GRGR (15): Good & Evil (was Enzian...)

[Paul Mackin]

On Thu, 16 Dec 1999, Seb Thirlway wrote:
> 
> Not wanting to make myself flame-bait as well, but isn't what
> people are referring to a simple fact, rather than a
> justification?  i.e. it just does happen that a child-abuser will
> think the child "wants it" - whether that's rationalisation post
> factum or misinterpretation, whether the child might even agree
> (under duress, perhaps) - these are just facts of child abuse,
> which in no way justify it.  OK so the thought-processes of
> child-abusers are hardly a comfortable subject, but I really
> don't think anything I've read on the list looks like an attempt
> to morally justify child-abuse.  In an other way: there's all
> kinds of interesting things to be said about how a child-abuser
> thinks, how right or wrong things appear _to him_, while holding
> firmly onto the conviction that, to us (and we hope, to everyone
> else) child abuse is wrong.

No, you've definitely not said anything to make you flame bait. I do
think you're completely safe about the consensus over the wrongness of
child molestation. What I want to know however is whether there is
anything to back up the idea that the classic child molester
would be likely to try to justify his action (to himself that is) on the
grounds that the child WANTS IT? This would blow the whole game. I'd
always assumed that the attraction of child sex is that the child doesn't
even know what IT is. What the child molester needs is to hide from
everybody, even his partner, that the filthy act ever actually happened.
Far from complicity but rather total innocence on the part of the partner
is what the evil molester most desires and hopes to sustain. What I'm
getting at of course is that discussing the relevant passages in GR in
terms of what is normally called child molestation (the child molestation
we have been conditioned to know about and abhor) is a complete red
herring. What goes on in the book is not child molestation. It may not
even have a counterpart in real life. I'm not saying it does or doesn't.
But carrying in a lot a surplus baggage about what one feels about child
molestation into the discussions is guaranteed to be unhelpful.

This goes for much else in the book as well.

			P.