From Erotic Innocence

From Erotic Innocence:

The Culture of Child-Molesting

by James Kincaid

(Duke University Press, 1998)

For a long decade or so, we have been uncovering stories of sexual child abuse in the United States, discovering the alarming reach of these stories, their range and variety, only to have the pendulum swing. Suddenly, we hear that memory is suspect, that accounts of molestation coming from children are dubious, that therapists may be crooks, that Freud himself is wobbling. As we up the voltage and try to deal with the dilemma by more carefully tagging the offenders, the counter-reaction grows as well. How can we locate in this bog a solid place to stand? That the stories proliferate and double back on themselves does not indicate indifference, certainly; but it may suggest that our stories are providing us with something other than solutions.

We are forever assuring ourselves that we are in denial, avoiding the issue; it takes, we say, great courage to speak out on a problem most people ignore or repress. That's an odd diagnosis, considering that these stories come at us (and from us) like killer bees. Take a look at these tales as they circulate and you notice right away two things: their redundancy and their strength. When we locate a good story, which we do every week or so, we chew on it ferociously: Michael Jackson, pedophile priests, recovered memory, six-year-old molesters.

I begin with two preliminary assumptions. The first is that these are stories that are doing something for us: we wouldn't be telling this tale of the exploitation of the child's body if we didn't wish to have it told. The second is that what these stories do for us is to keep the subject hot so that we can disown it while welcoming it in the back door. These are not stories told simply to solve a problem but also to focus and re-state the problem, keep it alive and before us. If the stories we tell about child-molesting were working, we might say, they would extinguish themselves. But maybe one of the reasons we tell these stories is to get the stories told . . .