VARIABLES DENDROMÉTRICAS-DASOMÉTRICAS

Centrepoint’s emphasis on emotional and physical closeness appeared to have fostered a culture of openness around both nudity and sexuality. The physical arrangements at Centrepoint were apparently designed to allow for this. We were told by our participants

about communal sleep arrangements which resulted in adults and children from different families sleeping together. With one exception, none of the toilets at Centrepoint had doors. Showering was also a communal affair and was, according to one of our participants, an important opportunity for ‘bonding’ with other community members. Together with this, open acceptance of bodily functions and nudity, free sexual expression and exploration was actively encouraged.

Several participants spoke about what they understood to be the philosophies of Centrepoint in relation to sex and sexuality. One of our participants passed on an explanation she had been given for the community’s resistance to what they saw as an unhealthy attitude to sex in general society:

And I think the simple way [Name] explained it to me was that society is how, how they always view it, is so closed off when it comes to sex, in the sense of there’s affairs, there’s rape, there’s husbands visiting prostitutes that he said, they always saw it as sex had been turned into this dirty, taboo, type of thing. And society had turned it that way. And so one of the main aspects of Centrepoint is that they wanted to that, to be completely normal, completely open, you know.

Another participant offered an empathic explanation of how her parents’ generation may have chosen to base Centrepoint around these kinds of beliefs:

There, was a bunch of people that didn’t learn about sex until they were in their twenties, you know. They thought that children were grown on trees or things like that and maybe had a few really bad life experiences because of those sorts of things and thought that they were giving their children, you know, and I mean here I’m talking about having sex in front of children and things and I think that’s where my Mum sort of thought maybe that’s not a bad thing, that sex is natural.

In addition to encouraging a more open attitude to sex in general, the community also discouraged monogamy as one of the unnecessary social restrictions on sexuality. As one participant explained it:

You know, and of course the whole idea of the place originally, well, not the whole concept of it, but a big part of it was this whole ‘no monogamy’, so everyone would of course was sleeping with everyone that they wanted to, which was you know, fair enough, if they were, if they wanted to do, you know?

One man we interviewed who had tried to maintain a monogamous relationship with his partner during his late teens and early twenties talked about how this action was frowned on in the community. He would be asked:

What are you, what are you hiding from that you’ve got to be in a monogamous relationship?

This participant, who remained angry about the pressure to have open relationships, saw this as part of Centrepoint’s strategy to keep community members in a state of emotional vulnerability so that they could “learn more about themselves”.

Our participants described how sexual relationships were not only non-monogamous but also occurred frequently and without concern for privacy. One participant described how assignations might be made over breakfast or during the tea break. When the bell rang to stop work people would rush off to have a ‘quickie’ and then get back to their jobs. The living arrangements made it likely that sex could be easily observed by anyone passing by and we were told that it was common for children to see and hear sexual encounters on a daily basis.

For a few participants who had been born at Centrepoint the experience of adult nudity did not seem to be a major issue. One described how she had experienced this as a child:

You know, if there was someone sunbathing naked on the deck or something we would just giggle about it and say ‘oh my God look at them, let’s run away’ [laughs]. We sort of knew sometimes that it was a little bit un-normal, you know, that other children didn’t experience things the way we did but you know at the same time it’s never been something that I’ve had in my mind as something that has really scarred me for life or anything.

But most of our participants who had come to the community during the course of their childhood spoke about their surprise at being initially exposed to the casual nudity and open sex at Centrepoint. One man described his first day at the community:

When I was 11 years old and I first, I got introduced to this woman [Name] there. And she had no top on, and she’s got huge breasts, and I just couldn’t believe it, it was like trying to look at her face, and all I wanted to do was go…[laughs]. And so that was my first vivid memory of the place, and that would have been like, the first couple of hours there.

But while he represented this as an amusing anecdote, another female participant described, what was for her, a more disturbing encounter on an early visit to Centrepoint. She

remembers going into a room to look for her parent and finding instead a group of naked people:

I don’t know how naked they were but I just remember a sea of naked people and trying to find my [parent] and just being absolutely freaked. Trying to find my [parent] and my [parent] being half naked, kind of draped on someone and just feeling kind of sick and just totally shocked, and not knowing what was going on.

Most of our participants who hadn’t spent all their childhood at Centrepoint described how they were horrified by their initial exposure to nudity and sex as well as to the arrangements for open showering and toileting. Several of our participants spoke about how they

continued to struggle with aspects of this arrangement and sometimes tried to find creative ways of ensuring their privacy. One woman spoke about how she and some teenage friends would try and shower early in the morning before anyone was awake so that they could avoid giving the men in the community an opportunity to “perve” at them. Others spoke about how they had struggled to use a toilet in public and waited to use the only toilet with a door.

A number of our participants reported having been uncomfortable with the open observation of sex between adults:

The stuff I didn’t like is that you did…when you were a kid you saw people having sex and there was you know you saw people just walking around naked and I really don’t like that. That’s something I really wish I could take out of my life because once you see something it’s in your mind and you can’t get rid of it. Like you’d walk past a room and they’d be people having sex like a metre away from you and it’s really gross.

But for this participant and others who stayed at Centrepoint over a long period, they soon began to experience these things as ‘normal’:

I’m not saying that’s what I would choose now in my life but it was kind of normalised.

Another explained how she later challenged her familiarity with this kind of behaviour:

It was normal but you get to an age and you sort of think: ‘Well that was a bit weird’. I definitely don’t see anything positive in having, seeing people having sex, and even my Mum says now, you know, she can see it. It’s a bit of a weird thing but living there and only having that, you do get a bit sort of used to it. It wasn’t strange until, even just visiting there on the weekends, that sort of thing didn’t seem like a weird thing until I was completely cut-off from the place.

It sounded like some of our participants had been exposed to more than just couple sex between adults but also some more extreme sexual behaviour. One young man described how when he was 11 or 12 years old he saw the adults of the community engaged in some communal sexual experience in the ‘glade’:

[We were] watching them and, and what we, what was, what we found was about a hundred people, all naked, and all eating off their tits you know, fucking. All just getting into each other and stuff like that.

It also appeared from our participants that at some stages of Centrepoint’s existence there was an active encouragement of child sexuality. One participant described how she remembered Bert Potter addressing the community:

Bert, at a meeting talking openly about ‘if a child is asking for sexual contact’ or whatever, or ‘if someone doesn’t say ‘no’ to sexual contact, then sexual contact is okay; it’s okay to sexualise your children from quite a young age and this is how you do it’ you know, and he’d show this technique that was blowing [mimics act] where you’d blow on their sexual parts, on their vagina or clitoris or whatever, to

stimulate sexual activity.

Although the majority of our participants did not describe themselves as having been sexually abused, a significant proportion (13 out of the 23 who had spent time at Centrepoint as teenagers) spontaneously disclosed their own experiences of ‘voluntary’ teenage under-age sex. While our participants seemed much more divided on the question of whether young children were sexually molested, most agreed that it was common for young people to have sex for the first time somewhere between the ages of 11 and 13.

I think children definitely had sex a lot younger. Growing up in the community. Because you’re around it so much that you’re kind of a lot more familiar, and I guess you’re thinking about it more and you’re um, it’s in your face more. And yeah, I guess you’d, you could be interested when you’re younger because you know, it’s something that adults are doing and you’re not, and you kind of want to know more. So, so we’re all, I guess most people were reasonably young, and a lot of my friends were around 11 when they lost their virginity.

This participant was clear that this was the norm during the period she lived at the community and spoke about how she had been relieved when she lost her own virginity:

It was kind of like, you just kind of felt out of place because you hadn’t finally done it yet so you could join in the conversations because everyone, you know, you’d seen stuff and you’d talked about it but you’d never actually done it.

One participant was vehement that none of the girls that he knew had ever been coerced into sexual activity although he recognised that in many instances this would have been against the law:

I can say for a fact that from my experience, none of the girls were ever actually forced into actual rape. It was all just statutory rape. Because there, there was the way of living, was that was just normal. You know, when you grew up, and, and you matured, you had the choice to go and um, um sleep with whoever you wanted.

In contrast to this, another male participant reflected back on the early age at which girls became active at Centrepoint and how this had felt perfectly acceptable at the time. But now he looked back and acknowledged that “some of those girls were probably introduced to sex far too early, and they were overly sexualised”. He went on to say that he believed it was probably the adults who were pushing them into it.

One young woman we interviewed outlined how she quickly developed her sexual

experience at Centrepoint. She explained how she had got her period early, at the age of 9. By 12 she had her first dose of vaginal ‘thrush’ and her teenage friends had had to explain to her what it was. By 13 she had lost her virginity and was starting to enjoy sex. By the time she was 14 she was ‘dating’ an older man with children of his own.

Other female participants spoke about feeling pressured into having sex even when they didn’t want to, although they told us that they did not define this as ‘abuse’. One, for example, spoke about how she had been approached to have sex with an older teenager and initially said no because she hadn’t wanted to. Later that night she had to accept his offer:

I remember one time actually going, being asked to spend the night with an older guy, a teenager and I said no. But then come time to go to bed, you know, I didn’t know where to go to bed and I didn’t know how to find Mum because there were so many long houses and I didn’t know where she was and I ended up sleeping with him.

A male participant also provided an interesting account of his journey to sexual maturity. He lost his virginity at 13 with an older woman he described as being “one of the girls’ mums” who had been in her late thirties. He remembered being pleased and excited

afterwards. This same participant said that he did not believe that he had ever been coerced into having sex although there had been times when he had thought: “Not the best

the night?” This was often arranged earlier in the day and sometimes he felt “sort of obliged to go through with it”. There were occasions when he found himself thinking:

How do I get out of here? [laughs] Is it morning yet? But nothing nasty or…. Just not having enough confidence to change my mind half way through or something.

Although he did not feel he had been forced to have sex at the time, he did acknowledge in retrospect that the general beliefs about sexuality may have exerted a pressure on his behaviour:

I guess if everybody says one thing, then you’ve kind of been coerced without sort of knowing, I guess. So there were definitely belief structures that, you know, I guess were kind of drilled into you which, which you may not have felt that you were being coerced. In fact you might have even started preaching yourself.

Another participant also described how, as a teenage boy, he had been frequently

‘propositioned’ by older women. Unlike the previous participant, he seemed to have found a way of refusing offers that he did not welcome:

And I’m just a teenager you know, eating my lunch and all these fucking adults are going, then some woman comes up to me: ‘Are you available?’ ‘Ah no, I’m right, mate’. It was all a bit weird still for a kid, for a teenager even.

He went on to elaborate how this kind of overture by an older woman to a boy was seen as perfectly normal in the community:

I mean it was kind of – you weren’t expected to but it was the done thing, absolutely. That’s what would happen. You’d ask if you wanted. No-one ever said ‘you have to have sex’ but you were asked continuously. If someone liked you and wanted

something with you, they would ask you – straight up: ‘Hey I think you’re pretty hot, I think you’re attractive, would you like to spend a bit of time with me’. That’s how straight-up they were. Everyone you know, well most people anyway.

It seemed that these sexual arrangements were sanctioned by their parents and other adults within and sometimes outside the community. One of our participants told us how she had excitedly told her father that she had lost her virginity. Another phoned his parent outside of the community as a teenager to tell her that he had a girlfriend nearly 20 years older than he was. One participant offered her opinion that many of the parents at the community were supportive of these practices:

Lots of other people were doing it but the mums of the children were aware, and supportive of it. And I’m not speaking for everyone, but that seems to me to be the

majority of what I’ve been told. What happened is that you know, they wanted to follow his teachings and they thought that was okay for older men to do sexual stuff with their children because they wanted their children to be brought up thinking that was okay.

While some of our participants clearly felt uncomfortable with their sexual experiences at Centrepoint this was often in retrospect as they recognised that they had been influenced into believing it was ‘normal’ at the time. Some participants, however, remained clear in their view that their exposure to sexuality had been healthy and largely beneficial for them.

Overall it was clear that open sex and sexuality were a significant part of the Centrepoint experience. Children who grew up there would have commonly witnessed sexual behaviour and were likely also to have participated in this at a younger age than is usual. It seems that these open attitudes to sexuality were strongly normalised within the community and it was once they had left, that some of our participants recognised that they had been influenced by the ideology of Centrepoint and coerced into its practices.