Child Sexual Abuse — an Anthropological Perspective

Abstract

The previous chapters of this book have clearly demonstrated that contemporary western definitions of child sexual abuse cannot be easily or unproblematically applied to past societies. They have shown the dangers of looking at abuse through the lens of early twenty-first-century understandings of this issue which imply a teleology in which contemporary ideas about appropriate adult—child relationships are imposed as ‘correct’ or ‘more enlightened’ on people in the past and which have a tendency to misinterpret, and even to demonize, their attitudes to children. One needs to go no further than the opening paragraph of Lloyd deMause’s A History of Childhood1 to argue for the importance of examining historical case studies which call into question such universalist and essentialist attempts to understand what is now commonly known as child sexual abuse. In a parallel way, social anthropology has recently begun to engage with issues of child sexual abuse, looking at how it is defined, and by whom, and how, as anthropologists, it is possible for us to distinguish between indigenous cultural practices, which may appear abusive to outsiders, but are not considered so internally to a community, and those which are acknowledged as aberrant.2 The most important lesson for an anthropologist looking at the previously discussed historical case studies in this book, is the necessity of analysing and understanding child sexual abuse within its specific local or historical contexts, as well as in the broader sense of the social values and hierarchical structures prevailing in the wider society at particular times.