(I put this Post up on my other site. The Post is primarily concerned with national affairs, but at one point I deal with the government use of victimist-type thinking to cover up its actions, and elsewhere in the text and in the last Note I discuss John Stuart Mill's Principle of Harm; both of these sections might be of interest to the SO community. I do not in any way seek to distract the focus of this site's readership away from matters of SO interest, nor do I put this Post up for any other purpose than to offer the insights mentioned above.)
Andrew O’Hagan has a short piece about the Wikileaks dust-up.
No doubt you’re familiar with the matter: European Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, published 92,000 pages of official military and government reports about how things are going in the day-to-day operations in Afghanistan.
O’Hagan has looked through many of them.
Most of the reports are laced with “thick, stubby acronyms and gamer-speak”. It’s not unusual to see a lot of acronyms – the military tries to convey a lot of info in the shortest possible way, and acronyms are one way to achieve that objective.
The “gamer-speak” is more worrying. It’s a way of distancing yourself from what you’re doing – especially if you or any normal person would otherwise find it unpalatable.
But whereas in the bad old days those in military service sort of came to the service with a decently formed conscience, and then ran into problems when there was nasty work to be done, the ‘gamer generation’ may well come into military service already far more ‘experienced in combat kills’ than Patton could ever have imagined. After all, a lot of kids spend dozens of hours a week for years (their most formative years, no less) in these interactive and wide-based online war games – kill games, might not be an inaccurate term for the things – and most have actually grown into late adolescence or early adulthood having fortified their sense of achievement through counting the blood-spatter they’ve caused on their screens.
Nor is there really anywhere near as much counter-influence (maturity, charity, decency, and all that sort of thing) available to them nowadays like there was before the country and its society and its culture started making so much of the ‘progress’ that is currently trumpeted by certain interests.
From his reading O’Hagan concludes that “you realize, first, that something much worse than we thought has been happening in Afghanistan, and, second, that journalism may never be the same again”.
I don’t need to take up time rehashing all the things wrong in Afghanistan; it’s ‘going south’ as the military likes to say, and that ain’t good.
I would like to suggest, however, that Our domestic situation is very similarly ‘going south’. And that a lot of folks don’t realize it any more – or even less – than they realize what has been going wrong ‘over there’.
I say this because when I read the piece today, I had a personal moment. Let me take a moment to share it. It came to me that in my Posts I might sound like Henry Adams – and nothing more than that.
Henry Adams, you may recall, was an observer of the American scene in the 1890s and the pre-WW1 era. He saw the America he knew fading away – which has been the case with almost all generations of Americans as they aged. So there’s that element in it.
But then he also sensed – especially after the high-level government skullduggery of McKinley’s era that used the ‘liberation’ of Cuba to cover the first-ever American overseas occupation (of the Philippines) – that the government was beginning to develop a much different relationship to the American People, not telling them the full truth and getting itself – and the People – involved in some mighty iffy business.
“Order becomes disorder” he said. Using the Second Law of Thermodynamics, he applied it to History and saw the country somehow declining or falling-off from what it had originally been – or perhaps sought to be.
I sense much the same thing. Only worse.
What has been happening in the past 40 years domestically has brought Us to a hugely dangerous place: We are economically undermined, and unless another world-changing invention along the lines of the Apple-Microsoft phenomenon of the 1980s comes along then this country is not bouncing back very soon, and it will surely not bounce as far back up as it used to.
Of course it was easy to miss (or ignore) the falling-off that Adams saw; for much of that new century (the 20th) the country improved economically and – especially under the stimulus of two World Wars (that nicely undermined the then-regnant governing Great Powers of the world) – progressively overtook its rivals to become the principality among the powers of this world.
No matter what else the government did or was suspected of doing, it was presiding over lots and lots of economic success, or at least a lot of money sloshing around.
That’s going away now. And as the blinding golden glow of endless cash dissolves, it reveals the actual goings-on that have been corroding as well as corrupting the whole American Experiment.
Unlike Adams, and for the first time in American history, We are a generation that will not see Our children do better. Or Our children’s children or their children (just on the basis of the national debt already incurred).
The ‘slackers’ were the canaries in the cage: sticking around home not simply because there was no room for ‘males’ in the knowledge-and-service ‘economy’ but also because the actual number of life-sustaining jobs (thus not barrista, leaf-blower, dog-walker, or nanny) were disappearing at an alarming rate. And you can add major glitz jobs in ‘the financial sector’ now as well. In fact – face it – as the general ‘wealth’ of the population decreases, there will be a declining need for lawyers, corporate honchos, bankers, and such. And if anyone is hoping that ‘the government’ will step in as the employer of last resort, then a) the government is already broke and that’s not getting better any time soon and b) a government that controls the employment and salaries of the majority of its Citizens is not going to be governed by those same Citizens and there goes the Constitutional balance and The People itself.
And if no People, then no Republic and – what the hey? – no need for the Constitution in any sense recognizable to the Vision of 1787. (Which is what the ‘progressive’ Revolutions have presumed – with the coy approval of the Rightists and Corporatists – all along.)
So I just want to say here that I see my only resemblance to Henry Adams being a concern to point things out while there still might be time.
That being said – and I don’t like injecting personal material into these essays – let’s continue with O’Hagan’s fine piece.
His point about journalism never being the same again ties in with the nature of Assange’s and the Web’s “potent new amateurism”: flouting the rules of journalism “because, by and large, it aligns itself with no commercial body, no political party, no ‘national security interest’, and no code of honor about who is more likely to deserve our protection”.
He’s writing in a British publication here, but what he says goes equally well for US journalism: it has ‘allied’ itself into irrelevance. The entire purpose of a “free press” in the Founding Vision was to provide accurate information to the governors of the government, i.e. The People.
But over time, papers developed ‘slants’. Which reduced objectivity somewhat, but there was still a cultural strength to Truth as a goal and a guide. And there were many independent newspapers (no radio or TV yet) even within one metropolitan area, so Citizens could compare and perhaps with some thought figure out what was going on.
But William Randolph Hearst’s decision to throw the weight of his entire publishing network behind fueling the run-up to the Spanish-American War (famously telegraphing to a reporter in Cuba “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war” – feast on the frakkeries of Yellow Journalism here) heralded an ominous change: corporately-webbed papers / deploying emotional and sensationalistic and selective ‘reporting’ / in order to manipulate rather than truly inform public opinion / among a population now having to judge vital national developments about which they had no personal knowledge / and under the eye of a government that was up to all sorts of major international skullduggery that it would much rather not have anybody know about.
Things were not improved by the ‘progressive’ Wilson’s insistence upon the passage of the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917 and 1918 respectively: even reporting by the mainstream press might be a criminal offense if it ‘reported’ the wrong things, and the laws were later used to suppress Labor in its efforts to achieve its goals.
But by the end of World War 2 the press – radio included and TV almost on the scene – had passed from the control of individual owners to corporate structure, and the bosses of the “free press” became part of the “elites” who had assumed control of the labrynthine and byzantine complex into which the Federal government had morphed.
Accommodating themselves to the requirements of a government now greatly concerned for ‘national security’ in the Cold War – headed up in the West by an United States that had supplanted the former Great Powers of Europe – the “media” also adapted themselves to a country now given less to complex consideration of issues and increasingly accustomed to the ‘sound bites’ and gripping (though shallow) images upon which television thrived.
The Civil Rights Movement agitations of the 1950s started to lure those media into not simply ‘reporting’ on events but helping to ‘shape’ them, dimly but surely reflecting a growing sense in theories of communication and of philosophical epistemology that there really was no way to be ‘objective’ about ‘facts’ since all such ‘facts’ are ‘constructed’ by the observer to begin with.
But it was a ‘good cause’ and the media came to feast upon the role of ‘shaper’, now not simply an objective and detached observer reporting to The People but rather part of the elites who ‘shaped’ ‘public opinion’.
With the agitations of the later 1960s, and the whole-hog importation of French Deconstruction theory by radical-feminism (already surfing the wave created by the second and Revolutionary, Black Power phase of the black Civil Rights Movement), the media were now given benefit-of-philosophy for their mutation.
The French elites were horrified by the effects of mass-movements in France and Germany during the era of World Wars 1 and 2. The French Rightists and Leftists waged ideological war upon each other as early as the Dreyfus matter of the 1890s; the populations of all the European nations were whipped into a frenzy as the Great Powers slid frakkingly into World War 1; and the Nazis had taken the manipulation of public opinion to horrific heights and depths.
Better, the French intellectuals thought after 1945, to simply keep everything as divided up and stymied as possible, to prevent any unanimity of public discourse, since unanimity seemed inevitably to lead to ‘totalizing’ and totalitarian governance.*
And this fed into American Identity Politics after 1970. (Along with a heavily Marxist analysis of American society and culture that injected profound suspicion of ‘majority opinion’ as well as profound hostility to ‘patriarchy’ and an insistence on an Identity that was not in any working sense ‘American’.)
And in a too-infrequently noted cumulative effect, the Black Power Identity was joined not only by the ‘feminist’ Identity, but by other follow-on Revolutions, which were then themselves given benefit-of-philosophy by the newly-minted movements (they can hardly be called ‘philosophies’) of Multiculturalism and Diversity.
And of course, being ‘government-friendly’ in ‘liberal’ administrations ensnared the media into being equally so in ‘conservative’ administrations.
And the band played on.
And the Beltway signed on, whole-hog. Perhaps, as I have been saying for quite a while, in an effort to forestall American shock at the end of postwar American economic primacy through distracting culture wars but also by Deconstructing the America and Americans who had achieved that primacy, replacing them with newly ‘valorized’ Youth and immigrants who would have no memory of what was being Deconstructed, as well as the numerous ‘liberal-progressives’ such as radical-feminists who were absolutely sure that their dampdreams would lead to broad, sunlit uplands of gender-Utopia and ‘justice’.
(Nor did the Republicans long remain out of this mud-hole, once it became clear that Wealth could benefit hugely if quietly from this Deconstruction of an America that was too Labor-friendly.)
So, thus, O’Hagan says much when he observes about Wikileaks’s Assange that “he is a believer in the truth for its own sake”. The Western mainstream media no longer believe that: either because – in the accents of Pilate – they no longer believe that there is such a thing as ‘truth’ or ‘Truth’, or else because – in the accents of Goebbels and Goring – they believe that ‘truth is whatever we think is good for the (German) people’. And, of course, ‘truth’ is no longer where the profits are.
Assange is “techy” about the objection – shrewdly raised – that “the leaked war reports would put US and coalition forces in danger”. This is a verrrry shrewd objection. It attempts to surf the regnant American predilection for ‘victimism’: the troops over there are ‘victims’, and will be ‘victimized’ by the dangers that might be inflamed by the Wikileaks.
Assange – not bound by American sensitivies and predilections – asks the acute question as to whether categorizing troops on active service as ‘victims’ or ‘potential victims’ doesn’t undermine any examination of military operations at all.
Because it is an axiom of victimism that ‘the victim cannot be doubted or questioned’ and that to do any such doubting or questioning is to ‘re-victimize the victim all over again’.
But if the government now tries to cover its activities under the mantle of ‘victimization’ – and using the troops themselves as ‘fronts’ like a bank-robber trying to get out of a surrounded bank by holding hostages in front of herself – then effectively and for all practical purposes We are back to Woodrow Wilson’s insistence that NOBODY, not even the Citizens and The People, can question the actions of the Federal government.
And THIS in the context of Our current hugely dubious and failing national military misadventures – which are themselves possibly in contravention of every principle established at Nuremberg and even Westphalia .
Assange states that “he is all for ‘victim protection’ but soldiers, as he sees it, represent the national security state”. Which is hardly a surprising revelation, except perhaps to a lot of Americans.
O’Hagan doesn’t get into it, but there is also the huge and ignored elephant-in-the-middle-of-the-room Question: has the government victimized its own troops (and on Our authority) by sending them into such a frakkulently mis-conceived, mis-justified, mis-conducted set of wars to begin with? Is the government the Prime Victimizer in all of this?
I’m not sure where O’Hagan stands on this, but he acknowledges with what seems a personal note that “Some of us believe that soldiers are basically poor guys from Blackpool [a poor English city] who aspire to a better life but don’t have many options. Some victims wear battle-fatigues”.
I can see where he’s coming from here and it’s not inaccurate or unjust of him to make the point.
But there’s also the problem that these “guys” (and upon them be peace) are now in the position of having to find a life by signing up to conduct invasive and preventive wars, military occupations, and God-knows what horrific duties or – alas – malfeasances that, on top of frakkulent strategic blunders and government deceptions, condemn them not only to the risk of physical maiming but place them on what can only be charitably described as ‘the moral low-ground’.
THIS is the core problem, and Wikileaks isn’t the cause of it. Government is. The very same government that now wants to somehow suppress the news about what’s been going on ‘over there’.
This is a moral catastrophe that screams to heaven – even before you factor in the consequences and effects rained upon the human beings and populations caught in the middle ‘over there’ (upon whom be peace).
Of course, given that Politically Correct doctrine refuses to admit the possibility of any dimensions of human existence that could be described as ‘moral’ or ‘Moral’, then We are all in the position – and not simply in terms of military operations – of having brought a knife to the proverbial gunfight. We are being battered on a dimension of the ‘battlespace’ that We don’t’ even know exists.**
Funny how the Cosmic night moves.
Lastly, O’Hagan refers to one of those types (linked-to in O’Hagan’s piece) whom perhaps might best be characterized – and with no gender disrespect intended – in Victorian terms as “kept women”: ‘thinkers’ employed by lobbyist ‘think tanks’ precisely to provide intellectual cover or grounds for whatever ideological position they are paid to shill. This particular fellow (it could as easily have been a woman) brays and bleats that Wikileaks has “muddied the waters between journalism and activism” and with “little regard for the hard moral choices and dearth of good policy options facing decision makers”.
Phooey.
First, this is the exact type of thing that with Daniel Ellsberg’s release of the so-called ‘Pentagon Papers’ in 1971, mainstream journalism mostly leaped upon as being indeed a very valid exercise of the officium of “a free press”. Something has gone verrrrry wrong subsequently (see my thoughts above) since American journalism no longer sees its role as digging up vital and accurate information to be provided to The People.
Second, “moral choices” is a tad insufficient here. A choice for an immoral action is not most accurately characterized as a “moral choice” … while you were originally confronted with a choice in the moral realm, the choice you actually chose was immoral, and thus the actual essence of what you finally did choose to do is best characterized as ‘immoral’. (Precisely, by the by, the type of gambit many say is now ingrained into liberal-progressive praxis through the efforts to ‘spin’ abortion, by odd coincidence.)
The Correct come-back to this, of course, is that ‘my’ morality is not the same as ‘your’ morality so if I think it’s ‘moral’ then there’s nothing you can rightly say about what I do. But then what is morality based upon that would make it Morality, i.e. a capital letter concept that has compelling universal validity as a guide to human action?***
And if there is no such Morality, then what remains to distinguish doing the ‘moral’ thing from doing-what-I-want?
And if governments can do what they want then … what’s left to judge them and their actions? Was the only reason that the Nuremberg trials were held that the Allies had won the war and thus could physically enforce their Way of looking at things? If the Nazis had won, and they and all Germans mostly agreed that what the Third Reich had done was moral, then would that mean that what they did was indeed ‘moral’? (This is what happens when you try to anchor Morality in the human dimension itself; you can’t establish an Archimedean Point within the quantum that you’re trying to lift – you need to establish it outside of – or ‘beyond’ or ‘Beyond’ – the quantum that you’re trying to lift or you’re simply going to tip yourself over disastrously when you start applying pressure on the machinery – as the Engineers saith.)
Third, if there is indeed now such a “dearth of good choices” then HOW did We come to this terrible pass? And I don’t pose this question to try to assign blame as much as to assert that whatever was done to lead to this pass may still be a dynamic factor in the continuation of this frakkish situation and We need to know what’s going on under-the-surface (see Note ** below about the Long Lance torpedo).
I still say that there is a future in this country for The People as conceived at the Framing, and that there are enough folks still capable of mature and deliberative thought (despite decades of government-empowered efforts to Dilute same) to justify getting real information out to The People.
While there is still time.
NOTES
*You will find clear echoes of this in Martha Nussbaum’s recent philosophizing in support of Identity Politics: that ‘majoritarian’ interests must not be allowed to interfere with ‘minority’ ‘rights’ – widely and vaguely defined. Thus, she asserts, ‘politics’ and democracy must not be allowed to interfere with the ‘rights’ agenda she wants the courts to impose and enforce (apparently she senses that legislators – shades of Autumn 1944! – are beginning to get a little nervous and are starting to think about ‘consequences’).
**An analogy from World War 2: the Japanese early developed the Type 93 ‘Long Lance’ torpedo, which could travel three times the distance of American torpedoes, packed twice the explosive power, and was fueled in such a way that the thing left no tell-tale trail of bubbles on the surface that would betray its path. Thus, for quite some time, American warships were taking defensive measures that presumed Japanese torpedoes operated within the same parameters as American torpedoes, and were being hit, holed, having their entire bows blown off, or sunk by what American naval commanders assumed must be mines or un-detected submarines. Meanwhile, Japanese warships and submarines could stay well outside the too-small American detection and protection screens, and blow up capital ships with unnerving accuracy and frequency. And for quite a while, the Americans didn’t even know what they were actually up against.
Or again: imagine that immediately upon hitting the berg, Titanic’s command staff ordered all the passengers locked below decks, and told them that things weren’t so bad and if everybody would simply ‘stay positive’ and perhaps pray (you can’t suggest this nowadays) then everything would be OK; the only thing to fear was fear itself (with all respect to FDR, whose use of the phrase was apt in 1933, but not today). Folks would thus continue their activities, perhaps with increasing reliance on champagne or rot-gut likker (depending on your Class) to dull the sick-making awareness that things were increasingly not-on-the-level.
***For the philosophically-minded: the Correct come-back to this point is that John Stuart Mill said that you can do anything you want to do as long as it doesn’t harm anybody else.
This was Mill’s way of trying to preserve the widest individual liberty, yet maintain the coherence or reliability of human society, while simultaneously NOT involving God or any metaphysical principles (Mill was a good Liberal, after all).
But while his effort looks good on first glance, it won’t float once out of the constructor’s dock and into the water. He’s forced to adopt a verrrrry narrow definition of ‘harm’: an act of ‘harm’ has to be clearly established as such and it has to become manifest quickly enough to justify or indict the person who perpetrated it.
BUT a) you therefore have to restrict your definition of ‘harm’ to something which can be established as such. There are dimensions of existence – the moral, the spiritual, the psychological – where ‘harm’ cannot be easily established, leading your theory to either i) overlook large swaths of harmful action or ii) accept what amounts to ‘spectral evidence’ as ‘proof’ of an alleged ‘harm’ (this is the gambit that Victimism has tried to enshrine: if the allegedly harmed person says s/he has been harmed, then that claim must be accepted as true even though there is no way to independently corroborate the claim).
And b) you have to presume that all harmful consequences will make themselves manifest in a short-enough period of time after the alleged harm has been perpetrated. But some consequences might not manifest for quite some time. An action that might not seem harmful in the time-period X after the act has been committed, might manifest harmful effects in the time-period X-plus-Y.
I’d also add here that Mill must restrict himself to non-metaphysical harms, since his theory does not admit the relevance or existence of the metaphysical plane. But suppose that all humans are linked in a great Web of emotional or mental or spiritual bonds; if THAT is so, then an action perpetrated by one person might indeed radiate out to have harmful consequences – much as if on a very large waterbed, the action of one person in one corner of the mattress would be radiated out to impact upon all the persons on the mattress.
And that’s without bringing God or His commandments or Morality into it.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Saturday, August 21, 2010
WIKILEAKS AND THE SO MANIA
HOW EASY IT IS
I apologize for putting up two Posts almost within minutes of each other but I think it’s important.
Early today I came across a story that the Founder of Wiki-Leaks – the folks who published documents exposing the failing US military effort in Afghanistan – had been accused of a sex offense (and rape, at that) and that Swedish prosecutors had issued a warrant for his arrest. By lunchtime a breaking story reported that the warrant had been withdrawn as baseless.
You can see this link for the story and this link for a shorter piece that has several useful internal links.
It stuns to see how quickly this trip-wire Sex Offense Mania regime can be deployed against anybody whom the US government finds to be ‘problematic’. If nothing else will stick, call him a Sex Offender.
I apologize for putting up two Posts almost within minutes of each other but I think it’s important.
Early today I came across a story that the Founder of Wiki-Leaks – the folks who published documents exposing the failing US military effort in Afghanistan – had been accused of a sex offense (and rape, at that) and that Swedish prosecutors had issued a warrant for his arrest. By lunchtime a breaking story reported that the warrant had been withdrawn as baseless.
You can see this link for the story and this link for a shorter piece that has several useful internal links.
It stuns to see how quickly this trip-wire Sex Offense Mania regime can be deployed against anybody whom the US government finds to be ‘problematic’. If nothing else will stick, call him a Sex Offender.
SO COMMUNITY AND PRIEST ABUSE
COLM TOIBIN AND THE POPE
I Posted this on my other site, but I think it might be of some interest here again as well.
I’ve Posted on this before* but the material now comes (with a new twist but still the same gravamen) in a book review by the Irish author Colm Toibin and in no less a venue than ‘The London Review of Books’, so I am going to briefly say it all again, with some attention to the new twist.
Toibin is setting himself a difficult task in this review of a book entitled “The Pope Is Not Gay”: he has to keep his liberal-progressive creds by going along with their agenda, while also adding this new spin of being ‘gay-positive’.
The ‘gay-positive’ bit means that he has taken it upon himself to somehow make ‘gay clergy’ not-look like the folks responsible for all the sex-abuse (and in this I agree with him and support him) while also making gays – even gays in the priesthood, even ‘active’ gays in the priesthood – look good in and of themselves.
It makes for some interesting twists and turns.
The first point, then, is to point out the massive and fatal incoherence in the liberal-progressive agenda: using the ‘sex abuse crisis’ (with or without the ‘gay’ bit) as a reason for doing away with both clerical celibacy and a male-only priesthood in the Catholic Church.
Serious sex-offense studies have established that a huge percentage of all child sex-abuse occurs in families, perpetrated by family members or relatives; much less than 10 percent is perpetrated by the now-classic cartoon of the ‘slavering and monstrous and incorrigible stranger’.
Therefore, the liberal-progressive effort to propose a married clergy is not only inaccurately grounded but also – in light of the actual known dynamics and demographics of sex-abusing – places a child in more rather than less danger.
Whether a non-male clergy, married or otherwise, might be any ‘safer’ would depend on just how much females engage in sex abuse, whether they are straight or lesbian. Curiously, there is little statistical information to go on here; nobody seems to be tracking it, although all the male-related possibilities in sex-abusing are heavily explored in the research.
Which segues rather quickly into his derisive recitation of the many comments by Church functionaries and supporters that the Catholic Church is being somehow singled-out. I can’t see how you can avoid that conclusion: the presumption of sex-offending in its classic formulation is that all males are prone to this (indeed some radical-feminist thought holds that all sex is rape and all males are potential – and probably ‘probable’ – rapists simply by virtue of their sex-drive).
Yet little coverage, comparatively speaking, is given to clergy of other faiths, or to such other functionaries as teachers, counselors, and assorted care-providers.
The reasons for this ‘singling-out’ no doubt range along a spectrum: outside the Church, the liberal-progressives are engaged in a major struggle to either supplant or at least discredit the Church’s moral stands against such major elements of the lib-prog agenda as abortion, the sanctity of marriage, the importance of the Family, and in general a stubborn bearing witness to the authoritative role of any Higher Law or Law-giver, the authority of Which (or Whom) can stand in judgment on human laws and practices.
The Rightist, nation-worshipping Fundamentalists (more or less Protestant) seek to supplant the Church’s moral authority as it stands against ‘preventive war’, torture, and many other elements that have now become Standard Operating Procedure by a government that in the Fundamentalist view is pretty much God’s Deputy and therefore authorized by Him to ‘do whatever it takes’ and to do so with His full support and approval.
Within the Church there is a strong ‘liberal’ (as the term is used nowadays) tendency against celibacy, against males as priests, and against hierarchy in general. (Although whether such an aversion would survive if a Popess were to be on the Throne of Peter is an interesting question.)
So, given the confluence and synergy of both Leftish and Rightish objectives, inside and outside the Church, you can see that there is more than enough richly-manured earth from which a selective focus on the Catholic priesthood and hierarchy might indeed spring.
As always, I am NOT saying here that no sex-abuse (however that term is defined) occurred NOR am I trying to smuggle in any sort of approval for the imposition of sexual-experience on any human being by any other human being.
With Church supporters, there are – as Toibin notes and quotes – ‘conservative’ or ‘traditional’ elements who insist that the whole problem stems from ‘gays’ in the priesthood. And – queasily – there are some in the hierarchy who are quite happy to go along with this ‘explanation’ if for no other reason than to offer up some sacrificial lambs to stave off further incidents of the aforementioned selective obloquy. In fact, you might almost say that some hierarchs are trying to use the gay-clerics much as Chamberlain used the Czechs: as sort of an appeasement to the monster, acceptable collateral damage because – and this was feculently untrue even when Chamberlain uttered the phrase – they were “a people of whom we know little”.
The Catholic priesthood, as Toibin notes and quotes, has a rather substantial gay contingent. He observes that in his own experience he saw a large number of what he describes – very nicely and vividly – as “male flutterers” who were given to doing a lot of “male fluttering”, swanning about with swishy and sequined vestments.
Indeed, in a nice by-the-by, he lets it be known that when in the mid-2000s the Archbishop of the US military forces conducted, on orders from Rome, a serious survey of American seminaries, he reported that anywhere from a quarter to a half of all seminarians and priests were gay (whether ‘out’ or ‘closeted’ is left un-discussed by Toibin). I don’t know how much of the Sisterhood (the nuns, that is) is lesbian, and that matter wasn’t examined … a point I raise here only to note that a female priesthood might well include quite a few ‘gays’ itself.
Anyhoo, Toibin then gets on to the current Pope and to the hierarchy. He reports himself shocked, shocked, that whereas in 1991 he observed mostly nuns helping prelates take their liturgical vestments off at large religious events, more recently he has noted that it is mostly good-looking males attending to the prelates.
This is a stretch that exposes a queasy elasticity. If there are gays in the Church they were surely there in the early 1990s. Indeed, he quotes one highly-placed Church source as saying that such stuff has been “going on for centuries”. So Toibin’s effort here to establish his creds as one of the Shocked is too much of a muchness.
It’s true that there are stories alleging that the late Cardinal-Archbishop of New York, Spellman – much like his contemporary Lavrentiy Beria, head of the NKVD and Commissar for Internal Affairs under Stalin – used to troll the city streets late at night in his official limo; the difference being that the Commissar was looking for young girls.
Which might put paid to any fantasies – however pious – of a Golden Age when all priests were Bing Crosby or Barry Fitzgerald (also contemporaries of the Cardinal-Archbishop).
I have no definite information on the late Cardinal-Archbishop. And while just about any excuse would have done to justify the erasure of Stalinist Communism from the earth, I don’t recall anybody suggesting the erasure of the US Congress or the Pentagon when this or that Member or official is entangled in sexual crimes or misadventures.
But Toibin is going for the gayness-of-the-hierarchy here, as part of his effort to not-disapprove of even those gay priests who consider themselves “more free to consult their consciences and break the rules of celibacy should they see fit”. Which he apparently considers a laudable exercise of conscience and individual freedom.
So, building on his ‘1991’ trope, he observes that even the current Pope himself has a stunningly handsome younger friend, a 40-ish priest from the same part of Bavaria as the Pope himself. I’m not sure about the “handsome” part; one man’s handsome is another man’s ‘beefy’, and surely the classic Enlightenment image of male beauty – that florid, well-fed type bursting out of its satin breeches – proves that beauty is in the eye of the beholding era.
Two points come to mind though.
First, it’s an established point in military history that generals have often chosen good-looking young officers as their aides-de-camp. Grant had one such on his staff, and Shelby Foote recounts a story of Lee playfully pulling down toward his cot a young aide who had come in with a late-night message from some commander on the front lines. I am making no innuendoes about Grant or Lee or anybody else in that rank and capacity, but it seems to be a typical human trait to enjoy the presence of physical beauty, especially youthful, in any form, especially by older members of the species.
Second, there is that under-appreciated (and highly ‘transgressive’) possibility that the Greeks considered females insufficient soul-mates for an adult male, who required the close companionship of another adult male for such soul-sharing. (The sex stuff was only between teens and early 20-year-olds, perhaps as a sage nod to the fact that among the young, biology pretty much dictates some form of sensual element to any relationship.)
Were the Greeks accurate in their surmise as to soul-mates? Was their ‘solution’ effective? Questions too big for me to resolve, but to suggest or imply that the Pope must be gay because he has a close and younger male friend (half his age, but with the Pope at 80-plus a friend half his age is still well into adulthood) does not at all convince.
But Toibin also notes that the Pope favors Prada for the red leather pumps required to go with the white-cassock that is his uniform of the day. Yes, some types of gays – and Imelda Marcos – are into the lotsa-shoes thing, but unless the Pope has a hundred or so pairs of pumps in an expensive closet where he retires to admire them late at night, I’m not impressed by the ‘evidence’.
And for that matter, the Pope may simply have the typically Germanic concern for good uniforms. Teddy Roosevelt, let’s not forget, prepared for the rigors of field command in the Spanish-American War by ordering a specially-designed uniform from Brooks Brothers, with very picky instructions on quality of cut and tailoring and on the amount of gold-bullion and rank insignia and so forth. And most gentleman officers of the era did exactly the same thing. And who can forget George Armstrong Custer with his personally-designed uniform that featured gold braid up to his elbows? Grant, in contrast, was a model of sartorial sobriety – although there was the matter of the youthy aide-de-camp. And Sherman, come to think of it, was said to become notably goo-goo in the presence of early-adolescent females visiting with their parents. And Lee had both gold-braid up to his elbows (as did all Confederate officers) and that come-to-my-cot moment. Go figure.
It is repulsive that Toibin would use as a closing flourish the statement to the effect that Alas, it hurts and stuns to think that “many of us who were brought up in the Church now know that we once listened to sermons about how to conduct our lives from men who were child molesters”. Yet even at the height of the 3rd Phase of the Catholic Sex Abuse Crisis (initiated in early January 2002) the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, in its official Report on the matter, could only point to 4 percent of all the priests in the United States who were accused of some form or other of the widely-elastic ‘sex abuse’, and the vast majority of putative victims were not children even at the time of the alleged incidents.
And this was with a stampede-driven loosening of rules of evidence and statutory limitations and other classical legal protections. Nor can one presume that all were guilty, since there were very few trials (such as could be fairly conducted under the conditions imposed) and many hierarchs took the prudent way out by simply settling civilly with huge amounts of cash to forestall the even greater expense of individual trials for each accused priest (those, that is, still alive).
So I don’t think that a whole lot of Catholics grew up learning their religion from “child molesters”.
Lastly, he covers the conventional ground conventionally, claiming that Ratzinger’s refusal to prosecute a priest who was close to death (and subsequently died) for child sex abuse offenses is proof-positive of a cover-up. I don’t think that would stand as the primary or only motivation for such a decision: after all, when you are firmly convinced that a) there is a God and that b) He will judge far more surely than any earthly court, and that c) given the certainty of (a) and (b) there is little to be gained from subjecting an old man’s dying-time to an ecclesiastical trial for matters that happened long before, especially when – again in light of (a) and (b) – the old gentleman is going to be facing a Judge far beyond (to use Lincoln’s phrase) “our poor power to add or detract”.
But this of course reveals the darkness at the heart of so much of this abuse-crisis material: somehow the existence of God and Judgment and Hell doesn’t seem to be an operative factor in the views or calculations of an awful lot of the folks who otherwise claim themselves such good Catholics.
There are many possibilities for that fact, but I leave those in your capable hands.
NOTE
*See, for example, here, here, and here.
I Posted this on my other site, but I think it might be of some interest here again as well.
I’ve Posted on this before* but the material now comes (with a new twist but still the same gravamen) in a book review by the Irish author Colm Toibin and in no less a venue than ‘The London Review of Books’, so I am going to briefly say it all again, with some attention to the new twist.
Toibin is setting himself a difficult task in this review of a book entitled “The Pope Is Not Gay”: he has to keep his liberal-progressive creds by going along with their agenda, while also adding this new spin of being ‘gay-positive’.
The ‘gay-positive’ bit means that he has taken it upon himself to somehow make ‘gay clergy’ not-look like the folks responsible for all the sex-abuse (and in this I agree with him and support him) while also making gays – even gays in the priesthood, even ‘active’ gays in the priesthood – look good in and of themselves.
It makes for some interesting twists and turns.
The first point, then, is to point out the massive and fatal incoherence in the liberal-progressive agenda: using the ‘sex abuse crisis’ (with or without the ‘gay’ bit) as a reason for doing away with both clerical celibacy and a male-only priesthood in the Catholic Church.
Serious sex-offense studies have established that a huge percentage of all child sex-abuse occurs in families, perpetrated by family members or relatives; much less than 10 percent is perpetrated by the now-classic cartoon of the ‘slavering and monstrous and incorrigible stranger’.
Therefore, the liberal-progressive effort to propose a married clergy is not only inaccurately grounded but also – in light of the actual known dynamics and demographics of sex-abusing – places a child in more rather than less danger.
Whether a non-male clergy, married or otherwise, might be any ‘safer’ would depend on just how much females engage in sex abuse, whether they are straight or lesbian. Curiously, there is little statistical information to go on here; nobody seems to be tracking it, although all the male-related possibilities in sex-abusing are heavily explored in the research.
Which segues rather quickly into his derisive recitation of the many comments by Church functionaries and supporters that the Catholic Church is being somehow singled-out. I can’t see how you can avoid that conclusion: the presumption of sex-offending in its classic formulation is that all males are prone to this (indeed some radical-feminist thought holds that all sex is rape and all males are potential – and probably ‘probable’ – rapists simply by virtue of their sex-drive).
Yet little coverage, comparatively speaking, is given to clergy of other faiths, or to such other functionaries as teachers, counselors, and assorted care-providers.
The reasons for this ‘singling-out’ no doubt range along a spectrum: outside the Church, the liberal-progressives are engaged in a major struggle to either supplant or at least discredit the Church’s moral stands against such major elements of the lib-prog agenda as abortion, the sanctity of marriage, the importance of the Family, and in general a stubborn bearing witness to the authoritative role of any Higher Law or Law-giver, the authority of Which (or Whom) can stand in judgment on human laws and practices.
The Rightist, nation-worshipping Fundamentalists (more or less Protestant) seek to supplant the Church’s moral authority as it stands against ‘preventive war’, torture, and many other elements that have now become Standard Operating Procedure by a government that in the Fundamentalist view is pretty much God’s Deputy and therefore authorized by Him to ‘do whatever it takes’ and to do so with His full support and approval.
Within the Church there is a strong ‘liberal’ (as the term is used nowadays) tendency against celibacy, against males as priests, and against hierarchy in general. (Although whether such an aversion would survive if a Popess were to be on the Throne of Peter is an interesting question.)
So, given the confluence and synergy of both Leftish and Rightish objectives, inside and outside the Church, you can see that there is more than enough richly-manured earth from which a selective focus on the Catholic priesthood and hierarchy might indeed spring.
As always, I am NOT saying here that no sex-abuse (however that term is defined) occurred NOR am I trying to smuggle in any sort of approval for the imposition of sexual-experience on any human being by any other human being.
With Church supporters, there are – as Toibin notes and quotes – ‘conservative’ or ‘traditional’ elements who insist that the whole problem stems from ‘gays’ in the priesthood. And – queasily – there are some in the hierarchy who are quite happy to go along with this ‘explanation’ if for no other reason than to offer up some sacrificial lambs to stave off further incidents of the aforementioned selective obloquy. In fact, you might almost say that some hierarchs are trying to use the gay-clerics much as Chamberlain used the Czechs: as sort of an appeasement to the monster, acceptable collateral damage because – and this was feculently untrue even when Chamberlain uttered the phrase – they were “a people of whom we know little”.
The Catholic priesthood, as Toibin notes and quotes, has a rather substantial gay contingent. He observes that in his own experience he saw a large number of what he describes – very nicely and vividly – as “male flutterers” who were given to doing a lot of “male fluttering”, swanning about with swishy and sequined vestments.
Indeed, in a nice by-the-by, he lets it be known that when in the mid-2000s the Archbishop of the US military forces conducted, on orders from Rome, a serious survey of American seminaries, he reported that anywhere from a quarter to a half of all seminarians and priests were gay (whether ‘out’ or ‘closeted’ is left un-discussed by Toibin). I don’t know how much of the Sisterhood (the nuns, that is) is lesbian, and that matter wasn’t examined … a point I raise here only to note that a female priesthood might well include quite a few ‘gays’ itself.
Anyhoo, Toibin then gets on to the current Pope and to the hierarchy. He reports himself shocked, shocked, that whereas in 1991 he observed mostly nuns helping prelates take their liturgical vestments off at large religious events, more recently he has noted that it is mostly good-looking males attending to the prelates.
This is a stretch that exposes a queasy elasticity. If there are gays in the Church they were surely there in the early 1990s. Indeed, he quotes one highly-placed Church source as saying that such stuff has been “going on for centuries”. So Toibin’s effort here to establish his creds as one of the Shocked is too much of a muchness.
It’s true that there are stories alleging that the late Cardinal-Archbishop of New York, Spellman – much like his contemporary Lavrentiy Beria, head of the NKVD and Commissar for Internal Affairs under Stalin – used to troll the city streets late at night in his official limo; the difference being that the Commissar was looking for young girls.
Which might put paid to any fantasies – however pious – of a Golden Age when all priests were Bing Crosby or Barry Fitzgerald (also contemporaries of the Cardinal-Archbishop).
I have no definite information on the late Cardinal-Archbishop. And while just about any excuse would have done to justify the erasure of Stalinist Communism from the earth, I don’t recall anybody suggesting the erasure of the US Congress or the Pentagon when this or that Member or official is entangled in sexual crimes or misadventures.
But Toibin is going for the gayness-of-the-hierarchy here, as part of his effort to not-disapprove of even those gay priests who consider themselves “more free to consult their consciences and break the rules of celibacy should they see fit”. Which he apparently considers a laudable exercise of conscience and individual freedom.
So, building on his ‘1991’ trope, he observes that even the current Pope himself has a stunningly handsome younger friend, a 40-ish priest from the same part of Bavaria as the Pope himself. I’m not sure about the “handsome” part; one man’s handsome is another man’s ‘beefy’, and surely the classic Enlightenment image of male beauty – that florid, well-fed type bursting out of its satin breeches – proves that beauty is in the eye of the beholding era.
Two points come to mind though.
First, it’s an established point in military history that generals have often chosen good-looking young officers as their aides-de-camp. Grant had one such on his staff, and Shelby Foote recounts a story of Lee playfully pulling down toward his cot a young aide who had come in with a late-night message from some commander on the front lines. I am making no innuendoes about Grant or Lee or anybody else in that rank and capacity, but it seems to be a typical human trait to enjoy the presence of physical beauty, especially youthful, in any form, especially by older members of the species.
Second, there is that under-appreciated (and highly ‘transgressive’) possibility that the Greeks considered females insufficient soul-mates for an adult male, who required the close companionship of another adult male for such soul-sharing. (The sex stuff was only between teens and early 20-year-olds, perhaps as a sage nod to the fact that among the young, biology pretty much dictates some form of sensual element to any relationship.)
Were the Greeks accurate in their surmise as to soul-mates? Was their ‘solution’ effective? Questions too big for me to resolve, but to suggest or imply that the Pope must be gay because he has a close and younger male friend (half his age, but with the Pope at 80-plus a friend half his age is still well into adulthood) does not at all convince.
But Toibin also notes that the Pope favors Prada for the red leather pumps required to go with the white-cassock that is his uniform of the day. Yes, some types of gays – and Imelda Marcos – are into the lotsa-shoes thing, but unless the Pope has a hundred or so pairs of pumps in an expensive closet where he retires to admire them late at night, I’m not impressed by the ‘evidence’.
And for that matter, the Pope may simply have the typically Germanic concern for good uniforms. Teddy Roosevelt, let’s not forget, prepared for the rigors of field command in the Spanish-American War by ordering a specially-designed uniform from Brooks Brothers, with very picky instructions on quality of cut and tailoring and on the amount of gold-bullion and rank insignia and so forth. And most gentleman officers of the era did exactly the same thing. And who can forget George Armstrong Custer with his personally-designed uniform that featured gold braid up to his elbows? Grant, in contrast, was a model of sartorial sobriety – although there was the matter of the youthy aide-de-camp. And Sherman, come to think of it, was said to become notably goo-goo in the presence of early-adolescent females visiting with their parents. And Lee had both gold-braid up to his elbows (as did all Confederate officers) and that come-to-my-cot moment. Go figure.
It is repulsive that Toibin would use as a closing flourish the statement to the effect that Alas, it hurts and stuns to think that “many of us who were brought up in the Church now know that we once listened to sermons about how to conduct our lives from men who were child molesters”. Yet even at the height of the 3rd Phase of the Catholic Sex Abuse Crisis (initiated in early January 2002) the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, in its official Report on the matter, could only point to 4 percent of all the priests in the United States who were accused of some form or other of the widely-elastic ‘sex abuse’, and the vast majority of putative victims were not children even at the time of the alleged incidents.
And this was with a stampede-driven loosening of rules of evidence and statutory limitations and other classical legal protections. Nor can one presume that all were guilty, since there were very few trials (such as could be fairly conducted under the conditions imposed) and many hierarchs took the prudent way out by simply settling civilly with huge amounts of cash to forestall the even greater expense of individual trials for each accused priest (those, that is, still alive).
So I don’t think that a whole lot of Catholics grew up learning their religion from “child molesters”.
Lastly, he covers the conventional ground conventionally, claiming that Ratzinger’s refusal to prosecute a priest who was close to death (and subsequently died) for child sex abuse offenses is proof-positive of a cover-up. I don’t think that would stand as the primary or only motivation for such a decision: after all, when you are firmly convinced that a) there is a God and that b) He will judge far more surely than any earthly court, and that c) given the certainty of (a) and (b) there is little to be gained from subjecting an old man’s dying-time to an ecclesiastical trial for matters that happened long before, especially when – again in light of (a) and (b) – the old gentleman is going to be facing a Judge far beyond (to use Lincoln’s phrase) “our poor power to add or detract”.
But this of course reveals the darkness at the heart of so much of this abuse-crisis material: somehow the existence of God and Judgment and Hell doesn’t seem to be an operative factor in the views or calculations of an awful lot of the folks who otherwise claim themselves such good Catholics.
There are many possibilities for that fact, but I leave those in your capable hands.
NOTE
*See, for example, here, here, and here.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
VICTIMOLOGY 5
Elias tries hard to objectively and comprehensively examine the ‘victimization’ issue – when, that is, he hasn’t got his ‘advocacy’ hat on instead.
He discusses ‘Shaping Public Opinion’ (p.40) and here it’s sobering to realize that he’s writing in 1986, less than half a decade before the first official steps in the SO Mania regime.
“What forces shape [public] opinion?” he asks. (p.40)
While noting “neighborhood networks” and word-of-mouth, he insightfully opines that the “fundamental sources might lie considerably deeper in the American consciousness” and that Americans might “unwittingly absorb them. He quotes – with impressive objectivity – the then-popular conservative commentator and writer Russell Baker, who observes that in a trip across America the place seemed to him “a booby-hatch for the criminally insane” because there were “campaigning politicians clamoring for use of the electric chair, the gallows, or the gas chambers as devices for restoring public civility” and that “everywhere one was confronted with … a national obsession for more … security” and that houses often had guard-company warning placards stuck in their front lawns and that “very little of this ‘security’ existed 20 years ago [i.e. in the 1950s] but now it is a national passion”. (p.40)
Two large American social trends seem relevant here. First, the Boomers – that huge birth cohort – were blossoming into their teens in the 1960s, and precisely as – second – society and culture were ‘loosening up’ under the pressure of the failing ‘adult’ performance in the Vietnam, the ‘cultural revolution’ spirit that seemed to be succeeding so gloriously in Mao’s youth-based Cultural Revolution, the excitements and agitations loosed by the Civil Rights Movement, and by the general Boomer rejection of ‘grown-up conformity’ in favor of Luv and Change.
And this was all BEFORE the 1970s saw the first steps in the actual Deconstruction of American culture and society (family and parent-guided, white, working-class, industrial, and ‘male’) under the pressure of a more organized ‘revolutionary advocacy’ – adopted almost whole-hog by the Beltway in its desperate pursuit of sustainable electoral viability.
A citizenry that had gotten through the 1950s ‘Cold War’ with just the occasional craze for backyard bomb-shelters was far more addled by the prospect of domestic criminality and anti-social behavior. Not surprising, when you think about it, but nobody realized at the time just how much the government was not only surfing the waves of this anxiety but was actually stoking those waves.
Elias even allows himself to wonder if “in addition to crime causing an obsession with security, an obsession with security might also cause crime”. (p.40) And yet what isn’t so clearly noticed a possibility is that the government would actually seek to stoke such an obsession for ‘security’ from ‘crime’.
And don’t forget: this is before the radical-feminist movement managed to get the Beltway’s acquiescence in declaring the American home as the nation’s largest ‘crime scene’ and the nation’s fathers as the nation’s largest body of incorrigible and un-reported perps. Even as the actual crime rate was declining.
Elias notes that other socialization forces than social networks are active in shaping public opinion: officials, educators, professionals, researchers, commissioners (I can’t quite figure that one), are among those who also shape attitudes.
Ominously – though the point seems lost on him – he immediately opines that “their views might actually be similar and reinforcing”. (p.41) I think what he means here is that the views of all those types might BE MADE TO BE similar and reinforcing; and if you as an ‘advocacy’ could do that (the Beltway’s sustained and clear support would be a big help) then you could take a huge step toward ‘shaping’ public opinion. And as I have often mentioned, since the days of Josef Goebbels, the line between ‘shaping’ and ‘manipulating’ public opinion has become verrrrry blurred indeed.
But “perhaps the greatest influence … comes from the mass media”, since it is a “mediator between the government and the public” that “substantially (and selectively) conveys and translates official statistics and statements into public perceptions”. (p.41)
Notice the conflict in approach: Elias adds that “(and selectively)” fully aware as an objective observer that the media don’t always tell it like it is; yet of course as an ‘advocate’ he is going to want to take advantage of that very characteristic.
You also notice that the media here are not envisioned as the Constitutionally-envisioned ‘watchdog’ over the government, the traditional American justification for a ‘free press’. Rather, it is a ‘mediator’ – sort of an unofficial government mimeograph and stenography organization – which, if they have secured great influence over the government, any dedicated ‘advocates’ will want to make full use of.
Surely what Elias sees in 1986 came to awful fruition less than 5 years later: Happily raking in bucks with sensationalist (and very ‘selective’) recounting of ‘stories’, the media merely amplified the ‘findings’ that the Beltway decided to make under the influence and pressure of the concerted victimist advocacies.
But Elias is truly tormented here. He legitimately bemoans the “sensationalized, misleading, and often inaccurate cover stories” of such major organs as ‘Time’, ‘U.S. News and World Report’, ‘The New York Times Magazine’ and ABC’s TV series ‘Crime in America’. He accurately observes that “the problems are many”. (p.41)
But, being a committed Victimologist, his concern is only that the government is limiting itself to “seven ‘index’ crimes”, and not expanding its definitions to cover the vast body of un-reported and under-reported ‘crime’ – that alleged ‘dark figure’ – and all the concomitant ‘victimization’. In other words, he’s bothered NOT actually by all this ‘sensationalism’ BUT RATHER that all the ‘sensationalism’ and ‘inaccuracy’ is too narrowly based on a few ‘traditionally-defined’ crimes, rather than on the vast unruly and dark ocean of as-yet-unacknowledged victimizations (and – necessarily – the ‘crimes’ that cause them).
And, by the oddest coincidence, within a few years there arose the Domestic Violence regime – based on the amazingly rapid re-visioning of the American Home and Family as the nation’s most vicious and frequent crime scene – and the Sex Offender Mania regime – based on the assumption that ‘men’ are incorrigible and predatory sexual assaulters and must be tagged and confined as such.
He bemoans how the media so often “sensationalize” crime, “pandering more to unique angles than to reality”. As an example he notes that “stories about bailed or paroled prisoners who commit murders … provide ‘good copy’ yet these situations rarely happen.” (p.41) Within a few years – and I’m not saying Elias consciously envisioned it – the American scene would erupt with the stranger-sex-offender sensationalism, on which rare and mushy basis the SORNA regime was justified (as so often, you can re-read the 1995 New Jersey Supreme Court Poritz Opinion to see how it all played out).
Remarkably, he singles out offending phrases that had become media mantras: “the curse of violent crime is rampant”, “we live in a reign of terror”, “our attackers are increasingly brutal marauders”, they are “mean, antisocial people with macho complexes”, and that “we have been held hostage to the irrational acts of a relatively small cadre of career criminals”. (p.41)
We know him well enough to realize that what’s upsetting him is that all the public ‘opinion’ is being wrongly (in his view) focused on just a few ‘traditionally defined’ crimes. But within a few years these handy media mantras will be applied in both the Domestic Violence and Sex Offender regimes.
Although, neatly and soooo selectively, that last bit about “a relatively small cadre of career criminals” will be re-jiggered to be a huge bunch of incorrigible (but still ‘macho’ and therefore ‘male’) lifelong criminal whackos. In the lurid Beltway kitchens, the committees of pols and ‘advocates’ will make certain changes to Elias’s recipe-book, with results that are now, finally, becoming undeniably clear.
He even bemoans the mantra that considers “plea bargaining as threatening justice-for-the-victim”. (p.42) That isn’t going to sit well with the American crime-focused variant of Victimology: the advocates of that approach will indeed consider that plea-bargaining is just such a threat, although they will also consider due-process Constitutional protections as nothing but ‘obstructions’ that provide ‘cover’ to perps. (In case you ever wondered where the Bush-Cheney team got the idea by 2002 that the Constitution was “quaint”.)
Now plea-bargaining is indeed a threat to the integrity of the justice system as well as to the Constitutional rights of the defendant: you can be induced to enter a Guilty plea that doesn’t apply to you, simply to avoid the greatly-inflated charges that prosecutors bring precisely to induce you and your attorney to take the lesser of two evils (i.e. a guilty plea in exchange for a guaranteed reduced charge). And in a prosecution-heavy environment, a defense attorney might be well-advised to urge you to take it, if the goal is not to ensure Justice but simply to keep you from the semi-demonic realm of prison.
But advocates far too often oppose plea-bargaining NOT out of concern for the integrity of the justice system or the Constitutional rights of the defendant, BUT out of Victimology’s (rather dubious) vision of the rights of the ‘victim’. They don’t want to clean up the justice system, Constitutionally speaking; they want to take that now fouled and rigged instrument and simply put it to their own use, i.e. to guarantee the ‘closure’ created by the defendant’s almost certain conviction. Which is precisely what both the Domestic Violence and Sex Offense regimes’ legislation was designed to do. (And in the process further corrupting the Constitutional integrity of the justice system and so many of its officials, and the legislative system as well).
And – by the oddest coincidence – note the stunning (it should have been verrrry ‘alarming’ as well) lack of concern for valid ‘evidence’ in the Beltway’s later run-up to the Iraq War. It wasn’t just the shocking governmental disregard for truth and accuracy in the reliability of the evidence it presented, but even more so the government’s apparently accurate gamble that most Americans were so used to the degradation of the concept of ‘evidence’ that they either wouldn’t notice or wouldn’t care.
Nor will I accept the suggestion that years and years of the official corrosion of the concept of ‘reliable evidence’ in the above-mentioned regimes had nothing to do with that; on the contrary, once invited back* into the American ‘house’, the vampire of anti-Constitutional disregard for facts and evidence did not limit itself to the ‘domestic affairs’ room but proceeded to rampage into the foreign-affairs and military affairs rooms as well. And much much blood has been spilled in consequence.
Elias then notes disapprovingly the “superficiality” of most media treatment. (p.42) He’s right, of course, but he is again undermined by his Victimology-‘advocacy’ stance: what irks him is that the media aren’t focusing widely enough on the many ‘unreported’ or ‘self-reported’ victimizations. And the SO community is well aware of the superficiality – and in most cases downright inaccuracy – of ‘evidence’ and careful analysis in SO cases and in the very Findings of legislatures when they enact the enabling legislation itself.
And while he bemoans the media characterization of “blacks as naturally violent” and “minorities as naturally criminal” (p.43), he will soon be blind-sided by the radical-feminist and ‘governance feminism’ characterizations of husbands and fathers (Domestic Violence) and ‘men’ (Sex Offender) as being naturally-sexually-violent in the respective regimes that were enacted in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Even more so, he objects to the “extraordinary” media portrayal of “violence”, in both news reporting and TV shows and films, which induces the citizenry to imagine that the country is awash in violence and which “desensitizes” children (92 percent of kid shows contain some form of violence, he notes). (p.42)
Such portrayals, he says, generate “fear, anxiety, and an identification with the unrestrained and violent forces of the law”. (p.43) Strong stuff indeed. Yet again, he will be blind-sided by the stunningly selective and inaccurate portrayals of ‘violence’ that will be alleged to underlie and comprise the majority of ‘sex offenses’, and the alleged ‘natural’ violence of males, in the sensationalistic and cartoonish characterizations of the afore-mentioned regimes.
And – ominously – the public has indeed for so long been induced to approve the removal of all traditional Constitutional and jurisprudential restraints when dealing with SOs. And indeed, the public now has become “desensitized” to such removals and such ‘legal violence’ – which, as I said, was a point not lost on the government when it created the run-up to the wars in Southwest Asia.
He raises the interesting possibility of the public’s “vicarious victimization” (p.43). By this he means that members of the public will feel themselves at risk and – even more – will actually respond as if they themselves had personally experienced the ‘victimizations’ reported so sensationalistically in the media. If he’s accurate here, then emotionally large numbers of the public are in the same agitated and angry state as the actual victims, seeking revenge quickly and clearly as a form of ‘satisfaction’.
Psychologically, he notes that the “media imposes or reinforces simplistic notions through superficial psychological appeals” and analyses. (p.44) Surely, a review of the Poritz Opinion, among many many others, and of the legislative Findings underlying the laws that courts have reviewed, supports his concern.
Such reports, he notes acutely, “may mystify instead of clarify, especially in a society generally adverse to critical thought”. (p.44) And THAT is a stunning observation, and alarmingly painful. Most folks don’t give ‘news’ much serious thought; and that unhappy and disconcerting reality is intensified when you have the corroboration of such a seemingly wide bunch of ‘experts’, some with serious professional status though many have merely ‘popular’ standing as paperback writers and others are ‘experts’ who stand to make a lot of government money from the Mania.
Worse, “people may simply accept the first credible guidance they receive and ignore any subsequent cues … or, if confronted … with conflicting information, they may accept views that support the most easily digestible symbols”. (p.45) Precisely what is seen when the first ‘symbols’ the public confronts are the slavering-monster-incorrigible-sex-offender. Although at this point it must also be noted that legislators now cannot admit to having made mistakes, even when confronted with increasing amounts of sober research indicating how wrong they have been. After all, they have their own status to consider, as well as the pressures of various groups to whom they have for so long and with such great financial largesse pandered.
Which brings him directly to “Government Motives” (p.45) “We cannot assume that the government wants to convey an objective account of crime and victimization”. (p.45) He quotes, nicely, H.L. Mencken: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the population alarmed (and thus clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins”. (p.45) This is a temptation facing any government, though one which the Framers sought to short-circuit by insisting on careful Constitutional protections for any accused.
In what now seem the innocent days of 1986, Elias observes that “if nothing else, state officials seem caught between wanting to portray crime as a minor problem to reinforce their legitimacy and effectiveness, and wanting to portray a major crime problem to justify various enforcement measures and an aura of restricted freedoms, and state power in exchange for greater security”. (p.45).
Notice his reference to “state” officials; he could not imagine that the Federal government would need to – or dare to – get into the criminal-justice role Constitutionally reserved to the States.
But in the SO Mania that is precisely what happened.
And where the American variant of Victimology shrewdly played upon the politicians’ abiding desire to be perceived as “effective” and “legitimate”, it also forced them to adopt, neatly, BOTH prongs of their dilemma: they created a monstrous ‘threat’ and then demonstrated their ‘effectiveness’ and ‘legitimacy’ (and responsiveness and sensitivity) by brushing aside Constitutional concerns and erecting the SO Mania regime. Having created ‘the Injuns’, the pols could then put on the mantle of John Wayne and ride to the settlers’ rescue. As American as apple pie – but grossly anti-Constitutional.**
Elias concludes this section with thoughts on “Media Collusion”. (p.46)
“While the media pursue their own separate agenda, largely related to making profits, we cannot discount their relationship with government, and the symbolic interactions they routinely pursue for mutual purposes”. (p.46) And then: “Some argue that what promotes state power and legitimacy will often simultaneously sell newspapers” while “Others argue that, intentional or not, we can hardly discount the ‘social production’ of the news and the orchestrating of public opinion through official statements and dutiful media acquiescence, if not encouragement” and that this is especially true when media “readily allow officials to manipulate the news through symbolic appeals, often lacking in substance yet free of critical media review”. (p.46)
I don’t know if you can put more succinctly or accurately precisely what happened in the run-up to the SO Mania regime and in the sustaining of it.
NOTES
*The Framers clearly had royal and tyrannical governments’ manipulation or outright disdain for evidence in mind when they framed the Constitution; and no doubt they also recalled the American colonies’ own Salem Witch Trials and their ‘spectral evidence’ of less than a century before.
**Alas, most Americans get their ‘history’ and even their sense of America from sources other than careful knowledge of the Constitutional vision and the machinery carefully constructed to preserve it. You may recall John Ford’s cavalry western film “Rio Grande” (1950), starring John Wayne. Baffled by a group of Apache who strike over the river from Mexico and then retreat back over the river into Mexico and beyond the reach of his cavalry, Wayne’s colonel is prohibited by ‘government policy’ from taking his force over the river to finish them off. Then he is visited by General Sheridan, his old Civil War commander who now commands the frontier. Sheridan gives Wayne an order – off the record and not in writing: chase them into Mexico and if you fail you may rest assured that all the officers sitting on your court-martial will be your old buds from the Civil War, handpicked by me.
In the setting of the film’s script, it seems like a neat little solution, and likable because Wayne and J. Carroll Naish (who played Sheridan) are likable and trustworthy to the film viewer.
But while it makes for a nice little film, it is hell-and-gone from the way Americans need to conduct their government. If Nixon allegedly invaded Cambodia in 1970 the morning after watching the newly-released film “Patton”, I wonder if a lot of pols watched “Rio Grande” before agreeing to the proposals of the American branch of Victimology and passing the legislation that enabled the regimes mentioned above.
He discusses ‘Shaping Public Opinion’ (p.40) and here it’s sobering to realize that he’s writing in 1986, less than half a decade before the first official steps in the SO Mania regime.
“What forces shape [public] opinion?” he asks. (p.40)
While noting “neighborhood networks” and word-of-mouth, he insightfully opines that the “fundamental sources might lie considerably deeper in the American consciousness” and that Americans might “unwittingly absorb them. He quotes – with impressive objectivity – the then-popular conservative commentator and writer Russell Baker, who observes that in a trip across America the place seemed to him “a booby-hatch for the criminally insane” because there were “campaigning politicians clamoring for use of the electric chair, the gallows, or the gas chambers as devices for restoring public civility” and that “everywhere one was confronted with … a national obsession for more … security” and that houses often had guard-company warning placards stuck in their front lawns and that “very little of this ‘security’ existed 20 years ago [i.e. in the 1950s] but now it is a national passion”. (p.40)
Two large American social trends seem relevant here. First, the Boomers – that huge birth cohort – were blossoming into their teens in the 1960s, and precisely as – second – society and culture were ‘loosening up’ under the pressure of the failing ‘adult’ performance in the Vietnam, the ‘cultural revolution’ spirit that seemed to be succeeding so gloriously in Mao’s youth-based Cultural Revolution, the excitements and agitations loosed by the Civil Rights Movement, and by the general Boomer rejection of ‘grown-up conformity’ in favor of Luv and Change.
And this was all BEFORE the 1970s saw the first steps in the actual Deconstruction of American culture and society (family and parent-guided, white, working-class, industrial, and ‘male’) under the pressure of a more organized ‘revolutionary advocacy’ – adopted almost whole-hog by the Beltway in its desperate pursuit of sustainable electoral viability.
A citizenry that had gotten through the 1950s ‘Cold War’ with just the occasional craze for backyard bomb-shelters was far more addled by the prospect of domestic criminality and anti-social behavior. Not surprising, when you think about it, but nobody realized at the time just how much the government was not only surfing the waves of this anxiety but was actually stoking those waves.
Elias even allows himself to wonder if “in addition to crime causing an obsession with security, an obsession with security might also cause crime”. (p.40) And yet what isn’t so clearly noticed a possibility is that the government would actually seek to stoke such an obsession for ‘security’ from ‘crime’.
And don’t forget: this is before the radical-feminist movement managed to get the Beltway’s acquiescence in declaring the American home as the nation’s largest ‘crime scene’ and the nation’s fathers as the nation’s largest body of incorrigible and un-reported perps. Even as the actual crime rate was declining.
Elias notes that other socialization forces than social networks are active in shaping public opinion: officials, educators, professionals, researchers, commissioners (I can’t quite figure that one), are among those who also shape attitudes.
Ominously – though the point seems lost on him – he immediately opines that “their views might actually be similar and reinforcing”. (p.41) I think what he means here is that the views of all those types might BE MADE TO BE similar and reinforcing; and if you as an ‘advocacy’ could do that (the Beltway’s sustained and clear support would be a big help) then you could take a huge step toward ‘shaping’ public opinion. And as I have often mentioned, since the days of Josef Goebbels, the line between ‘shaping’ and ‘manipulating’ public opinion has become verrrrry blurred indeed.
But “perhaps the greatest influence … comes from the mass media”, since it is a “mediator between the government and the public” that “substantially (and selectively) conveys and translates official statistics and statements into public perceptions”. (p.41)
Notice the conflict in approach: Elias adds that “(and selectively)” fully aware as an objective observer that the media don’t always tell it like it is; yet of course as an ‘advocate’ he is going to want to take advantage of that very characteristic.
You also notice that the media here are not envisioned as the Constitutionally-envisioned ‘watchdog’ over the government, the traditional American justification for a ‘free press’. Rather, it is a ‘mediator’ – sort of an unofficial government mimeograph and stenography organization – which, if they have secured great influence over the government, any dedicated ‘advocates’ will want to make full use of.
Surely what Elias sees in 1986 came to awful fruition less than 5 years later: Happily raking in bucks with sensationalist (and very ‘selective’) recounting of ‘stories’, the media merely amplified the ‘findings’ that the Beltway decided to make under the influence and pressure of the concerted victimist advocacies.
But Elias is truly tormented here. He legitimately bemoans the “sensationalized, misleading, and often inaccurate cover stories” of such major organs as ‘Time’, ‘U.S. News and World Report’, ‘The New York Times Magazine’ and ABC’s TV series ‘Crime in America’. He accurately observes that “the problems are many”. (p.41)
But, being a committed Victimologist, his concern is only that the government is limiting itself to “seven ‘index’ crimes”, and not expanding its definitions to cover the vast body of un-reported and under-reported ‘crime’ – that alleged ‘dark figure’ – and all the concomitant ‘victimization’. In other words, he’s bothered NOT actually by all this ‘sensationalism’ BUT RATHER that all the ‘sensationalism’ and ‘inaccuracy’ is too narrowly based on a few ‘traditionally-defined’ crimes, rather than on the vast unruly and dark ocean of as-yet-unacknowledged victimizations (and – necessarily – the ‘crimes’ that cause them).
And, by the oddest coincidence, within a few years there arose the Domestic Violence regime – based on the amazingly rapid re-visioning of the American Home and Family as the nation’s most vicious and frequent crime scene – and the Sex Offender Mania regime – based on the assumption that ‘men’ are incorrigible and predatory sexual assaulters and must be tagged and confined as such.
He bemoans how the media so often “sensationalize” crime, “pandering more to unique angles than to reality”. As an example he notes that “stories about bailed or paroled prisoners who commit murders … provide ‘good copy’ yet these situations rarely happen.” (p.41) Within a few years – and I’m not saying Elias consciously envisioned it – the American scene would erupt with the stranger-sex-offender sensationalism, on which rare and mushy basis the SORNA regime was justified (as so often, you can re-read the 1995 New Jersey Supreme Court Poritz Opinion to see how it all played out).
Remarkably, he singles out offending phrases that had become media mantras: “the curse of violent crime is rampant”, “we live in a reign of terror”, “our attackers are increasingly brutal marauders”, they are “mean, antisocial people with macho complexes”, and that “we have been held hostage to the irrational acts of a relatively small cadre of career criminals”. (p.41)
We know him well enough to realize that what’s upsetting him is that all the public ‘opinion’ is being wrongly (in his view) focused on just a few ‘traditionally defined’ crimes. But within a few years these handy media mantras will be applied in both the Domestic Violence and Sex Offender regimes.
Although, neatly and soooo selectively, that last bit about “a relatively small cadre of career criminals” will be re-jiggered to be a huge bunch of incorrigible (but still ‘macho’ and therefore ‘male’) lifelong criminal whackos. In the lurid Beltway kitchens, the committees of pols and ‘advocates’ will make certain changes to Elias’s recipe-book, with results that are now, finally, becoming undeniably clear.
He even bemoans the mantra that considers “plea bargaining as threatening justice-for-the-victim”. (p.42) That isn’t going to sit well with the American crime-focused variant of Victimology: the advocates of that approach will indeed consider that plea-bargaining is just such a threat, although they will also consider due-process Constitutional protections as nothing but ‘obstructions’ that provide ‘cover’ to perps. (In case you ever wondered where the Bush-Cheney team got the idea by 2002 that the Constitution was “quaint”.)
Now plea-bargaining is indeed a threat to the integrity of the justice system as well as to the Constitutional rights of the defendant: you can be induced to enter a Guilty plea that doesn’t apply to you, simply to avoid the greatly-inflated charges that prosecutors bring precisely to induce you and your attorney to take the lesser of two evils (i.e. a guilty plea in exchange for a guaranteed reduced charge). And in a prosecution-heavy environment, a defense attorney might be well-advised to urge you to take it, if the goal is not to ensure Justice but simply to keep you from the semi-demonic realm of prison.
But advocates far too often oppose plea-bargaining NOT out of concern for the integrity of the justice system or the Constitutional rights of the defendant, BUT out of Victimology’s (rather dubious) vision of the rights of the ‘victim’. They don’t want to clean up the justice system, Constitutionally speaking; they want to take that now fouled and rigged instrument and simply put it to their own use, i.e. to guarantee the ‘closure’ created by the defendant’s almost certain conviction. Which is precisely what both the Domestic Violence and Sex Offense regimes’ legislation was designed to do. (And in the process further corrupting the Constitutional integrity of the justice system and so many of its officials, and the legislative system as well).
And – by the oddest coincidence – note the stunning (it should have been verrrry ‘alarming’ as well) lack of concern for valid ‘evidence’ in the Beltway’s later run-up to the Iraq War. It wasn’t just the shocking governmental disregard for truth and accuracy in the reliability of the evidence it presented, but even more so the government’s apparently accurate gamble that most Americans were so used to the degradation of the concept of ‘evidence’ that they either wouldn’t notice or wouldn’t care.
Nor will I accept the suggestion that years and years of the official corrosion of the concept of ‘reliable evidence’ in the above-mentioned regimes had nothing to do with that; on the contrary, once invited back* into the American ‘house’, the vampire of anti-Constitutional disregard for facts and evidence did not limit itself to the ‘domestic affairs’ room but proceeded to rampage into the foreign-affairs and military affairs rooms as well. And much much blood has been spilled in consequence.
Elias then notes disapprovingly the “superficiality” of most media treatment. (p.42) He’s right, of course, but he is again undermined by his Victimology-‘advocacy’ stance: what irks him is that the media aren’t focusing widely enough on the many ‘unreported’ or ‘self-reported’ victimizations. And the SO community is well aware of the superficiality – and in most cases downright inaccuracy – of ‘evidence’ and careful analysis in SO cases and in the very Findings of legislatures when they enact the enabling legislation itself.
And while he bemoans the media characterization of “blacks as naturally violent” and “minorities as naturally criminal” (p.43), he will soon be blind-sided by the radical-feminist and ‘governance feminism’ characterizations of husbands and fathers (Domestic Violence) and ‘men’ (Sex Offender) as being naturally-sexually-violent in the respective regimes that were enacted in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Even more so, he objects to the “extraordinary” media portrayal of “violence”, in both news reporting and TV shows and films, which induces the citizenry to imagine that the country is awash in violence and which “desensitizes” children (92 percent of kid shows contain some form of violence, he notes). (p.42)
Such portrayals, he says, generate “fear, anxiety, and an identification with the unrestrained and violent forces of the law”. (p.43) Strong stuff indeed. Yet again, he will be blind-sided by the stunningly selective and inaccurate portrayals of ‘violence’ that will be alleged to underlie and comprise the majority of ‘sex offenses’, and the alleged ‘natural’ violence of males, in the sensationalistic and cartoonish characterizations of the afore-mentioned regimes.
And – ominously – the public has indeed for so long been induced to approve the removal of all traditional Constitutional and jurisprudential restraints when dealing with SOs. And indeed, the public now has become “desensitized” to such removals and such ‘legal violence’ – which, as I said, was a point not lost on the government when it created the run-up to the wars in Southwest Asia.
He raises the interesting possibility of the public’s “vicarious victimization” (p.43). By this he means that members of the public will feel themselves at risk and – even more – will actually respond as if they themselves had personally experienced the ‘victimizations’ reported so sensationalistically in the media. If he’s accurate here, then emotionally large numbers of the public are in the same agitated and angry state as the actual victims, seeking revenge quickly and clearly as a form of ‘satisfaction’.
Psychologically, he notes that the “media imposes or reinforces simplistic notions through superficial psychological appeals” and analyses. (p.44) Surely, a review of the Poritz Opinion, among many many others, and of the legislative Findings underlying the laws that courts have reviewed, supports his concern.
Such reports, he notes acutely, “may mystify instead of clarify, especially in a society generally adverse to critical thought”. (p.44) And THAT is a stunning observation, and alarmingly painful. Most folks don’t give ‘news’ much serious thought; and that unhappy and disconcerting reality is intensified when you have the corroboration of such a seemingly wide bunch of ‘experts’, some with serious professional status though many have merely ‘popular’ standing as paperback writers and others are ‘experts’ who stand to make a lot of government money from the Mania.
Worse, “people may simply accept the first credible guidance they receive and ignore any subsequent cues … or, if confronted … with conflicting information, they may accept views that support the most easily digestible symbols”. (p.45) Precisely what is seen when the first ‘symbols’ the public confronts are the slavering-monster-incorrigible-sex-offender. Although at this point it must also be noted that legislators now cannot admit to having made mistakes, even when confronted with increasing amounts of sober research indicating how wrong they have been. After all, they have their own status to consider, as well as the pressures of various groups to whom they have for so long and with such great financial largesse pandered.
Which brings him directly to “Government Motives” (p.45) “We cannot assume that the government wants to convey an objective account of crime and victimization”. (p.45) He quotes, nicely, H.L. Mencken: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the population alarmed (and thus clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins”. (p.45) This is a temptation facing any government, though one which the Framers sought to short-circuit by insisting on careful Constitutional protections for any accused.
In what now seem the innocent days of 1986, Elias observes that “if nothing else, state officials seem caught between wanting to portray crime as a minor problem to reinforce their legitimacy and effectiveness, and wanting to portray a major crime problem to justify various enforcement measures and an aura of restricted freedoms, and state power in exchange for greater security”. (p.45).
Notice his reference to “state” officials; he could not imagine that the Federal government would need to – or dare to – get into the criminal-justice role Constitutionally reserved to the States.
But in the SO Mania that is precisely what happened.
And where the American variant of Victimology shrewdly played upon the politicians’ abiding desire to be perceived as “effective” and “legitimate”, it also forced them to adopt, neatly, BOTH prongs of their dilemma: they created a monstrous ‘threat’ and then demonstrated their ‘effectiveness’ and ‘legitimacy’ (and responsiveness and sensitivity) by brushing aside Constitutional concerns and erecting the SO Mania regime. Having created ‘the Injuns’, the pols could then put on the mantle of John Wayne and ride to the settlers’ rescue. As American as apple pie – but grossly anti-Constitutional.**
Elias concludes this section with thoughts on “Media Collusion”. (p.46)
“While the media pursue their own separate agenda, largely related to making profits, we cannot discount their relationship with government, and the symbolic interactions they routinely pursue for mutual purposes”. (p.46) And then: “Some argue that what promotes state power and legitimacy will often simultaneously sell newspapers” while “Others argue that, intentional or not, we can hardly discount the ‘social production’ of the news and the orchestrating of public opinion through official statements and dutiful media acquiescence, if not encouragement” and that this is especially true when media “readily allow officials to manipulate the news through symbolic appeals, often lacking in substance yet free of critical media review”. (p.46)
I don’t know if you can put more succinctly or accurately precisely what happened in the run-up to the SO Mania regime and in the sustaining of it.
NOTES
*The Framers clearly had royal and tyrannical governments’ manipulation or outright disdain for evidence in mind when they framed the Constitution; and no doubt they also recalled the American colonies’ own Salem Witch Trials and their ‘spectral evidence’ of less than a century before.
**Alas, most Americans get their ‘history’ and even their sense of America from sources other than careful knowledge of the Constitutional vision and the machinery carefully constructed to preserve it. You may recall John Ford’s cavalry western film “Rio Grande” (1950), starring John Wayne. Baffled by a group of Apache who strike over the river from Mexico and then retreat back over the river into Mexico and beyond the reach of his cavalry, Wayne’s colonel is prohibited by ‘government policy’ from taking his force over the river to finish them off. Then he is visited by General Sheridan, his old Civil War commander who now commands the frontier. Sheridan gives Wayne an order – off the record and not in writing: chase them into Mexico and if you fail you may rest assured that all the officers sitting on your court-martial will be your old buds from the Civil War, handpicked by me.
In the setting of the film’s script, it seems like a neat little solution, and likable because Wayne and J. Carroll Naish (who played Sheridan) are likable and trustworthy to the film viewer.
But while it makes for a nice little film, it is hell-and-gone from the way Americans need to conduct their government. If Nixon allegedly invaded Cambodia in 1970 the morning after watching the newly-released film “Patton”, I wonder if a lot of pols watched “Rio Grande” before agreeing to the proposals of the American branch of Victimology and passing the legislation that enabled the regimes mentioned above.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
VICTIMOLOGY 4
We continue reviewing the 1986 book entitled “The Politics of Victimization” by Robert Elias, then of Tufts University.*
Elias can always be relied on to cover the proper bases; in that he’s professional. But he’s also an ‘advocate’ type of researcher/scholar, so you can never tell when his predispositions affect his analysis of an otherwise important sub-topic.
He rightly gets to “Measuring Victimization” and he’s going to look at the sources. (p.37) “These figures can tell us many things about victimization … [and about] how much victimization we suffer … [and] significantly affect public policy and perceptions, and thus we must closely analyze how they are derived.”
The SO community, going back to the initial stampedes of the ‘classic’ SO Mania era in the early 1990s, is well aware about how significantly public policy and perceptions are affected. You can, given the (im-)proper dispositions, start yourself a lethal if useful stampede by waving statistics in concert with selective and sensationalistic ‘reporting’ and ‘stories’. As many people walked around believing the country was swarming with slavering stranger sex offenders bent on kidnap-rape-murder, just as before long (by the oddest coincidence) the country started walking around in the sure and certain ‘knowledge’ that Saddam had WMDs.
And he speaks with an eerie foreshadowing (he’s writing in 1986) when he then says that “Our so-called ‘crime waves’ may reflect the ebb and flow of police and organization imperatives rather than actual crime”. (p.37) I think he’s trying to say that sometimes the official (and at that time not-victim-sensitive) law enforcement priorities are driven by forces other than concern for the victim; but it also works very well in reverse: in a ‘push’ initiated by politicians at all levels including the Federal, ‘forces’ can be generated that will equally (if not worse) skew and deform law enforcement in favor of Victimology.
In fact, when you think of it: when a crime is committed, its consequences ripple out for a certain distance into society. But when a type of crime is selectively raised up as a national ‘emergency’ and ‘crisis’, and then law enforcement and jurisprudence are deformed - even on the level of Constitutional integrity – in order to meet the ‘emergency’, then the bad consequences of THAT are not rippled-out (like a pebble dropped in water sends out waves) bur rather transmitted-out and amplified like radio waves. They don’t ripple out toward the citizens but rather rain-down upon them, passing through walls and seemingly solid objects. And that can’t be good. Especially when sustained over decades.
Elias notes the Uniform Crime Reports complied by the FBI. He notes that they indicate certain major categories of crime rising “an average of 350 percent” in the past twenty years:” (i.e. since the 1960s). Although in an aside he mentions that “we may have reached a peak sometime in the mid-1970s”. (p.37) Of course, this may have reflected the large number of Boomer youth coming of age, on top of that cohort of young kids during WW2 whose lives and families were disrupted by war and then possibly by a move to the suburbs right after it … lots of room for troubled and under-Shaped kids growing out of all that.
But then he observes, honestly enough, that what might be developing is not a ‘crime wave’ but rather a ‘crime reporting wave’. We saw this in the verrrrry curious phases and Waves of the verrrry curious Catholic abuse ‘crisis’: what surfaced was not so much a steady flow of reports of freshly-committed crimes, but rather a steady (indeed increasingly lurid) stream of reports about crimes long-past (assuming they were committed as described in the first place).
Then he gets on to “victimization surveys”, which are merely organized opportunities for persons to say whatever they’d like to say. After all, he says, “official statistics … apparently indicate only part of the crime problem”. (p.38)
The solution to that, he burbles proudly, was that “beginning in the late 1960s, researchers and later the government, began assessing crime through victimization surveys” – and, by amazing coincidence, these surveys demonstrate that “official statistics have underestimated actual victimization by 300 to 500%”.
Take a moment, if you will, to contemplate that.
If you haven’t got enough factual information to build your case (and perhaps its subsequent professional and advocacy ‘empire’) then you can raise up an entirely new source of ‘information’ and ‘statistics’ that is not bound by such inconvenient and limiting boundaries as truth, verification, and any objective assessment at all.
So, meshing nicely with the then-growing feminist assertion that women don’t so much process and relay information through abstract ‘facts, but rather cast their information in the form of ‘telling stories’, “researchers” (meaning either professionals who should have known better or non-professionals who figured that a pencil, some paper, and a couple-three leading questions made them professionals) started to ‘just ask’ certain types of folks.
And the result, as any 8 year-old could have told them, was a veritable Genesis Effect of ‘stories’, in this case – since the ‘research’ was skewed toward them – ‘victimization’ stories.
I am not saying that none of the stories thus gleaned were accurate. But a) there is no way to ascertain just how truthful and accurate such survey results really are. And b) there is thus no way that any prudent government, concerned for its legitimacy and integrity, could implement Constitutionally dangerous and broad policies based on them.
But the ‘story’ approach made great if shallow ‘reporting’ so the media eagerly signed on.
And – equally ominously – the “government” perked up its ears and its whiskers started twitching. Prosecutors could see huge hay to be made in conviction rates if you could i) point to this huge “dark figure” of an amount of ‘victimization’ quintuple the amount of official statistics: you could claim an ‘emergency’; you could put forth a telegenic ‘victim’ like a puppy or a meerkat or a penguin to ‘front’ your prosecutions; you could even – if the legislators and judges could be gotten on board like the media – free ‘prosecution’ from the ‘obstructions’ of Constitutional due process and factuality. ‘Victimology’ suddenly became verrrrry attractive to prosecutors who in a more ‘macho’ era simply saw law enforcement and criminal prosecution as a mano-a-mano between lawbreakers and cops, with a procedural ho-hum air to the settled rhythms of court process.
‘Victimology’, in a word, became ‘sexy’ and victimization surveys ‘sexed up’ the whole process, engrossing the public in lurid stories breathlessly ‘reported’, in which the law enforcers suddenly became ‘heroes’ (erasing in a quick swipe both the horror of Southern police beating up on civil rights marchers and the failures and atrocities of the Vietnam-era military). (And who can forget that in 2003 one British high official reported to Tony Blair that in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion the Americans were ‘sexing up’ their ‘facts’ in order to guarantee the rush to war?)
All of which caught the legislators like fish in a trolling-net. You could please a large and nicely mixed demographic of feminist advocates and law-and-order folks; make yourself look both ‘concerned’ and ‘effective’; build up fat bureaucracies filled with ‘jobs’ that would indenture fresh new employees and fund all sorts of ‘groups’ that would also be beholden to your control of the purse-strings; and also maybe distract lots and lots of voters from your inability to keep the Great American Success Story going. What was not to like?
And, of course, you would look verrrry ‘modern’ and ‘cutting edge’, moving American society toward the increasing government and police regulation you were going to need to ensure social order, since in other legislative policies you were Deconstructing the Family and Parents and Adult Authority and many many other institutions that had done the work of preparing kids to live a peaceable and orderly personal life in society. And since, instead, whole cohorts of kids were being raised according to a new philosophy that valued ‘total autonomy’ and insisted that limits, boundaries, and any sort of Shape to a life that you didn’t choose on your own merely constituted ‘oppression’. And, of course, it was as American as apple pie to hate ‘oppression’.
So a certain amount of police-state was built into all the new ‘reforms’; if there weren’t going to be all those ‘traditional’ forces doing the civilizing work in American culture, then the government was going to have to step in with the criminal law.
And if the Constitution was thereby rendered ‘quaint’, well – times change and so what? It would all work out, once people got used to things.
So the new national script would be that law enforcement ‘heroes’ would rush to the rescue of ‘victims’, manfully and heroically unhindered by namby-pamby concerns about ‘legality’ and the Constitution. In an odd way law enforcement put John Wayne’s classic movie approach to the service of the latest postmodern fads – and Victimology would be the benefactor, a theory and world-view rather very largely based, in the American crime-centered variant, on that huge ‘dark figure’ of crimes that existed only in those survey ‘stories’.
Elias is not bothered by the downsides. After all, he says, “many writers” came to the quick conclusion that the real reason for the ‘dark figure’ was simply that many ‘victims’ were “reluctant to report” their ‘victimizations. (p.38) Just how significant were the ‘crimes’ that made these folks feel ‘victimized’ is another question.
Nor, in the American crime-centered variant, was any attention going to be paid to citizens ‘victimized’ by government activity such as the improper use of military force against peoples around the world.*
Note also that the persons who ‘discovered’ or ‘determined’ that the main reason for non-reporting was simply ‘reluctance’ are not described by Elias as ‘researchers’ or ‘scholars’ but as “writers” – which opens up a whole new dark side to this thing: the explosion of ‘advocate’ writers, not professionally trained and/or not bound by the disciplines of objective research in service of actual facts. But of course, in an ‘emergency’ and in a Good Cause, ‘facts don’t matter’ any more than due-process ‘obstructions’.
What Elias talks about in 1986, and how he goes about it, will come to ominous fruition within half a decade.
Yes, he admits, some of those surveyed “might be inclined to overstate” what happened to them but “despite these reservations, most researchers place much more confidence in victim surveys than in official statistics”. (p.38) And then – who could be surprised? – the government saw a useful development and devised the National Crime Survey, thus combining governmental and Victimological interests into an ‘official’ survey.
Worse, he notes that “despite these reservations most researchers place much more confidence in victim surveys than in official statistics”. (p.38)
Again, he uses – and this is now typical – the terms ‘writers’, ‘researchers’, ‘scholars’, ‘thinkers’ and ‘experts’ interchangeably. And this, of course, opens the door to assertions and claims by many non-trained persons who are either sincerely ‘concerned’ but not trained in objectivity and actual research discipline; or are ‘advocacy’ scientists or scholars and feel that they have a higher purpose than mere (and ‘male’) objectivity and truth; or professionals who have to keep a weather eye on where their funding is coming from (i.e. the government); or entrepreneurs who stand to make more money the more extensive the ‘problem’ is.
All this on top of the fact that the ‘government’ whose statistics are relied upon – when they are relied upon at all – has clearly indicated that it wants this ‘emergency’ to expand.
You see where all this can quickly go. The SO community HAS seen it.
But then he adds other “indicators of victimization” (note ‘indicators’ thereof rather than evidence thereof): computerized records of prosecutors (new in 1986) (which will become a self-fulfilling circular dynamic as prosecutions are skewed by the political pressures); longitudinal studies that follow birth cohorts (“which follow the lives – and potentially ‘the crimes’ – of selected groups over long periods of time”); “self-report surveys” (We’ve already seen those above); archival data from sources such as police, hospital and insurance records; “experimental (laboratory and case studies)” (and We’ve seen what happens as soon as you have a bunch of ‘advocates’ of any sort conducting those); “anecdotal stories” (which are highly unreliable as ‘evidence’ as noted above); and “participant observations” (which are the raw reflections of persons involved in any of the above). (all quotes in this paragraph, p.39)
All of the foregoing constitute mostly ‘raw data’ which must be carefully and objectively examined before any accurate conclusions can be drawn. But such ‘detachment’ – like Constitutional due-process strictures – are merely ‘obstructions’ to any advocates for whom “facts don’t matter”, as is famously said.
And all of this came together in a monstrous and virulent goo to create the SO Mania (and to great extent the Domestic Violence Mania that preceded it).
While admitting that reliance on such a hash may result in the “indicators’ tending to “overstate the amount of people involved” yet he concludes that “even by official measures, we must be greatly alarmed by our crime level”. (p.39)
But the crime level has been declining (although the “reporting” – such as it may be termed – is, as he has said, increasing) and was trending in that direction even in the mid-80s.
It seems to me that having given itself over to the ‘advocacy mania’ approach by guaranteeing its receptivity to any ‘emergencies’ pushed its way by any ‘advocacy’ to whom it might profitably pander, the Beltway wound up moving toward a Regulatory State as well as a Nanny State. And a Regulatory State is a form of Benevolent Despotism, precisely what the Framers rejected as a possibility for their “American Experiment” – which, rather, depended on a daring trust that ‘people’ could be ultimately trusted to sustain their role in American government as The People.
But of course, if so many of the citizens are ‘oppressors’ and the rest are ‘oppressed’, then the entire Founding Vision becomes not only “quaint” but also unworkable, as the government must expand to be both Nanny and Regulator of everybody, who are either perps or victims.
And thus the erosion of any working reality called ‘Americans’ and ‘The People’.
This is what the SO community is working to correct through its efforts to rollback the SO Mania regime.
NOTES
*My copy is the paperback version put out by Oxford UP in 1986. It bears the ISBN 0-19-503980-7. It will be unwieldy to include both Chapter Titles and sub-headings as well as page numbers, in case you have a different edition. I will stick to only using page references when I make quotations, but for especially important points I will do so.
**Consider what the impact is going to be at this point, for example, of having one in six Army troops on some form of officially-prescribed psychoactive drugs (don’t even ask about the illicit drug use); or of the effect of thousands of young men getting through their days in combat simply by reducing their ‘care’ to their immediate ‘buds’ and deriving their sense of life from shooting and being shot at, and the thrill of killing.
Try to tote up the many ways, direct and indirect, that American society and the American People are going to be ‘victimized’ in the near and further future.
Consider, while you’re at it, what happens to the troops who are not on psychoactive medications but the ones who are ruff-tuff and combat competent. This recent piece discusses troops (all male, by the oddest coincidence) assigned to a remote outpost in Afghanistan: they report – and happily – that they don’t know or care how the war will turn out, and that they live day-to-day for the intense high of focused bro-hood with their combat buddies and the thrill of combat (and killing). They do worry – and rightly, more than they know – about how they will adapt to the ‘down’ of civilian life when they return home. What will We as a society face, when thousands of these troops return, on top of the dozens of thousands who have been on psychoactive medications for months or years over there? If We are not going to be indirectly but most really ‘victimized’ – to use Elias’s broad definition of the term – then nobody is ever going to be ‘victimized’.
Elias can always be relied on to cover the proper bases; in that he’s professional. But he’s also an ‘advocate’ type of researcher/scholar, so you can never tell when his predispositions affect his analysis of an otherwise important sub-topic.
He rightly gets to “Measuring Victimization” and he’s going to look at the sources. (p.37) “These figures can tell us many things about victimization … [and about] how much victimization we suffer … [and] significantly affect public policy and perceptions, and thus we must closely analyze how they are derived.”
The SO community, going back to the initial stampedes of the ‘classic’ SO Mania era in the early 1990s, is well aware about how significantly public policy and perceptions are affected. You can, given the (im-)proper dispositions, start yourself a lethal if useful stampede by waving statistics in concert with selective and sensationalistic ‘reporting’ and ‘stories’. As many people walked around believing the country was swarming with slavering stranger sex offenders bent on kidnap-rape-murder, just as before long (by the oddest coincidence) the country started walking around in the sure and certain ‘knowledge’ that Saddam had WMDs.
And he speaks with an eerie foreshadowing (he’s writing in 1986) when he then says that “Our so-called ‘crime waves’ may reflect the ebb and flow of police and organization imperatives rather than actual crime”. (p.37) I think he’s trying to say that sometimes the official (and at that time not-victim-sensitive) law enforcement priorities are driven by forces other than concern for the victim; but it also works very well in reverse: in a ‘push’ initiated by politicians at all levels including the Federal, ‘forces’ can be generated that will equally (if not worse) skew and deform law enforcement in favor of Victimology.
In fact, when you think of it: when a crime is committed, its consequences ripple out for a certain distance into society. But when a type of crime is selectively raised up as a national ‘emergency’ and ‘crisis’, and then law enforcement and jurisprudence are deformed - even on the level of Constitutional integrity – in order to meet the ‘emergency’, then the bad consequences of THAT are not rippled-out (like a pebble dropped in water sends out waves) bur rather transmitted-out and amplified like radio waves. They don’t ripple out toward the citizens but rather rain-down upon them, passing through walls and seemingly solid objects. And that can’t be good. Especially when sustained over decades.
Elias notes the Uniform Crime Reports complied by the FBI. He notes that they indicate certain major categories of crime rising “an average of 350 percent” in the past twenty years:” (i.e. since the 1960s). Although in an aside he mentions that “we may have reached a peak sometime in the mid-1970s”. (p.37) Of course, this may have reflected the large number of Boomer youth coming of age, on top of that cohort of young kids during WW2 whose lives and families were disrupted by war and then possibly by a move to the suburbs right after it … lots of room for troubled and under-Shaped kids growing out of all that.
But then he observes, honestly enough, that what might be developing is not a ‘crime wave’ but rather a ‘crime reporting wave’. We saw this in the verrrrry curious phases and Waves of the verrrry curious Catholic abuse ‘crisis’: what surfaced was not so much a steady flow of reports of freshly-committed crimes, but rather a steady (indeed increasingly lurid) stream of reports about crimes long-past (assuming they were committed as described in the first place).
Then he gets on to “victimization surveys”, which are merely organized opportunities for persons to say whatever they’d like to say. After all, he says, “official statistics … apparently indicate only part of the crime problem”. (p.38)
The solution to that, he burbles proudly, was that “beginning in the late 1960s, researchers and later the government, began assessing crime through victimization surveys” – and, by amazing coincidence, these surveys demonstrate that “official statistics have underestimated actual victimization by 300 to 500%”.
Take a moment, if you will, to contemplate that.
If you haven’t got enough factual information to build your case (and perhaps its subsequent professional and advocacy ‘empire’) then you can raise up an entirely new source of ‘information’ and ‘statistics’ that is not bound by such inconvenient and limiting boundaries as truth, verification, and any objective assessment at all.
So, meshing nicely with the then-growing feminist assertion that women don’t so much process and relay information through abstract ‘facts, but rather cast their information in the form of ‘telling stories’, “researchers” (meaning either professionals who should have known better or non-professionals who figured that a pencil, some paper, and a couple-three leading questions made them professionals) started to ‘just ask’ certain types of folks.
And the result, as any 8 year-old could have told them, was a veritable Genesis Effect of ‘stories’, in this case – since the ‘research’ was skewed toward them – ‘victimization’ stories.
I am not saying that none of the stories thus gleaned were accurate. But a) there is no way to ascertain just how truthful and accurate such survey results really are. And b) there is thus no way that any prudent government, concerned for its legitimacy and integrity, could implement Constitutionally dangerous and broad policies based on them.
But the ‘story’ approach made great if shallow ‘reporting’ so the media eagerly signed on.
And – equally ominously – the “government” perked up its ears and its whiskers started twitching. Prosecutors could see huge hay to be made in conviction rates if you could i) point to this huge “dark figure” of an amount of ‘victimization’ quintuple the amount of official statistics: you could claim an ‘emergency’; you could put forth a telegenic ‘victim’ like a puppy or a meerkat or a penguin to ‘front’ your prosecutions; you could even – if the legislators and judges could be gotten on board like the media – free ‘prosecution’ from the ‘obstructions’ of Constitutional due process and factuality. ‘Victimology’ suddenly became verrrrry attractive to prosecutors who in a more ‘macho’ era simply saw law enforcement and criminal prosecution as a mano-a-mano between lawbreakers and cops, with a procedural ho-hum air to the settled rhythms of court process.
‘Victimology’, in a word, became ‘sexy’ and victimization surveys ‘sexed up’ the whole process, engrossing the public in lurid stories breathlessly ‘reported’, in which the law enforcers suddenly became ‘heroes’ (erasing in a quick swipe both the horror of Southern police beating up on civil rights marchers and the failures and atrocities of the Vietnam-era military). (And who can forget that in 2003 one British high official reported to Tony Blair that in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion the Americans were ‘sexing up’ their ‘facts’ in order to guarantee the rush to war?)
All of which caught the legislators like fish in a trolling-net. You could please a large and nicely mixed demographic of feminist advocates and law-and-order folks; make yourself look both ‘concerned’ and ‘effective’; build up fat bureaucracies filled with ‘jobs’ that would indenture fresh new employees and fund all sorts of ‘groups’ that would also be beholden to your control of the purse-strings; and also maybe distract lots and lots of voters from your inability to keep the Great American Success Story going. What was not to like?
And, of course, you would look verrrry ‘modern’ and ‘cutting edge’, moving American society toward the increasing government and police regulation you were going to need to ensure social order, since in other legislative policies you were Deconstructing the Family and Parents and Adult Authority and many many other institutions that had done the work of preparing kids to live a peaceable and orderly personal life in society. And since, instead, whole cohorts of kids were being raised according to a new philosophy that valued ‘total autonomy’ and insisted that limits, boundaries, and any sort of Shape to a life that you didn’t choose on your own merely constituted ‘oppression’. And, of course, it was as American as apple pie to hate ‘oppression’.
So a certain amount of police-state was built into all the new ‘reforms’; if there weren’t going to be all those ‘traditional’ forces doing the civilizing work in American culture, then the government was going to have to step in with the criminal law.
And if the Constitution was thereby rendered ‘quaint’, well – times change and so what? It would all work out, once people got used to things.
So the new national script would be that law enforcement ‘heroes’ would rush to the rescue of ‘victims’, manfully and heroically unhindered by namby-pamby concerns about ‘legality’ and the Constitution. In an odd way law enforcement put John Wayne’s classic movie approach to the service of the latest postmodern fads – and Victimology would be the benefactor, a theory and world-view rather very largely based, in the American crime-centered variant, on that huge ‘dark figure’ of crimes that existed only in those survey ‘stories’.
Elias is not bothered by the downsides. After all, he says, “many writers” came to the quick conclusion that the real reason for the ‘dark figure’ was simply that many ‘victims’ were “reluctant to report” their ‘victimizations. (p.38) Just how significant were the ‘crimes’ that made these folks feel ‘victimized’ is another question.
Nor, in the American crime-centered variant, was any attention going to be paid to citizens ‘victimized’ by government activity such as the improper use of military force against peoples around the world.*
Note also that the persons who ‘discovered’ or ‘determined’ that the main reason for non-reporting was simply ‘reluctance’ are not described by Elias as ‘researchers’ or ‘scholars’ but as “writers” – which opens up a whole new dark side to this thing: the explosion of ‘advocate’ writers, not professionally trained and/or not bound by the disciplines of objective research in service of actual facts. But of course, in an ‘emergency’ and in a Good Cause, ‘facts don’t matter’ any more than due-process ‘obstructions’.
What Elias talks about in 1986, and how he goes about it, will come to ominous fruition within half a decade.
Yes, he admits, some of those surveyed “might be inclined to overstate” what happened to them but “despite these reservations, most researchers place much more confidence in victim surveys than in official statistics”. (p.38) And then – who could be surprised? – the government saw a useful development and devised the National Crime Survey, thus combining governmental and Victimological interests into an ‘official’ survey.
Worse, he notes that “despite these reservations most researchers place much more confidence in victim surveys than in official statistics”. (p.38)
Again, he uses – and this is now typical – the terms ‘writers’, ‘researchers’, ‘scholars’, ‘thinkers’ and ‘experts’ interchangeably. And this, of course, opens the door to assertions and claims by many non-trained persons who are either sincerely ‘concerned’ but not trained in objectivity and actual research discipline; or are ‘advocacy’ scientists or scholars and feel that they have a higher purpose than mere (and ‘male’) objectivity and truth; or professionals who have to keep a weather eye on where their funding is coming from (i.e. the government); or entrepreneurs who stand to make more money the more extensive the ‘problem’ is.
All this on top of the fact that the ‘government’ whose statistics are relied upon – when they are relied upon at all – has clearly indicated that it wants this ‘emergency’ to expand.
You see where all this can quickly go. The SO community HAS seen it.
But then he adds other “indicators of victimization” (note ‘indicators’ thereof rather than evidence thereof): computerized records of prosecutors (new in 1986) (which will become a self-fulfilling circular dynamic as prosecutions are skewed by the political pressures); longitudinal studies that follow birth cohorts (“which follow the lives – and potentially ‘the crimes’ – of selected groups over long periods of time”); “self-report surveys” (We’ve already seen those above); archival data from sources such as police, hospital and insurance records; “experimental (laboratory and case studies)” (and We’ve seen what happens as soon as you have a bunch of ‘advocates’ of any sort conducting those); “anecdotal stories” (which are highly unreliable as ‘evidence’ as noted above); and “participant observations” (which are the raw reflections of persons involved in any of the above). (all quotes in this paragraph, p.39)
All of the foregoing constitute mostly ‘raw data’ which must be carefully and objectively examined before any accurate conclusions can be drawn. But such ‘detachment’ – like Constitutional due-process strictures – are merely ‘obstructions’ to any advocates for whom “facts don’t matter”, as is famously said.
And all of this came together in a monstrous and virulent goo to create the SO Mania (and to great extent the Domestic Violence Mania that preceded it).
While admitting that reliance on such a hash may result in the “indicators’ tending to “overstate the amount of people involved” yet he concludes that “even by official measures, we must be greatly alarmed by our crime level”. (p.39)
But the crime level has been declining (although the “reporting” – such as it may be termed – is, as he has said, increasing) and was trending in that direction even in the mid-80s.
It seems to me that having given itself over to the ‘advocacy mania’ approach by guaranteeing its receptivity to any ‘emergencies’ pushed its way by any ‘advocacy’ to whom it might profitably pander, the Beltway wound up moving toward a Regulatory State as well as a Nanny State. And a Regulatory State is a form of Benevolent Despotism, precisely what the Framers rejected as a possibility for their “American Experiment” – which, rather, depended on a daring trust that ‘people’ could be ultimately trusted to sustain their role in American government as The People.
But of course, if so many of the citizens are ‘oppressors’ and the rest are ‘oppressed’, then the entire Founding Vision becomes not only “quaint” but also unworkable, as the government must expand to be both Nanny and Regulator of everybody, who are either perps or victims.
And thus the erosion of any working reality called ‘Americans’ and ‘The People’.
This is what the SO community is working to correct through its efforts to rollback the SO Mania regime.
NOTES
*My copy is the paperback version put out by Oxford UP in 1986. It bears the ISBN 0-19-503980-7. It will be unwieldy to include both Chapter Titles and sub-headings as well as page numbers, in case you have a different edition. I will stick to only using page references when I make quotations, but for especially important points I will do so.
**Consider what the impact is going to be at this point, for example, of having one in six Army troops on some form of officially-prescribed psychoactive drugs (don’t even ask about the illicit drug use); or of the effect of thousands of young men getting through their days in combat simply by reducing their ‘care’ to their immediate ‘buds’ and deriving their sense of life from shooting and being shot at, and the thrill of killing.
Try to tote up the many ways, direct and indirect, that American society and the American People are going to be ‘victimized’ in the near and further future.
Consider, while you’re at it, what happens to the troops who are not on psychoactive medications but the ones who are ruff-tuff and combat competent. This recent piece discusses troops (all male, by the oddest coincidence) assigned to a remote outpost in Afghanistan: they report – and happily – that they don’t know or care how the war will turn out, and that they live day-to-day for the intense high of focused bro-hood with their combat buddies and the thrill of combat (and killing). They do worry – and rightly, more than they know – about how they will adapt to the ‘down’ of civilian life when they return home. What will We as a society face, when thousands of these troops return, on top of the dozens of thousands who have been on psychoactive medications for months or years over there? If We are not going to be indirectly but most really ‘victimized’ – to use Elias’s broad definition of the term – then nobody is ever going to be ‘victimized’.
Thursday, August 5, 2010
DOJ CHILD-INTERNET REPORT
I have reviewed the DOJ’s Report to Congress entitled “National Strategy for Child Exploitation Prevention and Interdiction” that was released earlier this week.
The Report is 280 pages, and the text is here. It’s an Adobe file, and there is a 7 page differential between the Adobe pagination and the actual page number of the text: so page 15 in Adobe will be page 8 of the actual text and will appear as “15/8”.
I’ll mention the points that struck me in the text, and then offer a few concluding thoughts.
The Report begins with a quotation from Nelson Mandela to the effect that you can most keenly judge a country by the way it treats its children. This is instantly followed by “given the current statistics surrounding child pornography this is a country that is losing its soul”. (8/1) The second quote is taken from an Ohio Congressman, John Adams, although – curiously enough – it is cited as being from the text of a court case.
There are a lot of things over the past decade or two that have led me to think that the country is losing its soul – and Thoreau and the Puritans before him had been greatly concerned. The last decade’s wars of choice haven’t helped a lot of now-deceased kids. But the Congressman and the White House and a whole bunch of federal agencies want to go with this initiative, so it is what it is.
The Report immediately makes the point that “the sexual abuse and exploitation of children” will “rob children of their childhood, irrevocably interfering with their emotional and psychological development”. (8/1) Many will recall the incident a decade or more ago when a meta-study of already approved and accepted studies discovered (much to the researchers’ surprise) that the research actually did not support the assertion that children were permanently and hugely harmed (and I do NOT support the sexual abuse or exploitation of anybody, let’s remember). Congress instantly got so worked up that for the first time in American history it passed a Resolution condemning scientific findings and sent the dark message that any researchers who ever discovered anything else like this was going to lose funding.
Sort of like the Vatican and Gallileo.
Anyway, at this point then, you have to wonder just what “research” you can trust, since almost all of it is federally-funded directly or through an organization the researchers work for. But the Report will make some interesting statements further on so let’s keep at it.
I do note, here, however, that the Report states (shrewdly) only that a child will have his/her “emotional and psychological development” “interfered with”, which is a long way from the claims of utter and total psychic and maturational destruction that used to be tossed out.
It is, further, asserted that every child has a “right” to grow up free from “sexual abuse, trauma, and exploitation” … which is quite a tall order. First, because those terms are not well defined and so elastic; second, because it would take a government with a power surpassing Stalin’s at its height to even come close to stamping out all that; and third, because it seems not only impossible to achieve on its very face but also implies that a child with no challenges or threats will grow up ‘perfectly’ … and I don’t think that’s true at all. (Again, this is no subtle ploy on behalf of adults imposing sexual experience on minors.)
And in an echo of Martha Nussbaum’s Capabilities Approach (see previous relevant Posts) it is asserted that children have a “right” (just, as Nussbaum says, “women” do) not to have sexual experience imposed on them. I completely agree that it is criminal, sinful, and immoral to impose such experience on children; but “rights” are Constitutional things and I don’t like to see this vital and powerful concept tossed around. In the long run such unserious use of the term will weaken it for everyone.
Neatly, while the Report insists on this “right”, it also claims that “it will take our entire society” to achieve it. (8/1) No mention of the Family or Parents or Parental Authority … although such entities would be the first line of defense, and if they were able to do their job then a huge amount of repair work (and costs) would be rendered unnecessary. But the Beltway has actually been pursuing policies precisely designed to undermined those entities, and with no small success. Go figure.
Interestingly, the Report traces government history only back to President Bush’s “PROTECT Our Children Act” of 2008. Nothing further back, such as – oh, say – the Adam Walsh Act of 2006. Which may be a straw in the wind and I’ll discuss my thoughts on that later on.
In making its “Threat Assessment” (9/2) the Report’s compilers tick off all the prosecutors, police and “experts” whom they consulted, among which are listed that National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) that President Reagan raised up in 1984. And they also consulted lots of “relevant research”, but again it’s so hard to tell with this combination of ‘advocacy science’ and ‘government-directed’ science. But I’m keeping an open, though careful, mind.
The focus of this new initiative will be on Children at risk from child pornography, online enticement for sexual purposes, commercial sexual exploitation, and child sex tourism. (9/2) Again you may notice what doesn’t appear in all of this, and more on that later.
The US Marshals Service (USMS) figures more largely in this initiative than in previous initiatives. Although it is mentioned that it was the AWA (such references to AWA as the Report makes are mostly in connection with the USMS) that assigned the USMS the job of tracking down “sex offenders” in 2006. The Service claims, according to the Report, to have captured 10,000 SO “fugitives” in FY 2009, (12/5) although I find that rather high UNLESS you figure that many, many of those “fugitives” were simply persons administratively blind-sided by the AWA tier-system and thus became “fugitives” from Registration literally overnight.
Also, the Internet task force on child-crimes has apprehended or prosecuted only 17,000 since 1998 (12/5), so either the USMS is overstating matters, or it simply toted up all the ‘fish in a barrel’ that it ‘shot’ simply through the workings of the highly-dubious, much-contested, and greatly-resisted-by-States AWA tier reclassification.
Among the “broad goals” of this new initiative will be increasing education of federal, state, local, and tribal (the Tribes figure largely in this Report and in a way it reminds one of reading government documents from the Indian Wars era of the 19th century) judges in “the difficult issues involved in child sexual exploitation” . (14/7) I fully support education of everybody involved in any SO matters, especially if they are officially involved. But I hope this isn’t code and govspeak for trying to inveigle the judges into cutting jurisprudential corners in light of the ‘emergency’, which is a gambit the SO community has been seeing for many years and which in some jurisdictions has seen the erection of highly-questionable “special courts”. These entities, often seen in the Domestic Violence regime, seem to understand their role as short-cutting Constitutional protections (viewed by the courts as “obstructions”).
The Repot claims that “there has been a dramatic increase in cases of sexual exploitation of children”, including not only the four areas of concern noted above but also “sexual molestation of children since the 1990s”. (15/8) So after all of this past 20 years of massive SORNA regime, things have increased? But perhaps it is only the internet-mediated stuff, corresponding not only to the development of the Web but also all the social-networking sites that kids nowadays seem to spend a huge amount of their time on.
Figures are given: by 2006 U.S. Attorneys were handling 82.8 percent more child-pornography cases than they had in 1994; states saw a 230 percent increase in documented cases of child-enticement between 2004 and 2008. (15/8) And again I note that between 1994 and 2006 the Internet grew exponentially and the social-networking sites (and omnipresent personal communications devices in the hands of children) did the same. And if Family and Parents and Parental Authority were already in the process of being Deconstructed in 1994, before the Web and social-networking, you can imagine what has happened since then.
Even more interesting revelations: “It is no surprise then that most sexual abuse of children can be attributed to those who have a relationship of trust and authority relative to the child in addition to ready access to the child”, and that 69 percent of child-pornography cases involved abuse/exploitation by people familiar to the children”. (28/21) The Report lists “parents, other relatives, neighbors, family friends, baby-sitters, coaches, and guardians’ partners”: this would seem to indicate that the government was going to be going after a group of persons mostly overlooked in the previous incarnations of the SO regime – i.e. it's not going after the ‘stranger’ sex offender but rather adults who know kids closely, and perhaps other kids.
Indeed, the text immediately goes on to quote NCMEC figures to the effect that “only a small fraction of the victims (4 percent of the NCMEC data set) were victimized by individuals with whom the child had no relationship”. (28/21) Again, this indicates a far different ‘target population’ from anything previously seen in the SO regime’s 20 year reign. And seems to re-focus away from the now-classic ‘stranger-danger’ SO prowling around the nation like a slavering wolf or vampire.
The USMS again gets some stats in about itself: since 2006 (the year of the AWA’s passage) marshals have “apprehended approximately 40,000 fugitives wanted for sexual assaults, sex offender registrations and other sex crimes”. (53/46) In addition to the ever-necessary caution in any government agency’s self-reported figures of its ‘success’, you have to factor in here the sly conflation of ‘sex offender registration violations’ as ‘sex crimes’. The AWASORNA ‘violations’ may have been the simple administrative type automatically created overnight by the AWA, and administrative technicalities are not ‘sex crimes’ – although clearly at least some government agencies are counting them as such to keep the numbers up. I’d also wonder how many of those ‘apprehensions’ actually stood up in court, or will – as the AWA saga winds on its frakkulent yet declining path.
The NCMEC gets a section all to itself, wherein revelations are revealed: it has NCIC access and access to “other public databases” (one can only wonder) thanks to Congress; from 1984 to 1990 its “recovery rate” of missing and exploited children was 62 percent, but “since 1990 it has climbed to 97 percent”. (100/93) I have a clear recollection that it had been discovered goosing its ‘numbers’ by claiming as its own handiwork any and every child ‘missing’ even for an hour or so, lost rather than abducted, and things of that nature. Yet the Report puts it all out there as if it were gospel.
The NCMEC, by the way, got 24 million in government funding in FY 2008 – although, the Report piously reports, it is a not-for-profit. As my long-deceased granny used to say: At least Jesse James had a gun – you KNEW what was happening to you.
The Report concludes with almost 150 pages of Appendices (A through F) , and a couple of them are actually quite worthwhile.
Appendix C (starting on 167/B-7) lists Academic Research and reviews numerous studies. Impressively, the Report includes research that does not support the size of the purported emergency, although the Appendix is opened with a disclaimer that simply being included doesn’t mean that the government accepts all research findings.
In fact, the first study included here is a Harvard one that considers things overblown and public attention – over-stimulated by ‘problematic’ media coverage – to be distracted by sensationalism. Other peers and young adults (18-24) account for 90-94 percent of online encounters, and are often mere ‘solicitations’ or ‘teasing’ rather than ‘harassment’ or actual ‘enticement’. A whopping 69 percent of these do not involve a request for offline contact. (167/C-1)
From 19 percent of encounters that involved sexual solicitation in 2003, the number had decreased to 13 percent in 2006. And of those 81 percent involved recipients between 14 and 17 years of age. Only 4 to 9 percent of sexual solicitations involve persons substantially older than the recipients. (168/C-2)
In cases where the kiddo met the adult offline, most of kiddos were adolescents “who knew they were meeting adults for sexual encounters”, and consequently the adult was charged with statutory rape for nonforcible sexual relations with a minor. The adults were most often in their 20s. And thus, the Harvard study concludes, forcible sexual relations with a young child ‘ambushed’ (my term) by an adult male stranger met online “does not paint an accurate picture of the majority of sexual solicitations and internet-initiated offline sexual encounters.” (168/C-2)
Of “particular”concern, the Harvard study says, are the sexual solicitations between minors and the consequent frequency of statutory-rape rather than more sinister offline encounters. And also that it’s not so much a problem of the type of internet access but rather individual youths’ psychological profile and their willingness to engage in risky behaviors. (168/C-2)
This Study (well worth the read, and only a few pages of quotations from it are in the Report) continues that “known cases involving strangers are extremely rare”. Thus also “the threat of Internet-initiated sex crimes committed by strangers appears to be extremely exaggerated”. Nor do they often involve “prepubescent children”. (169/C-3)
“Significant deception does not appear to be common” in these encounters. (170/C-4)
I am very much impressed that a Study like this got into the Report. It tells me that the Report staff or the reviewing authorities were not all convinced that they wanted to participate in a replay of the SO Mania ‘research’ of 10 and 20 years ago.
Appendix F is a “Synthesis of Major Studies” that starts on page 215/F-1. One study found that girls were twice as likely as boys to be solicited over the internet; youth who were at least 15 years old accounted for almost 2/3s of the exposure incidents; of the ‘adults’ who accounted for 24 percent of online solicitations, most were between 18 and 25; only 4 percent were over 25. (231/F-17)
There is a 50-50 split between adolescents who are troubled and those not troubled who use the internet to arrange offline meetings. (232/F-18)
I would recommend Appendices C and F especially highly.
So then, what do I think?
First, it is clear that AWA has been for all practical purposes ignored – although what stratagems may be involved in that I can’t say for sure. But it seems that ‘sex offenders’ as they have been classically known are yesterday’s news for the government. Perhaps the weight of judicial complications and the chance that the SORNA regime actually has evolved into ‘punishment’, crossing the magic Constitutional line, has become for the government a game no longer worth the candle.
But, second, this ‘children-internet’ initiative may be something devised to distract from the government’s backing-away from the 2-decade old classical SO Mania and its regime. Yet, in best Beltway style, those already on the bandwagon will not be kicked to the curb: clearly, much government money (such as the term applies these days) will still be forth-coming.
Yet, in my view, history is never static and you can’t step into the same river twice – not even if you’re a government. Thus, although the strategy might have been to simply start-up ‘another sex-offense Mania’, such a strategy is not taking place in the same ‘world’ that the now-classic one took place in. Apparently there are persons in government, certainly in research, who don’t wish to repeat what they have seen going on all over the country for 20 years.
But ‘the children’ are a sure-fire draw and there is some legitimate cause for concern (although, as the studies I noted demonstrate, the problem is either being hugely exaggerated or wrongly-aimed, or both).
And this initiative, if it follows the stats reported in those studies, is going to have to start intruding in the lives of a large bunch of heretofore ‘normal’ people, since rarely are ‘strangers’ and actually ‘adult strangers’ involved in this sort of thing. I’m not sure how politically palatable that’s going to be for the program's political enablers.
Third, ‘sex offenders’ seem to be yesterday’s news, replaced by Internet Child Sexual Predators and Exploiters. And while there is a habitual reference by the USMS to this new type of sex-offender, there is no real effort to drum up the hysterical/maniacal response that characterized the wrecking-job done on Sex Offenders during the classical phase.
Fourth, the classical cartoon of the Stranger Sex Offender is clearly not going to be applicable to this new initiative.
Fifth, as with everything nowadays proposed, it's all subject to what I call The National Situation: there is no real money or public wealth left and it’s hardly inconceivable that the world’s governments might choose to dismiss the Dollar as the planet’s reserve currency. In which case, the government will be hard-pressed to keep its essential services going, let alone toss around ‘funding’ for some of the more baroque excresences of the Advocacy-Industrial Complex.
So I’d recommend to you the Executive Summary at the beginning of this Report, and Appendices C and F.
And I’d say that this Initiative is more than just another encouraging straw in the wind.
The Report is 280 pages, and the text is here. It’s an Adobe file, and there is a 7 page differential between the Adobe pagination and the actual page number of the text: so page 15 in Adobe will be page 8 of the actual text and will appear as “15/8”.
I’ll mention the points that struck me in the text, and then offer a few concluding thoughts.
The Report begins with a quotation from Nelson Mandela to the effect that you can most keenly judge a country by the way it treats its children. This is instantly followed by “given the current statistics surrounding child pornography this is a country that is losing its soul”. (8/1) The second quote is taken from an Ohio Congressman, John Adams, although – curiously enough – it is cited as being from the text of a court case.
There are a lot of things over the past decade or two that have led me to think that the country is losing its soul – and Thoreau and the Puritans before him had been greatly concerned. The last decade’s wars of choice haven’t helped a lot of now-deceased kids. But the Congressman and the White House and a whole bunch of federal agencies want to go with this initiative, so it is what it is.
The Report immediately makes the point that “the sexual abuse and exploitation of children” will “rob children of their childhood, irrevocably interfering with their emotional and psychological development”. (8/1) Many will recall the incident a decade or more ago when a meta-study of already approved and accepted studies discovered (much to the researchers’ surprise) that the research actually did not support the assertion that children were permanently and hugely harmed (and I do NOT support the sexual abuse or exploitation of anybody, let’s remember). Congress instantly got so worked up that for the first time in American history it passed a Resolution condemning scientific findings and sent the dark message that any researchers who ever discovered anything else like this was going to lose funding.
Sort of like the Vatican and Gallileo.
Anyway, at this point then, you have to wonder just what “research” you can trust, since almost all of it is federally-funded directly or through an organization the researchers work for. But the Report will make some interesting statements further on so let’s keep at it.
I do note, here, however, that the Report states (shrewdly) only that a child will have his/her “emotional and psychological development” “interfered with”, which is a long way from the claims of utter and total psychic and maturational destruction that used to be tossed out.
It is, further, asserted that every child has a “right” to grow up free from “sexual abuse, trauma, and exploitation” … which is quite a tall order. First, because those terms are not well defined and so elastic; second, because it would take a government with a power surpassing Stalin’s at its height to even come close to stamping out all that; and third, because it seems not only impossible to achieve on its very face but also implies that a child with no challenges or threats will grow up ‘perfectly’ … and I don’t think that’s true at all. (Again, this is no subtle ploy on behalf of adults imposing sexual experience on minors.)
And in an echo of Martha Nussbaum’s Capabilities Approach (see previous relevant Posts) it is asserted that children have a “right” (just, as Nussbaum says, “women” do) not to have sexual experience imposed on them. I completely agree that it is criminal, sinful, and immoral to impose such experience on children; but “rights” are Constitutional things and I don’t like to see this vital and powerful concept tossed around. In the long run such unserious use of the term will weaken it for everyone.
Neatly, while the Report insists on this “right”, it also claims that “it will take our entire society” to achieve it. (8/1) No mention of the Family or Parents or Parental Authority … although such entities would be the first line of defense, and if they were able to do their job then a huge amount of repair work (and costs) would be rendered unnecessary. But the Beltway has actually been pursuing policies precisely designed to undermined those entities, and with no small success. Go figure.
Interestingly, the Report traces government history only back to President Bush’s “PROTECT Our Children Act” of 2008. Nothing further back, such as – oh, say – the Adam Walsh Act of 2006. Which may be a straw in the wind and I’ll discuss my thoughts on that later on.
In making its “Threat Assessment” (9/2) the Report’s compilers tick off all the prosecutors, police and “experts” whom they consulted, among which are listed that National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) that President Reagan raised up in 1984. And they also consulted lots of “relevant research”, but again it’s so hard to tell with this combination of ‘advocacy science’ and ‘government-directed’ science. But I’m keeping an open, though careful, mind.
The focus of this new initiative will be on Children at risk from child pornography, online enticement for sexual purposes, commercial sexual exploitation, and child sex tourism. (9/2) Again you may notice what doesn’t appear in all of this, and more on that later.
The US Marshals Service (USMS) figures more largely in this initiative than in previous initiatives. Although it is mentioned that it was the AWA (such references to AWA as the Report makes are mostly in connection with the USMS) that assigned the USMS the job of tracking down “sex offenders” in 2006. The Service claims, according to the Report, to have captured 10,000 SO “fugitives” in FY 2009, (12/5) although I find that rather high UNLESS you figure that many, many of those “fugitives” were simply persons administratively blind-sided by the AWA tier-system and thus became “fugitives” from Registration literally overnight.
Also, the Internet task force on child-crimes has apprehended or prosecuted only 17,000 since 1998 (12/5), so either the USMS is overstating matters, or it simply toted up all the ‘fish in a barrel’ that it ‘shot’ simply through the workings of the highly-dubious, much-contested, and greatly-resisted-by-States AWA tier reclassification.
Among the “broad goals” of this new initiative will be increasing education of federal, state, local, and tribal (the Tribes figure largely in this Report and in a way it reminds one of reading government documents from the Indian Wars era of the 19th century) judges in “the difficult issues involved in child sexual exploitation” . (14/7) I fully support education of everybody involved in any SO matters, especially if they are officially involved. But I hope this isn’t code and govspeak for trying to inveigle the judges into cutting jurisprudential corners in light of the ‘emergency’, which is a gambit the SO community has been seeing for many years and which in some jurisdictions has seen the erection of highly-questionable “special courts”. These entities, often seen in the Domestic Violence regime, seem to understand their role as short-cutting Constitutional protections (viewed by the courts as “obstructions”).
The Repot claims that “there has been a dramatic increase in cases of sexual exploitation of children”, including not only the four areas of concern noted above but also “sexual molestation of children since the 1990s”. (15/8) So after all of this past 20 years of massive SORNA regime, things have increased? But perhaps it is only the internet-mediated stuff, corresponding not only to the development of the Web but also all the social-networking sites that kids nowadays seem to spend a huge amount of their time on.
Figures are given: by 2006 U.S. Attorneys were handling 82.8 percent more child-pornography cases than they had in 1994; states saw a 230 percent increase in documented cases of child-enticement between 2004 and 2008. (15/8) And again I note that between 1994 and 2006 the Internet grew exponentially and the social-networking sites (and omnipresent personal communications devices in the hands of children) did the same. And if Family and Parents and Parental Authority were already in the process of being Deconstructed in 1994, before the Web and social-networking, you can imagine what has happened since then.
Even more interesting revelations: “It is no surprise then that most sexual abuse of children can be attributed to those who have a relationship of trust and authority relative to the child in addition to ready access to the child”, and that 69 percent of child-pornography cases involved abuse/exploitation by people familiar to the children”. (28/21) The Report lists “parents, other relatives, neighbors, family friends, baby-sitters, coaches, and guardians’ partners”: this would seem to indicate that the government was going to be going after a group of persons mostly overlooked in the previous incarnations of the SO regime – i.e. it's not going after the ‘stranger’ sex offender but rather adults who know kids closely, and perhaps other kids.
Indeed, the text immediately goes on to quote NCMEC figures to the effect that “only a small fraction of the victims (4 percent of the NCMEC data set) were victimized by individuals with whom the child had no relationship”. (28/21) Again, this indicates a far different ‘target population’ from anything previously seen in the SO regime’s 20 year reign. And seems to re-focus away from the now-classic ‘stranger-danger’ SO prowling around the nation like a slavering wolf or vampire.
The USMS again gets some stats in about itself: since 2006 (the year of the AWA’s passage) marshals have “apprehended approximately 40,000 fugitives wanted for sexual assaults, sex offender registrations and other sex crimes”. (53/46) In addition to the ever-necessary caution in any government agency’s self-reported figures of its ‘success’, you have to factor in here the sly conflation of ‘sex offender registration violations’ as ‘sex crimes’. The AWASORNA ‘violations’ may have been the simple administrative type automatically created overnight by the AWA, and administrative technicalities are not ‘sex crimes’ – although clearly at least some government agencies are counting them as such to keep the numbers up. I’d also wonder how many of those ‘apprehensions’ actually stood up in court, or will – as the AWA saga winds on its frakkulent yet declining path.
The NCMEC gets a section all to itself, wherein revelations are revealed: it has NCIC access and access to “other public databases” (one can only wonder) thanks to Congress; from 1984 to 1990 its “recovery rate” of missing and exploited children was 62 percent, but “since 1990 it has climbed to 97 percent”. (100/93) I have a clear recollection that it had been discovered goosing its ‘numbers’ by claiming as its own handiwork any and every child ‘missing’ even for an hour or so, lost rather than abducted, and things of that nature. Yet the Report puts it all out there as if it were gospel.
The NCMEC, by the way, got 24 million in government funding in FY 2008 – although, the Report piously reports, it is a not-for-profit. As my long-deceased granny used to say: At least Jesse James had a gun – you KNEW what was happening to you.
The Report concludes with almost 150 pages of Appendices (A through F) , and a couple of them are actually quite worthwhile.
Appendix C (starting on 167/B-7) lists Academic Research and reviews numerous studies. Impressively, the Report includes research that does not support the size of the purported emergency, although the Appendix is opened with a disclaimer that simply being included doesn’t mean that the government accepts all research findings.
In fact, the first study included here is a Harvard one that considers things overblown and public attention – over-stimulated by ‘problematic’ media coverage – to be distracted by sensationalism. Other peers and young adults (18-24) account for 90-94 percent of online encounters, and are often mere ‘solicitations’ or ‘teasing’ rather than ‘harassment’ or actual ‘enticement’. A whopping 69 percent of these do not involve a request for offline contact. (167/C-1)
From 19 percent of encounters that involved sexual solicitation in 2003, the number had decreased to 13 percent in 2006. And of those 81 percent involved recipients between 14 and 17 years of age. Only 4 to 9 percent of sexual solicitations involve persons substantially older than the recipients. (168/C-2)
In cases where the kiddo met the adult offline, most of kiddos were adolescents “who knew they were meeting adults for sexual encounters”, and consequently the adult was charged with statutory rape for nonforcible sexual relations with a minor. The adults were most often in their 20s. And thus, the Harvard study concludes, forcible sexual relations with a young child ‘ambushed’ (my term) by an adult male stranger met online “does not paint an accurate picture of the majority of sexual solicitations and internet-initiated offline sexual encounters.” (168/C-2)
Of “particular”concern, the Harvard study says, are the sexual solicitations between minors and the consequent frequency of statutory-rape rather than more sinister offline encounters. And also that it’s not so much a problem of the type of internet access but rather individual youths’ psychological profile and their willingness to engage in risky behaviors. (168/C-2)
This Study (well worth the read, and only a few pages of quotations from it are in the Report) continues that “known cases involving strangers are extremely rare”. Thus also “the threat of Internet-initiated sex crimes committed by strangers appears to be extremely exaggerated”. Nor do they often involve “prepubescent children”. (169/C-3)
“Significant deception does not appear to be common” in these encounters. (170/C-4)
I am very much impressed that a Study like this got into the Report. It tells me that the Report staff or the reviewing authorities were not all convinced that they wanted to participate in a replay of the SO Mania ‘research’ of 10 and 20 years ago.
Appendix F is a “Synthesis of Major Studies” that starts on page 215/F-1. One study found that girls were twice as likely as boys to be solicited over the internet; youth who were at least 15 years old accounted for almost 2/3s of the exposure incidents; of the ‘adults’ who accounted for 24 percent of online solicitations, most were between 18 and 25; only 4 percent were over 25. (231/F-17)
There is a 50-50 split between adolescents who are troubled and those not troubled who use the internet to arrange offline meetings. (232/F-18)
I would recommend Appendices C and F especially highly.
So then, what do I think?
First, it is clear that AWA has been for all practical purposes ignored – although what stratagems may be involved in that I can’t say for sure. But it seems that ‘sex offenders’ as they have been classically known are yesterday’s news for the government. Perhaps the weight of judicial complications and the chance that the SORNA regime actually has evolved into ‘punishment’, crossing the magic Constitutional line, has become for the government a game no longer worth the candle.
But, second, this ‘children-internet’ initiative may be something devised to distract from the government’s backing-away from the 2-decade old classical SO Mania and its regime. Yet, in best Beltway style, those already on the bandwagon will not be kicked to the curb: clearly, much government money (such as the term applies these days) will still be forth-coming.
Yet, in my view, history is never static and you can’t step into the same river twice – not even if you’re a government. Thus, although the strategy might have been to simply start-up ‘another sex-offense Mania’, such a strategy is not taking place in the same ‘world’ that the now-classic one took place in. Apparently there are persons in government, certainly in research, who don’t wish to repeat what they have seen going on all over the country for 20 years.
But ‘the children’ are a sure-fire draw and there is some legitimate cause for concern (although, as the studies I noted demonstrate, the problem is either being hugely exaggerated or wrongly-aimed, or both).
And this initiative, if it follows the stats reported in those studies, is going to have to start intruding in the lives of a large bunch of heretofore ‘normal’ people, since rarely are ‘strangers’ and actually ‘adult strangers’ involved in this sort of thing. I’m not sure how politically palatable that’s going to be for the program's political enablers.
Third, ‘sex offenders’ seem to be yesterday’s news, replaced by Internet Child Sexual Predators and Exploiters. And while there is a habitual reference by the USMS to this new type of sex-offender, there is no real effort to drum up the hysterical/maniacal response that characterized the wrecking-job done on Sex Offenders during the classical phase.
Fourth, the classical cartoon of the Stranger Sex Offender is clearly not going to be applicable to this new initiative.
Fifth, as with everything nowadays proposed, it's all subject to what I call The National Situation: there is no real money or public wealth left and it’s hardly inconceivable that the world’s governments might choose to dismiss the Dollar as the planet’s reserve currency. In which case, the government will be hard-pressed to keep its essential services going, let alone toss around ‘funding’ for some of the more baroque excresences of the Advocacy-Industrial Complex.
So I’d recommend to you the Executive Summary at the beginning of this Report, and Appendices C and F.
And I’d say that this Initiative is more than just another encouraging straw in the wind.
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
VICTIMOLOGY 3
We continue reviewing the 1986 book entitled “The Politics of Victimization” by Robert Elias, then of Tufts University.*
Elias quotes Ivan Illych, a 1960s world-type guru: “The law is used to impose a given mindset on all participants. The resulting contend of the law embodies the ideologies of the lawmakers and judges. How they experience the ideology inherent in a culture becomes established mythology in the laws they make and apply”. (p.27)
There’s a lot more here than meets the eye.
Illych, whom Elias approvingly quotes, is doing a couple of things here, and none of them bode well (nor, being adopted, have they worked out well) for American Constitutional principles and law.
First, Illych is embracing a form of legal ‘positivism’. This doesn’t mean that laws are ‘positive’ in the sense of upbeat or good; it means that law is ‘posited’ or brought into being by the lawmakers who make it. If you think of it as ‘posited’ law you’re probably going to be closer to what the idea of ‘positive’ law really is.
This, however, means that there is no Higher Law coming from a Lawmaker or from any Source higher than the lawmakers themselves; there is no ‘natural law’ or ‘natural Law’ to which human (lawmaker-made) laws must conform if they are to be valid.
The Western tradition had reached a high-point with the achievement of the Medieval synthesis: God had created the world and made its (and His) principles accessible to human Reason – therefore the law-maker (and the ruler) wants to first arrive at an awareness of what this Higher Law requires, and then pass laws that are b) workable in the local jurisdiction but that also a) conform to the Higher Law. Otherwise, said the Medieval synthesis, a law that contravenes or is not in conformity with the Higher Law does not enjoy the authority of ‘law’ at all and can – perhaps must – be disobeyed.
As the unitive influence of Christendom waned after the Protestant Reformation and the wars of religion, and as ‘Science’ began to grow in cultural authority, legal thinking tried to achieve the same results without the ‘God’ part: you want to make laws that conform to Reason (but nothing about where Reason comes from or what Grounds it and gives it its authority).
You could get away with this for a while in the afterglow of the Medieval synthesis: Reason sort of replaced God but folks were still used to the idea that there was some Source of Law that gave it its authority to which even governments and elite legislators and law-makers must conform.
But then, coming into what historians call the Modern era, there was much more disagreement as to what Reason required or what it actually ‘said’.
There was still a lot of support for the idea of ‘natural law’: that there is a law built into the nature of human existence … this was again sort of a Medieval synthesis without any God: ‘nature’ became the replacement for ‘God’. You can see the effect of this in Constitutional thought and in Jefferson’s justifications for “inalienable rights” and “human dignity” in the Declaration of Independence: no earthly government can interfere with the rights and dignity of humans because those rights and that dignity were grounded in the ‘natural law’ of human existence itself.
But there were now not only folks who disagreed about the nature or will of God (as in the Protestant Reformation and subsequently) but also lots of thinkers who felt that there may well be no God at all, but there was human Reason instead.
And after some curves and twists and turns, Legal Positivism came along in the 19th century (after the Constitutional founding and after the Framers’ generation): some thinkers gave up on any Higher Law at all, whether from Nature or from a God. Instead, they figured, there was the actual power of a government, and that government (monarchy, republic, tyranny, or what-have-you) would make such laws as it made, and those laws had their authority (merely) from the bald fact that the government in that jurisdiction had made them.
So, in the Positivist view, a law is what it is. Its authority comes from the authority that made it, and that government is the ‘source’ of the law. And that government can change laws, or it can make new laws, and they will be authoritative because of the government that made them. And if that government changed a law – or even abolished it – then that was OK too. Government was the ‘source’ – and the only source – of law’s authority; a law did not have to ‘answer to’ or ‘conform to’ any Higher Law; and neither did the government that made it.
You can see where things could go wrong with a theory like this: a government could do what it wanted to. It didn’t have to ‘answer to’ any higher Authority or conform to any higher Theory. Of course, prudence would dictate that the government should use its huge authority wisely, and as ‘democracy’ began to spread after the American Constitution set an example, then The People or their elected representatives would actually have some control over the making of the laws that would govern them.
Although the French Revolution raised up the idea of “Reason” almost to the level of idolatry: Reason in that view was almost a living force (there was even a ‘Goddess of Reason’), but that force would reveal its wisdom only to the elites of the Revolution, and they would make the laws.
Things started to get wayyyyy complicated.
Karl Marx in the mid-1800s saw the whole of human existence as governed by the economic and the material concerns, a kind of very this-worldly approach. By the time of the Communist Revolution of 1917 those leading Communists – adults who had read Marx when they were young – under the guidance of Lenin picked up on the themes of Positivism (a law is what the government says it is), Marx (the only forces that govern human history are the economic forces of this world), and Lenin’s particular take on an elite Party whose cadres grasped the ‘reason’ of the Revolution, a ‘wisdom’ that had the force of Reason because it held the true key to ultimate paradise on earth and in human history.
What all this has to do with the SO community is that the radical-feminist movement, looking for some sort of conceptual scheme that would ‘justify’ its demands, adopted Marx by taking large chunks of his vision and simply substituting ‘gender’ for ‘class’: thus,‘capitalism’ in Marx became feministical ‘patriarchy’; ‘capitalists’ became ‘men’; ‘the workers’ became ‘women’; and the oppression that capitalists did to workers through dominating them economically, men did to women through sexual and physical domination and violence.
And you can see where things were bound to go.
Illych tried to use Marxism – still a viable theory in the 1950s and 1960s – to crack open more space for folks to get a bigger slice of the pie and a bigger grasp on life in general, and it was well-intentioned.
But once you get – here in America in the 1960s and since – a gambit whereby Marxist theory is introduced into a Constitutional Republic and a democracy based on the deliberative participation of The People … then you were going to create huge and deep cracks in the very foundations of the polity.
Marx and Lenin envisioned genuine ‘class war’ that would bring about the ‘revolution’ whereby the workers – under the guidance of the ‘vanguard elites’ of the Party – would rise up, demand their rightful authority and piece of the pie, and thus everything would turn into the Workers’ Paradise and Heaven – so to speak – would enter history and come to earth.
Translated by feministical alchemy to America, this meant a ‘gender war’ whereby ‘women’ would overthrow ‘men’ under the guidance of the vanguard cadres of feminism, turn the tables on the ‘patriarchy’, get what was rightfully theirs that had long been denied to them, and it would be ‘paradise’.
And but of course, this being a revolution and all, some “eggs would have to be broken to make the omelette” (as the Commies used to love saying). And again, the SO community now understands how History can get up-close and personal even when it seems so far away.
What has been bothering me for quite a while is that the Beltway pols bought all of this, especially in the decade of the 1990s when – ironically – the homeland of Marxism-Leninism and its entire system collapsed under the weight of such a frakkulously wrong and violent regime.
And then Illych echoes the idea that the only dynamics that grant laws their public aura of ‘rightness’ are ‘myths’ that grow up around them. There is no Higher Law and no Higher Reality, so the laws don’t have to conform to any of that; there is no Higher Law-giver either. People simply ‘get used to’ the laws and how they are applied, not because the laws might be ‘right’ or ‘rightly applied’ but simply out of force of habit.
And it is precisely here, says Illych, that ‘change’ can be effected: by ripping aside the veil of the people’s ‘myths’ and imposing the bright light of the revolution’s (whatever revolution you’re into) ‘reason’. And maybe the faster the better; because your average folks are like ‘muggles’ in Harry Potter: they really just don’t get it and the best thing to do is to maneuver them where they really need to go. (In that sense, I would say, Dumbledore is a better guide than Marx or Lenin or Illych or the feministicals: he had a deep respect for the ways of those who ‘just didn’t get it’ and still respected them).
Elias then does some more thinking out loud and spills more beans.
In a “democratic pluralist” approach, the criminal law reflects the preferences of ‘the people’; it is presumed that the preferences of the people and the shaping influence of their elected representatives and the work of general “public interest groups” will be enough to provide a workable and proper criminal law for a society. (p.29)
BUT, he quickly goes on, “many dispute the pluralist view” (p.29) And let’s not forget that the ‘democratic pluralist’ view is the one that has been the national ideal since the Founding.
Those who dispute it think that it’s “largely ineffective” and that you need more than those “public interest groups”. Since there are “special interest groups” that can concentrate their energies specifically to get what they want, then “special interests may largely dominate lawmaking, policymaking, and public opinion, marshalling the resources to wield the most effective political power”. (p.29)
So it’s not enough merely to establish solid and widely-known “definitions” of crimes or “criminal definitions”, because those “special interests” are actually “dominant interests” that will “dominate” how the laws and definitions are applied. (You can hear echoes of Marx already.) And these special interests may even help shape public opinion to support their “world view”… “even when it serves public interests far less than their own” (Ditto Marx.)
And since the “public” can be manipulated subtly to abandon its own interests, then clearly, of course, the public’s opinion cannot be fully trusted (or – although he doesn’t say it – respected).
Furthermore, there is an “ideological” element to all of this: dominant interests may well get to say what is and isn’t an important crime. (p.30) And you can see where Victimology and radical-feminism are starting to converge here – because suddenly ‘sex offenses’, broadly and vaguely defined are going to become the most awful of all crimes because ‘everybody just knows it’.
In a subsection a bit ominously entitled “Evolving Needs” he then says that “Some believe that official definitions of [crime and] victimization emerge from power and struggle, which powerful economic interests may dominate”. (p.30) You can again see the curious fusing of Marxist and criminal-law thinking, working toward a vision wherein dominant economic interests (patriarchal?) get to say because of their power what is and isn’t an important crime (and ‘victim’), and that “struggle” is required to fix this problem.
Whereas Elias tries to keep the Marxist thing going – that it is actual economic elites who try to keep the ‘poor’ and ‘working classes’ down by defining crime in such a way as to enable the state to control those classe, and that it is white-collar and economic crime that should be a focus of the criminal law – you can see quickly, from the vantage point of a quarter century, that American radical-feminism and ‘governance feminism’ was going to skip the Marxist economics and make ‘men’ the oppressing gender, upon whom the tables need to be turned by the radical-feminists themselves becoming a politically organized “special interest” and turning the criminal law against the oppressor class of ‘men’ by going after sex-offenses.
(And looking at what has happened to the economy, you can also see how vital it was to keep a close eye on that ‘white collar crime’, and what happened when the government police power let the Wall Street ‘white collar’ crowd run wild while it focused its attentions on ‘sex offenders’.)
Again, while Elias is trying to make the case for expanding the criminal law and its application to make ‘white-collar’ and ‘economic’ crimes more important and substantial, you can see where the American radical-feminists had another idea altogether: to make ‘male’ crimes – ‘sex offenses’ – vastly more significant a part of the national criminal law policy. And – I would add – in the process that radical-feminist advocacy, joined with certain Rightist law-and-order elements, took Elias’s Victimology in a whole other direction: into ‘sex offense land’, leaving the white-collar folks to play on their own in the Wall Street sandbox.
And in the process a “special interest” was raised up that functioned as dangerously as the dominant-economic special-interests that Elias himself had originally been talking about.
Elias is still trying to make his somewhat Marxist case for treating, say, negligent mine owners as far more dangerous criminals than lower-class violent offenders: while We recoil at the thought of one murder every 26 minutes in this country, he says, yet there is no concern for one workplace death due to injury or work-induced disease every 4.5 minutes. (p.32)
But these workplace deaths, he says, should be “predictable and preventable”. (p.32)
And you can see, right here, where the American crime-oriented Victimology would try to ‘predict’ and ‘prevent’ crimes (especially sex crimes), while Elias was talking about using the criminal law to buttress policies to prevent workplace injury and disease.
He uses an example: suppose the Ford Motor Company decided quietly that it would be cheaper to pay off a predictable number of families a predictable amount of money for fatalities caused by a certain defect than it would be to recall a whole lotta cars and fix the defect. (p.32) Is it right that this be considered merely a ‘business decision’ and not an actual crime?
I have something of an automobile image myself: suppose you as a legislator want to make a big bunch of potential voters as happy as you can. You let your office get involved with a bunch of folks who want ‘dangerous drivers’ off the roads; drivers who, say, ‘use their cars as a weapon’.
So you help them get media attention for the rare, rare case where a driver – in a fit of rage or lunacy – actually uses his motor vehicle as a weapon to purposely ram and harm somebody.
Well and good. But then that sort of thing doesn’t happen very often so you’re not going to get much bang for your buck, not many voters for the energy you’ve invested. So you expand the definition of ‘using a car as a weapon’ to include just about anybody who causes a motor-vehicle accident or has a motor-vehicle accident or who gets a ticket. NOW you’ve got some numbers!
Then you want to play up the ‘harm’ in order to keep up public sympathy and concern. And you also want to keep focusing on the grisly crashes so that folks think they happen all the time, while also quietly corralling all the accident-involved or ticketed drivers.
Neat.
In fact, Elias will get to that: referring again to “some thinkers” he suggests that Victimology should not accept conventionally-defined and prioritized crimes in the first place. Instead, victimologists “could begin defining victims and victimization using broader criteria, perhaps from some general theory of the state or from universal human rights” (p.34) (Which, you may recall, is exactly what Martha Nussbaum tries to do in her article 20 years later.)
That “general theory of the state” would include what you can call the Regulatory-Preventive State or the Nanny State, whose role is not simply to keep a level playing field for mature and adult citizens to work out their lives and express their energies, but rather is expected to be as intrusive as a mother at a breakfast table of squalling infants, arranging who gets what and so forth according to her own indisputable and un-appealable decision-making wisdom.
In such a theory, Legal Positivism – that a law derives its authority solely from the power of the government that makes it – works just fine. What Mommy says goes ‘just because’ and what the government says goes ‘just because’.
But that’s not the recipe for a Constitutional Republic, a democratic polity, or a politically competent Citizenry.
The “universal human rights” approach would state that there are some universally recognized “rights” that all humans have. But that’s not compatible with Legal Positivism: if some government in the world makes laws, who is to say that it can’t or that its laws are ‘wrong’?
And if just one government doesn’t recognize those “rights”, then by your definition they are precisely not “universal”.
(This is going to be a problem if American victim-oriented feminism seeks to extend itself into other countries and cultures, although the American media haven’t really gotten into the problem very much.)
So such approaches are going to run into the very defects of their theoretical virtues: what gives Victimology – as a ‘science’ or a ‘movement’ – the right or the authority to tell a government or a culture that it is not defining ‘victimization’ broadly enough and that it needs to change?
This is where “special interest” consciousness-raising and horse-trading would come in, but as I’ve said above, you wind up going down that road and you become a manipulator (and not just an educator) of public opinion, and the SO community can bear witness to just what frakkulence follows from a political agenda that seeks to bypass the opinion of those who ‘just don’t get it’ and get legislators to impose laws regardless of how poorly conceived or unworkable they are.
Which is pretty much where this country is now.
NOTES
*My copy is the paperback version put out by Oxford UP in 1986. It bears the ISBN 0-19-503980-7. It will be unwieldy to include both Chapter Titles and sub-headings as well as page numbers, in case you have a different edition. I will stick to only using page references when I make quotations, but for especially important points I will do so.
Elias quotes Ivan Illych, a 1960s world-type guru: “The law is used to impose a given mindset on all participants. The resulting contend of the law embodies the ideologies of the lawmakers and judges. How they experience the ideology inherent in a culture becomes established mythology in the laws they make and apply”. (p.27)
There’s a lot more here than meets the eye.
Illych, whom Elias approvingly quotes, is doing a couple of things here, and none of them bode well (nor, being adopted, have they worked out well) for American Constitutional principles and law.
First, Illych is embracing a form of legal ‘positivism’. This doesn’t mean that laws are ‘positive’ in the sense of upbeat or good; it means that law is ‘posited’ or brought into being by the lawmakers who make it. If you think of it as ‘posited’ law you’re probably going to be closer to what the idea of ‘positive’ law really is.
This, however, means that there is no Higher Law coming from a Lawmaker or from any Source higher than the lawmakers themselves; there is no ‘natural law’ or ‘natural Law’ to which human (lawmaker-made) laws must conform if they are to be valid.
The Western tradition had reached a high-point with the achievement of the Medieval synthesis: God had created the world and made its (and His) principles accessible to human Reason – therefore the law-maker (and the ruler) wants to first arrive at an awareness of what this Higher Law requires, and then pass laws that are b) workable in the local jurisdiction but that also a) conform to the Higher Law. Otherwise, said the Medieval synthesis, a law that contravenes or is not in conformity with the Higher Law does not enjoy the authority of ‘law’ at all and can – perhaps must – be disobeyed.
As the unitive influence of Christendom waned after the Protestant Reformation and the wars of religion, and as ‘Science’ began to grow in cultural authority, legal thinking tried to achieve the same results without the ‘God’ part: you want to make laws that conform to Reason (but nothing about where Reason comes from or what Grounds it and gives it its authority).
You could get away with this for a while in the afterglow of the Medieval synthesis: Reason sort of replaced God but folks were still used to the idea that there was some Source of Law that gave it its authority to which even governments and elite legislators and law-makers must conform.
But then, coming into what historians call the Modern era, there was much more disagreement as to what Reason required or what it actually ‘said’.
There was still a lot of support for the idea of ‘natural law’: that there is a law built into the nature of human existence … this was again sort of a Medieval synthesis without any God: ‘nature’ became the replacement for ‘God’. You can see the effect of this in Constitutional thought and in Jefferson’s justifications for “inalienable rights” and “human dignity” in the Declaration of Independence: no earthly government can interfere with the rights and dignity of humans because those rights and that dignity were grounded in the ‘natural law’ of human existence itself.
But there were now not only folks who disagreed about the nature or will of God (as in the Protestant Reformation and subsequently) but also lots of thinkers who felt that there may well be no God at all, but there was human Reason instead.
And after some curves and twists and turns, Legal Positivism came along in the 19th century (after the Constitutional founding and after the Framers’ generation): some thinkers gave up on any Higher Law at all, whether from Nature or from a God. Instead, they figured, there was the actual power of a government, and that government (monarchy, republic, tyranny, or what-have-you) would make such laws as it made, and those laws had their authority (merely) from the bald fact that the government in that jurisdiction had made them.
So, in the Positivist view, a law is what it is. Its authority comes from the authority that made it, and that government is the ‘source’ of the law. And that government can change laws, or it can make new laws, and they will be authoritative because of the government that made them. And if that government changed a law – or even abolished it – then that was OK too. Government was the ‘source’ – and the only source – of law’s authority; a law did not have to ‘answer to’ or ‘conform to’ any Higher Law; and neither did the government that made it.
You can see where things could go wrong with a theory like this: a government could do what it wanted to. It didn’t have to ‘answer to’ any higher Authority or conform to any higher Theory. Of course, prudence would dictate that the government should use its huge authority wisely, and as ‘democracy’ began to spread after the American Constitution set an example, then The People or their elected representatives would actually have some control over the making of the laws that would govern them.
Although the French Revolution raised up the idea of “Reason” almost to the level of idolatry: Reason in that view was almost a living force (there was even a ‘Goddess of Reason’), but that force would reveal its wisdom only to the elites of the Revolution, and they would make the laws.
Things started to get wayyyyy complicated.
Karl Marx in the mid-1800s saw the whole of human existence as governed by the economic and the material concerns, a kind of very this-worldly approach. By the time of the Communist Revolution of 1917 those leading Communists – adults who had read Marx when they were young – under the guidance of Lenin picked up on the themes of Positivism (a law is what the government says it is), Marx (the only forces that govern human history are the economic forces of this world), and Lenin’s particular take on an elite Party whose cadres grasped the ‘reason’ of the Revolution, a ‘wisdom’ that had the force of Reason because it held the true key to ultimate paradise on earth and in human history.
What all this has to do with the SO community is that the radical-feminist movement, looking for some sort of conceptual scheme that would ‘justify’ its demands, adopted Marx by taking large chunks of his vision and simply substituting ‘gender’ for ‘class’: thus,‘capitalism’ in Marx became feministical ‘patriarchy’; ‘capitalists’ became ‘men’; ‘the workers’ became ‘women’; and the oppression that capitalists did to workers through dominating them economically, men did to women through sexual and physical domination and violence.
And you can see where things were bound to go.
Illych tried to use Marxism – still a viable theory in the 1950s and 1960s – to crack open more space for folks to get a bigger slice of the pie and a bigger grasp on life in general, and it was well-intentioned.
But once you get – here in America in the 1960s and since – a gambit whereby Marxist theory is introduced into a Constitutional Republic and a democracy based on the deliberative participation of The People … then you were going to create huge and deep cracks in the very foundations of the polity.
Marx and Lenin envisioned genuine ‘class war’ that would bring about the ‘revolution’ whereby the workers – under the guidance of the ‘vanguard elites’ of the Party – would rise up, demand their rightful authority and piece of the pie, and thus everything would turn into the Workers’ Paradise and Heaven – so to speak – would enter history and come to earth.
Translated by feministical alchemy to America, this meant a ‘gender war’ whereby ‘women’ would overthrow ‘men’ under the guidance of the vanguard cadres of feminism, turn the tables on the ‘patriarchy’, get what was rightfully theirs that had long been denied to them, and it would be ‘paradise’.
And but of course, this being a revolution and all, some “eggs would have to be broken to make the omelette” (as the Commies used to love saying). And again, the SO community now understands how History can get up-close and personal even when it seems so far away.
What has been bothering me for quite a while is that the Beltway pols bought all of this, especially in the decade of the 1990s when – ironically – the homeland of Marxism-Leninism and its entire system collapsed under the weight of such a frakkulously wrong and violent regime.
And then Illych echoes the idea that the only dynamics that grant laws their public aura of ‘rightness’ are ‘myths’ that grow up around them. There is no Higher Law and no Higher Reality, so the laws don’t have to conform to any of that; there is no Higher Law-giver either. People simply ‘get used to’ the laws and how they are applied, not because the laws might be ‘right’ or ‘rightly applied’ but simply out of force of habit.
And it is precisely here, says Illych, that ‘change’ can be effected: by ripping aside the veil of the people’s ‘myths’ and imposing the bright light of the revolution’s (whatever revolution you’re into) ‘reason’. And maybe the faster the better; because your average folks are like ‘muggles’ in Harry Potter: they really just don’t get it and the best thing to do is to maneuver them where they really need to go. (In that sense, I would say, Dumbledore is a better guide than Marx or Lenin or Illych or the feministicals: he had a deep respect for the ways of those who ‘just didn’t get it’ and still respected them).
Elias then does some more thinking out loud and spills more beans.
In a “democratic pluralist” approach, the criminal law reflects the preferences of ‘the people’; it is presumed that the preferences of the people and the shaping influence of their elected representatives and the work of general “public interest groups” will be enough to provide a workable and proper criminal law for a society. (p.29)
BUT, he quickly goes on, “many dispute the pluralist view” (p.29) And let’s not forget that the ‘democratic pluralist’ view is the one that has been the national ideal since the Founding.
Those who dispute it think that it’s “largely ineffective” and that you need more than those “public interest groups”. Since there are “special interest groups” that can concentrate their energies specifically to get what they want, then “special interests may largely dominate lawmaking, policymaking, and public opinion, marshalling the resources to wield the most effective political power”. (p.29)
So it’s not enough merely to establish solid and widely-known “definitions” of crimes or “criminal definitions”, because those “special interests” are actually “dominant interests” that will “dominate” how the laws and definitions are applied. (You can hear echoes of Marx already.) And these special interests may even help shape public opinion to support their “world view”… “even when it serves public interests far less than their own” (Ditto Marx.)
And since the “public” can be manipulated subtly to abandon its own interests, then clearly, of course, the public’s opinion cannot be fully trusted (or – although he doesn’t say it – respected).
Furthermore, there is an “ideological” element to all of this: dominant interests may well get to say what is and isn’t an important crime. (p.30) And you can see where Victimology and radical-feminism are starting to converge here – because suddenly ‘sex offenses’, broadly and vaguely defined are going to become the most awful of all crimes because ‘everybody just knows it’.
In a subsection a bit ominously entitled “Evolving Needs” he then says that “Some believe that official definitions of [crime and] victimization emerge from power and struggle, which powerful economic interests may dominate”. (p.30) You can again see the curious fusing of Marxist and criminal-law thinking, working toward a vision wherein dominant economic interests (patriarchal?) get to say because of their power what is and isn’t an important crime (and ‘victim’), and that “struggle” is required to fix this problem.
Whereas Elias tries to keep the Marxist thing going – that it is actual economic elites who try to keep the ‘poor’ and ‘working classes’ down by defining crime in such a way as to enable the state to control those classe, and that it is white-collar and economic crime that should be a focus of the criminal law – you can see quickly, from the vantage point of a quarter century, that American radical-feminism and ‘governance feminism’ was going to skip the Marxist economics and make ‘men’ the oppressing gender, upon whom the tables need to be turned by the radical-feminists themselves becoming a politically organized “special interest” and turning the criminal law against the oppressor class of ‘men’ by going after sex-offenses.
(And looking at what has happened to the economy, you can also see how vital it was to keep a close eye on that ‘white collar crime’, and what happened when the government police power let the Wall Street ‘white collar’ crowd run wild while it focused its attentions on ‘sex offenders’.)
Again, while Elias is trying to make the case for expanding the criminal law and its application to make ‘white-collar’ and ‘economic’ crimes more important and substantial, you can see where the American radical-feminists had another idea altogether: to make ‘male’ crimes – ‘sex offenses’ – vastly more significant a part of the national criminal law policy. And – I would add – in the process that radical-feminist advocacy, joined with certain Rightist law-and-order elements, took Elias’s Victimology in a whole other direction: into ‘sex offense land’, leaving the white-collar folks to play on their own in the Wall Street sandbox.
And in the process a “special interest” was raised up that functioned as dangerously as the dominant-economic special-interests that Elias himself had originally been talking about.
Elias is still trying to make his somewhat Marxist case for treating, say, negligent mine owners as far more dangerous criminals than lower-class violent offenders: while We recoil at the thought of one murder every 26 minutes in this country, he says, yet there is no concern for one workplace death due to injury or work-induced disease every 4.5 minutes. (p.32)
But these workplace deaths, he says, should be “predictable and preventable”. (p.32)
And you can see, right here, where the American crime-oriented Victimology would try to ‘predict’ and ‘prevent’ crimes (especially sex crimes), while Elias was talking about using the criminal law to buttress policies to prevent workplace injury and disease.
He uses an example: suppose the Ford Motor Company decided quietly that it would be cheaper to pay off a predictable number of families a predictable amount of money for fatalities caused by a certain defect than it would be to recall a whole lotta cars and fix the defect. (p.32) Is it right that this be considered merely a ‘business decision’ and not an actual crime?
I have something of an automobile image myself: suppose you as a legislator want to make a big bunch of potential voters as happy as you can. You let your office get involved with a bunch of folks who want ‘dangerous drivers’ off the roads; drivers who, say, ‘use their cars as a weapon’.
So you help them get media attention for the rare, rare case where a driver – in a fit of rage or lunacy – actually uses his motor vehicle as a weapon to purposely ram and harm somebody.
Well and good. But then that sort of thing doesn’t happen very often so you’re not going to get much bang for your buck, not many voters for the energy you’ve invested. So you expand the definition of ‘using a car as a weapon’ to include just about anybody who causes a motor-vehicle accident or has a motor-vehicle accident or who gets a ticket. NOW you’ve got some numbers!
Then you want to play up the ‘harm’ in order to keep up public sympathy and concern. And you also want to keep focusing on the grisly crashes so that folks think they happen all the time, while also quietly corralling all the accident-involved or ticketed drivers.
Neat.
In fact, Elias will get to that: referring again to “some thinkers” he suggests that Victimology should not accept conventionally-defined and prioritized crimes in the first place. Instead, victimologists “could begin defining victims and victimization using broader criteria, perhaps from some general theory of the state or from universal human rights” (p.34) (Which, you may recall, is exactly what Martha Nussbaum tries to do in her article 20 years later.)
That “general theory of the state” would include what you can call the Regulatory-Preventive State or the Nanny State, whose role is not simply to keep a level playing field for mature and adult citizens to work out their lives and express their energies, but rather is expected to be as intrusive as a mother at a breakfast table of squalling infants, arranging who gets what and so forth according to her own indisputable and un-appealable decision-making wisdom.
In such a theory, Legal Positivism – that a law derives its authority solely from the power of the government that makes it – works just fine. What Mommy says goes ‘just because’ and what the government says goes ‘just because’.
But that’s not the recipe for a Constitutional Republic, a democratic polity, or a politically competent Citizenry.
The “universal human rights” approach would state that there are some universally recognized “rights” that all humans have. But that’s not compatible with Legal Positivism: if some government in the world makes laws, who is to say that it can’t or that its laws are ‘wrong’?
And if just one government doesn’t recognize those “rights”, then by your definition they are precisely not “universal”.
(This is going to be a problem if American victim-oriented feminism seeks to extend itself into other countries and cultures, although the American media haven’t really gotten into the problem very much.)
So such approaches are going to run into the very defects of their theoretical virtues: what gives Victimology – as a ‘science’ or a ‘movement’ – the right or the authority to tell a government or a culture that it is not defining ‘victimization’ broadly enough and that it needs to change?
This is where “special interest” consciousness-raising and horse-trading would come in, but as I’ve said above, you wind up going down that road and you become a manipulator (and not just an educator) of public opinion, and the SO community can bear witness to just what frakkulence follows from a political agenda that seeks to bypass the opinion of those who ‘just don’t get it’ and get legislators to impose laws regardless of how poorly conceived or unworkable they are.
Which is pretty much where this country is now.
NOTES
*My copy is the paperback version put out by Oxford UP in 1986. It bears the ISBN 0-19-503980-7. It will be unwieldy to include both Chapter Titles and sub-headings as well as page numbers, in case you have a different edition. I will stick to only using page references when I make quotations, but for especially important points I will do so.
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