| Thesis: In the English speaking world, we have allowed forces that are hostile to Christianity to set the boundaries of sexuality. We have allowed these same forces to establish social and legal controls that constitute an attack on the family. The current greatest threat regards paedophilia. |
It would be quite easy to do a lot of logical rabbit-chasing here. The issues of children and sex are so visceral for most people, so bound up in taboo, that anything approaching clear, logical thought is next to impossible. That's the whole point of this essay: we haven't thought about this enough. We have taken action -- entirely too much action, and most of it misses the point. We have attempted to enforce the impossible, and have come near to crushing what little good is left.
Most of the trouble comes from letting others think for us. Most of us are so fearful of thinking about this subject, we have abandoned the task to others. Let me assure you, there are plenty of strong-willed "experts" out there who welcome the opportunity of deciding for you, and most of them are hostile to your Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. In other words, we as Christians -- especially in America -- have committed the sin of omission: we haven't done what we ought to have done (James 4:17). We have not applied the Word of God to a serious problem, and we are now reaping the whirlwind.
How do we address adult-child sexual relations?
When we view the context of Scripture as a whole, we could sum up human sexuality this way:
Unless you practice a dangerous form of exegesis that stretches specific passages of Scripture far beyond their context and reasonable application, there is nothing in the Bible condemning sex involving children as participants, per se. In fact, the issue of what constitutes "a child" in the Bible is subject to much debate, and may not be consistent between the various periods of Bible History.
Much of Protestant Biblical Theology is based on the concept that what held true in the Old Testament is not necessarily true in the New Testament. Jesus tossed out Mosaic provisions for divorce, saying it was quite below God's real standard, and that divorce was permitted because He didn't expect much from the Nation of Israel on that point (Matthew 19:3ff). He also dismissed concerns about kosher (Matthew 15:10-20). This was followed up by Peter's vision (Acts 10:9-18).
The culture of the Old Testament included the notion that children under age 9 or 10 could be killed with a certain amount of impunity, especially if they were slaves. The assumption was that most such deaths were a result of too severe a beating for misconduct. Jesus, on the other hand, taught that children are in some ways better fitted than adults to respond to God (Matthew 19:14). We also know that women in the Old Testament were often no more than just really good livestock. Jesus elevated women to a much higher status (John 8:2-12).
At what age a female could become a wife is known to have varied from time to time. We strongly suspect Jesus' mother, Mary, bore Him as a teenager, with age guesses ranging between 13 and 19. The lower end is not wholly implausible. But this was based merely on custom, and is nowhere addressed in Moses' Law or anywhere else. "How young is too young?" is a questioned never addressed. Adult women and boys is never mentioned, as males were expected to have no such opportunity until they were adults, typically marrying after their mid-20s.
Not everything in the Mosaic Law was tossed aside. Paul warns that we are obliged to examine what parts apply as universal, and what does not pass into the New Covenant (2 Timothy 2:15 "dividing" is quite literally the correct translation, applying to the Old Testament). There are some things Jesus did not address in His teaching because they were too obviously not a mere matter of ritual observance. Thus, Paul boldly condemns homosexual relations wholesale. This prohibition dates as far back as Noah for certain (Genesis 9:18-23, "seeing nakedness" is a euphemism for sexual relations according to Leviticus 18; Ham sodomized his drunken father). The issue of participant age is immaterial.
Thus, while homosexual relations are wrong at any age, heterosexual relations with children are not addressed in Scripture, except as we define a sensible age for marriage.
While the Bible rules in all it addresses, there are plenty of things it simply does not address, or does not address fully. What is a godly viewpoint on higher mathematics? Even where Scripture is silent, we are not without guidance. Roughly 10,000 years of recorded human history should not have been in vain. We can review what humanity has experienced, relate it to Scripture as best we may, and find useful application.
Here, too, things are a bit difficult for us. The notion that children are not appropriate sex partners is almost entirely restricted to what we call Western Civilization (mostly Europe and the US) and only in recent history, at that. Until the mid to late 1800s, it was rarely mentioned in the first place. When it was, it seemed to be viewed as naughty, but nobody's business. Indeed, sexual activity of any sort between children themselves was regarded simply as child's play. Eastern cultures mostly thought sex for children was normal under all sorts of conditions, too varied to mention here.
With the rise of what we now call the culture of Victorian England, peaking in the 1890s, we have a sudden harsh restriction of child sex-play as evil and sinful. Masturbation became a really major concern for parents. Such concerns had existed in pockets all over the West at times (rather early in Christian Ireland), but at that point it became the norm for most of society. That norm seems to have crossed the Atlantic around our Civil War Period, in that it became the dominant viewpoint in American society. This was the same time as a general rise in all sorts of strict moral standards.
Sadly, these standards were generally unrealistic. For example, it stigmatized even the normal sexual relations in marriage, and portrayed wives as properly not too interested in sex. To the degree wives adhered to this standard, it placed a huge burden on husbands. Every man was obliged to hold himself just one step away from the celibacy of Catholic priesthood. "Neurotic" could hardly describe the resulting forced hypocrisy, as men and women were denied a legitimate outlet for their hormonal urges. Prostitution sky-rocketed, as did other forms of infidelity. It was the only way "fun" was allowed, as just about all human "fun" became synonymous with "sin." Everybody was forced to talk purity, and wink at sin.
At least, that is the story we all have been led to believe. While it contains an element of truth, the whole "sexual pressure cooker" image comes from the lies of Sigmund Freud, swallowed wholesale by every generation since he first published his sex-obsessed notions near the turn of the 19th Century to the 20th. He asserted we were that way from birth, and that we could never possibly be satisfied, not really, and it gave an excuse for everyone to become neurotic about sex. Believers bought it, then fought its implications.
Here's the insane part: most of this was promoted by a new "priesthood" of social experts, mostly Protestant clergymen, who would today qualify as liberal, Bible-rejecting, New World pagans. They gave birth to the academic discipline now known as Sociology. They had rejected a theology of personal salvation, at the same time they seriously perverted the notion that we can subject our world to the dominion of Christ by taking civil action. Thus, they relegated all serious faith to no more than just your personal subjective feelings, "and keep it to yourself." They developed massive programs of government enforcement of good human behavior as they defined it. God was "dead" as He was previously known.
All of this was the same program that destroyed the Bible-centered work of our seminaries, walled the church off from meaningful comment on government, alienated schools from parents, and trashed the solid constitutions of several national governments. Here in the US, it brought the rise of socialism, and the supremacy of the federal government in all things. It favored and built up the sort of people who brought us WWI.
Part and parcel of this moral chaos was the increase among adult men of sexual interest in little girls and boys. Whatever it had been in the past of Western society, it was nothing compared to what it became after the mid-1800s. Repressed natural urges resurface in some of most awful ways, but it's the same if the "victim" merely believes they are repressed.
The culture shock of modern liberalism gradually took hold of mainstream Americans. Several factors played into the rise of a dominant middle-class during the 1950s. No longer protected by the simple faith and world view of the peasantry, they literally had prosperity thrust upon them as the one thing of which they could be certain was good for their families. With no external challenges left them, the mass of American youth were affected by the new wave of college professors hostile to what had once been America. There was a similar revolution in England, but with different foundations and factors involved; the results were nonetheless similar.
One of these counter-culture professors was Alfred C. Kinsey of Indiana University. His work during and after WWII served to normalize these perverted sexual urges. He solicited paedophiles to submit reports of their ongoing activities. He also called prostitutes "housewives" in describing their behavior as typical of women. The foundation was laid for promoting child-adult sexual relations as normative and healthy. What began as a fairly minor issue in society, probably manageable two hundred years ago, now becomes the impetus for wholesale destruction of our children. It is plausible that, in the near future, parents will be legally forbidden to interfere in their children's sexuality, regardless of whom (or what) they choose as sex partner. Condom distribution at school makes us halfway there.
Meanwhile, current law enforcement to "protect" children works under the impossible assumption that anything connecting children with sex is abuse, by definition. This includes letting them see nudity. The hysteria of over-reaction has gone so far that a mother was recently jailed because she snapped photos of her toddler son in the bathtub. And how many of us are now hesitant to cuddle a child, even our own, in public? Prosecutors and their associates act as if every man is a child rapist, just waiting to be pushed over the edge. It will only get worse, and ever more ridiculous, serving to justify legalizing "voluntary" paedophilia, by seeming to be more sane.
The following notion, backed by solid Christian Psychology and good counsel from far back in time, would set alarms ringing in most government child protection agencies: fathers need to introduce their daughters to romance. That means in order for a girl to develop a healthy and safe attitude toward the opposite sex, and guard herself against too easily and cheaply offering her body, she must experience some pre-romance from her father. The line is fuzzy of necessity, because growing girls have to be led across safely from that zone where every male is a father or brother figure, to the zone where most men are potential suitors. It includes properly cuddling the girl at all ages, during which father will properly draw the line. If he fails to even try it out of misplaced fear, he has left her emotionally hungry, and open to draw her own conclusions. That is real abuse.
A part of this insane, hysterical view of childhood and sexuality is the current propaganda about child pornography. I say "propaganda" not to dismiss the problem, but to dismiss the noise currently made about it in government announcements through the media.
Most of us realize we have at least a dual nature, in that, though born again in Christ, we yet live with the sinful nature of our human flesh (Romans 7). If we detect the sinful inclinations of our flesh, we are in a position to guard against them, relying on the Holy Spirit for guidance and power. If we deny they exist, perhaps out of some misplaced fear they will consume us -- a lack of faith -- we are sure to fall at some point.
Most men, and many women, can wisely admit that something in youth calls out to us, and engenders various desires. The difference between fallen nature and sinful living is whether we can keep that fallen nature from having a vote in the process of deciding to act. To express shock that a man finds a flirty 10-year-old just a bit sexy is pure ignorance of God's Word regarding human nature. Save the shock for the man who goes on to solicit sexual favors from her. Making girls flirty is the result of modern advertising. Most Christian men (and many sinners, for that matter) can simply ignore it, and will express instead a proper and fatherly admiration for her "cuteness." Though there are fewer of them, a significant number of men face a similar dynamic with boys. But the Freudian myth of scarcely deniable urges -- that every man is on the verge of raping a child -- is simply not true.
What female doesn't know that men are dominated by a visual orientation when it comes to sex hormones? Why else the massive portion of our global economy supporting the enhancement of women's and girls' appearance? No surprise then, that pornography is primarily marketed at men. It's quite unlikely any given man will see that much flesh, and in so great a variety, in real life. How, and even whether, we control this market is a matter for another study. That we have a market in child pornography is the issue at hand.
Adults can legally engage in all sorts of sexual behavior in front of a camera, and most of us would simply avoid looking. The only way children can be photographed in such a setting is if someone breaks the law. Even assuming the child is willing to engage in the sex acts on camera (case histories indicate some kids thought it was just a game, and never complained), we naturally ask: How "willing" can a child be when they could scarcely understand what they are doing? There are plenty of adults who don't understand sex! What's most frightening is that the majority of these children are posed and photographed by their own family -- money is a powerful lure.
A Ph.D. Anthropologist, in a country with no pornography laws of any kind, conducted a thorough search of the Internet a couple of years ago. His target was to collect every child pornography image, as defined by US law, available on the Internet. This was about the time US federal authorities began making so much noise about it, seeking new and intrusive search powers. The researcher found that, dating back as far as the oldest Internet images available, there were about 400 children involved altogether. The whole collection of photos was well under 2000. Most of that came during a surge lasting 3-4 years. In more than 10 years time, over the whole world, the production of Internet child pornography was really quite tiny. Police reports indicate that the printed market is even smaller.
He notes some of the images are stomach-churning, but most are fairly tame, and many just barely meet the definition of "illegal." In communicating with some of the marketers, he found that their sources had somewhat dried up. There are seldom more than 12 new child subjects introduced in any given year. So we note that the practice is revolting, and rightly criminalized, but is on a surprisingly small scale. Compared to other categories of crime, this is a huge success story.
So why do we have claims in the media that so-and-so's computer had an astonishing 10,000 child pornography images downloaded from the Internet? Simple; most of them are not illegal images. There are indeed several hundred new images produced each year of simple child nudity. Say what you will about whether simple nudity should be illegal or not; by their own definitions, those media reports from police of "thousands of images" are bogus. In at least one case, it was leaked that the actual illegal content was about a dozen photos, and then several hundred nudity shots (nudist camp stuff), and quite a few of kids in swimming attire.
The real problem is buried in hype. It's an excuse for the government to intrude on your privacy. That's not just the Internet snooping; they use this propaganda to justify all sorts of intrusions on the sanctity of the family home. How many of us have heard the lie that one child in 10 is sexually abused? The truth is that really very few young children are being abused, and most of them not in the US.
However, given the recent rise of "Children's/Paedophiles' Rights" junk from the likes of the UN, there is a matching increase in closed and encrypted child pornography clubs. Our intrepid anthropoligist can't afford the club fees, so we look elsewhere for information. If we grant that certain non-US police agencies are less likely to mythologize the scope and size of the problem, we are still left with surprisingly few new images -- for now.
New sources of truly disgusting ("torture") images from the East are showing up. The problem is largely how the Eastern cultures view the problem, which is usually quite different from our Western views. The biggest source of new images in the West is the result of chatroom seductions of teens, and very few young children. The police masqueraders in these chatrooms are having a powerful effect in limiting this source, in part to prevent the seductions themselves, never mind the photos the paedophiles might make of their encounters.
The real fault is not the tools used for this. Computers, chatrooms and encryption all have very valid uses, and by far the vast majority of such use is, at worst, harmless to anyone. It is more the fault of our failure as believers to accurately identify and resist the changes in society introduced by Satan. The strictly enforced view that all cultures are equal hinders us sending enough missionaries to change Eastern nations and fulfill the Great Commission. The strictly enforced view that we must tolerate "alternative lifestyles" keeps us from demanding public schools back our values in teaching our children. Already the paedophiles and bestialists are demanding equal tolerance.
Being involved in sex is not the worst thing that can happen to children, though it is bad enough. We have clear anecdotal evidence that there are some fairly young children who have carried on sexual affairs with adults, and there is no measurable harm later in their adult lives. These are the exceptions. Further, this must be viewed against the background of a society that says anything between consenting adults is fine. There are so few children who come away unscathed that we must assume some measure of harm, though not necessarily catastrophic. The greatest harm, naturally, is to boys that have been sodomized. The least harm seems to be for boys seduced by women. Girls molested by men vary greatly in their responses. At any rate, it is not for some agency outside the children to decide the issue for them, but for the victims to decide if they are truly "victims" and to what degree they have been victimized. Strong Christian families are best equipped to heal. The psychologists employed by the state can frankly induce a tremendous sense of harm in a child's mind by the hysterical "de-programming" methods used during child molestation investigations. They end up more abused by the system than by the molester.
I return to our starting point: man and wife, male and female, committed in the presence of God. Somewhere between complete tolerance of everything, and enforcing everything strictly and oppressively, we can find a place where we do not neglect our calling to change our world, without demanding full righteousness from sinners. Sinners will sin, and there is a certain amount of sin they should be allowed to choose. If not, we all lose some choices in righteousness, too. At the same time, we are obliged to limit the consequences of sin to the sinner as much as possible. In the ebb and flow of human history, we can usually find a reasonable level of enforcement, knowing we will never completely escape the evil of others in a fallen world.
Our current notion that one is a child until 18 years of age (and 21 for some purposes) is quite recent, and poorly supported by human experience in history. Keeping kids in school 12 full years was the result of labor unions campaigning to keep youths from competing in the labor market, back when kids could be paid much less for the same work. At age 15, most manual labor can be performed at an adult skill level. When you consider that the average 8th grader in the 1700s could read and write Latin, quote Shakespeare, and tell you the difference between Pythagoras, Pericles and Damocles, you have to wonder what modern education is all about. There is no good educational reason for keeping most kids past 8th grade, just strong political reasons. In the Middle Ages, common culture was simple enough that children were essentially adults at age 7, having as much a grasp of the world, language and culture, as any adult they might meet. While our culture is more complex now than then, it is more a matter of technology, along with some cultural depth, than a matter of changes in human self-awareness.
Indeed, the concept of adolescence itself is a modern invention of the Priesthood of Sociology. Until they took the reins of society, the threshold of adulthood was largely a function of demonstrated ability. One was a child until they acted adultlike. Still, without major social restructuring, based on a major change in how we view adulthood, we are unlikely to adopt such a flexible standard for society as a whole. The idea that they are too emotionally immature at 15 or so is actually a direct result of conditioning by public schools and modern consumer culture. There are forces that want to keep them that way as long as possible. It is not due to anything inherent in human development.
So on the one hand, we should be prepared to let them go at around age 16, to engage in as much sexual freedom as any other adult. If we raise our children under that assumption, most will be ready then. It is worth noting that girls are ready 2 to 3 years sooner than boys. Generally, though, anyone under the age of 15 is under parental guidance. Most certainly, I would say, those under age 12 are completely dependent on parental control, but the biblical view is more about behavior than chronological age. Further, except for the most egregious and obvious abuse, the state has no business interfering in parental decisions. The current level of government snooping in family matters serves only to justify employing a host of power-hungry busy bodies, most of whom disapprove of true Christianity.
Let us return to a saner image of what marriage and family is, under God. Give sex its proper place in human life. Make room for some inevitable error, and be reluctant to smother. Within these bounds, let us carry out our Scriptural duties to our children, to raise them up in Christ. Outside these bounds, let us have no mercy on those who trespass on childhood.
Ed Hurst
19 April 2003
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