#WORLD #WORLDWIDE #FRANCE #ANARCHISM #LIBRARY #News #Journal #Update - (en) #France, UCL AL #332 - Antipatriarchy, Pedocrime: Against the culture of incest: listening and believing children (ca, de, it, fr, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 As every year, November 20 is International Children's Rights Day, an opportunity

to take stock of the progress of the struggles for the emancipation and
self-defense of children and adolescents. To understand how incest and sexist and
sexual violence committed against children and adolescents can take place, it is
necessary to have a political reading of childhood. ---- Today as yesterday, the
voice of children still struggles to be listened to, respected and believed. More
credit is only given to them once they have grown up, when their stories are
acted out. Incest in the media is depicted in a miserable and violent way,
including in feminist circles. If we want to get out of voyeuristic storytelling,
we must politically question the relationships between adults and children, and
their consequences on the material conditions of existence of children.

It is a subject almost unexplored across the political spectrum: in the name of
what can we deprive a human being of their most fundamental rights, such as
freedom of movement, of information, to decide on their own existence? In the
case of children, this deprivation of rights is made acceptable by naturalizing
childhood, in other words making social characteristics biological or natural.
This naturalization constructs the child as an incomplete adult, acquiring skills
as they go along. Thus, they and they are above all defined by what they lack to
be adults: reason, experience, critical perspective, the ability to defend
themselves, seriousness and maturity.

A naturalization of childhood
On the positive side, childhood is constructed as the domain of play, innocence,
happiness and freedom, even though their rights are almost non-existent. Under
the pretext of protecting them from society and preserving their innocence,
politics, sex and violence are made taboo. This naturalization of the naivety and
vulnerability of children therefore necessitates the intervention of an adult and
patriarchal authority to defend them. "It's always very complicated, always
winded, always hellish when you want to talk about incest"[1].

The stories of talking children are always the same. The child who speaks always
exaggerates, when he is not a liar. And even if the child is believed, even if
the incest gives rise to condemnation, it is always silence and shame that will
accompany it. Incest does not exist, it is erased from family history, from the
history of children. The few places where it is discussed are framed and
standardized, either by the courts or by the psychiatric institution. By
depriving children of their ability to defend themselves, by depriving them of
words like sex, rape or incest, by depriving them of their stories, all violence,
whether psychological, physical or sexual, is made possible and acceptable since
they are neither discussed nor debatable.

Incest, violence protected by law
"Nobody believes me, nobody likes me"[2]. These are the words of a five-year-old
child, victim of abuse by his father. To be able to escape the influence of his
or her incest, the child will often have to face alone adults who do not give any
credit to his word. From the parents who minimize the violence suffered by their
children, even accusing them of seducing adults, to the police officers who
collect testimonies: "Do you know that your father can go to prison for that? Did
your mother tell you to say that? ". How dare to speak of the liberation of
speech ? Children have always spoken, now is the time to hear them and believe them.

Red Photo Library /Martin Noda / Hans Lucas
Just as there is a culture of rape, there is a culture of incest. The latter is
made up of a set of discourses, laws and mechanisms of defense of the aggressors,
aimed at discrediting the voices of survivors and allowing the violence to
continue. These discourses are used during trials or children's testimonies.

We can take as an example the parental alienation syndrome (PAS), invented by a
psychiatrist in 1980. This syndrome aims to discredit so-called " protective "
parents, who denounce incestuous practices by their spouses. According to this
psychiatrist (who notably illustrated himself with this quote : "It is because
society overreacts to pedophilia that children suffer from it"), parents accusing
their spouses of incestuous violence are considered "insane" and manipulate their
children into lying to justice. This syndrome, decried by child protection
associations, is still widely used by abusers to prevent a court conviction. When
SGBV accusations against children are made by mothers, they are only recognized
by the courts in 15% of cases and almost never when the father accuses the mother
of manipulation (2% of convictions[3]).

"If you file a complaint, you will never see your daughter again"[4]. This
sentence, pronounced by an incestor father, is unfortunately verified by reality.
The protective parents who file a complaint for incest see themselves almost
immediately deprived of custody of their children, even before the trial and
without possible recourse for several years, condemning the children to live with
the incestor or the incesteuse. Worse still, adults convicted of incest very
often regain custody of the child victims of their abuse. Patriarchal justice, as
usual, maintains the dominant order.

Incest is a violence of confusing banality that affects all social groups, all
families, aggravated by all existing relationships of domination: disability,
gender, race, class, sexual orientation, etc. To all survivors of childhood
incest and gender-based or sexual abuse, we believe and support you. It's not you
to be ashamed of, but the aggressors. The culprit is the aggressor.

Maple and Rapha (UCL Toulouse)

INCEST, SOME FIGURES

5.5 million victims of SGBV in their childhood (CIASE), i.e. one in ten adults
concerned;
9 out of 10 victims are women, including 13% with disabilities (WHO);
80% of victims of incest among victims of SGBV during childhood;
33% of incestors are fathers;
84% of girl abusers are part of the family;
In the event of intra-familial aggression, there are several acts in 73% of cases
compared to 38.5% for extra-familial aggression.

To validate

[1]"Incest is everywhere", interview with Iris Brey, Mediapart, September 13,
2022. Iris Brey coordinated La culture de l'incest with Juliet Drouar, Seuil, 2022.

[2]Report of the Independent Commission on Incest and Sexual Violence Against
Children (CIIVISE).

[3]Source MEIER 2019.

[4]Ibid.

https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Pedocriminalite-Contre-la-culture-de-l-inceste-ecouter-et-croire-les-enfants
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