting. There is a
developing consensus that this is the way to do it.
Not many people any more are
advocating suggestive or leading questioning. The problem is still
that people who say they agree with us still go ahead and do
leading questioning anyway. They don't know they're doing it. As
you know, the main reason for the acquittals in the Mc Martin case
is that the interviews were so terrible that the jurors said,
"You can't tell what went on at all because the interviews
are so suggestive."
Unfortunately, there are still very
few people thinking about what happens to the child if the adults
make a mistake. The worst result of bad questioning for the child
is that if it is not abused, and is taught through suggestive
interviews that she has been abused, that is extremely harmful. It
runs the risk of making children psychotic.
Take the Mc Martin case. I think we
can assume that nothing happened to them. But now these children
who are fourteen, fifteen years old believe that they were
subjected to horrible, bizarre, ritualistic abuse. That's now part
of their reality. How are these teenagers going to turn out as
adults?
RALPH UNDERWAGER:
Holly and I can demonstrate two basic things. We were the first
people to publicly say, "Let's be more cautious, there's a
better way to do this, we should be doing it differently."
We're finding now that there is a growing concensus joining us. We
can be more accurate in making discriminations between real abuse
and false abuse.
In August, 1990, when we were at the
American Psychological Association convention, the majority of the
programs were in the same direction that we have been talking
about. There were two or three programs that were still saying,
"Children must be believed at all cost, they can't talk about
things they haven't experienced." The audiences at those
symposia were violently critical of that approach. Four years ago
that would never have happened. When you get to the people who are
doing the actual taped interviews, though, it is another story.
We're urging caution because of the
child, as Holly pointed out. What you do, when you require a child
who has not been abused to engage in repeated statements about
having been abused, is blur, if not destroy, the capacity of that
child to distinguish between reality and unreality. When a child
is reinforced by adults to repeat over and over accounts of having
been abused, of having been violated in these strange, bizarre
ways, children come to believe it. It becomes subjectively real.
You end up with, say, a sixteen year old who was never abused but
who now has a subjective experience of being abused. The person
becomes convinced that all these terribly bizarre things happened.
I was led into a tunnel; I was undressed; I was placed on an
altar; I was drenched in sacrificial blood; I have observed people
cutting the heart out of others and eating it." That is now
subjectively real for that child. But, the person who's taught
them to believe that is the one who actually abused them. They've
distorted their reality. They've made them pathological.
PAIDIKA:
Are you describing a distortion of reality that occurs because of
ignorance or because of malice and evil?
HOLLIDA WAKEFIELD:
I think ignorance is a big part of it. These aren't evil, wicked
people who are purposely setting out to make children believe they
were abused when they weren't. They see themselves as child
advocates, child savers. They're more or less convinced they're
doing a good thing. Ignorance is a very large part of it.
We have no experimental verification
of this, but our suspicion is that the front-line people are young
and have no children of their own. They're not trained in child
development. The social workers who do the initial interviews just
don't know about what a normal child is like, how suggestible they
are, how they behave.
Ignorance leads to a lot of things.
ordinary exploratory sex play between children is often
misunderstood. It is seen as indicative of a child sexual abuse,
and can therefore result in false accusations. Say a parent walks
in and a four year old has a three year old's clothes off and
they're exploring. The parents becomes upset, angry. "Who
taught you this? Where'd you learn how to do that?" If it's a
divorce and custody case, they might say, "Did Daddy ever do
this?"
You get bizarre things. For example,
we consulted in a case of a three year old child who reported that
a four year old had poked her in the genitals with a stick. This
was in a pre-school. The social services were called, and the
first thing they did was go to the four year old's house to see if
the four year old was being sexually abused. Their reasoning was
that if the four year old poked the three year old in the
genitals, he must have been sexually abused, or where would he
have learned to do this?
There was also the incident of a ten
year old girl and a twelve year old brother who were discovered
fooling around with each other. The girl was put in a sexual abuse
victims treatment program and the boy was put in a perpetrator's
program. Seriously, these things are happening. The underlying
feeling is that if you see children being sexual, they must have
learned it from some adult who abused them.
RALPH UNDERWAGER:
I agree with Holly. Ignorance is a very large part of hysteria.
Almost all the people we encounter who are involved in the system
of dealing with child sexual abuse allegations, have no knowledge,
no sophistication in developmental psychology. At most they have
been given, one, maybe two, weekend workshops. You can't make an
expert in a weekend. They form something called
"multidisciplinary teams," which is one of the favorite
ways that abuse is somehow supposed to be controlled.
Multidisciplinary teams do not result in any increase in the
effectiveness of the decision. What it results in is a pooling of
mediocrity and ignorance. of course, the APA code of ethics
maintains quite clearly that both ignorance and ineptitude are
unethical (laughs).
The dilemma, the reality is that we
do savage things to our children; we brutalize them. Children do
require the protection of society, and the protection of the law.
We've had a certain concept for a
number of years. Simply stated, it is that whenever two or more
human beings get together and attempt to accomplish some joint
task, one of the first things they do is to set up some rules. Now
generally this works. You get the joint task accomplished.
Rule-making is rewarded. As you add more than two people and you
increase the resources and the complexity of whatever the joint
tasks are, rule-making does permit more effective functioning, and
that's how making laws get reinforced.
However, there is a finite number of
laws in proportion to a given population that work effectively.
Any law above this number results in an increment of
ineffectiveness. Let's say the number of laws necessary in the U.
S. is 13,246. Law number 13,247 would then be over the threshold.
Each law you now add divides your society. People now begin to
exploit. There is more and more opportunity for malice, evasion of
responsibility and so on. The next effect is to begin to destroy
that society. However, nobody realizes or understands it so they
keep on making laws. You have now reached the point at which there
is some form of revolution required to start the process all over
again.
PAIDIKA:
one of your goals in formulating questions for the child about
possible abuse is to avoid distorting the child's reality. In your
interrogation methods, do your questions presuppose for the
children that they themselves see the sexual relationship as
abuse?
RALPH UNDERWAGER:
No, no. Not our methods.
HOLLIDA WAKEFIELD:
No. What we would do is get the child to use free recall, to
describe what took place. As scientists, our goal would be to get
as much information from the child about what happened and what
took place as possible. We would see it as somebody else's
responsibility to interpret this, or see whether it's legal or
illegal.
RALPH UNDERWAGER:
We don't tell children things like, "Well, it's all the other
person's fault, you were helpless, you were powerless, and you're
not responsible." Some people are now saying that this is the
best thing to tell children. If you tell them they were powerless,
it gives the children more power. We don't do that.
PAEDOPHILIA AND SPIRITUALITY
PAIDIKA: We
spoke at the beginning about paedophilia and spirituality. This is
not an issue that is very often discussed. Given the opposition to
and oppression of paedophilia in American society, how would you
describe a spirituality for paedophiles?
RALPH UNDERWAGER:
For me, the beginning of spiritual life is in knowing that God is
gracious, knowing that it is God's purpose that we have a good
life, knowing that it is God's purpose that we be free. The
freedom that God intends for us to have is absolute. The only
thing that can match absolute killing, and judgments that condemn
us, such as St. Paul's, "You have sinned and come short of
the glory of God," is the absolute, "You are free."
You are free, that is, from all accusation, nothing, no one can
accuse you.
The issue is never what is right or
wrong. That's mistaken question. Paying attention to what is right
and wrong is, I think, a penultimate goal because the issue is not
right and wrong but good and evil. That's totally different. Right
and wrong has to do with whether or not you hit the mark, whether
a given behavior matches a certain standard. If it doesn't, then
it's wrong.
Good and evil only pays attention to
outcomes. You can never know the outcomes until you have already
acted. Spirituality that attends to the issue of good and evil
must always be courageous, bold, operating always with incomplete
information. You never know, so you are continually making a
responsible choice about which there's always risk. You can only
know if something is good subsequent to having acted, and
observing the outcome.
As with all human behavior, I would
suggest that paedophiles can't say, "I have chosen; I choose;
I will act in this fashion. I believe that the outcome will be
good. I will pay the price for that act, whatever that price may
be."
HOLLIDA WAKEFIELD:
The price might be the difficulty of integrating oneself into
one's society.
RALPH UNDERWAGER:
Or, going to jail, certainly. As I said before, it may take people
being arrested. In a sense, what is, well, I guess I can say this,
what is offensive about what I know about paedophiles is their
intention to be able to do what they choose without paying the
price. "I want to be able to do this, but the society should
let me do it without exacting any kind of price from me."
PAIDIKA: Is
it reasonable for paedophiles to want and to work for the
decriminalization of what they believe is right?
RALPH UNDERWAGER:
It's not reasonable if the goal is "I want to do it, and I
don't really care what other people tell me. I'm not going to
engage in the attempt to communicate or to talk to people."
It's like saying to somebody, "Accept me because after all,
I'm really the same as you are." That's what tolerance is
supposed to be, and that's why tolerance always falls short. It is
never to me, acceptable.
I don't think it is honest to
tolerate somebody only because they are saying, "At rock
bottom, I'm really the same as you." or, conversely to say, I
can tolerate you, I can accept you, because you are the same. I
think it is much more honest and direct to say, "Yes, we're
different. You're black, I'm white, you're smart, I'm not. I'm
paedophile, you're heterosexual." Those are real differences,
real differences. Paedophiles should point out how different they
are, what the difference are.
PAIDIKA:
Still isn't it a reasonable wish for paedophiles to want to see
paedophile sex decriminalized? It may not be realistic right now
in the U. S., but does that make it less legitimate a goal?
RALPH UNDERWAGER:
oh yes, sure, sure. I mean Jesus said, "I really don't want
to do this. I don't want to go up there onto Calvary." But
when it came down to it, he said, "Well, okay, I'm going to
walk the steps." As for decriminalization, the question is
really if you're not there, how are you going to get there?
PAIDIKA:
Any advice?
RALPH UNDERWAGER:
Take the risk, the consequences of the risk, and make the claim:
this is something good. Paedophiles need to become more positive
and make the claim that paedophilia is an acceptable expression of
God's will for love and unity among human beings. This is the only
way the question is going to be answered, of whether or not it is
possible. Does it happen? Can it be good? That's what we don't
know yet, the ways in which paedophiles can conduct themselves in
loving ways. That's what you need to talk about. You need to get
involved in discourse, and to do so while acting. Matthew 11 talks
about the wisdom of God, and the way in which God's wisdom, like
ours, can only follow after.
Paedophiles need to become more
positive and make the claim that paedophiles is an acceptable
expression of God's will for love and unity among human beings.
I think the paedophile movement
makes a mistake when it seeks to label the church as the
instrument of repression, and in a sense, the enemy. I'm certainly
aware of the accusation that it's the church that represses
sexuality. I don't believe that's the case at all. I believe that
the repression of sexuality begins with Greek thought. People who
want to deal positively with human sexuality will do best to see
the church as an ally, and to elicit from the church the positive
responses about sexuality that are there.
PAIDIKA:
You spoke about the need for paedophiles to engage in a discourse.
What should that be?
HOLLIDA WAKEFIELD:
We can't presume to tell them specific behaviors, but in terms of
goals, certainly the goal is that the experience be positive, at
the very least not negative, for their partner and partner's
family. And nurturing. Even if it were a good relationship with
the boy, if the boy was not harmed and perhaps even benefited, it
it tore the family of the boy apart, that would be negative.
It would be nice if someone could
get some kind of big research grant to do a longitudinal study of,
let's say, a hundred twelve year old boys in relationships with
loving paedophiles. Whoever was doing the study would have to
follow that at five year intervals for twenty years. This is
impossible in the U. S. right now. We're talking a long time in
the future.--END
"Witness
for Mr. Bubbles" Australia 60 Minutes
Ralph Underwager & Tony Darren a.k.a. Mr
Bubbles
Ralph
Underwager "Expert" Testimony
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