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May 15, 2002
Stanton / Madsen
When the
War Hits Home:
Planning for Martial Law, Telegovernance and Suspension of Elections
May 14, 2002
Jacob Levich
Leaving the Truth Out?
Alternative Online Publication
Tells the Big Lie about Palestine
Michael Colby
Bush's
Cuba Blunder
Dave Marsh
Scapegoats: the Music Industry's War
on Cassettes
Jensen / Mahajan
US Power
Mideast Power Plays
May 13, 2002
Robert Fisk
Why Does John Malkovich
Want to Kill Me?
Mokhiber / Weissman
IMF
and World Bank:
Out of Control
Dean Baker
Will Darth Vader do Time?
The Enron Saga Continues
Nelson Valdés
American
Democracy:
A Lesson for Cubans
May 12, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Why Is America Acting Like This? A
Letter to European Friends
John Patrick Leary
Aiding Colombia
Kathleen Christison
Israel
and Ethics
May 11, 2002
Joady Guthrie
The Holy Lands:
A Peace Vision
Patrick Cockburn
Bombing
Iraq:
the Pentagon Prepares a Prolonged Campaign
George Sunderland
CounterPunch Special
Our
Vichy Congress: Israel's Stranglehold on Capitol Hill
May 10, 2002
Lisa Taraki
In Defense
of Sanctions
Against Israel
Jack McCarthy
Snitch Envy: Hitchens, Brock and
Whitaker Chambers
John Jonik
Tobacco
and Teens: Criminalizing the Victiims
Vijay Prashad
Fettered Histories:
Tariq Ali and Ahmed Rashid
on Islam
Bill Christison
A
Former CIA Analyst Details
The Disastrous Foreign
Policies of the United State
Omar Barghouti
Israel's Best Interest
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Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
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by Alexander
Cockburn
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The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
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May
15, 2002
Unsafe at Any Speed
Youth,
Sex, and the Heresies of Judith Levine
by Steve Perry
On the shelf in my fourth grade classroom-north
wall, near the front-there sat the obligatory set of junior encyclopedias.
Now and again during lulls in afternoon study time, either Brenda
S. or I would go and retrieve the R volume. Then, sitting cross
the aisle from each other near the back of the room, we proceeded
to inspect together the cross-sectioned diagrams of the human
reproductive system.
The details of interior plumbing were
of no particular interest to us, but we always lingered over
the sketched male and female forms that surrounded them like
sausage casings-the ample, pendulous breasts on one side, the
dejected-looking penis on the other-while exchanging the occasional
meaningful look.
I remember it as well as Proust recalled
his madeleines; it was one of the more worthwhile experiences
of my elementary school years. Nowadays, alas, it would be grounds
for throwing one or both of us in the kiddie calaboose and tattooing
Sex Offender on our foreheads.
Do I exaggerate? Not by much.
Judith Levine's endlessly reviled Harmful
to Minors: the Perils of Protecting Children from Sex
contains numerous stories of youngsters branded sexual predators
and forced into humiliating regimens of "counseling"
for behavior no less benign. Surely by now you have heard of
Levine's book, published a couple of months ago by the University
of  Minnesota Press after being
declined by a string of commercial publishers; before the ink
was dry, pols and shrinks were rising as one to condemn it.
The charge? Soft on child sex abuse,
which in the present climate is as good as being soft on communism
(and lord, how we miss communism) or brown-skinned terrorists.
Levine's book is actually a fine and
brave effort at putting into perspective various matters regarding
children, adolescents, sex, sex abuse, and sex education.
It's true that Levine seeks to debunk
much of the child sex-abuse hysteria that has been causing convulsions
all round the U.S. since the spate of day care sex abuse scandals
in Jordan, Minnesota, and across the country in the 1980s.
Despite the fact those cases proved to
be fictions promulgated by zealous interrogators and small children
anxious to please them, the stranger with candy-the adult predator
seeking children to sodomize, or worse-has become one of our
more durable icons and useful political props.
Levine commits two principal heresies
against right-thinking. First, she asserts that the stranger
with candy is not really the problem we make him out to be. (On
the special matter of priests with candy-who can scarcely be
called strangers-more in a second.) She notes that a great many
reports of extra-familial "sex abuse" involve consensual
liaisons between adolescents a little below the age of consent
and boyfriends or girlfriends a little above it.
As regards the great bogeyman in all
this, the pedophile moving with stealth through Internet chat
rooms, she makes two interesting points: first, that the manufacture
and distribution of kiddie porn through the Internet is controlled
almost exclusively by police agencies running sting operations
(an LAPD detective is quoted boasting as much); and second, that
the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children places
the total number of reported adult/adolescent assignations arranged
through the Internet from 1994-96 at a whopping 23. The Internet
was young then; if you assume the number has tripled or quadrupled
with the growth of online households since then, you come to
50 or so cases a year across the entire country.
Hardly the epidemic we're led to believe,
particularly when you bear in mind that a high proportion of
these involve nerdy guys not much over the age of consent and
lonely girls not much under. (And no, I am not saying I'd like
to see my own child in one of those relationships-but then again
it's hardly the portrait of the Internet Stalker we are routinely
presented, is it?)
The grand and terrible irony is that
child sexual abuse remains as real a problem as ever. But it's
not the stranger with candy putting kids at risk; the vast majority
of such abuse occurs in or near the home at the hands of male
adults in positions of authority and trust-the father, the uncle,
and to a far greater extent than even the most cynical supposed,
the parish priest. (Interesting factoid from the May 10 Minneapolis
Star Tribune: In 1989, at the time of Jacob Wetterling's
disappearance, there were no fewer than 11 priests cooling their
heels after sex abuse allegations at St. John's in nearby Collegeville,
news that surely would have astounded all those Church officials
now pleading ignorance to the scope and duration of the problem.)
Levine's second heresy is her belief
that post-pubescent teens are bound to explore sex, entitled
to do so, and perfectly capable of having constructive sexual
experiences. In these abstinence-only days, parents do not like
the idea that their kids are sexual beings for many reasons,
some practical and worthy and some selfish and narrow. The abstinence
movement, notes Levine, is partly about "reversing, or at
least holding back, the coming of age, which for parents is a
story of loss, as their children establish passionate connections
with people and values outside the family."
This being America, we should also ask
how many parents do not feel a pin-prick of resentment over their
kids' newfound power to explore pleasures unsanctioned by the
parent. So it's hardly surprising they'd rather tell their kids
not to think of it.
But in the age of AIDS and of dwindling
abortion rights, "child protection" of this sort comes
at a terrific cost.
Steve Perry
is a frequent contributor to CounterPunch and a columnist for
The Rake.
He can be reached at: sperry@mn.rr.com
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