It is evident that the abuse (including sexual) of children is not a recent phenomenon. Where records exist we see evidence. This section will examine this dark history. The social construction of concepts such as childhood and sexuality will also be explored as it gives us an understanding of how and why the treatment of children changes.
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It has been argued that child abuse is not a recent phenomenon and that the treatment of children in the past was cruel and suffused with much abuse (de Mause, 1998). Children held a much different position than today. An observer of history with an interest in children and childhood is likely to gain two significant impressions: firstly, children do not feature very prominently in historical texts; and, secondly, it is clear that children have a very long history of suffering at the hands of adults (Goddard, 1996). According to Lloyd de Mause (1991), the history of society is replete with ways in which children have been traumatised. The sexual abuse of children is just one such traumatic experience.
De Mause has written extensively on the history of childhood and the abuses suffered by children over time. His views are revealing and harsh:
The history of childhood has been a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes – and the further away from the West one gets – the more massive the neglect and cruelty one finds and the more likely children are to have been killed, rejected, beaten, terrorised and sexually abused by their caretakers (de Mause, 1991, p. 123).
De Mause (1998) supports his views of widespread child sexual abuse with numerous examples from Greece, India, China, the Middle East, and Africa that occurred centuries ago as well as in the recent past. He writes of pederasty in Greece; uncle-niece and cross-cousin marriages, baby masturbation, sex dormitories and widespread rape of young children in India; child concubinage and eunuchism in China, temple prostitution
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and parent-child marriage (among the Zoroastrians) in the middle east; and circumcision and clitoridectomy in Africa.
Only a few hundred years ago, children were commonly “neglected, abandoned, abused (sexually and otherwise), sold into slavery, mutilated and even killed with impunity” (Pappas, 1983, p. xxviii). While the evidence for such past abuse is convincing there is little to suggest that similar child sexual abuse does not occur today. In fact, the available evidence, which will be delineated in the coming sections, supports the view of the widespread sexual abuse of children worldwide today.
De Mause posits a psychogenic theory of history, which attempts to explain this abusive behaviour; his theory also explains how society develops according to the stage of child rearing they are utilising. He proposed six child-rearing modes in his model – infanticidal, abandoning, ambivalent, intrusive, socialising, and helping. According to this model, society moves from one lower developmental stage to a higher based on the improved treatment of children. He argues that adults have used children throughout the centuries as “poison containers” to alleviate their personal anxiety. He believes that the child-rearing mode functioning in a given society is the funnel through which its culture is passed on. Therefore, child rearing, which at its most deficient, includes child sexual abuse, is responsible for passing on certain aspects of culture. De Mause, thus, considers child sexual abuse to precede culture. This view is contrary to much literature, which cites certain cultural norms as partly responsible for abuse, for example, patriarchy. What accounts for the progress from one stage to the next is not clearly delineated by de Mause but he alludes to it in a chapter in his edited collection “The emotional lives of nations”:
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What is miraculous and what is the source of most social progress is that mothers throughout history have slowly and successfully struggled with their fear and hatred with so little help from others and have managed to evolve the loving, empathic childrearing one can find in many families around the world today (2002, p. 354).
Children were largely absent from history because they were not seen as distinctly different from adults. Indeed the idea of “childhood” has been described as a 'recent invention' (Goddard, 1996, p. 7). According to Phillipe Ariès, in the seminal work “Centuries of Childhood” (Ariès, 1962), children in the period up the seventeenth century were seen as “miniature adults” not yet developed; they were not seen as particularly different from adults. Children naturally were weaker and more vulnerable but they were not accorded any special allowances. This made them easy targets for abusive behaviour by adults. De Mause argues that children were used (abused) to lessen the anxieties of their parents. However, while evidence of all kinds of abuse exists throughout history, the evidence that this abuse was the result of parental anxieties is not conclusive by any means. Ariès has pointed out the treatment of children has improved dramatically since the concept of a distinct childhood has taken root.
Ariès has observed that conceptions of childhood have varied across time and that our current notion of childhood is socially constructed. His work was based on the depictions of children in Renaissance art. Ariès noted that the conception of a child shifted from being that of a little adult to being a separate vulnerable entity over the past three centuries. The validity of Ariès conclusions has been questioned (Shipman, 1988).
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For example, are depictions of aristocratic families (which were the basis for Ariès’ conclusions) representative of the general population? And is this secondary data reliable and valid? These methodological questions require readers to exercise caution in interpreting Ariès’ results. However, Ariès has highlighted the fact that the very notion of a child is historically and culturally conditioned. Indeed, the notion of “youth” that society subscribes to today is a similar social construction used to describe a particular subgroup of the population who share comparable attributes. This construction continues to develop and as Hart (1991) points out “the conceptualisation and treatment of children has moved the child from being considered basically a non- entity or miniature adult to being a special class of human being; and from property to partial person status” (p. 345). The concept of “kidult”, which refers to an adult who has interests typically appropriate for a child, points out the blurry nature of the concept of childhood. The concept of childhood often extends in adulthood, which is an evolving social construction in itself.
Child sexual abuse has only relatively recently been viewed as a serious social problem even if the available evidence suggests that it has existed as a social phenomenon for centuries. It has been argued by many historians that the prohibition of incest has been a universal human trait. Kroeber (1939) stated, “If ten anthropologists were asked to designate one universal institution, nine would likely name the incest prohibition; some have expressly named it as the only universal one (p. 446).” Meiselman (1979) has similar views on incest:
The taboo on nuclear family incest is more or less universal. The exceptions that are so frequently listed often serve to distract the reader from apprehending the
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truly remarkable degree of regularity with which nuclear family incest is prohibited (p. 3).
De Mause believes it is incest itself that is the universal institution in society. The evidence he presents for its existence in history throughout many civilisations is convincing. The universality of the incest taboo indicates that, in all cultures, there is an attraction between parents and children, usually of the opposite sex. The taboo, therefore, acts as a deterrent. However, Mead (1968) in “Sex and temperament in primitive societies” does find exceptions – indigenous groups where incest is not known to occur.
Child sexual abuse has received major attention in the developed world as of late although it is not a recent western phenomenon. Incest, a common form of sexual abuse between family members, occured in the brother/sister and father/daughter marriages in Egypt during the Pharaonic and Ptolemaic periods. Such marriages were also allowed in certain other ruling families, in, for example, Hawaii and among the Incas of Peru (Meiselman, 1979). Weinberg (1955), writing of remote areas in the United States, exposed groups who believed that men could “catch” purity (thus fighting off a venereal disease) by having sex with their pre-pubertal daughters. This type of ancient belief system is still believed to encourage and promote the sexual abuse of young children in the developing world today. In Weinberg's study of 203 incest criminal cases in Illinois, 78 per cent of incest occurs between fathers and daughters or stepfathers and stepdaughters. Eighteen per cent is between brothers and sisters, and one per cent between mothers and sons. The remaining three per cent are multiple relationships.
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Instances of child sexual abuse have also been noted in early-Christian Ireland, the Byzantine and Roman empires and Medieval Europe (Lalor, 2001). Breckenbridge (1992) examined historical episodes of child sexual abuse. Her work, elaborating on the recordings of Savonarola (1497) and Mandelso (1658), found that girls as young as six and nine years old were impregnated by men (cited in Helfer and Kempe, 1987). The statistical information provided from Germany displays the increase in sexual offences committed against children between 1897 and 1904, the recorded convictions in that period increased from 3085 to 4,378 (Breckenbridge, 1992).
In France, Ambroise Auguste Tardieu was one of the first physicians to deal with the sexual abuse of children. In 1857 “A Medico-Legal Study of Assaults on Decency” highlighted public indecent behaviours such as exhibitionism and taking obscene photographs but more importantly it presented Tardieu’s analysis of 632 cases of sexual abuse in females, children for the most part between the ages of four and twelve. He reported that sexual abuse of pre-pubertal children was increasing and also noted that this topic was completely neglected by previous medical authors. He also cited rape statistics for the period 1858-1869; out of 11,576 accusations of rape or attempted rape, 79 percent (9,125) were directed against children (Masson, 1984).
Bernard’s “Sexual Assaults on Young Girls” (1886) cited 36,176 reported cases of “rape and assaults on the morality” of children who were fifteen years or younger in France between 1827 and 1870. Breckenbridge (1992) maintains that, historically, sexual offences against children were widespread, and instinctively, this seems to be a sound proposal.
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This section has provided evidence for the widespread sexual abuse of children throughout history. The work of de Mause has been important in establishing the existence of the problem historically and in offering some explanations for the abuse. The contribution of Ariès has shed light on the idea of a socially constructed notion of childhood. Ultimately the way we think of childhood effects how we treat children.