Why has our outrage over adults having sex (or sexual communication) with minors exploded in recent years?
As has been much discussed this week in the wake of the Mark Foley scandal, in 1983 36 year-old Gerry Studds (D-Mass) had a consensual sexual relationship with a , then, 17 year-old male page. He was censured for sexual misconduct by the House but was reelected to his position until he retired in 1996.
That same year Dan Crane (R-Ill) was also censured by the House for having sex with a 17 year-old female page. He was not reelected but I don’t recall the kind of teeth gnashing we’ve seen this week.
Logic tells me this didn’t all start in 1983.
But here in 2006 we’re, shocked, shocked, I say, to find such goings on! People are sent to rehab, resignations are demanded. Heads must roll!
Why now? Can it all be laid at the feet of the Jacksons? Hysterical over-reaction and censorship seemed to take over all reason after Janet Jackson’s Boob-gate at the Super Bowl. And the whole child predator fad, exploited weekly on NBC’s Dateline, could be an overreaction to Michael Jackson’s child exploitation trial.
Are there other cultural factors that have fueled this fire in America?
I don’t know about Crane, but Studds’ affair was legal and consensual, if unethical.
Foley’s affair would have been statuatory rape, and was illegal sexual harrassment even disregarding the boy’s age.
And yes, we are a bit more sensitized to these things. It’s not a sudden thing. It’s due to years of “stranger danger” teaching in schools seeing effects, it’s Dateline reports on Internet Predators, it’s the aftereffects of the Catholic clergy sex abuse scandals.
And Foley hit all of those notes.
He made sexual overtures to a minor
Over the internet
He was in a position of power
And his peers and superiors apparently covered for him
Also, the irony of his committee position is too blatant to ignore. I personally don’t feel that he was using it to troll for kids or change laws in his favor, but it’s certainly easy to leap to that conclusion.
And he’s a Republican. The family values party. The anti-gay party. It’s a shocker to their base.
I blame talk shows. Donahue, Oprah, Geraldo, Sally Jesse, Montel, etc.
Discussion of sexual abuse and exploitation used to be taboo and the topic was relegated to doctor’s offices and court rooms. Talk shows realized early on that titillating subject matter brought high ratings, and now the monster feeds itself.
Note how many episodes the Dateline “To Catch a Predator” series have spawned. Exploitation is now being exploited.
Sexual abuse isn’t the only formerly taboo subject that is now widely understood by society: marijuana use, depression, sexual experimentation, gender issues, sexually transmitted diseases, etc have all been brought to the common man by talk shows. But pedophilia gets headlines. And while I am certain that many people have been helped by exposure to discussions of sexual abuse, there will also be those who exploit it for personal gain. Sexual exploitation is today’s witchcraft. Want to take out a politician in 17th century New England? Accuse him of casting spells. Want to take out a politician in 21st century DC? Accuse him of flirting with an underage boy.
Sexual molestation is a topic that both conservatives and liberals can agree is heinous and without excuse. And you called it right when you labeled it boogeyman. The people want something to be outraged about.
It seems to me that a large number of romantic relationships begin in a work setting. While this is in general somewhat nervous-making, employers often have policies against it and so on, it isn’t a huge taboo or anything. It does keep going on.
It also seems to me that at least some of those relationships occur between superior and subordinate. Also not usually welcomed with open arms, as it has been known to cause problems of various kinds, but also not exactly cloak-and-dagger secret stuff.
These facts do not make the stalking of former emplyees by former employers acceptable; despite these facts, stalking is still illegal.
Priests, as long as we are talking about priests, have been known to have affairs with and even leave the priesthood for former parishoners and nuns and even other priests. This causes some local scandal of course. But it is not the same as priests molesting a string of young boys in one parish or over numerous parishes. And it is not the times that changed; it is a different situation entirely.
The shocking thing was not that Foley was dating a page. It appears that he was not, or at least, not usually. The thing people are upset about is that he was using the page classes as his own personal barrel of fish for target practice.
Is it that hard to see the difference?
And as for this:
It seems to me that Foley actually was was doing considerably more than flirting for some number of years with impunity. So I rather doubt that this is entirely accurate.
Flirting is exactly what he was doing. And the guy the IM’s were sent to seemed willing to hook up with him. While we’re on the subject, lets remember that these “children” were 16 or 17 years old, and a full-on sexual relationship with them would be legal in many states. I’m not trying to defend Foley, just point out that 17-year-olds were not considered children in the old days.
In the 50’s, being a Communist was the great unforgivable sin. In the 80’s it was drugs. These days, it’s molestation.
At no point was I minimizing Foley’s actions. What are you contesting?
The OP asks what cultural factors might be behind the current public fixation on exploitation of minors.
I suggested that talk shows have given a lot of exposure to the topic, and the public has willingly taken the (deservedly so) outraged angle. Thanks to all of this popular attention, pedophilia is a hot topic right now. Almost any accusation will be given front page press.
There might have been a few who seemed to be OK with it, but others most certainly were not.
I think it has to do with the fact that he was hitting on a number of these pages, and with e-mail and IM, he was essentially invading people’s homes. Plus, the page scandal of the 80s was something that had happened 10 years earlier, while Foley was going at it in the present.
Historically, its only been in the past 50 years or so that we’ve started to get squimish about much older men marrying 15-18 year old girls. My grandmother married her first husband at 16 - he was 30. And he decided to marry her when she was five. They would have been married in the early 1930s. My other grandmother married a 19 year old serviceman at 15 - while knocked up.
So its possible that the scandals of 1983 still had an element of “my mother married my father at that age - he was in his 30s” that we are starting to lose as the population gets older.
Yeah, I think so. Partly (IMO), its due to the technology that is prevalent now which wasn’t before: texting, IMs, cell-phones, etc. It’s not that those methods of contact are fundamentally off the radar (because they obviously aren’t), but that unless the radar looks in their direction, they aren’t caught.
In other words, there’s a lot more ways to privately facilitate such a relationship than there used to be, so long as no one invades the privacy of those involved. Thus, I think that these liasons probably are happening a lot more than they used to, but they are also a lot easier to catch/document/prove…provided someone makes the effort.
That, plus the exploitation of the prejudice against such relationships, is fueling the current inferno. Beaucarnea makes some very good points.
It’s not just the people having these relationships (or attempting to…or NOT having them, but being portrayed as having them…or wanting to) that are the problem, it’s also the people who are opposed to such activities that are part of the total damage.
People live longer. When we died in the 50s and early 60s the ages were compressed. A society that has trouble regenerating itself will have sex at a youger age. See African tribes for example. As a country becomes heathier the society will gravitate toward older marriages etc.
I’m not conviced that there is some big cultural difference between now and the 80’s that makes the Foley scandal seem more important then earlier page/congresscritter incidents. Rather I think this particular case has some unique aspects that’ve grabbed attention:
Foley’s improprities might have been legal if it weren’t for the internet predator law he himself pushed into legislation. Irony makes for a good story.
There were emails and IM’s that left a pretty graphic record of what was going on that could be shown on the internet/TV due to thier “news value”.
“Dangers of the Internet” stories are always popular, especially when they involve young people.
Foley apparently had been dealing with this issue for sometime with several different pages.
Regardless of how culpable you feel the House leadership was in covering for Foley, thier initial reactions to the scandal was a mess of guilty fingerpointing, leading to the impression that this might be a bigger deal then just the one congressman. Also it comes on the heels of several other corruption scandals.
It broke a few weeks before a highly contested and possibly House swinging election.
That said Foley’s Repub replacement may yet win his seat, and I doubt we’ll be talking about this story much after another few weeks (especially if the North Koreans kill us all in the interm). So even with all the above, its still a pretty flash-in-the-pan type deal.
Just as a general note about average lifespans, the thing that contributes most to an increase in life expectancy stats is decreasing infant mortality. The reason a lot of countries with low life expectancies have such low life expectancies isn’t because people all die off at 50…it’s because so many people die at 1 or 2, and that skews the figures downward.
For some of the pages involved, it wasn’t just flirting. It was sexual harassment. Very lewd and graphic harassment by someone in a position of authority over them. That person knew that his behavior was wrong but he did it anyway. In some states where pages live, his actions would be criminal.
Yet, Tony Snow describes that behavior as “naughty.” Other Republicans say his lewd comments to minors were “inappropriate.”
The people may be outraged, but many Republican politicians and apologists are certainly downplaying it.
No one was sent to rehab. He signed himself in for alcoholism – though no one seems to believe he has a drinking problem. And I can certainly understand why resignations have been demanded. Putting political expediency before the welfare of a minor for even one day is not the sign of a person of exceptionally good judgment. To do that for years when more than one minor is involved is unthinkable.
I’m not saying that Hastert should resign as a Congressman – just as Speaker of the House. (Actually, considering those in a position to take over, I hope he doesn’t.)
If we find out that he has been lying about not knowing, then he should resign from Congress.
If anything, I think we are beginning to go easier on child molesters.
Maybe I’m wrong, and I’m willing to admit it if I am, but I thought all of Foley’s e-mails and IMs were with ex-pages…people who had already finished the program. So he was no longer in a position of authority.
And I’m pretty sure that sexual harrassment is a civil matter, not a criminal one.
Gross oversimplification. Sites show much more information than that…Infant mortality is one factor. Life expectancy is due to medical and environmental factors too.there are many societies that marry at very young ages. It is not coincidental that the life expectancy is shorter in them.
Sure, but the major medical and environmental factors that have improved in the “developed” world is better neonatal care, improved obstetrics and safety proceedures in childbirth, increased nutrition, and vaccination of childhood disease. In short, fewer kids are dying.
Even, though, assuming you’re right, everyone is dying at 80 now instead of at 60, that still wouldn’t increase the society’s ability to regenerate itself. By the time you’re 60, you’re pretty much infertile (more true for women than men, obviously, but even male fertility is pretty low by that age), so an extra 20 years of life after that isn’t really going to help birthrates.
If anything, people are physically maturing earlier these days, due to better nutrition. You’re starting to find girls having their first periods at 10 or 11, in rare cases. The fact that we have a category of “teenager” now, instead of a direct move from child to adult, isn’t due to lengthening lifespan. It’s cultural, brought on by rising American prosperity, urbanization, and public high schools. Check out Grace Palladino’s “Teenagers: An American History” about the creation of teenage culture, and Jeffrey Moran’s “Teaching Sex: The Shaping of Adolescence in the 20th Century”, about G. Stanley Hall’s creation of the concept of the “adolescent” at the beginning of the century, and the development of the idea of “sex education” and changing conceptions of it.