The Danger of Child Sexuality: A Discussion

[Gravitycollapse]

"The Danger of Child Sexuality", Foucault's dialogue with Guy Hocquenghem and Jean Danet, was produced by Roger Pillaudin and broadcast by France Culture on April 4, 1978. It was published as "La Loi de la pudeur" in RECHERCHES 37, April 1979. First published in English in Semiotext(e) Magazine (New York): Semiotext(e) Special Intervention Series 2: Loving Boys / Loving Children (Summer 1980), in a translation by Daniel Moshenberg.

This is the full version, published in: Michel Foucault: politics, philosophy, culture: interviews and other writings. Ed. by Lawrence D. Kritzman. (New York: Routledge, 1988). Translated by Alan Sheridan, with the title "Sexuality Morality and the Law."

In this discussion the three consider the illogical nature of consent laws; many of which are born out of "moral" concern rather than a legitimate fear for the child's safety. While making strong arguments for the case that those younger than 18 can and should be allowed to consent to sexual acts, the three also recognize the fact that there is a limit to the intellectual and emotional capacity of youth to consent. However, as it seems, judgement of such a cut off should be addressed by a relative judicial system and not a law of absolute age.


Warning: Many may be offended by what is said in this discussion. While I do agree with many points the three make, I do not personally endorse their messages in total. Read at your own risk.

The following is a small excerpt from the discussion...

http://www.ipce.info/ipceweb/Library/danger.htm

MICHEL FOUCAULT: All three of us agreed to take part in this broadcast (it was agreed in principle several months ago) for the following reason. Things had evolved on such a wide front, in such an overwhelming and at first sight apparently irreversible way, that many of us began to hope that the legal regime imposed on the sexual practices of our contemporaries would at last be relaxed and broken up. This regime is not as old as all that, since the penal code of 1810 (1) said very little about sexuality, as if sexuality was not the business of the law; and it was only during the 19th century and above all in the 20th, at the time of Petain or of the Mirguet amendment (1960) (2), that legislation on sexuality increasingly became oppressive. But, over the last ten years or so, a movement in public opinion and sexual morals has been discernible in favor of reconsidering this legal regime. A Commission for the Reform of Penal Law was even set up, whose task it was to revise a number of fundamental articles in the penal code. And this commission has actually admitted, I must say with great seriousness, not only the possibility, but the need to change most of the articles in our present legislation concerning sexual behavior. This commission, which has now been sitting for several months, considered this reform of the sexual legislation last May and June. I believe that the proposals it expected to make were what may be called liberal.

However, it would seem that for several months now, a movement in the opposite direction has begun to emerge. It is a disturbing movement - firstly, because it is not only occuring in France. Take, for example, what is happening in the United States, with Anita Bryant's campaign against homosexuals, which has almost gone so far as to call for murder. It's a phenomenon observable in France. But in France we see it through a number of particular, specific facts, which we shall talk about later (Jean Danet and Guy Hocquenghem will certainly provide examples), but ones that seem to show that in both police and legal practice we are returning to tougher and stricter positions. And this movement, observable in police and legal practice, is unfortunately very often supported by press campaigns, or by a system of information carried out in the press. It is therefore in this situation, that of an overall movement tending to liberalism, followed by a phenomenon of reaction, of slowing down, perhaps even the beginning of a reverse process, that we are holding our discussion this evening.

GUY HOCQUENGHEM: Six months ago we launched a petition demanding the abrogation of a number of articles in the law, in particular those concerning relations between and decriminalization of relations between adults and minors below the age of fifteen. A lot of people signed it,people belonging to a wide range of political positions, from the Communist Party to Mme. Dolto (3). So it's a petition that has been signed by a lot of people who are suspect neither of being particularly pedophiles themselves nor even of entertaining extravagant political views. We felt that a certain movement was beginning to emerge, and this movement was confirmed by the evidence submitted to the commission reforming the penal code. What we can now see, then, is not only that this kind of movement is something of a liberal illusion, but that in fact it does not amount to a profound transformation in the legal system, either in the way in which a case is investigated or in the way it is judged in court. Furthermore, at the level of public opinion, at the level of the mass media, the newspapers, radio, television, etc., it is rather the opposite that is beginning to take place, with new arguments being used. These new arguments are essentially about childhood, that is to say, about the exploitation of popular sentiment and its spontaneous horror of anything that links sex with the child. Thus in an article in the Nouvel Observeateur begins with a few remarks to the effect that "pornography involving children is the ultimate American nightmare and no doubt the most terrible in a country fertile in scandals." When someone says that child pornography is the most terrible of present scandals, one cannot but be struck by the disproportion between this - child pornography, which is not even prostitution - and everything that is happening in the world today- what the black population has to put up with in the United States, for instance. This whole campaign about pornography, about prostitution, about all those social phenomena - which are in any case controversial - only leads to one fundamental presupposition: 'it's worse when children are consenting and worse still if it is neither pornographic nor paid for', etc. In other words, the entire criminalizing context serves only to bring out the kernel of the accusation: you want to make love with consenting children. It serves only to stress the traditional prohibition and to stress in a new way, with new arguments, the traditional prohibition against sexual relations without violence, without money, without any form of prostitution, that may take place between adults and minors.

JEAN DANET: We already know that some psychiatrists consider that sexual relations between children and adults are always traumatizing. And that if a child doesn't remember them, it is because they remain in his subconscious, but in any case the child is marked forever, the child will become emotionally disturbed. So what takes place with the intervention of psychiatrists in court is a manipulation of the children's consent, a manipulation of their words. Then there is another use - a fairly recent one, I think - of repressive legislation, which should be noted because it may be used by the legal system as a temporary tactic to fill in the gaps. Indeed in the traditional disciplinary institutions - prisons, schools, and asylums - the nurses, teachers, and so on, followed a very strict regimen. Their superiors kept as close a watch on them as on the inmates. On the other hand, in the new agencies of social control, control through hierarchy is much more difficult. Indeed we may well wonder whether we are not witnessing a use of common-law legislation; incitement of a minor to commit an immoral act, for example, can be used against social workers and teachers. And I would point out in passing that Villerot is a teacher, that Gallien was a doctor even if the acts did not take place at a time when he was practicing his profession; that in 1976, in Nantes, a teacher was tried for inciting minors to immoral acts, when in fact what he had done was to supply contaceptives to the boys and girls in his charge. So the common-law appears to have been used this time to repress teachers and social workers who were not carrying out their task of social control as their respective hierarchies wished. Between 1830 and 1860, there already were laws directed specifically at teachers: certain judgements stated this explicitly. Article 334 of the Penal Code - which applied to certain persons, teachers, for example, and concerned the incitement of minors to commit immoral acts - was invoked in a case that did not involve a teacher. So we can see the extent to which such legislation is ultimately looking for places where 'perverts likely to corrupt young people' might slip in. The judges were obsessed with this. They were unable to come up with a definition of the perversions. Medicine and psychiatry were to do it for them. In the mid-19th century they had one obsession: if the pervert was everywhere, then they must start tracking him down in the most dangerous institutions, the institutions at risk, among the populations at risk, though the term had not yet been invented. If it has been possible to believe for a time that there was to be a withdrawal of legislation, it was not because we thought that we were living in a liberal period but because we knew that more subtle forms of sexual supervision would be set up - and perhaps the apparent freedom that camouflaged these more subtle, more diffuse social controls was going to extend beyond the field of the juridical and the penal. This is not always necessarily the case, and it is quite possible to believe that traditional repressive laws will function side-by-side with much more subtle form of control, a hitherto unknown form of sexology that would invade all institutions, including educational ones.