Taking Children: A History of American Terror, by Laura Briggs, University of California Press, 256 pages, $24.95
America exploded with indignation in 2018, when the Trump administration initiated mass separations of border-crossing migrant children from their parents, shipping the kids to the federal equivalent of orphanages.
The administration said the parents had broken a federal law that prohibits crossing the border without documents. Never mind that many, if not most, of the families intended to claim asylum, or that they handed themselves to Border Patrol agents as soon as they traversed the international line. Never mind that when claiming asylum, a person without papers can legally cross at any place on the border whatsoever. These parents had broken no law, but the administration defined them as criminals subject to arrest and trial. While in jail they couldn't care for their children, officials said, so the government needed to take the kids.
The administration also said that it was sending a "deterrence" message to Central Americans: If you come here, we will take your children.
Public outrage and civil rights lawsuits quickly softened President Donald Trump and swayed judges. By summer's end, most of the parents and children were reunited. Most, that is, who fit a highly constrained definition of "families"—adults caring for their biological children only. Aunts, uncles, grandmothers, and older siblings head many families in poverty-stricken and violence-ridden countries. But extended kin trying to escape terrible conditions are often accused of "trafficking" the children in their care.
As a result, many immigrant children remain in federal detention. Family separations continue apace, but most of us have moved on, telling ourselves that the boys and girls of 2018 are back with mom and dad, that the whole thing was an aberration, that America loves family unity.
But these separations, as shocking as they were to some Americans, are part of a much longer history. Different arms of the government have been destroying families for a very long time, a history entangled with race, immigration, and colonization. The current administration's family separation policy is only the most recent example of this appalling legacy.
Most of us already know some of what Laura Briggs writes about in Taking Children. Most of us are aware that, for hundreds of years, African-American children were routinely and forcibly separated from their parents on auction blocks. And many know that in the 19th century, Native American children were removed from their families and shipped to white-run boarding schools, where they were stripped of their Indigenous clothing, dressed as Westerners, forbidden to speak their native tongues, and kept from their parents for years.
If slave sales and boarding school seizures were the family separations described in Taking Children, the work would read like an A.P. high school textbook. But Briggs, a historian at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, also recounts outrages that are only a few decades old. Resurrecting this forgotten history, she demonstrates its continuity with the recent separation of migrant families.
For years in America, unmarried, pregnant white women had been disciplined by being hidden in "homes for unwed mothers" and pressured to relinquish their newborns for adoption. Cloistered and closeted, most of these white women remained invisible, even as unwed-mother homes and adoption agencies wanted nothing to do with pregnant black women. Unmarried African Americans mostly kept their babies, and the families were highly visible.
But as the civil rights movement reached its apex in the 1950s and early 1960s, white supremacists lashed back. Beginning in 1958, the Mississippi legislature started crafting legislation to discipline unwed mothers. One 1964 bill called for charging them with a felony, punishable by sterilization or three years in prison. The de facto targets were black women and their children.
The Mississippi bills did not pass. But other Southern states devised related punishments, using welfare as a tool of social engineering. In 1957, at the height of Little Rock's school desegregation fight, Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus enacted a rule to remove families headed by unwed mothers from the welfare rolls. During the same period, Florida ceased to recognize common-law marriages, redefining them as "illicit relationships" and "illegal cohabitation." Florida and Tennessee defined households headed by unmarried mothers—again, disproportionately black women—as "unsuitable" and kicked the women and their kids off assistance.
Seven Southern states enacted laws along these lines. Briggs documents caseworkers telling mothers that if they wanted to stay on the rolls, they needed to relinquish their sons and daughters to foster care.
One of those seven states was Louisiana. In 1960, after New Orleans faced a court decision requiring it to racially integrate city schools, Gov. Jimmie Davis and the legislature announced a "segregation package" of new laws to stop the desegregation order. Most were deemed illegal by the federal courts, but one that survived was a "suitable home" provision intended to prohibit 23,000 children from receiving welfare. Black New Orleans residents considered the rule a political punishment and turned it into a national and international issue. Black civil rights groups and white allies organized "Operation Feed the Babies" to collect food, clothing, and funds for the threatened families. Aid came from as far away as England.
The statute was overturned. But in 1961, the federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare mandated that children could be removed from homes deemed "unsuitable"—including because of a mother's extramarital sex and cohabitation—if the mom refused to "rehabilitate." Not until 1968 did the Supreme Court forbid welfare bureaucrats from investigating poor parents' sex lives. In the meantime, the foster care system swelled with black and brown children.
While compulsory boarding school attendance for Native American children was abolished in the 1930s, Briggs notes that it was quickly replaced: White welfare workers were soon coming on to reservations to evaluate children's need for foster care. Particularly vulnerable to being taken were children whose mothers weren't married or whose caretakers were extended family, such as grandmothers. (Grandparents were considered too old to raise children.) Again, foster care numbers burgeoned. By the 1970s in North Dakota, Native Americans constituted only 2 percent of the state's population but half of the children in foster care.
Sustained activism by Native Americans resulted in the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, which mandated that tribal governments, not white-dominated county welfare departments, decide whether Native children should stay with their families. But it's not clear whether the situation improved. One federal study found that a third of Native children were still in out-of-home care in the mid-1980s.
Meanwhile, the separation of American children from their American parents continued with a vengeance, mainly because of the drug war. This too fell more heavily on the poor, thanks in part to mandatory minimum sentences for possession of crack—a relatively affordable drug—compared to much lighter sentencing for crack's monied-people cousin, powder cocaine. Black children entered foster care at an alarming pace as crack charges put their parents in prison. Incarceration rates for women tripled in the 1980s, and four out of five black women in jail or prison had children living with them when they were arrested. Today 10 million American kids, including one in nine black children, have a parent who has been locked up.
Briggs also decries the criminalization of pregnant women who test positive for illegal drugs or alcohol. Many of us remember the '80s and '90s press panic about "crack babies" with permanently destroyed brains. These babies' abnormal symptoms turned out to be short-lived and mostly due to other conditions related to their mothers' poverty. During the same period, fetal alcohol syndrome in newborns became a concern. It's a medically valid one, although maternal drinking's worst effects on babies are also tied to poverty. But rather than seeking to address the poverty, authorities arrest the pregnant mothers and take their older children. Native women are disproportionately prosecuted. Briggs notes that the most avid supporters of criminalizing women for mistreating their unborn fetuses are people who are trying to overturn Roe v. Wade.
So the family separations of 2018 were hardly the first time the government unjustly tore kids from their parents, and they probably won't be the last time either. Then–Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said it best while explaining why she thought taking children from their parents on the border was OK. It was "no different," she explained, "than what we do every day in every part of the United States."
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]]>Deported Americans: Life After Deportation to Mexico, by Beth C. Caldwell, Duke University Press, 248 pages, $94.95
Peter Sean Brown was jailed in Florida last year for a probation violation. Three weeks passed before the charge was dismissed. During that time, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) mistakenly thought Brown, who was born in Philadelphia and raised in New Jersey, was a deportable Jamaican.
ICE asked the county jail to honor what's called a "detainer"—a request that Brown be held for ICE pickup. Brown repeatedly told his jailers that he was an American citizen, but they ignored him. After a judge dismissed the probation violation, he was turned over to ICE, which recognized its error in a few hours and released him. Brown is now suing the sheriff who runs the jail for illegally holding him for ICE.
You may have heard about that case. You're less likely to have heard about millions of other people, people who have been in this country practically for their entire lives, who really have been deported, often accompanied by spouses and children who are U.S. citizens. The courts provide these deportees no relief, because they were neither born here nor naturalized. They might as well be citizens—they've lived in the United States for years and we know them as Americans. But de facto does not equal de jure.
This disconnect between life and the law is the theme of Beth C. Caldwell's Deported Americans. Many people in the United States have no papers but are wed to American citizens; about half have U.S.-born children. Two-thirds have been here for more than a decade. Many came when they were so young that they have no memories of the countries where they were born. Their language is English. They celebrate the Fourth of July. But they're at risk of banishment.
That risk precedes the current president. From 2009 to 2013, during the Obama administration, 1.5 million noncitizens were deported. The Trump administration has continued the expulsions. More than a quarter of a million people were sent packing in fiscal year 2018, a 13 percent increase over 2017. Most of the deported are Latino men who were adjudged as criminals—though the crimes that most committed were traffic infractions, driving under the influence, or immigration violations, such as coming back to the country illegally after being kicked out.
Today, more than a million children in the United States, most of them citizens, have parents who have been deported. Many suffer from depression, conduct disorders, and, in Caldwell's words, the "constant sense of a diminishing and ambiguous future." Many other U.S.-citizen kids have left the country to be with deported parents. About 600,000 such children reside in Mexico, for example. Most arrived speaking only kitchen Spanish. They founder at school and are bullied by classmates. One study found that they display more symptoms of depression than do children who stayed in the U.S. after a parent was deported.
Caldwell, a legal scholar in California and a former public defender, interviewed some 100 people who were deported to Mexico or who stayed in the United States after a loved one was banished. They compared their experiences to dying, amputation, and rape. They were depressed, anxious, and suicidal. Some scholars have described the deportation experience as "social death."
A woman named Melany talked about living happily with her undocumented Mexican husband in New York City until the day police stopped him for not wearing a seatbelt. He was deported, tried to return via the Southwest desert, and almost died before being caught and expelled again. Melany joined him in Mexico, and the couple now live on a farm, raising vegetables and earning less than $100 a week. In New York, Melany wore designer clothes. In Mexico, her home sometimes lacks running water.
Melany told Caldwell about a recurrent nightmare. She's in Central Park and sees her husband. "She walks toward him, he grabs her, and she breaks into pieces." Meanwhile, her husband dreams about the desert. Both frequently wake up screaming.
A recent Gallup poll found that eight in 10 Americans support a path to citizenship for immigrants here illegally. Given that high figure, why is America so bollixed about legalizing and naturalizing our compatriots who happen to have been born abroad? Caldwell answers with a historical map of the legislation and court decisions that brought us to this point.
In America, virtually all immigration policy flows from the antique idea that a country must define itself by rejecting unwanted foreigners. This is enacted through what's called plenary power—the principle that Congress, not the courts, has the sole ability to regulate foreign affairs and international relations, including immigration. With judges hesitant to intervene, the rights of the foreign born and their U.S.-citizen families can be trampled in ways that would never happen if immigration were not involved.
Marriage and family are the most glaring arenas of abrogation. The right to marry has been deemed fundamental by our justice system, and in the past half-century we've seen a march toward extending that right. Loving v. Virginia, decided by the Supreme Court in 1967, outlawed prohibitions on interracial marriage. In 2015, Obergefell v. Hodges extended the right to wed to same-sex couples.
Yet when it comes to the right to marry an immigrant, courts have said that deporting the spouse of a U.S. citizen does not violate the Constitution, because the citizen can live with her spouse anywhere else in the world where they're both allowed. In other words, to enjoy one right (marriage), a U.S. citizen spouse must give up another right (to live in the United States). Yet in other legal contexts, the Supreme Court has said it's unconstitutional to force someone to choose between two basic rights.
In nonimmigration contexts, courts forbid the government from separating children and parents absent a compelling state interest. Kids clearly suffer terribly when a parent is deported. Yet as Caldwell points out, American courts have routinely dismissed children's challenges to a parent's deportation.
But things may be changing. Some judges are having bouts of conscience. Others have already challenged the plenary power doctrine.
For an example of judges' consciences kicking in, consider the case of Andres Magaña Ortiz, who came to the U.S. from Mexico at age 15. Three decades later, he was a successful coffee farmer in Hawaii with a wife and three children who were American citizens. When the government set out to deport him, Magaña Ortiz applied for what immigration law calls a "stay of removal." But because of the plenary powers doctrine, the 9th Circuit said it had no authority to grant the stay.
Even so, the judges called their decision neither "fair [nor] just." The government's "insistence on expelling a good man from the country in which he has lived for the past 28 years," the court said, "deprives his children of their right to be with their father, his wife of her right to be with her husband, and our country of a productive and responsible member of our community." One judge expressed dismay at "having to participate in such inhuman acts."
Caldwell thinks that in the long run, individual rights will increasingly trump plenary power. To help things along, she proposes two changes. First, courts should treat the deportation of people who grew up in America with the same gravity as when they consider whether to denaturalize a citizen. (Though the Trump administration has made noises about broadening that punishment, it is considered draconian—denaturalization is traditionally reserved for people exposed as former Nazi concentration camp guards or people who have funded terrorists.) Second, courts should protect the rights of U.S. citizens and their noncitizen loved ones to keep their families whole.
Caldwell also proposes legislation to reverse the automatic social death of immigrants convicted of crimes. Before 1996, judges could consider, case-by-case, the harms deportation could wreak on a person and his or her family. That discretion is not allowed today, and immigrants convicted of crimes are uniformly painted as "bad hombres," no matter the offense they committed.
Passing laws to protect these people would be "a political challenge, to say the least," Caldwell writes. "It would require a radical transformation in public discourse from one that demonizes noncitizens who have been convicted of crimes to one that recognizes their humanity." Don't hold your breath.
Still, Caldwell suggests concrete legislative reforms. One would again allow judges to exercise discretion, even in aggravated felony cases. Another would offer deported "criminals" a legal path back into the U.S. based on their demonstrated rehabilitation.
Even amid growing nationalism and xenophobia, Caldwell concludes, new concepts of citizenship are emerging—concepts that derive from individuals' cultural associations rather than where they were born. As the Canadian political scientist Joseph Carens has put it, "People who live and work and raise their families in a society become members, whatever their legal status." Recognizing that fact, and honoring it under the law, could propel America out of reaction and into the modern world.
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Sex Offenders, Stigma, and Social Control, by Diana Rickard, Rutgers University Press, 216 pp., $44.95
Last year, Lenore Skenazy hosted a brunch at her home in New York City. The "free range kids" advocate invited journalists, fed them quiche, and introduced them to two guest speakers. Both were young men who had served time for sex crimes against minors.
As videotape rolled, one man told the audience about entering puberty with great sexual confusion. He said he'd been raised in a fundamentalist Christian family, homeschooled, and kept isolated from other kids, including girls. He talked about sexually touching his little sister, and he talked about being incarcerated for this offense while he himself was still a child.
The other man described a statutory crime. He is gay, and as a very young adult, he said, he began a relationship—including sex—with a gay teen younger than the legal age of consent. The young man served his time in prison, but then an effort began to "civilly commit" him to a locked mental hospital for sex offenders, probably for the rest of his life. That effort was irrational and vicious, he said; he certainly was not a continuing danger to children.
The reporters scribbled notes. They looked spellbound.
I was at the brunch. It was a terrific event, one whose time had come. (Reason ran video from it online, and Skenazy wrote about it in the July 2015 issue.) Skenazy has spent the past several years writing and speaking about what she feels is a modern-day panic about imagined danger to children. She talks about parents reluctant to let their kids roam the neighborhood, about children not allowed even to play on their lawns for fear of being kidnapped or molested. One big trigger for that panic, Skenazy believes, is erroneous attitudes about sex offenders.
Research by the U.S. Department of Justice shows that the vast majority of sex offenders pose no further threat to children after they do their time. Nevertheless, they get put on public sex offender registries, and residence restrictions banish them from parts of cities and even entire cities. They can't get work. They fear vigilantes visiting their addresses, which are publicized on the registry. Thus do irrationality and paranoia quarantine a group from society.
That was the message of Skenazy's brunch, with its Sunday-morning quiche, its ex-cons, and the favorable press that followed. But the event's success was marred months later, when the gay man who had spoken there was re-arrested. He'd been caught texting with a teenaged boy. He was jailed again, amid a new round of publicity.
For the fledgling movement for sex offenders' civil and human rights, the incident was disheartening. The movement's nascent efforts remain swamped by cultural noise about sex offenders, noise that is often wrong.
Take the claim that sex offenders are incorrigible even after being punished—that most can't or won't control themselves, and they inevitably re-offend. Sometimes they do. But a raft of research, including studies by both the U.S. and Canadian governments, have shown that adjudicated sex offenders have a very low recidivism rate. The U.S. study found that rates for first-time offenders are as low as five percent during the first three years after release. That's the lowest rate for any violent crime except murder.
Nor is it true that people who sexually assault kids tend to be strangers to their victims. That's the idea that fuels sex offender registries and residency restrictions, but the vast majority of offenders are family members or friends of victims. Every time you see sex-crime law christened with the first name of a dead child who was kidnapped, sexually assaulted, and murdered by a stranger, remember that these scenarios are about as rare as death by lightning.
But child sex abuse is common. Trusted stepfathers, fathers, grandfathers, uncles, teachers, family friends, religious leaders—these are typical offenders. Police, prosecutors, and court-mandated psychotherapists characterize them as notorious and unrepentant minimizers. They're said to downplay their crimes, to omit damning details, to shirk responsibility. These claims are untested but do not sound unreasonable. True or false, they're another rationale for endless punishment. These men's sneaky accounts of who they are and what they did mean nothing. We should listen only to their victims.
Diana Rickard strongly disagrees. Rickard, a sociologist at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, recruited half a dozen former and very typical offenders, then asked them their life stories, including why they committed their crimes. Rickard spent hours talking with each man. She could have taken a prosecutorial or journalistic approach, cross-checking their stories with their criminal records, interviewing their prosecutors, maybe even calling in polygraphers. She did none of this. She wasn't interested in the legal factuality of the men's cases as much as she was in the stories they told. Their stories, she felt, might in themselves say something about their future dangerousness or lack thereof.
Here is what Rickard heard from five of the six men.
One liked to spend time on internet chat sites, and he ended up talking sexually to someone he assumed was a woman. About a month into their chatting, she said she was 14 years old. But he continued talking anyway, and arranged to meet her. That's when he learned that she was not a girl but a police officer. He was arrested.
A guy in his fifties said he went to a bachelor party where a bevy of strippers were entertaining the guests. He and a stripper began a sexual relationship. She said she was 19, but later he learned she was 16. Her mother found out when she read the girl's diary.
Another middle-aged man met his longtime friend's daughter, whom he hadn't seen since she was a child. She was now a teen; he wasn't sure how old. One day they started kissing and fondling each other. He stopped but she called her father, who called the police. The girl was 15.
One man got angry with his wife. He went into his 13-year-old stepdaughter's room, took two photographs of her genitalia, and mockingly showed them to his partner.
And then there was Karl, a 30-year-old high school teacher. A gay freshman asked Karl if he could come to his house for private tutoring. Karl said yes. They had oral sex. Someone found out.
These men lost their jobs and careers, served time in prison or on probation, were placed on sex-offender registries for decades, and were sent for years to sex-offender group therapy. But they are not pedophiles—people sexually attracted to prepubescents.
The man who photographed his stepdaughter clearly went beyond the pale of any notion of consensuality. But the others, if their stories are true, fall into areas that different democratic societies treat in different ways. In most parts of America, the man who fell for the stripper wouldn't have been doing anything illegal, since most states' age of consent is 16. But he was in New York, where it's 17. Similarly, the guy who engaged in mutual fondling with his friend's daughter would have been fine if he'd happened to live in France, Sweden, and Denmark, where the age of consent is 15. The gay teacher could legally have had sex with his 14-year-old student if they'd been in Germany. That's also true for the man in the chat room and his faux teen friend whom the police invented. (Though in Germany cops don't conduct internet sex stings—at least, not with the totalizing vigor that they do in America.)
All of these men broke the law, and most of them sound like jerks, but they do not seem to be sexual deviants. Even so, they've been caught, punished, and sent to therapy. (One man has to go every day.) The four who touched minors—even when the minors eagerly touched back—now freely describe those teens as their victims. They say they did wrong, and to Rickard they seem sincere. Even the man who committed the computer crime with the imaginary girl apologizes.
It's when they try to explain why they did what they did that their stories get fascinating.
The man who got fooled on the internet said that he hung out online because he was disabled and homebound. He says he still doesn't know why he made a date to meet someone who claimed to be a 14-year-old girl, but now he knows not to do it again.
The middle-aged man who took up with the 16-year-old stripper took one look at her, and she at him, and they felt an immediate connection. The man was married but the couple weren't getting along. The stripper looked a lot older than 16. She acted older, too, and lied about his age. How, he asks, could he have known?
Likewise the man who fondled his friend's daughter. He should have known better. But she was making eyes at him, and she looked and acted older than 15. He says he'll never do anything like that again. In fact, he's really attracted to women his age.
Karl grew up attending a homophobic church. At age 30, he was still working to accept that he was gay. At times he became very stressed, and when that happened he did drugs and drank. He was in this state when his student asked him for private tutoring. He shouldn't have said yes, but he felt overwhelmed. He insists he would never do this again.
The man with who took the genitalia photos knows it was a terrible thing to do. But he and his wife had five children: two of their own and three of hers by a previous marriage, including the 13-year-old stepdaughter. He'd recently lost his job, felt terrible, and started drinking and drugging. His wife got work and began an affair with a fellow employee. The man felt cuckolded. He remembered that his wife had said her ex had molested two of the children. The man had always treated his stepdaughter as his own daughter, but now he exacted revenge by rejecting her. He shot the photos, showed them to his wife, and felt glee.
The patterns of these stories are a drumbeat. Getting turned on and knowing better than to follow through, but just not being able to help oneself. Being tricked. Beer and weed, drunk and stoned. Bitchy wives, bad marriages, the economy. If I'd only known then what I know now. I used to have a bad side and a good side. Today I'm different. The good me is the real me.
Reading these men's explanations is like listening to a low-rent version of The Moth. They are stereotypical and repetitive in ways we've all heard a million times, all our lives—and mostly not from sexual offenders. Tales of men having sex with minors, it turns out, are just a blip in the schlemiel-ish and sometimes brutal narrative of everyday American masculinity, straight and gay.
And this is a major reason why Rickard thinks we should calm down about sex offenders. We can all agree that they shouldn't have broken the law. We concur that, regardless of the variability of age-of-consent laws, their actions were probably immoral, even if they aren't everywhere illegal. Rickard's research shows how similar "deviant" men are to "non-deviants"—including in their potential to feel remorse and to correct their "behaving badly" behavior.
In their own eyes, in fact, these men are so rehabilitated now that they draw a line between themselves and the "true" deviants: the people who abuse little kids instead of teens, who penetrate instead of fondle, who operate with force instead of flirtation, who can't help molesting again. It's the real deviants, according to Rickard's interviewees, whom we need protection from. The sex-offender registry is fine, as long as it lists the right people.
These drab but credible-sounding expressions of "normalcy" are food for thought, but maybe comfort food compared to the unsettling story told by Rickard's sixth interviewee. He is Terry, formerly an upstanding member of his community: a church leader and associate at local financial institutions. Terry is no one-time sex offender. For years before he was put on the registry, he was a serial habitué of public spaces, such as shopping malls, where he publicly masturbated, rubbed up against women and girls, and grabbed their breasts.
Terry started committing his crimes in high school, and in ensuing years he racked up many victims. He was arrested a few times, but because of his "respectability" judges and prosecutors let him off with slaps on the wrist and obscured his name from the media. He was finally caught in flagrante delicto by a mall security camera. The video was picked up by the press, and the local criminal justice system could no longer coddle Terry.
Like the five other men, he told Rickard he'd done wrong. Unlike them, he defined himself as mentally ill and sexually deviant, and he wondered if he should be surgically castrated. His story sounds far less "normal" than the other five men's. It could be taken as evidence that we really do need a sex offender registry and related restrictions.
But Rickard opposes such moves even for offenders like Terry, preferring more conventional responses. What, she asks, if Terry's first offense had been dealt with seriously by the criminal justice system instead of being minimized? He might have been scared straight or given psychotherapy and medication. If those interventions hadn't controlled him, subsequent offenses would have landed him back in jail, away from women and girls. In America, we're supposed to remove people like Terry from society after they've hurt others, not before. Then, after they've done their time, we're not supposed to punish them all over again with states of exception like registries.
Yet we do. American's national sex offender registry has been in place for two decades, and it now contains almost has 850,000 people. (People under age 18, including some as young as 12, number about a quarter of the total.) Some cities ban these people from living in every neighborhood containing houses, so they huddle in tents and sleeping bags in no man's lands. Human Rights Watch notes this population's remarkably high rates of suicide.
All these shamings, torturings and breachings of civil liberties are intended to protect children, but studies overwhelmingly conclude that they don't. They are senseless. Except, perhaps, as proxies for social rage and panic.
As Rickard shows with her Moth-like stories, even sex offenders have bought into these feelings. Like most Americans, they believe in the registry—as long as they're not on it. Like most Americans, they cling to this side of humanity by asserting their "normalcy."
It's pretty clear they really are "normal," whatever that means. Having served their time, paid their dues, they wish to go to brunch. To eat some eggs, talk, feel empathy, to live on Sunday morning in the land of the free.
The post Listening to Sex Offenders appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Poor Lady Sybil, the Downton Abbey daughter who died in child-birth after flitting on the edges of the movement for a woman's right to vote. Lady Sybil—so beautiful, so sweet, so oddly impassive when it came to feminism. If, instead of flitting, she'd been portrayed as a fully involved suffragette, we might have enjoyed some knock-down-drag-out scenes. Perhaps we could see teenaged Sybil in jail (or gaol, as it's spelled in England), on a hunger strike with force-feeding tubes down her throat. Or maybe we could watch her trembling as she listens to speakers railing against "white slavery": the widespread kidnapping of virgin girls by men who prostituted the young innocents and infected them fatally with syphilis.
It turns out white slavery never existed, though millions during Sybil's time thought it did. As the English social historian Carol Dyhouse explains in Girl Trouble, the white-slavery scare was propelled by two forces. One was angst about women's social and political gains, which were burgeoning as the 19th century turned into the 20th. The other was the tendency of women's activists themselves to promote moral panics in order to achieve their goals in a conservative, male-dominated milieu.
Girl Trouble begins with the late Victorian era, when doctors and psychologists were fretting about how college for girls made their breasts and ovaries shrink, preventing them from being mothers. Moving through decades of similar rhetoric to today, Dyhouse shows that women's progress has always been met with noisy, obsessive, and in hindsight often nutty fretting about girls' behavior and bodies. Dyhouse writes almost exclusively about Great Britain, but variations on the panics she describes have also emanated from the United States. Comparing notes, Americans will find Dyhouse instructive—not to mention entertaining. If you like Alistair Cooke's Masterpiece Theatre, you'll love Girl Trouble.
Here you can learn new vocabulary, including "French letter" (Brit English for "condom"), "wide boy" (in American, a hustler), and "stroppy" (irritable). Here you will learn that early Girl Scouts in Great Britain at first organized themselves into troops christened Wildcats, Foxes, and Wolverines—until worried scout leaders replaced them with prim, feminine names such as Roses, Cornflowers, and Lilies of the Valley. You'll also read about the British panic, during World War II and just after, over "good time girls," who were said to be interested in nothing but gaudy makeup, imported perfume, sweets cadged from American soldiers and, as a prestigious British medical journal put it, "sluttish…undergarments."
Mainland America didn't endure the bombings that Britain did during World War II, nor was it overrun by foreign soldiers. Maybe that's why Americans never fretted about "good time girls." Nor did we suffer from the "coffee bar" panic. It seems that in postwar England, coffee houses started opening in many cities besides London, and by the 1960s young people were frequenting them to sip caffeine and hear rock 'n' roll. Men and women mixed freely at these establishments, as did members of different classes, ethnicities, and races. The same happened in America, but only in bohemian zones like Greenwich Village, so no one much cared. But in England, white slavery–style panic ensued again, with baseless rumors about girl coffee-bar customers being kidnapped and delivered to male Pakistanis.
If World War II and the 1960s are so far gone that they seem like a different country, then the Downton Abbey era is a whole other continent. At such remove, it's easy for Dyhouse to crisply assess a moral panic. It gets harder as her timeline moves forward, and sometimes she goes mushy. She misses the mark when discussing a massive 1980s sex-abuse scandal, in which British doctors and social workers over-diagnosed and misdiagnosed rape and molestation in hundreds of children in a working-class community in Cleveland, wreaking havoc on families and leading to a government inquiry.
Dyhouse does not mention the diagnostic mistakes committed in the case, and she blames the media backlash against the social workers and doctors on hostility toward feminism. It's true that the women's movement was scapegoated, but if Dyhouse had dug deeper she would have understood that feminism did share some of the blame for what happened. Attempting to redress violence against women, major strands of the U.S. and British movements really did promote gothic delusions about child sexual endangerment and replayed the old white-slavery crusade. It's a shame Dyhouse missed the connection.
Usually, though, she ably applies her lessons of yore to parse the panics of today. Since the 1990s and continuing into the '00s, she notes, a veritable library of books from both sides of the Atlantic have decried the damage supposedly being done to contemporary girls by social change. Reviving Ophelia, The Beauty Myth, The Body Project, Female Chauvinist Pigs, The Lolita Effect, Living Dolls: All warn that a girl-hating culture is gravely wounding young women. It's inflicting them with eating disorders. Pressuring them to obsess over their looks. Creating an unhealthy predilection for vapid girl bands like the Spice Girls and the Pussycat Dolls. Imparting the misconception that bawdiness in women (acting like "ladettes," as they say in England) equals women's liberation. Perhaps worst of all, according to these books, modern culture injects girls with a premature and perverse sexualization.
Dyhouse smells a moral panic. Girls obsessing over their looks? She cites studies that show they've been obsessing since at least the 1940s. Eating disorders? Research suggests that anorexia and bulimia among young women has actually declined in the past generation. And since the late 1990s, Dyhouse reminds us, females have outnumbered males in college. It remains true that women's salaries and prospects for promotion start to drag behind men's a few years after graduation, so perhaps the media mantra about "girl power" has been exaggerated, Dyhouse writes. But "the evidence suggests it was no empty concept."
And no one can deny that little girls' T-shirts at 99-cent stores now come emblazoned with words like "sexy," or that a big-eyed, crop-topped Bratz doll looks very different from a ringletted and pinafored Madame Alexander. But what does it mean to say that such material "sexualizes" girls? "Sexualization" used this way is a new term, only a generation old. Dyhouse notes that the idea it's based on—that girls in their "natural" state are devoid of sexual desire unless they are "contaminated" by forces invading from outside—sounds suspiciously like old white slavery–era chestnuts about the purity and fragility of young, endangered females.
Yes, girls are bombarded with materials reflecting narrow, hidebound ideas about their sexuality. But when has this not been true? They may see more of it today, since the media have become more unrelenting, but that doesn't mean the basic dynamics have changed. The trick, according to critical researchers, is to stop thinking of young women as coin flips—innocent versus non-innocent—and instead learn how they deal, as complex and sexual human beings, with the cultural junk that comes their way.
Dyhouse also suggests that we examine the motives of those touting the coin-toss idea in the first place. She quotes a British newspaper columnist, for example, who wonders whether part of the worry about "trashy" clothes for little girls isn't an upper-class assault on working-class taste. This is not an observation you see much in America, even though we've got plenty of socioeconomic splits. To study our own moral panics, maybe America needs the perspective of a nation with Downton Abbeys. As Girl Trouble demonstrates, British history can help us get a handle on our own.
The post From White Slavery to Bratz Dolls appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Poor Lady Sybil, the Downton Abbey daughter who died in childbirth after flitting on the edges of the movement for a woman's right to vote. Lady Sybil—so beautiful, so sweet, so vaguely impassive when it came to feminism. If, instead of flitting, she'd been portrayed as a fully involved suffragette, we might have enjoyed some knock-down-drag-out scenes. Perhaps we could see teenaged Sybil in jail (or gaol, as it's spelled in England), on a hunger strike with force-feeding tubes down her throat. Or maybe we could watch her trembling as she listens to speakers railing against "white slavery": the widespread kidnapping of virgin girls by men who prostituted the young innocents and infected them fatally with syphilis.
It turns out white slavery never existed, though millions during Sybil's time thought it did. As the English social historian Carol Dyhouse explains in Girl Trouble, the white-slavery scare was propelled by two forces. One was angst about women's social and political gains, which were burgeoning as the 19th century turned into the 20th. The other was the tendency of women's activists themselves to promote moral panics in order to achieve their goals in a conservative, male-dominated milieu.
Girl Trouble begins with the late Victorian era, when doctors and psychologists were worried not just about white slavery, but about how college for girls made their breasts and ovaries shrink, preventing them from being mothers. Moving through decades of similar rhetoric to today, Dyhouse shows that women's progress has always been met with noisy, obsessive, and in hindsight often nutty fretting about girls' behavior and bodies. Dyhouse writes almost exclusively about Great Britain, but variations on the panics she describes have also emanated from the United States. Comparing notes, Americans will find Dyhouse instructive—not to mention entertaining. If you like Alistair Cooke, you'll love Girl Trouble.
Here you can you learn new vocabulary, including "French letter" (Brit English for "condom"), "wide boy" (in American, a hustler), and "stroppy" (irritable). Here you will you learn that early Girl Scouts in Great Britain at first organized themselves into troops christened Wildcats, Foxes, and Wolverines—until worried scout leaders replaced them with prim, feminine names such as Roses, Cornflowers, and Lilies of the Valley. You'll also read about the British panic, during World War II and just after, over "good time girls," who were said to be interested in nothing but gaudy makeup, imported perfume, sweets cadged from American soldiers and, as a prestigious British medical journal put it, "sluttish…undergarments."
Mainland America didn't endure the bombings that Britain did during World War II, nor was it overrun by foreign soldiers. Maybe that's why Americans never fretted about "good time girls." Nor did we suffer from the "coffee bar" panic. It seems that in postwar England, coffee houses started opening in many cities besides London, and by the 1960s young people were frequenting them to sip caffeine and hear rock 'n' roll. Men and woman mixed freely at these establishments, as did members of different classes, ethnicities, and races. The same happened in America, but only in bohemian zones like Greenwich Village, so no one much cared. But in England, white slavery–style panic ensued again, with baseless rumors about girl coffee-bar customers being kidnapped and delivered to male Pakistanis.
If World War II and the 1960s are so far gone that they seem like a different country, then the Downton Abbey era is a whole other continent. At such remove, it's easy for Dyhouse to crisply assess a moral panic. It gets harder as her timeline moves forward, and sometimes she goes mushy. She misses the mark when discussing a massive 1980s sex-abuse scandal, in which British doctors and social workers over-diagnosed and misdiagnosed rape and molestation in hundreds of children in the working-class community of Cleveland, wreaking havoc on low-income families and leading to a government inquiry.
Dyhouse does not mention the diagnostic mistakes committed in the case, and she blames the media backlash against the social workers and doctors on hostility against feminism. It's true that the women's movement was scapegoated, but if Dyhouse had dug deeper she would have understood that feminism did share some of the blame for what happened. Attempting to redress violence against women, major strands of the U.S. and British movements really did promote gothic delusions about child sexual endangerment and replayed the old white-slavery crusade. It's a shame Dyhouse missed the connection.
Usually, though, she ably applies her lessons of yore to parse the panics of today. Since the 1990s and continuing into the aughts, she notes, a veritable library of books from both sides of the Atlantic have decried the damage supposedly being done to contemporary girls by social change. Reviving Ophelia, The Beauty Myth, The Body Project, Female Chauvinist Pigs, The Lolita Effect, Living Dolls: All warn that a girl-hating culture is gravely wounding young women. It's inflicting them with eating disorders. Pressuring them to obsess over their looks. Creating an unhealthy predilection for vapid girl bands like the Spice Girls and the Pussycat Dolls. Imparting the misconception that bawdiness in women (acting like "ladettes," as they say in England) equals women's liberation. Perhaps worst of all, according to these books, modern culture injects girls with a premature and perverse sexualization.
Dyhouse smells a moral panic. Girls obsessing over their looks? She cites studies that show they've been obsessing at least since the 1940s. Eating disorders? Research suggests that anorexia and bulimia among young women has actually declined in the past generation. And since the late 1990s, Dyhouse reminds us, females have outnumbered males in college. It remains true that women's salaries and prospects for promotion start to drag behind men's a few years after graduation, so perhaps the media mantra about "girl power" has been exaggerated, Dyhouse writes. But "the evidence suggests it was no empty concept."
And no one can deny that little girls' T-shirts at 99-cent stores now come emblazoned with words like "sexy," or that a Bratz doll looks very different from a Madame Alexander. But what does it mean to say that such material "sexualizes" girls? "Sexualization" used this way is a new term, only a generation old. Dyhouse notes that the idea it's based on—that girls in their "natural" state are devoid of sexual desire unless they are "contaminated" by forces invading from outside—sounds suspiciously like old white slavery–era chestnuts about the purity and fragility of young, endangered females.
Yes, girls are bombarded with materials reflecting narrow, hidebound ideas about their sexuality. But when has this not been true? They may see more of it today, since the media have become more unrelenting, but that doesn't mean the basic dynamics have changed. The trick, according to critical researchers, is to stop thinking of young women as coin flips—innocent versus non-innocent—and instead learn how they deal, as complex and sexual human beings, with the cultural junk that comes their way.
Dyhouse also suggests that we examine the motives of those touting the coin-toss idea of girls. She quotes a British newspaper columnist, for example, who wonders whether part of the worry about "trashy" clothes for little girls isn't an upper-class assault on working-class taste. This is not an observation you see much in America, even though we've got plenty of socioeconomic splits. To study our own moral panics, maybe America needs the perspective of a nation with Downton Abbeys. As Girl Trouble demonstrates, British history can help us get a handle on our own.
The post From White Slavery to Bratz Dolls appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>That's the takeaway from How Sex Became a Civil Liberty, Leigh Ann Wheeler's dense but fascinating account of the ACLU's wildly successful efforts, since its founding almost 100 years ago, to bring sex under the purview of the Bill of Rights. Wheeler, a Binghamton University historian, could have stuck with a wonky narrative about a long march of law and jurisprudence. Instead, she's taken what she calls an "empathic" approach. She has combed vast archives, including personal correspondence of the ACLU's founders and decades of files from the national office and local affiliates.
From these papers she has assembled a story about men and women working through their own sexual passions and contradictions as they shaped a legal and political practice for the entire country. She reveals how activists pushed, slouched, and pushed some more to arm their fellow citizens with sexual rights, even as those rights provoked further conflicts, including among ACLUers themselves.
Wheeler's story starts in the 1920s, as young, educated men and women flocked to Greenwich Village to partake of a modernist cultural revolution with heady new ideas about the nature and purpose of sex. One of these migrants was Roger Baldwin. As a 12- or 13-year-old in the 1890s, he had been seduced by his family's Irish servant. He'd spent the next few years having sex with her, learning, as he put it, "everything that was to be known, even how to prevent getting her pregnant."
In the Village, Baldwin met Madeleine Zabriskie Doty, who had spent her youth wondering if she was physically attracted to women rather than men. By the 1920s, she was in love with Baldwin. The couple wed in the new style, sans ring or vows. And Baldwin founded the ACLU.
Baldwin was a proponent of "free love," believing that living a "creative life" required "many loves shared together openly, honestly, and joyously." Like other women she knew, Doty agreed that her husband could have lovers, but she was reluctant to take her own. She became accidentally pregnant at least once by Baldwin. She managed to end the pregnancy, though it's not clear how.
Though Doty, Baldwin, and other founding ACLUers fought Mars-versus-Venus battles over sex and sex roles, they sought detente by jointly taking up the cause of birth control education. All had a gut understanding of how desperately men and women wanted this teaching. But the so-called Comstock Law of 1873 banned distribution of this information through the mail, calling it obscenity. And the federal statute had inspired "little Comstock laws" in many states that outlawed even public discussion of contraception. One of the ACLU's first campaigns, beginning in the 1920s, asked courts to apply the First Amendment to lectures, pamphlets, and ads on such topics as the rhythm method and condoms.
The early ACLU leadership vacationed together at Martha's Vineyard. On isolated beaches there, many practiced nudism. Nudists today are largely winked at if not ignored. But in the 1930s and '40s, they saw themselves as an avant-garde movement. Going undressed, they believed, would strengthen democracy by challenging the class distinctions so visible in clothing. They also thought the sight of people casually strolling in the buff would cool the frisson of obscenity.
In 1934, ACLU started not just defending nudists' right to publish material depicting them and their families naked, but to gather that way in private. The organization thus entered a new arena. Heretofore it had defended speech deemed sexually inappropriate. Now it spoke up for acts in the privacy of the bedroom—including, a generation later, homosexuals' right to commit "sodomy."
Until the late 1960s, as Wheeler tells it, the ACLU occupied an easy moral high ground when it came to sex and the First Amendment. Exploiting the tenets of an exploding consumer culture after World War II, the group successfully pushed the notion that everyone should be able to see and read anything they pleased, even if the speech in question was commercial and cheesy.
Take Playboy. During its consumerist period, the ACLU befriended Hugh Hefner and his enterprise. In 1966, the organization's Illinois affiliate even got Hef's subscriber list and sent out a membership solicitation. It told the overwhelmingly male recipients that "Sophisticated people like yourself are not afraid to read whatever magazine or book you want to," including those with pictures "of a divine figure with smasheroo legs."
Then things got dicey.
By the time of the Playboy mailing, Second Wave feminism was taking up where people like Madeleine Zabriskie Doty and other First Wavers had left off 50 years earlier in the Village. In the early 1970s, the ACLU staunchly supported abortion rights, as did Hefner and his magazine. At the same time, ACLU members were arguing among themselves about other civil liberties, liberties that were starting to seem sticky when framed in the lens of gender rights.
Rape-shield laws, for example, aimed to prevent defense lawyers from using accusers' prior sexual histories to bash their credibility. Feminists enthusiastically promoted rape-shielding. But old-school ACLUers remembered the organization's earlier advocacy for black men in the South who'd been accused of rape by white women—women the ACLU had been happy to discredit by claiming they'd been promiscuous in the past.
New controversies played out alongside good old-fashioned theater. In 1972 feminists in the Chicago Women's Liberation Union—some of them also ACLU members—crashed an ACLU fundraiser held at the Playboy Mansion. The fete was so Hefner-inflected that it included nude swimming at 4 a.m. The women's liberationists bounded in with pinups of men in bunny suits, featuring slogans such as "He's got a nice ass but he's kind of dumb."
Today those Playboy-hating days, like Playboy itself, are largely passé. Inside the organization, the ACLU has since weathered further First Amendment controversies about everything from sexual harassment laws to Dworkin-McKinnonesque moves to ban revoltingly violent porn.
Through thick and thin, Wheeler believes, the ACLU's support of unfettered sexual expression has tended to polarize the public. But the trend has been on the organization's side. Opinion polls show that most Americans today oppose laws against gay sex, support legal abortion, and condemn censorship.
How did the country come to these card-carrying positions? Through the intrepid and conflicted men and women of the early ACLU, Wheeler argues. By working out their own issues in an organizational and political sphere, they stretched their sexual revolution clear through the 20th century and into 21st.
The post Finding Sex in the Bill of Rights appeared first on Reason.com.
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