>Catherine McDonald:
>> I must surely be in the wrong place, if murderers, rapists
>> and pedophiles are defended here.
>
>I think one thing you need to think about is whether you
>merely want to suppress the objectionable acts, or you
>regard the acts as inherent in a certain class of persons.
>Your present language, which being customary may only
>indicate habit rather than conviction, is cast in the
>latter form. But I doubt whether there are classes of
>persons who are intrinsically murderers, rapists, and so
>on, although I agree there might be. If there were, the
>progress of science could surely lead to finding them out as
>children or even in the womb, and we could kill them (or
>"treat" them) in advance -- indeed, there are people who are
>working on projects to do just that. However, if there are
>not, then we should probably direct our attention towards the
>acts, rather than the persons; and then we will be concerned
>with such questions the conditions under which they occur
>and the history and genealogy of practices which led up to
>them. The three crimes you mention, for instance, are often
>exercises of power against weaker persons, which resonate
>an overarching social organization based upon the same
>principle. That social organization should be questioned
>as an accomplice, should it not?
Let's take pedophilia for example. The majority of child abuses -- including sexual abuses -- in rich nations are committed by family members & acquaintances rather than strangers. This being the case, it certainly makes sense to examine how the mode of production (capitalism) & the mode of reproduction (mainly families) shape each other in such a way to cause child abuses including sexual ones. In the case of poor nations, we must consider how capitalism & imperialism have underdeveloped the periphery & put many nations under perpetual debt servitude to boot; primitive accumulation has dispossessed peasant families, a good number of whom have been forced to sell their children, wittingly or unwittingly, to sex industries; the residual feudal ideology of filial & other obligations to parents & other family members has made many young women to turn to prostitution out of the need to support not just themselves but their families; debt bondage traps many young women into unpaid labor of sexual work; etc. That's the supply side. On the demand side, the combination of sexism & racism makes many men to feel it's perfectly OK to do in poor nations what they won't be able to get away with in rich nations. Focusing upon "the Ted Bundys and Richard Specks" as Catherine does completely obscures the ensemble of social relations that are the main problem here.
Yoshie