"Participant Victim": Oncology of an
Oxymoron
© 2008 by David L.
Riegel
Abstract
For many decades the social sciences
have struggled with the issue of the child who, in flagrant violation of
cultural taboos, willingly cooperates in sexual intimacies with an older
person, or even seeks out and initiates such activities. While some social
scientists have accepted the reality of this collaboration, others presume the
child to be a de facto victim. This
latter assignment, however, is contradicted by the child's willing involvement,
a conundrum which led in the 1950s to the unlikely combining of two essentially
diametrically opposed words into the phrase "participant victim." For
a time, various authors embraced this concept; however, as victimology and
child sexual abuse anxiety began to take hold in the late 1970s, the
"victim" was redefined as absolutely incapable of being a
"participant," and the phrase has fallen into disuse.
The social sciences have traveled a
rocky road since the journey began with such pioneers as Wundt, Hall,
Ebbinghaus, and James; and over the years the jarring self-correcting nature of
science has knocked the wheels off some of the most prestigious of chariots.
From the masturbatory insanity hypothesis that afflicted young people for some two
hundred years up until the 1950s (Hare, 1962), through the hyper-behavioralism
of John Watson (1913) epitomized by the traumatization
of "Little Albert," (Harris, 1979) the lobotomies of Freemen and
Watts (Swayze, 1995), and Hawke's castration "solution" (Kinsey,
Pomeroy, & Martin, 1953, p. 744)–just to mention a few of the more
egregious–one staunchly defended hypothesis after another has fallen by the
wayside, but not before having done incalculable and irretrievable harm to
countless people. In the victimological hypothesis currently in vogue,
"Priests, doctors, psychiatrists, and others have invested sex with
magical powers ..." (Wilson, 1981, p. 129) while at the same time
installing themselves as the principal authorities in sexual matters: "Victimologists
are, de facto, the new social-science police." (Money, 1988, p. 9).
Children are seen as incapable of grasping the complexities inherent in this
magical view of sexuality, and when they choose to participate in sexual
activities with others, especially older persons, they are automatically
presumed to be "victims." Founded principally on ideologies, and contradicted
by empirical research (e.g. Bender & Blau, 1937; Ingram, 1981; Sandfort,
1987; etc.), the validity of this "magical powers" hypothesis of harm,
like so many others that preceded it, is open to question.
One of the few pre-1950s empirical studies
of sexual interactions between children and older persons was conducted by
Bender & Blau (1937), who concluded that "The child was either a
passive or active partner ... and in some instances seemed to be the initiator
or seducer." (p.517). The perception of the child principally as a
"victim" is not found in this study. That children were sexual beings
capable of expressing and acting upon their sexual desires was generally
accepted in that period; Angelides
(2004) notes that early in the 20th century "[V]arious ...
discourses began explicitly to acknowledge child sexuality as a normal and
natural reality. In fact, prior to the 1980s [textual] representations of child
sexuality were common, particularly in the context of sexual encounters with
adults ... as flirtatious, precocious, and seductive..." (p. 143).
The precise beginnings of the idea of the child as a "victim" are
uncertain, but, as noted above, the concept of the child being a
"participant" had become well established by the 1950s when these two
were formally united:
Sexual victimization is a form of
prohibited sex contact involving two or more persons. It is of such a character
as to give these persons the respective legal statuses of victims and offenders
under the laws designed to protect the 'weaker' against the 'stronger' members
of society. From this definition it follows that there are two major types of
victimization episodes: those of actual assault by an offender who forces his
sexual contacts on a victim without the latter's consent, against his will, or
against his resistance; and those episodes of mutual consent relations between
coparticipants, in which the consent of the 'weaker' party has no legal
sanction. The first type includes victims in fact as well as in law. These may
be called accidental victims. The second type consists of victims under the law
but not in fact. They are participant victims. (Mangus, 1953b p. 147, cf. Weiss, Rogers,
Darwin, & Dutton, 1955 p. 2).
Apart from the questionable
assumption that children are always in the "weaker" position in these
transactions (they can destroy the older partner simply by complaining or
making an accusation), it seems illogical that an individual who is "not
in fact" a "victim" can subsequently be designated "under
the law" as a "participant victim." In this interpretation it
would appear that "the law" is not concerned with tangible "fact,"
but instead with such ethnocentric cultural ephemera as tradition, ideologies, religion,
and other superstitions. Science should have little or no use for these latter
factors, but rather is charged by its very nature with a relentless search for
truth and facts. Regardless of the impeccable credentials and good intentions
of the originator(s), the fabrication of the "participant victim"
cannot, at least in hindsight, be seen as science.
Various authors (e.g., Bolen, 2001; Davis, 2005;
Ingram described participants who
quite obviously did not see themselves as victims, except perhaps as victims of
their parents and other authorities. Even though he titles his chapter
"Participating Victims," his obvious emphasis is on participation, almost to the exclusion of any
aspect of victimization.
The use of "participant
victim" began to decline with the advent of the "child sexual
abuse" paradigm. One of the first proponents of this victimological concept
was Finkelhor (1979, 1981, 1984, 1986) who took the position that almost every
sexually expressed relationship between a minor and an older person is inevitably destructive to the
minor's psychosexual development and overall mental health. Thus children were redefined
as innocent victims without any participation in, or responsibility for, such
relationships (Angelides, 2004), and the participant victim, for better or
worse, gradually faded from the social science lexicon.
Although victimology and child sexual abuse
anxiety rapidly surged to the forefront of both academic and "pop"
social science in the latter third of the 20th century, not everyone
viewed this phenomenon as positive. Money ( 1988), for example,
described victimology as "a science only in the etymology of its name. In
practice it is a branch of the sexosophy of the judicial and punishment
industry, not of sexology, the science of sex and sex research." (p. 9). The victimological assumptions that
child/older person sexual contacts cause “harm, that this harm is
pervasive …, [and] that this harm is likely to be intense... " have been called into
question by Rind, Bauserman, & Tromovitch (1998, p.22). Neither did Constantine
(1981) accept
that such contacts were a principal source of harm, but observed that “Negative reactions of
parents [and other adults] ... to a child’s sexual encounters, aside from their
function of inducing guilt, can be ... the most psychonoxious aspect of the
entire experience." (p. 241). Schultz (1980) further notes that
victimology "seems to artificially create 'norms' for minors and then
justifies departures from them as traumatic. Such fabrication is professionally
unethical and possibly damaging to minors..." (p. 40).
The dissemination of the
"magical powers" paradigm was noted previously (Wilson, 1981, p.
129), and Wilson went on to observe that boys pay little heed to such ideas,
but rather see " ... sex as being no more than just a game... ."
(ibid., p. 130). As they continue to promote their victimological magical
powers hypotheses of harm, members of what Dineen (1996) refers to as the
"psychology industry" would rather not be reminded of the dire
sequelae of their predecessors' no-doubt well intentioned blunders mentioned
above, nor of the possibility that they may be doing similar harm to the very
children they claim to be "protecting." The adoption and subsequent
abandonment of the "participant victim" paradigm forcefully demonstrates
the tenuousness of hypotheses which are based on ideology rather than empirical
evidence, and the extensive iatrogenic harm that may be generated by such
specious experiments on real people.
Earlier in this paper, the
statement by Mangus (1953b p. 147) that some children are "victims under
the law, but not in fact" was quoted. With the "participant
victim" hypothesis essentially having been abandoned, the issue for those
"not in fact" children then becomes the question of their
willingness, i.e., their capacity to "consent," which, although
disparaged by some (e.g., Spiegel, 2000), is
presented as an accomplished fact by Bender & Blau (1937), Weiss et
al. (1955), Sandfort (1987), and supported by the research of Waber et al.
(2007), as well as by the American
Psychological Association (1989) and many others. Absent this consent,
the child is, as Mangus and others note, an "accidental victim," a
victim both in fact and under the law. But with this consent in place, we are
left with a "participant" who is not a victim "in fact,"
but only in the eyes of "laws seemingly designed for the protection of the
young [that] are really intended to control them." (Mirkin, 1999, p. 503).
In the final analysis, social scientists need to come to grips with the reality
that "participant victim" is nothing more than an obsolescent oxymoron, and that in fact there exist only
the mutually exclusive non-consenting child "victim" and the consenting
child "participant," both of whom are viable individuals whose humanity,
integrity, rights, freedoms, and choices deserve to be respected in either
situation.
References:
American Psychological Association
(1989) Amicus curiae brief to the United States Supreme Court, Nos. 88-805,
88-1125, and 88-1309.
Angelides, S.
(2004). Feminism, child sexual abuse, and the erasure of child sexuality. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies,
10(2), 141-177.
120-133.
Bolen, R. (2001). Child sexual abuse: Its scope and our failure. Dordrecht, The
Netherlands: Kluwer
Davis, J. (2005). Accounts of innocence: Sexual abuse, trauma and the self. Chicago:
University of Chicago.
56-60.
Dineen, T. (1996). Manufacturing victims. Toronto: Robert
Davies.
Finkelhor, D (1979).
What's wrong with sex between adults and children? Ethics and the problem of
sexual abuse. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry. 49(4): 692-697.
Finkelhor, D (1981). Sexually
victimized children. New York: The Free Press
Finkelhor, D (1984). Child
sexual abuse. New theory and research. New York: Free
Press.
Finkelhor, D (1986). A
sourcebook on child sexual abuse. Beverly Hills, CA: SAGE Publications.
Hare, E. (1962). Masturbatory insanity: the
history of an idea. Journal of Mental
Science, 108, 1-25.
Harris, B. (1979). Whatever happened to Little
Albert? American Psychologist 34, 151-160.
Ingram, M. (1981). Participating Victims: A
Study of Sexual Offenses with Boys. in L. Constantine, & F. Martinson
(Eds.) Children and sex. New findings,
new perspectives. Boston: Little Brown.
Kinsey, A; Pomeroy, W.,
& Martin, C. (1953). Sexual behavior
in the human female.
Philadelphia: Saunders.
Mangus, A. (1953a).
Methods in sexual deviation research. In F. Talman,
(Dir.) California sexual deviation research. 134-154.
California: State of California, Department of Mental
Hygiene.
Mangus, A. (1953b). Sex crimes
in California. In F. Talman, (Dir.) California
sexual deviation research. 9-46. California: State of
California, Department of Mental Hygiene.
Mirkin, H. (1999). The prohibited image: Child pornography and the
First Amendment. In J. Elias, V. Elias, V. Bullough, G. Brewer, J. Douglas,
& W. Jarvis, (Eds.) Porn 101: Eroticism, pornography, and the First
Amendment. Amherst, NY: Prometheus.
Money, J. (1988). Commentary: current status of
sex research. Journal of psychology and
human sexuality, 1, 5-15
Rind, B., Bauserman,
R., & Tromovich, P. (1998). A meta-analytic examination of assumed
properties of child sexual abuse using college samples. Psychological
Bulletin, 124 (1), 22-53.
Rogers, M.. & Weiss, J.
(1953). Study of sex crimes against children, Introduction and conclusions.
In F. Tallman (Dir.), California sexual deviation research. California: State of
California. Department of Mental Hygiene, 37-52
Sandfort, T. (1987). Boys on
their contacts with men: a study of sexually expressed friendships. Elmhurst,
NY: Global Academic.
Schultz, L. (1980). The sexual victimology of youth.
Springfield IL: Charles C. Thomas.
Spiegel, D. (2000) The price of abusing
children and numbers. Sexuality & Culture
4 (2) 63-66.
Swayze, V..
(1995). Frontal leucotomy and related psychosurgical procedures. American Journal of Psychiatry 152 (4),
505-515.
Waber, D., De Moor, C., Forbes, P., Almli, C., Botteron, K., Leonard,
G., Milovan, D., Paus, T., Rumsey, J. (2007) The NIH MRI study of normal
brain development. Journal of the International
Neuropsychological Society 13
pp. 1-18.
Watson, J. (1913)
Psychology as the behaviorist views it. Psychological
Review 20 158-177.
Weiss, J., Rogers,
E., Darwin, M., & Dutton, C. (1955). Study of girl sex victims. Psychiatry
Quarterly, 21, 1-27.
Wilson, P. (1981). The man they called
a monster. North Melbourne, Australia: Cassell.