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http://www.tasa.org.au/members/docs/2001_10/McMillan,%20Jones%20&%20Worth.pdf
TASA 2001 Conference, The
Institute
for Research on Gender, University of
Institute
for Research on Gender, University of
Institute
for Research on Gender, University of
Abstract Everyday activities such as
eating, sex and looking after children were once considered ‘common sense’.
Now they are increasingly regulated by discourses of risk and safety. This
paper, taking a ‘case study’ approach, considers the ways that risk is
(re)constructed and played out in contemporary anxieties about male childcare
workers. It suggests that in a ‘risk society’ moral judgments are ultimately
recast in terms of risk assessment – which has little to do with ‘actual’
risk, but much to do with the convergences of old and new ‘expert’ discourses
and influential social movements. It investigates a specific instantiation of
risk anxiety in
Ulrich Beck (1992) argues that
there has been an epochal shift in the social order - from an industrialised
or class society to a ‘risk society’. This shift, he maintains, marks a
fundamental change in normative social and moral forces which characterise
Western societies. Where the normative project for class society was
equality, for ‘risk’ society the normative project is safety. This
preoccupation with safety generates ubiquitous anxieties. Danger is no longer
a quality that inheres specifically in particular individuals and actions,
but rather appears (apparently more democratically) as generalised risk; a
degree of probability always-present in every common practice and person. The popular perception of risk, or
risk anxiety, often has very little to do with any scientifically calculable
probability, or the ‘real likelihood’ of danger. Rather, free-floating
anxiety requires that increasing numbers of common practices (such as eating,
sex, sunbathing, caring for children) and groups (such as male primary
teachers, overweight people, homosexual men, smokers) are identified as high
risk, or a threat to safety – their own or others’. Such practices as sex and
eating, now seen as ‘risky’, might have been understood as ‘natural’ in
earlier times. Groups now marked as ‘high risk’ might have been identified as
‘deviant’, or ‘having a good (words
missing from original) That new-risky everyday activities
are associated with widespread anxiety is hardly surprising. Risk assessments
and decisions are informed by multiple and competing discourses and often
irreconcilable information (‘red wine is good for you’, ‘red wine is bad for
you’). A variety of experts dump their contradictions and conflicts at the
feet of the individual, who is invited to make sense of the contradictions,
and make their own choices (Beck 1992:137). Indeed, this responsibility is
central to the injunction to autonomy that is the signifier of risk society.
In a contemporary plural society, making sense tends to require not only the
tolerance of ambiguity, but also a certain indifference to contradiction. Perhaps
predictably then, the requirement to make sense of a contradictory
environment can also generate a desire for, and retreat to, black- and-white
certitudes of moral positions (and a nostalgia for the imagined simplicity
and safety of earlier times). This paper will investigate the
operation of risk anxiety within a particular site: day-care centres. We
consider the ‘fashionable’ danger of sexual abuse in day-care as a case study
of the ways in which the conjunction of a variety of discordant accounts works
to produce a particular site as a locus of risk and how, within that site,
certain groups are assigned as high risk. While exact figures on all
convictions for sexual offences against young children are unavailable, the
data that is obtainable in Because of this, in professional
adult-child interactions propriety has become predominantly an issue of
safety, and this anxiety about safe behaviour is also evident in the training
of male (and female) teachers - and even Santa Claus - in the ‘proper’
touching of young children (Jones, 2001). The childcare centre has become a
locus for some of the most intense anxiety about risk. Our era is “an
historical moment of massive anxiety in the West about the capacities, the
safety and the status of children” (Wallace 1997:285). The government and
protection of not only children, but of the state of childhood itself, are
particular loci of concern in a risk society because children cannot manage
risk for themselves. Moreover, lacking the ‘knowledge’ necessary to be
constituted as fully autonomous and therefore fully responsible for making
their own choices, children embody the nostalgic ideal of innocence (an
innocence which has been ‘lost’ elsewhere, leaving childhood – the original
site - the only repository of that purity). Anxieties about the protection of
childhood and care of the child, pervade discourses
around working mothers and the possible deficiencies of early childcare as
opposed to maternal care, as well as that of the risk of abuse and neglect in
early childhood education centres. In addition to anxieties about
children which are accentuated in ‘risk’ society, the feminist- driven desire
to redress gender power imbalances generates many dilemmas in relation to
children, and gives rise to certain insoluble ambivalences. A feminist desire
to see men take on more nurturing roles and an active responsibility for
children is now combined with a clear distrust of men in relation to children
(Note 2) At
the same time, the more conservative impulse in society that would seek to
preserve gender roles from increasing destabilisation censures, in
particular, men whose masculine identity is problematised
. (Note 3)
An extreme expression of the
hyper-anxiety about childcare combined with a more general anxiety about
gender roles and the ‘breakdown of the family’ occurred, in English speaking
countries, in the “outbreak’ of satanic and ritual abuse claims.
Consequently, child sexual abuse in day care center
allegations have been (in)famously associated with
satanic and ritual abuse. . (Note 4)
Allegations of bizarre abuse triggered investigations on more than a
hundred While many of the early satanic
abuse charges involved family members, the later allegations were
predominantly laid against professional childcare workers. In the course of
speculation and rumour surrounding these cases, the accused were routinely
identified as homosexual /lesbian or otherwise ‘morally deviant’ – even when
they were older women with husbands and children. In the light of these
accusations, even normality itself became a sign of malevolent intent (see
discussion below). Although a small minority of the accused were openly
homosexual, in most cases these assignments were purely speculative and
retrospective. . (Note 5) In addition,
in many cases a characterisation of the accused as ‘a likeable rogue’ or
‘amazingly imaginative’ or even as one who ‘went that extra mile’ by devoting
weekends or evenings to their young charges, quickly turned to evidence of
their thoroughly suspect character. The initial critique contended
that ‘satanic’ child sexual abuse cases were the product of deluded
individuals (usually women). However, this account gave way to a ‘sexual
abuse industry’ argument, which claimed that a comprehensive official
apparatus for generating investigations and trials had been assembled.
Through this ‘industry,’ psychology produced itself as the expert authority,
defining both pathology and cure. Social workers took over the normal police
role of interviewing complainants, and giving evidence in court. The
interrogation style of prolonged interviews and an insistence on children
‘disclosing’ led to the seemingly uncontrollable and incredible series of
accusations. Psychologists not only became the detectives (finding the
‘facts’) but also arbiter of the truth and the reliability of evidence. The ‘industry’ argument goes some
way toward offering an explanation for the transmission of the phenomenon
across national borders. Ritual abuse allegations involving daycare workers, remarkable for their similarities to the
US cases, emerged in Britain, Canada and other parts of the English speaking
world, including New Zealand and Australia (Fontaine 1998). . (Note 6) Although oftentimes the two are inherently
bound up, this paper is not so concerned with the mechanisms by which the
phenomena of ritual abuse cases are transmitted but, rather, with
investigating the various strands to the narratives informing the issue of
child sexual abuse in early childhood education.
Given the relatively high
incidence of child abuse within the family, it has been contended that the
public fascination with stories of childcare ritual abuse and of sexual
molestation-by- strangers deflects attention from, and anxieties about, the
health and status and safety of the family (Ashby 1997, p.165). The coding of sexual offenders
against children as sexual ‘predators’, sexual ‘psychopaths’ and ‘ogres’
constitutes the offender as inhuman and monstrous. To a certain extent this
disavows the pervasiveness and shocking ‘ordinariness’ of child abuse within
the home. Added to this deflection of attention, charges laid
against a family member usually result in the suppression of names and other
details that may identify the victim. This means that the news-reading public
is provided only with detailed information about child sexual abuse charges
that are not directed at a family member. Thus the problem of child sexual
abuse is framed in terms of stranger or extra-familial molesters, and what is
primarily a domestic horror is projected onto the public arena. It is probably the case that
‘stranger danger’ and daycare danger has generated
more public fascination and anxiety than family danger because of the
middle-class driven media’s portrayal of class culture. Sexual abuse has
generally been portrayed as arising from poverty, poor education,
overcrowding and deprivation. In addition, the children of the poor have
traditionally been the objects of child protectionists, moral crusaders, and
the attentions and bodily scrutinies of welfare agencies. Perhaps because of
this, stranger danger and day-care workers appear to pose more of a risk . (Note 7) to the middle classes (Jenkins
1998). Certainly, the pre-schools that engendered ritual abuse cases in the
The tensions between ‘day care’
and ‘the family’ have typically been played out in the traditionally-opposed
positions of feminism and conservatism. It is interesting, therefore, that
ritual abuse narratives are often produced through a convergence of such
apparently irreconcilable psychological and moral discourses. Although riven
with ambiguities, and impelled by contradictory motives, the moral narratives
of groups such as radical feminism and Christian fundamentalism combine the
political imperatives of liberation . (Note 8) with the moral
imperatives of conservatism. Day-care has traditionally been a
cornerstone issue of feminist policy. Although popularly characterized as
simply ‘man-hating’, feminism generally aspires to change the gendered social
order, particularly the cultural imperatives around children’s care. In
simple terms, many feminists have insisted that men and the state take a
greater role in the care of children; however, commentators have also pointed
to the ways in which feminism has contributed to the hysteria around male
childcare workers through the promulgation of the attitude that all men are
by nature or by dint of the patriarchy, sexual suspects (Best 1990:182-3;
Hood 2001). . (Note 9) While feminists linked child abuse
with wife battering, and with patriarchal power, it was largely their conservative
and fundamentalist adversaries who located the main threats to children
outside the home. Those concerned with preserving the patriarchal family and
its gendered roles held working women responsible for the breakdown of the
nuclear family, and therefore responsible for all social ills. Within a moral
conservative framework daycare centres do represent
the root of all evil, in that they encourage and allow mothers to work
outside the home. Feminist anxieties about men, and
conservative anxieties about the family have converged to make the daycare centre, and particularly the male daycare worker, an object of suspicion. Moral conservatism, of course, is
not the sole preserve of Christian fundamentalists believing in the existence
of satanic abuse rituals. Conservatives appear on both sides of the ritual
abuse belief divide, and strange alliances have appeared. There is also
scepticism, in some quarters, about ‘exaggerated’ sexual abuse allegations,
on the grounds that society is under attack by ‘radical feminists’ (e.g. Interestingly enough, while
feminism is regularly vilified as the force behind the persecution of
innocent people in false sex abuse charges, Finkelhor
(1988 - see below) also claims that the supposed active participation of
women in ritual abuse can be explained as a result of feminism.
In the late 1980s, when ritual
abuse was ‘widespread’, the book Nursery Crimes (Finkelhor,
Williams and Burns 1988) became a bible for ritual abuse believers (Jenkins
1998). Finkelhor, a highly regarded social
scientist who pioneered sociological investigation into child sexual abuse,
had already established that women were far less likely than men to molest
children. In order to reconcile a belief in the occurrence of ritual abuse,
in which 40% of the accused are female, with those earlier findings, he
theorised that apparent normality is a characteristic of female day-care
molesters. The sexual revolution and gender politics of the 1960’s had
engendered a New Woman so obsessed with ‘power and control’ that domination
of men was not enough - she had to engage in the ‘mortification’ of innocent
children as well (Finkelhor 1988: 47). This ‘expert’ sociological
narrative coincided with the fundamentalist Christian account as well as the
folk devil story (see Cohen 1972) that devil worshippers’ appearance of
normality is their particular disguise. Female childcare workers, under the
guise of being ‘decent’ women, (i.e., ostensibly performing traditional
women’s work) facilitate and encourage other women to leave the home and to
work. Women in professional childcare may appear to be normal women operating
in their natural sphere, but this appearance is deceitful as they are, after
all, women in the public world. They have taken the private, sacred, world of
the family into the profane world of the public. Their confederates are
unnatural men, homosexuals and other deviants who have eschewed the normal
masculine role.
If the male (and female) childcare
worker – already guilty on a range of charges – was solidly a suspect
subject, the homosexual childcare worker was beyond the pale. Male
homosexuality had been firmly linked to sex with children, and therefore
homosexual childcare workers were by definition a danger to them. Till mid-
19th century, crimes involving sex (falling under such categories as sodomy
or carnal abuse) did not assign the sex criminal as a distinct or especially
menacing category of malefactor (Jenkins 1998:26). The offender was a person
who had perpetrated certain acts rather than one pre-disposed to do so. By
the twentieth century psychiatry and medicine had defined sexual acts that
could not lead to procreation as perverted. Moreover such an act revealed a
‘predilection’, or aspect of moral character, and it was that tendency,
rather than the act itself, which transformed non-procreative acts into sexual
perversion. The belief that perversion,
including homosexuality and pederasty, if unchecked, would lead to criminal
violence can be traced to this time (see Jenkins 1998). That idea meant that
homosexuality became viewed as a dangerous sexual psychopathology. Moreover,
the homosexual has been seen to be a seducer of not just boys but the young
of both sexes. Mid- century dictionaries and medical texts defined pederast
in terms of both ‘boy-love’ and anal sex and gave sodomite as a synonym, so
that English usage thoroughly supported the identification of homosexuals and
paedophiles (Jenkins 1998:62).
The issue of male homosexuality
has predominated in Incredible claims were made by the
children, and these claims were remarkably similar to those made in the McMartin and other One of the interesting aspects of
the Ellis case for this discussion is the way that maleness and homosexuality
was at the silent centre of the case. Abuse literature asserts that ritual
abuse is a group activity. The open spaces and usual practices of pre-schools
mean that for one individual to engage in abuse then others would have to be
complicit. Ellis’s four female co-workers were initially accused of ritual
abuse along with Ellis, the sole male member of the créche
staff. Ultimately, he was the only worker brought to trial. It is very clear
that without the knowledge and collaboration of other female crèche workers
he could not have perpetrated the crimes. All charges against those women
were dropped. The early dropping of the charges
against the women in the Ellis case differed from the pattern in the It may be that changes signalled
by a move to a ‘risk society’ are rhetorical in quite important ways. The
same narratives that once cast homosexuals as ‘perverts’ now cast them as
high risk. In parallel terms, fatty food or smoking that were once ‘bad for
you’ are now ‘high risk behaviour’; badly-tuned cars are ‘a risk to the
environment’; badly-behaved or delinquent children are ‘at risk’; those who
were addicts, or speeding drivers, are now ‘a risk to their/our health or
safety’, racist or culturally ignorant doctors are now ‘culturally unsafe’,
and so on. Risk marks out new discursive boundaries – delineating a
post-moral territory where ‘deviants’, ‘delinquents’ and ‘bad food’ do not
exist. Rather, there are a series of high risk practices and categories of person,
who are a threat to the normalising project of safety, or the reduction of
risk. In this environment, full enfranchisement for categories of person or
practices (like homosexuals, or smoking) is less dependent on civil rights
legislation than on the discourse of technological expertise in the form of
social scientific authority. In this way the tolerant plural society
disguises its moral judgements as objective risk assessment.
Ashby L.R (1997). Endangered
Children: Dependency, Neglect, and Abuse in American History. Twayne: Beck, U. (1992). Risk Society:
towards a new modernity. (trans. M. Ritter). Sage: Best, J. (1990). Threatened
Children. Cockburn, A. (1990) Abused
Imaginings New Statesman & Society 3(85): 19-20 Cohen, S., (1972). Folk Devils and
Moral Panics. Blackwell: Crewsdon, J. (1988). By silence
betrayed: sexual abuse of children in Farquar, S.E. (1997).
Teaching: A women only profession? Finkelhor. D., Williams, L., and
N. Burns (1988) Nursery Crimes. Sage: la Fontaine, J.S. (1998).
Speak of the Devil: Tales of satanic abuse in contemporary Hayden, J. (1996). Beyond Mr
Bubbles: An Analysis of the Public Image of Early Childhood Care and
Education in Hood, Lynley (2001 Forthcoming). A
City Possessed. Longacre Press: Jenkins, P. (1998). Moral Panic:
changing concepts of the child molester in modern Jones, A. (2001). 'Learning Proper
Masculine Pleasure: Santa Clauses and Teachers' in, A. Jones (ed) Touchy
Subjects: Teachers Touching Children. Nathan, D., and Snedecker, M. (1995). Satan's Silence: ritual abuse and
the making of a modern American witch hunt. Basic Books: de Young, M., (1997). The
Devil Goes to Day Care: McMartin and the Making of
a Moral Panic. Journal of American Culture 20(1):19-25. Wallace, J. (1997) Technologies of
‘the child’: towards a theory of the child-subject, Textual Practice 9, (2), 285-302. Notes Note 1 The overall rate of convictions
for offending, and the percentage of convictions involving victims under 12
years, was very similar
The perception that male childcare
workers and primary teachers are extremely vulnerable to suspicion and even criminal charges contributes to men avoiding work
with young children (Farquhar, 1997).
It may be that the adoption by men
of a traditionally ‘female’ caring and maternal role itself problematises masculinity.
The charges of repeated and
bizarre acts, first classified as ‘satanic abuse’, became known as ‘ritual
abuse’ and are now referred to more soberly as ‘sadism’. It is interesting
that these changing classifications tend towards less sensational
explanations of the motivation for such strange deeds.
In the most famous of the
Cases surfaced in
Day-care and professional care is
not usually considered a risk situation for non-sexual violence, or even
emotional abuse. (words
missing from original)
A belief in the generally
therapeutic power of unburdening oneself of repressed desires,
has metamorphosed into the necessity of re-membering
one’s (whole) self through the remembering of repressed suffering.
These commentators seem to forget
that feminist rhetoric around men’s propensity for sexual violence was mainly
directed at law changes to facilitate the recognition and prosecution of rape
and domestic violence. The seepage into child abuse discourse is (words missing from original)
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