Chapter 8----The Evolution of Childrearing
"Who
would not shudder if he were given the choice of eternal death
or life again as a child? Who would not choose to die?" |
----St. Augustine
|
Children throughout history have arguably been more
vital, more gentle, more joyous, more trustful, more curious, more
courageous and more innovative than adults. Yet adults throughout
history have routinely called little children "beasts," "sinful,"
"greedy," "arrogant," "lumps of flesh," "vile," "polluted," "enemies,"
"vipers" and "infant fiends."1 Although it is extraordinarily
difficult to believe, parents until relatively recently have been
so frightened of and have so hated their newborn infants that they
have killed them by the billions, routinely sent them out to extremely
neglectful wetnurses, tied them up tightly in swaddling bandages lest
they be overpowered by them, starved, mutilated, raped, neglected
and beat them so badly that prior to modern times I have not been
able to find evidence of a single parent who would not today be put
in jail for child abuse. I have searched so hard during the past three
decades for any exceptions to this extremely abusive pattern that
I have offered a prize to anyone who could find even one "good mother"
prior to the eighteenth century-the definition being one who would
not today be incarcerated for child abuse. No one so far has claimed
the prize. Instead, historians have assumed that my evidence for routinely
abusive parenting must be terribly exaggerated, since if it were true
it "would mean parents acted in direct opposition to their biological
inheritance," and surely evolution "wouldn't be so careless...as to
leave us too immature to care properly for our offspring."2
It is not surprising that the existence of widespread
child abuse throughout history has been viewed with disbelief.
3 In this chapter, the historical evidence for each childrearing
practice will be presented, focusing on the actual statements made
by caretakers and children so that one can understand the intrapsychic
reasons behind the abuse and neglect and show how parents have struggled
against restaging their own childhoods and have slowly evolved the
more loving, empathic childrearing which has been achieved by some
families in the modern world.
THE MISSING FATHER: CHILDHOOD IN THE GYNARCHY
The problem with the overly monolithic conception of a "patriarchy"
wherein men dominate women both in society and in the family is that
while no Bachofen-style "matriarchal" society has been found,4
there is little evidence that until modern times fathers have been
very much present in historical families. In our promiscuous chimpanzee
ancestors, fathers were quite absent in child-rearing, so there are
no "families,"5 only grandmothers and mothers moving about
with their children.6 It is also likely that "there were
no Neandertal families to begin with,"7 since women and
children lived in separate areas from the males in caves. Although
Bachofen's "gynocratic state" is only slightly approximated in such
tribes as the Iroquois, the Navajo, the Ashanti, and the Dahomeans,8
the families themselves in preliterate cultures are usually run by
women, who often live in separate spaces from their husbands. In some,
like the Ashanti, they have a "visiting husband...in which the husband
and wife live with their respective mothers [and] at night the man
'visits' his wife in her house..."9 In others, men spend
much of their time in their own cult houses, and women in separate
family or menstrual huts, "segregating themselves of their own accord."10
Even when men lived with their wives, females took care of the children,
although cross-cultural studies conclude that "in the majority of
societies mothers are not the principal caretakers or companions of
young children...older children and other female family members" mainly
looking after them.11 Although in a few very simple hunting
tribes fathers are claimed to hold their infants, it turns out they
are only hallucinating being fused with their mothers, "fondling the
child as its mother does. He takes it to his breast and holds it there,"12
or sucks its face in the traditional "full-lipped manner,"13
using the infant as a breast substitute but not really caretaking.
Even when the children are somewhat older, fathers are generally not
the ones that teach them skills: "Among the Hadza, as a typical example,
boys learn their bow-and-arrow hunting knowledge and techniques and
their tracking skills mainly informally from other boys"14
not their fathers.
The historical family, it turns out, cannot remotely
be termed a "patriarchy" until modern times. It is in fact a gynarchy,
composed of the grandmother, mother, aunts, unmarried daughters, female
servants, midwives, neighbors called "gossips" who acted as substitute
mothers, plus the children.15 Fathers in traditional families
may sometimes eat and sleep within the gynarchy, but they do not determine
its emotional atmosphere, nor do they in any way attempt to raise
the children. To avoid experiencing their own domination and abuse
during childhood by females, men throughout history have instead set
up androcentric political and religious spheres for male-only group-fantasy
activities, contributing to the family gynarchy only some sustenance,
periodic temper tantrums and occasional sexual service.
Evidence of fathers playing any real role in children's
upbringing is simply missing until early modern times. In antiquity,
I have been unable to find a single classical scholar who has been
able to cite any instance of a father saying one word to his child
prior to the age of seven.16 Little children were occasionally
shown as used by fathers as sensuous objects-as when in Aristophanes'
Wasps the father says he "routinely enjoys letting his daughter
fish small coins from his mouth with her tongue"17-but
otherwise, scholars conclude, "In antiquity, women [and children]
lived shut away [from men]. They rarely showed themselves in public
[but] stayed in apartments men did not enter; they rarely ate with
their husbands...they never spent their days together."18
In Greece, for instance, "women had a special place. Larger houses
at any rate had a room or suite of rooms in which women worked and
otherwise spent much of their day, the women's apartments, the gynaikonitis,
which Xenophon says was "separated from the men's quarters by a bolted
door."19 In two-story houses, the gynaikonitis would
usually be upstairs."20 The men's dining-room, the andron,
was located downstairs near the entrance, guarding the women's quarters:
"Here men in the family dined and entertained male guests...Vase-paintings
do not depict Greek couples eating together."21 This mainly
vertical organization of most homes lasted well into the eighteenth
century, when a new "structure of intimacy" began to be built, with
rooms connected to each other on the same level.22
The women's area held the grandmother, the mother,
the concubines, the slave nurses, the aunts and the children. Thus
Herodotus could assume his reader would easily recognize families
where "a boy is not seen by his father before he is five years old,
but lives with the women,"23 and Aristotle could assume
his readers' assent that "no male creatures take trouble over their
young."24 Ancient Greek, Roman and Jewish men had all-male
eating clubs where women and children were not welcome.25
Plato has Socrates suggest a possibly better home arrangement, with
"dinners at which citizens will feast in the company of their children....In
general, however, children ate with their mothers, not their fathers...Eating
and drinking, far from offering the whole family an opportunity for
communal activity, tended to express and reinforce cleavages within
it."26 Boys tended to remain in the gynarchy of their own
or others' homes until their middle teens.27
The husband is usually missing from the homes of most
earlier societies, and not just during their frequent military service.
Evelyn Reed describes the early "matrifamily" as everywhere being
ruled by mothers: "The family in Egypt...was matriarchal...The most
important person in the family was not the father, but the mother.
The Egyptian wife was called the 'Ruler of the House'...there is no
corresponding term for the husband."28 In rural Greek villages
even today the mother owns the house, passes it on to her daughter
as dowry, and continues to rule the house when her daughter has children.29
Indeed, the husband was rarely with his family in antiquity-legislators
sometimes suggest that in order to prevent population decline it would
be a good idea for husbands to visit their wives occasionally and
not just have sex with boys, as in Solon's law "that a man should
consort with his wife not less than three times a month-not for pleasure
surely, but as cities renew their agreements from time to time."30
But for the most part, as Plutarch puts it, "Love has no connection
whatsoever with the women's quarters;"31 it is reserved
for pederastic relations with boys. As Scroggs summarized Greco-Roman
practice, "To enter the 'women's quarters' in search of love is to
enter the world of the feminine and therefore is effeminate for a
male."32 Xenophon says "the women's apartments [are] separated
from the men's by a bolted door..."33 As Plutarch wrote,
"Genuine love has no connections whatsoever with the women's quarters."34
When Socrates asks, "Are there any people you talk to less than you
do to your wife?" his answer was, "Possibly. But if so, very few indeed."35
Men stayed in the thiasos, the men's club, with other men, and had
little to do with their children. Greek boys stayed in the gynarchy
of their own home until they at the age of about ten were forced to
be eromenos, sexual objects, in the andron of a much older man's home.36
Greek girls stayed in the gynarchy until they were about twelve, when
they too were raped by a much older man, a stranger chosen for them
by their family to be their husband. The father might try to enforce
an occasional dominance of the gynarchy by beating the women and children,
as Seneca described his father doing, usually for the most "trivial
actions,"37 but usually it was the women of the household
who wielded the family whip on their children.
The gynarchy ruled supreme in early homes. In Byzantium,
women had separate spheres with strict exclusion of men from the family,
where "men live in light and brightness, the palaestra; women
live in the gynaecaeum, enclosed, secluded."38 This
was even true of supposedly patriarchal Chinese families. The Chinese
gynarchy was described by visitors as living in "women's apartments
behind the high walls of their husbands' compounds," dominated by
women who "are reputed to terrorize the men of their households and
their neighbors with their fierce tempers, searing tongues, and indomitable
wills...When father and son do work together, they have nothing to
say, and even at home they speak only when there is business to discuss.
[Otherwise] they mutually avoid each other."39 Likewise,
in Indonesian families, "fathers are simply not present very much...the
woman has more authority, influence and responsibility than her husband..."40
The examples can easily be extended around the world and into the
Middle Ages:
the female world was highly structured, like
a little monarchy-that monarchy wielded by the master's wife, the
'lady' who dominated the other women in the house. This monarchy was
often tyrannical. The chronicles of French families at the end of
the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century paint a picture
of shrews reigning brutally over servants whom they terrorized, and
over their sons' wives whom they tormented...Indeed, a female power
existed which rivaled that of men...Men were afraid of women, especially
their own wives, afraid of being incapable of satisfying a being who
was seen both as a devourer and as a bearer of death...41
Feminist historians have pioneered in uncovering the
evidence revealing families as gynarchies, saying "the need to keep
women in line revealed permanent high tension in men around a being
with disquieting power."42 Men are shown as being excluded
from the traditional "gynaeceum":43 the nursery, the kitchen,
the work bees, even the laundry: "No man would dare approach the laundry,
so feared is this group of women..."44 Women are depicted
as ruling both their husbands and their children, who are often shown
as fearing them,45 and while husbands are hopefully told
in moralist's instruction manuals about the "Duties of a Husband"
to instruct their wives, the sections on the "Duties of a Father"
to care for their children are nowhere to be found until modern times.46
Most fathers agreed with Abelard, who, after he got Heloise pregnant,
sent her away, admitting, "Who can bear the screams of children...Who
can tolerate the unclean and continuous soilings of babies?"47
As Buchan wrote, "Men generally keep at such a distance from even
the smallest acquaintance with the affairs of the nursery [and] is
not ashamed to give directions concerning the management of his dogs
or horses, yet would blush were he surprised in performing the same
office for [his] heir..."48 Since children of the upper
classes were sent out to wetnurse and then to school, many adults
could agree with Talleyrand when he stated that he "had never slept
under the same roof with his father and mother."49 Fathers
were so distant that most could agree with Vandermonde, who said,
"One blushes to think of loving one's children."50 When
their children died, most fathers, like William Byrd, revealed no
signs of grief, writing in their diaries the night of the death only
that they had "good thoughts and good humor."51 Should
a father try to play with his child, they were unable to summon the
empathy needed to understand its capacities, as seen in the following
typical interaction:
A gentleman was playing with his child of
a year old, who began to cry. He ordered silence; the child did not
obey; the father then began to whip it, but this terrified the child
and increased its cries...The father thought the child would be ruined
unless it was made to yield, and renewed his chastisement with increased
severity....On undressing it, a pin was discovered sticking into its
back.52
By the nineteenth century, some fathers began to relate
to their children with some empathy, yet even they were seen as rare,
as when Grigorii Belynskii was described as "the only father in the
city who understood that in raising children it is not necessary to
treat them like cattle."53 Even those who began at this
time to criticize "paternal neglect," like John Abbott, said it was
the father's sole task "to teach his children to obey their mother."54
It wasn't actually until late socializing mode fathers came along
that they actually began some caretaking, pushing prams and otherwise
trying to live up to the New Fatherhood proclamations of the twentieth
century.55 Yet even though there are some fathers today
who are helping mode parents and who spend equal time with their wives
caring for their children,56 various time surveys in America
still show that working fathers spend only about 12 to 18 minutes
per day with their young children,57 without even counting
the one-third of all babies who are born to unmarried women.58
The gynarchy, it appears, still reigns supreme, and fathers around
the world have yet to seriously embrace the tasks and joys of fatherhood.
GIRLS HAD WORSE CHILDHOODS THAN BOYS
The problem with having only women raising children is that parenting
is an emotionally demanding task, requiring considerable maturity,
and throughout history girls have grown up universally despised. When
a girl was born, said the Hebrews, "the walls wept."59
Japanese lullabies sang, "If it's a girl, stamp on her."60
In medieval Muslim cultures "a grave used to be prepared, even before
delivery, beside the woman's resting place [and] if the new-born was
a female she was immediately thrown by her mother into the grave."61
"Blessed is the door out of which goes a dead daughter" was a popular
Italian proverb that was meant quite literally.62 Girls
from birth have everywhere been considered full of dangerous pollution-the
projected hatred of adults-and were therefore more often killed, exposed,
abandoned, malnourished, raped and neglected than boys. Girls in traditional
societies spent most of their growing up years trying to avoid being
raped by their neighbors or employers and thereby being forced into
a lives of prostitution. To expect horribly abused girls to magically
become mature, loving caretakers when as teenagers they go to live
as virtual slaves in a strange family simply goes against the conclusions
of every clinical study we have showing the disastrous effects of
trauma upon the ability to mother.63
As we have seen in Chapter 5, mothers earlier in history
mainly saw their children as their own screaming, needy, dominating
mothers-forming what Nancy Chodorow terms a "hypersymbiotic relationship"64
-wherein the child is expected to make up for all the love missing
in the mother's own life, cure her post-partum depression and restore
her vitality. Like acutely disturbed destructive mothers in current
clinical studies who "indifferently admit the desire to abuse, rape,
mutilate, or kill a child, any child,"65 mothers in the
past feared their infants' crying so much they were determined to
"never let a child have anything it cries for...I think it right to
withhold it steadily, however much the little creature may cry...and
the habit of crying would be broken."66 The need to shut
up the mother's angry voice in babies lead to their being tied up,
neglected and beaten. Tiny infants were experienced as being so destructive
that, according to Augustine, "If left to do what he wants, there
is no crime he will not plunge into."67 In fact, infants
were felt to be so full of badness that when they died they were often
buried under rain gutters so the water would wash off their inborn
pollution.68 An average mother in the past was like the
extremely disturbed mother of today, described by clinical studies,
whose "death wishes she harboured unconsciously towards her [own]
mother are now experienced in relation to the child [so that] death
pervades the relationship between mother and child [with the mother
often reporting,] 'I can remember hurling the baby down on the pillows
once, and just screaming, and not caring. I wanted to kill him really...I
hated the baby for constantly being there.'"69 Many mothers
today admit that they must struggle against feeling "dominated, exploited,
humiliated, drained and criticized by their babies," saying they sometimes
"want to hurt them, get rid of them, squash them like a pancake, or
beat them into silence."70 Mothers in the past, unfortunately,
less often won the maternal love/hate struggle because their own formative
years were so much less nurturant. The baby in the past must not need
anything, but must just give love solely to the emotionally-deprived
mother:
Augustus Hare's account of his childhood
provides an insight into such relationships...He could never express
a wish to his mother, as she would have thought it her duty to refuse
it. 'The will is the thing that needs to be brought into subjection,'
she said...[Once] his mother, finding him much attached to a household
cat, ceremoniously hanged the cat in the garden, so that he should
have no object but her to love.71
Mothers hallucinated their children as maternal breasts
with such intensity that they were constantly licking and sucking
their faces, lips, breasts and genitals,72 feeling so needy
from their own loveless childhoods that they expected their children
to care for them emotionally as they grow up. Instead, mothers confessed,
"children eat you up...you are sucked dry by them...my children sucked
me dry; all my vitality is gone."73 It is only when one
realizes their own severe neglect and abuse and the extent to which
their babies are poison containers for their feelings that one can
begin to understand why mothers in the past routinely killed, neglected
and abused their children. What is miraculous-and what is the source
of most social progress-is that mothers throughout history have
slowly and successfully struggled with their fear and hatred with
so little help from others and have managed to evolve the loving,
empathic childrearing one can find in many families around the world
today.
CHILD SACRIFICE AS PUNISHMENT FOR SUCCESS
The act of having a child is, says Rheingold, "the most forbidden
act of self-realization, the ultimate and least pardonable offense,"
and brings with it inevitable fears of maternal retribution for one's
success and individuation.74 Mothers in antiquity hallucinated
female demons-Lamia, Gorgo, Striga, Empusa-who were actually grandmother
alters in the mothers' heads, so jealous of their having babies that
they sucked out their blood and otherwise murdered them.75
Even today peasant villages fear the outbreak of "angry, malevolent,
dangerous" hallucinations that surround the newborn and threaten the
mother and even keep the nursery room boarded up with the door barred
to prevent the intrusion of dangerous spirits.76 All early
societies invented sacrificial rituals wherein babies were tortured
and killed to honor maternal goddesses, from Anit to Kali, vowing
that, "although Mommy wants to kill me for having sex and making a
baby, if I kill the baby instead [usually the first-born was sacrificed],
I can then go on having sex and other babies with less fear of retribution."
The severely immature parents of the past felt under
such constant threat for success by malevolent forces-maternal alters-that
their own children were constantly being used as poison containers
for their disowned feelings. As one informant in a contemporary rural
Greek community put it, "When you're angry a demon gets inside of
you. Only if a pure individual passes by, like a child for instance,
will the bad leave you, for it will fall on the unpolluted."77
The dynamics are clear: the "demon inside you" is the alter, the "unpolluted
child" is the poison container. A typical child sacrifice for parental
success can be seen in Carthage, where archeologists have found a
child cemetery called The Tophet that is filled with over 20,000 urns
containing bones of children sacrificed by the parents, who would
make a vow to kill their next child if the gods would grant them a
favor-for instance, if their shipment of goods were to arrive safely
in a foreign port.78 They placed their children alive in
the arms of a bronze statue of "the lady Tanit...the hands of the
statue extended over a brazier into which the child fell once the
flames had caused its limbs to contract and its mouth to open...the
child was alive and conscious when burned...Philo specified that the
sacrificed child was best-loved."79
Child sacrifice was the foundation of all great religions,
depicted in myths as absolutely necessary to save the world from "chaos,"
that is, from terrible inner annihilation anxiety as punishment for
success. Maccoby's book, The Sacred Executioner: Human Sacrifice
and the Legacy of Guilt, portrays the entire history of religion
as dramas featuring a vengeful, bloodthirsty Sacred Executioner, demonstrating
that the role of children, from Isaac to Christ, was to act as sacrifices
for the sins of the parents.80 Behind even male gods demanding
sacrifice are Avenging Terrible Mothers of Death, says Lederer-Belili,
Inanna, Tiamat, Ishtar, Astarte, Lilith, Hathor-Sekhmet, Izanami,
Chicomecoatl-all Mother alters in the brains of the new parents, demanding
revenge for the hubris of daring to be a parent.81 The
wealthier the family, the more children had to be sacrificed to the
goddess, representing the infant's furious grandmother.82
Child sacrifices have been found from the beginning
of human history: decapitated skeletons of early hominid children
have been found, with evidence of cannibalism, as their parents ate
them on behalf of the spirits of their life-devouring grandmothers;83
young children were buried with their skulls split by an ax at Woodhenge/Stonehenge;84
decapitated infant sacrifices to the Great Goddess were found at Jericho;85
early Arabians sacrificed their daughters to "the mothers;"86
the serpent goddess of the Aztecs demanded skull and heart sacrifice
of children, including the eating of the children's bodies and covering
themselves with their blood;87 Mayan and Incan sacrificed
children are still being discovered in the South American mountains,
along with children who have been killed by drug dealers to ward off
revenge for their successful cocaine runs.88 The need to
sacrifice children to ward off fears of success was so powerful that
right through medieval times, when people built new buildings, walls
or bridges, little children were sealed in them alive as "foundation
sacrifices" to ward off the angry, avenging spirits, alters of parents
who felt envious of the accomplishments of their children.89
Even when children died in the past from natural causes,
the sources often reveal a deep satisfaction by the parents. Sometimes
an adult recalled their mother's death wishes in their memoirs-a typical
passage occurs when Leopardi remembers clearly of his mother that
When she saw the death of one of her infants approaching,
she experienced a deep happiness, which she attempted to conceal
only from those who were likely to blame her....When, as several
times happened, she seemed likely to lose an infant child, she did
not pray God that it should die, since religion forbids it, but
she did in fact rejoice.90
Over and over again death wishes are revealed in the
historical sources, breaking out when interacting with children. Epictetus
admitted, "What harm is there if you whisper to yourself, at the very
moment you are kissing your child, and say 'Tomorrow you will die?'"91
Another recalled his mother tucking him into bed nightly with the
words, "Soon my son you will exchange the bed for the grave, and your
clothes for a winding sheet."92 The deaths of children
were rarely mourned: mothers were commonly reported to have "regarded
the death of various daughters at school with great equanimity" and
fathers to "cheerfully remark when two of his fifteen children died
that he still had left a baker's dozen."93 Often adults
recorded in their diaries a vow to have "the Lord" (the parent's parental
alter) kill the child, as Cotton Mather did as each of his children
died:
I resigned the Child unto the Lord; my Will
was extinguished. I could say, My Father, Kill my Child, if it
be thy Pleasure to do so...I had rather have him dy in his Infancy,
than live in cursed and lothsome Wickedness...[my dead child is] a
Family-Sacrifice...I would endeavour exceedingly to glorify
God, by making a Sacrifice of the lovely Child...94
As we will see in the sections that follow on infanticide,
mutilation and abandonment, parents are the child's most lethal enemy,
because inside the parents' psyches lie a powerful, dangerous alter
that is their own parent's death wishes toward the child.
INFANTICIDE AS CHILD SACRIFICE
Mothers who feel like killing their newborn children today are clinically
found to be deeply depressed and lonely, because, according to Rheingold's
study of 350 filicidal mothers, "It is only the fear of being a woman
that can create the infanticidal impulse...having a child is the most
forbidden act of self-realization...punishment is inescapable and
punishment means annihilation...To appease the mother she must destroy
the child, but the child is a love object too. To preserve the child
she must renounce mother... She is trapped in a desperate conflict:
kill mother and preserve the baby or kill the baby and preserve the
mother."95 Mothers in the past routinely chose killing
the baby, by the billions, driven to it by her devil alter (her own
destructive mother image in her head).
In my previous articles on infanticide,
I have shown that boy/girl sex ratios of preliterate tribes average
128/100, while boy/girl ratios from census and other sources in European
history ranged from as high as 400/100 to 140/100 in the middle ages.96
With Indian and Chinese boy/girl ratios in the nineteenth century
running at 300/100 and higher,97 and with current Asian
statistics still showing over 200 million girls "missing" in the census
figures,98 I have determined that it is likely that overall
infanticide rates of both sexes exceeded 30 percent in antiquity and
only slowly declined to the very small rate in advanced societies
today.99 Multiplying these infanticide rates by the 80
billion human births in the past 100,000 years100-80 percent
of them occurring before 1750, and even more of them occurring in
areas with high Asian-style infanticide rates-a weighted average infanticide
rate for the entire 80 billion births was likely at the very least
15 percent, or 12 billion children killed by their parents.
Even this astonishing figure is not the
whole story of infanticide, however. Every study of infant death rates
among children sent out to wetnurses and abandoned in foundling homes
shows much higher death rates, running to over 70 per cent and higher,
even in modern times.101 Doctors of every age agreed that
"the most profound cause of the terrific waste of infant life [is]
neglect...neglected by their own mothers and neglected by the nurses
to whom they were abandoned..."102 Since parents who sent
their children to wetnurse and foundling homes knew quite well they
would likely not see them again-indeed, often they were sent to so-called
"killing wetnurses" with a small sum of money under the tacit assumption
that they would not be returned103-these "delayed infanticide"
acts must be added to the estimated rate of child killing, increasing
it by at the very least a third, or a total of 16 billion children
killed by parental acts over the entire historical span. No wonder
people in the past so often said that everywhere in their areas "you
could hear coming out of the bottom of latrines and ponds and rivers
the groanings of the children that one had thrown there."104
Although poverty played some part in
this holocaust of children, it is doubtful if it was the main cause
of child deaths. In the first place, the cost of bringing up a girl
is no more than the cost of bringing up a boy, so the differential
infanticide rates are certainly parental choices. When, for instance,
Arabs dug a grave next to the birthing place of every new mother so
"if the newborn child was a female she could be immediately thrown
by her mother into the grave,"105 it was likely hatred
of girls, not poverty, that was the motive. Secondly, if scarce resources
were the main cause, then wealthy parents should kill less than poor.
But the historical record shows exactly the opposite: historical boy/girl
ratios are higher among wealthy parents,106 where economic
necessity is no problem at all. Even in early modern England, the
infant mortality rates for wealthy children were higher than the same
rates for ordinary farmers, day laborers and craftsman.107
Thirdly, many wealthy high civilizations such as Greece, Rome, China,
India, Hawaii and Tahiti are very infanticidal, especially among their
elite classes. As one visitor to Hawaii reported, there probably wasn't
a single mother who didn't throw one or more of her children to the
sharks.108 There were even societies where virtually all
newborn were killed to satisfy their overwhemling infanticidal needs,
and infants had to be imported from adjoining groups to continue the
society.109 Finally, many nations-like in Japan until recently-kill
their children selectively in order to balance out an equal number
of boys and girls, a practice called mabiki, or "thinning out"
the less promising ones,110 again revealing a quite different
motive than the purely economic. It is most certainly not economics
that causes so many depressed women on the delivery tables even today
to implore their mothers not to kill them after they have given birth.111
Women since the beginning of time have felt that their children "really"
belonged to God-a symbol of the grandmother, and that "the child was
a gift that God had every right to reclaim."112 When killing
her child, therefore, the mother was simply acting as her own mother's
avenger.
We are left, unfortunately, with what
one psychoanalyst calls our "universal resistance to acknowledging
the mother's filicidal drives, undoubtedly the most dreaded and uncanny
truth for us to face."113 Our only defenses are denial
and dissociation, like people in the past, who regularly dissociated
from the emotional impact of their murder of their innocent little
children by sayings such as, "Do we not cast away from us our spittle,
lice and such which are engendered out of our own selves," "mad dogs
we knock on the head [and] we drown even children at birth," "when
children die there is no need to get excited...one is born every year...live
and let die."114 Both mothers and fathers knew their own
parents demanded a death; both struggled against the grandparents'
dire threat to kill them if they dare to became parents themselves.
What helped the dissociation was such beliefs as denying that the
babies were human, so during most of history, East and West, if the
mother would kill the newborn before it took any nourishment, it wasn't
considered "really born," it wasn't human yet.115
Usually it was the mother or one of the
other women of the gynarchy who did the killing, in the past as in
the present,116 usually violently, smashing in the baby's
head, crushing it between her knees, asphyxiating it against her breasts,
sitting on it, or throwing it alive into the privy, with the mother
sometimes earning the nickname of "child-stabber" or "child-crusher."117
It helped to have gynecological writings like Soranus's on "How to
Recognize the Newborn That Is Worth Rearing" to rationalize the infanticide.118
It helped to share the blame for the murder with your children, who
were often made to help the mother kill their newborn siblings, and
who would then be more likely to restage the murder upon their own
newborn.119 It helped to have daemonic beliefs like those
still held in rural Greece that Evil Spirits had turned the newborn
into a changling, a demon baby, a Striga, which had to be strangled
to protect the mother from harm.120 The mother's struggle
against the urge to kill her children was (and is) usually a conscious
one, and the role of the dissociated parental alter is often evident-as
when mothers today tell therapists that "someone keeps talking to
me in my mind telling me to choke my daughter" or as when Medea struggled
against killing her children, saying, "I know what wickedness I am
about to do; but the thumos is stronger than my purposes, thumos,
the root of our mankind's worst acts."121 But the feeling
of being driven by the Destructive Mother alter, the struggle against
killing one's baby and the severe postpatrum depression were all universal
for mothers in traditional societies, and sixteen billion murdered
children were the result of losing the sacrificial battle.
Opposition by society to infanticide
was negligible until modern times. Jews considered any child who died
within thirty days after birth, even by violence, to have been a "miscarriage."122
Most ancient societies openly approved of infanticide, and although
Roman law, in response to Christianity, made infanticide a capital
offense in 374 C.E., no cases have been found punishing it.123
Anglo-Saxons actually considered infanticide a virtue, not a crime,
saying, "A child cries when he comes into the world, for he anticipates
its wretchedness. It is well for him that he should die...he was placed
on a slanting roof [and] if he laughed, he was reared, but if he was
frightened and cried, he was thrust out to perish."124
Prosecutions for infanticide before the modern period were rare.125
Even medieval penitentials excused mothers who killed their newborn
before feeding them.126 By Puritan times, a few mothers
began being hanged for infanticide.127 But even in the
nineteenth century it was still "not an uncommon spectacle to see
the corpses of infants lying in the streets or on the dunghills of
London and other large cities.128 The English at the end
of the century had over seven million children enrolled in "burial
insurance societies;" with the infant mortality rate at 50 percent,
parents could easily collect the insurance by killing their child.
As one doctor said, "sudden death in infants is too common a circumstance
to be brought before the attention of the coroner...Free medical care
for children was refused...'No, thank you, he is in two burial clubs'
was a frequent reply to offers of medical assistance for a sick child.
Arsenic was a favorite poison..."129
Century after century, the children in traditional
societies who survived remembered the cries of their murdered brothers
and sisters, feared their murderous parents, believed themselves
unworthy of living, irredeemably bad, and grew up to inflict the
killings on their own children.
MUTILATING CHILDREN'S BODIES
In the previous chapter, the propensity of preliterate tribes to cut,
burn and otherwise mutilate the bodies of their children was discussed,
particularly the role of genital mutilation, where during initiation
rites boys' penises are sliced open under the conviction that it was
necessary to expel the "mothers blood and bad words" that had lodged
in them. The powerful need to mutilate children's bodies is found
in nearly all cultures in some form, and reaches back to the Paleolithic
caves where handprints on the walls130 show clearly that
children's fingers were cut off in the widespread belief by many cultures
that the Devil (the destructive parental alter) demanded a child's
finger to appease his wrath. Frazer documented these finger sacrifice
rituals in many cultures, and sanctuaries have been found as far back
as the Neolithic with finger bones, right up through ancient Greek
times, when, Pausanias reported, finger sacrifice rituals were still
performed to pacify pursuing demons.131 Finger amputation
was also endemic in Ocean, Polynesia and among North American Indians.132
But more often it is the genitals, head
or feet of children which are assaulted; as the Canadian Intuit Eskimos
say, "A hurt baby is more lovable!" and mothers who feel affectionate
toward their infants are reported as commonly "slapping it, squeezing
it tightly, or biting it until it bursts into tears."133
Few mothers even today are free of dreams in which their babies are
badly hurt, though most are able to laugh off the impulses and perhaps
only be overprotective toward their infants. But Rheingold's clinical
studies reveal many mothers ward off maternal retribution for having
the baby by what he terms a "mutilation impulse," which he finds mainly
directed toward the genitals of the boy and the girl and toward the
"insides" of the girl's body, producing in boys severe castration
anxieties and "a fear of femaleness" in girls, including fears of
injury to the pelvic region.134
Cutting off parts or all of the girl's
genitals is a widespread practice,135 possibly reaching
back to Paleolithic times since a stone knife is often used, and is
still practiced in preliterate tribes from Africa to Australia, where
the girl's vagina is torn open with a stone knife and the child is
then gang raped.136 Historical evidence dates from ancient
Egypt, where mummies have been found with clitoral excision and labial
fusions,137 and Greek physicians like Soranos and Aetius
regularly advocated the removal of a girl's clitoris if it was "overly
large" so she would not be overly lustful.138
8:2 A girl in Cairo is mutilated
by her Mother
There are over 100 million Arab females today who
have had their genitals chopped off, having been told that "if the
clitoris is left alone, it will grow and drag on the ground, and if
left uncircumcised, they will be wild and...grow up horny."139
Often the girl's labia are cut off in addition to the clitoris, and
the remaining flesh is sewn together, leaving only a small opening
for urination. The vagina must therefore be cut open again before
intercourse, and the women have great difficulty giving birth and
often are further cut to allow the baby to pass through.
During the mutilations-usually done around the age
of six with rusty knives by the women of the gynarchy-the girls undergo
excruciating pain, sometimes die of complications, usually hemorrhage,
and often pass out from the shock since no anaesthetic is used.140
The ritual-which is not a religious rite and is nowhere mentioned
in the Koran-is accompanied by the joyful shouting and chanting of
the women, shouting, "now you are a woman," "Bring her the groom now."
"Bring her a penis, she is ready for intercourse," etc.141
They act out in manic ritual Rheingold's dicta that destructive mothers
"seem to have the urge to destroy her daughter's femaleness: her external
genitals, her 'insides'...her total sexuality."142 It is
not surprising that the overwhelming majority of circumcised girls
grow up to be frigid. Female circumcision was practiced historically
in various groups from Russia to Latin America,143 and
was even inflicted on girls "who masturbated too much" in Europe and
America in the nineteenth century, using a red hot iron to burn away
the little girl's clitoris.144
Circumcision for boys might be thought of as less
traumatic since it involves only removal of the foreskin, a far less
painful and serious mutilation. Yet in many cultures circumcision
of boys is quite painful, as when Moslem boys are circumcised between
the ages of 3 and 7 in a painful, bloody ceremony, after which "he
is placed on his mother's naked back [so] that his bleeding penis
presses against her. His mother dances along with the other women
until he stops crying."145 That this ceremony is connected
with the incestuous feelings of the mother is apparent from the fact
that genital mutilation is far more likely found in societies where
the little boy sleeps with his mother while the father sleeps elsewhere.146
Circumcision of boys-practiced from Egypt and Africa to Peru and Polynesia147-makes
them into "little mothers," with the peeling away of the foreskin
uncovering the glans so that it can act as a maternal nipple. That
circumcision of boys is still practiced so regularly in America is
a testimony to the continuing ubiquity of parental assault on the
sexuality of children.148
But the more serious genital mutilation of boys that
occurred throughout history, East and West, was castration. Eunichs
were found in most cultures, beginning as a sacrificial rite to early
goddeses: "piles of freshly severed genitals lay beneath the altars
in Egyptian temples, where hundreds of virile youths were initiated
daily into male prostitution."149 In addition, castration
was necessary to satisfy all the men who preferred hairless castrated
boys to rape, plus all those used as harem keepers, palace officials,
boy singers, actors and many other roles thought to require castrates.150
Nero was said to enjoy the use of eunuchs in his orgies, even marrying
one of them.151 When parents sent their boys to aristocratic
households for sexual use, they were said to sometimes cut off their
genitals and keep them in a jar.152 Eunuchs were especially
popular in Byzantium, while in the West Verdun was widely known as
"the great eunuch factory." In some Italian towns, boys who were destined
for the clergy were castrated at an early age; in Naples, signs hung
above stores, "Boys castrated here."153 Many cultures castrated
boys when they are just infants, claiming they "really wanted" to
be girls. They are then used as women, sexually and otherwise, when
they grow up, as in the hijras of India or the berdaches
of American Indian tribes.154 The testicles of these boys
were either torn from them, crushed or seared off them with red-hot
irons, usually between the ages of 3 and 7; in China, "both the penis
and scrotum were removed with one cut."155 Castration of
boys continued until recently in the Middle East, followed by burial
of the mutilated boy in hot sand for several days to reduce hemorrhage-only
one in five surviving the bloody operation.156 Some societies
had variations of circumcision that approached castration, as in some
Arab tribes where they performed salkh, which "consisted of flaying
and removing all of the skin of the penis..."157
The ancients' more usual assault on boys' genitals,
however-called infibulation-was less painful, though longer lasting.
Since they were so deprived of maternal love, ancients saw the boy's
glans as an exciting nipple ("it strikes terror and wonder in the
heart of man") and felt they needed to hide it, so they drew the prepuce
foreword, drilled two holes in it, and closed it up with a ring, pin
or clamp.158 Infibulated penises are regularly shown in
drawings of Greeks and Roman athletes and was popular until modern
times.159 The same practice in the East is called mohree,
sewing or cauterizing the prepuce over the glans, preventing erection;
to this day some Japanese athletes use infibulation to prevent the
loss of their strength, which could evaporate through the glans.160
Aztec parents cut both boys' and girls' genitals regularly throughout
their childhood, the blood being used in a sacrifice to their goddess,
a ritual which was said to "cleanse one's heart of the guilt that
could drive a person crazy."161 Indeed, one is tempted
to give the Aztecs the prize for the most sacrificial parenting, since
they were routinely sacrificed, cut, tied to cradleboards, holes drilled
in their lips, drugged, burned over fires, starved, stuck with spines,
thrown naked into icewater, tortured and battered nearly every day
of their lives.162 But this would be a mistake. Aztec childhood
was simply more fully described, by visitors from Europe. Equally
graphic were those who described the ancient Chinese habit of beheading
or strangling children who were "guilty of addressing abusive language
to his or her father or mother"163 or of the nineteenth-century
Yugoslav practice of smearing infants with excrement and holding them
over the fire or pushing them into a bread-oven to cure "bewitchment."164
Parents in traditional societies couldn't keep their
hands off their little babies; they simply were compelled to hurt
and torture them. The first thing most Western societies did to the
newborn up until the twentieth century was cut the ligament under
their tongue with their thumbnail, assaulting them in advance for
what they experienced as maternal tongue-lashing.165 Then
their heads and genitals would be forcibly "shaped":
Long heads would be reshaped, indeed all babies'
heads would be reshaped to make the conform to the desired shape.
The nose would be corrected...the nurse would gentle stretch the
end of the foreskin every day...The scrotum would also be massaged...166
Severe cranial deformation can be seen in the drawings
of Egyptian, Aztec, Huns, Native American and other children, as their
head was routinely put between two boards, one of the back of the
head and the other on the forehead, so as to squash the head into
the angle formed by the boards-a practice found as far back as the
Neanderthals and continuing "throughout much of Europe, especially
in Holland and France, until the middle of the nineteenth century."167
Particularly widespread was the impulse to burn children.
Traditional Arab children had burn marks all over their body from
being burned by their parents with red-hot irons or pins.168
English newspapers often reported parents "stirring up the fire with
[children's] feet so that their toes rotted off...But we don't hear
that there are any proceedings against her on this score."169
The regular use of applying burning Mona to the child's body
is still common in Japan.170 Pouring scalding hot water
("iron water") over children was supposed to be curative in Eastern
European therapy.171 Similar results are ascribed to the
Italian medieval practice of, "as soon as children be born, they cauterize
or burn them in the neck with a hot iron, or else drop a burning wax
candle upon the place...they think the brain is dried, and by pain
the humour which doth flow is drawn to the hinder part of the head."172
Every kind of excuse is given for the torture of children. Parents
of every period force children who have soiled their bed, to consume
their own excrement.173 Particularly crippling were mutilations
like Chinese footbinding, which breaks the bones of little girls so
their flesh deteriorates, all done in order to make the big toe stick
out (as a penis substitute) so men could masturbate against it during
the sex act.174
THE LACK OF EMPATHY TOWARD CHILDREN AND MALNUTRITION
IN HISTORY
Every childrearing practice in traditional societies around the globe
betrays a profound lack of empathy toward one's children. This should
not, however, be simply seen as a result of poverty or even "the brutality
of human nature." These parents are in thrall to their own mothers'
alters, demanding the torture and sacrifice of their grandchildren.
A typical example of this thralldom can be seen in the following observation
of a visitor to Italy who describes a popular religious festival:
The most striking object of the solemnities is a
procession [in which] a colossal car is dragged by a long team of
buffaloes through the streets. Upon this are erected a great variety
of objects, such as the sun, moon, and principal planets, set in
rotary motion...The heart sickens at sight of it [for] bound to
the rays of sun and moon, to the circles forming the spheres of
the various planets, are infants yet unweaned, whose mothers, for
the gain of a few ducats, thus expose their offspring, to represent
the cherub escort which is supposed to accompany the Virgin [Mary]
to heaven.
When this huge machine has made its jolting round,
these helpless creatures...having been whirled round and round for
a period of seven hours, are taken down from this fatal machine,
already dead or dying. Then ensues a scene impossible to describe-the
mothers struggling with each other, screaming, and trampling each
other down. It not being possible, on account of the number, for
each mother to recognize her own child among the survivors, one
disputes with the other the identity of her infant...The less fortunate
mothers, as they receive the dead bodies of their infants, often
already cold, rend the air with their fictitious lamentations, but
consoled with the certainty that Maria, enamoured of her child,
has taken it with her into Paradise.175
The Mother Mary-symbol of the infant's grandmother-is
shown as demanding possession of the child even unto death. The mothers
give up their child's life to the infanticidal grandmother happily,
knowing they are thereby being good little girls who obey the destructive
wishes of their mothers.
This destructive grandmother-alter in every mothers'
head is the missing factor in historians' accounts of the ubiquitous
cruelty toward children in the past. Edward Shorter, for instance,
effectively counters the "poverty" argument for "the manifest callousness"
with which children were treated in the past by showing how upper-
and middle-class mothers "got the money for large weddings, dowries,
and militia uniforms...yet omitted just as much as did the laborers
to breast-feed infants while alive, and to grieve for them when dead."176
Indeed, almost every mother who could afford to send their newborn
out to wetnurses did so, even when the wetnurses fed them pap, not
breast milk, and even though their child was more than likely to die
from the wetnurse's callous treatment. In fact, mothers in the past
seemed unable to even empathize enough with their infants to notice
when they were hungry. Doctors throughout the centuries in all parts
of the world routinely reported that "babies should only be fed two
to three times in twenty-four hours."177 Héroard's diary
of little Louis XIII showed that despite over a dozen nurses and caretakers
being assigned to provide for his needs, he was regularly malnourished,
even close to death.178 Even princesses as late as the
eighteenth century were regularly reported to be "naked and dying
of hunger."179 Mothers and nurses in the past were closer
than one wishes to admit to the mother chimpanzees whom we discussed
in the previous chapter, who cannot empathize with their weaned babies
enough to give them food or water or even to show them how to get
it, so that one-third starve to death during the weaning crisis.180
Human mothers, however, go far beyond this lack of empathy, and purposely
starve their children in fasting or punishment rituals so beloved
by many societies in the past.181 Buchan's conclusion that
"almost one half of the human species perish in infancy by improper
management or neglect"182 is quite accurate, and by no
means restricted to the poor. When babies cried, mothers heard their
own mothers' demanding voices, and only wanted to quiet them, so they
would as likely feed them beer, wine or opium-available in every store
as Godfrey's Cordial, Dalby's Carminative or Syrup of Poppies,183
which would either narcotize them enough to quiet them or would kill
them.184 The use of opium on infants goes back to ancient
Egypt, where the Ebers papyrus tells parents: "It acts at once!"185
Physicians complained of the thousands of infants killed every year
by nurses "forever pouring Godfrey's Cordial down their little throats,
which is a strong opiate and in the end as fatal as arsenic."186
At all costs the baby must be quieted; Rheingold describes mothers
in treatment who "stop producing milk every time their mothers appear"
because they "fear their own vengeful mothers and fear that she may
destroy her child."187
There is no conscious guilt on the part of mothers
who allow their children to starve to death, since they blame the
children "for wanting to die."188 Many mothers and wetnurses
didn't breastfeed at all, but just gave infants pap, "gruel" (bouillie),
made of water or sour milk mixed with flour,189 which has very little
nourishment and was so thick that "soon the whole belly is clogged,
convulsions set in, and the little ones die."190 In Bavaria,
for instance, mothers considered nursing their children "disgusting,"
while the fathers were totally lacking in empathy, telling their wives
"those breasts are mine" and threatening to go on a hunger strike
if the mothers nursed their baby.191 All sort of past childrearing
practices contributed to the starvation or malnutrition of infants.
Newborn babies were usually not fed at all for the first week or more,
since the mother's colostrum was believed to be poisonous to the baby.
Swaddled babies were hung on a peg or put in a cradle in another room,
where their hunger cries could not be heard; in addition, tight swaddling
makes infants withdraw into themselves so they refrain from crying
when hungry. Infants sent out to wetnurse, after not being fed during
the journey, were given to women who often attempted to nurse up to
five or more babies at a time as they worked in the fields, while
"the child is left to himself, drowning in his own excrement, bound
like a criminal..."192 Particularly malnourished were those
babies fed on pap by nurses, sometimes taking on as many as 40 children
at a time, most dying, while mothers continued to send them their
subsequent babies.193 These and other starvation practices
made malnutrition for most babies a near certainty until modern times.
SENDING TO WETNURSE AS A DELEGATE OF THE DESTRUCTIVE
GRANDMOTHER
Most historians have been as little able to feel empathy for infants
sent to wetnurses as the mothers themselves were, claiming it "reflected
not so much a lack of love for them as a deep fear of loving them,"194
or that was just "a harmless convention not a rejection of the child."195
Most mothers who could afford to send their babies out did so; for
instance, from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, less
than 5 percent of the babies born in Paris were nursed by their own
mothers, rich or poor alike.196 Six percent of eighteenth-century
Parisian parents that wetnursed their babies were noble, 44 percent
were master artisans and tradesmen and 24 percent were journeymen
or other workers; over a third of the children died during their time
at wetnurse, a mortality rate at least double that of maternal nursing,
with the mortality rate of foundlings placed at wetnurse being a deadly
92 percent.197 Parents, of course, knew these enormous
infant mortality figures when they condemned their innocent babies
to wetnurse.
Mothers knew their own mothers would be jealous if
they cared about the newborn rather than devoting themselves to the
grandmother, so they rarely inquired about the baby at wetnurse. One
unusual mother who actually visited her baby at wetnurse was warned
by a relative that "such exaggerated love was a crime against God
[her maternal alter], and he [she] would surely punish it."198
Besides, "many young mothers say...'If I turn nurse, I should destroy
my husband's life, and my own too.'"199 Upper-class mothers
almost never nursed their babies, saying, "Nourish an infant! Indeed,
Indeed! ...I must have my sleep o'nights...And a new gown to wear
at the Opera...What! Must the brat have my paps too?"200
Defoe called suckling babies by ladies of quality "a thing as unnatural
as if God had never intended it."201 Newborn babies were
experienced as demon alters-dragon-snakes (drákoi)-until they
were exorcized at baptism.202 Even when their babies had
in-house nurses to care for them, the mothers wouldn't breastfeed
them herself. Breast milk was supposed to have been made from the
mother's blood, and mothers imagined that "every time the baby sucks
on her breasts, she feeleth the blood come from her heart to nourish
it,"203 making her feel like the baby depleted her of her
very life's blood. Doctors beginning with Soranus agreed that mothers
who nursed their babies would "grow prematurely old, having spent
herself through the daily suckling."204 In addition, since
it was believed that "sperm would spoil the milk and turn it sour,"205
for most of history maternal breastfeeding meant no sex for the mother
while nursing. Still others rejected breastfeeding because it felt
"too sensual,"206 violating the anti-sexual prohibitions
of their family upbringing.
Physicians have complained since antiquity about parents
who routinely give their newborn over to negligent and abusive wetnurses.
"At birth our children are handed over to some silly little Greek
serving girl," says Tacitus;207 Soranus warns about "some
wet-nurses so lacking in sympathy towards the nursling that they not
only pay no heed when it cries for a long time, but [are] angry women
like maniacs and sometimes when the newborn cries from fear and they
are unable to restrain it, they let it drop from their hands or overturn
it dangerously."208 Aulus Gellius says wetnurses are chosen
at random from the most useless slaves: "they take the first woman
who has milk."209 Throughout history, parents were quite
casual about entrusting their babies for from two to seven years with
wetnurses. Agents would "stop the first peasant woman he might come
across, without examining her health or her milk [or use] a placement
office [who would] get rid of him cheap or hand him over to the first
person who comes along..."210 The child-peddlers who hawked
their services in the streets or by newspaper ads were not expected
to know anything about the wetnurse, only to take the infant off the
mother's hands. Those few parents who tried to find a good wetnurse
were usually disappointed; one diarist wrote of his own life: "Four
different wet-nurses were alternately turn'd out of doors on my account...The
first...nearly suffocated me in bed...The second let me fall from
her arms on the stones till my head was almost fractured...The third
carried me under an old brick wall which fell [on me]...while the
fourth proved to be a thief, and deprived me even of my very baby
clothes."211
The trip to wetnurse began the infant's traumatic
life experiences. "The infants were bundled upright in groups of four
or five in pannier baskets strapped to the backs of donkeys. Those
who died on the journey were just thrown out en route."212
Once there, their parents "seldom inquired about the survival of their
infants and were often uninformed as to their whereabouts."213
Mothers sent each newborn to wetnurse "despite the killing off, one
by one, of their children...Neither poverty nor ignorance explains
such infanticide-only indifference...Mothers on learning of their
child's death at the nurse's console themselves, without wondering
about the cause, by saying, 'Ah well, another angel in heaven!'"214
The wetnurse herself was usually an infanticidal mother.
The common practice was to require that she get rid of her own baby
in order to nurse the stranger-termed "a life for a life" by parents
in the past.215 Montaigne laments "Every day we snatch
children from the arms of their mothers and put our own in their charge
for a very small payment."216 Society thought this system
fair, since "by the sacrifice of the infant of the poor woman, the
offspring of the wealthy will be preserved."217 It is not
surprising, then, that wetnurses were universally described as "vicious,
slothful and inclined to drunkenness,"218 "debauched, indolent,
superstitious,"219 guilty of "gross negligence...leaving
babies...unattended when helping with the harvest...crawling or falling
into the fire and being attacked by animals, especially pigs,"220
"hung from a nail like a bundle of old clothes...the unfortunate one
remains thus crucified [with] a purple face and violently compressed
chest."221 The wetnurses' superstitions included a belief
"in favor of cradle cap and of human wastes, which were thought to
have therapeutic value,"222 so infants were rarely washed
and lived in their own feces and urine for their entire time at nurse:
"Infants sat in animal and human filth, were suspended on a hook in
unchanged swaddling bands or were slung from the rafters in an improvised
hammock...their mouths crammed with rotting rags."223 Even
live-in wetnurses were described as unfeeling:
When he cried she used to shake him-when she washed
him she used to stuff the sponge in his little mouth-push her finger
(beast!) in his little throat-say she hated the child, wished he
were dead-used to let him lie on the floor screaming while she sat
quietly by and said screams did not annoy her...224
Complaints by physicians that wetnurses let infants
die of simple neglect were legion: "While the women attend to the
vineyards, the infant remains alone...swaddled to a board and suspended
from a hook on the wall...crying and hungry in putrid diapers. Often
the child cries so hard it ends up with a hernia...turkeys peck out
the eyes of a child...or they fall into a fire, or drown in pails
left carelessly on doorsteps."225 Children were described
as being "kept ragged and bare, sickly and starved...in terror of
their nurse, who handed out blows and vituperation freely" or who
"tied them up by the shoulders and wrists with ragged ends of sheets...face
down on the floor...to protect them from injuring themselves while
she was away...Never played with or cuddled...it is a holiday when
they are taken for a walk around the room by the nurses..."226
Infants who are sent to "killing nurses" are described as being fed
while the nurse croons, "Cry no more! Soon you will go, deté drago,
soon...'Tis truly better that you go, dear infant...onto the lap of
Virgin Mary, Mother of Jesus."227 The destructive Mother
of Jesus, who gave birth for him to be sacrificed, was never far away
from the child. It is no wonder that well into the nineteenth century
many areas had a two-thirds mortality rate of infants sent to wetnurse.228
Since their parents seldom visited them, the children
were total strangers when they were returned to them years later.
"If they returned home alive, they often came back in a pitiable state:
thin, tiny, deformed, consumed by fevers, prone to convulsions."229
The mother has by then nearly forgotten her baby, since, as physicians
complained since antiquity, "When a child is given to another and
removed from its mother's sight, the strength of maternal ardor is
gradually and little by little extinguished and it is almost as completely
forgotten as if it had been lost by death."230 One typical
report came from a woman who described her mother saying when she
was returned at two from wetnurse, "My God! What have you brought
me here! This goggle-eyed, splatter-faced, gabbart-mouthed wretch
is not my child! Take her away!"231 Another is praised
by Locke for beating her child when she first saw her, saying she
was "forced to whip her little Daughter, at her first coming
home from Nurse, eight times successively the same Morning, before
she could master her Stubbornness and obtain a compliance in
a very easie and indifferent matter."232 The return home
to mother from wetnurse was often like going from the frying pan into
the fire.
Wetnursing was practiced by societies all over the
world, from Europe to Asia, as far back as records exist.233
The Code of Hammurabi even allowed the wetnurse to sell the baby if
the parents couldn't pay her the contracted amount.234
The first improvement did not come until the seventeenth century,
when wetnurses began more often to be brought into the parents' homes,
especially in England, Holland and America.235 The next
step was for the mother to nurse herself. The decision was made purely
for psychogenic reasons; no new invention nor social condition caused
the change. Nor was it due to a change in the opinions of experts-the
pro-nursing tracts of Rousseau and others had little affect on the
near-universal wetnursing practice in France, for instance, while
in America, even in the South where slave nurses were available, mothers
usually nursed themselves by the eighteenth century.236
Advanced mothers began by telling each other they would find new delights
in nursing their own infants, for, "in recompence whereof, he endeavors
to show her a thousand delights...he kisseth her, strokes her hair,
nose and ears, he flatters her..."237 Rather than a draining
of vital blood, nursing could actually be a pleasure to the mother!
The new middle class took the lead in maternal nursing, while-even
in England-the upper classes gave their infants to wetnurses well
into the nineteenth century; Victoria was the first English monarch
who was not put out to wetnurse.238 All of these changes
took place before the advent of sterilized bottle feeding in the twentieth
century. Infant mortality in these areas immediately plunged,239
and mothers began to work out how to face the new emotional challenges
of relating to their babies.
SWADDLING THE EVIL INFANT
Since "infant humans are inclined in their hearts to adultery, fornication,
impure desires, lewdness...anger, strife, gluttony, hatred and more,"240
they had to be tightly tied up so they "be not crooked nor evil shapen"241
and will not "tear its ears off, scratch its eyes out, break its legs,
or touch its genitals, "242 would undoubtedly "fall to
pieces,"243 and would certainly "go upon all four, as most
other animals do."244 Worse, infants are always on the
verge of turning into your own angry mother; there is so much "viciousness
in all children [if you] pamper them the least little bit, at once
they will rule their parents."245 Infants are so violent
that even their heads must be "firmly tied down, that they might not
throw off their heads from their shoulders."246 Physicians
complained "mothers and nurses bind and tie their children so hard
[they] made me weep {as they] lie the children behind the hot oven,
whereby the child may soon be stiffled or choked..."247
The swaddling process was much the same for millennia:
[The mother] stretches the baby out on a board or
straw mattress and dresses it in a little gown or a coarse, crumpled
diaper, on top of which she begins to apply the swaddling bands.
She pins the infant's arms against its chest, then passes the band
under the armpits, which presses the arms firmly into place. Around
and around she winds the band down to the buttocks, tighter and
tighter...clear down to the feet, and...covers the baby's head with
a bonnet [all of which] is fastened with pins.248
Physicians complain that the infant "is lucky if he
is not squeezed so hard that he is unable to breathe, and if he has
been placed on his side, so that the water which he has to pass through
his mouth can run out," or he will choke to death.249 Swaddled
Albanian infants were described as follows in a 1934 study:
The child began immediately to passionately scream
and tried to free himself...This seemed to be a signal for the mother
to rock the cradle violently; at the same time she covered the head
of the baby with a white sheet. While the baby's miserable screaming
made a strong impression to us, it seemed to be an everyday thing
to the mother, to which she did not react except by rocking the
cradle as strongly as possible...250
The traditional "benumbing shaking" of the baby and
"violent rocking" of the cradle-described over and over again by our
sources251-"puts the babe into a dazed condition in order that he
may not trouble those that have the care of him,"252 is
sometimes supplemented by "a piece of linen rag stuffed into its mouth"253
to stop the screaming. Because straight pins were used to keep the
swaddling bands in place,254 "nurses, blinded by passion
and prejudice, do not hesitate to beat the helpless babe, without
examining whether its cries are not occasioned by a pin..."255
Because every visitor to the home represents the jealous grandmother,
infants are usually kept in dark rooms and their faces are covered
by blankets to ward off the "world full of angry, malevolent, burning,
glaring looks, a world dominated by evil and fear...usually represented
by an older woman...Sharp objects are placed into the cradle or stuck
between the swaddling bands-knives, needles, forks, nails-to protect
against incubi..."256 Salt was rubbed into the baby's skin,
irritating it terribly,257 excrement was sometimes smeared
on its nipples, infants were made to drink their own urine and neighbors
would often spit on it, saying: "Ugh, aren't you just ugly," all to
ward off jealous "evil eye" spirits.258 Since the infants
were nursed while swaddled, they stewed in their own excrement for
days at a time, the mothers leaving their babies "crying with all
their might" in the cradle or "tossed in a corner" or "hung from a
nail on the wall" while they "spend hours away from their cottages"
during the day.259 Few traditional mothers or nurses heeded
doctors' pleas "not to let them lie in their filth,"260
so that during their first year of life261 they were usually
"covered with excrement, reeking of a pestilential stench [their]
skin completely inflamed [and] covered with filthy ulcerations [so
that] if touched...they let out piercing cries."262
Swaddling was a world-wide practice, undoubtedly reaching
back to tribal cultures, since so many of them have featured tying
up to cradleboards for as long as three years as their way of controlling
the infant's supposedly aggressive tendencies.263 Asian
parents favored techniques like wrapping it in a blanket and tying
it into a basket made of straw or bamboo (ejiko) until it is three
or four years old.264 Eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxon physicians
began to suggest doing away with swaddling entirely, at least during
the day, stressing what mothers had been unable so far to notice,
"that particular happiness, which a child shows by all its powers
of expression, when it is newly undressed. How pleased! How delightful!
it is with this new liberty."265 Soon more and more mothers
discovered "the extreme pleasure that all children discover when stript
of their incumbrances, the content and satisfaction with which they
stretch themselves, enjoying the freedom of voluntary motion,"266
and by the nineteenth century swaddling was "unheard of" in France,
England and America, though continuing in Germany into the twentieth
century and in various parts of Eastern Europe even today.267
The effects of swaddling upon every human born during
the past ten millennia were catastrophic. Besides having "the pressure
force blood to their heads and make their little faces purple," besides
"crushing his breast and ribs" and "compressing the flesh almost to
gangrene, the circulation nearly arrested,"268 swaddled
infants were severely withdrawn, listless and physically retarded
in the onset of walking, which often didn't begin until from two to
five years of age (see my table of historical ages of first walking).269
The effects of swaddling on all adults' emotional lives is even more
profound. Because of the lack of warmth and holding, there is a lifelong
deficit in oxytocin and oversupply of cortisol, the stress hormone,
resulting in a lifetime of rage and anxiety states.270
Even rats lose neurons in the hippocampus and orbital frontal lobes
when tied up like human infants were, producing depletions in serotonin,
norepinephrine and dopamine, exacerbated aggressive behavior and a
severe decrease in social capabilities.271 In the next
chapter we will discuss the enormous transformation produced in Western
science, politics and culture by the ending of wetnursing and swaddling
and the evolution of parental love during the modern period.
THE HISTORY OF CHILD BEATING
Despite belief to the contrary, mothers beat their children today
"at a rate approaching twice that of fathers,"272 and mothers
in the past were even more likely to be the child beaters than today.
The typical mother of the hundreds I have collected from memoirs in
the past was described as endlessly beating her children:
She was a curious woman, my mother. Children seemed
to inspire her with a vindictive animosity, with a fury for beating
and banging them, against walls, against, chairs, upon the ground...273
My mother...strictly followed Solomon's advice,
in never sparing the rod; insomuch that I have frequently been whipped
for looking blue on a frosty morning; and, whether I deserved it
or not, I was sure of correction every day of my life.274
Mama whipped us for the least thing...sometimes
the chastisement could better be called a flogging...we kept the
marks for many many days.275
I was often whipped. My mother said that one mustn't
spoil children, and she whipped me every morning; if she didn't
have time in the morning, she would do so at noon, rarely later
than four o'clock.276
If the mother could not spare the time to beat her
child, or if she complained "I have a little pain in my back with
whipping Susan today, who struggled so that I have got a wrench,"277
she could always hire a "professional flagellant" who advertised their
child-beating services in newspaper ads278 or, like one
mother, she could hire a "garde-de-ville to whip her three children
once a week, naughty or not."279 After all, until just
recently, all experts advised that mothers should "let the child from
a year old be taught to fear the rod, and cry softy...make him do
as he is bid, if you whip him ten times running to do it."280
Since "God has given every mother the power [and] placed in your hands
a helpless babe...if it disobeys you, all you have to do is to...inflict
bodily pain so steadily and so invariably that disobedience and suffering
shall be indissolubly connected in the mind of the child."281
And since your child needs you so much, "he does not bear a grudge
against those who have hurt him...However much his mother whips him,
he looks for her and values her above all others."282 "After
thou hast beat him...then he hath forgotten all that was done to him
before and will come to thee...running...to please thee and to kiss
thee."283
Children throughout history began being beaten in
the womb. Pregnant mothers in the past were usually beaten by their
husbands, a practice they had a legal right to do until the twentieth
century,284 and even today over a third of pregnant women
are in physically abusive relationships-physical assault escalating
during pregnancy.285 "Unborn children, trapped in their
mother's wombs, are victims...from the father's blows to the abdomen."286
After birth, a half or more-depending upon the area-of mothers today
begin hitting their infants during their first year of life;287
in the past, nearly all were beaten in their cribs. Susanna Wesleys
children were typical:
[I would] break their wills...before they can speak...[Before
they] turned a year old they were taught to fear the rod and to
cry softly...that most odious noise of the crying of children was
rarely heard in the house, but the family usually lived in as much
quietness as if there had not been a child among them.288
Usually the mother managed to effect what she felt
was total control of the infant early on:
I have begun to govern Sally. She has been Whip'd
[and] when she has done any thing that she suspects is wrong, will
look with concern to see what Mama says, and if I only knit my brow
she will cry till I smile, and although She is not quite Ten months
old, yet...tis time she should be taught.289
Even when the infant doesn't stop crying and begin
to obey the mother's merest glance, the early beatings had to begin
in earnest, as with this mother and her four-month-old infant:
I whipped him till he was actually black and blue,
and until I could not whip him any more, and he never gave up one
single inch.290
Even if the crying is because the child is sick, the
rod must be applied, since the mother still hears the child's cries
as critical of her:
Our little daughter...before she was quite a year
old, we began to correct her for crying...It has taught her a command
over her feelings...even when she is unwell, and blurts into a loud
cry, we generally correct her until she suppresses it...[using]
a rod...291
Children, says Locke, must always show total "submission
and ready obedience...it must be early, or else it will cost pains
and blows to recover it."292 An Irish mother puts it more
succinctly: "You've got to slash them while they're still to young
to remember it and hold it against you."293 Yet in fact
the floggings continued throughout the lives of children prior to
the socializing mode, so that diaries are filled with entries of "the
dog-whip over the door," "the razor-strap hanging on a nail on the
kitchen shelf," and "the carpet-beater in the corner. Mother didn't
have to use it. If we were being naughty, we just followed her eyes
to the corner..."294
The beating process was ritualized, to relieve the
parents' guilt and to enhance its sexualization. Children often would
be forced to "ask for God's blessing on the flogging," "the wife then
bares the child's bottom with delight for the flogging," "the child
must ask to be beaten...(Batty rhapsodizes on God's wisdom in providing
children with bottoms so they can be beaten repeatedly without permanent
damage)." 295 After the beatings, the child would often
be made to kiss or thank the beating instrument or the beater for
the beating, as when Roger North recalled "being made to stop crying
and thank 'the good rail which [mother] said was to break our spirits.'"296
Parents usually are described as being out of control, "fearce and
eager upon the child, striking, flinging, kicking it, as the usual
manner is."297 Even mothers who wrote about being nice
to their children, like Anne Bradstreet, stressed the need to flog
until "the plough of correction makes long furrows on their back."298
Professional floggers hired by parents used more openly sexually sadistic
equipment:
Preparations consist in having ready a strong narrow
table, straps (waist-band with sliding straps, anklets and wristlets),
cushions, and a good, long, pliable birch rod, telling her to prepare
by removing her dress...For screams increased strokes must be given.
If a girl tries very hard indeed to bear it bravely, then, perhaps,
I give ten instead of twelve.299
Children of wealthy parents were, if anything, more
severely beaten than others, by both their caretakers and parents.
Louis XIII was routinely "beaten mercilessly...On waking in the morning...he
was beaten on the buttocks by his nurse with a birch or a switch...his
father whipped him himself when in a rage..."300 On the
day of his coronation at eight, after being whipped, he said he "would
rather do without so much obeisance and honor if they wouldn't have
me whipped."301 Noble parents demanded nurses whip their
children; Henri IV wrote: "I have a complaint to make: you do not
send word that you have whipped my son...when I was his age I was
often whipped. That is why I want you to whip him..."302
The beatings were usually bloody:
Katharine by a blow on th'ear given by her mother
did bleed at the nose very much...coming home an hour, she bled
again, very sore, by gushes and pulses, very fresh good blood, whereupon
I perceived it to be the blood of the artery...303
Laws did not protect children against cruelty until
the modern period unless they were beaten to death; as one thirteenth-century
law put it, "If one beats a child until it bleeds, then it will remember,
but if one beats it to death, the law applies."304 Since
children were beaten with the same instruments as criminals and slaves,
floggings could be accomplished with whips, shovels, canes, iron rods,
cat-o'-nine tails, bundles of sticks, shovels, whatever came to hand.305
Parents could avoid killing them, said Bartholomew Batty, if they
would not "strike and buffet their children about the face and head,
and lace upon them like malt sacks with cudgels, staves, fork or fire
shovel...[but instead] hit him upon the sides with the rod, he shall
not die thereof."306
When children went to school, the beatings continued
with increased ferocity. Beatings were considered the basis for learning,
since, as one educator said, "fear is good for putting the child in
the mood to hear and to understand. A child cannot quickly forget
what he has learned in fear."307 Augustine recalled the
regular beatings he received at school and described the use of "racks
and hooks and other torments."308 Children were beaten
for every error, such as "being flogged for not marking the ablative
case,"309 and since sexual sadism was rampant among teachers
throughout the centuries the floggings were often described as being
administered to children "stripped in front of the whole community
and beaten until they bled"310 and beatings were often
described as being made by teachers "with a gloating glance of sensual
cruelty."311 Schoolmasters were often described as taking
"the most pretty and amorous boys...into his lodgings and after a
jerke or two [a blow with a rod or a whip] to meddle with their privities..."312
Many books and articles have been written detailing the "erotic flagellation"
of British schools,313 but the erotic content of school
beatings was well-known everywhere since early times.314
Children wondered why "We are taught during our first five or six
years to hide our buttocks and shameful parts; then...along comes
a teacher who forces us to unbutton our trousers, push them down,
life our shirt, show everything and receive the whip in the middle
of the class."315 Girls were equally flogged. Hannah Lynch's
beatings in the nineteenth century were typical: "The superioress
took my head tightly under her arm, and the brawny red-cheeked lay-sister
scourged my back with a three-pointed whip till the blood gushed from
the long strips and I fainted."316
No child in antiquity and the middle ages can be found
who escaped severe physical abuse-at home, at school , in apprenticeship,
all suffered from "battered child syndrome," from infancy until adolescence.
The Old Testament not only demands beating children, it says children
who curse their mother or father "shall surely be put to death" and
of stubborn sons, "All the men of the city shall stone him to death
with stones."317 Spartan boys were flogged in public contest
to see who could endure the longest, and ritually whipped at altars
which became filled with their blood.318 Chinese parents
punished children by "a hundred blows with a bamboo...strangulation
[or] having his flesh torn from his body with red-hot pincers."319
Education was similarly full of floggings. St. Ambrose praised tutors
for being "unsparing with the whip,"320 Augustine "lived
in dread of the whip of his teacher," and Martial "jokes about the
complaints of neighbours living next to a schoolroom: the sounds of
students being beaten awakens them annoyingly early in the morning."321
Mothers are depicted as bringing their children to school and demanding
they be beaten, and descriptions of beatings by the ferula,
a cane with knots in it, tell how "children's hands were so swollen
by this instrument that they could barely hold their books."322
By the middle ages, a few reformers, like Saint Anselm,
began questioning whether whipping children "day and night" was wise,323
and saying that "casting them on the ground [and] kicking them like
dogs [is a] manner of correcting I judge to be detested..."324
Still, little changed for most children, except that by the seventeenth
century sometimes if they were whipped to death during apprenticeship
the master could be convicted of manslaughter.325 Small
infants were the first to be exempted from whippings; "a babe at six
months cries when its mother gives it into the arms of another person...the
child ought not to be whipped for this..."326 By the eighteenth
century's socializing mode parenting, I have found the first children
in history who could be said not to have been beaten at all327-particularly
in America, where European visitors agreed "one and all that American
children were badly spoiled."328 Although Pleck's massive
study of American family violence found all eighteenth-century children
"were hit with an object...ranging from a belt to a horsewhip,"329
she found some in the nineteenth century who were not hit at all.
Mothers discovered for the first time in history that they could have
"a deep, unquenchable love for her offspring,"330 and would
abjure all "whipping, caning, slapping, ear-pulling or hair-dragging,"331
favoring chastising words or locking up in a room instead. By the
early twentieth century, twelve percent of white Americans in one
study claimed never to have been spanked.332 In schools,
however, most Americans agreed with the teacher who said that "moral
suasion's my belief but lickin's my practice,"333 and Boston
schools in 1850 found that it took "sixty-five beatings a day to operate
a school of four hundred."334 Still, even though twenty-three
states approve of school beatings, and three million children are
still paddled in American schools yearly,335 they are nothing
like the infamous British school floggings that continued unabated
throughout the twentieth century, where the beatings were too often
inflicted by flagellomaniac teachers in public displays of cruelty.336
Polls of American parents' spanking practices show
about half spanked on the bottom and a quarter hit with some hard
object, mothers still beating more than fathers and toddlers being
the ones most often beaten, as high as 70 percent.337 In
1979 Sweden became the first country in the world to ban all corporal
punishment of children, so that even though there is no punishment
given to parents who hit their children, the disapproval alone plus
the training of high school children in alternatives to hitting has
reduced the number of children hit to under 30 percent.338
There are at this writing eight more European nations which have anti-spanking
statutes, and even Germany and England are considering them.339
Most of the nations of Western Europe currently have hitting rates
somewhat higher than those of America, while outside of Western Europe
most rates are considerably higher.340
FREEZING, TOSSING AND TORTURING CHILDREN
The number of daily tortures routinely inflicted upon children in
the past seem beyond comprehension. From birth, children had to endure
constant freezing practices, including ice-water bathing and baptism:
Children were baptized by being plunged into a large
hole which had been made in the ice [on the river} Neva, then covered
with five feet of ice...the priest happened to let one of the children
slip through his hands. "Give me another," he cried...I saw that
the father and mother of the child were in an ecstasy of joy...the
babe had been carried straight to heaven.341
The mother took the naked baby and a pot of hot
water into the backyard...poured the water on the snow, melting
it and creating a pool which could serve as a washing basin for
several days; all she had to do the next day was to break the ice.342
Ice-water bathing was a widespread historical practice
from antiquity to modern times, "the colder the Bath the better...use
every Day,"343 so that "the shock was dreadful, the poor
child's horror of it, every morning, when taken out of bed, still
more so."344 The excuse given was that it was necessary
for "hardening" the child, "to toughen their bodies by dipping them
into cold water like white-hot iron,"345 so that when the
"little infant [is washed] in cold water...itself in one continuous
scream [the] mother covering her ears under the bed-clothes that she
may not be distressed by its cries"346 it can be hardened
to life's cruelties. John Locke not only recommended parents wash
the feet of their children every day in cold water, but also make
them wear "shoes so thin that they might leak and let in water" and
clothes and sleeping quarters that allow them to be cold all the time.347
Most societies used these Spartan hardening practices: Russians complained
about traditional hardening such as being put to bed wrapped in wet
cold towels,348 and Colonial New Englanders regularly complained
that they were made to sit with wet feet "more than half the time."349
Alternatively, mothers are so unable to empathize with their children
that they often "take no notice what pains they cause and make baths
for children so hot" they are badly burned.350
Many people over the centuries complained of parents
who "customarily" tossed infants, as when the brother of Henri IV,
while being passed for amusement from one window to another, was dropped
and killed."351 Children were often put to bed tied up
by the hands and made to wear corsets with bone stays, iron bodices
and steel collars, forced to sit many hours a day in stocks, strapped
to a backboard, supposedly to teach them restraint.352
Reports of shutting up little children in closets for hours were legion.353
Painful enemas were given regularly, since "it was thought that children
should be purged especially before eating 'for fear that the milk
will be mixed with some ordure..."354 Children were often
put to bed and told to think about their death and the misery they
will feel in Hell.355 Children were religiously taken to
witness public executions, then "on returning home, whipping them
to make them remember the example."356 Children from antiquity
were not only endlessly frightened that they would be eaten up, abducted
or cut up by ghosts, Lamia, "the black man who comes for naughty children,"
"the goblin in the basement," "the tailor with the huge sizzors,"
"Striga that attack children, defile their bodies and rend the flesh
of sucklings with their beaks."357 To make the terror more
real, their caretakers would actually dress up dummies in order to
terrorized them, or would paint themselves as the werewolf or bloody
monster and "roar and scream at the child [and] make as if it would
swallow the infant up."358 All this terrorizing for no
other reason than to act out concretely the destructive mother alter
in their own heads.
THE ABANDONMENT OF CHILDREN
Abandonment of children may seem less traumatic than tying up, beating
and terrorizing them, but adult biographies rarely fail to mention
the deep hurt they felt as children when they were given away by their
parents-as most children in history were, under one excuse or another.
Newborn infants who were abandoned on the side of the road, of course,
almost always died,359 but even the one-third to two-thirds
of the babies born who were abandoned to foundling homes beginning
in the modern period usually died from maltreatment in the institutions.360
Visitors to these foundling homes regularly described the children
there as:
stunted creatures, neither childlike nor human...they
sit close-packed against the wall or gathered into knots, dull and
stupefied...Never played with or cuddled...it is a holiday when
they are taken for a walk around the room...It is a room of filth,
filled with ceaseless crying, where their lack of decent covering,
their misery and consequent infirmities combine to bring about their
death within a few days.361
The congestion of the infants in narrow, cold, and
humid rooms, with no cleanliness, the lack of linens and the poor
choice of wetnurses, shorten the painful agony before death...Often
a wetnurse was forced to nurse up to five or six children, and,
to ensure that the last of these did not suck on breasts that had
been entirely emptied by the first, she tore the babies from her
breast, screaming.362
Most of the children abandoned in foundling homes
were legitimate363-more girls than boys364-and
up to 90 percent of foundlings died either in the hospital or when
sent to wetnurse, so it is no wonder that it was proposed that a motto
be carved over the gate of one foundling home: "Here children are
killed at public expense."365 It is unlikely that historians
are correct in concluding that the babies being sent there "reflected
not so much a lack of love for them as a deep fear of loving them[sic]."366
Meladze describes his experiences in a Communist-run foster home in
Moscow recently as follows:
Children were regularly stripped naked and their
genitals ridiculed...The foster parents deriving sexual gratification
and feelings of power from these weekly rituals....Psychological
torture and brainwashing were interspersed with sexual abuse. The
aunt, the primary torturer, slept in a double bed with her mother.
I slept in between the two. In the evening, before bed, the great
aunt would undress in front of me and ask me if I wanted to suck
her breasts...The aunt stripped off my pajamas and laughed at my
genitals shouting she would castrate me: "We will cut your balls
off and make you into a girl."...367
Babies not abandoned to foundling homes could be sold
by their parents as slaves during most of history; indeed, there are
still hundreds of thousands of chattel slaves around the world today,
even more in debt bondage.368 Public auctions of children
were common throughout Europe and Asia well into modern times.369
One American colonist described the sale of children in debt bondage
that took place as ships arrived in Philadelphia: "Many parents must
sell and trade away their children like so many head of cattle; for
if their children take the debt upon themselves, the parents can leave
the ship free and unrestrained..."370
The one institution to which parents could abandon
their children and know they were likely to live was the religious
order. Parents knew monasteries and nunneries were abusive-"there
is an inscription over the gate of hell: 'Abandon all hope, you who
enter'; on the gate of monasteries, the same should appear"371-but
they nevertheless paid good money to them to dump their children in
them permanently.372 Most oblates were children of aristocrats,
so there is no argument for economic necessity, and gave large gifts
to the religious orders to take their children, usually at around
five years of age.373 The child became a holocaust,
a sacrifice, to God, the destructive grandmother in the parent's unconscious,
and the cloister "became a cruel life of hard labor, boring routine,
beatings, and fear of sexual sin and assault.374 In return,
the parents could expect "clerical prayer and, ultimately, salvation"375-i.e.,
some peace in their heads from the punitive maternal alter. The children
held the legal status of slaves of the monastery, and they were endlessly
whipped, naked, regularly starved in severe fasts, only allowed to
sleep for five hours a night and used sexually by clerics and older
boys.376 Although most monks were earlier oblates, oblation
began to decline in the late twelfth century, as wealthy parents decided
they preferred to hire servants to whip, starve, torture and sexually
abuse their children in their own home.377
SENDING OUT CHILDREN TO FOSTERAGE, APPRENTICESHIP
AND SERVICE
Another widespread abandonment practice throughout history was fosterage:
Fosterage was found mainly among royalty and other
well-to-do parents [and] was so common that the remark that 'all
the children grew up at home' was offered as an unusual occurrence....sons
obtained new networks of kin relations, but bonding with the mother
was most often precluded, and-most surprising to the modern reader-she
did not seem to have desired her son's company.378
Children might be sent to fosterage "for affection
or for payment" as soon as they returned from wetnurse, usually to
other family members, and not returned until adolescence.379
Since so many families simply traded children with each other, the
custom was puzzling unless one realizes that adults emotionally were
able to treat foster children more abusively-working them like slaves,
beating them, using them sexually-than if they had kept their own
children and not traded them to others.380 Parents who
foster their children today usually explain that they "cannot effectively
discipline their own offspring" if they keep them themselves.381
Fostering in archaic civilizations was so common the mother's brother
was often called the "upbringer" or "fostering brother," and "among
Hittites, Greeks, Romans, Celts and Germans, mother's brothers [would]
supervise initiation and...ritually sodomize his ward..."382
Fosterage was practiced in all complex civilizations in every continent
on earth, right into modern times.383 Parents would simply
ask the uncles or grandparents if they "needed a child"384
and shipped one off to them without tears. If one sent one's child
to royalty and it was killed by abuse, one was expected to thank the
foster parent and bring another.385
There was little difference between fosterage, adoption,
apprenticeship and service. All involved virtual slavery without rights
for the children. The opinion of the Italian at the end of the fifteenth
century that "the want of affection in the English is strongly manifested
towards their children...they put them out, both males and females,
to hard service in the houses of other people...few are born who are
exempted from this fate, for every one, however rich he may be, sends
away his children into the houses of others; whilst he, in return,
receives those of strangers into his own" is often quoted-but in fact
Italians of the time equally fostered and apprenticed their children.386
Everyone agreed that "It is good to remove children from the sight
of their father and mother and give them to friends so that they do
not become quarrelsome; also, when they are in a strange house, they
are more timid and do not dare to enjoy themselves and fear being
scolded..."387 Half of all persons who came to the colonies
in the American South were indentured children.388 England
continued to send hundreds of thousands of children to Canada and
Australia for fosterage well into the twentieth century; a Canadian
minister complained about England' practice using Canada as "a dumping
ground for the refuse of the highways...waifs, strays, and the children
of vicious and criminal tendencies..."389 The practice
continues in many areas of the world for tens of millions of children
today.390
Apprenticeship and service were the fate of virtually
all children, rich or poor alike.391 A master "may be a
tiger in cruelty, he may beat, abuse, strip naked, starve or do what
he will to the poor innocent lad, few people take much notice."392
Mothers also beat the girls apprenticed to them. A typical eighteenth-century
description read: "Elizabeth began to beat and kick them about, and
would drag them up and down stairs making use of the most horrible
expressions. She always kept a rod soaking in brine, with which she
used to beat them on their bare skin when they were undressed to go
to bed...She frequently tied the girl up naked and beat her with a
hearth broom, a horsewhip or a cane, till the child was absolutely
speechless."393 Rape of these children was widespread-since
they felt so lonely and rejected, they more easily allowed themselves
to be used sexually in return for the illusion of some feeling. Entries
in diaries like "my master came to my bed at 2 o'clock in the morning
and violated my person"394 were common, and relatives who
sent children to be servants would assure the new master that she
"will match your cock."395 Masters frequently slept with
their servants and raped them, both the boys and the girls.396
The work done by even small children sent out to others
was often the heaviest and most dangerous needed to be done.397
Whether it was 12 hours a day of heavy labor in the fields398
or climbing boys who were constantly "pinned, beaten, cold, pinched
and abused,"399 even small children could not count on
simple empathy during their time with others:
Little boys had to go on sweeping chimneys and getting
stuck in them or suffocated with soot, or even roasted...Their terror
of the dark, and often suffocating, flues had somehow to be overcome
by the pressure of a greater terror below...masters would threaten
to beat them [or] would set straw on fire below or thrust pins into
their feet...no wonder nursemaids threatened to give naughty children
to the sweep, and children shrieked at sight of him.400
Even when schools began to be more widespread in the
eighteenth century, the children would only go for a few years, then
be sent to apprenticeship. One English girl remembered:
On the day that I was eight years of age, I left
school, and began to work fourteen hours a day in the fields, with
from forty to fifty other children...We were followed all day long
by an old man carrying a long whip in his hand which he did not
forget to use.401
Beyond formal abandonment like fosterage and apprenticeship,
mothers throughout history were constantly giving away their children
for all kinds of rationalized reasons: "because the mother was expecting
another child" (Juhannes Butzbach, "to learn to speak" (Disraeli),
"to cure timidness" (Clara Barton), for "health" (Edmund Burke), "as
pledge for a debt" (Madame d'Aubigné), or simply because they were
not wanted (Richard Baxter, Richard Savage, Augustus Hare, Swift,
Yeats, etc.) Hare's mother expresses the casualness of these abandonments:
"Yes, certainly, the baby shall be sent as soon as it is weaned; and,
if anyone else would like one, would you kindly recollect that we
have others."402 If no one wanted the child, it would most
often be assigned to older children or nurses or others to care for
(autobiographies regularly recalled "I never saw my father and mother
but for an instant in the morning")403 so that they very
often wandered off into the fire or fell down the well.404
Even in the modern period, when mothers began to show some delight
in infants, they soon grew tired of caretaking and sent their children
elsewhere. On June 7, 1748, Madame d'Epinay got her 20-month-old son
back from wetnurse, and writes in her diary:
My son is back with me...He cries when I leave him.
He is already afraid of me, and I am not sorry for it, for I do
not want to spoil him. I sometimes think, when he smiles as he looks
at me, and shows his delight at seeing me by clapping his little
hands, that there is no satisfaction equal to that of making one's
fellow-creatures happy.405
But she soon finds caretaking depressing, writes about
the "apathy and indifference" she feels because her children "are
only an occupation, a duty for me, and do not fill my heart at all,"
and turns them over to the nurse, taking a lover for herself.
MATERNAL INCEST: THE CHILD AS BREAST
In the previous chapter, widespread maternal incest-with the mother
using the child as an erotic breast-substitute by masturbating it
or sucking on its genitals-was documented for many contemporary preliterate
tribes. Although equally clear evidence is hard to come by in history
because of the lack of detailed descriptions of early mothering in
the past, it is likely the sexual abuse by both mothers and wetnurses
continued until modern times.
Primate mothers are widely reported as copulating
with their children; indeed, many cannot learn to reproduce unless
they have had sex with adults when they were children.406 Many immature
primates "copulate with their mothers...explore adult genitalia and
experience manipulation of their own."407 Our closest ancestors,
the bonobo chimps-termed "the erotic champions" of primates-spend
much of their time sucking and masturbating the genitals and "genitogenital
rubbing" of both male and female juveniles, "to reduce tensions."408
Primate children are regularly observed being taught to thrust against
their mothers' genitals.409 This "sexualization of the
infant" was likely extended when human infants grew much larger heads,
since it meant in order to get through the narrow birth canal before
the head grew too large human infants had to be "born fetal," extremely
immature and increasingly helpless, so that in early humans "maternal
attention was not sufficient to care for more helpless infants..."410
This in turn meant a selection for those babies who could most satisfy
the mother's erotic needs-for instance through the extension of non-hairy,
erotic skin areas-for they would be best nursed and cared for as an
erotic, tension-reducing object. Likewise, those human mothers were
selected who had evolved the largest and most erotic breasts411
and who had genitals shifted around to the front, where they could
rub them against their children.412
The psychogenic evolution of the central motivation
for mothering from incest to empathy took millennia, and is still
far more prevalent than is realized. As we detailed in the previous
chapter, researchers have described mothers in various tribal areas
and countries outside of the West as routinely sucking and masturbating
their children, but have concluded that this was not incest since
the society didn't believe it was sexual abuse. Since both the perpetrators
and the victims of maternal incest also collude-each for their own
reasons-in denying its occurrence, current figures for sexual abuse
by females-13 percent of girl victims and 24 percent of boys victims-are
considered likely to be underestimates.413 (Some studies
actually find girls twice as likely to be abused by women as by men.)414
This denial is possible because women sexually abuse children at a
much younger age than men do, so the incidents are more likely to
be repressed by victims of female abuse.415 Maternal sexual
abuse is acknowledged to "remain undetected"416 and therefore
to be badly "underreported...unless coercion was involved...[because]
sexual abuse of children by adult females is usually nonviolent and
at times quite subtle [involving] intercourse, cunnilingus, analingus,
fellatio, genital fondling, digital penetration...and direct exposure
to adult sexual activity."417 Genital contact with the
parent is even more prevalent; in America, "more than fifty percent
of eight- to ten-year-old daughters touched their mother's...genitals
[and] more than forty percent of eight- to ten-year-old sons touched
their mother's genitals..."418 Some clinical studies reveal
widespread female masturbation of little children "to counter her
feelings of lethargy, depression and deadness," "the only way she
could make herself go to sleep," or "painful manipulation of the genitals
by mother [with] the wish to destroy the sexuality of the child."419
The sexual use of children by mothers has been widely
reported by outside observers in both non-literate and literate nations
outside the West. Childhood in much of India earlier in the century
was said to begin with masturbation by the mother, "high caste or
low caste, the girl 'to make her sleep well,' the boy 'to make him
manly.'"420 Like most traditional families, children rotated
around the extended family as sleeping partners rather like a comfort
blanket, and one sociologist who did interviews modeled on the Kinsey
studies reported "there is a lot of incest...It is hidden along with
other secrets of families and rarely gets a chance to come out, like
seduction at the hands of trusted friends of the family...To arrive
at even a passable estimate of incest cases would be to touch the
hornet's nest..."421 Throughout Indian history, says Spencer,
"Mothers stimulated the penises of their infants and gave a 'deep
massage' to their daughters as a form of affectionate consolation."422
Arab mothers are said to "rub the penis long and energetically to
increase its size," "In China, Manchu mothers tickle the genitals
of their little daughters and suck the penis of a small son," "In
Thailand, mothers habitually stroke their son's genitals," etc.423
Western observers even today often notice that Japanese
mothers masturbate their young children during the day in public and
at night in the family bed-in order, they say, "to put them to sleep."424
The average Japanese mother sleeps with her children until they are
ten or fifteen years old, traditionally sleeping "skin-to-skin" (dakine)
while embracing her child because the father-as in the traditional
gynarchy-is usually absent, over two-thirds of Japanese husbands being
involved in extramarital intercourse.425 Japanese mothers
often teach their sons how to masturbate, helping them achieve first
ejaculation in much the same manner as with toilet training.426
A "mental health hotline" in Tokyo recently reported being flooded
with calls about incest, 29 percent of them with complaints such as
that the mother would offer her body for sex while telling the son,
"You cannot study if you cannot have sex. You may use by body," or
"I don't want you to get into trouble with a girl. Have sex with me
instead."427 Wagatsuma reports "Japanese mothers often
exhibit an obsession with their sons' penises...[they are] usually
brought in by their mothers who fear that their sons' penises are
abnormally small,"428 with the result that Japanese marriage
clinics find "60 percent of their patients are afflicted with the
'no-touch syndrome,' that is, they will have no physical contact with
their wives for fear that it will lead to sex...[termed] the ''I love
mommy' complex."429 Adams and Hill and Rosenman have thoroughly
documented the castration anxieties resulting from Japanese maternal
incest.430
Maternal incest in history is, of course, almost impossible
to document except for indirect evidence. Doctors told mothers and
nurses to "gently stretch the end of the foreskin every day" and to
"massage the scrotum" as well as to infibulate the foreskin later.431
Rabbinic sources deemed "a woman 'rubbing' with her minor son" common
enough to have a law concerning it.432 Myths and drama
endlessly depicted maternal incest,433 and dream-books
like Artemidorus' mostly interpreted dreams of maternal incest as
indicating good luck.434 Sophocles has Oedipus claim that
"in dreams...many a man has lain with his own mother,"435
a fact mainly true of actual victims of maternal incest. Incest in
antiquity was not illegal,436 nor was it spoken of as a
miasma, an impurity,437 and early civilizations from Egypt
and Iran to Peru and Hawaii had brother-sister incestuous marriages
where the parents played out their incestuous needs by forcing their
children to marry each other-a third or more of marriages being incestuous
in the case of Roman Egypt.438
Still, direct evidence of widespread maternal sexual
use of children in history can hardly be expected if even today it
is everywhere denied. True, doctors from Soranus to Fallopius counsel
mothers "to take every pain in infancy to enlarge the penis of boys
(by massage and the application of stimulants)..."439 But
usually the only reference to maternal incest is in the penitentials,
where the Canons of Theodore mention that "a mother simulating sexual
intercourse with her small son is to abstain from meat for three years...,"440
or, as in Dominici and Gerson, the child is told not to allow
the mother to touch him.441 One could also cite various
cleric's warnings about maternal incest, the many illustrations of
mothers and grandmothers being shown with their hands on or near their
children's genitals, or one could detail the nearly endless accounts
in autobiographies and other direct reports of the sexual use of children
by nurses and other female servants who masturbated and had intercourse
with their charges "to keep them quiet," "for fun" or "to put them
to sleep."442 Alternatively, one could document various
other routine practices of mothers that indicated they used their
children erotically, such as the habit of grandmothers and mothers
to "lick it with 'the basting tongue'" all day long, sucking their
lips, faces and breasts as though the child was itself a breast,443
or one could describe the incestuous behavior in the public baths
(many of them doubling as brothels) in which mothers and children
co-bathed.444 But just how widespread these incestuous
maternal practices were escapes our research tools.
There is, however, one indirect measure of maternal
incestuous practice that could indicate that mothers until well into
the middle ages were acting out their erotic need to violate their
daughter's genitals. Mothers in China and India have been observed
to "clean the sexual organs of the little children during daily washings...so
scrupulously" that the girls have no trace of a hymen...Even Chinese
doctors do not know anything about the existence of the hymen."445
Some Arab mothers also "practice 'deep cleansing' on their very young
daughters, purposely tearing the girls' hymen."446 A survey
of physicians from antiquity to early modern times reveals that none
of them were able to discover a hymen on any of the little girls they
examined.447 Obviously the mothers and wetnurses of little
girls during this period were routinely rupturing the hymen during
some assault on their vaginas. Even Paré in the sixteenth century
found when he dissected innumerable little girls as young as three
yours old, "I was never able to perceive it."448 Occasionally
a doctor like Soranus would find a hymen with his probe, but considered
it an aberration.449 If one wanted to determine if a girl
was a virgin in Greece, one resorted to magical virginity tests, like
sending her to a cave where a poisonous snake lived, and "if they
were bitten, it was a sign that they were no longer chaste."450
By the fifteenth century, the existence of the hymen and the act of
deflowering by breaking it was finally recognized,451 indicating
that the practice of assaulting girls' genitals had become less than
universal.452
By the sixteenth century, giant communal family beds,
"with people packed like sardines between the blankets,"453
including "grandparents, parents, children, servants and visitors,"454
began to diminish, so that over the next three centuries more and
more people asked each other nostalgically, "Do you not remember those
big beds in which everyone slept together without difficulty?...in
those days men did not become aroused at the sight of naked women
[but now] each one has his own separate bed..."455 The
change was completely psychogenic, as it occurred in rich and poor
families alike. Those who couldn't afford separate beds simply turned
the children around so their heads were opposite to their parents,
and nightclothes were used rather than "skin-to-skin" sleeping of
previous times, so that even "working-class children seldom saw a
naked body because most of their parents slept with their clothes
on and changed clothing in a corner when others were not looking."456
By 1908, incest was finally made a criminal offence; it is today a
minor felony in most nations.457
THE UBIQUITY OF CHILD SEXUAL MOLESTATION
The best studies of incidence of sexual molestation of children are
those of American adults conducted by Wyatt and Russell,458
both based upon face-to-face interviews lasting from one to eight
hours, so that time is allowed for the trust necessary for accurate
recall. Russell found 38 percent and Wyatt 45 percent of women interviewed
reported memories of sexual abuse during their childhood. In my article
"The Universality of Incest," I corrected these figures to reflect
the major biases in their studies-their population does not include
groups who have far higher than average sexual molestation experiences,
such as criminals, prostitutes, the mentally ill, etc.; they neither
count those who refused to be interviewed; and they did not count
either those who might have suppressed conscious memories nor did
they allow for the possibility of unconscious memories, which most
early molestation produces. Adjusting for these factors, I posited
a 60 percent rate of sexual abuse for girls. Using Landis' figures
on men, I posited a 45 percent rate of sexual abuse for boys.459
The average age of the child molested was only 7 years old,460
the average duration of abuse was 5 years,461 and boys
were more often molested by females while girls were more often molested
by males.462 The only comparable studies from interviews
were a Canadian Gallup study, a York University study and two British
surveys, all four of which conclude with incidence rates the same
or higher than the U.S. studies.463 Non-statistical studies
of sexual molestation in other countries indicate the likelihood of
rates being even higher.464
With over half of the children even today being subjected
to sexual abuse-about half occurring between family members and most
of the remainder occurring with the complicity if not outright collusion
of one of the parents-children in the past were likely to have been
routinely used as sexual objects by the adults around them. Although
intimate historical records of past sexual abuse within the family
are obviously selective, a few unusual glimpses of the widespread
frequency of this molestation can be recovered. For instance, when
Beatrice Webb and others reported in the nineteenth century that they
had found that the sexual abuse of young girls by their fathers and
brothers was so common in the families they visited that the girls
often joked about their babies being products of incest,465
or when anthropologists report incest between fathers and daughters
was quite common in rural villages from Greece to Japan,466
one can reject the reports as being perhaps unrepresentative of whole
nations. But when Karen Taylor studied 381 cases of "Venereal Disease
in Nineteenth-Century Children" and found that doctors in nineteenth-century
Europe and America routinely treated children with venereal disease,
mainly on their genitals, anuses and mouths, she finds she agreed
with almost all of them that "There is no doubt on my mind that the
father of this family was the source whence all the other received
infections."467 Since the diseases cannot spread except
by intimate contact with open wounds, when doctors found fathers with
ulcerations of the penis in the same families with children who had
ulcerations on the genitals, anus or mouth, incest had to be the cause.
Reports from European hospitals showed similar patterns of venereal
disease from incest in children.468
A second method that can reveal the extent of sexual
abuse of children is to study measurable physical results of the abuse
and determine their overall patterns in past centuries. One of these
physical results of sexual and other severe childhood abuse is that
girls who are abused reach puberty a few years ahead of others because
of substantial increases in the stress hormone cortisol, in testosterone
and in adrenal hormones, all of which accelerate their age of menarche.469
The age of menarche was approximately12 in antiquity, rose to around
17 in the early modern period, then dropped steadily in the past 200
years down to the present 13 years of age in modern nations.470
The cause of the overall drop recently has been demonstrated as due
to the improvement in the overall population of more protein and calories
during children's growth years.471 But since mainly wealthy
children made up the measured population of menarche from antiquity
to modern times-and these wealthy children did not eat less protein
and calories than the entire population of children around 1700-only
a slowly diminishing rate of sexual abuse of girls can account for
the rise from 12 to 17 during the earlier two millennia. Only if most
girls in antiquity and the middle ages were sexually molested could
they have such an early average age of menarche and age of first children.
Boys do not have such an easily identifiable mark
of puberty as girls, nor do they accelerate their sexual development
as girls do when abused. In fact, boys delay their onset of
puberty as a result of sexual and physical abuse, as John Money's
work on the Kaspar Hauser Syndrome revealed, again connected with
a deficiency of thyroid and growth hormones from the pituitary.472
Was boys' sexual development delayed in early history? It turns out
it was. The growth of first beard in antiquity and the middle ages,
first appeared in the boys' twenties, compared to appearing around
14 years of age today.473 The historical pattern was that
beards began their reduction in the West from the 20s down to 14 around
200 years ago, which, as we will see in the next two sections, was
when most of the reduction in frequency of sexual abuse took place.
A third method of revealing the routine nature of
sexual abuse of children is examine one child's life that is adequately
recorded and see how everyone around him casually uses him sexually.
The best-documented life of a child in past times was that of Louis
XIII (born 1601), through the daily diary of Jean Héroard, his physician.474
The assault on little Louis's erotic zones began at birth, with daily
enemas and suppositories. These had nothing to do with toilet training
or cleanliness-he was left filthy, and was nearly seven years old
before he had his first bath. As doctors regularly recommended for
all infants,475 frequent enemas or even fingers routinely
put deep into the anus were for the purpose of removing the evil inside
contents of the child, contents projected into them by the adults
around them as a poison container. As David Hunt described the process:
"The bowels of children were thought to harbor matter which spoke
to the adult world insolently, threateningly, with malice and insubordination...the
excrement which was regularly washed out of him was regarded as the
insulting message of an inner demon, indicating the 'bad humors' which
lurked within."476 Thus infants must be purged of their
badness before each nursing so the "good" milk wouldn't get mixed
up with the "bad" feces.
Fondling, sucking and kissing little Louis's penis
and nipples were common practices by everyone around him-his parents,
his nurses, his servants-beginning in his infancy and continuing throughout
his childhood. This was done openly, without guilt, and sexual play
with others became Louis's main topic of conversation, recorded in
detail by Héroard. When he was an infant, all the women around him
could hardly refrain from putting their hands up under his clothes,
and one year old, still unable to walk, the entire court lined up
to "kiss his cock."477 At the same time, he was made to
feel guilty for his own assault, being told, "Monsieur, never let
anybody touch your nipples or your cock or they will cut it off."
His parents often undressed him in the middle of the day and took
him to bed with them and "gambled about freely" while they had intercourse.478
After his father stretches out his penis as says, "Behold what made
you what you are," Louis reports that "papa's penis is much longer
than his, that it is this long, indicating half the length of his
arm." "The Queen, touching his cock, tells him: 'Son, I am holding
your spout.'... "He was undressed and [his sister] too and they were
placed naked in bed with the King, where they kissed and twittered
and gave great amusement to the King. The King asked him: 'Son, where
is the Infanta's bundle?' He showed it to him, saying: 'There is no
bone in it, Papa.' Then, as it was slightly distended, he added: 'There
is now, there is sometimes.'"479 By the time he was four,
he was also routinely taken to bed by his ladies-in-waiting and nurses
and encouraged to explore their genitals and play sexual games like
whipping their buttocks, later commenting publicly, "'Mercier has
a cunt as big as that,' showing his two fists, and saying that 'there's
a lot of water inside....the cunt of Saint-Georges is big as this
box [and] the cunt of Dubois is big as my belly."480 His
nurse, Mercier, usually slept with him and used him sexually. When
asked "What have you seen of Mercier?" he answered, "I've seen her
hole." "Is it pretty then?" "No, its pretty fat." "How do you know
that?" "He answers that he has pissed on her."
The constant sexual use of little children in the
past cannot be written off as harmless, as Ariès does when he writes,
"All that was involved was a game whose scabrous nature we should
beware of exaggerating."481 Nor was it limited to poor,
illiterate peasants or workers. It was universal-indeed, it is still
the rule for most of the children on earth-and it was done solely
for psychological reasons. The final two sections of this chapter
will examine more deeply the rape first of girls and then of boys
throughout history.
THE RAPE OF GIRLS IN HISTORY
The attitude of most adults until the twentieth century toward raping
girls is summed up in the comments of a British journalist in 1924
who wrote: "Cases of incest are terribly common in all classes. [Usually]
the criminal goes unpunished...Two men coming out from [a rape] trial
were overheard saying to a woman who deplored there had been no conviction,
'What nonsense! Men should not be punished for a thing like that.
It doesn't harm the child."482 The conviction that girls
always "forget" about being raped after they grow up reaches back
to Maimonides, who assures us that the rape of a girl under three
was no cause for alarm for, once past three, "she will recover her
virginity and be like other virgins."483 Guilt about rape
was simply missing in the past because men recognized only two sexual
categories: rapists and raped, dominators or dominated. Socarides'
pedophile patient tells him why he rapes little girls:
"Women are filthy. They have menstruation, blood...Kids
are cleaner...I have sex with kids so I won't die. It keeps me young,
keeps me youthful. Having sex with women means that you are grown
up already. Kids don't have sex with women, only grownups have sex
with women. If I don't grow up, I don't die."484
Child rapists are so afraid of individuating that
"grownup sex" with women means leaving their neglectful/destructive
mothers, which means death to them. Raping a child means having possession
of a "good breast devoid of frightening configurations" and overcoming
an overpowering sense of emptiness, abandonment and death. Rapists
in history over and over again tell how "rejuvenating" raping children
can be. Epictetus gives this advice to those who want to help others
overcome their fear of death: "What if you offer him a little girl?
And if it is in darkness?"485 The traditional world was
full of children-slaves, servants, sisters, street urchins, child
prostitutes-all available to stave off death and loneliness and to
revenge oneself upon the unloving mother.
Empathy for raped girls was missing in traditional
societies. Even when the rapist was punished-and this was rare-it
was only because "rape or seduction without paternal consent undermined
the father's sovereign authority over his daughter.486
"A girl was quite unprotected if she did not live under the actual
supervision of her father. Moreover, this protection did not extend
to lower class girls, and if the guilty person was of high rank he
was never prosecuted.487 Moreover, it was the general practice
to brutally punish the girl if she was raped, so few ever told anyone
about it.488 Vives says, "I know that many fathers have cut the throats
of their daughters [if raped]...Hippomenes, a great man of Athens,
when he knew his daughter debauched, shut her up in a stable with
a wild horse, kept meatless, [who] tore the young woman [apart] to
feed himself..."489 Girls in the past-as in many Arab countries
still today-would often be killed if they had been raped.490
Even today in rural Greek communities, anthropologists report that
"incest may sometimes be practiced, with the father, or both the fathers
and the brothers, exploiting the growing girl....If the girl should
become pregnant...her brothers or her father will kill her [in] an
'honor' killing."491 Or, in antiquity, "the father could
exercise his power by putting the raped girl up for sale."492
Or the father would "give his daughter to the ravisher in marriage,"493
a custom still practiced in many areas of the world today.494
Men began raping girls when they were extremely young.
Even today, the average age of rape is 7 years, with 81 percent of
sexual abuse occurring before puberty and 42 percent under age 7.495
Well into the modern period many people thought raping little girls
was a good idea because it was "instructive" for them; a woman physician
wrote in 1878:
Infants but two and three years of age are often
raped, by men of all ages, not only for present gratification, but
to familiarize girls of immature ages with carnal matters and to
excite, so that seduction may be easy in the future....We cannot
too strongly impress upon the fathers of daughters their duty in
seeing that their little girls are instructed in regard to the certainty
of protecting themselves against rapes, by grabbing the testicles.496
Not all fathers in the past were protective of their
daughters' virginity. Although only three percent of women report
incest with fathers in America today,497 Gorden found far
more widespread incest in nineteenth-century American families, with
biological fathers accounting for nearly half of the cases that reached
Boston courts498 and Lowndes reported that the only reason
British courts were not swamped by paternal incest cases was that
they simply didn't believe the victims and that the Society for Prevention
of Cruelty to Children was precluded from touching incest cases.499
"Cases were hushed up, the rapist bribed parents not to report them,
and wives might refuse to believe that the husbands were capable of
such monstrosity, and even turn on their own daughters if they tried
to complain."500 Records of mothers colluding with the
fathers' rape were legion, as in the colonial American family where
the mother "forced her daughter to go to bed with her stepfather,
and, as the girl told the court, 'my mother held me by the hand whilst
my father did abuse me and had his will of me.'"501 Many
if not most "delinquent" girls in the past were simply victims of
incest:
A Chicago study of delinquent girls in 1917 included
many anecdotal cases of [sexual] abuse by relatives or neighbors,
including "one girl raped by her own father when she was ten years
of age, one by an uncle, two by boarders." In such accounts, phrases
like "incest with a father" and "raped by a lodger" recur in a bleak
litany. Jane Addams noted in 1913 that "a surprising number of little
girls have first become involved in wrongdoing through the men of
their own households,' often as a result of assaults that occurred
before the victims were eight years old.502
Many societies prefer incestuous marriages-n China,
for instance, some families would avoid marriages to strangers by
adopting girls when infants and raising them with their sons so they
can marry their sisters.503 In many poor countries, "girls
were regularly allowed to die off-through giving them less food and
by other neglect-if they did not appeal sexually to the men around
them. Even though this meant very high sexual abuse rates for young
girls and severe sexual problems for them as women, the girls' flirtatious
traits were adaptive..."504 Again, the entire gynarchy
often colluded in the rapes. One of Madam Du Barry's main duties was
"to search the land for the most beautiful girls who could be bought
or kidnapped [as] 'baby-mistresses'" for Louis XV: "And with each
of them, it was his custom before violating them to have them kneel
with him in prayer at the edge of the bed which was to be the place
of their defloration."505 Even Queen Elizabeth was made
to play sexual games in bed with her foster-father in the home where
she was sent as a teenager506-which could be the reason
why she never married.
The fact that most girls were routinely badly beaten
in the past made rapes more easy to cover up. A typical case was reported
by a Boston physician:
A relative began masturbating her when she was about
8. He threatened to tell her father about some childish error if
she wouldn't let him do as he pleased and she was afraid of her
father....She has cut herself 28 or 30 times...Cuts herself slowly
to bring out the pain...Mother whipped her with horsewhip...A Dr.
in Lynn told her she should have connections [sexual intercourse]
that it would cure her desire to cut herself...Stuck pen-knife in
her vagina...Dr. Briggs [a previous physician she'd consulted] got
a 'hard-on.[ Took her hand and put it on his penis...Then he masturbated
her breasts and genitals over an hour...[her uncle] often used to
hurt her horribly when he masturbated her.507
If the father had no daughter, he could use his son's
child bride:
Fathers marry their sons to some blooming girl in
the village at a very early age, and then send the young men either
to Moscow or St. Petersburg to seek employment...when the son returns
to his cottage, he finds himself nominal father of several children,
the off-spring of his own parent...This is done all over Russia.508
It is not surprising that Duby reports of medieval
families that they were "a hotbed of sexual adventure...penitentials
forbid a man to know his wife's sister or daughter, his brother's
wife...maidservants, female relatives, women still 'vacant,' or not
yet disposed of [were] an open invitation to male licentiousness.
In this small enclosed Paradise every man was an Adam: the young,
the not so young, and first and foremost the head of the family, all
were constantly exposed to temptation."509 Grandfathers
in particular had to be warned by early psychoanalysts not to insert
their fingers into their granddaughters' vaginas.510 The
traditional family of the past was similar to families in less advanced
areas today: for instance, a recent report of Middle Eastern women
found four out of five recalled having been forced into fellatio between
the ages of 3 and 6 by older brothers and other relatives.511
The molestation begins with masturbation or fellatio and proceeds
to intercourse: "In most cases the girl surrenders and is afraid to
complain since, if there is any punishment to be meted out, it will
always end up by being inflicted on her."512 Sometimes,
as in contemporary rural Greek villages, the young girl might invite
the seduction in order to act out a fantasy of conquest of the abusive
male. As one anthropologist reports:
To be raped or be the victim of an incestuous attack
may have the appearance of a villainous assault upon innocence.
[But while they usually] are angry at their seducers and exploiters,
they can be very pleased by conquest [and] are not above seducing
priests, fathers, and brothers as well as the husbands of their
neighbours.513
Sexual slavery-whether of actual slaves or of foster
children, servants or apprentices-was very widespread in the past.
Even today there are over 100 million sexual slaves around the world,
most of them starting their sexual services as children.514
Nor is the sale always forced by poverty: "A recent survey in Thailand
found that of the families who sold their daughters, two-thirds could
afford not to do so but instead preferred to buy color televisions
and video equipment."515 Rape of girl servants in the past
was nearly universal:
Masters seemed to believe that they had a right
to their servants' or apprentices' sexual favours, a right they
would claim by force if servants did not acquiesce...In 1772, when
Sarah Bishop, aged sixteen, claimed to her mistress that her master
had raped her, she told her "he always served all his servants so
the night they came into the house." ...Rape seems to have been
almost a ritual assertion of the master's authority...he believed
that he had committed no crime.516
The majority of girls raped were done so with some
sort of collusion of their parents. Mothers commonly rented out rooms
to borders and forced their daughters to sleep with them.517
Throughout medieval Europe "daughters were loaned to guests as an
act of hospitality."518 In Victorian London, "children
went out onto the streets 'with the connivance of the mother,' returned
home at night, and made their contribution to 'the profit of the household.'"519
Children as young as six were openly offered for sale and sexual use
by public advertisements in most cities of Europe.520 One
British chaplain declared that trying to stop child prostitution was
like 'taking a spoon to empty the Mersey;"521 it was estimated
in Victorian London one house in sixty was a brothel (6,000 in all)
and one female in sixteen a prostitute.522 Virtually all
prostitutes began either after rape in homes as children or because
they were sold by their parents into prostitution.523 In
antiquity, either "sacred" prostitution-with as many as six thousand
prostitutes available in many temples-or profane prostitution or sex
slavery was the lot of the majority of little girls born.524
Fathers sold and rented out their daughters for sexual use without
the least guilt.525 If Genesis is to be believed, Lot handed
over his two daughters for sexual use without even a payment.526
Chinese chiefs would provide harem girls to guests to rape, and one
of them, Shihu, chief of the Huns, even had one of his harem girls
cooked and served to his guests as a delicacy.527 Greek
plays portray the sexual use of slave-girls as routine.528
Greek wives were often not allowed to do farming chores lest they
be raped.529 John Chrysostome tells parents to frighten
their children not to go out into the streets because they "ran the
risk of sexual attack by pedophiles offering sweets and nuts."530
Christianity changed little in the use of young girls for raping.
Convents were open brothels where "monks and confessors alike treated
nuns and young novitiates as wives, but their victims' mouths were
sealed by the 'dread of excommunication threatened by their spiritual
fathers."531 In many cities, "nunneries were often little
more than whorehouses [providing] fornication between nuns and their
gentlemen callers."532 The clergy-in the past as in the
present-was often reported as preferring little children to rape:
"At Pope Alexander VI's celebration of Catholic Spain's victory over
the Moors, children were passed amongst the clergy in a veritable
'sexual bacchanalia.'"533
Girls who went into the streets alone sometimes carried
knives for protection against rape.534 Since rape was thought
to be "a mere trifle (paulum quiddam)," rapists until very
recently were rarely prosecuted and even more rarely found guilty
(since there had to be others who witnessed the rape),535
and even if found guilty, most were let off with a mild fine.536
One of the most-used excuses for raping girls was the widespread belief
that rape of a virgin cures one of venereal disease; if you said this
was your reason for rape, you were usually let go.537 The
belief was the typical "poison container" theory, that sexual intercourse
with the pure was an antidote to the impure. Even the bubonic plague
was thought to be cured by raping pure girls.538 Many brothels
in the past and in the present specialized in providing "virgins"
to men suffering from venereal disease for supposed "treatment" for
the disease.539
Perhaps the most popular way to rape girls in the
past was in the "raping gangs" that existed in nearly every country
from antiquity to modern times. Roving gangs of "youths"-which practiced
homosexual submission to the older among them540-practiced
nightly collective raping attacks on unprotected women, "forcing the
doors of a woman's house and, without concealing their identity and
mixing brutality with blandishments, threats and insults, would rape
their prey on the spot [and] drag the victim through the streets,
eventually pulling her into a house whose keepers were accessories
to the plot, where they would do as they pleased, all night long."541
Gang rapes made up to 80 percent of all sexual assaults in many areas,542
and violent gang rape "constituted a veritable rite of initiation"
for youth in the past.543 Neighbors did not intervene;
indeed, the rapes were considered "public performances" and the gang
rapes were considered just normal, youthful "sporting" activities
by their fathers and other city officials.544 Over half
of the youth of the cities participated in the gang rapes, and over
the years a large minority of the young girls of the city would end
up being raped, giving credence to the conclusion that gang rape was
a rite of initiation for youth in traditional societies, a preparation
for the violence of knightly society.545
Finally, even when the girl got married, the marriage
was usually at a very young age and to a man who was chosen by the
parents, so in fact it would be considered child rape today. Girls
were usually married off in antiquity between 12 and 14, to men in
their 30s;546 "it was not uncommon," says Blümner, "since
Greek girls married very early, for them to play with their dolls
up to the time of their marriage, and just before their wedding to
take these to some temple...and there dedicate them as a pious offering."547
Christian canon law ostensibly forbade child marriage, but the legal
age for girls was twelve, and for most of medieval times "It was not
at all uncommon for a girl to be a bride at ten [since] one of tender
years [could] be married to a septuagenarian while 'church laws did
not rescind the nuptials.'"548 Marriage thus was simply
the final rape for most girls throughout history until modern times.
THE UNIVERSALITY OF HISTORICAL PEDERASTY
Pederasts past and present use boys for sexual purposes to make up
for the traumas of their own childhood, "the male child representing
his ideal self, whose youthfulness protects him from annihilation
(death anxiety)."549 The boy is the smooth, maternal breast,
the penis is the nipple, and raping the boy is an act of revenge toward
the mother, showing that the pederast is in total control, dominating
the boy to overcome his sense of emptiness and abandonment. As one
pederast put it, "I want to hold him in my arms, control him, dominate
him, make him do my bidding, that I'm all-powerful."550
The pederast's sexual targets are so interchangeable that he often
seduces hundreds of boys in his lifetime. The sexual use of boys is
not to be thought of as "a lack of impulse controls" or even as "only
a different object choice" as most historians claim; pederasts are
driven not by their sexual instincts but by their overwhelming anxieties.
Domination rather than tender love was in fact the
central aim of all sexuality until modern times. Raping boys was by
far the preferred sexual activity of men; it was considered more "according
to nature" than heterosexuality, "an ordinance enacted by divine laws."551
Pythagoras, when asked when one should have sex with women rather
than boys, replied: "When you want to lose what strength you have."552
As one historian of sexuality put it, "The world was divided into
the screwers-all male-and the screwed-both male and female."553
Because the boy represented the ideal self with whom the rapist merged,
he must be without hair: "I like the smooth surface of the young boy's
body, I don't like hair on it, I can't stand it..."554
So as soon as boys reached puberty, they were felt to be useless for
sexual purposes, and all pederastic poetry mentions the first hairs
terminate the boy's attractiveness. According to graffiti and poetry,
the boy is most often raped anally.555 Lucilius compares
sexual relations with boys and women: "She bloodies you, but he on
the other hand beshits you."556 While the vagina is "castigated
in invective as smelly, dirty, wet, loose, noisy, hairy, and so on...no
such feeling seems to have been applied to the anuses of pueri."557
Boys' anuses were called "rosebud, sometimes compared to the sweetest
of fruits, the fig, other times again equated with gold."558
The only precaution taken was to depilitate boys' anuses, says Martial
and Suetonius.559 Indeed, as Martial put it, men must only
penetrate the anus of boys, warning a man who was stimulating a boy's
penis: "Nature has divided the male into two parts: one was made for
girls, the other for men. Use your part."560 Boys were
far preferred over women; Propertius vowed, "May my enemies all fall
in love with women and my friends with boys."561 It was
important that the boy not experience pleasure, only "pain and tears...of
pleasure he has none at all."562 The painful assault on
the boy's anus also restaged the painful routine insertion by mothers
and nurses of fingers, enemas and suppositories into the rectums of
children. In particular, "initiatory" pederasty was always anal, involving
a fantasy of "the intrinsic spiritual value of sperm" that-as we have
seen in the previous chapter-was needed to ejaculate into the boy's
anus in order to "make him a man."563 Parents taught boys
in antiquity to "Put up with it: not as a pleasure, but as a duty."564
Physicians were regularly expected to provide ointments and other
lubricants for anal penetration of boys and they were asked to repair
the rectal tears and other injuries that were the usual results of
the rapes.565
Pederasty was widespread in preliterate tribes around
the world, from the "customary pederasty" of Australians and the sexual
use of berdaches in North and Central American tribes-where
boys were dressed as girls beginning in infancy for raping-to the
"boy-wives" of Africa.566 All early civilizations practiced
boy rape and even had boys serve as temple prostitutes, including
the ancient Hebrews, Sumerians, Persians, Mesopotamians, Celts, Egyptians,
Etruscans, Carthaginians, Chinese, Japanese, Indians, Aztecs, Mayans,
etc.567 The rape was expected to be violent; men were expected
to take along with them when going out in the streets "scissors, to
make a hole in the trousers of the boy [and] a small pillow to put
in the boy's mouth if he should scream..."568 Tutors and
teachers often raped their pupils along with beating them; as Quintilian
warned, "I blush to mention the shameful abuse which scoundrels sometimes
make of their right to administer corporal punishment. Fathers in
Greece chose the penetrator of his boy, often obtaining gifts or favors
in return.569 Aristophanes shows one father in Birds
complaining to another, "Well, this is a fine state of affairs...You
meet my son just as he comes out of the gymnasium, all fresh from
the bath, and you don't kiss him, you don't say a word to him, you
don't hug him, you don't feel his balls! And yet you're supposed to
be a friend of ours!"570 Pedagogues were hired to guard
boys against rape by unapproved men, but the pedagogue might assault
the boy himself.571 Boys. in Greece were blamed if their
failed to find a pederast for themselves; every boy was expected to
have one.572 Greek and Roman soldiers brought boys along
with them on campaigns to use sexually.573 Slave boys were
often furnished to guests for sexual use.574 Doctors prescribed
sex with boys as therapy.575 Boy brothels and rent-a-boy
services were widespread, and pederasts chosen by the father could
even sell his rights to rape a particular boy to another man.576
With the number of boys prostitutes worldwide still in the millions,577
it is not surprising that every city in antiquity had its boy-brothels;
in Rome, boys could be picked up at the barbershop or at the exit
of any of the games.578 All men, even when married, were
expected to have sex with boys. "Almost all of the great democratic
leaders of Archaic Athens were...pederastic."579 Wives
found it hard to compete with their husbands' boys. Juvenal says wives
were "always hot with quarrels...bitching away...about his boy-friends,"580
and Martial describes a wife yelling, "Bumming a boy again! Don't
I have a rump as well?"581
A few early Christians began to object to using boys
sexually. John Chrysostom complained about fathers taking their boys
to banquets where they were made to perform fellatio on men "under
the blankets," recommending that boys be placed in the care of monks
at the age of ten to avoid seduction.582 But most medieval
authors gave the pro-pederast advice of antiquity, with medical books
recommending sex with boys as "less harmful [than] sexual union with
women [which] leads more quickly to old age..."583 The
reason men in medieval times waited until their 30s to get married
was because they routinely used young boys for sex until then; in
Florence, for instance, only a quarter of the men in the fifteenth
century were married by the age of 32.584 Since over a
third of most households had servants or apprentices, sexual relations
between masters and male servants were even more common and even acceptable
than between masters and female servants.585 Tutors and
teachers in schools were expected to use their students sexually,
and those who protested that it was a "vice so inveterate [and] so
strong a custom" that it was "hardly likely to be discouraged" were
thought odd.586
But placing boys as oblates into monasteries only
made them available for rape by monks, who could not keep their hands
off them. One abbott wrote about an infant boy brought to the monastery
by his father:
...the man turned the child over to me altogether,
and I received the baby with pleasure and joy and a clean heart.
[But] when the boy got older and had reached the age of about ten...I
was tortured and overwhelmed by an obscene desire, and the beast
of impure lust and a desire for pleasure burned in my soul...I wanted
to have sex with the boy...587
Sex with boys was the central obsession of monks beginning
with the early anchorites who went to the desert; Macarius saw so
many monks having sex with boys in the desert that he strongly advised
monks not to take them in.588 But the need was too strong, and even
rules such as those requiring boys to have escorts when going to the
lavatory did not prevent monks from routinely using their oblates
sexually.589 So many monks raped their novices that there
was a common saying, "With wine and boys around, the monks have no
need of the Devil to tempt them."590 Priests also commonly
used confessions to solicit sex with boys, but early Christian penitentials
assessed penances only for the boys, since they were blamed for their
own rape. Peter Damian said in the eleventh century that sex with
boys in monasteries "rages like a bloodthirsty beast in the midst
of the sheepfold of Christ with bold freedom" and suggested both the
man and boy be punished as accomplices for a "sin against nature."591
So acceptable was pederasty in medieval times that
parents continued handing over their boys for sexual use to friends
and others from whom they expected favors.592 Bernardino
of Siena condemned parents as "pimps" of their own sons, saying the
fathers, pederasts themselves, were the ones most responsible, taking
money or gifts from their sons' rapists.593 Boys were so
likely to be raped in the streets-"a boy can't even pass nearby without
having a sodomite on his tail"-that Bernardino urged mothers, "Send
your girls out instead, who aren't in any danger at all if you let
them out among such people...this is less evil."594 Mothers,
too, colluded in the seduction of their sons. "When a boy started
to mature sexually...his mother gave him a bedroom to himself on the
ground floor, 'with a separate entrance and every convenience, so
that he can do whatever he pleases and bring home whomever he likes.'"595
When beginning in the fifteenth century some more
violent pederasty disputes began being handled by courts, the huge
number of cases prosecuted revealed that every place boys were gathered-from
schools and monasteries to taverns and pastry shops-were "schools
of sodomy" where pederasts gathered to violate boys.596
In Florence, according to the thorough analysis of court records by
Michael Rocke, "in the later fifteenth century, the majority of local
males at least once during their lifetimes were officially incriminated
for engaging in homosexual relations" with boys.597 Since
many pederasts were never incriminated in court, since courts were
reluctant to try any but the most violent cases of boy rape, and since
pederasts past and present usually rape dozens of boys each, these
early court statistics reveal as nothing else the universality of
pederasty in history. If the majority of men were hauled into court
for cases in connection with their pederasty, the number of boys actually
being raped must have been nearly everyone.
As more parents evolved into the intrusive and socializing
modes of modern times, they were more and more reluctant to hand over
their boys for use by pederasts. Tutors began being monitored to see
that they were not pederasts, and reformers began to warn that servants
too often "take liberties with a child which they would not risk with
a young man."598 Some suggested that public female brothels
should be encouraged as "the best chance of keeping men away from
boys."599 The rape of boys in British public schools, "with
the full knowledge and collusion, even the approval, of their elders,"600
nevertheless continued into the twentieth century, where every older
boy and even teachers had a younger boy as their "bitch" to use sexually.601
Only slowly in recent decades has it become acceptable to defend children
against sexual attack, and only in the most psychogenically advanced
nations has the rate of sexual abuse of children dropped to only half
of the children born.
Obviously, despite the achievement of empathic childrearing
among some parents today, most of humankind still has a long way to
evolve to get beyond severe abuse and give their children the love
and respect they deserve. The ubiquity of severe child abuse and neglect
in historical sources makes even the most horrific descriptions found
in contemporary clinical and child advocacy reports seem limited in
comparison. It is no wonder that historians have chosen to hide, deny
and whitewash the record here uncovered, in order to avoid confronting
the parental holocaust that has been the central cause of violence
and misery throughout history.
Citations
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