September 26, 2009

Paedophile Hysteria: A Tentative Foucauldian Analysis

Posted in America, Books, History, Hysteria, Media, Political Philosophy, Politics, Society at 12:29 pm by Paul Sagar

That Britain is a nation which suffers, to varying extents, from a mass hysteria about paedophilia would seem a relatively uncontroversial statement. This, of course, is not to suggest that paedophilia is anything other than a heinous, deeply disturbing and horribly abusive practice. But it is to observe that the tabloid frenzies and mass panics about paedophiles – so fantastically satirised by Brass Eye – are a very real part of modern British society.

The latest manifestation of this came a couple of weeks ago, with the launch of the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA). This almost universally derrided mad-cap government scheme would apparently have “blacklisted” parents from being able to organise activities with their neighbours’ children if their behaviour had ever been reported as having involved the use of…sarcastic comments.

The ISA appears to have been bumped on the head – for now. But it’s worth asking, what was it that made the government initially think that the ISA was a good idea: an appropriate response to a widely-perceived social problem which would satisfy public demand for solutions to that problem?

A fairly standard story is usually trotted out at this point: New Labour is slavishly obsessed with chasing tabloid headlines; tabloids stir up paedophile frenzies to make money for themselves; ergo the government introduces crazy legislation as a way of pandering to mass hysteria on the paedophile issue.

All those things are, it’s worth stressing, true. But I’ve recently been wondering if perhaps there is a great deal more to it than just that. Here’s my very tentative early analysis.

I’ve recently been increasingly influenced by the thought of Michael Foucault, in particular his analysis of the prison system in Discipline and Punish. In that work, Foucault analyses the evolution and change of social systems of punishment, which includes the rise of individualised punishment, surveillance and importantly, the birth of the prison. The book is absolutely rammed full of ideas – many of which I’m still a long way from fully appreciating – but one aspect of Foucault’s analysis seems to me as follows.

There appears to be a paradox at the heart of modern penal systems. Prison is the default punishment for everything except the pettiest of crimes in our society. As soon as a crime breaches a certain level of (perceived) seriousness, prison is the inevitable and unchanging response. Yet if prison is intended to deter others from transgressing the law, to prevent individuals re-offending or to make society less crime-ridden, as we are frequently told, then it manifestly fails on all these counts – and badly*. Michael Howard was very wrong to claim that “prison works” if he meant it addressed those concerns. Prison is a school for criminals, and what is worse, a revolving-door institution of repeated incarceration for the majority of those who come into contact with it.

What Foucault does is flip the analysis on its head. Prison’s function is clearly not deterrence, correction or prevention – hence why it fails to achieve all these things, and why no serious efforts are implemented to try and make it achieve these things. Given this is in fact the state of affairs we are presented with, Foucault argues that it must in truth be the case that prison’s purpose is actually not to deter, to prevent re-offending or to make society less crime ridden at all. That those are prison’s functions is a common and deep-running misperception. In truth, it’s functions must be something else entirely (and certainly prison must have some function or functions, after all why else would prisons continue to exist unless they were doing something useful for which they were needed?).

Rather, prison’s function is far darker, more sinister and complicated than we are commonly encouraged to believe. It is something to do with the facilitation of methods of social control and surveillance, the entrenchment of the powers and privileges of the ruling classes, and the maintenance of classes of illegality which reflect social hierarchies of power (hence, for example, why very few “white collar” criminals go to prison, and most of the world’s prison populations are poor and working class criminals).

In providing this analysis – which one may or may not find plausible – Foucault presents the prison not as a simple institution offering simple solutions (deterrence, prevention, rehabilitation etc) to a simple phenomenon, but as a complex institution, responding to a very complex phenomenon with apparently simple solutions, which in fact mask vast underlying complexities about what prison’s true function is.

These vast complexities are, Foucault apparently contends, the product of a milieu of factors and tensions embedded within – and to a large extent, underpinning – our society. One of the more obvious ones to consider here is what can be termed the forces of the means of production (to borrow some Marxist-esque language): the way that relations of property influence not just society’s laws on property, but also the social hierarchies that grow up in relation to those property distributions and laws. These forces of the means of production shape our society in fundamental ways, one of which is the creation of certain classes of “crime” and “criminals”, defined in relation to the ownership of property under the particular property laws of a society . Prison must be seen as, in part, a complex product of those underlying forces of production.

Prison does have a function, therefore – but it’s function is not straightforwardly to deter, prevent and rehabilitate. It is rather (at least in part) to reflect the distributions of material and social power, and to be conducive to ends which those who control the most material and social power find beneficial (consciously or otherwise). Prison is not a simple response to a simple problem: it’s a complex phenomenon which is a product of not just the likewise complex phenomenon of “crime”, but also of the underlying features of our society which define what “crime” is in reference to fundamental forces, and relations that structure and define society in the first place.

So what on Earth does this have to do with paedophiles?

What I want to borrow are Foucault’s ideas that we need to analyse institutions or happenings as being the products of complex social phenomena in order to properly understand them, rather than offering easy, surface-level explanations.

The paedophile hysteria example looks like a case in point. The story which goes “there is paedophile hysteria because the Daily Mail creates it” looks to me far too simple. Sure, the Mail feeds a hysteria, and to a certain extent no doubt helps create it too. Yet we need to step back and ask: what is it about our society which means that creating hysteria about monstrous paedophile bogeymen hiding in every bush preying on every child is so easy, and so easily-received? Our society is highly conducive and receptive to this sort of hysteria in the first place. That the Mail et al. feed it – and the government respond with things like ISA – is indicative that something more fundamental is at play.

So what is it? Frustratingly, my analysis here comes up short. Certainly, there appears to be an age-old need – or perhaps better, demand – by human societies for the creation of enemies against which to define and oppose themselves. This is commonly done with external enemies who are perceived – sometimes rightly, but more often wrongly – as being fundamentally different and alien, as well as a mortal and perennial threat. Think the USSR until the early 1990s; think Islamic fundamentalism today.

There is also apparently a parallel need (or demand) to create enemies within societies; the terrifying threat of “the enemy within” which Thatcher, for example, identified, articulated and employed with such great effect. At this point crass and crude analogies to the persecutions of witches in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries appear, at least tentatively, useful: the demonising and hunting-down of the internal enemy which – perhaps even more so than the external enemy – was a fundamental threat to life and limb. The same can, tentatively, be said of McCarthyism in 1950′s America: the zeal and fervour of the need to expose internal enemy agents working from within one’s own society – though in this case, on behalf of the external enemy too – created a truly terrifying possibility for many Americans caught-up in that particular hysteria.

So society’s appear to need – or possibly, demand – enemies, both within and without. It looks, again tentatively, as though a plausible story can be told about paedophile hysteria fulfilling – and being the product of – something fundamental in our society: a need for internal enemies; for demons that must be hunted down, exposed and destroyed. The behaviour of tabloid newspapers, and kowtowing populist governments, is only the surface of a very complex picture.

Because we surely must not simply stop at noting that paedophile hysteria appears to fulfil a need (or demand) for internal enemies. We must in turn ask: why do we collectively need (or demand) these internal enemies, and what are the underling social forces that create this demand? Furthermore, what is it about society that makes us turn to paedophiles specifically as the bogey-men of choice? Clearly, it has something to do with sex – but that in itself opens up a whole can of worms about the way our society conceives of, orientates itself towards, and responds to the notions of sex, innocence, vulnerability and chastity. Which, again, goes to show how complex this is – and also, incidentally, how society-specific: in the United States, the media hysteria centres around kidnapping**, and not paedophelia. The obsession with child molestation appears to be a very British thing, even if the need for internal enemies appears more universal.

So what is it about our British society – about all of us , you and I, collectively – that facilitates and enables the paedophile hysteria? Blaming tabloid newspapers and demagogic politicians can only be one chapter of a much longer story.

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*I’m going to leave out considerations about retribution and revenge. Foucault addresses these, but they’re far too complex for present purposes.

** This was my marked experience when spending two months in the USA last summer: kidnapping stories dominated the 24 hours news networks in the way that paedophile hysteria is seized upon by British tabloids.

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