A familiar voice here, Feinmann commented on International Megan’s Law faces challenge recently: “…parents who physically abuse their kids are exempted from the additional punishments meted out post-prison to sex offenders…” In a guest blog today, he drills into US and UK stats to probe what he sees as a war against children, and postulates that witch-hunting Kind people is a diversionary tactic. The author wishes to acknowledge the work of “A”, also a regular and highly valued Heretic TOC contributor, in locating many of the numerous links.
Now exiled after an English childhood, a university education, and a successful career in technology, Feinmann was married before family health issues led to him experiencing the responsibility of life as a single dad to two sons, now in their twenties. Attracted to both prepubescent boys and girls, he has had traumatic encounters with mental health professionals and the law, doing tough prison time. Professionally retired, he remains highly active as a field researcher working on the conservation of endangered species. He has contributed to the Forum for Understanding Minor Attraction and to Ipce on the topic of civil commitment.
WAR ON KIDS IN THE ANGLOSPHERE’S ROTTEN CORE
“We in the United States should be all the more thankful for the freedom and religious tolerance we enjoy. And we should always remember the lessons learned from the Holocaust, in hopes we stay vigilant against such inhumanity now and in the future” – United States congressman Charlie Dent.
“But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country” – Hermann Wilhelm Goering, founder of The Gestapo in Nazi Germany.
DATA
The war on children in the United States (population: 320,000,000)
US Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities
In 2012 and 2013, state agencies reported an estimated 1,640 and 1,520 children, respectively, who died as a result of abuse and neglect. Looking at it another way: on average, four children are dying across the US every day over that two-year period from abuse and neglect. However, studies also indicated significant under-counting of child maltreatment fatalities by state agencies, by 50% or more. When one factors in deaths from circumcision plus under-counting, the US figures rival global rates of death resulting from child abuse and neglect.
- In 2012, more than 70% of the victims were two years of age or younger and more than 80% of the victims were not yet old enough for kindergarten.
- In 2013: 46.5% of the victims were less than one year old, 34.5% were between one and three years old, and a further 11.7% were aged between four and seven years old.
- In 2012, around 80% of child abuse or neglect fatalities involved parents acting alone or with another parent. 2013 witnessed a similar figure of nearly 79%.
US Child Maltreatment and Protective Service Referrals
In 2012, state agencies reported an estimated 686,000 victims of child maltreatment.
Yearly, referrals to state child protective services involve 6,300,000 children; around 3,000,000 of those children are subject to an investigated report.
US Circumcision Fatalities
In 2010 in the US, approximately 1,000,000 baby boys were born, and in that year, 56% of them were circumcised.
An estimated 117 neonatal infants die annually whilst undergoing circumcision surgery in the US. “However, the number of boys who died from those surgeries has not been reported or estimated in any credible way. Some reasons include record-keeping practices, indifference, and concerns about liability. Death certificates typically do not list circumcision as the immediate or leading cause of death and rarely list circumcision as an underlying cause. Incomplete and inaccurate death certificates for children are a common phenomenon. Thus, many circumcision-related deaths are more often reported as surgical mishap, infection, haemorrhage, cardiac arrest, stroke, reaction to anaesthesia, or even parental neglect. Greater numbers of male infant fatalities may be accounted for by circumcision-related deaths.”
Teenage Pregnancy
In 2002, 56 out of every 1000 girls aged between 15 and 19 in the US gave birth, topping the list of births among teenagers in twenty-eight of the world’s wealthiest nations. At the other end of the scale, Korea, Japan, Switzerland, The Netherlands and Sweden, had a rate of less than 7 births per 1000 teenagers. In 2006, a third of teenage pregnancies in the US were subsequently aborted. Among females aged 14 or younger, pregnancy rates in 2010 exceeded 3 out of every 1000.
The war on children in the United Kingdom (population: 64,000,000)
UK Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities
In 2012, the rate of child deaths due to assault and undetermined intent (violent death or injury) to be: in Scotland 5.1 per million, in Northern Ireland 4.5 per million, and in England and Wales 3.6 per million. These statistics yield 44 fatalities for the UK in that year. The NSPCC stresses that the statistics do not reflect the full number of child deaths where abuse or neglect is suspected as a factor without saying why, but it does say that the data excludes deaths of children aged 14 and 15.
Over a similar period, the Department for Education reports 3,857 child death reviews completed; of these 806 deaths were identified as having modifiable factors, with 65% of these categorised as: deliberately inflicted injury, abuse or neglect. This yields a figure of 523. This statistic also includes 17 and 18 year-olds.
UK Child Maltreatment and Protective Service Referrals
The author could find no government-sourced UK-specific data on child maltreatment, and no UK-specific data on referrals to child-protection agencies. However, the NSPCC stated that over 50,000 children had been identified as needing protection from abuse, but that for every one of these children, another eight are suffering abuse. This suggests 450,000 children in total annually, are suffering abuse in the UK, a similar rate to US figures. A 2003 report by UNICEF says the following: “… survey data are inclined to produce higher figures for child maltreatment than are established from official statistics. One example from the UK has survey data estimating 389 cases each year of serious physical maltreatment per 100,000 children … as compared to official data records of 70 reported cases of physical maltreatment per 100,000 children per year.” Extrapolating the UNICEF survey figure above yields nearly 250,000 children suffering serious physical maltreatment across the UK.
Circumcision
The author could find no recent UK-specific data on either the number of circumcisions on infants, nor neonatal infant fatalities as a result of circumcision surgery. In 2009 in just one hospital alone in Birmingham, 105 boys were treated in the Accident and Emergency department, for complications arising from circumcision procedure. Two years later, 11 baby boys aged 0-1 years old were admitted to the paediatric intensive care unit of this hospital with life-threatening complications directly caused by circumcision.
Teenage Pregnancy
In 2002, 30 out of every 1000 girls aged between 15 and 19 in the UK gave birth, topping the list of births among teenagers in Europe, and placing them second in an equivalent list of twenty-eight of the world’s wealthiest nations. The UK has the highest teenage birth rate and the highest abortion rate in Western Europe. At the other end of the scale, Korea, Japan, Switzerland, The Netherlands and Sweden, had a rate of less than 7 births per 1000 teenagers. By 2006, the UK had five times the rate of teenage births than that recorded in The Netherlands. Although the UK claims to have done much better recently, rates remain among the highest in Europe.
OBSERVATIONS
Child abuse and neglect fatalities: comparisons, perpetrators, causes, effects
The 2012 fatality rate of US children detailed in the Data section above is in stark contrast to the equivalent figure for Japan in the same year; although suicide-murders are excluded, the figure is in the order of a factor of 10 smaller. Depending on what figure is considered, the 2012 child fatality rate for the UK is between two times and ten times the Japan total.
“There is no single profile of a perpetrator of fatal child abuse, although certain characteristics reappear in many studies. Frequently, the perpetrator is a young adult in his or her mid-20s, without a high school diploma, living at or below the poverty level, depressed, and who may have difficulty coping with stressful situations. Fathers and mothers’ boyfriends are most often the perpetrators in abuse deaths; mothers are more often at fault in neglect fatalities.” – Children’s Bureau.
In other words, this is a systemic failure at least as much as an individual failure.
At 25%, Romania topped a 2012 league table listing the child poverty levels of 35 developed countries, but the US was a close second at 23%.
Child abuse spikes during recession, and: “In a population-based cohort of middle-aged men and women, childhood physical abuse predicted worse mental and physical health decades after the abuse. These effects were attenuated by age, sex, family background, and childhood adversities, but not eliminated.”
Genital mutilation: myths, ignorance and a violation of human rights
“A British doctor, Douglas Gairdner, who reviewed the issue in 1949 found that scientific understanding of the foreskin was woefully inadequate; little research had ever been done on its normal development, including the time it takes for the foreskin to fully separate from the head of the penis and become retractable. This was remarkable, since one of the most common indications for circumcision since the late 19th Century had been ‘phimosis’, or the abnormal adhesion of the foreskin to the underlying glans. Doctors in both America and Britain believed that the foreskin was normally – that is, in healthy infants – separate from the glans at birth; when it was not, circumcision was indicated. But Gairdner discovered that no one had bothered to find out what happened to the foreskin when it was left alone. Contrary to common wisdom, Gairdner found that boys differed widely in the time it took for the foreskin to naturally separate from the glans – anywhere from birth to three years. Circumcision as a treatment for so-called ‘adherent prepuce’ before this time was therefore unnecessary. The National Health Service agreed, and in the years following the circumcision rate in Britain fell, from about 33% in 1948 to less than 10% today, with most of those being done for religious reasons.” – Matthew Tontonoz.
In the US: “Excepting its use as a religious rite, circumcision is done essentially for cosmetic reasons, much like ear piercing in females or for the emotional concern of parents – reasons that lack scientific validity.” Self-evidently, the child whose genitals are destined to be mutilated has no choice in the matter, and accordingly the surgery is a violation of the child’s human rights, as declared by: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Convention Against Torture.
The Royal Dutch Medical Association believes that circumcision should be discouraged through a public education campaign. The German Paediatric Association also takes a stand against circumcision: “The debate over ritual circumcision shows fundamentalist characteristics. The proponents of circumcision trivialise this form of bodily harm, which can also lead to lifelong physical and emotional injuries and repeatedly accuse the advocates of child welfare with anti-Semitism. However, we must be allowed as advocates of child welfare, to question thousand year old religious rites and customs, which permanently impair the physical integrity of an underage person or child who is incapable of consent, and in the 21st century, based on new findings, stimulate people to think about them, asking whether or not it would be also possible for boys to be educated in the religious tradition of their parents without needing to have their foreskins removed.”
The NSPCC have set up a helpline for female genital mutilation but not for male genital mutilation. “The attitude of Western societies to oppose to female genital mutilation, but not to condemn male circumcision, suggests a double standard of the acceptance and implies (racial) discrimination of circumcised Jewish and Moslem boys, by not trying to protect them against useless pain as is the case with girls and non-circumcised boys.” – Jacqueline Smith.
If you have the stomach for it, many circumcision surgery accident, complication, and atrocity horror stories are related here.
Teenage Pregnancy: risks to the girl’s well-being and main causes
“Teenagers who keep their baby are twice as likely to end up living in poverty, than those who delay motherhood. The eightfold difference in birth rates can be partly explained, the report says, by the move away from traditional family values in some countries to what the researchers call a ‘socio-sexual transformation’, where sexual imagery permeates all aspects of life, and where teenagers are under greater pressure to experiment with sex. But the report adds that equally important is how countries prepare their young people to cope with modern life. Some countries, such as Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, and France, have travelled far down the road from traditional values, but they have also made successful efforts to prepare their young people to cope with a more sexualized society. By comparison, the US and the UK are secretive and embarrassed about contraceptive services. After interviewing young people about sexual services, the UK government’s Social Exclusion Unit concluded: ‘The universal message received from young people is that the sex and relationship education they receive falls far short of what they would like to equip them for managing relations as they grow into adulthood’. By tackling teenage births, governments have the chance to reduce poverty and its ‘perpetuation from one generation to the next’, says the report.” – The BMJ.
“We conclude that the health hazard associated with school-age pregnancy is predominantly pre-maturity, and is increased only in middle school-aged mothers, that is: 11 to 15 year olds. We suggest that middle school pregnancy, particularly for inner-city teenagers, should be a special focus for pregnancy prevention and intervention.” – AJOG.
The highest teenage pregnancy rates in 2010 occurred in the following US states: Mississippi, Arkansas, New Mexico, and Texas. The location of these States coincides to a striking degree with the heartland of the bible-belt, and to the heartland of abstinence-only-until-marriage education. “Mississippi does not require sex education in schools, but when it is taught, abstinence-only education is the state standard. New Mexico, which has the second highest teen birth rate, does not require sex education and has no requirements on what should be included when it is taught.” ThinkProgress, provides a link to a full state-by-state policy rundown. The pregnancy rates of children of 14 years old and younger in Mississippi, Arkansas, New Mexico, and Texas, were ranked in the top 10 of all US state-rates, with Mississippi leading the table with 6 pregnancies per 1000, nearly double the nation’s average.
THE WAR ON MINOR-ATTRACTED INDIVIDUALS
Dystopian hypocrisy of UK law and US law
The COPINE scale in the UK was devised in order to classify “indecent images” of children, also known as child pornography. Originally intended for used by psychologists, it has been adopted for law enforcement purposes, and has provided the starting point from which the categories now used in sentencing guidelines were developed. The minimum scale of 1 equates with non-erotic and non-sexualised pictures showing children in their underwear, swimming costumes from either commercial sources or family albums. The maximum scale of 10 equates with sadistic pictures showing a child being tied, bound, beaten, whipped or otherwise subject to something that implies pain. ‘Production’ and ‘distribution’ of such images in the latter case can attract a prison sentence of up to ten years in the UK, and saw Thomas Reedy in the US jailed for 1,335 years – although, very fortunately for him, this was reduced to a mere 180 years on appeal! And yet, the internet is awash with videos graphically communicating images of pain being inflicted on screaming infants as their genitals are mutilated. The US and UK law is wilfully blind to the production and distribution of these horrific child abuse images, images that merit a ranking of typology level 10 on the COPINE scale.
The Brit Milah ceremony can be conducted legally in the UK by a mohel, or circumciser and foreskin remover. The ceremony involves the following procedure: the mohel takes the penis of the boy in his hand, cuts around the prepuce, takes the mutilated boy’s penis in his mouth, sucks off the foreskin, and spits out the amputated flap along with a mouthful of blood and saliva. When an adult has been convicted of rape, including oral rape, he may expect as much as life imprisonment as punishment. When an adult commits cruelty to a child and where the child is particularly vulnerable, the crime attracts 10 years imprisonment. When a mohel does both these things simultaneously, he is praised by all those around him, including the boy’s own parents. The facilitators and perpetrators of this potentially lethal child circumcision abuse appear to be immune from prosecution under UK law and under US law.
The first four typology levels of the COPINE scale are as follows:
1 – Indicative: in which the context or organisation of pictures by the collector indicates inappropriateness. This category is mentioned above.
2 – Nudist: pictures of naked or semi-naked children in appropriate nudist settings, and from legitimate sources.
3 – Erotica: surreptitiously taken photographs of children in play areas or other safe environments showing either underwear or varying degrees of nakedness.
4 – Posing: deliberately posed pictures of children fully clothed, partially clothed or naked.
In the UK, and across Europe, naturism is legal and often family-oriented. There are also many freely accessible naturist beaches where members of the public of all ages can be naked, publicly, and watch others enjoying being naked, including children. There are websites promoting naturism online with images of naked children, although even these may be judged illegal in the UK now. There are galleries in every country containing works of art: sculpture, paintings and photographs that display naked children. Fashion magazines contain sexualised, desirable, erotic, posed images of children coining headlines such as: “Pedocouture: In Vogue magazine, 6-year-olds are sex vixens”. In the latter two cases, members of the public pay a fee to see these ‘obscene’ images, images that effortlessly meet the ‘damning’ criteria detailed in COPINE typology levels 1 to 4 above, categorising child sexual abuse images, known also as child pornography. But in all these cases, the law is wilfully blind to such public displays of child nudity, and so they fail to attract prosecution under UK law.
CONCLUSIONS
An unequivocal message emerges from the often hard-to-come-by child-harm and child-fatality data: UK and US governments are failing to protect and empower society’s youngest people. The following points are germane:
- High child poverty levels are a primary driver for high levels of child abuse and neglect.
- Under-reporting of child deaths in the UK where abuse or neglect is suspected to be a factor, the lack of data reporting of child maltreatment and of referrals to child protection agencies (or any other agency), conspire to suggest the deliberate burial of damning news by UK government agencies.
- Absence of data of neonatal infant fatalities due to circumcision in the UK, and under-reporting of same in the US, appeases pro-circumcision lobbies but guarantees the continued maiming and slaughter of hundreds of ‘disposable’ baby boys via a barbaric procedure that contravenes all applicable international human rights directives.
- Denying the right to access and enjoy sexuality by imposing 17th Century Puritanism on children and denying them adequate sex education in schools, but all the while selling hedonistic lifestyles via the media, creates a toxic recipe for underage pregnancy.
A further unequivocal message to emerge is how the war on paedophiles is being used to cover up systemic government failures in preventing the primary causes of child abuse and neglect:
- The unholy trinity of media, governments and law-makers foment child-sexual-abuse hysteria and fear by conducting a witch-hunt on scapegoat ‘paedophiles’ in the delusory belief that the war being waged by society, mostly by the child’s legal guardians on its own children, will not be noticed. This diversionary tactic is employed to cover up the appalling record of welfare agencies tasked with detecting and preventing widespread child abuse and neglect in the family home.
- A devastating consequence of the male-stranger-danger mantra being trumpeted by media-led governments from every hilltop is that it unravels the fabric that binds communities together, simply because men can no longer be trusted (ironic perhaps when women are just as capable of child sexual abuse). Diminishing male teacher numbers in primary schools testifies to the damage already inflicted; youngsters, particularly boys, suffer as a result due to lack of role models. A further example of the lunacy of male-stranger-danger propaganda is airline seating sex discrimination.
- Permitting individuals to mutilate and then suck the freshly-maimed genitals of infants, but simultaneously prosecuting, imprisoning, civilly-committing, scarlet-lettering, techno-tethering, and ostracising ‘irredeemable pervert paedophiles’ for life for having in their possession images of naked children, demonstrates that sexual crime trumps violent crime, and that Fascist hypocrisy worms its way maggot-like and unchecked through the rotten core of Anglosphere Children’s charities are equally culpable in this wilful hypocrisy and discrimination.
Six schools have been burnt in order to prevent sexual education in Belgium:
family anti-touch education is proved to be effective:
a new study by Finkelhor on how anti-sexual education influences quantity and quality of reporting:
a new “hip hop–based” sexual education:
up to 96 weeks of anti-sexual lessons at school— even ones using “game lessons”, “dice-roll games”, “role-playing scenarios”, “dolls”, mobapps &c.— are still claimed to be not enough for effectiveness! To fix it “research programs for the self-protection of adolescent girls and children” are recommended, i.e., to study how to manipulate minors and teach them avoiding pleasures.
cartoons are used at school to prevent children from having sex lives:
anti-sexual “Education to children, on average, led to 77.43% more awareness and as a results self-protection against sexual abuse and rape.”
On the other hand, I used to quote studies that anti-sexual education is not effective.
sexual education program which “ultimately promotes sexual abstinence” and “creates a culture of consent”
is supported by 90% of parents, “including for topics typically considered highly controversial (e.g., gender identity, 68.7%; abortion, 77.7% in 2021).”
some country’s “Department for Education recently administered new Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) guidance… to develop and maintain healthy romantic relationships in adulthood”:
“Researchers analyze costs of child sexual abuse prevention programs”:
school teachers are used in order to inspect children’s sex lives:
a new study on anti-CSA education: https://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0272872
anti-MAP education is not effective — parenthal supervision is: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0145213422002009
Hey tom, I have recently made a site similar to your own, if you want to check it out here is the link.
https://nucklearonline.wordpress.com/2017/09/29/blog-post-title/
Good luck with your venture! Having two main bloggers rather than one could be a good idea.
The war on children in the United States.
This from the American Psychological Association: apa.org/news/press/releases/2014/10/psychological-abuse.aspx:
‘Children who are emotionally abused and neglected face similar and sometimes worse mental health problems as children who are physically or sexually abused, yet psychological abuse is rarely addressed in prevention programs or in treating victims, according to a new study published by the American Psychological Association.
“Child protective service case workers may have a harder time recognizing and substantiating emotional neglect and abuse because there are no physical wounds,” said Spinazzola. “Also, psychological abuse isn’t considered a serious social taboo like physical and sexual child abuse. We need public awareness initiatives to help people understand just how harmful psychological maltreatment is for children and adolescents.”
Nearly 3 million U.S. children experience some form of maltreatment annually, predominantly by a parent, family member or other adult caregiver, according to the U.S. Children’s Bureau. The American Academy of Pediatrics in 2012 identified psychological maltreatment as “the most challenging and prevalent form of child abuse and neglect.”’
>“Child protective service case workers may have a harder time recognizing and substantiating emotional neglect and abuse because there are no physical wounds,” said Spinazzola.
This is very true, unfortunately. I suspect it is a reason for many adults, damaged in childhood, to start lashing out later on in subconscious revenge, or “justice”-seeking, over the one thing where they know they will get attention: sexual abuse, whether real or imagined, or sexual encounters not felt as abusive at the time.
Child Protection aka the greatest excuse apart from anti terrorism laws for the system to screw people as much as they want without incurring the wrath of the civil rights movement!
Right on target!
[…] has it, and is by Feinmann, whose debut as a blogger here was in April this year under the title “War on Kinds disguises one against kids”. Professionally retired, he remains highly active as a field researcher working on the […]
Feinmann, I’m sorry not to have read, and responded to, this terrific piece earlier. I have been mired in tax filing issues and other government horrors these past several weeks. The paperwork required on my part to buy the bullet for my own head is worse than ever, despite making less this past year than in any year for the last 25 (essentially, “$0”).
As you may know, I produced an emotive piece that was part of my documentary about Tom last year, “Who Kills Children?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pzegLJMyvo
It dealt with the hundreds of children who were actually murdered each year by their parents (or the boyfriends of mothers and, in one case a grandfather who killed all of his grandkids and several of his own kids).
Suffice it to say, vastly more children are killed by family members than by “pedophiles”. I never finished doing the final confirmation on data for 2015 of such “pedophile murders” but, the most it could have been for this past year appears to be two.
Your figures provide another point of comparison when you note the number of male babies who die as a result of botched circumcisions: 117.
115 happens to be the number of children said to be abducted by strangers every year by our government. They have also said that dozens of those are also murdered. That’s a lie, of course, and those numbers have not been updated in over a decade although, even then, they were a lie (one brought to us by David Finkelhor). But even the invented figure of 115 is less than the figure you have provided for male baby circumcision deaths.
Those willing to do the hard research to dig up actual statistics about child abuse as well as figures related to “sex offending” and “offenders” are few, indeed.
Thank you for your work. I would like for us to stay in touch.
Thank you David. I must admit I did not refer to your YouTube video when preparing the article. It was all completed in double-quick time, and so my apologies for that. I have asked Tom to pass on my email address to you so that we may stay in touch.
Thank you Feinmann. Do give it a watch, although it is pretty wrenching. I found myself in tears a number of times while making it, and I never cry ordinarily (post-incarceration, which made me cynical and bitter, apparently). Thanks for the email! Let’s talk!
In reply to Summer Breeze, let me say that I passed through the British school system — both private and state — in the 40s and 50s and I find that your heavy use of irony on the subject of corporal punishment of children conceals a skewed message, somewhere…
Perhaps I have mis-read you?
I HATED being hit with a cane or a tawse and I hated the people who did it. I truly feared and hated those people as individuals and the few teachers that I do remember are the ones who did not beat me.
Violence towards kids is absolute ANATHEMA to me and I applied this to my two sons as they grew up. Perhaps that is one reason why my family is still a tight, supportive group — even after all my past legal problems and the public disgrace that went with them?
It is beyond my comprehension how anyone can sanction a grown man — or woman — deliberately inflicting physical pain upon a child. How can this possibly be justified?
Oh, I see… The primitive lex talionis that justifies the death penalty in the US? The ancient eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth VENGEANCE thing!
Agreed M T-W
I was placed in a boarding school during the 1960s in the heart of England. Lindsay Anderson’s film ‘If’ was set in a school that was a dead ringer for the one I endured. Such schools were essentially self-contained communities within which both the law and parents seemed to delegate jurisdiction. As a result, masters tended to dish out whatever punishment suited them. I recall a glass-fronted case full of different-sized canes on the wall of the headmaster’s study; I also recall the excruciating pain on my backside during and immediately after four of the best on the occasion when I was punished. I think the record number of canings for any single boy was in the order of 268; evidently this form of punishment did not alter his behaviour one jot. As an aside, this boy was eventually expelled together with another boy for drugging a third (notoriously well-hung) boy, and having their wicked way with him whilst he was semi-comatose. Other punishments included slapping a boy’s face hard with the front of the hand, often in front of the whole class. My lasting impression was that the physical violence meted out to boys by staff simply fomented aggression and thus caused older boys to act in a similar way towards defenceless boys via bullying.
>”My lasting impression was that the physical violence meted out to boys by staff simply fomented aggression and thus caused older boys to act in a similar way towards defenceless boys via bullying.”
My first two years at junior school were a bit of a hell. The school was situated in a problem area. The pupils were constantly fighting and there was a lot of bullying of which, as an unaggressive child with an odd accent, I suffered my fair share.
Every afternoon, when school finished there would be crowds of children gathering in rings to watch the fights, and a teacher whose duty it was to go from one fight to the next breaking them up.
The head-teacher was an old-fashioned type and used corporal punishment. A couple of year after I started there he retired and was replaced by a progressive head-teacher who didn’t use corporal punishment and who treated the children (and probably the teachers too) with respect.
Almost over-night (or so I remember it) the whole atmosphere at the school changed – the bullying and the fighting seemed to stop. I started enjoying school again.
Whether the change was simply because he stopped using corporal punishment, or whether it was because he treated people with respect (of course these two factors overlap a great deal) or because he effected other changes which would have made the school more civilised is hard to say.
But whatever he did worked and I remember at the time feeling gratitude and respect for the changes he had brought about.
A head-teacher has a big influence on the atmosphere and personality of a school – they set a tone which determines the disposition and behaviour of the teachers and pupils.
Thank you Feinmann, for your supportive comments.
But lest we lose sight of one of the main principles of Heretic’s blog: it is surely the juxtaposition of cold-hearted violence towards children being seen as beneficial: as opposed to any warm, consensual sexual activity being seen as harmful, that is really the problem?
Put simply, it is seen as OK to beat a kid black & blue, but don’t DARE let that same kid explore his or her own physical world, let alone allow that young person to feel the love, or even simple affection that often go with those explorations when they happen with another person.
Cruelty and pain, OK: love and warmth, BAD!
Have I got that right?
I don’t think there is much fear of losing sight of the main purpose of the Heretic TOC blog; the ‘discourse of resistance to the dominant narrative’ shines through in each and every one of the topics published here at heretic central.
If you mean this particular topic, for me, it is more complex than the black and white scenario you paint, which of course in itself is very important. The horrific statistics reproduced in the article above are intended to raise the profile of the broad systemic failures of government in caring for children across the board, and the implication that having no solution to the problem, they (and a malignantly corrupt media) have dishonestly shifted the blame onto a scapegoat: the paedophile terrorist. All the while children continue to suffer, and no-one seems to care.
Sorry, Feinmann. Yes, I do tend to oversimplify!
As I get older — I am 78 — things distil more into black and white. Right and wrong: good and bad.
Yes, we are the rapist-murderers, the ‘paedophile terrorists’ and we will remain so because the deeply cultural power of the establishment marginalizes us into into a vile sort of infection that dwells in the outer sewers of society.
Am I being over dramatic? Ask any public figure who would be seen as worthy. Ask any aspiring professional medical person who does not wish to commit professional or personal, social suicide!
Have I lost hope?
Pretty much!
There is a lot of negative observations about the authoritarianism of modern Russia (and memoirs of the totalitarianism of long-gone USSR) that can and should be voiced. But there is one good thing that has to be said: neither USSR allowed, nor Russia allows, whipping of children in schools.
Britain, despite its (apparently) liberal and democratic nature, has only very recently prohibited school floggings. And in some Southern states of the US, beating of kids in (private) schools are still permitted… I remember how shocked I was when I learned that some US schools teachers still practice ritualised hitting (or “corporal punishment”, as it is euphemistically called) of their students. Before this unpleasant revelation, I had thought that the Western countries had forbidden “corporal punishment”, at least in educational institutions, if not at home as well… Some of them still had not.
The very idea of teachers forcing the participation in sadomasochistic episode onto their pupils seems plain crazy to me – since, despite all the obfuscating rhetoric about “discipline”, whipping is SM stuff. Hiding this fact beyond (pseudo-)pedagogic metaphors turn this SM stuff into genuine sexual – not just physical – abuse of the child. Unlike the harmless, mutually pleasant and voluntary tenderness of consensual child-paedophile encounters, here we have unsafe, insane and nonconsensual sadomasochism.
I always wodered why all direct and indirect participants – teachers, students, parents – seemed to be so obedient in this cruel process.
Tom, you yourself was a schoolteacher in the times when “corporal punishment’ was a norm… So, may I ask you: how many teachers rejected, or even decried, the usage of flogging? How many pupils resisted it? How many parents protested? Or everyone, including beaten students, considered the situation as appropriate?
>Or everyone, including beaten students, considered the situation as appropriate?
This was very much the case. When I was a schoolboy in the 1950s and 60s caning was considered absolutely necessary, not just by teachers but by parents and kids. A child, or a parent, might consider a particular punishment was unfair, but few questioned the overall system of physically imposed discipline.
My own view was typical. I got into trouble at school for a number of relatively trivial offences, for which I was caned, such as failing to hand in my homework on time. One memorable reason for a caning was sitting on a sign saying “Keep off the grass”! In an early sign that my journalism was not universally appreciated, I was caned for criticising a member of staff in an article submitted to the school magazine.
In one of two cases I thought my punishment was a bit unfair or excessive but I was in no doubt whatever that physical chastisement was necessary in many cases, and I still held that opinion at the time when I became a young teacher. It was not until I joined PIE, in the mid-1970s, that my views started to change. I was “radicalised” towards non-violence through long discussions with those who had given greater thought to the issue, including Keith Hose, my predecessor as chair of PIE.
Well you see, we need to hit children. How else are they to learn the consequences of their actions? It is insane comparing corporal punishment to sexual abuse! A child would never ever want to be sexual with an adult! Oh sure… biologically they have all the pleasure receptors there and are capable of orgasm. It causally brings about pleasure. Yes, true, they have the innate curiosity that drives them to learn how their bodies and the bodies of others work. Yes yes kids often do very sexual things with other kids and it is widely seen as okay and even healthy. I know kids can find others attractive, even adults. However, they would never want to with an adult! Hitting kids to teach them to be good people? See now that makes sense. Sure causally it causes pain. True it makes no sense to say that a child is not logical enough to connect the dots about natural consequences but is logical enough to connect the dots about being hit by someone that is supposed to love and protect them to learn something. Okay they actively resist it. However it is still important!
This one Tom, Is just for you:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7R7dDJmwPY
Wicked, man! Or should that be wikid? Great stuff anyway.
You may like the film he was in ‘Borat, Cultural learnings:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0443453/
Yes, saw it. Borat comes out with some of the most gloriously un-PC lines one could possibly wish for. After watching Pamela Anderson in Baywatch on his hotel telly, he proclaims, “She had the arse-hole of a seven-year-old. I knew I was in love.”
It’s the crass equation of love and arse-holes that does it, especially with a seven-year-old in mind. Laugh? Like crazy! Cringe? That too!
Another good part was when he was showing an American lady his family photos — All naked, with his son holding him – look how strong he is, Oh I don’t think that’s appropriate! Also the scene where they fight naked is hilarious.
Trust a water-for-brains geriatric like yourself to find amusement in the pathetic antics of a third rate comedian like Baron Cohen.
Hey, Tom, when you are sitting in your own shit and being patronised in an old peoples’ home, remember that the society we live in is everything that you fought for all those years ago.
Ah, Sapphocidaire, you have such a way with words! 🙂
For everyone: I just found another intellectual pro-paedophile YouTube Channel – “Antipedophobe Aktion”. Despite the German-sounding name, it is in English language.
Here it is:
http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqpGPc4NSxMIJRPP9fmXm1Q?nohtml5=False
Looks interesting.
Article by Steve Moxon re Adam Jonston:http://theantifeminist.com/steve-moxon-utterly-crazy-sex-law-exposed-by-adam-johnsons-sentence-indeed-his-conviction-and-that-he-was-ever-charged/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter….Any evidence ten is rationally deemed to be the end of childhood Tom? I know you did a blog a while ago called The magical age of ten — Might have to broach that one again!
Thanks, Salem. I am travelling right now. Aim to return to this theme.
Here is an interesting article, If you have not already seen it:http://archbishopcranmer.com/when-did-child-abuse-become-the-unforgivable-sin/
Thanks to all of you for your supportive comments here.
I would just like to add that the media seem utterly obsessed with trivia and image, and of course, tales of bogey-man paedophiles, but strangely silent on the ongoing child abuse and neglect epidemic within Anglosphere families. Why?
It seems to me that no journalist has the guts to expose and hold accountable the real tail (family poverty plus Christian fundamentalism) that wags the whole war-on-kids dog.
There are several precedents within the journalistic profession. The majority of Western press cowardly refused to publish the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons, first to show the public what all the fuss was about and second to show solidarity towards their fellow Danish journalists. Incidentally, most religious leaders condemned both the cartoons and The Satanic Verses as blasphemous but not the simultaneous violence originating from Muslim extremists around the globe.
Journalism content plus cultural attitudes prove that Western nations have capitulated. The barbarians are not at the gate; they are well inside. Who holds the gate open? Cowardly media and media-led governments do.
See the following about a little girl screaming “no” while she is forced to have her earlobes pierced: http://davehingsburger.blogspot.fr/2014/07/no-means-force.html
I quote the last sentences:
Little children learn early and often that ‘no doesn’t mean no.’
Little children learn early that no one will stand with them, even the two old men looking horrified at the events from the cafeteria.
Little girls learn early and often that their will is not their own.
No means no, yeah, right.
Most often, for kids and others without power, ”no means force.”
Well done, Feinmann0. I’ve been waiting for a blog from you for a while now! 🙂
Unfortunately, the general public and the media are not much interested in the factual information recorded in the stats you provided. Pedophobia, as you know, is based around belief, and it serves the government well in that capacity. Sexual activity is always considered “worse” for children and younger teens to experience than any sort of violence or the effects of poverty and neglect. The emotional harm done to kids by many of our institutions are given a free pass, while society only focuses upon what “damage” may be done by sexual contact. Painful activity conducted on children’s genitals are given a free pass if it’s done for culturally aesthetic purposes, yet pleasurable activity visited upon a younger person is condemned as evil incarnate because it involves sexual desire. Even the anti-choicers amongst the Kind community very frequently ignore all of the above stats, because they know that their agenda demands doing so.
It’s all about the preservation of a gerontocentric (adult-based) socio-political infrastructure, and it only aims to “protect” kids from becoming too empowered.
Well said, Dissident.
The trouble is that critical thinking is not taught in schools. In fact, very few universities indulge themselves in this simple application of common sense…
When Joe and Joanna Public, however, read ‘a court was told today’, this has the ring of truth to them and they believe it. It could be a bare-faced lie, but people tend to believe that — if the police charge someone — then there’s ‘no smoke without fire’?
We have seen how this works in the UK over the last couple of years. People vilified into extinction, and even though ‘Nick’ is now discredited, there are many people who will always suspect Field Marshall Lord Bramall of being one of ‘they disgusting old peediofoils’.
As for the newspaper that publishes the report, the editor is paid to produce news where possibly nothing much existed.
Further, we confuse TV news as a ‘service’, when in fact, it is a ‘product’. This can be further skewed by the interests of the people paying for the product. In short, the sponsors.
Joe’s Tyres will not support a product that sticks to the boring facts. So jazz it up. Never spoil a good story for the truth and lots of people will see the advertisements for Joe’s Tyres.
Even better said, M T-W! 🙂 Thank you for your complimentary words and additional insights about the how the media is just another commodity.
What astonishes me is when people talk about the Brit Milah ceremony they often get upset at the penis sucking part. The one part that might actually be soothing to the poor baby is the part they freak out about. Paul Joseph Watson recently posted a youtube video where he denounces cultural relativism (I denounce it too, our anti-sexual and anti-youth cultural values are worse than in cultures where sexuality is celebrated and youth are not treated like dirt) and uses examples of cultural practices that are worse than western cultural practices. The Brit Milah ceremony is one of the ones he uses. His focus is on the penis sucking, not the mutilation of the infant’s penis, which is just ignored in his video.
The acceptance of infant male circumcision is the US is very telling. I can’t play with a little girl’s vagina, even though she asked me to, because it would be horrible soul crushing abuse and I would go to jail for a large portion of my life, but doctors can cut off foreskin of infants and preteen boys and most people don’t bat an eye. A Rabbi can cut off an infant’s foreskin and then suck the infant’s penis, and there is no huge outcry.
Well done, Feinmann. I have an old video recorded many years ago of a documentary that includes footage of a baby boy being circumcised without anaesthetic. It is practically unbearable to watch. A culture that would allow this but condemn any form of child-adult sexual interaction has certainly got its priorities wrong, to put it mildly.
A very level-headed comment LSM, thank you.
Clearly, there is huge scope for researching those areas you mention, for example: to shine a cold, objective light on the all-powerful media’s eagerness in appealing to the worst aspects of the human psyche, and in-so-doing dictating and imposing twisted morals on a sheep-like society, at the expense of truth. I am sure that if occurrences of Paedophobia in today’s Anglosphere societies were analysed, there would be striking parallels with the anti-Jewish prejudice spread by Joseph Goebbels propaganda machine in Nazi Germany during the 1930s and 1940s.
On the topic of pacifying children through masturbation, I recall being invited to join a group of eight or so people in Myanmar in a shanty town where they lived. These were impoverished townsfolk of all ages between 4 and 80. The guide who brought me there told me it was his dream to build a school for the kids in the area, where there was none. As time went by I couldn’t help noticing the 4 year-old on the lap of a young 20’s something lady sitting opposite – maybe it was his mum – and what was being done to him. The boy had on a T-shirt and nothing else. The woman was gently masturbating the boy as if it was the most natural thing in the world, and no-one else in the group took a blind bit of notice. I think they call this ‘placating’ the child. This must be a rather widespread practice in this part of the world, and naturally kids placated in this way will masturbate themselves as an alternative say, to sucking their thumb in the absence of a nipple to suck, or just because it comforts them and makes them feel good. It is ironic that many ‘authorities’ in sick, aberrant WEIRD cultures, equate masturbatory behaviour in children to a dangerous malady, among other choice negative phrases. These teachings go a long way to explaining why WEIRD cultures are so weird. They comprise individuals that have been systematically denied the joy of sex in their first 18 years of life, and consequently have become so mentally warped that they are perfectly willing to place children as young as nine on sex offender registers, and punish perpetrators of sex ‘crimes’ where there is no victim, to life in jail.
>”I am sure that if occurrences of Paedophobia in today’s Anglosphere societies were analysed, there would be striking parallels with the anti-Jewish prejudice spread by Joseph Goebbels propaganda machine in Nazi Germany during the 1930s and 1940s.”
I agree that the media make use of paedophobia – and that it takes the form of propaganda ( if defined as ‘ a form of biased communication, aimed at promoting or demoting certain views, perceptions or agendas’).
But the most interesting, difficult and troubling question remains why the ‘masses’ are particularly receptive to any one particular form of it – why were the German population susceptible to the imperialist antisemitic propaganda of Goebbels etc (I don’t doubt that the Nazi party chose to nurture and amplify sentiments that were already present in the population, rather than create those sentiments ‘from scratch’, as it were), why young moslems are susceptible to the Daesh propaganda, and why, in the contemporary West, does anti-paedophile propaganda seem to be pushing at an open door.
I suppose, in short, what I’m suggesting is that we should be wary of blaming the media or those in power, for paedophobia. In a sense they are very much giving the population what the population want.
The scary thing is that there is probably no person, persons, group, groups or demographic responsible for paedophobia – but rather every individual in society shares a collective responsibility when they buy into a certain conception or vision of ‘society’, a vision which entails paedophobia as a mere unintended consequence.
Which is to say that maybe paedophobia has no fundamental ‘function’ in western society – it is a ‘waste product’ of our social system. But like any waste product, it can affect the environment it is excreted into – either positively (manure on rhubarb) or negatively (pollution).
And that is where the media and the propagandists come in…
“I agree that the media make use of paedophobia – and that it takes the form of propaganda (if defined as ‘ a form of biased communication, aimed at promoting or demoting certain views, perceptions or agendas’). But the most interesting, difficult and troubling question remains why the ‘masses’ are particularly receptive to any one particular form of it …”
It seems to me that the UK has had more than its fair share of social justice warriors (aka entrepreneurs!), compensation seekers and conspiraloons scrabbling to jump on the paedophobia bandwagon and milk it for all its worth by spinning false allegations at the expense of many innocent people.
El Coyote in Anna Raccoon’s Waiting For Goddard blog says this about the Hampstead Satanic Cult Hoax: “In some cases, I think the motives spring from a wish to ‘monetise’ the dramatic false allegations for personal gain; in some cases the motive seems to have to do with promoting a conspiracy-centred agenda; in some cases it’s about validating an evangelical/charismatic Christian world-view in which Satanists commit foul crimes against children; and in some cases I think there is verifiable mental illness (such as a delusional disorder) at work. One of the strangest aspects is … the fact that these people do not want things to be resolved. As a relative latecomer to the scene, I confess to complete puzzlement when I saw the reaction outside the Royal Courts of Justice last March, when Mrs Justice Pauffley declared the entire Hampstead Satanic cult thing a hoax. In my naïveté, I’d thought the protesters would be overjoyed to hear that 30 or so small children had not been horribly victimised, and thousands of babies had not been beheaded, skinned, and cooked at McDonald’s.”
And as for Jimmy Savile, Moor Larkin’s has done sterling work in refuting one by one the legion posthumous allegations made by fraudulent and composeeking allegators in his JimCannotFixThis.blogspot.com blog.
We have the misfortune to live within a very sick society indeed.
LSM: Paedophobia is neither a conspiracy designed in advance by the politicians and the media, nor a popular panic of random origin, which the media and the politicians passively follow. It is rather a trial and error process, you see some scare, you publicize it, and if it works, you try again. As during the witchhunts of the 15th to 17th centuries, you need a scapegoat for the crisis of society, on which people will transfer all the frustrations and fears of their lives. The scapegoat must hide the real root of the crisis, otherwise the exploited lower classes would overthrow the system, thus the ruling class and its acolytes need that scapegoat to protect themselves.
See my quote of Marvin Harris on https://tomocarroll.wordpress.com/2015/10/13/time-to-say-r-i-p-to-v-i-p-paedo-scandal/
>you see some scare, you publicize it, and if it works, you try again
Good point. But what distinguishes what works from what doesn’t?
That’s a very hard-hitting blog Feinmann – the statistics are damning and seem to reveal all kinds of delusions and psychoses when it comes to the way the USA and the UK view child welfare.
That ‘child abuse’ has become synonymous with ‘child sexual abuse’ (type ‘child abuse’ into google and almost everything that comes up is about sexual abuse), and the way it is still thought of as something perpetrated by people outside the family, reveals a profound and determined blindness in our culture (It seems that NSPCC fact sheets seek to play down the fact that most abuse and ‘abuse’ happens in the home – presumably they find this a very inconvenient statistic).
This can be seen in the way that, when a child is killed by a parent, or dies from neglect, it will make the news for a few days and then disappear, be forgotten. If a child is murdered by a stranger and/or if there is a sexual component to the murder then it stays in the media for decades.
This seems to indicate that parental cruelty, neglect and murder are, if not actually ‘acceptable’ are at least something that the culture can ‘process’, that doesn’t disrupt the culture’s idea of itself.
Why do stories such this one
– http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/562292/Polly-Chowdury-Kiki-Muddar-lesbian-lovers-jailed-killing-Ayesha-Ali –
fail to enter the national consciousness in the same way as the murder of April Jones? Both stories are appalling and tragic, but one is forgotten after a few days whilst the other continues to resonate years afterwards.
I think that there’s a fascinating research project to be done in studying the nature of news stories concerning child abuse (both actual abuse and also pseudo-abuse stories – such as the Adam Johnson one) and the ‘trails’ they leave. Why some stories live on and others barely make the news. I’m sure that such a study could reveal a huge amount about the nation’s conceptualisation of childhood, parenthood, sexuality and violence.
I agree with everything you say about circumcision, but being a bit squeamish I have passed on clicking the ‘fathermag’ link – I will do so when I feel a bit more courageous. Attitudes towards circumcision again show how confused and twisted attitudes are towards children and their sexuality.
I wonder what the effect must be on someone of having, as their first intense genital experience, that of great pain and discomfort rather than pleasure?
Another study I’d be interested in reading would be a comparison of communities which practice circumcision and communities where the giving genital pleasure to babies is acceptable – I’ve read of several tribes and cultures where parents stimulate the child’s genitals as means of soothing them – I vaguely remember that such practices are (or have been) common in Southern and Central American countires…
Are ‘circumcision cultures’ more belligerent and aggressive? Given the prevelance of circumcision in the USA and in islam there seems to be at least a prima facie case.
Two wrongs don’t make a right. It is true there is child neglect and abuse. But that is not mitigated by allowing older men to have “consensual” sex with 9 year olds.
Your scare quotes around the word’ consensual’ suggest you have things to learn, if you can trouble yourself to do it
Hi Mike!
Forgive me if I don’t address the issues around consent which your statement raises, other than to suggest that rephrasing it as:
‘allowing 9 year olds to have “consensual” acts with older men’
would be a more honest way of addressing the issue: after all it is children who are deprived of the right to seek and give consent, not ‘older men’.
But what interests me particularly about your comment is the question it raises of ‘proportionality of response’ in the media and public.
When, in the UK, on average between one and two children are killed every week by their parents in acts of physical abuse or neglect – why is there not a national panic about this?
Compare this to the rate of children killed by ‘strangers’ with a sexual motivation – these are so infrequent that it is hard to calculate a frequency – once every 5? 10? years in the UK?
http://straightstatistics.fullfact.org/article/how-many-children-are-murdered-britain-every-year
There is no ‘proportionality’ in the public response. If one were to work with the best-case scenario (from the paedo-hysteric’s point of view) – four in every thousand child homicides are committed by a sexually motivated stranger, and in the ‘worst-case’ parental homicide of children happens as much as a thousand times more frequently than the much publicised and much dwelt-upon murder by a sexually-motivated stranger.
Of course child murder is terrible whether perpetrated by a parent or a stranger. One does not ‘mitigate’ the other – but surely the public’s concerns should be in proportion to the relative frequency of these forms of murder, not in ‘inverse proportion’?
This disproportionality doesn’t exist just with child murder – it goes all the way through the statistics for various crimes related to children – right down to illegal sexual activity – which, again, is overwhelmingly a family affair – but we wouldn’t know this from the way the media reports it (celebrities, Westminster paedophile rings, paedophile priests, strangers lurking in the bushes…).
Maybe the public doesn’t want to hear that the true locus of these crimes (and ‘crimes’) are homes and families like their own? Maybe they’re so much more comfortable disregarding the statistics and believing that it’s some shifty stranger that does these things.
That the family home is still considered as the haven where children are safe from abuse – in opposition to the public places where every bush conceals a homicidal sex maniac – indicates that the public’s perception and attitudes towards such crimes has nothing to do with facts or reason.
I suggest that there’s so much invested in ‘the family’ that all the crimes of the family are overlooked and forgiven, and those crimes are transferred to the scapegoat of the ‘stranger’.
The trouble is that this kind of ignorance has victims, and those victims are children. Sex offender registries essentially target ‘strangers’ and generally those strangers are men who have never bothered a child and who never will (most men on the register are there for having accessed child pornography) and their job is to placate the ignorant public, whilst completely missing the problem. The idea that the child is safer at home than in the community or in public embeds and isolates children back in the very places where abuse (whether emotional, physical or unwanted sexual attentions) is most likely to occur.
A similar thing happens with animal welfare – where an economic and social imperative determines the public’s emotional response to an issue.
There are people who go to inordinate lengths and expenses pampering their pet dogs and cats – and who are distressed (rightly) by any cruelty or neglect of cats and dogs. However they are quite happy to buy meat at the supermarket – whilst remaining blind to the inherent violence, venality and exploitation of the meat industry. How many pet owners who coo over their little shitzu would be happy spending a day watching the sharp-end of the industrial-scale butchery they finance each time they buy their dog a tin of Kangerchunks? For them ignorance is a so much more comfortable way of dealing with this than facing the hard truths.
The underlying causes of the public’s disproportional response to animal welfare are quite clear – people’s readiness to justify their pleasures encouraged by the billions spent by the food and meat industry in making the issues ‘disappear’.
“implies (racial) discrimination of circumcised Jewish and Moslem boys, by not trying to protect them against useless pain as is the case with girls and non-circumcised boys.”
There can be no doubt that anti-circumcision promotion was once historically done to discourage the practice of Judaism. Today, however, most people in the western world who are circumcised are, in fact, not Jewish. It is for this reason I do not view that vast majority of present day anti-circumcision as anti-Semitic. An anti-Semitic approach would simply call for the ending of bris milah (Jewish ritual circumcision) as opposed to the practice as a whole. It could more easily accomplish this as well, since most mohels are not doctors—despite the lower complication rate–and are performing medical procedures.
Wether it is a girl or a boy to be circumcised, the person performing this act is taking away a natural part, or component, of that human body for no good reason at all. The act inflicts pain, it can cause infection and even death and one has to ask, who would risk doing that to a child that presumably, they love?
I believe the answer lies in the deep-seated cultural belief that the child belongs to the parent. That the child, is their actual PROPERTY.
So, if the child is mine, I will specify what he/she looks like, indeed what his or her future sexual experience will be. This is taken to be no-one else’s business, because the child BELONGS to me!
My two sons were not circumcised because I left it to them to decide if — at a later date — they would want to do this completely pointless thing. Or, if they were afflicted by some life-threatening infection that only circumcision could avert. Either way, I hoped that they would then be old enough to decide for themselves.
Finally, Feinemann’s blog is brilliant. Thank you!
M T-W
PROPERTY: Precisely MT-W. Further evidence, if indeed any were needed, of the selfishness that permeates the nuclear family dynamic.
Brillant, Feinmann! Concerning MGM, there are many good research articles by Brian D. Earp on the ethical and human rights aspects of it, mainly on https://www.academia.edu/, and in particular I appreciated the following one on USA/UNO moral hypocrisy:
https://www.academia.edu/10197867/Between_moral_relativism_and_moral_hypocrisy_Reframing_the_debate_on_FGM_
A short and easy to read article summarizing his views:
https://aeon.co/essays/are-male-and-female-circumcision-morally-equivalent
Some feminists have joined opposition to MGM:
http://www.hystericalfeminisms.com/male-circumcision-is-a-feminist-issue-too/
Thank you for the additional information Christian. I will take a look.