Thinking further about some of the responses to the abuse thread has me thinking that in the area of sexual morality many people fall back to a conventional moral reasoning position, so I thought I’d put a dilemma to you all. It’s based on an actual case that happened in Australia in the late seventies that got a fair amount of publicity (not all of it negative). I still remember it because I thought that it was a case that was not subject to a clear answer.
The case was this. A widowed father raised his two daughters. He did not set clear boundaries and as they grew older the three of them became sexually initimate eventuating in consensual intercourse. What’s interesting about the case is that one daughter reported the case but only after she had fallen in love with a devout Christian (which the father had not tried to stop). She told him of her relationship with her father and he convinced her it was wrong and that she had to report him. She had no plans to report the father until she was persuaded by the boyfriend – she had not considered it wrong until then. When she told her older sister the sister (they were 16 and 17 at the time) was horrified that she would betray her father. Despite her sister’s objection she proceeded and the father was eventually jailed. I first heard of this story through an interview with the older sister who defended her father and attacked her younger sister. The older sister said that their father was always loving and that both her her sister and herself enjoyed and had wanted the experiences. She also said that if any of them had said no then their father would have stopped. She said both of them sometimes initiated contact. In other words she said there was no coercion, rather he seems to have indulged their curiosity and allowed it to go too far. The older sister emphasised that their father was always kind and loving. She also said that her sister had enjoyed it too and could have said no at anytime. She was angry at her younger sister for being a hypocrit and for betraying her father – and for being persuaded by a conservative moralist to report him.
It was a tragic situation. The older sister was very bitter because her younger sister had taken action to put their father in jail. This drove a wedge between the sisters – in effect also punishing the older sister who was traumatized by the investigation, court case and the jailing of her father.
The question is this – what would have happened if the younger sister had not been convinced she had sinned by a moral conservative and had not reported her father? The older sister had said that both she and her sister had boyfriends and as a result the sexual contact with their father was declining with his blessing. It may have happened that all would have moved on quite happily.
What happened was clearly against the law and from an absolutist position the father should have been punished. But he was not the only one punished. The older sister now hated her younger sister and it drove a wedge into what had apparently been an otherwise loving family dynamic. To the older sister she had been punished because her father was taken from her and in her view it was actually her sister who had done the wrong thing by betraying them all. She was especially angry at the Christian boyfriend who she believed had brainwashed her sister (she was deeply in love with him and was therefore under his influence – and I should add that even without the sex this happens reasonably often where a family member becomes persuaded by an outside belief system and leaves the family culture, causing considerable anxiety and recrimination).
So, should the younger sister have proceeded against her older sister’s wishes? Should she have considered the impact on her older sister? Was the boyfriend right to impose his absolutist values on a more nuanced moral situation? As far as I’m concerned the father was a fool but should he have been jailed or should the family have been counselled so that all parties could learn from the experience and keep the family intact? Is jail always the best answer in such cases? Should children in such situations be removed from the family? What is the impact of the removal on the child? Who is being served by jailing the father – him, his daughters, society or is jailing really about satisfying the moralist’s personal outrage?
How might a postconventional thinker resolve the conflict caused by everyone’s behaviour?
I don’t know how the situation eventually played out. I think the father was jailed for two years (he pleaded guilty). Did the older sister change her mind and forgive the younger sister? Did the younger sister change her mind and regret her actions or did she stay loyal to her boyfriend and marry him? What if she broke up with the boyfriend and then realised what she had done to her family when she was no longer under his influence? It can definitely be argued that as children they could not have understood the consequences of their actions but neither can children who are pressured to give evidence against a parent understand the consequences of doing so. (Don’t prosecutors trick children into testifying? If they fully understood what would happen to their parents and to them would they testify? Isn’t it hypocritical?) Did the younger sister fully understand what she was doing? Did the father forgive the younger sister (as I recall he bore no animosity toward her)? Did the family reach a reconciliation and forgiveness?
I should add that developmentally speaking individuals are first socialized into family cultural norms. Social norms are understood through the family. During adolescence the individual begins to be socialized to peer norms and to differentiate from family norms. In late adolescence they begin to negotiate social norms directly (either rejecting or accepting) and differentiating from peer norms. This occurs within the spectrum of preconventional to conventional. The postconventional stage differentiates from social norms and begins to develop an ethics based on degrees of complex reasoning.
This impacts sexual morality. The family culture will have one view, the peer group another, society something different again, and reason again different. In my example above the family norms were, for one daughter, in direct conflict with the peer norms she was accepting through her contact with her boyfriend. I say peer norms because religious groups are peer groups that often differ quite remarkably from the general social norms, particularly in morally conservative religious groups who impose stricter standards.
It is often difficult to negotiate the different domains. In many cases adolescents have to negotiate a peer sexual culture that is more tolerant than their family culture. Many adolescents have a secret sexual life that is hidden from their parents.
The thing is that as the individual makes the transition from one sphere to the next they may have cause to reassess earlier actions and even come to regret what they did. Thus an individual may regret being raised in a conservative Catholic family and look back at their earlier acceptance of the faith with embarassment. As part of their rebellion they may then comitt a sexual act when they are an adolescent that they may regret as an adult and move into the social sphere. And then when they move into postconventional they reassess again and regret their regret.
Of course, part of the process of negotiating any rule system (family, peer, society and self-determined) is transgressing those rules and boundaries and dealing with the consequences of such transgressions. You often don’t know there’s a boundary until you cross it and are rebuked.
In the case of sexual transgression the boundaries are usually very closely monitored and the rebuke is often quick and severe. But why are sexual transgressions given such weight?
I think people have forgotten that much of this is based on Judeo-Christian principles and the idea of the Fall. Humanity is in a state of sin because of an act of sexual transgression. In the Christian worldview sexual transgression is a major sin (in many cases worse than murder). In any case we grow up understanding that sexual transgression is ‘very’ serious – it will send us to hell.
But is their a natural reason to explain this? If we go back to primate behaviour we actually have competing models – Chimpanzee behaviour is different to Bonobo. Chimpanzees are more aggressive and sexually possessive whereas Bonobos use sexual contact to bind the group. Chimpanzees are controlled by dominant males who guard their females jealously whereas Bonobos are more polymorphous.
Sexual possessiveness and jealousy might therefore seem to be a valid explanation for rules. Unfortunately the ethnographic material shows that humans are capable of being more like Bonobos. In other words their is greater variety in human sexual behaviour. I argue in my entry on integral sexology that sexual rules are usually constructed to benefit a certain class in a society. Certainly sexual rules differ according to your class (with considerable moral hypocrisy). In patriarchal societies the rules are designed to control women and make the best available to the dominant men. This seems to be justified by Chimpanzee culture, but matrirachal societies are much more fluid and are closer to Bonobo.
Are there any sexual absolutes? I don’t think so. This is not relativism. It does not prevent us from saying that certain rules are superior to other rules. As far as I’m concerned rape is always bad but many warrior cultures tolerated the rape of defeated peoples. Are there any absolutes? If there are I’m not aware of them. It used to be thought that incest was absolute but it turns out not to be so (although it is rare).
Anyway, I need to pull this back to my dilemma. Some self-reported abuse cases occur when the individual realises the family rules clash with social norms and the trauma comes from trying to resolve the conflict (most cases are not self-reported but are discovered in which case the child has no power whatsoever to proceed or not proceed). (Btw, I think we need to understand that most reported abuse cases involve minor and opportunistic acts – serious abuse, where the child is forced to comply and is terrorised are actually relatively rare and usually involve physical abuse, in fact the sexual component is often part of a general sado-masochistic complex – but conservative moralists often fail to make such distinctions and collapse all sexual contact into the simplistic category of ’serious’ because of the Christian idea that all sexual transgression is ‘very’ serious).
In conclusion – we need to include the fact that as individuals make the transition from one moral sphere to another they may regret their actions (and even regret their regret). How many times do we change our mind in a lifetime? This makes me wonder how many children caught up in sexual abuse cases change their mind later and regret the action to punish a parent was taken?
In other words, when society punishes the transgression they are not actually considering the best interests of the individuals who might be better served through counselling. It seems to me that what is served is the conservative moralists’ need to see someone punished.