The Terrorist and the Pedophile: Exploring the Emergence, Construction and Function of Criminal Figures in a Time of Structural Dissolution
A Division III By: Alison Bowen Fall 2010 - Spring 2011
Committee Chair: Peter Gilford, Ph.D., Professor of Clinical Psychology Committee Member: Vishnupad, Ph.D., Professor of South Asian Studies Hampshire College
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I would like to thank my committee, Peter and Vishnupad, for your knowledge, guidance and friendship. I would also like to thank my family and friends, for your love and support.
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Introduction
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For the purpose this inquiry, I have chosen to discuss the criminal figures of the terrorist and the pedophile with respect to the putative societal threat their presences pose in current American society. Mainstream America – the government, the public and the media – presumes evil and dehumanizes these figures. In an attempt to offer an understanding alternative to that of the mainstream, I have decided to deconstruct the figures of the terrorist and the pedophile and characterize their positionalities within American society. By positionality I mean how these figures are situated in relation to other social structures such as institutions, ideology, practices, knowledge and history. In
Chapter 1, I discuss the case of John Walker Lindh – the 20‐year‐old, White,
American Muslim‐convert who the US military captured in Afghanistan while he was fighting with the Taliban shortly after 9/11– as a vehicle for a larger discussion on the figure of the terrorist with respect to the current United States War On Terror. I argue that the construction of the figure of the terrorist and the US War On Terror creates a site of moral positionality – and thus communal anchorage – for America as a whole. In Chapter 2, I employ the figure of the pedophile and discuss its genealogy and presence in the United States beginning at the turn of the 20th century. I demonstrate how, over the past century or so, there have been waves of mass panic over sex crime in the US and how these waves – and the most recent’s lack of recess – have coincided with the deterioration of traditional social structures due to periods of liberalism. In tandem, the discussions surrounding these two figures provide for the reader an interpretive understanding of criminality, morality and societal threat alternative to that of the American mainstream. 5
The criminal labels “terrorist” and “pedophile” are far‐reaching and applied – by the legal system, the media and the public – with fervent generosity. The USA
PATRIOT ACT (2001) deems any activity relating to the destruction of an aircraft, arson of government property, the protection of computers, killing or attempted killing of US officials or employees, harboring terrorists and material support to terrorists – all of which threaten this notion of “national security” and are considered federal felonies – terrorist activity. Currently, many American politicians and media outlets are directly linking all “Muslims” to “Sharia Law,” jihadist movements – extremist practices of Islam – and, thus, terrorism (Elliot,
2011). The pedophile – the child predator, the child molester – is anyone who has committed a sexual offense against a minor. These offenses include everything from the violent rape of a 5‐year‐old to consensual sex between teenagers – deemed statutory rape – to the possession of child pornography – where the “minors” are sometimes simulated images. However, with the widespread use of the label “sex offender” to refer to any sexual offense along with sex offender legislation resulting from fears of child predation, American society tends to understand the sex offender and the pedophile synonymously. As a result, the public, the media and legislators view persons convicted of lesser offenses such as voyeurism and indecent exposure along side rape, child molestation and even child kidnapping‐sex‐murders. Despite the non‐specifying function of the terrorist and pedophile labels, American society understands those held subject to these labels along very simplified and totalizing terms: Terrorists are amoral and motivated by nothing more than hate. Pedophiles are monstrous, violent and twisted in and through the very cores of their beings. 6
Thus is characterized the figure of the terrorist and the figure of the pedophile in current American society.
In the following two chapters, I will engage a more detailed discussion surrounding the construction of the terrorist and pedophile figures in the US. This discussion will include, but is not limited to, state and federal legislation, media portrayals, medico‐psychiatric discourse, racialization and public response. In deconstructing these criminal labels, I begin to deconstruct criminality itself.
Criminality – what is determined criminal behavior, the categorization and labeling of criminal acts, forensic techniques, the criminal justice system, medico‐psychiatric understandings of criminality – and criminal culpability – the act of blaming and holding subjects accountable for criminal behavior – become complicated when one considers the socio‐historical emergence and function of their practice. Social theorist Michel Foucault seeks to understand social phenomena such as the criminal justice system, the modern day prison, the psychiatric institution and techniques of governance by tracing the historical evolution – conducting a genealogy – of the various social practices, systems, networks and channels of power leading up to the phenomenon in question. He finds that the ultimate purpose of social structures such as the medico‐psychiatric institution, the academic institution, the criminal justice system and the institution of the family is to maintain a normalized, manageable population. In other words, while these institutions present as having an interest in helping people by ameliorating suffering, as providing education for people in order to foster liberal values of autonomy and personal responsibility, as seeing that justice is carried forth and as promoting what is natural and 7 fundamentally ethical, these institutions are, in fact, mechanisms of power that work on an entire social body as technologies of normalization. Therefore, according to
Foucault’s framework, criminality itself is a societal invention. Subjects are not fundamentally criminal or non‐criminal, moral or amoral, nor are these concepts determined by nature, by God – outside of society: A person – his behavior, his thoughts – is either consistent with societal norms or he deviates from those norms, and such deviation potentially falls under the category of criminality.
However, acknowledging and demonstrating the constructedness of criminality –and, more specifically, the constructedness of criminal figures of the terrorist and the pedophile – does not fully satisfy my inquiry. What is at stake, here, is the overemphasis of the terrorist and the pedophile in American society.
Therefore, the issues I shall address in the following chapters will answer the following questions: How is it that the figures of the terrorist and the pedophile have come to occupy such a prominent space of threat and dehumanization? What is the underlying societal function of these figures in terms of this drastic positionality? Utilizing Foucault’s terminology, I ask: What are the “conditions of possibility” for – the set of socio‐historical, socio‐political structures and phenomena that allow for – the figures of the terrorist and the pedophile to emerge as such threatening presences in American society?
I will argue that the figures of the terrorist and the pedophile function amidst a much larger societal trend involving the unraveling of traditional American social structures. The scope of this structural unraveling ranges from the deterioration of the traditional structure of the family – White, heterosexual, nuclear – to the 8 deterioration of traditional gender roles – women bound to the private sphere of the home for housekeeping and child rearing; men dominating the workplace and public sphere – to the complicating of a traditionally more homogenized value system – involving religion, sexuality, civil rights, cultural practices – to the replacement of a traditionally more isolationist approach to nation‐hood with globalization.
This dissolution of traditional structures began in late 19th to turn of the 20th century America, a period during which the country experienced pivotal social changes due to the rise of capitalism and the resulting immigration, population growth, industrialization and urbanization. In his book, “Constructing the Self,
Constructing America,” Phillip Cushman examines the historical evolution of the
American conceptualization of the self and how it drastically shifted with the arrival of this capitalist structure (Cushman, 1995). His analysis is reminiscent of
Foucault’s methodology in that he situates the American subject within a historical framework in order to characterize and interpret the subject’s current relationship with American society. Drawing from Cushman’s genealogy of the American self, I am able to characterize aspects of the dissolution of traditional structures out of which I believe the panic surrounding the figures of the terrorist and the pedophile to be emerging.
Cushman depicts the American – in terms of his self‐conceptualization – as becoming increasingly disoriented in conjunction with the deterioration of traditional social structures and, thus, the deterioration of shared meaning, value and purpose (Cushman, 1995). He characterizes the New World colonists as having 9 experienced a communal, Puritan self whose existence was wholly for God, the religious mission and not for the individual (Cushman, 1995). By the mid 18th century, as the country’s population and geography expanded and the colonists discovered in their new land a potential for economic gain, the prospect of wealth and power took precedent over their religious mission (Cushman, 1995). Cushman understands the rise of industrialization, urbanization, and immigration in the late
19th century at the expense of traditional agrarian communities and values to have fostered feelings of isolation, discomfort and confusion in Americans (Cushman,
1995). He sees Americans entering the 20th century with an experienced a lack of guidance from tradition and community and, as a result, a loss of certainty and centeredness (Cushman, 1995). Thus, in struggling to adjust to a rapidly changing country, the turn of the century self was characterized by loneliness and a need for personal recognition (Cushman, 1995). From here through the post World War II era into the present, Cushman believes that the empty, modern, American self, desiring authenticity in place of community, has striven to achieve fulfillment and personality through consumption and material gain (Cushman, 1995).
Cushman tracks the American’s increasing disorientation with respect to collapsing structures of shared value, meaning and purpose in conjunction with an increasingly pervasive capitalist structure (Cushman, 1995). However, he fails to emphasize that a steadily increasing practice of liberal ideology has, in fact, been closely entwined with the emergence of this capitalist structure, its evolution across 10 the 20th century and the coinciding dissolution of traditional American structures.1
Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, the civil liberties of the American individual and the recognition that those liberties should be equal for all Americans have contributed to the deterioration of traditional social structures. As women, people of color and people of queer sexualities, for example, have slowly begun to gain legitimacy and civil liberties equal to those of White, heterosexual men, American societal structuration has gradually become more complex and less communal. For instance, the traditional structure of the American family now exists among a multiplicity of widely accepted familial arrangements. Women have penetrated the public sphere, men can be stay‐at‐home Fathers, gay couples are raising children and America pretends that race is of no matter. Cushman argues that the loss of shared value, meaning and purpose for Americans stems from a pervasive capitalist structure and American society’s willingness to allow a newfound interest in economic gain and consumerism overpower traditional structures of shared value, meaning and purpose (Cushman, 1995). However, when discussing the unraveling of traditional structures – the unraveling of communal anchorage – Cushman does not include the influence of liberalism alongside the influence of capitalism
(Cushman, 1995). Liberalism has effectuated a mass fragmentation of ideology, meaning, direction and structuration in American society. This deterioration of shared positionality has left Americans increasingly disoriented. Cushman argues that the disoriented, empty, anxious American engages in consumerist activity in an
1 I use “liberalism” in its most generic sense (and will not bring into the conversation 200 years of liberal thought), alluding to an ideology of individualism, autonomy, choice, agency, self- directedness, personal responsibility, freedom from governmental regulation, etc. 11 attempt to create meaning and anchorage for himself (Cushman, 1995). However, consumerism, as Cushman frames it, is one of many responses to the dissolution of traditional social structures.
Complementing and expanding upon Cushman, social theorists Susan
Harding and Kathleen Stewart analyze the phenomenon of conspiracy theory and frame it as a response to America’s structural dissolution (Harding & Stewart,
2003). In their essay “Anxieties of Influence: Conspiracy Theory and Therapeutic
Culture in Millennial America,” Harding and Stewart discuss turn of the 20th century through millennial America unraveling of traditional structures as the condition of possibility for conspiracy theory culture (Harding & Stewart, 2003). They point to the growth of liberalism throughout 20th and 21st century American society as having effectuated the collapse of metanarratives – structures of shared meaning
(Harding & Stewart, 2003). They believe that the disorientation and anxiety resulting from this structural unmooring converges with an awareness of one’s inevitable subjected‐ness to social systems – and awareness of the processes of normalization Foucault speaks of – with the result that Americans desire agency and
‘truth’ beyond the strictures of experienced society (Harding & Stewart, 2003).
Groups – cults and religious communities – founded upon conspiracy theory serve as a locale for community anchorage and as a subversive mindset yielding agency and the discovery of a ‘truth’ (Harding and Stewart, 2003). Thus, Harding and
Stewart’s discussion of conspiracy theory culture and Cushman’s discussion of the consumerist American similarly find that these behaviors arise from the collapse of 12 traditional social structures and function as points of shared positionality for the disoriented American.
In the following two chapters, I will argue that an extensive and perpetual unraveling of traditional social structures coinciding with the increasing practice of liberal ideology is, in effect, the condition of possibility for the figures of the terrorist and the pedophile to emerge as major societal threats in the United States. In
Chapter 1, I will characterize the construction of the terrorist figure through a discussion of John Walker Lindh and the US War On Terror, and I will shed light on the moral positioning America achieves via its moral justification of the War On
Terror. In Chapter 2, I will examine the genealogy of the figure of the pedophile and discuss the waves of US panic over sex crime as they have emerged throughout the
20th and 21st centuries. I will argue that these waves of panic have coincided with periods of liberalism and the resulting dissolution of traditional social structures. I hope for these two chapters to provide the reader an understanding of the figures of the terrorist and the pedophile alternative to that of the American mainstream.
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The Figure of the Terrorist
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One week prior to the September 11 attacks the United States in 2001, John
Walker Lindh, a 20‐year‐old American citizen, arrived at the Takhar Province in northeast Afghanistan (US v. John Walker Lindh, h.). Perched upon a foothill, he was guarding his frontline post (US v. John Walker Lindh, a.). Lindh was engaged in the
Afghani civil war between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban, and he was on the side of the Taliban. What began as a religious pursuit for the Muslim convert – a pursuit taking place in the Middle East, seemingly disconnected from the United
States – turned into the epitome of a nightmare for Lindh; for everyone else in the post‐9/11 United States, it turned into the capture of the first American terrorist, the “American Taliban.”
The United States government’s legal case began with ten charges – almost all of which were terrorist charges – against Lindh (US v. John Walker Lindh, c.).
Five months later, however, Lindh was convicted of only one, non‐terrorist crime of these ten charges (US v. John Walker Lindh, e.). Within this period of time and the two preceding months Lindh became an extraordinarily inflammatory figure to
America. The federal government, the media and the American public considered him a terrorist, and despite the outcome of his case, it is likely that most of America today remembers John Walker Lindh as the American terrorist.
This chapter demonstrates some of the ways by which American society – the US government, the media and the majority of the public – locates itself in opposition to the figure of the terrorist with respect to the US War On Terror. More 15 specifically, I will first depict the US government’s biased portrayal of Lindh in the media, which generated an overall public opinion against Lindh. Then, I will demonstrate how America racialized Lindh as a Muslim, emasculated him, and located the point at which he left his White, American upbringing in order to pursue his radical Islamic desires: This dominant narrative of Lindh’s personhood simultaneously portrays Lindh as the figure of the terrorist. Next, I will strive to explain the lack of outcry from the American public in response to Lindh’s inhumane treatment. Within this analysis I will demonstrate how the US government both legally and morally legitimizes its own violence while it concurrently de‐legitimizes terrorist violence. Then, I will explain how the public dissemination of the US government’s inhumane treatment of terror suspects functions as a sort of a modern day “spectacle of the scaffold.” Subsequently, I will attribute the American public’s lack of outrage to the de‐realization of certain human beings and the fear of human sameness. As a whole, this analysis of the John Walker Lindh case should provide an in depth characterization of the American perspective regarding the function and construction of the figure of the terrorist and, thus, the War On Terror. This characterization is, in fact, a demonstration of American society’s creation of a moral opposition against which it can position itself.
John Walker Lindh grew up in Marin County, California – just north of San
Francisco. He was raised by Catholic parents but explored many different religions as a child (Kukis, 2003). As a teenager, he discovered Islam, converted, and traveled to Yemen to study the Koran in his late teens (Lindh, 2006). He eventually became interested in joining a jihadist struggle and chose the Kashmir conflict (Kukis, 16
2003).2 Lindh attended one month of training at a paramilitary training camp in
Pakistan where, according to a couple of men who trained with him, he did not present as a very good soldier (Kukis, 2003). Still hoping to join a jihadist struggle, officials at his training camp sent Lindh to Afghanistan where he met up with the
Taliban in Kabul. He was then sent to Kandahar for two weeks of training in Arabic and military skills (Kukis, 2003). Upon graduating the training camp and swearing allegiance to jihad, in August of 2001, Lindh, AKM rifle in hand (which he never shot in combat) traveled with approximately 150 other Taliban soldiers to Takhar
Province (US v. John Walker Lindh, a.). From September through November, these men took turns in the trenches against the Northern Alliance (US v. John Walker
Lindh, h.). Lindh claims to have become somewhat disillusioned with the Taliban after 9/11 when his comrades celebrated the falling of the twin towers. However, he did not stand up for the United States nor did he attempt leave, as he feared resulting death (US v. John Walker Lindh, a.).
In accordance with the Northern Alliance, the United States military attacks on Takhar against the Taliban began November 5, 2001 and by November 10,
Lindh’s unit was in retreat (US v. John Walker Lindh, a.). Lindh recognized the U.S. forces but, unaware of the connection between the Taliban struggle and terrorism, he was confused as to why they were present (US v. John Walker Lindh, a.). Fearful of being captured by the Northern Alliance, whose General, Rashid Dostum, is infamous for his brutal treatment of prisoners, Lindh’s unit fled fifty miles on foot
2 According to Lindh, Jihad literally means struggle. The conflict between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban is the continuation of the 1980s conflict between the Soviet Unions and the mujahideen (US v. John Walker Lindh, f.). 17 over a period of two days (US v. John Walker Lindh, a.). They had little to no food or water, and a third of them died along the way (Mayer, 2003). By the time they reached Kunduz, Lindh hardly able to walk, the Taliban had struck a deal with
Dostum (a large cash payment) for the Northern Alliance to allow the unit’s safe passage (Mayer, 2003). Dostum proceeded to go back on his agreement and held
Lindh and his unit as prisoners in the basement of his fortress called Qala‐i‐Jangi
(Mayer 2003).
The next morning, the prisoners were brought outside to be interrogated by
Dostum and two American officials, one of them C.I.A. agent Johnny Michael Spann.
They spoke with Lindh and recognized him as a Westerner, but Lindh remained mute (Mayer, 2003).3 Shortly after this discussion there was a spontaneous uprising among the Taliban prisoners, which resulted in the death of Agent Spann
(Mayer, 2003; US v. John Walker Lindh, a.). Lindh, tied up and unarmed, was shot in the leg and hit with shrapnel while running for cover (Mayer, 2003; US v. John
Walker Lindh, a.). He and the Taliban then holed themselves up in the basement of the fortress for seven days, over which period the Northern Alliance (with the support of the US) tried to extract the prisoners with bullets, grenades, ignited diesel fuel and, finally, cold water, which resulted in many deaths (US v. John Walker
Lindh, d.). On December 1, Lindh and the other 85 survivors (of the original 300 holed up in the basement) surrendered (Mayer, 2003). At this point, Lindh identified American Red Cross workers and journalists, ran over to them and begged them for help saying he was a US citizen (Mayer, 2003).
3 There is video footage of this interrogation (Mayer, 2003). 18
Lindh was transported to a hospital where he did not receive treatment for his wounds (US v. John Walker Lindh, d.). He did, however, receive Valium,
Morphine and questions from CNN’s Robert Pelton, a videotaped “interview” that would later be broadcast to the American public (US v. John Walker Lindh, d.).
American officials then stripped Lindh of his clothes, shackled his hands and feet, blindfolded him, duct taped him to a stretcher, put him in a metal shipping container and left him there on the cold desert floor for two to three days without heat and with little food (US v. John Walker Lindh, d.).4 The government proceeded to detain and interrogate Lindh for 54 days, in an Afghan prison and on Naval ships, without contact with his parents or a lawyer (despite Lindh’s repeated requests) (US v. John
Walker Lindh, d.). Upon hearing about their son’s capture in the news, Lindh’s parents hired him a prominent attorney named James Brosnahan (Mayer, 2003).
Brosnahan began writing letters to US federal government officials December 3,
2001 requesting contact and information about Lindh’s status (US v. John Walker
Lindh, i.). He wrote several letters and received no replies until January 3, when he was informed that Lindh was in good health (US v. John Walker Lindh, i.). Attorney
General John Ashcroft announced the criminal indictment February 5, 2002, and the first count was “Conspiracy to Murder US Nationals” (US v. John Walker Lindh, c.)5
4 This photograph appears at the beginning of this chapter. 5 Counts 2 and 4: “Conspiracy to Provide Material Support and Resources to Foreign Terrorist Organizations.” Counts 3 and 5: “Providing Material Support and Resources to Foreign Terrorist Organizations.” Count 6: “Conspiracy to Contribute Services to Al Qaeda.” Count 7: “Contributing Services to Al Qaeda.” Count 8: “Conspiring to Supply Services to the Taliban.” Count 9: “Supply Services to the Taliban.” Count 10: “Using and Carrying Firearms and Destructive Devices During Crimes of Violence” (US v. John Walker Lindh, c.). 19
I will not go into the details of the development of Lindh’s legal case. What is important is that on July 15, 2002 Lindh entered into a plea agreement with the
United States (US v. John Walker Lindh, e.). He was convicted of “Supply Services to the Taliban,” which was illegal according to President Clinton’s executive order forbidding economic service to the Taliban, and knowingly carrying an AKM rifle and two grenades (US v. John Walker Lindh, e.).6 Lindh also agreed to a 20‐year federal prison sentence, which he is currently serving (US v. John Walker Lindh).
The American media carefully followed John Walker Lindh’s case from the day he was captured up until his sentencing. Needless to say, the emotional climate of the American people less than two months after the attacks of 9/11 was volatile and unsympathetic with respect to anything that went against the American‐ness the country was rallying around in order to overcome its wounds. In early
December, the New York Times printed a front‐page story with a huge photograph of C.I.A. agent Johnny Spann’s funeral with his flag draped coffin and widowed wife and their baby in her arms. The title of the story was “One for His Country, and One
Against It” (referring to Spann and Lindh) (Harden & Sack, 2001). On December 19,
CNN aired Robert Pelton’s interview with wounded, delirious Lindh from the day of his capture (Pelton, 2001).7 The public heard Lindh say that his “heart became attached to [the Taliban],” and that it was “the goal of every Muslim [to be martyred]” (Pelton, 2001). He did not say anything to explicitly implicate himself in
6 See Executive Order 13129 (1999). Also, the Taliban is not a listed terrorist group in Designated Foreign Terrorist Organization under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act or in the Immigration and Naturalization Act. 7 They neglected to air the beginning of the recording where Lindh says: “Look, you don’t have my permission to film me…If you care about my welfare, don’t film me” (Pelton, 2001). 20 attacks against American citizens; nevertheless, the New York Times interpreted from the video that “when pressed, [Lindh] said he supported the Sept. 11 attacks”
(Glaberson, 2001).
It is fundamental to note that the media did not purposefully decide to skew
John Walker Lindh’s story so that he appeared to be an anti‐American terrorist. In fact, the media was, essentially, disseminating the information they were receiving from Lindh’s prosecutor – the US federal government. It is contrary to the ethical practice of law for the prosecutor to prejudice public opinion by speaking out about a criminal indictment as though it were fact (whether or not it happens to be true)
(American Bar Association, 2004). It is unethical to do this before the defendant’s trial, let alone before the defendant meets with his counsel (American Bar
Association, 2004). In his opening statement to a press conference about the criminal indictment for Lindh’s case, Attorney General John Ashcroft said: “We cannot overlook attacks on America when they come from United States citizens…We may never know why [Lindh] turned his back on our country and our values, but we cannot ignore that he did” (Lindh, 2006). Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfield told the American public that Lindh was “captured by the United
States with an AK47 in his hands” (Lindh, 2006). In late December, President Bush referred to Lindh as “the first American Al Qaeda fighter we’ve captured” (Lewis &
Seelye, 2001).
The US government consistently spoke of Lindh as being a member of Al
Qaeda and frequently used the terms “Al Qaeda” and “Taliban” interchangeably (US v. John Walker Lindh, b.). They repeatedly referred to the Taliban military training 21 camps Lindh attended as “terrorist camps” (US v. John Walker Lindh, b.). Rohan
Gunaratna, an expert on terrorism, explained that, at the time, the US had very little knowledge surrounding Al Qaeda and its relationship to the Taliban (US v. John
Walker Lindh, b.). On a very basic level, the Taliban recruits soldiers for its conflict with the Northern Alliance (US v. John Walker Lindh, b.). Therefore, they establish camps for military training since they primarily target combatants (US v. John
Walker Lindh, b.). Al Qaeda strives to attack the US and its Western allies and to wage a global jihad (US v. John Walker Lindh, b.). Their main target is civilians, and their camps are oriented toward terrorist training (US v. John Walker Lindh, b.).
The Taliban and Al Qaeda are related in that each of their top officials, Osama Bin
Laden and Mullah Omar, have agreed that the Taliban will provide Al Qaeda protection (US v. John Walker Lindh, b.). Despite its ignorance towards this history, the US government went ahead and voiced its speculation as truth claims to the
American public.
I have pointed to some of the very explicit ways by which the US came to view John Walker Lindh as a terrorist, namely, the government’s false, prejudicial statements shaping public opinion. However, within the language of this discourse,
America formulates and perpetuates its conceptualization of the figure of the terrorist. The framework through which I will first explore the construction of the terrorist is that of John Boalt. In 1877, Boalt argued in an essay entitled “The
Chinese Question” that two non‐assimilating races are incapable of “harmoniously” living together (Boalt, 1877). While by today’s standards Boalt’s analysis appears entirely racist and outdated, his framework is, in fact, quite reflective of the current, 22 dominant portrayal of the racialized Muslim (Boalt, 1877). Lindh is a White
American, yet America does not struggle to characterize Lindh in some of the same ways by which Boalt characterizes the non‐assimilating race. Within many of their reports, government officials and media outlets racialize Lindh in terms of his
Muslim identity and appearance. In a Newsweek article the author writes: “The photo of Lindh, naked, blindfolded and strapped tightly to a stretcher, was becoming nearly as ubiquitous as that of the sooty, wild‐eyed, bearded creature after his arrest in Afghanistan” (Breslau, 2002). On “Good Morning America” former President
Bush Senior stated: “I thought of a unique penalty. Make him leave his hair the way it is and his face as dirty as it is and let him go wandering around this country and see what kind of sympathy he would get” (Seelye, 2001). According to Boalt’s framework, one of the major points of un‐assimilation is what he calls “physical peculiarities” (Boalt, 1877). Unlike the racialization of the Chinese, much of the
Muslim stereotype depends upon dress and does not necessarily depend upon the physical attributes with which a person is born. As a result, a white American was easily able to, in a sense, assume the “Muslim race.”
Boalt also identifies differences in culture such as notions of right and wrong, treatment of women, and religious fanaticism as characteristics of un‐ assimilation (Boalt, 1877). At a news conference John Ashcroft stated: “The United
States is a country that cherishes religious tolerance, political democracy and equality between men and women. By his own account, John Walker Lindh allied himself with terrorists who reject these values” (Johnston, 2002). In characterizing
Lindh in respect to his terrorist label, the US is characterizing Lindh as un‐ 23 assimilable in terms of Boalt’s framework. In this sense, the terrorist threatens the
US not only on the level of bloodshed but also on a more fundamental level of national identity.
The racialization of the terrorist also appears in Jasbir Puar and Amit Rai’s piece, “Monster, Terrorist, Fag,” where they frame the terrorist as a monster, characterized by his race and his sexuality (Puar & Rai, 2002). In referring to sexuality, Puar and Rai are specifically referring to male homosexuality (Puar & Rai,
2002). In terms of the male homosexual characterization, the terrorist becomes a monster by way of total emasculation. I say total because attributing female characteristics to a male‐bodied person is also a common form of emasculation in a masculinist society. However, in our society, male homosexuality is the ultimate emasculation – the ultimate fall from power – and thus appropriate for the monster and the monster‐terrorist. I have not found examples of John Walker Lindh being portrayed as a male homosexual in the US mainstream media. This is relatively unsurprising since such a portrayal would usually constitute explicitness and lewdness. There is, however, an identifiable trend of Lindh being sexualized in terms of the negative female stereotype – in terms of his weakness. The US condemned Lindh for not deserting the Taliban after 9/11, as his fear of death was no justifiable excuse. The US also blamed Lindh for the death of Agent Spann, implying that he should have stopped the Qala‐i‐Jangi uprising and made an effort to save Spann, his fellow American. The US found Lindh culpable of terrorism, of the death of a US citizen as a result of his perceived cowardice – his inability to perform as the American hero. On “Good Morning America” former President Bush Senior 24 said, speaking of Lindh: “This guy doesn’t look like he could be too staunch a fighter”
(Seelye, 2001). While the US rebukes Lindh for his supposed terrorism in terms of his weakness, they concurrently portray the terrorist as a violent, blood‐thirsty, martyr. Usually, these two characterizations stand in opposition to one another, or at the very least, they are not used jointly to depict the same subject. However, in order to entirely obfuscate a White, American citizen to the extent that he becomes the terrorist‐monster, logical characterization must be rendered unimportant.
Thus, the White American becomes the Muslim terrorist.
In acknowledging and regularly referring to Lindh’s Muslim‐ness, the media also strove to figure out the “why” and the “what happened” in terms of John Walker
Lindh’s perceived transformation from a regular American boy to a Muslim terrorist. BBC News asked: “What led a ‘bright and quiet’ middle‐class child from
California to fight against his fellow Americans in a far off country?” (Profile: John
Walker Lindh, 2002). They look to his family and his upbringing and point out that
Lindh went to an alternative, elite school where students were encouraged to independently shape their studies (Profile: John Walker Lindh, 2002). This blame of light‐handed parenting appears multiple times. “I hope that the case of John Walker
Lindh, the American who fought for the Taliban, will serve as a lesson to American parents that all children need guidance and that moral relativism doesn't work as a parenting tool” (Sholler, 2001). It is as though liberal parenting can no longer stand against the perverse and pervasive influences of the post 9/11 World. Another person suggests Lindh’s behavior can be explained by his subjugation to an
American culture of consumer advertising and the glorification of the “extreme” 25
(Frank, 2001). Usually this influence drives young people to the extreme in terms of cars and fancy computers, he argues, but Lindh was driven to Islamic extremism
(Frank, 2001). Many people search for an exact moment at which Lindh switched from American boy to American Taliban, as though there is no fluidity to his personhood. “At some point in his mid‐teens, John Walker is said to have stopped visiting hip‐hop Internet sites and to have begun studying the Koran…[he] adopted the name Sulayman and started wearing a long white robe and a turban. He also got rid of his collection of hip‐hop and rap CD’s” (Profile: John Walker Lindh, 2002).
“Before he adopted Islam, Mr. Walker seems to have tried on several masks, especially on the Internet, until he found one that obscured his face completely”
(The American prisoner, 2002). If Lindh is in fact an un‐assimilable, terrorist‐ monster, his personhood cannot be fluid. The separation of Lindh into pre‐Islam
Lindh and post‐Islam Lindh provides consolation to America. If there is a precise moment to which one can point in order to understand this separation of Lindh into two different people, one can develop a sense of control over the production of people – of American citizens. If one does not understand there to be a staunch separation between the American and the terrorist, the implications mark a significant loss of power to America – a loss of American identity. The terrorist‐ monster simply cannot simultaneously be a good patriot.
The construction of John Walker Lindh as a terrorist occurred most explicitly in terms of the media and the government’s dissemination of the prosecutorial case.
This prejudicial information easily inflamed an already vulnerable and suggestible
American public. However, more significant is the language within this public 26 discourse. This language connotes a normalized conceptualization of the figure of the terrorist in terms of his Muslim race and his discordant value‐system. Further, in looking to Lindh’s upbringing for a point of separation between American and terrorist, the US perpetuates the notion that there is, in fact, an absolute separation between the true American citizen and the Muslim terrorist. I believe a point that
Frank Lindh, John Walker Lindh’s father, raised in one of his presentations about his son’s case can serve as a vehicle for further exploration of Lindh’s terrorist construction and the American public’s relationship to the figure of the terrorist.
While discussing the media coverage of the government’s unfettered statements regarding John Walker Lindh’s case, Frank Lindh stated: “Despite the fact that the torture and abuse of John Lindh was fully disclosed to the press there was no outcry here in the United States. So strong was the emotion at that time against this young man” (Lindh, 2006). The public disclosure of torture and abuse to which Frank Lindh was referring was most explicitly communicated by way of a photograph in early April 2002 (Feyerick, 2002; Esterbrook, 2002). In the photograph, Lindh is naked, blindfolded, tightly zip‐tied and bound at the hands and feet, and duct‐taped to a stretcher.8 Lindh, in his stretcher, is leaning upright against the wall of the metal shipping container in which he was left on the cold desert floor for two to three days with no heat and little food. The image is graphic and leaves no question of Lindh’s inhumane treatment. Further, in mid June 2002, Lindh’s defense team released a detailed description of his mistreatment, which the media proceeded to report upon (US v. John Walker Lindh, g.; Seelye, 2002).
8 This photograph appears at the beginning of this chapter. 27
While four months did indeed pass between learning of Lindh’s initial capture and becoming fully informed of his mistreatment, the American public, meanwhile, was receiving daily exposure to the Lindh case. Thus, it is safe to claim that the public was well familiarized with the broader context of this graphic photograph of Lindh. So then, why was there no public outcry over this inhumane treatment? Frank Lindh attributes the lack of public outcry to America’s overwhelming anger against his son (Lindh, 2006). While Frank is correct in saying that the United States was indeed collectively angry with Lindh, I believe this question regarding the absence of public outcry should be examined more deeply.
How does it happen that an entire country of human beings remains indifferent or, worse yet, satisfied when presented with the image of another human being’s – and in this case, another American citizen’s – suffering at the hands of the US government? 9 More specifically, how does the human being’s terrorist label permit this exceptional treatment?
First, it is necessary to touch upon the US government’s legal justifications for the inhumane treatment of terrorists. Judith Butler frames her discussion of this topic around the US detainment camp at the Guantanamo Bay Navel Base (Butler,
2004). She discusses the current phenomenon of indefinite detention in terms of
Michel Foucault’s account of the shift from sovereign power to “governmentality”
(Butler, 2004; Foucault, 2004). In earlier centuries, before the founding of the
United States, the power to rule over the state and its subjects was concentrated under one body: the sovereign (i.e. the king) (Foucault, 2004). As time carried on
9 A CNN “Crossfire” host refers to the Lindh torture image: “But I look at that, and I say actually, that’s pretty amusing” (Carlson & Begala, 2002). 28 and populations and territories changed the style of governance also changed
(Foucault, 2004). “Governmentality” refers to the decentralization of state power to a multiplicity of localized instruments of state control (Foucault, 2004). In the
United States we have the federal system of checks and balances, state and local representatives, the institution of education, the media, law enforcement officers, the family and the learned self‐regulation of oneself. All of these locales represent an aspect of state power and perform the necessary maintenance and reproduction of the societal order. However, this dispersal of state power does not indicate the complete disappearance of sovereign power. In fact, Foucault describes the emergence of “governmentality” in relation to the “de‐vitalization” of sovereign power (Foucault, 2004). Butler detects a re‐vitalization of sovereign power in the phenomenon of indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay (Butler, 2004).
Guantanamo Bay mistreats its detainees in terms of the conditions in which they are held – torture – and the conditions under which they are held – stripped entirely of juridico‐political support. Guanatanmo Bay is a suitable analogy for
Lindh’s case in that Lindh experienced torture as well as the deprivation of legal rights when he was detained and interrogated for two months incommunicado.
Butler explains that these instances of extra‐juridical treatment occur under the absolute power of the US executive government and the managerial officials making the daily decisions at Guantanamo (Butler, 2004). In this context, these two parties assume the role of the sovereign (Butler, 2004). Shortly after 9/11, the Department of Justice issued an opinion to President Bush in response to his desire to “deploy military force preemptively against terrorist organizations…whether or not they can 29 be linked to the specific terrorist incidents of September 11” (US Department of
Justice, 2001). The Deputy Assistant Attorney General concluded that in the history of executive power, the Constitution has always vested the President with plenary power in times of national emergency (US Department of Justice, 2001). Thus, the executive government is entitled to indefinitely detain suspected terrorists in a location outside the US legal system’s jurisdiction (US Department of Justice,
2001).10 To not keep these suspects detained would be to release potential danger into American society – thus the preemptive measure is permitted (Defense
Department briefing, 2002). 11 In terms of the conditions of Guantanamo and the treatment of John Walker Lindh, the US has abstained from abiding by the accords of the Geneva Convention to which it signed along with other international human rights doctrines, reasoning that first and foremost, the US has the right to protect itself as a nation‐state (Butler, 2004). What “legally” constitutes torture is a continuously under debate, whilst, of course, inhumane interrogations carry forth.
While the United States government’s legal justification for these detention practices is by no means unremarkable, I find that the question of, and the US’s answer to, the moral justification of these practices provides greater enlightenment to the figure of the terrorist and the War On Terror.
I find it comprehensible that the US government might reason it permissible to treat terror suspects inhumanely via detached systems of legalities, but take away the juridical veil and one is left a government “fighting terror” with what amount to
10 Further, the executive branch’s Secretary of Defense has the final say over whether or not someone is officially deemed a terrorist, according to the Military Commissions Act 2006. 11 Rumsfeld echoed these sentiments during an interview about indefinite detention at Guantanamo (Defense Department briefing, 2002). 30 their own acts of terror. Talal Asad examines this moral hypocrisy by comparing
America’s utter disapproval and horror with regards to suicide bombing to the tens of thousands of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan and practices of torture that concurrently occur at the hands of the US government (Asad, 2007). Asad invokes
Albert Camus’ concept of the “just assassin” in order to explain this moral discrepancy (Asad, 2007). The “just assassin,” or the moral criminal, knows that he is not supposed to commit war crimes and does everything in his power to avoid committing such crimes (Asad, 2007). However, in order to complete the task at hand – in order to fight terrorism – he must sometimes resort to criminal measures
(Asad, 2007). However, because the moral criminal will subsequently suffer the anguish of a guilty conscience, his acts are not considered unethical (Asad, 2007).
American officials did not want to have to leave Lindh naked in a metal shipping container for three days, but they had to in order to force him to reveal information and prevent future terrorist attacks. The terrorist, on the other hand, from the US perspective, does not have an ethic great enough to justify his violence. The Israeli occupation and complete decimation of juridico‐political means are the conditions from which the Palestinian suicide bomber arises. However, the US instead tends to construct the suicide bomber such that his violence is motivated by his desire to perform an Islamic ritual. Thus, if his violence is motivated purely by the religious values he chooses to follow (rather than his subjugation to social strife), the terrorist can be viewed as fully culpable and morally unredeemable.
Sayers Rudy sets up the analogy: Universalism is to America as Islam is to
Islamism (Rudy, 2007). If the United States understands the American value system 31 to represent what should be a universally held value system, this sense of American moral superiority implicates any sort of opposition to American liberalism and its global mission as the moral enemy (Rudy, 2007). Thus, there is a sharp distinction between the progress‐killing of the United States and the hatred‐killing of the terrorists. America, the moral criminal, may have killed hundreds of Afghan children but has done so in the name of progress. The terrorist kills simply because he hates. In his address to the nation shortly after 9/11 President Bush stated:
“Americans are asking, ‘Why do they hate us?” (Bush, 2001). He proceeded to explain that the terrorists attacked because they hate America’s democracy and freedoms (Bush, 2001). The terrorists hate our superior moral fabric, and thus, in the name of global progress America must fight back. The inhumane violence of the
US War On Terror is, in fact, legitimized by its proclaimed morality – by the
American military uniforms whose drone wielding inhabiters kill your family in the name of progress. The terrorist’s violence, whose limited arsenal includes the destruction of his own body, is dismissed as illegitimate, hateful, religious fanaticism.
Even if the US government is able to legally and morally justify its criminal acts of violence, why does it then allow the dissemination of certain instances of this violence to the American public? The US government, John Walker Lindh’s prosecutor, filed numerous pre‐trial motions requesting the non‐disclosure of their evidence against Lindh for the purpose of government secrecy and national 32 security.12 However, when the defense presented the photograph of Lindh the prosecution and ultimately the Judge deemed the evidence allowable in court
(Andrews, 2002). A few days later, it was learned that the Pentagon had in its possession additional photographs of US troops posing next to Lindh while he was restrained in the stretcher with “shithead” scrawled across his blindfold (Starr,
2002). Although the US government did not purposefully release the photograph of
Lindh, there is still the question of what possessed the government officials to take these photographs and pose with Lindh in these photographs in the first place.
Judith Butler wonders similarly with regards to the US Department of Defense’s intentional photographic release to the media of inhumanely restrained
Guantanamo detainees (Butler, 2004). She believes that the photographs were released as a symbol of American triumph in the War On Terror (Butler, 2004). This flaunting of the degradation of the enemy serves as a symbol of US power and strength (Butler 2004). The terrorists humiliated and left vulnerable the United
States on 9/11, and in retaliation the US is exposing these weaknesses in the enemy by torturing and humiliating detained subjects.
Foucault discusses the function of the “spectacle of the scaffold” with respect to his genealogy of the modern day prison (Foucault, 1977). Centuries earlier, the publicly performed torture and state execution of criminals centered on the body and the punishment of inflicting pain and suffering upon the body (Foucault, 1977).
Despite the state’s move from bodily harm to the “more humane” technologies of psychology and education – technologies of the mind – for the criminal, the body is
12 A list of motions for the Lindh case: http://news.findlaw.com/legalnews/us/terrorism/cases/index.html/ 33 incarcerated and thus the body remains the site at which the state implements its instruments of control over the criminal subject (Foucault, 1977). However, this public spectacle of a human subject’s bodily disfigurement and suffering also functioned as a specific instrument of control for the state (Foucault, 1977).13 As the crowd witnessed the strangling, the breaking and the burning of the condemned, the crowd was concurrently witnessing the state reclaim its power over the subject, whose crime – the defiance of a certain juridico‐political order – essentially challenged that state power (Foucault, 1977). Thus, the state is not only symbolically reclaiming its power over the subject, but the state is also communicating to the witnesses the totality of and the propensity for its power
(Foucault, 1977). This spectacle, by way of fear, communicates to the subject a requirement of obedience and in turn incites in the subject a level of self‐regulation
(Foucault, 1977). The John Walker Lindh photograph serves as a sort of modern day
“spectacle of the scaffold” (Foucault, 1977). This image of torture and degradation simultaneously communicates to the American public and other nations the strength and power of the US and the threat of similar treatment if one does not comport oneself.
While the photograph of Lindh may have in fact functioned as a sort of spectacle, the American public is not accustomed to such explicit displays of inhumane governmental treatment. I have already addressed the US government’s self‐exculpation of moral wrong doing, but what about the American public? Why
13 Of course one can argue that there is a modern day spectacle of the criminal, i.e. the orange jump-suited prisoners picking trash from the side of the road or the Sex Offender Registry Boards. 34 didn’t the American public react with outrage to the raw human suffering portrayed in the Lindh photograph? Butler frames this question within the context of grief
(Butler, 2004). In the United States, some human lives are grieveable while others are not (Butler, 2004). America collectively mourned the lives lost on 9/11 and the beheading of American journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002, yet the country has remained relatively indifferent to the tens of thousands of civilian deaths resulting from the US War On Terror in Afghanistan and Iraq (Butler, 2004). One grieves because when one has lost another, one has lost a part of oneself (Butler, 2004).
The majority of America did not have a personal relationship with Pearl or the victims of 9/11; still, Americans were able to identify with the victim’s humanity and the tragedy of human loss (Butler, 2004). Butler explains that the function of the obituary in the US strongly influences grievability (Butler, 2004). The obituary is an official, public acknowledgement of a human life (Butler, 2004). The US military does not write obituaries for the people it kills, while, of course, every
American war‐related death is highly publicized (Butler, 2004). In December 2001, the New York Times covered half of its front‐page with a photograph of CIA Agent
Johnny Spann’s funeral (Harden & Sack, 2001). A couple of pages into the newspaper, an article mentioned the 230 Taliban deaths of the Qala‐i‐Jangi uprising
(of which Lindh was a survivor) – the same context in which Spann’s death occurred
(Gall, 2001). The number of Taliban deaths was acknowledged, but the individual lives were not. In this sense, the obituary functions as an instrument of nation‐ building (Butler, 2004). If “enemy” deaths are reduced to pure numbers – that is, if the numbers are mentioned at all – Americans cannot easily experience the loss of 35 those people. It is not that there is a discourse of dehumanization, Butler explains, it is that these de‐realized lives do not even warrant the acknowledgement of a public discourse (Butler, 2004). This lack of discourse – this refusal to recognize certain human lives – has, of course, an effect of dehumanization and in turn the violence of torture and murder.
Ghassan Hage addresses these same issues when writing about the American requirement to “absolutely condemn” suicide bombing (Hage, 2003). Any sort of effort to gain an understanding of the suicide bomber, he found, is morally questionable (Hage, 2003). He attributes this phenomenon to exighophobia – the fear of explanation – resulting from homoiophobia – the fear of human sameness
(Hage, 2003). Usually one’s inability to experience the human‐ness of another person is constituted as xenophobia or the fear of another’s foreign‐ness (Hage,
2003). Thus, this fundamental experienced disconnect from another’s humanity permits the lack of understanding and in turn, violence. Hage argues, however, that human difference is not what is at stake (Hage, 2003). Rather, human sameness is fueling the American culture of non‐explanation and non‐understanding of terrorist violence (Hage, 2003). The socio‐political explanation for the suicide bomber implies a commonality between those subjects who commit acts of suicide bombing in response to social strife and those subjects who suffer the same conditions and do not act violently (Hage, 2003). When framed in this social context, the suicide bomber cannot simply be viewed as arising from exceptional circumstances of evil and value systems of hate (Hage, 2003). Further, when the American recognizes a level of social determinism behind the suicide bomber, he also recognizes the 36 interchangeability of subjects’ social conditions and thus, the human same‐ness of himself and the suicide bomber (Hage, 2003). If the US were to acknowledge the socio‐political explanations for terrorist violence, the US would not be able to situate itself against Islamic terrorism. Nor would the US be able to found the “War
On Terror” upon a moral disparity. If the American public were to view the photograph of Lindh and experience feelings of grief for his suffering, the American public could not simultaneously experience hatred towards the figure of the terrorist and, in turn, tolerate US war crimes. The US War On Terror and US military violence is thus dependent upon the de‐realization of certain human lives and the perpetuation of American society’s exighophobia and homoiophobia (Butler, 2004;
Hage, 2003).
In his Plea Agreement, John Walker Lindh relinquished his right to file a human rights violation case against the US government (US v. John Walker Lindh, e.). In 2007, he asked President Bush for a commutation of his 20‐year sentence – his request was denied (Liptak, 2007). It is likely that this man’s case strongly influenced the overall American sentiment regarding the figure of the terrorist in the War On Terror. This sentiment reflects a racialized, morally inferior terrorist‐ monster whose humanity is de‐realized and whose suffering remains widely accepted. Such a sentiment establishes the conditions of possibility for the boundless permissibility of US violence.
The figure of the terrorist with respect to the US War On Terror emerges amidst a structural dissolution occurring on a global scale, where America’s traditionally more rigid national boundaries have become increasingly obsolete in 37 the wake of globalization – the worldwide integration of economics, technology, law, military presence, language, culture, politics and liberal‐democratic ideology. The influence, as we have seen it, has been predominantly Western. I find it illuminating to characterize this worldwide structural dissolution in terms of American constitutional law. Ever since its conception and the drafting of its Constitution, the
United States has considered its liberal‐democratic ideology the superior ideology and thus an ideology that should be spread and effectuated throughout the World
(Toobin, 2007). Over the course of history, many other nations have, in fact, adopted some version of the American ideological framework, and for some time the United States served as an example for other nations with respect to a liberal‐ democratic approach to the law (Toobin, 2007).
However, America’s international effect has waned in the recent decade.
This was made apparent in the US Supreme Court’s reference to international trends in their opinions for Lawrence v. Texas (2003) – when, in order to support their argument to do the same, the Court referred to the tendency for other nations to decriminalize sodomy and to uphold the rights of homosexuals – and Roper v.
Simmons (2005) – when the Court acknowledged that the US was one of only three nations who at that time officially sanctioned the death penalty for juveniles and, in turn, deemed the practice unconstitutional. In both of these cases the Justices who wrote dissenting opinions claimed that other nations should not influence the
Court’s interpretation of the US constitution – that the Court should not impose the values of other nations onto American history, tradition and principle. In making these claims – in promoting this concept of American exceptionalism – one assumes 38 that America is somehow ideologically and socially isolated from other nations, or even more irrationally, that America influences the values of other nations in an unreciprocated manner. In the millennial World, it is impossible to assume such an international relationship: American values are constantly in dialogue with the international community. Thus, there exist the conflicting pressures of conforming to international, liberal‐democratic trends and regressing to the traditional values of the Founding Fathers. The strong, threatening presence of the terrorist figure and the moral positionality such a figure substantiates for the United States can be viewed in line with the sentiments of the dissenting Justices in Lawrence v. Texas
(2003) and Roper v. Simmons (2005): In a time of international structural dissolution the disappearance of a traditional framework within which the US, as a nation, is able to determine its ideological positionality opens up the space for and requires the presence of an orienting structure or figure, such as that of the terrorist.
In the following chapter, I will introduce the pedophile as a figure that has functioned similarly amidst a structural unraveling occurring within the United
States. Just as I have demonstrated that the figure of the terrorist provides orientation for and contributes to establishing America’s moral positionality, I will argue that the figure of the pedophile has served as a site of positionality for
Americans throughout more than a century of deteriorating traditional social structures.
39
The Figure of the Pedophile
40
Jody Jenkins and his friend took their kids camping in Georgia – backwoods style, where they dug out holes for toilets and cooked over an open fire – and snapped a few pictures (Jenkins, 2006). One captured Jenkin’s three‐year‐old climbing into a lake to go skinny‐dipping, and in another, his eight‐year‐old had his pants on a long stick, drying over the campfire (Jenkins, 2006). The Eckerd’s drugstore clerk who developed the film called the police, reporting many of the pictures as child pornography (Jenkins, 2006). What followed for these two families
– who had no criminal records or suspicious backgrounds – was a several month long journey with the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services (DFCS)
(Jenkins, 2006). While the officer who responded to the Eckerd’s tip‐off did not personally find the photos offensive, federal legislation mandated him to investigate any report of child abuse (Jenkins, 2006; Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment act,
1974). DFCS treated the investigation with utmost seriousness (Jenkins, 2006). The parents obtained lawyers for themselves, as DFCS was representing the children – the victims (Jenkins, 2006). The threat of losing their children to the state was real.
Jenkins describes their experience as utterly tormenting (Jenkins, 2006).
They had to disclose to their family, friends and kids’ schools that they were being investigated for child pornography and child exploitation (Jenkins, 2006). The children endured interviews involving the good‐touch‐bad‐touch conversation
(Jenkins, 2006). Jenkins became hyper‐aware of any physical contact he had with his kids: Was that kiss too close to his mouth? Was that pat on her bottom 41 suggestive? When DFCS announced their plan to conduct a home visit Jenkins and his wife rushed about the house hiding anything that might be deemed inappropriate: A photograph of the child bearing wife in the nude (Jenkins, 2006).
Jenkins’ wife panicked when she saw the neighbor’s son naked, playing on the swing and asked the mother to bring her child inside (Jenkins, 2006). In the end, the state found nothing and dropped the case (Jenkins, 2006).
The whole ordeal, despite its positive end, infuriated Jenkins and pushed him into state of depression (Jenkins, 2006). Nevertheless, he understood that child sexual abuse was a serious issue and attributed his family’s nightmare to flaws in the state system, namely, the federal mandate to investigate any report of child abuse and the wholly interpretive nature of labeling child sexual exploitation
(Jenkins, 2006; Georgia Code).14 However, while Jenkins could indeed explain the disaster of his own experience by pointing to specific systemic imperfections he did not explicitly allude to the fact that his experience exists within this larger environment of collective paranoia with regards to child sexual abuse. How was it that the Eckerd’s clerk was prompted to call the police so quickly? How was it that a child abuse investigation carried such profoundly disturbing meaning for the accused parents?
In this chapter, I will depict the figure of the pedophile with respect to nation‐wide sex crime panics – panics involving the participation of the private and the public spheres, US federal and state legislation, the criminal justice system, the
14 “'Sexual exploitation' means conduct by a child’s parent or caretaker who allows, permits, encourages, or requires that child to engage in…sexually explicit conduct for the purpose of producing any visual or print medium depicting such conduct” (Georgia Code). 42 media and the medico‐psychiatric apparatus – and how this figure has appeared, functioned and changed over the course of 20th century America up until now. The name of the figure from which the sex crime threats arise – to whom I refer as the pedophile – changes in accordance with the time period and the overall nature of the perceived threat. Thus, I will invoke multiple names in reference to the pedophile such as the sex pervert, the sex offender, the sex psychopath, the sexual deviant, the child molester and the child predator. I will demonstrate that American society’s conceptualization of this figure is historically situated and therefore neither static nor rigid. I will also show how the sex crime panic has not been a constant phenomenon in the United States but has, on the contrary, ebbed and flowed in conjunction with the socio‐historical moment. I will contend that the arousal of sex crime panics coincides with major structural changes, namely, the dissolution of traditional social structures in response to liberal ideology. This structural dissolution, I will argue, engenders a widespread social disorientation and resulting anxiety, and the social response to the threat of the figure of the pedophile, similarly to that of the terrorist, is a site at which Americans can channel such anxiety and experience a social re‐grounding. This need for re‐grounding, I will discover, has not ceased since post‐1960s liberalism and neither has the most recent wave of sex crime panic.
First, I shall further characterize the current environment of sex offender panic.15 In 2005, Miami‐Dade County, Florida passed a residency restriction law
15 A ‘sex offender’ is anyone who has been convicted of a crime that is in some respect sexual including: convictions of downloading child pornography, open and gross lewdness, bestiality, statutory rape, child molestation and rape with force, etc. For the past two decades US legal, 43 forbidding all sex offenders from living within 2,500 feet of any place where children congregate (such as parks, schools, daycares, bus stops) (Skipp, 2010). As a result, many sex offenders had absolutely nowhere to go (Skipp, 2010). By default, offenders began living under the Julia Tuttle Causeway, which is located in the middle of Biscayre Bay (Skipp, 2010). An encampment was established and many probation officers actually began making a practice of bringing newly released sex offenders to the community under the bridge (Skipp, 2010). By 2009, a population of 67 sex offenders (all men except for one woman) was living under this bridge
(Skipp, 2010).
At least thirty states and hundreds of municipalities have passed residency restriction laws for sex offenders since 2001 (Council of State Governments, 2007).
This legislative trend is rather recent, however, considering the federal government began enacting sex offender registry laws in the mid 1990s (Jacob Wetterling Act,
1994; Megan’s Law, 1996). These laws require every convicted sex offender to enter his or her personal information into federal and state‐by‐state kept databases called the Sex Offender Registry Boards (SORBs) (Jacob Wetterling Act, 1994; Megan’s
Law, 1996).16 The SORBs were created as a means for law enforcement to keep track of sex offenders and, thus, prevent recidivism. However, after seven‐year‐old
Megan Kanka was kidnapped, repeatedly raped, and asphyxiated with a belt and a plastic bag by a neighbor who, unbeknownst to the neighborhood, was a registered sex offender, federal legislation required all states to disseminate to the public the medical and media discourse has regularly referred to the ‘sex offender’ rather than the individualized criminal acts. 16 According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children there are over 705,000 registered sex offenders in the US (2010). 44
SORB information (Jacob Wetterling Act, 1994; Megan’s Law, 1996; meganslaw.ca.gov). This is known as “community notification” (Megan’s Law,
1996).17 Despite this massive SORB apparatus and its broad locus within the state, the public, and the private spheres, the US embarked on the residency restriction laws for sex offender movement in the early 2000s.18 As one might expect, the constitutionality of these laws was challenged with regards to the ex post facto clause and the right to due process (U.S. Const. Art. I § 9 & 10; U.S. Const. Amend. V).
In 2005, however, the US Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Iowa’s residency restriction legislation interpreting the law as not another form of punishment but, rather, as addressing the state’s compelling interest to protect its children from sex offenders (Doe v. Miller).
Juridico‐political discourse has tossed around this blanket term “sex offender” for the past couple of decades, but the term’s loaded nature arises from the underlying figure to which the sex offender alludes: We know him as the pedophile, the child molester, the child predator. This figure has haunted American society as the ultimate internal threat. He lurks within the confines of the home, the bushes in the playground, and the digital sphere of the Internet.19 His presence is all‐pervasive. He is the Uncle, the friendly neighbor, the sixteen‐year‐old babysitter,
17 Community notification might include postering and/or door-to-door introductions by the sex offender and/or sheriff; See stories of community notification’s negative repercussions (Neighborhood ‘child rapist’ sign blamed for sex offender’s suicide, 2005; Kaste, 2005). 18 Iowa was the first state to pass residency restriction laws for sex offenders. In 2002, Iowa established legislation that prohibits all sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of any school, daycare center or park in the entire state. See: Iowa Code 692A. 19 I have chosen to use ‘he’ since over 90% of registered sex offenders are male, and since I believe that when most of us envision the figure of the pedophile we imagine that figure to be residing within the male body. 45 the teacher, the coach, the daily park‐jogger – he obscures himself with the mask of the everyday schmoe. Once one is forced to assume the pedophile label, however, one is no longer an everyday schmoe. The figure of the pedophile is a monstrosity.
With the assignation of such a label comes the loss of a certain degree of (if not all) humanity.
This general attitude toward the pedophile manifests as a sort of purposeful vilification. In 1996, the widely respected author A. M. Homes published a novel entitled “The End of Alice” (Homes, 1996). She tells the story through the perspective of a pedophile, Chappy, who has been incarcerated for more than twenty years (Homes, 1996). He is deranged and twisted and regularly nauseates the reader with graphic descriptions of his violent acts and fantasies (Homes, 1996).
However, as the narrative progresses and Chappy’s memory is jogged he reveals aspects of his childhood and the horrific abuse he endured at the hands of his mother (Homes, 1996). The reader is simultaneously bombarded with the implicit suffering of Chappy’s victims and a suffering Chappy (Homes, 1996). While the majority of literary reviewers were quite fond of “The End of Alice,” many reviewers found the intentionally disturbing quality of the novel excessive if not useless – the
New York Times called the book, among other things, “revolting trash”
(amhomesbooks.com; Kakutani, 1996). Others specifically loathed the sympathetic pedophile. When the novel was released in the United Kingdom the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children attempted ban the book by urging booksellers to keep it off of their shelves (Children’s charity urges ban on pedophile novel, 1997). They believed the words of a fictionalized pedophile would incite real 46 life pedophiles to translate their thoughts into behavior (Children’s charity urges ban on pedophile novel, 1997). Further, as The Daily Telegraph’s Review explained,
“That Homes should choose to try to see the world through Chappy’s eyes was in itself enough for there to be a call to ban this book” (Adams, 1997). This sentiment, this unwillingness to even begin to humanize the figure behind the pedophile label can be, along with the treatment of the terrorist figure, attributed to exighophobia – the fear of explanation – as a result of homoiophobia – the fear of human sameness
(Hage, 2003). Ghassan Hage invokes these words while discussing the United
States’ “absolute condemnation” of the suicide bomber during the current US War
On Terror (Hage, 2003). If one strives to understand and thus humanize the suicide bomber or the pedophile – to acknowledge the shared humanity between the pedophile and the non‐pedophile and in turn attempt to gain insight into the pedophile’s perspective – one is crossing the boundary of moral acceptability.
Oprah Winfrey, once the World’s only black billionaire and, according to many, the most influential woman on the planet, has hosted the “Oprah Winfrey
Show” since 1986. The show has a confessional format where guests reveal to a national audience their most intimate stories, during which Oprah regularly imposes on those guests her interpretations of morality with respect to those stories. Oprah is herself a child sexual abuse survivor and advocates against it, in part, by hosting guests whose stories are related to the topic. In 2010, she sat down with four men convicted of child sexual abuse for a two‐hour discussion (Oprah’s 47 conversation with child molesters, 2010).20 Her “sole purpose” of the discussion,
Oprah explained, was not to “sit in judgment” of the men but to hear their stories and “to have parents understand what it means when their child has been sexually seduced, molested and abused” (Oprah’s conversation with child molestors, 2010).
At the very beginning of the conversation, Oprah asked the men’s “sex offender therapist,” who was also participating, “What kind of program are these gentlemen in that allows them to have this moment?” (Oprah’s conversation with child molesters, 2010). The therapist replied with an explanation of how the men had been in sex offender counseling “for years” and how they were sharing their stories for “education,” “for community service,” and “as an act of giving back” (Oprah’s conversation with child molesters, 2010). Essentially, it appears that Oprah sought to understand the pedophile for the purpose of commodification and public gain.
The premise for the program was, in fact, the absolute condemnation of the pedophile. However, it was morally sound for Oprah to supposedly humanize these
“child molesters” – to sit with them and listen to their stories – because their stories were of some utility to greater society (Oprah’s conversation with child molesters,
2010).21 If it were not for that utility, for that purposeful framing of the stories, she seemed to imply, she would not have provided that space for the words of the pedophile. However, while the program was structured such that Oprah appeared to be providing space for the voices and for the perspectives of these men, the men –
20 In a description of the program, the men are referred to as “sex offenders” and “child molesters” (Oprah’s conversation with child molesters, 2010). 21 Oprah did slip into the discussion some explicit words of condemnation. For example: “You didn’t think you were a disgusting old man,” she asked 65-year-old Lee, “no seriously, you didn’t think you were disgusting?” (Oprah’s conversation with child molesters, 2010). 48 despite the fact that their stories were coming out of their mouths – did not, in effect, become human subjects or communicate identifiable human qualities to the viewing audience: The pedophiles remained objects. Oprah accomplished this – presenting her discussion as an attempt at understanding and individualizing with the implied result of humanizing the pedophile while, instead, effectuating the perpetuation of the objectification and, thus, the dehumanization of the pedophile – by frequently interjecting into the men’s stories, forcing her interpretation of their stated experiences and then completely redirecting the tract of their stories in order to further support her imposition of meaning on their experiences (Oprah’s conversation with child molesters, 2010).22 For example, one of the men, Darren, had molested his twelve‐year‐old daughter, submitting to obsessive fantasies of orally copulating her (Oprah’s conversation with child molesters, 2010). (He later revealed that as a child his mother forced him to orally copulate her and that he had since fantasized about performing this act on all women (Oprah’s conversation with child molesters, 2010)). Darren explained to Oprah: “I was at a very dark place in my life. I was feeling very lonely. I was also very much a sex addict and I was using sex and other addictions such as alcohol and drugs to keep my inner pain inside”
(Oprah’s conversation with child molesters, 2010). Oprah could have responded by
22 See: Foucault, M. (1978). History of Sexuality: Volume I. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Foucault discusses the act of confession and the ritual of confession as a production of truth in modern society. We confess about everything and to everybody – to police, to family, to lovers, to doctors, to educators, in public and private. People generally understand the act of confession to be an act of liberation despite the fact that the confession requires a listener – the dominant participant – to interpret and make meaning – truth – of the confession for the confessor. For example, the patient confesses to his doctor his symptoms and his actions surrounding his symptoms. The doctor in turn pathologizes – diagnoses [creates a truth] and in turn treats the patient. 49 asking for information regarding the circumstances leading up to this “dark place” and “loneliness” in Darren’s life. Rather, Oprah responded, deadpan: “Well, there are all kinds of sex addicts so what kind were you?” (Oprah’s conversation with child molesters, 2010). Further inquiring about Darren’s life would have begun to humanize him. Seemingly uninterested in such a pursuit, Oprah re‐invoked the objectifying label of “sex addict” – a label with which Darren unlikely identified before his entry into sex offender therapy – in order to further characterize the figure of the pedophile rather than to further characterize the subject, Darren.
Throughout this discussion, Oprah unfalteringly employed this technique such that the figure of the pedophile remained absolutely condemned.
How is it, though, that the figure of the pedophile has achieved this status of absolute condemnation in American society?23 For the past two decades, this has been the fact of the matter. However, historically, social panic over the figure of the pedophile has waxed and waned, and the framing of the perceived threat and characterization of the figure has shifted with the historical moment. Western society’s conceptualization of the criminal and criminality has changed drastically over the past three or four centuries. Michel Foucault addresses this in his lectures on the figure of the “human monster” (Foucault, 1999). From the Middle Ages through the 17th century, the assignation of the label “monster” was an issue of somatic deformity (Foucault, 1999). Any sort of natural, physical abnormality was an indication of a person’s inherent criminality (Foucault, 1999). As a result,
Siamese twins and hermaphrodites, for example, were regularly executed for their
23 We can extend this question to cover, more generally, Western society. 50 criminal nature (Foucault, 1999). At the turn of the 19th century, however, the
“moral monster” emerged as the figure suspected behind all acts of criminality – where all deviant behavior was understood to be that of a fundamentally flawed person (Foucault, 1999). Foucault explains this evolution – from the natural monster to the moral monster – by looking to the shifting function of punitive power
(Foucault, 1999). Prior to the 19th century, an act of criminality was an attack on the sovereign’s power (Foucault, 1999). Thus, the ritualistic punishment for acts of criminality – the “spectacle of the scaffold” – represented the sovereign concurrently reclaiming his power and employing intimidation in order to prevent future infringement on his power (Foucault, 1977). Criminality became less of an issue of the revenge of the sovereign and more of an issue of the criminal’s flawed nature as a new apparatus of surveillance and control – of “governmentality” – emerged, to a large degree, replacing the power of the sovereign structure (Foucault, 2004). This modern mechanism of population control employs technologies such as the criminal justice and correctional systems in order to prevent recidivism (Foucault, 1999).
This system involves determining the motives behind criminal conduct and, in turn, implementing a corresponding level and mode of punishment (Foucault, 1999).
Thus, criminality is now a science‐based understanding of human abnormality.
The criminalization of sexuality coincided with the rise of 18th century bourgeoisie society (Foucault, 1978). At the heart of population control and management is sex (Foucault, 1978).24 The state began constructing a database of
24 “Governmentality” – regulatory state power – is interested in the production of human bodies – of human life and its management – because the size, strength and utility of a population is in effect a source of state power – “bio-power” (Foucault, 1978). 51 birth rates, death rates, fertility rates, (il)legitimate birth rates, age of marriage rates and contraceptive use rates for the purpose of determining the fulfillment of resources for a growing population (Foucault, 1978). The institution of the family and its maintenance has been a primary target for population control (Foucault,
1978). Thus, there ensued an effort to confine sex to the married adult bedroom of the heterosexual, nuclear family household (Foucault, 1978). Age of consent laws became instrumental in controlling the sexuality of young women and in turn the legitimate family – a girl’s marriage‐ability depended upon her virginity (Jenkins,
1998). The age of consent for sex in colonial America was originally ten‐years‐old, and by 1887 many states raised it to sixteen and then to eighteen in 1895 (Jenkins,
1998).25 The sexuality of the child was also addressed during the 19th century through a massive secular campaign – involving parents, doctors and teachers – to end childhood masturbation (Foucault, 1978). Discourse surrounding childhood masturbation constructed a medicalized conceptualization of the issue: Child onanism was at the root of many medical and psychiatric ailments (Foucault, 1978).
Thus, the child and childhood development became a prominent site at which the state – via discourse and institutions permeating the social fabric all the way down to the household, the child’s bedroom, and even the child’s body – could control the production of people.
The naming and medicalization of sexual perversions became a standard knowledge by the end of the 19th century (Jenkins, 1998). Before the late 19th
25 Ironically, the age of puberty has been falling since the 17th century, counter to the rising age of consent (Jenkins, 1998). Currently, the age of consent varies from state to state but is usually between 16 and 18 (for boys and girls alike). 52 century certain sexual behaviors such as sodomy and adultery were heavily criminalized (Jenkins, 1998). However, these deviations were lumped in with most other crimes and understood as issues of conduct, of acting out, as opposed to deeply seeded abnormalities (Jenkins, 1998). The institutions of American psychiatry and medicine largely contributed to the development of the identity of the sexual pervert – to the production of the moral monster (Jenkins, 1998).26 In medical journals experts began arguing, along with some prominent moral crusaders, that sexual perverts posed a serious threat to social and racial hygiene
(Jenkins, 1998). German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft‐Ebing’s work,
“Psychopathia Sexualis,” – a collection of sexual case studies popularizing terms such as “sadism,” “masochism” and “homosexuality” – highly inspired American institutions in their creation of a medico‐sexual taxonomy (Jenkins, 1998; Krafft‐
Ebing, 1965). In 1894, an American doctor, Charles G. Chaddock, pioneered the notion of “sexual crimes” in his section within the larger, widely read forensics textbook, “A System of Legal Medicine” (Chaddock, 1895; Jenkins, 1998). He positioned the “normal sexual instinct” – that is, heterosexual desire within the appropriate age range – secondarily to anatomical gender differentiation, with the development of normal sexual instinct depending upon the asexual child’s upbringing and adult surroundings (Chaddock, 1895). Chaddock provided a lengthy list of names and descriptions of sexual perversions and also claimed: “Rape of children is the most frequent form of sexual crime. The majority of children thus
26 Sexual perversions encompassed all sexual acts occurring outside of the act of procreation (Jenkins, 1998). 53 abused are of tender years; even babyhood is not exempt” (Chaddock, 1895).27 He concluded his section by stating that all sexual perversions predispose subjects to criminal behavior – a reference to the moral monster (Chaddock, 1895). In the same textbook, W. Travis Gibb wrote a section called “Indecent Assault of Children” (Gibb,
1895). This was the first study to suggest a prevalence of “incest” and “molestation” in the United States (Jenkins, 1998). Gibb worked as a gynecologist and examining physician for the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty of Children charity.
Urban populations and poverty rates were increasing with the influx of immigration to the United States (Jenkins, 1998). This organization contributed to a larger turn of the 20th century movement addressing the rising issue of child delinquency and neglect, which social reformists understood to be emanating from impoverished, undesirably structured families (Jenkins, 1998). Based on his work within these communities of low socio‐economic status, Gibb documented a wide array of child sexual abuse occurring between various combinations of age and gender and concluded that abuse was a common and well kept secret (Gibb, 1895). Gibb’s definition of “molestation” included anal and vaginal intercourse, oral sex, and
“manustrupation” – a conceptualization of child sexual abuse that greatly expanded upon the more traditional reliance on the intactness of a girl’s hymen (Gibb, 1895).
With this refined language of classification and positivist understanding of sexuality and criminality in addition to a newfound state interest in controlling the
27 Examples of Chaddock’s list of sexual perversions: sodomy, pederasty, bestiality, tribadism, incest, exhibitionism, sexual paradoxia, sexual anesthesia, sexual hyperesthesia, sadism, lust- murder, necrophilia, fetishism, passivism (Chaddock, 1895). 54 production of children – both for the purpose of population management – the stage was set for the figure of the pedophile to emerge as a serious social threat.
Turn of the 20th century America also saw a proliferation of journalistic reporting on serial sex crimes and murders (Jenkins, 1998). Despite the medical, criminal and academic communities’ acknowledgement of prevalent incest, the
American public and the media framed the “sex fiend” and the “child molester” as a community outsider, typically an old, degenerate, “feebleminded” man (Jenkins,
1998). As compulsive sex criminals frequented the mass media psychiatric experts were simultaneously constructing the concept of the morally and intellectually
“defective” person (Jenkins, 1998). Such people – moral monsters – fell subject to a standardized practice of eugenic sterilization and civil commitment (Jenkins,
1998).28 With the horrific stories of serial sex murders in mind, the criminal justice system believed they could prevent future atrocities by identifying defective subjects before they had the chance to act out violently. As a result, in an effort to eliminate the serial sex killer in his earlier stages of development, people accused or convicted of lesser crimes such as homosexuality or exhibitionism faced the possibilities of sterilization and civil commitment (Jenkins, 1998). The widespread implementation of these juridico‐medical practices in reaction to the perceived threat of the fundamentally defective figure of the sex pervert or the child molester marks a wave of sex crime panic during the Progressive Era.
28 The Supreme Court deemed the practice of compulsory sterilization constitutional in Buck v. Bell (1927) so long as the practice was reserved for eugenic goals and not as a form of criminal punishment. (The Court overturned this ruling in Skinner v. Oklahoma (1942), in light of Nazi Germany). 55
America’s perception of the sex crime threat receded with its entry into the
Roaring Twenties (Jenkins, 1998). During this era, the United States’ experienced a burst of capitalism in terms of the mass production and consumption of new technologies such as the automobile (Cayton & Williams, 2001). There was a growing culture of music and film, and women, who by then had achieved the right to vote, enjoyed a degree of sexual liberation as well as greater entry into the workplace (Cayton & Williams, 2001).29 Homosexuality gained an amount of social acceptance, and arrest rates for crimes of sexual unorthodoxy in general were, in fact, quite low (Cayton & Williams, 2001; Jenkins, 1998). This was a period of relative liberalism with the materially consumptive individual characterizing the masses. The Roaring Twenties ended with the Black Tuesday stock market crash in
1929 and the country’s entry into the Great Depression.
Another sex crime panic erupted within the US in the late 1930s and lasted through the early 1950’s (Jenkins, 1998). The arrest of Albert Fish in 1934, a serial‐ child‐sex‐murderer and cannibal, popularized the association between sex crimes and child killing (Jenkins, 1998). Fish killed (and ate) possibly fifteen children before the police arrested him, contributing to the resurrection of the notion that dangerous perverts were out on the streets committing serious harm and not getting caught (Jenkins, 1998; Police try to link Budd girl’s slayer to 3 other crimes,
29 In 1920, Tennessee became the 36th state needed to ratify the 19th Amendment of the US Constitution, guaranteeing women’s suffrage. Women’s fashion was tightly connected to their sexual liberation: the “flapper” was a woman who wore a dress that exposed her legs and arms, wore make-up and had a “bob” hairstyle. 56
1934; Isolation advised for sex criminals, 1937) .30 Local police reacted with a crackdown on known, minor sexual offenders in their communities, to whom they had paid no attention a decade earlier, and newspapers, in turn, reported on these arrests and contextualized them as a part of the greater sex crime problem (Jenkins,
1998). During this time, Federal Bureau of Investigations director J. Edgar Hoover had adopted the sex crime problem as his matter of address (Jenkins, 1998).31 The
New York Times began referring to all sexually related crimes as “sex crimes,” engraining into the public the idea that rape, voyeurism, pornography, homosexuality and child molestation were all equally damaging and arising from the same common defect (Jenkins, 1998; Dougan et al., 1939). Psychiatric journals were publishing heavily about sex crime and the “sex psychopath” (Jenkins, 1998).
Drawing from their earlier conceptualization of the defective person, the sex psychopath was compulsive and escalated in his crimes, beginning with very minor offenses and slowly progressing to the most violent of offenses (Jenkins, 1998).
Thus, all sexual deviants were sex psychopaths and potential Albert Fish’s.
Psychiatrists became heavily involved in the criminal justice system conducting examinations and diagnosing suspected sex psychopaths (Jenkins, 1998). As a
30 In: Isolation advised for sex criminals. (1937, October 14). New York Times: The opening sentence of this article reads: “Complete separation of mentally defective persons and ordinary criminals in diagnostic procedure and institutional care recommended yesterday by witnesses before the legislative committee investigating sex crimes at a hearing in the County Court House.” 31Although, Hoover along with the rest of the FBI turned their attention to the Nazi spy scares between 1938-1940 (Jenkins, 1998). 57 result, the practice of civilly committing sex psychopaths was repopularized
(Jenkins, 1998).32
Similarly to the breaking of traditional family structures at the turn of the century – mostly within impoverished, urban communities – late 1930s to early
1950s America experienced major shifts in familial structure and a coinciding sex crime panic. During World War II, with millions of men leaving their families for the military service, women entered the workforce in large numbers and, as a result, had to send their children to daycare (Ferguson, 2007). This major social change engendered a sense of community and familial lack of stability (Ferguson, 2007).
Women no longer had the protection of their male counterparts, and children no longer had the protection of their homebound mothers. In addition to these World
War II changes, the country was simultaneously emerging from the 1920’s period of relative indifference with respect to the minor sex offender, only to realize that these everyday deviants had been developing into serial sex murderers (Jenkins,
1998). Thus, between a collective sense of community destabilization and the institution of positivist science’s promotion of the sex psychopath, late 1930s to early 1950s America was primed for a wave of sex crime panic. That wave ebbed, however, in the mid 1950s.
By the late 1950s, America’s sex crime discourse had significantly shifted.
Psychiatrists and academics began reflecting upon the previous decade of hysteria and found that the hysteria itself was more damaging to the public than the sexually deviant behavior (Jenkins, 1998). The issue of sex crime still appeared in the media
32 These practices of diagnosing and civilly committing the sex psychopath, however, did not effectively reduce sex crime (Jenkins, 1998). 58 but in a very different context. By then, liberal academics and psychiatrists along with prominent public voices were pointing to the racial injustices associated with sex crime arrests and convictions (Jenkins, 1998). Additionally, the inhumane conditions of incarceration, especially civil commitment, became a major site of condemnation (Jenkins, 1998).33 The blanket term “sex crime” fragmented such that violent rapes and sex killings were distinguished from lesser sexual offenses, and the term “child molester” appeared infrequently and separate from the more violent categories of sexual crimes (Jenkins, 1998; Robinson, 1961). During this liberal, “sexual revolution” era, homosexuality and abortions began to gain acceptance as non‐criminal acts along with adolescent sexuality (Jenkins, 1998).34
Age of consent laws were taken much less seriously, as marked by media portrayals of underage (sometimes topless) sexualized girls (Jenkins, 1998). The sex psychopathology interpretation of child molestation receded into the 40s and the public came to understand the figure of the pedophile as relatively benign (Jenkins,
1998). Health experts found that only a small portion of child molesters were compulsive pedophiles and attributed such behavior to a treatable “mental weakness” (Jenkins, 1998). According to psychiatric and health institutions, child molestation did not usually harm the child (Jenkins, 1998). Rather, reactions of horror from parents, police officials and mental health clinicians were presumed
33 In a landmark decision for O’connor v. Donaldson (1974), the US Supreme Court found it unconstitutional for states to (post criminal sentence) involuntarily incarcerate, treat, or hospitalize non-dangerous individuals. 34For example, the landmark US Supreme Court decisions for reproductive rights in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) and Roe v. Wade (1973). 59 more damaging to the child than the offense itself (Jenkins, 1998).35 Even child molesters who were expected to recommit their crimes did not pose so much of a danger to the public as to warrant the sex psychopath policies of indefinite civil commitment, which, in any case, states were slowly overturning as unconstitutional
(Davy v. Sullivan, 1973; Millard v. Harris, 1968). The late 1950s through the mid
1970s was an era of marked liberalism, with the constitutional violations of sex offender legislation presenting more of a social problem than the sex offenses themselves. However, this recessed wave of sex crime panic reemerged, yet again, in the late 1970s.
After the 1960’s practice of liberal ideology granted Americans additional freedoms from the state and, correspondingly, further dismantled traditional social structures, the country was disoriented and in need of a common point of grounding, and the issue of sex crime and pedophilia served as a container into which America could pour and give meaning to some of this anxiety and confusion.
By the mid 1970s, feminist groups were drawing public attention to the issue of rape against women by framing it not so much as a sex crime committed by feebleminded men but rather as an everyday act of violence committed by ordinary men (Jenkins, 1998).36 The medical field was simultaneously calling attention to the physical abuse of children (Jenkins, 1998). These two movements, which cultivated fears of sexual violence and domestic abuse, coalesced into an overall fear of child sexual abuse by the early 1980s (Jenkins, 1998). In 1974, US Congress passed the
35 The child victim as the seducer was a popular explanation for acts of child molestation. See: Stanley Kubrick (1962) film portrayal of “Lolita.” 36 As a result of a patriarchal society. 60
Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, mandating that all instances of abuse be reported and investigated. The act also allocated funds for treatment and prevention to states in conjunction with their abuse statistics (Child Abuse
Prevention and Treatment Act, 1974). As a result, many states erected local agencies whose sole function was the investigation of child abuse (Jenkins, 1998).37
In the late 1970s, child pornography and its industry surfaced as a social problem and led to a major police crackdown on otherwise unnoticed adult stores and underground manufacturers (Jenkins, 1998).38 Television programming gave this topic a great deal of attention, and activists began connecting domestic child sexual abuse with the child pornography industry (Jenkins, 1998). The National Center for
Missing and Exploited Children, established in 1984, became very vocal and made extreme claims regarding child endangerment, and in the same year, the US
Department of Justice held a national symposium on child molestation (Jenkins,
1998).39 An overall increased sensitivity to the issue of child sexual abuse and mandatory reporting skyrocketed abuse rates between the mid 1980s and early
1990s (Jenkins, 1998). Additionally, many adults began admitting they had been subjected to unwanted sexual contact as children – such as molestation, incest and rape – contradicting the 1960s notion that the 1940s panic was groundless and
37 The Center on Child Abuse and Neglect was a 1974 add on branch to the US Department of Health and Human Services; also, many private groups emerged between 1970 and 1975: the Children’s Defense Fund, the National Committee for the Prevention of Child Abuse, Parents Anonymous, Parents United, and the Society for Young Victims, for example (Jenkins, 1998). 38 In New York v. Ferber (1982) the Supreme Court found that a New York law banning any sale or distribution of child pornography did not violate the First Amendment of the US Constitution. 39 Powerful voices of Congressmen, victims and parents of victims vastly overstated the frequency of child kidnappings and sex murders, and the media regularly reported on hugely overblown statistics (Jenkins, 1998). For example, activist John Walsh (future host of America’s Most Wanted) claimed that 205 children are reported missing in the US every hour – that’s 1.8 million a year (Jenkins, 1998). 61 overblown (Jenkins, 1998). Experts turned on their 1960s molestation‐is‐harmless position and began discussing the grave psychological harm that results from child sexual abuse (Jenkins, 1998). The term “survivor” – characterizing people who experienced sexual abuse – entered the mainstream discourse in the mid 1980s
(Jenkins, 1998). The figure of the pedophile was no longer the feebleminded, sex psychopath community outsider of the 1940s. The 1980s pedophile was the everyday man who frequented one’s community space and domestic sphere. The moral monster was more hidden in plain sight than ever before.
This 1980s shift in attitude toward child sexual abuse had major legal implications. In previous decades, courts had presumed child testimony unreliable, but in the 1980s culture of survivorship this presumption was deemed callous and re‐victimizing (Jenkins, 1998). Thus, courts began hearing child testimony and interpreting claims of sexual abuse as objective truths (Jenkins, 1998). Therapists served a pivotal role in eliciting the evidence from children needed for a sexual abuse conviction (Jenkins, 1998). Simultaneously, adults were recalling memories of child sexual abuse in their therapy sessions (Jenkins, 1998). Many of these accounts, both from children and adults, included outlandish stories of satanic sex rings and ritualistic cults (Jenkins, 1998). The prevalence of organized, institutional child molestation – be it satanic and ritualistic abuse or child pornography – was a common notion by the end of the 1980s (Jenkins, 1998). The famous McMartin preschool case both perpetuated and ultimately debunked this scare. In 1983, a delusional woman claimed her son had been molested at the McMartin preschool in
Manhattan Beach, California (Linder, 2003). Police encouraged the parents of all of 62 the other children in the class to have their kids interviewed by a therapist (Linder,
2003). Therapists employed on these children techniques designed for those who had actually been abused with the unintended result that many of the children – wanting to please the adults – invented stories of abuse (Jenkins, 1998).40 This led the public to believe that pedophile rings were targeting preschools and that the
McMartin abuse could be occurring at any school or daycare (Jenkins, 1998).
However, rather than accept these McMartin abuse allegations as undisputed fact, officials investigated further, and in 1990 the court, the media, and the American public deemed the case a sensationalistic mess (Jenkins, 1998; Linder, 2003). In the end, after seven years and fifteen millions dollars, all of the charges were dropped
(Jenkins, 1998; Linder, 2003). Thus faded the threat of the satanically oriented, conspiring groups of pedophiles.
By the early 1990s the once unconditional acceptance of sexual abuse allegations – especially those involving incest – became enshrouded with skepticism. The mental health technique of memory recovery had served as a false basis of evidence for enough sexual abuse cases that the media and the American public began discounting memory recovery and demonizing therapists (Jenkins,
1998). However, this change in attitude did not indicate the end of the sex panic.
Rather, the site of the pedophile threat shifted away from the sphere of the family and organized rings back to a figure more reminiscent of the 1940’s sex psychopath.
The media began speaking of the “child predator” and the “serial pedophile,” and,
40 In fact, a group of nearly 50 McMartin parents along with the local District Attorney’s office began digging around the preschool in search of tunnels and secret rooms in which they believed the abuse was occurring (Linder, 2003). No such underground structures were found (Linder, 2003). 63 thus, re‐invoked the concept of the compulsive, fundamentally incorrigible moral monstrosity whose crimes might eventually escalate to a child sex killing (Jenkins,
1998).41 Stories involving serial child sex murders carried out by already convicted sex offenders – like that of Megan Kanka, which I mentioned earlier – created a public stir over the perceived systemic failures of the federal and state governments’ sex offender policies. This brings us back to the current Sex Offender Registry
Boards, community notification policies, and residency restriction laws for sex offenders I discussed towards the beginning of the chapter. These policies of heavy surveillance – carried out by both the public and the state – simultaneously function as a tool for sex crime prevention and as a mechanism for instilling within the sex offender a level of self‐regulation.42 However, the surveillance provided by the
SORBs and community notification policies are never enough to fully protect a community from the fundamentally incorrigible sex‐psychopath‐child‐predator.
Hence the creation of residency restriction laws: the localized threat of a known predator is greatly reduced if he is geographically limited, so goes the thinking.43
Civil commitment for sex offenders, for which the American public had a rekindled interest by the 1980s, is the totalizing version of residency restriction laws.
Currently, twenty states and the federal government operate civil commitment facilities for sex offenders deemed too dangerous to return to society after having
41 By the mid 1990s, the term “pedophilia” described any sexual contact between an adult and minor – pre or post pubescent – as it still does today (Jenkins, 1998). 42 See Foucault’s “panopticon” (Foucault, 1977). 43 However, residency restriction laws for sex offenders have proven ineffective for and possibly detrimental to the augmentation of public safety. Such laws act as a barrier to sex offender community reintegration and the development of social networks of support. See: “Center for Sex Offender Management” (csom.org). 64 completed their criminal sentences (Young, 2011).44 Today’s medical and psychiatric institution understands the sex offender’s – especially the pedophile’s – sexual urges to be a primary component of that subject’s personhood (Sartorius et al., 2008; Seto, 2004; Diagnostic criteria for pedophilia, 2000). However, states are bound by the constitution to provide treatment for civilly committed subjects
(O’connor v. Donaldson, 1975). How though, does one treat the fundamentally broken moral monster? Both civil commitment and alternative state‐run facilities employ behavioral treatment programs for sex offenders in an effort to teach these incorrigible subjects techniques of self‐control.45 For example, some programs utilize a penile plethysmograph, which measures the circumference of the penis, for the purpose of monitoring a pedophile’s arousal response to images of sexualized children (Freund, 1991).46 Thus, the state and medical apparatuses have created a specific technology of behavioral control for those who struggle more than others to conform to societal norms. This technology contributes to ameliorating the threat of the sex offender in the context of the convicted, newly released sex offender.
However, there emerged yet another site for the sex offender threat in the 1990s: the Internet.
44 In Kansas v. Hendricks (1997), the US Supreme Court found that it did not violate the Due Process Clause of the Constitution for states to institutionalize “sexually violent predators” with “mental abnormalities” or “personality disorders.” Some civilly committed individuals are repeat offenders of child pornography consumption (Young, 2011). Between the late 1990s and 2008, six states had in place the ultimate solution for the moral monster: the death penalty for child rapists. While none of these states carried out an execution before the Supreme Court deemed the policy cruel and unusual in its Kennedy v. Louisiana (2008) ruling. The sentiment is, nonetheless, still present among the American public. 45 See: Overview of Texas Sexually Violent Predator Program. Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Fiscal Year 2005-2007. 46 The Penile Plethysmograph was originally developed in 1950s Czechoslovakia to prove that men who were avoiding the military draft by claiming homosexuality weren’t actually homosexual (Freund, 1991). 65
Beginning in the mid 1990s, the Internet has been making its way into
American homes at an ever‐increasing rate.47 The presence of this new, largely unregulated space has exasperated the issue of child pornography, contributing to the expansion of its accessibility and distribution capabilities. The Internet has also allowed for the creation of a new threat: the cyber‐child predator. Now, with his new tool – the Internet – the pedophile is able to break the protective boundaries of the family and the home in order to gain access to children. The dual threats of cyber‐porn and cyber‐predators have seemingly exposed a connection between sexual fantasy and the act of child molestation (Jenkins, 1998).48 This contributes to the notion of a natural tendency within the sex offender to escalate in his acts of violence. Thus, fantasy precedes and must ultimately lead to criminal behavior.
Dateline NBC reinforces this presumption on its show “To Catch a Predator,” which aired from 2004 to 2007. Dateline – a camera crew and “investigative journalist”
Chris Hansen – teams up with Perverted‐Justice – a volunteer group that uses adult actors to pose as minors (usually 12, 13, or 14 years old) on Internet chatrooms, engage in sexually explicit conversations with child predators and attempt to lure the predators to a decoy house (Hansen, 2011). Once a predator – always an adult male and sometimes, if Hansen is lucky, a doctor, a teacher, a police officer or a
47 According to Nielsen Company, an Internet monitoring service, 137 million Americans had home Internet access by 2000. 48 There also emerged a concern regarding children’s access to adult material via the Internet. In 1996, Congress passed the Communications Decency Act, criminalizing any intentional exchange of “obscene or indecent” messages or information depicting or describing “sexual or excretory functions or organs” such that community standards would find them “offensive.” In the Reno v. ACLU (1997) unanimous ruling, the Supreme Court overturned this provision of the law as a violation of the First Amendment of the US Constitution, thus granting the Internet the highest standard of constitutional protection. Also see: Seto, M. C., Blanchard, R., Cantor, J. M. (2006, August). Child pornography offenses are a valid diagnostic indicator of pedophilia. Journal of Abnormal Psychology. (115: 3) 610-615. 66 marine – arrives at the decoy house expecting to meet the minor from the chatroom, he is confronted with Chris Hansen (Hansen, 2011). This is the show’s ritual for every predator: Hansen, clad in his TV suit and make‐up, asks the predator to take a seat and then, still standing, proceeds to “interview” the predator (Hansen, 2011).
Hansen first asks the predator why he came to the house; then, he presents the predator with the chatroom transcripts; after a brief back and forth Hansen finally introduces himself (Hansen, 2011). The cameramen reveal themselves, and Hansen informs the predator that he is on a Dateline show about online child predators
(Hansen, 2011). Upon exiting the decoy house, the predator is arrested – sometimes tackled into the ground and at gunpoint – by a local police team (Hansen, 2011).
The police have set up a “booking station” in a nearby trailer so that the cameras can get a shot of the predator’s personal belongings – the condoms, Viagra and alcohol, for example – and the police interview (Hansen, 2011). “The most shocking part,” explains Chris Hansen during the show, “[is that] unbelievably, some men who show up at our house thinking they might be having sex with a twelve or thirteen‐year‐old are registered sex offenders. They’re supposed to be known to law enforcement, but despite their history they’re free to come and go” (Hansen, 2011). Hansen invokes this image of a pedophile whose urges and whose means of fulfillment for those urges transcend the protective structures of both the state and the home.
Parents may assume their children are finally safe at the end of the day within the confines of the family and the house when in fact the child, sitting just a few feet away, could be developing a relationship with an online predator. Families cannot even trust law enforcement to protect them from this threat. Hansen asks Michelle 67
Paradise, the prosecutor for a town in which some of the “To Catch a Predator” sting operations take place, “Based upon your experience, if one of these guys serves three or four years and gets out, would it surprise you if he got right back on the
Internet and started this activity again?” Paradise replies, “It wouldn’t surprise me if he got back on the Internet an hour after he got out.” Hansen says with pain in his voice, “An hour…,” and Paradise responds with great conviction, “Yes” (Hansen,
2011). “To Catch a Predator” portrays child predation as a deeply penetrating societal threat and does so within the specific context of the Internet, which represents only one portion of the greater sex offender threat. Having netted and convicted over two hundred child predators in less than forty days (spread out over a period of four years) “To Catch a Predator” appears to have merely scratched the surface of the problem (Hansen, 2011). Since the 1990s, the figure of the pedophile has permeated every social space and has gained the additional, infinite space of the
Internet.
In light of current media portrayals and legislative movements directed toward sex offenders, this current wave of sex crime panic, which began in the late
1970s, over thirty years ago, does not appear to be losing strength. The figure of the pedophile – the compulsive, incorrigible child predator – has characterized the threat American society has understood to be emanating from all sex offenders for twenty years. As I have demonstrated, sex crime hysteria has lain dormant for periods of time throughout the 20th century. As a result, one wonders how it is that millennial America has yet to experience such a recess as opposed to the on‐going escalation. The 20th century sex crime panic waves tended to follow eras of marked 68 structural dissolution. Alongside turn of the century urbanization, industrialization and population growth came an unraveling of the American’s social situated‐ness in terms of the conceptualization of the self, community, and greater structures of influence. This was a period of individuation for the American subject – a pressure for the subject to develop an authentic self (Cushman, 1995). Colonial, puritanical
America did not foster individuation (Cushman, 1995). Rather, the subject’s selfhood belonged wholly to God and the community’s religious mission (Cushman,
1995). The loss of the agrarian community and its shared self‐conceptualization and sense of purpose to industrialization and capitalist values of individuality and economic gain unhinged the subject and cultivated feelings of emptiness and isolation (Cushman, 1995). Thus, the rising consumerist culture throughout turn of the century America began serving as a means for individual self‐fulfillment
(Cushman, 1995). Consumerist freedom has come to represent the liberated subject
(Cushman, 1995). A sex crime panic accompanied the loss of community structure at the turn of the century but lost emphasis during the 1920s when the consumerist subject was further realized by a widespread boom of consumerist opportunity.
The 1920s also saw the further loss of traditional structures to a move toward women’s liberation. In fact, there has since been an ever‐progressing disintegration of traditional structures and an ever‐more‐deeply penetrating liberal‐consumerist ethic. Concurrently, in reaction to this structural dismantling, there has been a constant pushback of conservativist values and nostalgia for structural control and visible state power. Sex crime hysteria is one aspect of this pushback. 69
This pushback of conservatism and traditional values characterizes the condition of modern, capitalist America: ideological hypocrisy, or, even, ideological schizophrenia. As I discussed earlier in the chapter, Foucault locates state power in modern capitalist society as having shifted from the absolute control of the sovereign to technologies of imposed self‐regulation. The individuating technique of these technologies – for example, the categorizing and naming of medico‐ psychiatric disorders and the subsequent assignation of labels – fosters in the subject a false sense of agency and freedom from state control. The production of these medico‐psychiatric categories as societal truths further obscures from society the underlying mechanism of state control. Thus, while capitalist America individuates the subject, capitalist America simultaneously normalizes its population via technologies such as the medico‐psychiatric apparatus. Since the beginning of the 20th century, Americans have experienced the dual forces of individualization and normalization. Americans have also experienced conflicting desires for freedom from state power and an increase of state power, for social strictures and for civil liberties. The subject is compelled to strip himself of his social anchors in the name of autonomy, but once he is naked and disoriented he wants nothing more than for a greater entity of power to situate him and his meaning‐making in relation to the rest of society. Those periods of collective liberalism during the 1920s and the 1960s – especially during the 60s – experienced an expansion of the rights of the individual and his freedom from the strictures of the state and traditional morality. However, both of these periods of liberalism saw subsequent pushbacks of social discomfort and conservatism – as well as sex crime 70 panics. With the further dissolution of traditional structures of the family, communities, morality and the public and the private spheres, a politically fragmented American public and government have poured their resulting anxieties into and rallied around the issue of sex crime – of the pedophile – as a common point understanding. America has been able to situate itself – its sense of morality and order – in relation to the amorality and disorder surrounding the defective sex pervert, the sex psychopath, the sex offender, the child predator. In turn, the US has erected new legislative structures of state control, which have not quelled the hysteria but have rather opened up additional spaces for its perpetuation. As traditional structures continue to dissipate amidst an ongoing conservative pushback is doubtful that millennial America will tear down the structures currently situating the sex offender hysteria.
71
Conclusion
72
Currently, both the figures of the terrorist and the pedophile, alongside the
United States’ – the government’s, the media’s and the public’s – reaction to their putative threat, function as sites of orientation for Americans amidst a societal environment of structural dissolution. The figure of the terrorist in the US War On
Terror provides a locus of amorality against which Americans can situate their own sense of moral superiority. American society has constructed the figure of the terrorist such that the terrorist’s violence can never be justified. In delegitimizing the terrorist’s violence by dismissing it as amoral and purposeless, the US is able to use the figure of the terrorist as a backdrop against which it can construct its own moral justification for US violence. This moral justification provides a shared sense of morality – and thus anchorage – for Americans. The figure of the pedophile has functioned similarly to the figure of the terrorist over the past century. Waves of sex crime panic have tended to coincide with periods of liberalism and the deterioration of traditional American social structures. Thus, the evidence appears to suggest that this unraveling effect liberalism and capitalism have had on traditional social structures throughout the 20th and 21st centuries has left Americans unmoored from their sense of social grounding. As I have described, sex crime panics have emerged out of these periods of structural dissolution as a point of anchorage for Americans – a container into which Americans have been able to pour some of the anxiety and confusion arising from these societal changes. The figure of the pedophile – and the threat this figure is believed to pose – frames this anxiety such that it is discernible 73 and meaningful. Much of this discernibility and meaning arises from the fact that the majority of Americans share this sense of threat with respect to the figure of the pedophile. Thus, just as the figure of the terrorist provides moral positioning for
Americans, the figure of the pedophile provides positionality for America’s sense of fear and anxiety. Both of these figures and the positionality they provide function in reaction to the perpetual unraveling of traditional social structures.
This dissolution of traditional structures, as I have demonstrated, is multi‐ layered: The traditional structuration of nation‐state boundaries – economic, cultural, juridical and ideological – has eroded with the global expansion of capitalism and liberal‐democratic ideology; also, traditional American structures of morality, the family, the private and the public spheres and shared values have been unraveling since the turn of the 20th century. The figures of the terrorist and the pedophile are just two examples of the many situating structures that have emerged amidst this era of structural dissolution. I could have made the same claim of conditions of possibility for the strong social presences of, for instance, fundamentalist Christianity, the Tea Party movement, the War On Drugs and abstinence‐only sex education. These ideologies or movements all arise from perceived social threats – God’s wrath, the principles of the Founding Fathers’ disappearance from US government, disorder and undesirable family structures.
Similarly, the terrorist and the pedophile – the threat of amorality, violence and disorder – necessitate the US War On Terror and excessive sex offender policy.
While the figures of terrorist and the pedophile are just two of the many examples of structures of positionality that have emerged in response to this 74 structural unraveling, I do believe that the terrorist and the pedophile have, indeed, achieved a rather remarkable status of dehumanization. In the previous chapters, I invoked Ghassan Hage and his discussion regarding American society’s requirement to absolutely condemn the suicide bomber and, thus, make no attempt to understand the social conditions from which the suicide bomber’s actions arise
(Hage, 2003). Hage attributes this requirement to America’s fear of explanation – exighophobia – resulting from a fear of human sameness – homoiophobia (Hage,
2003). If Americans are socialized to absolutely condemn the figures of the terrorist and the pedophile without any understanding of the composition of these figures, besides their presumed perverted evil, Americans are thus socialized to dehumanize the terrorist and the pedophile and participate in the resulting violence committed against them.
However, it is not only the dehumanization of the figures of the terrorist and the pedophile that is of concern to me. In emphasizing these figures in American society – in exerting a massive amount of time, money and political and emotional energy on these figures – the US is concurrently de‐emphasizing many other societal issues that are, in fact, serious problems with regards to which Americans should experience a greater sense of threat, such as climate change, the energy crisis, US socio‐economic stratification and US human rights violations. If America were to pour its anxiety into issues that actually pose a serious threat to the well‐being of
American society – and the rest of the World, for that matter – rather than into to the invented threats of the figures of the terrorist and the pedophile, the US would strengthen its potentiality for social betterment. 75
Thus, I find that the exceptional prominence of the figures of the terrorist and the pedophile in American society is detrimental to both those held subject to these labels and to American society’s socio‐political awareness and sense of what is important. I hope for the knowledge I have provided to serve as an alternative interpretation for, specifically, those notions surrounding the figures of the terrorist and the pedophile and also, if more broadly applied, for those notions surrounding any such dehumanized figures.
As a society, America too often neglects to acknowledge the interrelatedness of all people and every socio‐historical, socio‐cultural, socio‐political and socio‐ economic circumstance. As a result, Americans habitually formulate absolutist claims, misguided interpretations and rash social policies. In conducting this deconstructive analysis and, thus, having lain bare many of the pieces that have contributed to the over‐emphasis and dehumanization of the figures of the terrorist and the pedophile, I have revealed points of entry for those who whish to effectuate social change. However, as it stands, this inquiry serves as a source of enlightenment for people willing to challenge their assumptions regarding truth, morality, threat and social importance.
76
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