Melville Cooke
IT IS going to take more, much more, than a "carnal abuse crackdown", as I read in one newspaper recently, to address this nasty situation of men raping children, some still in diapers.
At this stage it is going to take more than punishment; it is going to require an entire shift in our carnal culture, a shift that I fear we are not prepared to make.
Extremists thrive in cultures that are pre-conditioned towards their particular illness. So, in a culture of unflagging patriotism, George Bush feels justified in bombing those deemed worthy of demo-cracy, as well as sufficiently weak not to fight back (negotiations are the order of the day with North Korea). In a culture of militarism, Israel is quite happy to roll tanks into the Palestinian townships for a captured soldier, yet cannot comprehend the irony of its jails being full of Palestinians and their families wanting them back. In a culture of religious fervour, witches are pointed out and slaughtered in Salem. In an 'anti-informer' culture, a man who is willing to
testify about the slaughter of his family can be murdered at a busy intersection on an ordinary day.
And, in a 'young gal business' culture, the extremist will play the most natural game in the world, just how low can you go. Very, very low, actually, in more ways than one. Down to not walking yet. Down to months, no teeth, still drooling.
I view this vaunted 'carnal abuse crackdown' with a great deal of cynicism. Years ago I read somewhere that the average age of the 'babygrandfather' of a girl under the age of consent is three times the girl's age. That means middle-aged men are sleeping with 13-year-old children and since not all such incidents will end up in pregnancy, or will be reported or will even be known by the child's parents (if they care) in the first place, who knows just how prevalent it is?
I sometimes listen to men discuss the age of consent, almost invariably saying it should be lower, and speak about girls who are quite young but "dem look like big ooman still". From there it is a very short step to one of the cruder ways that I have heard this matter of the desire to sleep with children expressed, "from grass deh pon di pitch, ball can roll".
We do not, of course, generally make the connection between our carnal culture and the reports of three-year-old babies and six-month-old toddlers being abused. We prefer to believe (and it is easier) that the men who do these terrible acts are aberrations, are not a part of us, a society in some parts of which a girl who has reached 18 and not yet had a baby is considered a 'mule' and the advertising billboards, as well as the music videos, are stocked with nubile, inviting young flesh.
It is much easier for us to 'gash and light' child molesters figuratively than for us to consider that they are very sick and very nasty men, but cut very much from the same cloth as the respected gentlemen who prop up schoolgirls in their cars, in more ways than one.
Extremism of any sort flourishes only when the conditions in the general society set the stage for that behaviour to happen and so it is with carnal abuse. (And by the way, long before the headlines were blaring about some farce of a 'carnal abuse crackdown', how often were men who got 13- and 12-year-old children pregnant prosecuted? There is hardly any more evidence needed that an offence took place than a child having a child, is there? So if we as a society did not draw the line at 14, did we not expect it to go lower and lower? For just as how we gradually overlooked single murders and now we are seeing clutches of three and four and five, there is this very human tendency to break the limits of what has been done before.)
We cannot address carnal abuse without taking an honest, hard look at ourselves as a society. But it is not only fat people who find a mirror the hardest thing to face, or see what they wish to when they look at their reflection.
Melville Cooke is a freelance writer.
