Ann Wolbert Burgess
SOURCE: PAN Magazine
- n=number, p=page number
n.8, p.12
TRASHING THE PARTY OF THE NUTTY NURSE
One could write volumes about victimology. A likely candidate can be anybody with what he thinks is a disadvantage -- a Jew, a black, a gay, a boy-lover. Once he has identified himself as vulnerable there are a hundred bullies eager and ready to turn him into a victim. And they have the tracts to justify it: Mein Kampf, the Epistles of St. Paul, laws in the penal codes, even the unending stream of prurient "exposés" in gutter journals too numerous and well-known to mention.
A good case can be made for civilisation advancing only when victims stop being victims and turn on their bullies. People might feel sorry for the hundreds of thousands of Middle-Age Catherists who went to their firey deaths as the priests of Rome danced about them clutching bible and cross -- but the Catherists didn't leave much behind them. It would seem to be no coincidence that anti-semitism in the Western world didn't diminish one iota as the world learned of the Warsaw ghetto and the torture/extermination camps -- but it did after Israel was established and, for better or worse, showed a national aggressiveness the Jews had never been thought to possess.
It might seem that we spend a lot of time in these pages talking about Boston -- and that Massachusetts paedophiles are subject to an unusual amount of victimization. This is only because we hear about it. (Does a stone cast in a pond really make a noise if it is unheard? Does a boy-lover screaming the truth in some police cellar, abandoned by friends, abandoned by gays and other boy-lovers, really make a noise either?) In this one medium-sized American city there is a small group of people who refuse to let the bullies get away with everything they want. These men are very much out of the closet. They are excellent at getting attention in the press, over the radio, even on TV. And the authorities have left them alone.
Their latest success was trashing the "Nutty Nurse" caper. It seems that Boston University has a rather nasty nursing dean by the name of Ann Burgess ("the living image of Nurse Ratchett in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," according to Tom Reeves) who somehow inveigled $50,000 out of the US government to "rehabilitate" children photographed by paedophiles. No sooner was the cash in hand than she put on a wing-ding party (excuse us, a conference) -- and invited a fine cast of bullies to participate. There was Lloyd Martin, of course, as the keynote speaker at the celebratory banquet. The affair was to begin in the morning of 12 March at 9 am in the Curtis Auditorium of the Boston University School of Nursing. The nutty nurse herself would kick off with a one-hour presentation called Linkages Among Child Victimization: Prostitution and Pornography (evidently grammar was not one of the required subjects in her education). This was to be followed by a Dr. Roland Summit talking on Incest Patterns. After lunch the cops were to hold forth on State and Federal Laws and Investigation of Child Pornography. Then there was to be an "Interagency Panel Discussion Identifying Child Pornography: Roles of the Various Federal Agencies". In case all of this had been a little too serious, participants could unwind at a "cash bar" at 6:00 ("Har, har, har, you shudda seen that little scout-leaders face when the judge slapped him
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with a lifer -- make the next one a double, Harry!") Finally dinner at seven, and the Lloyd Martin Show would start with the ice-cream.
Well, the party went off almost as planned, except for a little background music from the opposition. Tom Reeves attended the "serious" part of the affair, the morning and afternoon conference. "The day got off to a swinging start," Reeves reports, "with Nurse Burgess standing at the podium beneath a huge screen on which slides of boys were shown. The first were slides of boys fully clothed, playing ball, swimming, sitting around, wrestling, etc. These she called 'innocent but essentially pornographic to the paraphiliac (sic)'. She explained that certain men lurk near playgrounds, etc., sometimes using zoom lenses, but sometimes actually photographing the boys up close. These types do not ever even touch their 'victims', but later masturbate over the photographs, imagining vile scenarios.
"The next photos showed boys in the process of undressing. 'This is typical,' she confided. 'There is something special about slipping in and out of underwear and bathing suits, and they seem to prefer red ones. It is possibly the image of innocence before the fall.' Next came nudes. 'These were seized from a man (George Jacobs ; see PAN 5, page 7) who made over 90,000 such slides and is now serving a prison sentence. A part of his plea bargain included a deal that he would work with us, and he is now working with us, especially to identify the victims and their families so we can interview them, and also to lead us to other potential paedophiles and to the rings.' The nudes were individuals and groups of boys, really beautiful, well-photographed artistic photos, of apparently happy, uncoaxed, relaxed boys. Each one, though, had its special significance in her mind. Regarding one photo of three boys, about 12-13, wearing little black Halloween masks (and nothing else), 'Now, this means something, probably sado-masochism. It follows a pattern. Secrecy, that sort of thing. And games -- the paedophile loves games and puts his boys through all sorts of tricks for the camera.'
"She showed several photos of nude boys (not aroused) on beaches, in woods, fields, etc. 'This is very frequent. It definitely means something that they always want them outdoors.' She showed one photo of two boys, about 10, pissing. 'This is a real specialty. Urination is a request -- they take big orders for this: golden showers, you know.' (Lots of laughs, guffaws, ribald remarks, as at a stag party.) Next were a series of ten photos of different boys taken by another photographer -- I saw nothing peculiar about them. 'What do you see?' Burgess asked. Nobody responded. 'They all are skinny! That was especially true of this man. He was very fat. But a lot of these men are overweight and you will see as
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you examine the pornography collections circulating in these rings that the boys are usually skinny. I mean, look at that boy, look at how skinny he is!' (The boy was lovely, lying on his stomach, nude.) 'Just imagine this old, fat man looking at this photo and you can perhaps get inside the paedophile for a moment. He is imagining that the boy is himself, as he once was or wishes he had been! We find that this is what they are usually fantasizing. Especially where there are two or more boys, they are imagining they are one of the boys in the photo. Essentially it is narcissism.
"'I hope I have prepared you now by these slides, because I have to show you the hard-core stuff now. It is important to prepare people slowly, to let them get used to the easier slides, before moving on to the really bad stuff.' She flipped through about a dozen slides of boys with erections, mutual masturbation, fellatio, and commented, 'They have this oral fixation. Oral is definitely in. They get a lot of orders for special things. Now look at this one...' Virtually every boy in the slides has looked like he was having fun. She seems suddenly to notice this and says, 'They often drug the boys first... They usually smile. They obviously are cued to smile, they tell them they do have to smile. Or sometimes you can see the stupor, they are just stoned.' Not one of the boys in the photos she showed looked stoned. They looked incredibly innocent and having fun. "The slides stopped. 'This whole thing is a big business,' she said (Later, incidentally, this was contradicted by the chief New England FBI officer who tells the conference that they have not been able to prosecute a single case of organized, commercial pornography under the child porn law in 4 years because they don't seem to exist, 'or we can't find them.'). 'The most important thing for us after we are in on the raid of a ring is the follow-up. We seek out the victims and their families. Many of them won't talk. This one boy -- one of the ones you just saw -- would not talk at all at first. He is 13. But we talked to his parents and they were frantic at what damage might have been caused by this. They were so disturbed. So we went back and we just kept insisting...' The upshot was that the boy finally confessed he was gay, into S and M and hates the man who seduced him when he was ten and 'made him that way.'
"'The self-loathing is so great among the boys who have been victimised,' Burgess continued. 'They blame themselves as well as the offender, and they carry the awful secret which they must keep from their parents and those they love... That is the usual course for these things. The boy meets the man -- usually a neighbour, an uncle, someone known to him -- he poses nude, he feels funny taking off his clothes, but his friends do it.
Next comes sex . Then the photos. Then he starts doing the sex for money. He
Notes made by Mitzel during Lloyd Martin's banquet speech:
This man is deeply sick and opportunistic in the manner of a self-made promoter.
He trashes pro-paedo service agencies (which I had never heard of and which he probably made up).
"Child pornography is the ultimate crime," he says.
"Paedophiles look like you and I." He keeps telling little stories which begin, "I, Lloyd Martin, am a paedophile and here is how I operate..."
A male paedophile, he says, will seduce Mom to get Billy, and when he gets Billy alone he wants to "suck his pee-pee", then will blackmail Billy not to tell, saying there will be no more long camping weekends, fishing trips, etc. "And as soon as Billy turns 13 the paedophile drops him and goes after the younger brother."
"I don't like to read." Quite obvious from his language and his platform manner. He's a semi-literate onto a scam.
Goes into the Stayner story (See PAN 5, page 4 & PAN 7, page 7). He says the reason Stevie Stayner turned in Timmy White was that he was
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goes downtown. And it's all over.'
"Father Mark Janus is introduced as Director of Bridge Over Troubled Waters which works with street kids, especially sexually abused kids. Actually he is a 'consultant', not the Director. Janus explains that the kids are in the grasp of pimps and pushers the minute they step onto the streets. They 'are out there ready to jump right in when they see a fresh face, a new body."' Tom Reeves chronicles the good Father's analysis of the kinds of kids who end up "on the street" and concludes with what he calls the "typical spiral down." "'Sexual abuse is the start,"' Reeves quotes Janus. "'It is where the money is. It is fun. It is exciting. The streets are alluring - where else is there so much excitement in today's boring world? But then comes the exposure to cold nights, diseases, VD, drug overdoses, fights, being thrown out in the middle of the night, suicide, murder. Many of the boys make the circuit over and over: Boston, New York, Florida, California and back. The longer they stay, the worse they look. I don't know what happens to most of these kids. They become missing persons. It may be when they are 12 or 30, but I really believe what happens is (pause) they die!"'
Most quotable of the afternoon speakers seems to have been Detective Tom Rodgers of the Indianapolis Police Department. According to him the big problem with child porn is that much of it is not commercial. Most of it is "deep underground in the child sex cults. We need laws to deal specifically with these
jealous of Timmy's appeal to Parnell and wanted to get rid of him. Martin suggests that Stevie was planning to go back to Parnell. Quite a departure from the usual straight-hysterical approach to this story. Martin has really thought out a boy-man affair, how the boy and the man must feel and how important it is to each.
Martin: "Wherever your children go, so goes the paedophile... I spell paedophlia L-0-V-E."
He says René Guyon Society has 5,000 members, Childhood Sensuality Circle 10,000 members, that PAN is published in West Germany.
Most irrelevant touch: he has a photo, which he walks through the audience, of some device picked up on a 45-year-old man. He calls it "Big Bertha -- The Balloon Buster". Some gimmick which inflated balloons up the man's anus and then popped them. Overheard at this point a comment from a psychiatric professional from Washington, "This is Kiwanis-circuit stuff. It doesn't belong on a university campus."
He is asked what he would do with a sexually active 14-year-old male who is gay identified. "We must protect him until he is 18." From whom? "From himself and from the paedophile he will find who will give him love and attention." Why? "Because the paedophile will destroy the boy's soul."
At the end of the address he asks people not to divorce. He says paedos can't love kids if families love their children. "How many of you will go home tonight and line up your children and hug each and every one of them -- the wives will have no trouble with this, but some of the macho guys will find it kind of hard -- and tell them you love them?" 6 or 7 hands go up (out of 50). It's the Peter Principle. Because he was a success on the yahoo circuit he's moved up and out of his level of competency and now he's just a joke.
His speaking fee is estimated at $1000.
As soon as he finishes he gathers up his kiddie porn (hundreds of mags which were all over the tables in the dining room and in the foyer) and stuffs them all into his case, ties his rubber fastener around it and is gone. Wonder if he has any trouble at airports carrying around a case full of contraband.
n.8, p.16
[CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS PAGE]
underground cults. They are organized into big groups like PIE in England and PAL and PAN in Germany (sic) and they have cult magazines like BSJournal and Man Boy Love Journal and the sole purpose of these groups and mags is to protect child molesters and exchange photos. The groups maintain they are not involved in illegal activity. Our task is to prove they are. Where that is not possible we can link individual members of the groups to sex crimes and discredit the groups."
Like all policemen, his mouth watered at the thought of what the micro-chip might do. "So far there is no nation-wide, computerized system on child molesters, child sex cults and sex offenders, but we are working on one and hope to have it in place by 1982.' (Surely he meant 1984!) 'Then we will have every name, every group, every address and even before specific laws are broken, and we will share this with all law enforcement agencies. Colorado is an example of a state with exciting new innovations in law... (Here you ) can get severe penalties. We must raise the penalties for these offenses to discourage the acts...
"Someone talked earlier about the 'innocent' photos. We have to have some way to deal with those guys, because they are usually at the bottom of it. They just take these photos of children fully clothed, but the guys later use the photos sexually and they sell this kind of item for a lot of money."
A little later Rodgers described the typical paedophile: "He usually lives alone and is lonely. His only adult friends are other paedophiles, with whom he is competitive and jealous. The paedophile with boys is not usually interested in penetration. Now we have wondered about that, and we think it is because penetration leaves evidence. You know, if you penetrated the anus of a small boy he might bleed to death. And these men don't mean to hurt -- they always say that. One paedophile told me he wanted to penetrate, but it wasn't practically possible. He especially liked little babies, up to about 4 years, and penetration was just out.
"We don't usually get involved with the victims. The kids are often uncooperative. They usually deny they had sex at all. You have to establish rapport with them, explain to them that they have been victims. They usually don't know they are victims, and some don't know it was wrong. Once they admit it they usually say they were drugged, drinking or asleep..."
At one point during the afternoon session Boston Vice-squad cop Skippy Halliday came up to Tom Reeves, flashed his badge and said, "Let's go out in back and work this thing out." Reeves refused. The Nutty Nurse had obviously ordered Halliday to get rid of Reeves, although she denied it later.
The dinner got off to a tense start when guests had to enter through a picket put up by NAMBLA members carrying signs which read STOP KILLER COP LLOYD MARTIN and FIRE DEAN BURGESS AND DETECTIVE MARTIN. A flyer entitled Who is the LAPD Det. Lloyd Martin whom B.U. honors tonight? was passed out detailing the terrible career and horrifying statements of California's most famous paedophobe. The flyer demanded that Martin be suspended without pay immediately by L.A. Police Chief Daryl Gates pending an official investigation of his activities and asked some pointed questions: "Why is Martin here at Boston University tonight? Why is Martin using the Kiddie Protection scam to kill and imprison so many faggots? Why do Martin and others like him continue to deny youths the right to full sexual consent? What crimes in his own past is Martin covering up? How can a cop who has terrorized kids by hanging them by their ankles over a cliff (See PAN 6, page 9) now pose as a protector of children?" The flyer also demanded that B.U. investigate the connection of its nutty nurse with Martin and the illegal entrapment of homosexuals behind the smoke screen of supposed statutory sex offenses and kid porn. Finally it asked the university to make a public apology to the gay community for allowing Nurse Burgess to invite "criminal-cop Martin to this city."
n.8, p.25 NUTTY NURSE, Continued from Page 16
NUTTY NURSE, Continued from Page 16
Tom Reeves and reporter Mitzel attended the banquet and actually dined with Detective Martin -- and his wife, who seems to have come along with him on this federally-funded junket all the way from Los Angeles. "During coffee Skippy Halliday and Burgess joined us," Mitzel reports. "Burgess was trying to neutralise us by being sweet. Tom asked her if she was heterosexual and -- I actually counted the seconds -- she took six seconds to decide how to answer."
After the banquet speech (see box) Mitzel told a conspicuous assistant of Burgess "that what I had observed was the grossest orgy of unscientific pandering of homophobia and gross manipulation of children's lives for phonies to make bucks that I had ever seen and I would leave the room and go out into the community and work tirelessly for the immediate firing of Nurse Burgess." That, of course, brought the nutty nurse herself, who asked, "What did you say about getting me fired?" "I repeated my line,"
Mitzel; continues. "She grabbed my wrist and said, 'No, please don't!' Well, if she thinks I can do it, perhaps I can!"
The following day there was a follow-up "evaluation" session, and this was attended by George Jacobs's attorney Tom Butters. Martin and the nutty nurse "were furious at our presence," according to Mitzel. "We had ruined it for them.
They couldn't talk about anything else.
Burgess kept wondering 'when are they going to drop the other shoe'."
NAMBLA is putting together a press release and packet demanding a federal investigation of the $50,000 of taxpayer's money the nutty nurse received.
Pressure is also being mounted in California -- with the speaker of the House, the Attorney General, a pro-gay L.A. City Council member -- to get Martin at least discredited and possibly investigated and fired.
And it all might just happen. Bullies like victims: they are afraid of fighters. And in Tom Reeves, Mitzel, Tom Butters, Michael Thompson and the others behind the magnificent trashing of the nutty nurse's little federally-funded party they have found a group of wily fighters indeed.
n.20, p.20
Nutty Nurse Two
Nutty Nurse Two
The American Journal of Psychiatry is the professional publication of The American Psychiatric Association, probably the world's largest and most influential organization of its kind. Even opponents of psychiatry recognize the generally high standards which the Journal has demanded of its authors: if the premises upon which the articles are based have more to do with Truth Revealed in the rooted past than principles derived from empirical study, at least the working out, like the best of theological writing, has had both internal logic and appeal to the mind rather than emotions. So when the Journal publishes a blatantly bad, gutter-press type paper on a sensitive, if not explosive, subject written by people who, if we use the standards imposed by the American Psychiatric Association itself, have subminimum professional qualifications, one is entitled to wonder why.
Ann Wolbert Burgess is not a medical doctor and thus is no psychiatrist. She does, however, have a long record of professional paed-bashing, going back to the so-called "Nutty Nurse" conference at Boston University on "child abuse" (See PAN 8-12; 9-11; P.A.N. 11-12; 12-7), plus the ability to attract government money for "study" of kiddie-porn and sex between adults and minors. In 1981 she was part-beneficiary of an $8 million Federal grant, and in 1982 received, all for herself, a more modest transfusion of $100,000. Recently she appeared on NBC's inflammatory documentary The Silent Shame. The fruits of her efforts first appeared in one of the FBI journals earlier this year, and now, dressed up with a few elementary figures and percentages, it is on display for all mind industry professionals to see: "Response Patterns in Children and Adolescents Exploited Through Sex Rings and Pornography", by Ann Wolbert Burgess, R.N., D.N.Sc., Carol R. Hartman, R.N., D.N.Sc., Maureen P. McCausland, R.N., M.S., and Patricia Powers, R.N., M.S. Am. J. Psy. 141:5, May, 1984.
Scientific literature goes to great lengths to eliminate emotional bias in the terminology it uses, and so, for the most part, does medical literature; propaganda does not. The title alone of this paper gives a clue as to which category it
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falls into: it contains three loaded terms: "exploited", "pornography" and "sex rings". As one plows through the 3,300-word article which follows, the terms "ring, rings, sex rings, ringleader" are used 61 more times, "exploit, exploited, exploiter" an additional 19 times and "pornography" (undefined, but probably including all photos of children which paedophiles might find erotic) 34 times. "Victim, victimizing, victimization" are used 18 times, "abuse" five times, "sadism, sadistic" three times and "used" (in the sense of "sexually exploited") four times. Other biased terms include "rape", "molestation", "enticing", "crisis", "crisis intervention", "recruitment", "extortion", "network" and "offender". Were this article written with pretensions to dispassionate examination, "exploited" would become "participating in", "exploiter" and "offender" would be "the adult partner", "sex rings" "established sex relationships", "pornography" "erotic photos", "victim" "the younger partner", "abuse" and "molestation" "sexual interaction", etc. Thus a more responsible title would have been "Reactions of Children and Adolescents to Erotic Photo Modeling and Sexual Interaction with Adults".
The paper deals with 62 minors involved with 14 adults in 11 "rings". Burgess and her fellow-nurses distinguish three types of "sex rings". First there is the solo ring: one adult involved with one or more children. Thus, according to them, every man/boy relationship is a "ring"! Then there is the syndicated ring which "includes several adults which form a well-structured organization for the recruitment of children, the production of pornography, the delivery of direct sexual services, and the establishment of an extensive network of customers." Finally there is the transitional ring, where "there may be more than one adult with several children, but the organizational aspect of the syndicated ring is missing." (Obviously most of the 11 "rings" were "solo rings".) Such a classification -- at once mixing unalikes and drawing divisions between likes is, of course, absurd: it simply confuses matters. More meaningful divisions of adult-minor sexual relationships could be made on the basis of whether long-term or short-term relationships exist between adults and minors; degree of mutual interaction (apart from sexual interaction) between the two, whether adult or minor preferentially interact with a single partner or many partners; whether or not the adults permit, or even encourage, sex for profit with other adults and/or sale of sex photos of the kids. But to do so would suggest a curiosity about the quality of the relationship between adult and minor, and such a curiosity would be heretical within whatever Christian or psychiatric value system these nurses were using.
According to the nurses, "entrance into a sex ring introduces children to an elaborate socialization process that not only binds them to the ring but locks them into patterns of learned behaviors. The maintenance of the children in the ring is through a distortion of the belief
n.20, p.22
system that convinces the child the activities are 'normal' and strongly discourages any challenges to the behavior... The leader uses a peer network that forces a pattern of adaptation which perpetuates sexually aggressive and potentially sadistic behaviors." He "pits the group members against one another, encourages them to act out, and vicariously enjoys the peer sadism."
No qualifications are given to these statements, no attempt to limit their applicability to leaders of "syndicated rings", say, or even the 14 "ringleaders" which make up the nurses' sample: such Machiavellian manipulation and indulgence in sadistic thrills characterizes all active boy-lovers.
Deplorable reporting but, in Falwell-era America, effective myth-making. Of course, in reality, establishing a sexual relationship with an adult is a new experience for many youngsters, but is it really "an elaborate socialization process"? And does this new experience "lock him into" behaviour patterns which he would have difficulty breaking out of? Nonsense. In all adult-minor sexual relationships the minor holds the trump cards. He can tell his parents, turn the adult in to the authorities or -- more easily -- just not come back. As for peer pressure, it is generally weak compared with the weapons society puts at the disposal of the reluctant juvenile seductee! And notice how inobtrusively these nurses slip in the premise that sex between men and minors is not "normal": the boy has to be made to "believe" it is -- i.e., suspend his healthy, rational (heterosexual, apple pie American) thinking in order to adopt an alien, abnormal, distorted "belief system". The idea that sex between an adult and a minor could be a perfectly normal and healthy variety of sexual behaviour would seem to be so threatening to these nurses' value system that it requires this elaborate sort of screening.
Next we read that "in all rings adult pornographic books are used for instruction". (The nurses are big on sweeping generalizations.) Once again, it isn't "in all these eleven rings", but "in all rings" - that is, all men everywhere who have sexual relationships with minors show the kids porn. This isn't even bad psychiatry: it is simply self-evidently false. Some boy-lovers do use standard heterosexual porn magazines to help their boy-friends learn about the reality of coitus -- or to turn them sexually on; some may use homo-porn to show the possibilities of male coupling; some may even use child-porn to persuade minors that having sex with adults can be fun (for most child-pornography is of the happy, spontaneous sort) -- but as long as some men don't do this (and probably the majority don't) the statement must be regarded as untrue.
And then, according to the nurses, the kids are made to pose for pornographic photos themselves "and its lucrative outcome is a powerful reinforcement to the group... The use of alcohol and drugs, together with promises of extra money for the photographs, plays a key role in enticing the child."
The photos, of course, are then used to blackmail the child into keeping quiet: "'Would you like your mother to see the pictures?'"
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We have often wondered why such blackmailing is so very rarely reported. Perhaps boy-lovers are more ethical than their straight brothers, perhaps a blackmailed boy becomes a reluctant, and therefore uninteresting, sex partner, or perhaps the boy becomes frightened and unpredictable and thus dangerous. Whatever the reason, the only adults we have heard of who regularly blackmail boys through sex photos are cops trying to make boys testify against their adult friends.
The crusading nurses don't tell us what percentage of their 14 "ring-leaders" gave the kids alcohol and drugs, nor do they give any data to indicate how common these practices are in other adult-child relationships. Instead they invoke a kind of rule that this is what the sexually active paedophile simply does.
So much for the nurses' description of "sex rings". There is worse to come. Each of the "sex rings", obviously, was broken up by the cops, each of the "ring-leaders" was arrested. Every one of the "children" was questioned by the police, some made to testify against the adult he or she was involved with; there seems to have been abundant newspaper and television publicity which strongly altered the social climate in which many of the children lived. All of the minors, subsequent to the discovery of the "ring activities" and arrests, "agreed" to let these nurses probe into their personal and emotional lives: did they wet their beds, bite their nails, develop speech impediments, suffer temper tantrums? Worse, did they day-dream and fantasize? Did they sometimes act rebellious and stubborn? They were asked about the sex that had taken place within the "ring": how did they feel about it then, and about it now -- and how did they like discussing these matters with the nurses? There were also "questions about the exposure of the ring and who found out about the activities."
"We found four patterns of response to stress based on the overt behavioral adjustments of the child," say the nurses. First, there is integration of the event, where the child has "mastered the anxiety about the exploitation". Such kids believe that the adult "was not only wrong but was responsible for initiating the behavior." Criminal prosecution of the adult is "viewed positively" and the child makes such statements about the erstwhile older partner as "He should stay in prison forever". It doesn't occur to the nurses that this may simply be opportunistic behaviour, or that the child has been successfully brainwashed by the police, judges, parents and nurses, or that he has been terrified into saying what he knows adults want to hear. Instead, a kid who reacts this way has "a future orientation" and is busy with making "age-appropriate adjustments" with peers, family and school. In other words, capitulation to social conformity - and this is equated by the nurses with a return to mental health.
Then the child can display avoidance of the event. The kid doesn't want to talk about "the event" -- at least not with the nurses. He or she may have troubles at school and as a result may have terminated some of his friendships. Since he "does not have a sense of right and wrong" he can't see where any of the kids in the ring were exploited. "Unconsciously," the nurses solemnly assert, "the child feels responsible." Typical, it seems, is the case of Jimmy who at 12 was "introduced to drugs and sex" (by whom, and whether separately or together, we are not told): by the time he was 17 he was heavily into drugs and had been arrested three times for breaking and entering. "While he did not make a connection between the ring activities and the deterioration of his behaviors, he viewed himself as 'bad and a loser'." A clear case of cause and effect, apparently, which the poor boy himself couldn't see! (The nurses aren't only big on generalizations; they never shrink from making causal connections where there is only the dimmest trail to follow!)
Worse is repetition of symptoms. The child is "not successful with socializing with children of the same age." He or she may "continue sexually explicit
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behaviors or be repeatedly victimized."
The child blames himself for what happened, believes he should have blown the whistle on "ring" activities. In other words, the boy or girl continues sexual relations with adults, but society has been successful in making him feel guilty and has prevented him from having friendships with his more conventional peers.
Finally there is identification with the exploiter, and it is worth quoting extensively from what the good nurses say about this reaction, for it is a beautiful example of how loaded terminology and confusion of sex with violence can be worked up with blithe disregard of logic and lack of worry about presenting evidence into <sic> the most fantastic verbal souffle: "In this response pattern the child has introjected some characteristic of the anxiety caused by the exploitation and assimilates the anxiety through impersonating the aggressor. The child transforms himself from the person threatened into the person who makes the threat. The child masters the anxiety by exploiting others and adopting an antisocial position toward peers, school, and family."
We leave it to the reader to discover how many non sequiturs and mind-boggling violations of causality he can find in just these three sentences. We will simply point out that even by the nurses' own testimony these kids evinced no anxiety over whatever sexual acts took place, leaving the nurses no other option than to use an old and hoary psychiatric trick: the kids really were suffering from anxiety over the sex, in fact it was so intense and profound that they didn't even know about it themselves. It was eating away inside their unconscious minds and could only be dealt with through a neurosis, by transforming themselves from victim to victimizer. Also note that the "exploiter" has now been vilified one step further: he has become "the aggressor" and obtained his evil ends through "threats".
A child reacting in this way "minimizes the exploitation and pornography, resents the interference of the authorities and feels there is 'much ado about nothing'. The child maintains emotional, social and economic ties with the offender and feels sorry or angry that the adult was exposed and convicted." In the topsy-turvy world of these nurses' analysis, such a response, which, shorn of the prejudicial description the nurses use, would be considered most healthy were it operative in most other settings, is considered the worst, most tragic, most intractable.
Of the nurses' sample, 45 of the 62 "victims" were boys. 13 of them (29%) "integrated" the event, that is, after a shorter or longer time, underwent a kind of born-again process, turned against their former adult sex partners and so rejoined apple pie American society, another 13 reacted with "avoidance", 8 (18%) "repeated" the "symptoms", while 11 (24%) "identified with the exploiter". It is noteworthy that over half of the boys, despite what must have been enormous social pressures, could not be induced to blame the adult for what had happened and a quar-
n.20, p.25
ter of them actively resented the intrusion of "the authorities" into an activity which they apparently enjoyed.
All through the paper the nurses refer to "anxiety" suffered by the boys and girls, whether the kids are aware of such anxiety or not, yet they never analyse what specific situations or experiences actually caused this alleged anxiety. They refer vaguely to "the ring event", and most adherent descriptions are of "ring activities", i.e. sex and sex-photo making. To be fair, the nurses do devote five short paragraphs to the stresses the boys and girls were put under by their social environment once the rings, and thus the kids themselves, were exposed by the press and television. They even admit that in all but 13 cases "symptoms" of anxiety began at the time of "ring" exposure. But no mention is made of questioning by the police, being made to testify against a former friend or lover in court or verbal or physical beatings by shocked parents. One is left with the impression that in the minds of these four nurses the overwhelmingly greater part of the anxiety (conscious and unconscious) they allege was rooted in the sex and pornography. That was what was traumatic, that was what turned the boys and girls into anti-social persons, destroyed their relationships with family and peers, give them nightmares, made them wet their beds, have temper tantrums, rape girls, drop out of school, resign from the football team -- even though these behaviour patterns developed after exposure of the "ring" they belonged to and not before! Obviously the nurses are either deliberately not making the right distinctions or they are incredibly naive.
One finishes reading this article with the strengthened conviction that psychiatry is neither science nor medicine but a peculiarly Western form of religion which grew from sincere, if misguided, roots thrust tenaciously and precariously in turn-of-the-century Viennese soil into a lucrative and powerful industry dedicated less to the emotional well-being of men, women and children than to the implementation and justification of social, and especially sexual, conformity. By accepting and publishing such a patently propagandistic and non-professional paper, the Decision Makers in the American Psychiatric Association have told us a great deal about themselves, how they view their social responsibilities in this area. The very badness of the paper marks it as a kind of editorial, a message to APA members that, despite the intense interest of the public in what it conceives of as "child molestation", open inquiry into adult-child sexual interaction is not only unnecessary but must be discouraged. A "position" has been taken, and woe betide the psychiatrist who might question it with logic, honesty, facts and dispassion. That is the significance of this paper: not its idiocy, for many idiotic articles about child-sex appear every day of the year in America and England, but the fact that it was published at this particular time by this particular profession in its most influential journal.
As [Marshall] MacLuhan said, the medium is the message.
