Alex Cockburn's Despicable CP Piece on 'Sex Crimes Mania'

[Gouda]

The Long Gaze of the State

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

It is no accident, Thomas Wilkinson, a CounterPuncher now living in Germany, pointed out to me a while back, that the first "political" novels about the US, e.g. those of Nathaniel Hawthorne, were concerned with violations of the official sexual code imposed by the country's founding theocrats.

The control of sex and pornography is a major part of promulgating a prudish, puritanical political culture without ever imposing an overt political censorship regime. The debates about so-called "political correctness", whether in the race, gender, or ethnicity conflicts can only be explained by the culture of prudery which prevails in American political discourse of all sorts.

“I think it is useful and important,” Wilkinson writes, “to see the ‘sexual crimes’ mania, even its embarrassingly retroactive manifestations, as part of maintaining this rigorously prudish, puritanical political culture the surface of which was barely scratched by the Sixties. Sexual crimes stand for the violation of the established order based on supposed personal deviance and not on any actual material challenge. They have the benefit of being immensely trivial and yet due to the absolutely poor to non-existent transmission of the ‘standards’ for acceptable sexual conduct, esp. occlusion from public instruction, remain ultimately "fantasy crimes". People can imagine the most heinous punishments for this behavior because it is impossible for them to conceive of a sex crime in the same way as bribery of public officials or assassinations performed by agencies disguised as armies or cultural aid missions. This impossibility goes back to the terror used by parents and teachers to threaten children for violations of their will by creating nonsensical consequences for trivial acts.”

With these reflections in mind, let us turn to that story of the man in Fairfax County Virginia, who got up early on Monday morning, October 19, walked naked into his own kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee? The next significant thing that happed to 29-year-old Eric Williamson (not to be confused with Tom Wilkinson, quoted above) is the local cops arriving to charge him with indecent exposure. It turns out that while he was brewing the coffee, a mother was taking her 7-year-old son along a path beside Williamson’s house, espied the naked Williamson and called the local precinct, or more likely her husband, who turns out to be a cop.

“Yes, I wasn’t wearing any clothes,” Williamson said later, “but I was alone, in my own home and just got out of bed. It was dark and I had no idea anyone was outside looking in at me.”

The story ended up on TV, starting with Fox, and in the opening rounds the newscasters and network blogs had \ merciless sport with the Fairfax police for their absurd behavior. Hasn’t a man the right to walk around his own home (or in this case rented accommodations) dressed according to his fancy? Answer, obvious to anyone familiar with relevant case law, absolutely not.

Peeved by public ridicule the Fairfax cops turned up the heat. The cop’s wife started to maintain that first she saw Williamson by a glass kitchen door, then through the kitchen window. Mary Ann Jennings, a Fair-fax County Police spokesperson, stirred the pot of innuendo:” We’ve heard there may have been other people who had a similar incident.” The cops are asking anyone who may have seen an unclothed Williamson through his windows to come forward, even if it was at a different time. They’ve also been papering the neighborhood with fliers, asking for reports on any other questionable activities by anyone resembling Williamson—a white guy who’s a former diver, and who has a 5-year old daughter, not living with him.

I’d say that if the cops keep it up, and some prosecutor scents opportunity Williamson will be pretty lucky if they don’t throw some cobbled-up indictment at him. Toss in a jailhouse snitch making his own plea deal, a faked police line-up, maybe an artist’s impression of the Fairfax Flasher, and Eric could end up losing his visitation rights and, worst comes to worst, getting ten yeats plus posted for life on some sex offender site. You think we’re living in the twenty-first century, in the clinical fantasy world of CSI? Wrong. So far as forensic evidence is concerned, we remain planted in the seventeenth century with trial by ordeal such as when they killed women as witches if they floated when thrown into a pond.

Let’s head north from Fairfax County to Massachusetts, home of the witch trials. How about if you’re white in Boston (wise decision), weigh yourself in your own bedroom with no clothes on and…. But let my Boston friend pick up the story, because it happened to him.

“It was the early ’90s. Early on Xmas eve two burly cops pushed into our house and invaded our bedroom—no warrant. They only backed off after they realized that the scale in our bedroom where I weighed myself was in front of a window. To see me there the born-agains who moved in next door (actually on the far side of a vacant lot separating us) had to keep a tight watch since it does not take long to weigh oneself.

“My girlfriend was dressing in the bedroom and my mom and stepdaughter were visiting. By the time the cops understood that I had been weighing myself every morning, the paddy wagon was there ready to take me away.

“I would have sued them but I was running for Congress at the time. The cops liked my opponent, a right-wing pro-lifer, and I have always thought that had something to do with their moral diligence that day. One of the cops, the chief, later resigned in a corruption scandal.”

Now this was in the early 1990s, please note. This was when the wave of hysteria over satanic abuse of children was in full spate with people being imprisoned for life on just the sort of ‘evidence’ the cops are now trying to marshal against Williamson. Massachusetts actually saw the first trial of a daycare teacher charged with satanic abuse. Bernard Baran was released after twenty-two years and exonerated three years after that, on June 9 of this year.

As the attorney Mike Snedeker, who co-authored with Debbie Nathan the 1998 book Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt, recently reminded us here on the CounterPunch website, there are victims of that hysteria, almost certainly innocent, still rotting in prison: Fran and Danny Keller in Texas; James Toward and Francisco Fuster in Florida almost a generation later.

Earlier this year Nancy Smith, a school teacher, and Joseph Allen, a Head Start bus driver, were released from Ohio prisons after SERVING fourteen years for committing phantom crimes against five-year-olds. John Stoll—convicted of allowing people he barely knew to sodomize his 6-year-old son, and himself sodomizing young children he had just met and then sending them on home after school—was released in 2004 after twenty years in state prison. He is featured in the documentary Witch Hunt, narrated by Sean Penn, and recently settled a civil rights suit against Kern County, California, for $5.5 million.

Among the many brilliant observations of Morse Peckham in his 1969 book Art and Pornography (published by the Kinsey Institute) was that the concern with sexual behavior has nothing to do with sex but everything to do with policing. American sexual prudery is part of political and social policing within the nominally legal context of supposed individual freedom. People learn to be prudish with sex before they understand anything else in society and this prudery is transferred to other areas later which are even more important for social control and stability.

The control of sex and pornography is, as Wilkinson suggested to me, a major part of promulgating a puritanical political culture without ever imposing an overt political censorship regime. Sexual repression, through the allegation of ‘deviant’ fantasy crimes, is often the designated stand-in for violations of the social order harder to stand up in court.

The “satanic abuse” hysteria was particularly appalling, but year after year in America prudery exacts a terrible toll – as witness the unfortunate female schoolteachers packed often to prison with hefty sentences for having affairs with boys in their mid to late teens. Is America permanently lodged in the seventeenth century so far as moral policing is concerned? The answer is Not exactly, since gay marriage wasn’t a big item on the legislative agenda of the colonies at that time. But regulation of sexual behavior is the preferred route to wider social control.

As Williamson is now ruefully aware, the state not only has a long arm, it has a long gaze. Moral: the eyes of the law are on you at all times, even at 8.30 am in the supposed privacy of your own kitchen.

[Jeff]

Truly.

"The discourse of disbelief uses a number of strategies in order to dismiss ritual abuse reports as features of a social scare or moral panic. These include the constant coupling of 'satanism' and ritual abuse, the claim that a complicit media have promoted a unified scare-mongering 'line', the homogenizing of 'believers' so that differences between such diverse interests as those of feminists and fundamentalists are obscured, the trivializing of claims, hystericizing of claim-makers, and slipping between a view of claims as socially constructed and as individually invented."

Sara Scott, The Politics and Experience of Ritual Abuse

[American Dream]

There were already a few comments about this buried at the end of The False Memory Syndrome Foundation thread (third post on0, but I will continue here because Cockburn's truly despicable position is much more visible here.

I haven't studied up on this, but the opinionated Mr. Cockburn apparently has a long history of fighting to prove he is "right" about this:

http://www.counterpunch.org/pollitt.html

October 26, 1999

Katha's Silence

by Alexander Cockburn


The last time I saw Katha Pollitt was on a Nation cruise in the Caribbean just under a year ago. By the second day Katha was making it clear that all was not well between us. Soon it came out that by quoting some of her off-the-cuff remarks in the New York Press I'd transgressed propriety and decorum. An apology was due, Katha told me testily, before normal social intercourse could resume. I hauled out appropriate expressions of contrition and Katha resumed the wary palaver that has always been the currency of our relationship.

So, Katha, here's the sequel. This time you owe an apology, and it's not a matter of some few mumbled words of contrition. You've got some serious explaining to do, and among the audience measuring your words are people who are doing hard prison time because influential feminists such as yourself kept your mouths shut when you could have made a difference, possibly even a vital one.

Let me take you back to l990. At that time the poisonous hysteria about Satanic ritual abuse was still at full tilt. Even though, on January l8 of that year, after the longest trial in US legal history, a jury in Los Angeles acquitted Ray Buckey and his mother, Peggy McMartin Buckey on 52 counts of molestation, plenty of people had already had their lives destroyed on demented charges of having forced children into having had oral sex with a goat (Wilkes-Barre, Pa); eating a boiled baby (Chicago); committing "repulsively bizarre acts" such as assaulting children with tampons and playing the piano naked (Maplewood, N.J.).

The first time I wrote about these persecutions was early in l990, in The Nation and also in the Wall Street Journal, and I returned to the topic from time to time, particularly in l993, when Bill Clinton nominated Janet Reno to be his attorney general. In The Nation I wrote about two cases where Reno had put young people, Bobby Fijne and Ileana Fuster, through terrible torments in an effort to win convictions on satanic abuse charges. I should say that as a journalist I was by no means a pioneer in trying to draw attention to this Salem-like eruption in our society. That credit would go most particularly to Debbie Nathan, who by l986 was already covering a satanic abuse case in El Paso, where she was living at the time, and about to write for the Village Voice about the Kelley Michaels case in New Jersey. But I do remember very well in the early l990s how you, Katha, went about The Nation deprecating my articles, suggesting that I was being cavalier and anti-feminist in my posture. You also made dismissive remarks about Debbie Nathan.

Katha, these were the years when a column by you in The Nation could have been enormously influential. Why? You know the answer perfectly well, though even today you cannot really bring yourself to admit it. In the coalition powering the satanic abuse persecutions feminists constituted a powerful component, most conspicuously in the form of Gloria Steinem and Ms. magazine. How did feminism, a movement that grew out of the radical passions of the l960s, navigate itself into this demonic alliance? Charges of perverse abuse of children seemed an inviting line of attack in the larger onslaught on patriarchy, sexual violence and harassment. Social workers and therapists--many of them feminists -- became the investigators and effective prosecutors.

Since you had belittled her work, Katha, perhaps you didn't bother, back in l995, to read Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker's definitive book Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt. You would have found some very acute analysis of feminism's crucial involvement in the hysteria, plus some well merited condemnation. "It is difficult to explain to justifiably indignant and frightened people that feminist theory and practice are not monolithic, and that many women's advocates abhor that part of the movement that demonizes masculinity, forges alliances with the anti-feminist right, and communicates such profound fear and loathing of sexuality that -- as the ritual abuse cases demonstrate -- it is even willing to cast women as demons... It is ...obvious that the antipornographers and victimologists are feminism's main contributors to the ritual-abuse panic. Catharine MacKinnon, for instance, has publicly proclaimed her belief in the existence of widespread ritual sex abuse. So have Gloria Steinem and countless psychotherapists, social workers, doctors, lawyers, and writers who call themselves feminists. Indeed, during the past decade, belief in ritual abuse has become so ensconced in this wing of feminism that the arrest, trial by ordeal, and lifelong incarceration of accused women have occasioned hardly a blink from its proponents. They have remained silent as convicted mothers and teachers are sent to prison."

Katha, even if you managed to avoid reading those words, back then, do you remember Bruce Heitman's letter? He sent it to you on April 2,l996. Bruce was a researcher at the Justice Committee in San Diego, founded by Carol Hopkins, and campaigning for the wretched people whose lives had been destroyed by the hysteria over satanic ritual abuse and its later transmutation into recovered memory syndrome. It was a good letter. Bruce had sweated over it for a week or so, and after he'd posted it to you at The Nation he sent copies to me and a few other people. He told you truthfully he was a fan of your work and then drew your attention to "one of the strangest alliances in modern political history: the l980s confluence of victimology feminists and Christian fundamentalists, who promoted the national hysteria about Satanic conspiracies that resulted in the infamous ritual abuse prosecutions."

Bruce reminded you that some prominent feminists had spoken out against the cult of victimology that had helped give rise to the witch hunt. "Carol Tavris in a controversial New York Times Book Review article decried the 'incest-survivor machine.' Wendy Kaminer's I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctiuonal lamented "the growth of the memory-retrieval industry during a period of hysteria about child abuse, ritual abuse, Satanism and pornography.... But ... women like Tavris, Kaminer and Nathan have been vilified as part of the 'backlash' against the women's movement."

Then Bruce, near the end of his six-page letter, made his appeal to you: "Fairly or unfairly, feminists are already being blamed for the ritual abuse panic even though police, prosecutors, and judges actually exercised the power..." Such discrediting of feminism could be avoided, Bruce wrote, "if prominent feminist writers, like yourself, were to speak out forcefully and persistently against the injustices of the ritual abuse persecutions.... You could be very helpful in getting the message through to the left and to other Americans of conscience that the wounds inflicted on our society by these misguided social engineers have festered long enough... I look forward to hearing from you."

Would it have made a difference in l996 if you had taken up Bruce's invitation? Some, but not a lot.The insurance companies had already done more than liberals like you simply by cutting back on pay-outs for therapists to concoct their fantasies. The crucial time was back at the end of the l980s, when Debbie Nathan was trying to explain to the Nation's editor, Victor Navasky, the need to combat the witch hunt, and getting a brush off. If people like you and Navasky had taken up the issue, if Debbie had been able to find a book publisher back then , Satan's Silence would have come out in the early instead of the middle l990s and the tide perhaps turned much earlier. As it was, the woman who was able to sieze the issue and make the running was Dorothy Rabinowitz, a right-winger.

And now, Katha, in early October, l999, you've finally caught up with the issue in your Nation column, "'Finality' or Justice", about the Amirault case in Boston, where Violet and her two children, Cheryl and Gerald, drew twenty and thirty year sentences back in l984 on the usual mad accusations. It's a well-known case and your rendition of it was fairly humdrum. I made my way through with a slight sense of surprise, thinking, "Why now?" Then, right near the end, came these distinctly furtive sentences: "... it would still be embarassing for those involved in the prosecution to admit that a terrible injustice was committed. The forces arrayed against the Amiraults are 'good guys,' after all -- liberal Democrats, child welfare and victims' rights advocates, feminists. Across the justice system, 'finality' is the watchword now. A lot of people may think, 'where there's smoke, there's fire': the Amiraults may not have sodomized toddlers with knives, but something happened. I used to think that myself about the day care cases, but now it's clear they're really about smoke and mirrors, and the entrapment of innocent people..."

Katha, do you really think it's enough just to tuck in the word "feminists" at the end of a sentence, then scurry on without further ado? And why is it, for you, only "now" in late l999, clear that it's all "smoke and mirrors", which is a pretty sedate way of describing an Inquisition that shattered many lives?

After thinking about your column off and on for a couple of weeks, I called Debbie Nathan to ask her what she thought. Here's what she wrote back a day later.
"It's very unfortunate that Katha Pollitt waited so long to educate herself about false allegations of child sex abuse and about the phenomenon's more bizarre manifestations, such as 'ritual abuse.' If she'd come into this issue on time, she could have made a political and practical difference.

"Back in the late 1980s, at the height of the ritual abuse hysteria, the only feminist journalist with national clout who showed any critical guts on the issue was Ellen Willis -- who got me started on the topic in 1986 when she assigned me my first piece for the Village Voice. In subsequent years, Ellen assigned me more Voice space for related stories, and herself wrote occasional pieces commenting on updates,e.g. the Buckey acquittal/hung jury I believe. But by the early 1990s, Ellen was not a Voice senior editor anymore or was gone from the staff altogether. She had no regular venue, much less national space, as Katha did. Although Pollitt says in her recent column that there have been no cases 'in a decade,' cases DID continue to surface as late as the early 1990s.

Wenatchee is the most notorious example: dozens of people were accused and some are still in prison. Plus, I remember in about 1992 or 1993, Judith Herman, the feminist psychiatrist and author of the very influential book Father-Daughter Incest, published a piece in the Nieman newsletter (the journalistic ethics thing out of Harvard) dismissing female journalists such as myself, who took false child sex abuse accusations and false memory seriously, as no more than obedient 'daddies' girls' of male editors.

"In the early 1990s, someone with Pollitt's progressive-feminist stature and steady national venue could have helped feminists and leftists claim a critical stance on this issue rather than yielding it to the right, who embraced it mainly because they don't like public child care, because they think children are parents' private property, and because they saw a very easy way to discredit feminism (a theoretical and political contributor to the hysteria).Pollitt could definitely have influenced MS. magazine and Gloria Steinem. She might also have saved some children and their
caretakers -- many of them public school and childcare workers -- from hard time in bad therapy and behind bars."

It took me longer to find Bruce Heitman and though I remembered his letter it was buried too deeply in one of my file boxes. Snedeker sent me a copy and via Carol Hopkins, living outside Cuernavaca, I got Bruce's number, who told me the Justice Committee is defunct and that he, pro tem, is working for the post office. Yes, he said, he had seen your column:

"I wanted to get prominent feminist writers to do something about this -- the left. What we at the Justice Committee found was that most of our allies tended to be on the right -- the libertarians, the Christians, even some outfits like the Rutherford Institute. Here we had people being railroaded in show trials and you'd think the left would have taken an interest. I knew you had written about it. And I thought Katha Pollitt would, since she had an important feminist audience and could make a difference. I also wanted her to look at other cases. I thought she could have at least replied to my letter. But she didn't.

"When we had the Republican convention here in San Diego in l996, there was an alternative left convention, set up in a downtown warehouse -- I tried to hand out fliers on satanic abuse cases and the injustices being done -- but there was no interest from so-called progressives.

"Back to Katha. It's curious to see her jumping on the bandwaggon after it's left the parade ground. She gives the impression it's all okay now. She says interviewing techniques of supposed victims have improved and that video-taping is mandatory. I think that in only two states, Minnesota and Alaska is it required to videotape. It's still a big issue.

"And then, at end of her article -- she put in 'feminists' almost as an afterthought. But prominent believers in satanic ritual abuse were Gloria Steinem, Ms and feminists,. They weren't part of a larger group. They were central."

But I guess, Katha, you know that now, because you've obviously got around to reading Satan's Silence. At the start of October you posted an enthusiastic review of it on Amazon.com not so long after, so the authors tell me, it's finally gone out of print. CP
.

[blanc]

how did I guess after reading the first couple of paras about an indecent exposure case with the particularity that the accused was in his house at the time of the alleged offence, that this article would really be about getting us to swallow the hysteria part in 'satanic abuse hysteria'.

[Jeff]

I lost track of Cockburn a few years ago. I didn't know he's become a climate-change denier as well.

[psynapz]

I lost track of Cockburn a few years ago. I didn't know he's become a climate-change denier as well.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Cute! I wonder if he got comprimised, but only because I'd rather not believe that the "dark side" is so mundane and stupid.

Plus homeboy can't even get his facts straight on the public nudity case, which totally fell apart upon examination. (Dude was, in fact, a drunken perv by the sound of things. Thus making all of this "fractally wrong.")

[Searcher08]

Cock
Burn




Indeed he has.

[Crow]

It's always a special moment when a man hops in to tell feminists what they should be writing about.

[professorpan]

Well, as far as panic about RA is concerned, there certainly were many people imprisoned unjustly and some are still rotting in jail. Denying that doesn't help anyone, including those who have been victims of abuse.

[American Dream]

You're certainly entitled to your own take on things, pp, but I'm not sure who you're referring to when you make the assertion that "certainly were many people imprisoned unjustly and some are still rotting in jail".

I know that I don't find Cockburn's accounting very convincing, and I'm recalling that he was a key factor in closing my mind towards the possibility of these things some 20 years ago or so, even though they were breaking out around me.

[Jeff]

Well, as far as panic about RA is concerned, there certainly were many people imprisoned unjustly and some are still rotting in jail. Denying that doesn't help anyone, including those who have been victims of abuse.

There are many people falsely imprisoned. Only with respect to RA is that considered an argument to construe the crime as imaginary.

[JackRiddler]

.

Is there a paradox in a society that punishes home nudists and makes a perversion of all sexual expression, yet also produces self-hating child rapists? Seems to me these things would go together.

[professorpan]

Well, as far as panic about RA is concerned, there certainly were many people imprisoned unjustly and some are still rotting in jail. Denying that doesn't help anyone, including those who have been victims of abuse.

There are many people falsely imprisoned. Only with respect to RA is that considered an argument to construe the crime as imaginary.

Understood, Jeff. I guess too often I've been one of the lone voices on this forum pointing out the reality of false RA panics and the damage they have caused (and are still causing -- the West Memphis 3 can explain as well as anyone the continuing consequences of fearful, misled, irrational, and vengeful people). And I don't think writers like Cockburn, who believe RA is entirely hysteria, are necessarily malign. Uninformed? Yes. Misled? Very probably. Intentionally trying to cover up something? Maybe, maybe not. But as someone who has paid attention to this subject for a couple of decades, I can understand how people can make up their minds that it's all just another witch hunt.

We know there are documented accounts of ritual abuse. We also know that many of the high-profile cases in the late 80s and early 90s, as well as some of the popular books about the subject, were bogus. Believers and deniers both make exaggerated claims, and the truth is muddled. I'm all for a sober and factual discussion of the subject, and I think vilifying those who are wrongly convinced RA doesn't exist is not a way to further the discussion. Plenty of smart, caring people have not seen the evidence many of us have seen and have made up their minds that RA is just a myth. We can reach out to those people, but they won't listen if we're shouting at them and suggesting they're intentional liars and part of the coverup.

[American Dream]

professorpan wrote:

I don't think writers like Cockburn, who believe RA is entirely hysteria, are necessarily malign. Uninformed? Yes. Misled? Very probably. Intentionally trying to cover up something? Maybe, maybe not. But as someone who has paid attention to this subject for a couple of decades, I can understand how people can make up their minds that it's all just another witch hunt.

I have seen no evidence to convince me that Cockburn's intentions are malign in this regard. His opinions here reflect the view of the cultural majority in North America, near as I can tell. But these sorts of totalistic arguments serve only to polarize the debate.

No one should be convicted of a crime based on bad evidence that was wrongly collected. We should certainly insist that prosecutors, investigators and etc. follow appropriate procedures in these cases. We should all hold fast to the principle that with any crime some people are wrongly convicted, others rightly, and yet other perpetrators neither investigated nor prosecuted as they should be.

I don't think Cockburn fully gets this and I'm not sure why. I'd imagine that ego and misogyny are involved, not to mention being a bit crystallized in his view of the world.