Our Dark Side (21 page)

It is therefore difficult to describe a sexual relationship between, for example, an adolescent girl or boy of fourteen with a young adult (man or woman) of sixteen or eighteen as paedophile in any strict sense, even though all sexual relations with minors under fifteen are now illegal under French law.
³⁰

It was at the end of the nineteenth century, or at the time when doctors were still hounding children who masturbated, that an interest began to be taken in the sexual abuse – incestuous and otherwise – of young children by adults. Such abuse had long been covered up, and it took the extension of psychoanalysis on the one hand and the observation of sexology on the other to bring it to light. At that time, children did not directly disclose their abuse when it happened but, years later, when they had become adults, they did disclose it to their therapists. While the victims – who were usually hysterical women – talked in the private consulting rooms of their soul-doctors about the pain they had suffered, their aggressors remain silent. And they admitted their perversions only when they came into contact with forensic medicine as a result of some offence against public decency. ‘Ordinary' paedophiles who, without being child murderers or even, it would seem, violent men, interfered with their own children within the family, or with children of people they knew, and took the view that the child's body belonged to them and that the seduction was initiated by the children, who were anxious to give adults sexual pleasure.

These retrospective disclosures were so common that Freud initially thought that hysterical neuroses resulted from the trauma of childhood sexual abuse. Convinced that he was right about his
neurotica
, he went so far as to suspect that his old father, Jacob Freud, had been a pervert who forced some of his children to fellate him. In a famous letter dated 21 September 1897, he then abandoned the so-called ‘seduction theory' and asserted that, while actual abuse did occur, it could not be regarded as the sole cause of neurosis. He subsequently developed the notion of fantasy, and demonstrated that the famous sexual scenes that puzzled all the scientists of his day could easily have been imagined, and that psychical reality was different from material reality (Freud 1985. On the many debates that surround Freud's rejection of the seduction theory, see Roudinesco 1999).

Now that paedophiles (who have become paraphiles) are described as suffering from ‘sexual preference disorder', it is the children themselves who have to disclose, even though retrospective evidence is still legally admissible. This is an effect of the way the status of children has been transformed. Thanks to the work of Freud and his successors, children are no longer seen as pure and innocent, but as ‘polymorphously perverse' creatures whose sexuality must be educated without being repressed or, worse still, excited by attempts to seduce them. Their bodies are therefore all the more taboo because we are aware of the disastrous effects of childhood abuse. And their disclosures therefore tend to be taken at face value.

Our experience teaches us that while ‘out of the mouths of babes and sucklings …' what they claim to be the truth has been distorted or reinterpreted. Children who have been the victims of abuse often accuse, in other words, other people around them as well as, or instead of, their abusers. They use a real traumatic lived experience to invent sexual scenes that are often fanciful,
³¹
and dream up rings, plots and occult powers. And given that contemporary paedophilia is both widely publicized on pornographic sites and over-exposed in the media, it is not unusual for the fantasies to conform to virtual reality.

A child who has been abused, neglected, beaten, abandoned or seduced by an adult who is close to him always experiences ‘soul murder'. In such situations, children lose all self-respect because they believe they are guilty of the abuse that is inflicted on them, and later repeat the same acts or even torture themselves and their own children. ‘Some of the stories that patients tell about their parents and childhood could make the psychiatrist weep: my father beat us so badly he broke bones; my mother put lye in my halfwit brother's oatmeal; my mother kept the bedroom door open when she brought men home for sex; my stepfather took baths with me and taught me to suck him off, and when I told my mother she slapped me and called me a liar' (Shengold 1990: 14).

The disclosures do not only reveal sexual abuse; as Shengold describes, they also reveal moral tortures in which hatred or indifference, silence and concealed madness are the dominant factors. Shengold (1990: 8f) describes the case of a young man from a very wealthy family who suffered from depression with suicidal tendencies. His alcoholic father had always treated him like an object but showed great affection towards his horses. As for his mother, she had never stopped humiliating him, even though she showered him with material gifts. When he told her that he had entered psychoanalysis, her birthday gift to him was a set of pistols that had belonged to her father.

We have already seen that the childhood of some truly perverse individuals was punctuated by similar atrocities. We also know that children who are victims of hatred, aggression, abuse and ‘soul murder' in the privacy of their own homes are much more likely than others to become the choice prey of the paedophiles who seduce them with caresses and kind words in order to destroy them because of their perverse conviction that they actually want to be seduced.

While it is now accepted that the victims suffer, what is done to treat those who are now described as ‘sexual deviants'?

Specialist sex therapists in the United States and Canada have been using some very curious ways of treating their bodies and souls for twenty years now, with their consent. In clinics that have been transformed into research laboratories, they supply their patients, who enjoy being instrumentalized in this way, with an arsenal of gadgets and synthetic images designed to satisfy their every demand. In an attempt to extract the psychological truth from the very body of their patients, they encourage them to watch pornographic films to their hearts' content and hook them up to the many machines that measure the intensity of their emotions and erections: luxmeters, thermistors, transducers, standard polygraphs and cumulative integrators that measure how their pupils respond (Lotringer 2006).
³²
They even go so far as to hire them ‘partners', who are given the task of correcting their cognitive failings by touching them or performing sex acts in the presence of the therapists. Sexual perverts, who are now known as deviants, are thus forced to become laboratory rats
of their own free will.
³³

They are invited to fantasize repeatedly about their criminal acts so that they can be conditioned to find them undesirable. They are then encouraged to re-educate themselves by having so-called normal intercourse while still under observation. If the treatment is found to have no effect, the sex doctors first recommend chemical castration (ingestion of hormones)
³⁴
and then surgical castration (ablation of the testicles). There is no shortage of volunteers.

Can we claim that such practices are justifiable? Is it, for example, acceptable to accede to a transvestite's request to give him electrical shocks as he changes his clothes in order to cure him of his horror at being a transvestite? Do we have the right to give a homosexual drugs that make him vomit whenever he has an erection to make him sick of the homosexuality that makes him hate himself so much that he asks for them?

In more general terms, does our response to sexual perverts have to be exclusively surgical, behaviourist or drug-based, when we know that the reoffending rates for those sanctioned by the law is relatively low?
³⁵
Would it not be better to resort to more classic forms of treatment that combine all possible approaches – chemical treatment, psychotherapy, monitoring, referrals to social services, imprisonment
³⁶
– but not those based upon protocols inherited from predicative medicine? We are well aware that such subjects have to be treated on an individual basis, not because they are ill but because their subjectivity has been perverted.
³⁷
In that respect, and as Freud emphasized, the existence of the Law, and therefore of sanctions, is much more significant than conditioning when it comes to controlling drives that are mistakenly described as ‘uncontrollable'.

Being perverse, and neither mad nor deluded, paedophiles act out their fantasies quite lucidly, once they have made sure that they are in no danger, that there are no police officers or witnesses around, and that the child will not resist. Whatever they may say, they are in control of their impulses, which is why, when they can, they indulge in sexual tourism to countries where child-slavery is organized.

The fact remains that the most dangerous sexual perverts, or those who rape or kill children on more than one occasion, always end up defying the Law and medicine. It is as though, in their madness, they enjoyed frustrating all attempts to sanction them by exacerbating society's will to punish – even by using the power of drugs for their own purposes.
³⁸

No experimenter has succeeded in proving that perverse forms of treatment work. The perverse defy the Law. And when science, which has replaced the Law, encourages the use of such therapies, it simply encourages them to defy the Law even more. Stanley Kubrick skilfully dismantles this mechanism in
A Clockwork Orange
. When it comes to acts like these – and they are often compared with crimes against humanity – surely the Law must prevail over crime.

Such perverse forms of treatment are basically no more than a disguised reproduction of the corporal punishments of old. And they are no more effective than the bleedings and purges that Molière's doctors gave their patients in the age of pre-scientific medicine. In that respect, it is curious that the supporters of this insane behaviourism
³⁹
have yet to reach the conclusion that abusers who have already been chemically or surgically castrated should have their hand and tongues amputated, should they re-offend. One day, they will.
⁴⁰
In a remarkable article, Daniel Soulez-Larivière rightly points out (2007) that our fear of paedophilia is so great that we have surreptitiously reintroduced the idea of legal elimination, which disappeared when the death penalty was abolished in France and Europe: ‘The only way to prevent all re-offending is to eliminate all delinquents, just as the only way to prevent all plane crashes is to put an end to air travel.'

As might have been expected, the introduction of such forms of treatment
⁴¹
has had the effect of promoting the idea that so-called deviant sexuality can be prevented, and not just treated: fantasies should be put under surveillance, and suspected paedophiles should be prevented from coming into contact with adolescents. A Californian pervert with no criminal record who wanted to enjoy the fear he could inspire recently stated in public that he was a paedophile and liked young girls, and posted some possible meeting places on his website (Hall 2007). At the request of concerned families, the local authorities forbade him to approach children and adolescents under the age of seventeen. He was then issued with a restraining order and regarded as a carrier of the plague.

Satisfied with their results, the sex doctors have now reached the conclusion that, if it is to be effective, the prevention of delinquency must involve not only potentially perverse patients, but also a population that has hitherto been spared their attentions: children under the age of three. While this proposal was greeted with a wave of protests, and even revulsion, in France,
⁴²
it has been implemented in Canada and Great Britain. It is designed to suggest that an effective policy on delinquency has less to do with either genetic or organic screening than with prevention in the classic sense. The outcome has been a transition from the screening of the behaviour of young children to the screening of foetuses. In May 2007, the British government launched a project designed to use all kinds of medical tests to identify, sixteen weeks after their conception, babies who would in future be ‘most at risk' in terms of social exclusion and potential criminality: ‘The goal of the government's parenting strategy is, they say, to hand back control to parents, to improve their children's living conditions before they are even born and to prevent them from becoming delinquent' (Manach 2007).

To make their project more credible, the health authorities claimed that their proposals were based on brain scans that supposedly indicated neurological differences between the brains of children who were loved by their parents and the brains of children who were not. The programme is in fact designed to help single mothers who are in difficulties or from underprivileged backgrounds during pregnancy. But is there any need to promote a campaign to help the destitute by invoking brain scans or neurological differences that have no particular significance? As we know, there is as yet and given the current state of science, no way of establishing the slightest correlation between delinquency or ‘sexual deviance' and cerebral or neurological defects. Given its fantastic plasticity, it is a truism to say that the human brain is sensitive to psychological states. That does not, however, mean that we can deduce any meaning from our actions, desires, history or relationship with good and evil. From that point of view, the brain is nothing more than an organ that allows us to know we are thinking.

These barbaric forms of treatment have dispossessed the perverse of their perversions without overcoming their desire to hurt others and themselves; they have also been applied to a different category of patients, namely the obsessional neurotics
DSM
describes as being handicapped by serious organic disorders.
⁴³
Having been subjected to pointless surgical interventions, they are now exposed, like laboratory animals, to various pointless techniques that use electrodes to stimulate them. Although they are effective against neurological disorders like Parkinson's disease, such techniques do nothing for neurotics, unless, that is, they make them even worse than they were. A whole new vocabulary has been developed to go along with these dangerous, mutilating practices: anterior capsulectomy, anterior cingulotomy, sub-caudeal tracheotomy, bimedial lobotomy … (Wainrib 2006).