NO MINOR ISSUES: AGE OF CONSENT, CHILD PORNOGRAPHY, AND CROSSGENERATIONAL RELATIONSHIPS

I wrote a pair of articles about these topics for The Advocate in the late '70s. These pieces remain extremely controversial, probably drawing more criticism than anything else I've published. I decided to reprint them in the first edition of Public Sex even though I had some questions and qualms about the positions they took because there was almost no debate about age of consent laws or the enforcement of the ban on child pornography. Twenty years later, the social treatment of the many issues surrounding youth and sexuality (and my own feelings about these issues) have changed enough that it has become important for me to write an update. In 1980, I was suspicious of state regulation of any form of sexual expression. Rather than rely on a hodgepodge of statutory rape laws at the state level, which designate a wide range of ages at which young people supposedly become able to give informed consent to engage in sexual activity, I argued that the existing laws against sexual assault should be enforced whenever a minor complained of unwanted sexual attention or violence. I believed that if adults would listen, children were capable of telling us what kind of attention they wanted or when something harmful had happened to them. Children and teenagers had their own sexuality; who was I to say what form it ought to take? So I was not comfortable with arguing for reform of age of consent laws, i.e., picking one year that all states should adopt as the benchmark for sexual agency. I thought they should all be repealed. I was critical of the vague and far-reaching language of child pornography laws and the huge apparatus of law enforcement that was being created to ferret out (read: entrap) secret pedophiles. At the time these articles were written, child pornography had been available in commercial outlets in this country for a few years, but it was never very popular or easy to find. The passage of federal laws against it guaranteed that it would disappear from the shelves of adult bookstores. (Material featuring minors continued to be available from some European and Asian countries where the age of consent was lower than the the U.S., and there was a small underground import trade in such items.) Nevertheless, antiporn feminists and antigay cops and politicians continued to speak about the growing menace of child pornography as if it could be found in any corner store that rented X-rated videos. In fact, the majority of "kiddy porn" in circulation at the time when I wrote these articles was material that had been confiscated by the authorities and, in some cases, copied or reprinted using government funds, for use as bait in entrapment schemes. As late as 1986, a two-year study by a Senate subcommittee concluded that child pornography was not increasing, was not profitable, was not a major activity of organized crime, and membership in known pedophile groups in the U.S. actively involved fewer than 2,000 people. It is "extremely difficult, if not impossible" to buy child porn in American cities, said the 76-page draft report of the Senate Permanent Investigations subcommittee headed by Sen. Willaim Roth (R-Del.). In the late '70s, all of these laws were disproportionately enforced against gay men who had sex with adolescent males. Many of these "boys" were gay-identified. I knew several gay men who proudly called themselves boy-lovers. They were politically conscious, kind and ethical people. I wished that I had been able to rely on adults like them for guidance and erotic initiation when I was a teenager trying to come out. What the cops called "protecting children" looked like repression of queer youth to me. And while our society cranked up an enormous moral panic about pedophiles, the institution responsible for the majority of child abuse went unexamined-the heterosexual nuclear family. These positions were part of a call for a drastic change in the way our society perceived and treated children and adolescents. In large part because they are financially dependent on their parents for survival, young people are just one step away legally from having the status of property. Children are usually expected to mirror their parents' values and live out the parents' plan for their lives. This doesn't seem healthy to me. Instead, I thought the autonomy of young people ought to be encouraged. If the family of origin could not provide a safe and respectful environment for its offspring, there should be a nurturing and loving alternative. Lack of funds should never trap a young person in a hostile or dangerous family situation. It seemed obvious that if young people were denied information about the full spectrum of human sexual possibilities, or did not have the means to prevent pregnancy and protect themselves from sexually-transmitted diseases, doing away with age of consent laws would simply make them more vulnerable to predation. So. What has changed? I still believe that young people are one of the most oppressed groups in our society. One world leader has spoken movingly about this devastating fact. According to the calculations of renowned economists, the world economy grew six-fold and the production of wealth and services grew from less than five trillion to more than twenty-nine trillion dollars between 1950 and 1997. Why then is it still the case that each year, 12 million children under five years of age die-that is to say 33,000 per day-of whom the overwhelming majority could be saved? Nowhere in the world, in no act of genocide, in no war, are so many people killed per minute, per hour and per day as those who are killed by hunger and poverty on our planet-53 years after the creation of the United Nations. The maltreatment of children is not a problem relegated to undeveloped nations. 1998 income data from the U.S. Census Bureau revealed that the poverty rate for children under age six was 20.6%. Granted, this was a 14% decrease since 1993's high of 22%. But during the same time period, the U.S. Gross Domestic Product grew by 30%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average increased by 177%, and the unemployment rate fell by 41%. A 46% decrease in the national welfare caseload since 1993 is jarringly out of step with the much smaller decrease in the number of impoverished American children. There are 13.5 million children living in poverty in the United States, and 4.9 million of them are under age six. I still believe that human beings possess a capacity for erotic expression and feeling at birth; although adolescence gives desire a new, genitally-focused urgency, it is not a dividing line between the asexual versus sexual phases of our lives. In a society where most children reach puberty at age 12, I think placing the age of consent at 18 is lunacy. The majority of teens do not wait for adults to give them permission to be sexually active. In 1995, 66% of teenagers reported having sex by the time they graduated from high school. One 1986 study found that of those teenagers who began premarital sex at age 16 or younger, fewer than half had received sexual and contraceptive education in school. Only 35% of those who became sexually active by age 18 had received information about where to obtain contraceptives. A 1989 study reported that more than one million American teenagers became pregnant each year, and just under half a million teenage girls had abortions. The majority of these pregnancies were unplanned. The school system seems oblivious to the terrible consequences that ignorance about sex has for adolescents, especially young girls. Two studies from 1999 showed that one out of three American schools teach their teenage students that abstinence from sex is the only appropriate option. Discussion of pregnancy, birth control, and prevention of sexually transmitted diseases is censored. Most other schools recommend abstinence as the best choice, but also present at least some information about contraception. This is partly the result of the 1996 welfare overhaul in which President Clinton signed legislation creating a $250 million grant for a five-year program to promote abstinence-only education in public schools. This crazy emphasis on abstinence-only sex education (or obfuscation, rather) can only be attributed to the disproportionate influence of the Christian right-wing, and the cowardice of our elected officials. A recent study conducted by Hickman-Brown Research, Inc. for Advocates for Youth and the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) revealed that seven out of 10 Americans oppose withholding information about contraception or disease prevention from minors. Eight out of every 10 believe young people should be given information to protect themselves from unplanned pregnancies and STDs, as well as about abstinence. More than 70% believe that information about puberty, abstinence, and prevention of HIV/AIDS and STDs should be available to students in grades seven and higher. It's clear that adults don't think twice before imposing their own sexual agenda on minors, whether that agenda calls for abstinence till marriage or gratification of the adult's libido. I've become alarmed at the way people who want to justify imposing their sexual needs on young people have made use of my name and work. I thought I was proposing a broad program of social reform that might empower and protect children-and humble adults enough to make some form of healthy erotic contact possible between queer youth and adults. Instead, these articles were interpreted as giving permission, here and now, for things like father/daughter incest or adult American men traveling to southeast Asia to buy sex from prepubescent boys. Neglect, violence, and the sexual abuse of children are shocking offenses, yet they are also terribly ordinary acts. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Donna E. Shalala reported in 1999 that 1997 national child abuse and neglect statistics declined to slightly under one million children as reported by states. HHS estimates that child protective service agencies investigated reports of alleged maltreatment of nearly three million children. Parents and relative scontinue to be the main perpetrators of maltreatment. (Parents comprised 75% and other relatives 10% of perpetrators. Non-related individuals were guilty in 6% of the cases.) Anthony J. Urquiza found that about 40% of the female college students he surveyed in Sacramento recalled being sexually abused as children, and 17-20% of the male students. David Finkelhor reported that 42% of women in California reported abuse as children compared with a national rate of 28%. Figures as high as one in three women being sexually abused prior to the age of 18 are also sometimes cited. A privately funded study at the University of Chicago reported in 1995 that 12% of women and 6% of men had some form of genital sexaul contact with a significantly older person before age 14. The Justice Department estimates that only 28% of violent crimes against children are reported to police, versus 48% of violent crimes against adults. The very frequency of child abuse makes me question the sincerity of all the politicians and cops who claim they want to protect the children. I want to be very clear here that when I criticize public policy about youth sexuality, I am not negating the terrible suffering that too many children experience at the behest of arrogant and self-righteous, out-of-control adults. No relationship between a minor and an adult is equal. The priority always has to be on the child's needs, the young person's well-being. If there is any chance that an interaction between an older person and a younger person might be harmful to the younger person, the older person is under a moral imperative to prevent or mitigate that harm. Staci Haines, the author of a recovery manual for women who were sexually abused as children, has this to say about her experience trying to bridge the gap between the sex-radical agenda and the survivors' movement. As a manager at Good Vibrations ... I found myself caught repeatedly between two worlds: the world of survivors, hurt and at times paranoid about sex, and the world of sex-positive educators, many of whom did not want to hear about the negative uses of sex or the effects of sexual abuse. Many in the survivors' community were afraid of sex and thought the best they could hope for would be something slightly better than just tolerating it. Survivors who liked sex and who spoke openly about it were met with mistrust and even, at times, disdain. It was assumed that they were "acting out" their sexual abuse. Pleasure was suspect. To me, it seemed to boil down to no trust in sex. Understandable, but not the recovery I hoped for. Among sex educators, there was little talk of sexual violence or the sexual contradictions experienced by women who had been sexually violated. ... I found myself educating the educators about the effects of childhood sexual abuse on adult sexuality. One colleague went so far as to suggest that incest itself wasn't the problem, that it was the cultural taboo surrounding incest that was harmful. No, no, no! I think that Haines is right to call on sex radicals to take a strong position against incest. If I have been guility of this offense myself, this article is an attempt to correct that shortcoming. Incest is wrong for the same reason that a sexual or romantic relationship between a therapist and a client is wrong. It's a dual relationship. The emotional expectations and ethical obligations of these two separate types of relationships cannot be reconciled. An adult cannot adequately parent a child if there is also an erotic involvement, even if that activity looks consensual from the outside or seems to be welcomed by the child. You can't encourage your child to develop his or her own values around sexuality or intimate relationships if you have an agenda about justifying the incest. How could an incestuous parent respect the natural process of development, which takes a child out of the parent's world into his or her own future? Depending on what age the adult perpetrator of incest found the most attractive, there would be a tendency to either retard adolescence or anticipate it prematurely. A young person who is being incested has very little chance of receiving adequate parental support for developing good relationships with peers, dating, or exploring questions of gender and sexual identity. This may seem obvious to most readers, but I think it needs to be spelled out because there are still a small number of people who consider themselves to have progressive sexual politics who also believe that incest is damaging only because it is criminalized and stigmatized. There are also a handful of people who will say that they had sex with a sibling, parent, or other family member, and were not damaged by that contact. I've heard a few of those stories too. Sometimes I think the person telling me this kind of story is just in denial because their personality and relationships with others are so clearly dysfunctional. Sometimes, to be absolutely honest, I can't see any symptoms of pathology. Most of these anecdotes concern meetings between adult siblings who never knew one another as children. But this tiny minority of exceptional people is not enough, I believe, to counterbalance the enormous amount of evidence we have that incest is, the overwhelming majority of the time, injurious to its object. Similar ethical problems are raised by sexual relationships between children or teenagers and teachers, counselors, religious leaders, coaches, and other adult caretakers. When I wrote "The Age of Consent: The Great Kiddy-Porn Panic of '77" and "The Aftermath of the Great Kiddy-Porn Panic of '77" in 1980, I was naive about the developmental issues that make sex between adults and prepubescent children unacceptable, and the nature of the power dynamic between minors and their adult caretakers which make informed consent to sex problematic. Yes, prepubescent children are sensual and sexual beings who sometimes display that eroticism to adults in a way that may appear to be flirtatious or inviting. The appropriate realm for expression of that sexuality is, I now believe, via masturbation or age-appropriate exploration with peers. A child displaying his or her body or playfully soliciting adult attention for erotic behavior is not stating readiness or willingness to engage in crossgenerational sex. One of the prerequisites for giving informed consent is possession of knowledge about what one is consenting to and the potential consequences or outcome of that behavior. Prepubescent children and many young teeagers are not developmentally equipped to have that knowledge; it isn't physically possible. The preening and posing that kids do is a test to see "is this part of me really okay" and "can I trust you to keep me safe?" Adults who engage in sex with prepubescent children flunk that test. It is the adult's responsibility to provide the child with reassurance, unconditional positive regard, and make sure any activity with self or peers is consensual and benign. In the twenty years since these articles were published, I've become much more cynical about the ability of adults to listen to children. We are so busy, so set on having our own way, and we've forgotten what the world looks like to a person who is not as tall as the seat of our chairs. When a fetish for sex with children is added to this adult proclivity to be self-centered, you wind up with a person who sees consent where it cannot reasonably exist. "If she didn't want to have sex with me, she shouldn't have come into the living room while I was watching television," a perpetrator might say. Or, "He just has that look in his eye that says come and get me. I can recognize it. He doesn't have to say anything." Perhaps because I am a parent now, I am less idealistic about the possibilities for an equal adult/child relationship. When I try to describe the difference between a good or bad parent/child connection, I think more in terms of making the child's welfare a priority. Raising a child involves making all kinds of decisions that the child resents and opposes. Most children do not want to sleep in their own beds, take medicine, nap, give up the baby bottle, get a bath, learn their multiplication tables, etc. In order to avoid having every interaction turn into a pitched battle, adults condition their offspring to obey and please them. While this meets with varying degrees of success, there's never a time when the playing field is level. The parent/child paradigm is so powerful that it colors all interactions between adults and young people. Ironically, the developmental limitations of children also make the criminal justice system a problematic way to try to protect them. Children often don't understand adult demands or behavior. So they may not be certain what constitutes a violation or an offense that should be reported. Being smaller and less physically powerful than adults, children are often afraid to complain about mistreatment. Having been conditioned to blame themselves, if an adult says, "It was your fault" or "You are making that you, you're a liar," it's almost impossible for the child to persist in asking for help. If they succeed in getting the attention of social workers, cops, or other authorities, children make lousy witnesses. They often don't have the vocabulary to describe abuse. I also have to take issue with people who claim that children never lie. This is simply not true. A lie can be motivated by shaming or parental pressure, or by jealousy, or a desire for revenge. Children also forget or don't remember things accurately since their memories are not fully developed. And yet, in 1997, a four-year-old girl who told a judge that she didn't know what it meant to tell the truth was allowed to testify against a man who was charged with molesting her. On appeal, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled 2-1 that she was a legally competent witness and upheld the 35-year prison sentence of George Ronald Walters. But the only system we seem to be able to envision to protect children or exact a penalty for abusing them is the criminal justice model. Let's take a look at what we're doing about the sexual abuse of children, and what's wrong with public policy in that arena. Of course it ought to be illegal for anyone to profit from documenting the sexual abuse of a child and marketing such images for the titillation of perpetrators. But I continue to have objections about the vague wording of these laws, the way they are enforced, and the fact that they are used as a springboard for attacking adults-only material. Let me give you some examples. vague = conviction even if models are clothed, prosecutions of family members for taking photos of their kids, prosecutions of artists who take nude photos of minors, attempt to ban "virtual" kiddy porn or material that "appeared" to be minors enforcement = the huge # of cops on-line, mailings intended to entrap people, the Jacobsen case, etc. attacking adults-only material = record keeping requirements for all producers of explicit material, raising age at which you can be in erotica or have sex, etc., the CDA's proposed "dumbing down" of the Internet, filtering software on public computers as in Virginia Publishers were required to begin keeping files that contained proof of their models' legal identities and ages. [NAME OF LAW AND DATE] Attempts were made to raise the age at which one could legally appear in erotic materials from 18 to 21. Material that featured models who appeared to be underage was in danger of being banned. So were art photos which depicted youthful nudity or even fully-clothed young people if there was any overtone of sensuality. Age of consent Cross-generational relationships Child pornography: mention Jock Sturges, Barnes & Noble picketing, huge budget for police surveillance random points: the criminalization of children. we don't say, what is wrong with this kid's family that running away, living on the street, turning tricks, strung out on drugs became more attractive than staying home and in school? we see it as evidence that the kid is dangerous, depraved, incorrigible. trend toward kids being tried as adults. Forty states have recently lowered the age when a minor can be tried as an adult. Congress is considering a juvenile justice bill that may make this a federal policy. In 1997, 9,100 prisoners under 18 were in adult facilities. This is a 12% increase since 1996 and a 34% increase since 1994. Amnesty International has condemned this trend in the U.S. as being "inconsistent with the approach encouraged by international standards that have been adopted by almost every country in the world." The Internet: increase in predatory behavior by adults, more kid porn in circulation. Hard to say how much of it is the FBI, how much is somebody who is just curious because they've heard so much about it, how much is hardcore dedicated pedophilia. Internet regulation done in the name of "Child Protection;" yet it's clear it's about preventing children from looking at materials that they want to access. Corrupt children vs. pure adults. If we want to liberate children, I think we have to focus first on their economic issues, education (including sex education), and physical safety (including protection from queerbashing, unwanted pregnancy, and STDs), not on the hypothetical role that altruistic adults might be able to play as sexual initiators in a more utopian society. Even though I no longer agree with NAMBLA's political agenda, I will still support the right of NAMBLA to march in gay events, publish their material, debate these issues. I think the infiltration and harassment directed at this organization is wrong. It should not be a crime to discuss any idea, however outrageous. But I think people in the queer community have been slow to recognize the homophobic agenda of sexual conservatives who push legislation like the Communications Decency Act in the name of protecting children. Right-wing Christians are not really interested in improving the lives of young people. In fact, research shows that states with strict antiabortion laws spend less on children at risk. The study was conducted by Jean Schroedel, an associate professor of political science at Claremont Graduate University in Los Angeles County. She compared states' abortion laws to their spending in the areas of foster care, stipends for parents who adopt children with special needs, and payments for poor women with dependent children. "As you move from the strongest pro-choice states to the strongest pro-life states, the amount of spending in these areas becomes increasingly lower," she says. "... pro-life states make it difficult for women to have abortions, but they do not help these women provide for the children once born." There is no safety net for queer youth. It's estimated that 530,000 kids nationwide are in the drastically under-funded foster-care system. That's up from 280,000 children in 1986. Yet the Child Welfare League of America reports that the number of foster parents actually declined from 147,000 in 1985 to 142,000 by the mid-'90s. In New York, six gay foster boys are suing the city and the state for being placed in situations where they were verbally abused, queer-bashed and otherwise mistreated. This is the first-ever class action suit of its kind, but a similar case could probably be made in virtually every American city. Things are bad enough for straight kids. About 20 foster-care jurisdictions nationwide are currently being sued for abuse and neglect of children intheir care, or are operating under a consent decree following a negative court judgment. At the same time, bills banning or restricting lesbians and gay men from becoming adoptive or foster parents have been introduced in eight states. the dilemma of a queer youth who has no community of peers to relate to people will always try to cross barriers of age, race, sex, etc. to form intimate connections with one another criminalizing things that runaways can do to survive does not make their lives better.