On Oct 24, 2006, at 5:31 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> Onward to ever more spectacular sex crime scares and ever bigger
> prison populations, America, the land of rapists and rape victims!
[Susie doesn't like it when one forwards the whole text of a blog entry, so please visit her site for a full dose.]
"http://susiebright.blogs.com/susie_brights_journal_/2006/10/ how_safe_is_you.html"
October 23, 2006
How Safe is Your Daughter?
To my mind, it began with the milk cartons — not the Washington pages.
One day, my breakfast bowl of cereal was no longer accompanied by a back-of-the-box advertisement for secret decoder rings or action-toy figurines.
Instead, the graphic that held my attention was the back of the milk container, where a little face peered out at me, a missing child, with her name listed urgently alongside a set of statistics about her age, hair color, and the time she was last seen.
Next week, next breakfast, there was another face. It was heartbreaking and anxiety-provoking all at once— every week, every gallon, there was another missing kid. Who was stealing the children?
The implication was that some despicable monster had made off with these tots, and now their family's only hope was that one of us, one of the decent people at the breakfast table, would spot young Timmy or Sandy and get on the line to 1-800-MIS-SING.
[...]
We can't pretend as if all the "decent" people are all on one side of the breakfast table, and all the shitheads are on the other. Their indifference to their children, or their exploitation of them, may make us blanch; but don't call this "unnatural."
Grown-ups have been fucking kids and fucking them over, creating them and protecting them and letting go of them, treating them like property, loving them badly and loving them inadequately and loving them mindlessly—FOREVER. If we wanted to change the face of abandonment and abuse, we'd give more respect and power to young people than we do to fetuses.
It's difficult to imagine a revolution of sons and daughters. The context around me is the story of Oedipus's revenge, which is usually merged with the fashion of blaming everything that's new and shiny around us. I am accustomed to viewing child-nappings and missing victims from our late twentieth-century bogeyman perspective.
[...]
For comparison, let's take a nostalgic look back at three frightening sex crimes against children that roused the entire country's outrage:
"On November 14, ... Linda Joyce Glucoft, aged six years, was sexually assaulted by an elderly relative of the friend she had gone to visit in her Los Angeles neighborhood. When she cried out, her assailant, a retired baker who the police had already charged in another child molestation case, choked her with a necktie, stabbed her with an ice pick, and bludgeoned her with an ax, then buried her body in a nearby rubbish heap.
"Only a few days later, a drunken farm laborer assaulted and murdered a seventeen-month-old baby girl outside a dance hall in a small town near Fresno. That same week, the Idaho police found the body of seven- year-old Glenda Brisbois, who had last been seen entering a dark blue sedan near her home; she had been murdered by a powerful assailant who had heaved her body fifteen feet into an irrigation canal.
"The gruesome details of these murders and of the hunt for their perpetrators were telegraphed to homes throughout the country by the nation’s press. According to police statistics, such assaults were proportionately no more common than in previous years, but ... these three murders epitomized to many Americans the heightened dangers that seemed to face women and children... Many regarded them not as isolated tragedies but as horrifying confirmation that a plague of “sex crime” threatened their families."
If the details of these crimes are fresh in your mind, then you must be old enough to be my mother.
These murders happened in 1949, a half century ago, and are related as a history lesson from George Chauncey Jr.'s article, "The Postwar Sex Crime Panic" (True Stories From the American Past). Obviously, given the time frame, there was no fast food, dope, rap music, or gay congressmen to pin the blame on. No porn videos, or even Playboy magazine. People did not say "fuck" in The New Yorker at the time these kids were murdered.
Nevertheless, these deaths spurred parents and legislators into a first-class sex panic, the first real doozy after the war. How could these things happen in America? How could we fight enemies abroad and then face this in our neighborhoods? This wasn't the face of communism or fascism; it was something much more frightening, a group of predators destroying the very littlest, the most innocent.
By our society beliefs, culled from our understanding of man's relationship to God and each other, the perpetrators who committed these acts must have thought about them beforehand, and the reason they thought about them was because the devil was in their minds, they had been corrupted by something that was not in The Spaghetti Monster's plan.
God, country, and righteousness seemed to reach their apex after the sex crimes of 1949, when J. Edgar Hoover published an article in The American Magazine called "How Safe is Your Daughter?" A barrage of subsequent articles on sex crime seemed to confirm that she wasn’t safe at all!
[...]
It's a relief that the public sensibility of what makes someone dangerous is not that they're effeminate—but rather that they're dangerous because they're ALIENATED. That's quite a switch. The deviant of the twenty-first century is the man who doesn't know how to give or receive love.
This discovery has the potential to horrify us even more than their deeds. Is this the end product of our civilization, the dumping ground for the price of progress? What have we gained materially that was worth it?
[...]
This story is adapted from my chapter in The Sexual State of the Union. Photos from Reefer Madness— essential social guidance for the whole family!