I want to address the Bill Henson censorship issue here soon, but to background it I offer this comment I wrote back in 1997. I think it has some relevance to the case.But visitors will have to forgive me for failing to offer an accompanying illustration for this post as I doubt that anything could be as salacious as the crude representation of the exhibition that is being shared in the media.(As I say I cannot bring myself to sample it for you here).
I also suggest that this issue -- the attempt to ban the exhibition -- has more than a little relevance to the 'moral' impulse that supposedly 'justified' the federal intervention into Northern Territory Aboriginal communities.
One wonders that since the exhibition was housed in an inner Sydney art gallery maybe the troops should be pulled out of the Northern Territory and bivouacked nearbye and all local children be vetted for molestation -- primary school by primary school -- within a suitable moral radius of the Roslyn Oxley Gallery.
10 December 1997The continuing brouhaha about paedophilia should give us all cause for thought.
Suddenly -- if NSW MP Franca Arena and various submissions to commissions of inquiry in both NSW and Queensland are to be believed -- the country should wake up to itself and beware the creeping fingers of rapacious local networks of paedophiles.
If your paranoia hasn't yet recovered from the grievous mental harm generated by fear of the red menace, homosexuality, Asian triads or the Costa Nostra, this new threat to your social mores is sure to scare the living daylights out of you. These child molesters are everywhere!
Everywhere, that is, except in your own or your neighbours' family. This feature of the incidence of paedophilia has not been addressed in the manipulated discussion we have been treated to.
Most acts of child molestation, researchers suggest, occur within families or are perpetrated by adults well known to the child, such as a relative or close family friend. It is estimated that upwards of 85% of paedophile acts are of this kind. Without the aid of networks or child pornography rings, the nuclear family can manage quite well as the major franchisee of paedophilia.
But instead of giving this fact the attention it warrants, and addressing the features of family life that may lead to the sexual abuse of minors, we are led to believe that the threat to our children emanates almost exclusively from male strangers.
While a healthy suspicion of unfamiliar men offering lollies or lifts needs, unfortunately, to be instilled in every child in this society, the fanfare generated by the current campaign against paedophilia seems to go much further than that.
One reason for this is the effectiveness of the offensive as a big stick with which to beat the gay community. Despite the low incidence of same-sex paedophile acts compared to male-female paedophilia, it is the molestation of boys by male adults that has been given the larger share of the headlines.
Another insidious aspect of the offensive is not so obvious, however. That is the way the ruckus over paedophilia shores up the gender segregation of the Australian work force. At stake are jobs involving men working with children.
In some areas, parents have withdrawn their children from child-care services in which men are employed as carers. At creches and kindergartens, male staff are often suspected of ulterior motives.
Similar distrust is frequently applied to male nurses and infant school teachers, the suspicion being that they're either gay or sexually interested in young children.
At issue is not whether men can do the job. It is whether men have any business doing it (or wanting to do it) since such nurturing is primarily the role of women who are assumed to be naturally more caring (as against men's ravenous sexuality).
It is a continuing struggle to open a wider range of job opportunities to women by breaking through the stereotypes of what “girls” can do. Now the open season on paedophilia has added another cord to the backlash against women by re-affirming that men should not work in occupations involving young children. And if we can't trust our children with men, then women should stay where they are.
- See also Ban Lolita? Never!
