Some Aborigines 'Don't Understand Abuse'

Discussion in 'Ethics, Morality, & Justice' started by Willy, Jul 24, 2007.

  1. Willy Banned Banned

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    Some Aborigines 'Don't Understand Abuse'
    July 24, 2007

    SOME Aborigines do not fully understand what child abuse is, the chair of the Federal Government's indigenous intervention strategy said.

    Sue Gordon said she has been speaking with women in Maningrida, one of the communities which is to be taken over as part of a Commonwealth plan to stop child sex abuse in Northern Territory Aboriginal communities.

    "I spoke to them about the definitions of child abuse, that is a lot of people don't fully understand it," Dr Gordon told ABC radio.

    "Sometimes people think that sexual abuse is a straight sexual assault but it can take many forms.

    "It's very important for women to understand there's a difference between a rape, sexual assault and grooming a child for abuse."

    Dr Gordon said she had also spoken to the women about the importance of children attending school.

    "They're thinking ... the children do need long-term help and I thought that was a very good outcome."

    http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22125215-5005961,00.html

    Is it they "don't understand abuse" or they don't care?
     
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  3. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Many people don't understand the concept of abuse. This problem is exacerbated in poor communities.

    I once read an article by an American feminist that asserted rape among ducks and fruit flies. She certainly didn't understand. But it would be hard to accuse that she didn't care.

    Take something like Jomo Kenyatta's Facing Mount Kenya, which includes sociological consideration of sexual grooming in tribal cultures. And then consider Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Neither the tribal culture nor the speculative future culture bear the same values of shame that we of the twenty-first century industrialized Western world recognize.

    Then consider that one of the challenges faced by sexual abuse survivors in modern Western society is a stigma that comes not only from the abuse itself or hurtful accusations that a victim deserved or wanted the abuse, but also from the well-intended portion of a survivor's life. The effect of having everyone who cares about you walking on eggshells is a tremendous burden of guilt that afflicts many abuse survivors, and breaks more than a few.

    Part of this stigma comes from simplistic double standards in society. A man who gets around is a stud. Accusations of insensitivity are futile. A woman who gets around is a slut.

    Imagine for a minute you were anally raped by another man. And then imagine if, instead of giving a damn, all your friends abandon you because you're a homo slut. Doesn't seem fair, does it? And then you find you can't talk to what friends you have left, or your family, because everyone's so goddamned nervous about how to treat you in the aftermath. I promise you, Willy, the effect would be tremendous at least. There are myriad other psychological factors including things like religion.

    Take away the sacrosanct abstracts, and the experience will be different. Eliminate the post-Puritan bullshit we've attached to sexuality, and a good deal of that stigma will disappear.

    We call it abuse because at least one party is a child. I wouldn't suggest that we revoke that standard, but the first thing you'll have to teach some of the victims of abuse in some cultures is the notion that they are abused.

    Take the Huxley example, for instance. In one scene, a young girl is not enjoying the mandatory sex-play. This isn't so much the abstract sacrosanct, but rather the fact that it doesn't feel good, she's not enjoying it, and she'd rather be doing something else.

    See, this is the thing about the Garden of Eden: before the apple, Adam had it made. Tasked to populate the Earth, he had a woman crafted in God's notion of beauty to screw limitlessly, and without any sense of shame. It wasn't, "That's right, you dirty bitch! Come on! Come on!" It was more, "Wow. This is great!"

    Think about the shame. That it is a core mythopoeic component in Abramic and post-Abramic cultures is telling. Thousands of years of prevailing myths searing shame into our consciences is a powerful coefficient.

    And other cultures simply view shame differently; sexual shame is not necessarily so close to the center of every culture's mythology. As such, something will be lost in translation. We should not be surprised if someone from a different culture does not understand our notion of what constitutes sexual abuse.
     
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  5. Willy Banned Banned

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    Or maybe what white folks consider "sex abuse" is just normal cultural behaviour for Aborigines?
     
    Last edited: Jul 24, 2007
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  7. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Could be. Does that mean the whites are tight, or the Aborigines loose?
     
  8. Willy Banned Banned

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    I think it has more to do with the different levels of intelligence, of different peoples.
     
  9. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    An interesting thesis. Can you back it at all, or is it just speculation? For instance, is sitzpinkel significant of cultural differences between Germans and Americans, or does it indicate different levels of intelligence (e.g., Germans are incapable of aiming)?
     
  10. Willy Banned Banned

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    If one culture is accepts child sexual abuse as the norm and another culture does not, I would consider the accepting culture least intelligent.
     
  11. Grantywanty Registered Senior Member

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    If one culture thought it was OK to come into land where other people had lived for hundreds or thousands of years and

    kill many of them
    sterilize many of them
    take their children way and beat the children if they spoke their native languages
    forbid their religions


    and the victimized culture would never have done the same to the other, I consider the victimized culture MORE INTELLIGENT. Westerners consider the ability to make weapons and ignorance of other cultures to be signs of their own intelligence. They are wrong about this.

    None of this excuses child abuse - much of which white cultures aimed directly at aboriginal children and contributed to in a variety of ways including forced reltocation, destruction of sacred land, destruction of the religions, murder, rape, racist indoctrination and so on. Oddly enough, just like whites aboriginals abuse children when they are poor and abused themselves.
     
  12. Xev Registered Senior Member

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    What the frack is "grooming a child for abuse?"


    If they don't percieve it as abuse, how abusive is it?
     
  13. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Xev

    In that context, grooming a child for abuse is laying the behvioral groundwork for a child's complicity and participation. It's similar to grooming a child for other crime: running drugs, break-and-enter, confidence swindles, &c.

    As to how abusive? Hell, I don't know. I'm not prepared to declare a general principle. In, say, American terms, that's an interesting question. At some point, I will be obliged to force my daughter to wear clothes. At some point, I will have to do something about her habit of coming to my room every 3:00 AM and crawling into my bed. To the other, I'm in no rush to sexualize her outlook.

    According to other terms, though, yikes. I mean, reading Kenyatta's Facing Mt. Kenya, I can grasp the significance and propriety of certain sexual-grooming behaviors within certain tribal cultures (e.g. femoral intercourse as "practice"). I won't pretend for a moment, though, that there is no exploitation. In terms of the topic case, we don't even have enough of a sense of the range of alleged abuse to make even those broad statements.
     
  14. Xev Registered Senior Member

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    Tiassa:
    I can see this happening, sure. But I can also see this as just a well-intentioned government trying to force the recent trend of paranoia about child sex abuse on the Aborigines.

    I think you will be forced to do so soon enough, primarily to avoid a visit from Child Protective Services.
     
  15. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    I can imagine that, too. Um, how might one say, "We need more details," about this and not sound so damned undignified as it does to my ear?

    Yeah, I suppose. To the other, perhaps I should start conditioning her to sleep with her hands outside the blankets, perform panty checks each morning to ensure she hasn't "sinned" ... I'm sorry, but doesn't that just seem creepy? I can't figure out how that sort of puritanical focus on sex actually helps anything.
     
  16. guthrie paradox generator Registered Senior Member

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    It helps keep them titivated, like Clinton and Lewinsky.

    It keeps them busy, and scared, like the reds under the bed.

    And in the case of Willy, it feeds his trollish nature.
     
  17. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Yeah, but isn't that ... creepy? I mean, truly, skin-crawlingly creepy? To be so sexually repressed that you take it out on children?

    For instance, children learn masturbation naturally at an early age. In my daughter's case, I just don't see what the point would be of attaching Pavlovian conditioning to her future sexuality. There's something inherently perverse, it seems, about curbing sexual expression by becoming inwardly obsessed with it.
     
  18. Xev Registered Senior Member

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    Tiassa:
    Off-topic, marginally, but there's probably an age appropriate time to simply explain a concept of privacy to the kid. Both of my sisters went through a period of streaking when they were about five - my stepmother basically dealt with the subject by explaining privacy to them, without even mentioning sex.

    You know the show, "To Catch a Predator?"
    I love that show, in a furtive guilty way. I mean, I recognize that it's scummy, but there's something about the setups and Chris Hanson's interactions with the pedophiles that reduces me to laughter after a few pints.
    But you've got to wonder about people who decide to roleplay 13 year old girls and have men chat them up on the internet.
    I suppose you could say that about people who work for rape crisis centers - they're also exposing themselves to nasty horribleness, but it seems on a different level than pretending to be a 13 year old and listening to "like2lickU24" talk about his johnson on AIM chat.

    It takes sexualizing a child in your own mind, to think of other people doing it in theirs.
     
  19. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Huh? Actually, the only reason I ask is that my first response is probably off the mark, but here goes.

    What if the other people make a point of it? I'm not about to condition my daughter (again, Pavlovian) to break her desire to be around her father as much as possible. The objection put before me by the Christian side of her family, however, involved both the developmental concerns and the idea of sexual abuse; that is, the developmental concern focused entirely on sexuality.

    Think of it this way: If I become aware that she is vaginally masturbating, my obligation to stop this habit is a matter pertaining to her health. (As weird and creepy as it sounds, you'd be amazed--or, maybe not if we've similar experiences with people--at the things a young boy will attempt to insert into his penis. BBs, twigs, coffee straws ... I've heard plenty of strange stories from nurses in family and pediatric practice. Though I must admit, sticking things into my penis isn't a phase I recall going through.)

    Why introduce "sin" and shame when health is the focus?

    Of course, as I said, I expect that I've read the point wrongly.
     
  20. Xev Registered Senior Member

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    Tiassa:
    Yes, but I'm tired and didn't explain it well.
    What I mean is that a person who, in your example, introduces the concept of "sin" or the idea that a naked child is in some way an abused child, is looking at children in a sexual way. Not to call your partner's family pedophiles - but there's something weird to me, in focusing on a child's sexuality that way.
     
  21. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    In that case, I think we're on the same page. Thanks for clearing it up.
     
  22. Baron Max Registered Senior Member

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    I know lots of people who say the same kind of thing about homosexuality. So...?

    Little girls in India, and many places in the world, are married and have children by 12 or 13. What's the big deal with that?

    Baron Max
     
  23. Willy Banned Banned

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    And now that same one culture that thought it was OK to come into land where other people had lived for hundreds or thousands of years are still trying to help the Aboriginal people understand what they are doing with their children is sexual child abuse to us.

    Right now it is us Westerners that need those weapon's to defend our boarders from all those "victimized cultures" that want to live with us.

    For you to claim that Westerners influence was able to change the minds of Aboriginals to the point where they would want to have sex with their children, that is a claim that makes Nazi's smille.
     

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