technical images and linear text

So, I’ve been neglecting this blog of late, as I’ve been devoting my internet energies to maintaining another blog related to a course I’ve been taking. I noticed that my recent post on critical animal studies was of some interest, and so I encourage those interested in such issues to check out the other blog, dealing generally with the question of ‘life itself,’ and eventually with specific topics directly tied to CAS.

But I came across this piece recently in the WSJ, and I wanted to link to it and comment, but it was simply too far removed from the other blog.

I think it speaks to the necessarily situational character of political commitments, and why it’s wrong to identify oneself univocally with a given party. (Not many of us know that many founders of many contemporary democractic states were deeply suspicious of political parties – but that’s somewhat beside the point.) Dorothy Rabinowitz writes quite critically in this piece of Martha Coakley, the Democratic candidate who recently stood in the election for the late Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, specifically questioning her judgment with regard to the case of Gerald Amirault. In 1984, Amirault was convicted in the famous Fells Acres Day Care Center trial and sentenced, along with his mother and sister, to a lengthy prison term for the sexual abuse of children. This may be regarded as of a piece with the various sexual abuse hysterias of the 1980s, wherein a wide array of bizarre accusations were made of vicious sex acts performed on children, orgies, devil-worship, animal mutilation, and so forth, all occurring at day care centers and all in the absence of any supporting physical evidence.

The difference between Amirault’s case and the many similar cases which were prosecuted around the same time, was that Amirault’s conviction was never really overturned. This in spite of the evident absurdity of the accusations against him, which Rabinowitz describes as follows:

Gerald, it was alleged, had plunged a wide-blade butcher knife into the rectum of a 4-year-old boy, which he then had trouble removing. When a teacher in the school saw him in action with the knife, she asked him what he was doing, and then told him not to do it again, a child said. On this testimony, Gerald was convicted of a rape which had, miraculously, left no mark or other injury. Violet [his mother] had tied a boy to a tree in front of the school one bright afternoon, in full view of everyone, and had assaulted him anally with a stick, and then with “a magic wand.” She would be convicted of these charges. Cheryl [his sister] had cut the leg off a squirrel.

Now such cases of hysteria are fascinating enough in themselves, and as one example amongst many of North American culture’s peculiar, schizoid relationship with the sexuality of children. They are also testament to the suggestibility of children as witnesses. In many of these cases the process of getting testimony was described as “getting blood from a stone,” as interviewers would cajole children ’suspected’ of being abused, often over a period of months, to detail the sexual crimes committed against them.

Where Coakley comes in is at the very end, just as Amirault might have seen justice:

In 2000, the Massachusetts Governor’s Board of Pardons and Paroles met to consider a commutation of Gerald’s sentence. After nine months of investigation, the board, reputed to be the toughest in the country, voted 5-0, with one abstention, to commute his sentence. Still more newsworthy was an added statement, signed by a majority of the board, which pointed to the lack of evidence against the Amiraults, and the “extraordinary if not bizarre allegations” on which they had been convicted.

Editorials in every major and minor paper in the state applauded the Board’s findings. District Attorney Coakley was not idle either, and quickly set about organizing the parents and children in the case, bringing them to meetings with Acting Gov. Jane Swift, to persuade her to reject the board’s ruling. Ms. Coakley also worked the press, setting up a special interview so that the now adult accusers could tell reporters, once more, of the tortures they had suffered at the hands of the Amiraults, and of their panic at the prospect of Gerald going free.

As a result, the governor rejected the Board’s findings, and Amirault remained in jail for two more years; now, released on parole, he is forced to wear an electronic tracking device and report his whereabouts. He is also restricted from entering certain areas – as apparently befits a so-called ’sex offender’ in our day – and, of course, his prospects of employment are effectively nil.

This story makes me think about a lot of things, but most immediately it makes me think that Coakley is a horrid bitch, and one whom the United States Senate is lucky not to have. The republican who beat her, Scott Brown, may be an awful human being for all I know, but he would have to really work at it to surpass Coakley in this regard. And though my political leanings are generally liberal, in many ways far to the left of the mainstream Left, I would almost certainly have voted Republican in this election. (Had I been an American, that is. And in this regard I also would have been trying to send a message to this ‘President Obama,’ who in spite of the world’s hopes has proven to be awfully well-spoken and telegenic but essentially just that: in other words a façade, one who is the inverse image of Bush, but who plays precisely the same role in the US political machine.) Then it makes me think the aforementioned and afore-alluded-to thoughts about how fucked up the contemporary treatment of children’s sexuality is: fucked up to the point that in even mentioning the topic in such a tone, I’ll probably convince many people that I’ve got pedophilic tendencies of my own. I’ve got no interest in children as sex objects per se, but I am academically interested in how various cultures have constructed and construed child sexuality: how did we get from the wackiness of Ancient Greece to the Puritanism of the nineteenth century and on to the confused secular morality of our day? (where, one hardly needs to mention, the hysteria over pedophiles exists alongside the insane world of Toddlers and Tiaras?) It’s obvious that children need to be protected from sexual exploitation by adults – and, we may note, the Greeks had their own social norms that served this function – but cases like Amirault’s show that there is often something pathological and downright evil at work in how the justice system deals with sexual offenses. Then, finally, I think how awful it must have been for the guy wrongly accused of abusing children, living for years in prison, and I think about how much, in his shoes, I would hate the whole apparatus responsible for putting me there, and continuing to prevent me from leading a normal life.

I can only imagine what I’d think. I can only imagine what I’d do.  But in any case, it wouldn’t be pleasant.