The Trauma Myth (Part 3): Moral Harm vs Real Harm
Real harm hurts real people. It is demonstrable and measurable. With the recent findings on the pathology of stress we can now measure its impact on the body. It is no longer in the realm of subjective opinion; of someone saying I ‘feel’ stressed.
Moral harm is an offence against an idea, not a real person.
The problem with the whole child abuse debate is that too many people are reacting from a position of moral harm and not real harm. Susan Clancy attempts to separate these two but fails because she herself conflates the two.
…a disturbing tendency exists among many people to equate wrongfulness with harmfulness. Thus, if sexual abuse was not traumatic for the victims when it happened, if it did not immediately and directly cause harm, many people conclude “not wrong”. Sexual abuse is very wrong, regardless of how it affects the victims. pg 185
Note how Clancy reinforces the moral argument – ‘regardless of how it affects the victims’. Meaning, regardless of the extent of real harm; meaning, ignore what some victims say. She also seems to miss the other side to this conflation, that moral abuse must necessarily cause actual harm – which drives the expectation in many victims that they should feel more traumatized than they actually do.
This is a contradiction in her argument. She argues quite forcefully that we must listen to the victim of the abuse, then says it is very wrong ‘regardless of what the victim feels’. Yet she provides many examples from subjects that did not feel it was very wrong at the time. Indeed, who were caught between competing feelings of good/wrong.
By insisting that it is very wrong isn’t she negating and silencing those victims who say that it did not feel wrong at the time?
This is important because Clancy tells us directly that our failure to accept that these victims were not traumatized at the time, did not necessarily think it was wrong and even continued the relationship, creates the conditions in which they self-stigmatize and come to reconceptualize themselves as bad people. This feeling comes from the growing gap between how they initially saw the incident and how they have reconceptualized the incident later on.
The missing fact here that how they reconceptualize the incident will be dependent on the prevailing attitude to such things. What Clancy fails to point out is that a person raised in the Bible-belt of America will reconceptualize the event using the prevailing norms of that society, whereas a person raised in a tribal culture in which some adult/child sexual contact is considered normal, even amusing, will reconceptualize the event entirely differently.
20 Responses to The Trauma Myth (Part 3): Moral Harm vs Real Harm
Leave a Reply Cancel reply
- The Naked Child in Art: The New Arguments Against 43174 view(s)
- The Lure of Aphrodite’s Mirror: Brooke Shields and Eva Ionesco 20854 view(s)
- The Naked Child in Art: Naturist Photography 10984 view(s)
- Futanari 8225 view(s)
- The Naked Child in Art: Misty Dawn 8007 view(s)
- Eva Ionesco: My Little Princess 6485 view(s)
- The Childhood Culture Wars: Dani Brubaker 6256 view(s)
- Abigail Bray (3): Silencing the Subject 5594 view(s)
- Abigail Bray: Adopting the Paedophiliac Gaze 5382 view(s)
- The Naked Child in Art: Photography 4511 view(s)
Recent Posts
- The Naked Child in Art: Nicolas Poussin
- Eros, Cupid, Putti and Cherubs
- The Naked Child in Art: Polixeni Papapetrou and Olympia Nelson
- Academic Lesley-Anne Ey’s Bogus Study
- The Naked Child in Art: Virginia Mann
- The Problem With ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’
- The Grand Tour
- Birdy
- Madonna, Gaga and Kusama
- The Museum of Erotic Art
Recent Comments
- Ray on Q: A Film by Laurent Bouhnik
- antyq on Q: A Film by Laurent Bouhnik
- Ray on The Erotic as One of the 64 Arts of Saraswati
- Irtsa Thgirw on The Erotic as One of the 64 Arts of Saraswati
- Ray on Academic Lesley-Anne Ey’s Bogus Study
- Tom on Academic Lesley-Anne Ey’s Bogus Study
- Daniel on Two Photos of Paris
- D Dean on TNCA: The Legal Precendents – the OZ Trial
- Ray on TNCA: The Legal Precendents – the OZ Trial
- D Dean on TNCA: The Legal Precendents – the OZ Trial
Abigail Bray About Ray Artemis Articles Bill Henson Child Abuse Child Prodigy Christianity Classical Culture Dark Matter Emma Rush Empty Taboos Eros False Certainties Gail Dines Gifted Kids Guitar Prodigies Hippie Kids Hippies Intersexed Islam Japanese Culture Jock Sturges Melinda Tankard Reist Michael Carr-Gregg Moral Conservatives My Photographs Naked Child In Art Navaratri Porn Psyche Radical Ideas Rock Chicks Sexology Sexualisation Sexualisation Debate Sexuality Stonefield Talented Kids Tantra The Anthropology of Sex The Childhood Culture Wars Transgender Transgression Wild Child
WP Cumulus Flash tag cloud by Roy Tanck requires Flash Player 9 or better.
A work in progress – and something completely different. A crime novel about cultural and generational clashes. A series of murders in the Melbourne art world. 
Greenfields Site.
I appreciate what you are writing. I doubt that ‘more’ harm is caused by the outrage than by the primary abuse, but I get your point, and it is important.
What all of us with “morally outraged” want is for the adults who are interfering sexually with children to STOP their behaviour. That is what ‘moral outrage’ really is, a great big “STOP THAT NOW, OR I WILL STOP YOU WITH WHATEVER MEANS I HAVE TO USE.”
Sexual interference of children is morally outrageous behaviour FOR ADULTS, regardless of how the child is affected.
Have you got any suggestions about how to put across this message and the consequences to the adults with these proclivities that does not harm the children who have been caught in the complicity of the adults’ behaviour?
Thanks. Jane
Jane,
One thing I forgot to mention, or ran out of space to mention (it started getting rather long) is that the rates of child abuse started going down in the 90′s. The reason is that there has been a concerted effort to raise public awareness of this problem. We must remember that child abuse has always been with us but that until progressive voices started to raise the issue, children simply were not believed and the problem was kept hidden.
In general the solution is knowledge. Many children report that they did not know that what was being done was sexual. Proper sex education is part of the solution.
But the reason why adults use and abuse children in any circumstance is more complex. My view is that many adults have a rather juvenile sexuality because we live in a culture of embarrassment and their sexual development has been stunted.
One thing I can tell you is that children who have been raised to speak up for their rights and who know what sex is are less likely to be abused, furthermore, they are more likely to grow up with a mature sexuality and therefore not to offend.
I completely agree with you about this. I spent years working with an entire community where sexual abuse by the clergy, and also by family members created a very difficult challenge, and was one factor among many that created a chaotic environment for children to grow up in. I also know that the heavy hand of social services and all of the morally outraged among us has done its share of damage to the children involved.
I also have a sense that especially in the abuse by the clergy, the secondary damage done to the children when they were not believed (and in some cases beaten for reporting the abuse) by their parents added another horrific violation to the mix.
Thanks for writing about this difficult topic and for taking the risks that you have in differentiating between ‘moral’ and ‘actual’ harm, and how it effects some children differently.
Jane
Jane,
Thanks. The abuse within the church (and not just the Catholic) is a shocking crime. I have written a couple of posts on this subject. But it is not just the sexual abuse, it is the physical and psychological abuse.
yes, it is, all those, but the sexual abuse is particularly disturbing. Not just because it is perpetuated on children (and that is beyond horrible), but who are the men that have these wounded lives that they could have be able to do this!?, how did it actually happen that all of these young men, often first born, living in these pious, strict families, and ‘called’ to serve the lord…. HOW could so many of them turned out to be so perverse. It is an epidemic of power perversion… and it is not really being looked at as a public health issue….. The closest I have ever had to understanding this was reading the Swiss child Psychologist, Alice Miller, in the ’90′s…….
Jane,
Abuse is divided into four categories: neglect, and physical, psychological and sexual abuse. The serious experts seem to agree that of these four categories, sexual abuse is the least likely to cause long term trauma. This doesn’t mean that it doesn’t cause any trauma, but that the victims of stand-alone sexual abuse stand the best chance of recovery. Yet people still believe it is the ‘worst’ form of abuse.
As for wounded men, well I have long believed that it is Christianity’s teaching about sex that is the main cause of the problem. Many Christians grow up with a deep, unresolved conflict between their natural desires and the belief that those desires are sinful. This conflict stunts their sexual development and a great many are confused and unsatisfied. It is therefore of no surprise that they offend against the most vulnerable.
But I think we have, in general, chosen to ignore the realities of history – that children have always been abused and that the Church always turned a blind eye, no, that it was always an abuser itself. It is interesting to go back and read the Talmud, Jewish law, on this. At the time of Jesus the minimum age of marriage was 12. There was allowance for it to be earlier and one exception was that the father could give the future husband the right to rape the intended bride. And under Jewish law the father had absolute right over his children, even the right to kill them for disobedience. The idea that children were the property of the father persisted until well after the Enlightenment began to talk about human rights. Not many know that the Catholic Church maintained the minimum age of 12 as part of canon law until 1918 and that children were married by priests in Catholic churches during the Middle Ages. There is nothing written in the NT that argues against child marriage. So no wonder some priests got some strange ideas!
I’m glad you mentioned Alice Miller – she wrote extensively on the concept of ‘Poisonous Pedagogy’, attacking the notion that children were inherently sinful and needed physical punishment to ‘beat the devil out of them’. See http://novelactivist.com/blog/the-forgotten-australians-report/
I share your understanding of this, and thank you for articulating so clearly. Of the sorts of abuse there are, it is not necessary to rank them in worse, worser etc… and I agree that sexual abuse may sometimes not be the worst kind of abuse…. although it can be that too…. I am a medical doctor, and now work (when I work) mostly in the emergency department in a small hospital…and I spent the bulk of my career in a small, impoverished aboriginal community. My heart has been blown to smithereens from the tragedy
I wonder what it takes to be a ‘serious expert’ in this area. I am not an academic writer on this, but I have witnessed enough in my life and career to be a serious expert in some way.
Jane,
Yes, it would be heart wrenching and as you know we are talking about all four forms of abuse in Aboriginal communities. We are talking about an entire culture that has been severely traumatized.
And by serious expert I simply mean a specialist who keeps up to date with the literature and who does original research, as opposed to those standing on the outside offering commentary. For example I have a lot of respect for David Finklehor who’s been working in this field for close to 30 years.
I guess by referring to myself as serious expert, I am somebody who was deep in the trenches of the chaos, often deeper than most people I have ever seen who were doing original research and writing papers. I wasn’t organized like that for that period of my life. Anyway, there are many ways of doing research….some are subjective and some are objective. I was never very good at collecting the data for the latter, though I did listened to all the stories in one community, and watched many of them as they unfolded too….The first nations’ story world wide is quite an epic….. and I hope it brightens up soon…
I have no doubt that you’d be a serious expert in that regard and as you’d know Aboriginal children usually suffer all four forms of abuse; neglect, physical abuse, emotional abuse and sexual abuse. And when someone is the victim of all four they can be severely traumatised. But stand-alone sexual abuse does not involve neglect or any physical or psychological abuse. The one story that has always stuck in my mind happened in the mid 70′s. A father was charged with sexually abusing his daughters. One sister was furious at the sister who had made the complaint after her religious boyfriend had convinced her it was wrong (and of course it was wrong). This sister complained that the other sister had betrayed her and her father in telling their secret and explained that they had come to like the sexual attention, even to initiate it and that their father was always loving, gentle and would have stopped if they had said no, indeed, that he was already backing off and encouraging them to have boyfriends. This was an example where affection became sexual. There was no neglect, violence or psychological threat. The people working in the field know that ‘sexual’ abuse covers a very wide spectrum from children of a violent, alcoholic father being hit and raped – to a loving parent crossing the line from cuddling and tickling to sexual play.
I agree with much of what you say, but not all of it. There is psychological threat and actual harm to a child who has ‘consensual’ sex with their father. Because of the inappropriate and ‘forbid’ sexual relationship with the father in this day and age, the child will be forced to hold the secret and live in fear that the sexual behaviour will be discovered and all mayhem will ensue. This is a huge and heavy burden to go on any child at any age. I have spend some time with young women who have been involved in just the way you describe. For one when the relationship was discovered, her father was jailed, she got involved with a partner immediately afterwards at the age of 16, popped out 4 beautiful children, and then was killed in a murder suicide by her partner. I have other stories, sort of similar….. I am can not think of any instance when it would not be true that crossing the sexual boundary of a child, for any reason will have psychological harm included in it. The consequenses will be deep, and if not dramatic and obvious, like the situation described above, the consequences will be very difficult for the abused child-grown-to-woman to work through and still be available to ‘evolve the planet’ or ‘give her unique gift’ or whatever happens when we are not clogged with psychological baggage. Mind you, I am saying ‘very difficult’ not ‘impossible’….
and it is more too, than just carrying the burden of the secret. There is a primary psychological violation for a child who has a sexual relationship with a parent. There is a violation in the energetics of the parent-child relationship. This is a relationship that is supposed to serve as a vehicle to safely deliver the child into adulthood. It is horribly damaged on an energetic level with sexual abuse and interference. I have spent many hours with women who have told me about this occurring. Many have eating disorders, low self esteem, and a difficult relationship to sex… and many have replicated marital relationships that are rift with odd dynamics that are debilitating, often being a daughter/mother to their spouse instead of a partner, and choosing a partner who plays into those dynamics.. Therapy needs to include a huge amount of bodywork to unblock the energetic confusion, and this is very rarely available.
Jane,
Well, it’s not really a question of agreeing or disagreeing with me personally because I’m simply reporting what the professional literature is saying. No one is saying that stand alone sexual abuse doesn’t have psychological consequences, it clearly does. But perhaps I need to clarify why a distinction is made between sexual abuse and psychological/emotional abuse as a separate category. Emotional abuse is the withdrawal of affection/love and/or the constant denigration of the child as useless, bad, evil, a mistake, an idiot, etc, etc. Substantive studies have shown that the withdrawal of affection can have devastating effects, so much so that some psychologists regard it as the worst of all. In regard to stand alone sexual abuse I’ll remind you of Finklehor’s Traumagenics Model which I mention in part 2. If you remember he said that there are four sources of trauma, the event itself, the sense of disempowerment, the sense of betrayal and stigmatization. He goes on to say that of these four, the original event is often the least traumatic and that stigmatization, including self-blame, can have long lasting effects. In the case of a very dear friend of mine who was molested by her uncle, it was the sense of self-disgust that she had had an orgasm that was the most debilitating. It took her many years before she finally understood that her orgasm was a natural response and that her self-hate was internalized judgment reflecting societal attitudes around her, especially, given her strict religious upbringing, that having an orgasm and experiencing pleasure meant she was a bad girl. She suffered anorexia and relationship problems too. Unfortunately her journey included going to therapists who tried to tell her how she should feel, who imposed their fears, moral judgments, etc onto her, silencing her true voice. There is no ‘right’ or ‘correct’ way to respond to sexual abuse. Each person is different. That is why we must listen to each without prejudice or judgment of any kind.
I am not intending to be agreeing or disagreeing with you. I am trying to feel into the implications of what this article is about, and see what makes a deeper sense according to what seems most real to me. In the case of the uncle, this is not the same relationship being disturbed as with a parent. When I am considering what the trauma is with parent/child incest, I am not even sure it is captured in the four categories in the tramogenic model: ” the event itself, the sense of disempowerment, the sense of betrayal and stigmatization.” It is more in the order of a congential defect in the relationship, before there is much consciousness brought to event by the child…. Indeed, there may be no consciousness brought to the event ever by the child, grown or otherwise… but that does not mean there has not been an invisible and subtle and devastating trauma to the child, one that has altered their life to take ‘this’ road instead of ‘that’ one….and likely the road or the trajectory caused by the sexual abuse leads into being ‘less conscious and more reactive’ than the opposite, especially if there has not been a great deal of person done around the situation.
(To be fair to this discussion though, I guess I would have to read Finklehorn work.)
I appreciate your engagement.
Jane,
Well, if you’re talking incest then perhaps we are entering the realm of Freud and the Oedipus and Electra complexes.
yes, I never really thought of that, but incest is a specific kind of sexual abuse, and the psychological trauma specifically
seems to be adherent in this … Another remarkable book about this topic is Ann Marie MacDonald’s book Fall on your Knees.
Anyway, thank you for indulging me!
Jane
This is all very interesting reading, and very level-headed all around. I of course agree with you, Ray. I have mentioned to you before someone I know who was molested at age 7 by a man he didn’t know that well. He never experienced any immediate harm from the event; indeed, he bragged about it right after to a relative. Wrong thing to do. It was only after he witnessed the reactions from the adults that he internalized it as problematic, but he has always been able to distinguish between what actually happened to him and the popular myth that he was victimized and harmed. He refuses to see himself as a victim, even though the act was technically not consensual. Even though he has experienced a great deal of confusion over the moral reaction, he is nevertheless thankful that his relatives had the good sense not to call the cops and subject him to a system that almost certainly would’ve made a huge holy deal out of what he saw (and still sees) as a fairly innocuous event in his life. Of course, in his case it amounted to nothing more than fondling. Had it been more than that the results may have been different. This is tricky stuff for sure.
Yes, there are people out there who were ‘abused’ but who never particularly objected to it and who do not ever talk about because of the consequences. I participated in a self-improvement seminar in which people were encouraged to reveal their secret, there were one or two who confessed to an encounter with an adult that they quite liked and would never dream of confessing to if that adult were to be charged.
Yep, exactly so. He doesn’t talk about his childhood sexual contact with a lot of people because there are so many out there who misunderstand and project their own views and labels onto him. On the one hand he has had people treat him with kid gloves and act like his soul has been demolished, and on the other he fears people will think that he is a child molester (he’s well aware of the ‘cycle of abuse’ theory), especially since he never saw it as particularly troublesome. So he mostly just keeps it to himself. I have to wonder how many other people have similar stories. He’s said that he’s actually thankful in some ways for the contact because it opened him up to a lot of ideas about sexuality he never would’ve considered otherwise. For example, he has always been open-minded about gays, a pretty big deal given that he grew up in the rural American South.
We can only wonder how many have similar stories, but we will never know because they choose to remain silent, just as most adults keep silent about their secret sexual lives as children. However, we do get the occasional glimpses from writers who reveal such things in autobiographical material. What people also seem to forget is that children do fall in love. Only we call them crushes. I’ve written a post about smashes, raves or spoons: a fad around the turn of the 19th century in which schoolgirls were allowed to form intense romantic relationships with older girls and yes, even teachers. It was thought they were innocent because their virginity was preserved, but it was open season for lesbian and bisexual women. There is also a body of literature within the male homosexual sub-culture about men who discovered they were gay when they had a crush on an older man. Some of these became a much treasured ‘first time’ and they have no intention of reporting the incident.