01.05.1997

Zero tolerance misses the point

“Ultimately, child abuse is a political and social issue. We live in a system that sees people as nothing more than property - a system based on exploitation and control. The first step towards ending the abuse of children is to fight for a new society that sees people as human beings” (Mark Scott Scottish Socialist Voice March 21).

Recently, comrades from the CPGB met with Mark Scott and another Scottish Militant Labour comrade to discuss further the difficult issues around the politics of child sexual abuse. It is a subject which has seen most of the left in denial. While around us the media hype up their sensationalised and often salacious campaigns of hatred to the point of mass hysteria, the left’s response has offered little in the way of either understanding or solutions.

Some see the whole thing as fabrication by the moral majority, trying to wish away the fact that children and young people are sexual beings. Others confuse child sexual abuse with consenting sexual relationships between younger people and older people, failing to realise that babies and toddlers are often victims: we are not referring to consenting sexual relationships, but to abuse. Others still shrug their shoulders and bleat rather pathetically that it will not exist under socialism.

I believe that it will not exist under communism, but under socialism we will have the opportunity to eradicate it. We will only succeed in this if we start to understand it: what it is, why it happens, how survivors can be helped and how perpetrators can be treated.

Mark began our discussion from the perspective of “How we as Marxists should approach the subject”. He identified the “family system that we have as one of the causes of child sexual abuse”. A system where women and children are regarded as property and where many individuals are deeply alienated, leading to a spiral of domination where people can be treated in a degrading and abusive manner.

The family is held up as a place that is warm, loving and, most of all, safe. For very few people does reality live up to this sugary fantasy. Most recent research indicates that abuse is widespread in Britain (as many as one in two women and one in three males may have been victims) and that by far the majority of abuse is perpetrated not by ‘strangers’ or ‘monsters’ or ‘beasts’, but by members of the family or close family friends and associates. Media propaganda feeds this misconception that strangers are the problem.

We have young people who have their childhood play tightly restricted because of this obsessive and understandable deep anxiety about their safety. Parents are literally afraid to let them out of their sight. They are discouraged from speaking to anyone who is not well known to them. But the worst thing about this ‘keep your head down’ approach is that it does not keep our children safe at all. They believe that family members are to be trusted, respected and obeyed without question, but, as we have said, it is predominantly within the family that the problem exists.

The feminist movement played an important role in bringing child sexual abuse to the attention of the wider public. However, for them, it was seen as a gender issue: little girls were abused by men. As more information has come to light, it is clear that both male and female children are abused by both men and women. It is estimated that almost 50% of boy victims are abused by women. The materials distributed by ‘zero tolerance’ campaigns in Scotland have continued to perpetuate this view. Their posters and postcards of young girls, but not of young boys, carry the slogan, ‘Men don’t have the right’.

The feminist movement is incapable of taking the debate forward.

It is the duty of communists and socialists to be looking to provide answers in the here and now. We need to look at measures to keep our children as safe as possible, while at the same time dealing humanely and effectively with perpetrators. There has been some work done with abusers which found that offenders were the best people to make each other face up to the consequences of their actions. Offenders who were seeking help and who completed the programmes were not abusing when they left.

Like all other long-term counselling projects working with offenders, funding is being cut to the bone and many abusers are unable to follow a project through. It is much easier to follow ‘public opinion’ and the ‘hang ‘em and flog ‘em’ brigade.

It is necessary for those of us on the left to combat the massive amounts of disinformation regarding child sexual abuse and to try to take as much of the emotion out of the debate as possible. We need to see abuse as part of the same continuum of power relationships between men and women and adults and children under the degrading system in which we live.

Abuse is a problem for the whole of society, not just an issue for the individual survivor or individual perpetrator. It is a problem of socialisation and alienation.

Our immediate demands must be for facilities and counselling for survivors run by trained survivors. We also require voluntary programmes for offenders under the direction of skilled people, recognising that many offenders desperately want to stop.

However, at the end of the day, it will only be our active struggle against capitalism that will liberate the whole of humanity, regardless of gender or age.

Mary Ward