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Sexual deregulation or, the child

abuser as hero in neoliberalism FT
Feminist Theory
Copyright © 2001
SAGE Publications
(London,
Thousand Oaks, CA
and New Delhi)
vol. 2(1): 55-78.
[1464-7001
(200104) 2:1;
Frigga Haug University of Hamburg 55-78; 016439]

Abstract Focusing on the issue of the sexual abuse of children, I discuss

the question of the relationship between changes in sexual politics and
how we think about drives in the context of their relation to
neoliberalism. This subject is so emotionally charged that a rational
discussion of that which goes beyond our comprehension is almost
impossible. Any doubt of an easy solution moves the doubter himself or
herself into the domain of abuse. The sets of complex interrelated issues
associated with child sexual abuse deny any simple description or
critique. I therefore approach the topic from three fronts which initially
may seem quite separate but which will enable a new perspective and
facilitate thinking about it. The first part of this article historicizes the
topic. Here I present Ian Hacking’s (1996) work on knowledge, power
and truth, which elucidates the crusading nature that the fight against
sexual abuse has assumed. I then invoke Foucault’s reconstruction of
the production of sexuality in the family in order to replace a position of
straightforward moral disgust with the issue of power in the context of
sexuality and drive construction. Hacking and Foucault serve as the
conceptual bases for reviewing the infamous case of the Belgian child
abuser Dutroux.1 In the third part of the article my analysis is in the first
instance focused on a theoretically informed critique of the news media,
in particular European and German media. This Eurocentric study has
global implications. Its aim is to make a first attempt to demonstrate a
relationship between sex scandals and the demands and opportunities
of the global free markets.
keywords control, crime, Foucault, global politics, Hacking, political
campaigns, power, sexual abuse, sexuality

This is the end of those who do evil!

And their end
Is always commensurate with their life.
(Don Giovanni)
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56 Feminist Theory 2(1)

Abuse and psychotherapy

When I flew into Toronto in 1992 I was greeted by lots of TV programmes blaring
all over the place at the airport. I had to wait for my luggage so I went closer to
inhale my first English/Canadian in preparation for the months to come. There
were two women on the screen, one of them crying, the other encouraging her
with a voice habituated to offering commodities to go on to dig deeper, to reveal
and confess. I could not understand the crying woman and then the showmistress
interrupted the whole scene, took a book from a nearby table and encouraged all
of us to come out to reveal our secret that we had all been abused as children. If
we were not sure we could read all about it in the book – the symptoms from nail
biting to forgetting and problems with concentration, the book could be ordered
and bought by calling a special number, its price was only 100 Canadian dollars.
My luggage arrived so I moved to the exit and forgot the scene on the TV.
I was a visiting professor at the OISE (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education,
graduate school of the University of Toronto). From my very first day there I
enjoyed the hospitality of my fellow researchers. Every day someone from the
faculty would come to have lunch with me and get acquainted, every second week
the ‘Feminist Focus’ met for dinner and discussions. My first lunch started with
a Caesar salad and almost immediately went on with my colleague’s confession
that she was an incest survivor. I was shocked and tried hard to find something
comforting to say. My mind was full of unasked questions. I did not finish my
salad, went back to my office, to my class and home later to prepare my next
lecture. I taught two graduate courses. One was on ‘advanced sociological theory’,
which went very well; the students argued different positions on a very abstract
level and seemed to learn a lot. The second class was a catastrophe. I wanted to
discuss memory work – more than 50 students were squeezed into a room too
small for this number and they yelled at me. They refused to do memory work,
demanded special measures of safety, asked for at least two additional therapists
and wanted to know if I could handle this. It took me three weeks to understand
that they had self-evidently assumed memory work meant that they would be
expected to reveal an incestuous past, an idea that they found fascinating and hor-
rible in equal measure.
The next lunch I had was with another female colleague whom I had liked from
the beginning. I chatted in a relaxed manner until she, too, suddenly confessed to
being an incest survivor. I was quite disturbed but already starting to have doubts.
I was not quite sure whether my doubts were directed at the Canadian family, or
at the university, or at the women.
The next day I was prepared and waited for the confession, which – when it
eventually came – I was no longer unprepared for. I was ready to ask whether she
thought that all Canadian female academics, or at least the ones at OISE, were
victims of child abuse. I knew the relevant data from the literature, of course, and
do not remember whether I had come across such confessions in my everyday life
before. I am sure I did not know the term ‘abuse’ in this context at that time. My
female colleague gave me a short summary which resulted more or less in the
advice to believe that almost every girl in Canada was in some way or other a
victim of sexual abuse by her father or uncle.
Toronto has a very well-developed neighbourhood culture. So I asked my neigh-
bours at the next social event whether they had ever heard of sexual abuse of girls
in Canada. They were quite astonished that I asked such a question at all, because
sexual abuse had been the social scandal of the previous two years. It was of
course everywhere, just like the pestilence in the Middle Ages. My neighbours’
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Haug: The child abuser as hero 57

15-year-old daughter contributed stories about a teacher at her school who had
been sued following allegations of abuse. She was not quite sure whether this was
a victory or a problem.
I brought the subject up in the ‘Feminist Focus’ group and found out that, of
course, everybody was an incest survivor except one woman. At this time I was
already convinced that she was the one who must be wrong and that this was to
be expected of her because she struck me as rather insensitive.
Some time later I met a student who wanted to write her thesis on feminist
therapy and sexual abuse. She confessed that she had wanted to criticize the total
obsession of all feminist therapy and politics with abuse, but she did not dare do
so. At this time the campaign against sexual abuse had become a movement with
a religious passion, as Ian Hacking pointed out in his book on the history of the
soul (1996).
When I returned to Germany 4 months later, sexual abuse as a political issue of
epidemic proportions had travelled ahead. So I started to work on it seriously. My
reason for engaging in research on sexual political campaigns was not only the
increase of such campaigns in the past decade and even more intensively since
1989, but moreover a certain contradiction within those campaigns. Antagonists
as well as protagonists came from opposite political camps including feminists
fighting for women’s rights on the one hand, side by side with the moral majority
rallying for ‘law and order’, marriage and the family, and both asking for more
state intervention in this field. This paradoxical situation was mirrored by my
own feelings and thoughts. In short the contractions also caused a rupture within
myself. Such a strange situation urgently needed an analytical approach. I began
my research on the campaigns on sexual abuse.

1. Ian Hacking’s work on knowledge, power and truth

Canadian writer Ian Hacking begins his narrative in Rewriting the Soul:
Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (1996) with the follow-
ing scenario:
The arguments [about problems of dissociation] are raging. We are not on purely
medical grounds here. Rather, we are dealing with questions of morality. Susan
Sontag has persuasively described how first tuberculosis, then cancer and finally
AIDS were mercilessly invested with judgements of the character of the sick.
Childhood traumas produce a completely new dimension in the moral arena
around problems of dissociation. The most sensational trauma of recent times is
child abuse. As a trauma this abuse has equal impact on morality and on medi-
cine. It absolves guilt, redistributing it to the abuser. A person suffering from mul-
tiple personalities is no longer simply genuinely ill; someone else is responsible
for the illness. (1996: 24)

To illustrate his point Hacking quotes from the introductory lecture of

the Annual Conference on Multiple Personalities (1993): ‘AIDS is a plague
which attacks the individual. Child abuse damages the individual and is a
cancer of our society; all too often it grows unrecognized and generates
metastases across families and generations.’
In the USA and other western countries there is a lively debate about,
and numerous research projects on, the connection between personality
disorders and sexual abuse in childhood. In the USA this has resulted, on
the one hand, in a specialist Psychiatrists’ Association, and, on the other,
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58 Feminist Theory 2(1)

in a movement which, from 1992, found its counterpart in the False

Memory Foundation. The latter supports parents who stand accused of
child sexual abuse to initiate court proceedings, and seeks to make public
the dangers of ‘irresponsible therapies’. Both camps have had an impact on
relevant debates in Germany (see, for example, ‘Sexueller Missbrauch’,
Forum Kritische Psychologie 33, 1994 and ‘Sexueller Missbrauch II,
Diskussion’, Forum Kritische Psychologie 37, 1997). At this point I do not
wish to engage with those positions again (see Haug, 1994) but will focus
on Hacking’s views instead. His interest is in the emergence and changes
in the science of memory from the end of the 19th century onwards. Mul-
tiple personality syndrome in this context functions as an illustrative and
very specific example of how one might think about the concept of memory.
The important point is how, when and why multiple personality syndrome
became entwined with the discourse on sexual abuse and turned into a
politics of memory. Unaffected by moral pressures and party-political
investments, and drawing on Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge,
Hacking considers the various aspects of campaigns associated with sexual
abuse and multiple personality syndrome. He examines how the science of
memory developed in the second half of the 19th century within the nexus
of pathology (the domain of multiple personality syndrome), neurology
(concerned with the localization of particular functions in the brain) and
psychodynamics (a branch of science dominated by Freud and his
followers).
Hacking is concerned to show that the attack on the soul, which is what
the science of memory amounts to, constitutes one of the forms of circu-
lating power as Foucault describes them in relation to bio-politics and to a
politics of the anatomy. For this purpose Hacking coins the term ‘memo-
ropolitics’. Like Foucault he wants to outline an archaeology in which a
surface knowledge with an emphasis on power, politics and the sciences
is revealed to gain regulatory force. Hacking’s domain is the control of the
soul. As he writes (1996: 279): ‘What is missing [in Foucault’s work] is
evident enough: the mind, the psyche, the soul.’
The movement around multiple personality syndrome that evolved in
the USA during the 1980s is his starting point for a series of scientific and
theoretical inquiries. Hacking asserts that three very different elements
account for the sudden and extensive emergence of multiple personality
syndrome: a discourse of liberation emanating from the feminist move-
ment, a conservative discourse based on anxiety about ‘the family’ (1996:
79), and a more extended cultural arena that enabled an explanation of mul-
tiple personality syndrome: child sexual abuse (1996: 58). Hacking does not
doubt that child sexual abuse exists – on the contrary, he considers it to
have a long history. His doubts are related to the association of abuse in
childhood with later psychiatric disorders and multiple personality syn-
drome. Hacking questions this connection. He details the transformation of
a medical diagnosis into a mass movement with forms of belief, testimony,
religiosity, believers and dissenters, a development that in itself prompts
doubt concerning the scientific nature of the connection made between
child sexual abuse and multiple personality disorders. He examines the
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Haug: The child abuser as hero 59

relevant evidence bases, statistical data, hypotheses and verification pro-

cesses and shows that they do not stand up to even the most limited
demands of scientific inquiry (1996: 129–50). He finally addresses the ques-
tion whether or not multiple personality syndrome, the disintegration into
several (up to 100) identities, is an illness that can provide knowledge about
how the soul functions. He uses the early case histories of Bleuler and Janet,
of Charcot and Kraepelin, which he reproduces extensively. He shows that
certain terms such as ‘double consciousness’, ‘co-consciousness’, ‘former
personality’, ‘splitting’, ‘dissociation’, ‘somnambulism’ (1996: 170
onwards) have been associated with certain illnesses rather than with the
specific patients or agents who were dealing with their experiences. For
this reason the current movement around multiple personality syndrome
connects with the work of French, Swiss and American psychiatrists and
psychologists of the late 19th century rather than with Freud. Freud took
memory to be a productive process of repression, displacement and com-
promise which was neither true nor false but constituted a working
through in the direction of the potential for agency in everyday life.
Because Janet considered traumas to be impersonal, he believed that they
did not demand a different interpretation, especially where the effect of
memory was concerned. For Freud traumas involved human action and
therefore demanded a new interpretation as they were being remembered
(Hacking, 1996: 250).
Towards the end of his book, Hacking addresses the question of the diag-
nosis and treatment of multiple personality syndrome. He emphasizes that
memory is rewritten across changing contexts, as evidenced, for example,
in the development of new vocabularies. Thus the meaning of the phrase
sexual abuse as one requiring remembrance and testimony has emerged
only in the past few decades. The cultural context for the remembrance of
sexual abuse is provided by related campaigns, movements and therapies
that connect that remembrance as the traumatic event associated with mul-
tiple personality syndrome. Thus language and remembrance are culturally
formed. Hacking questions the healing effect of being able to demonstrate
that two dozen or more identity fragments are connected with abuse in
childhood. He considers the memory produced by therapy as a form of
‘false consciousness’ (1996: 345) and cautiously sides with those therapists
who want to address the disintegration of identity or ‘dissociative identity
disorder’ through the building of greater self-confidence for the future
rather than through forms of reminiscence: not because the supposed mem-
ories of a former abuse are necessarily false or distorted – they may well be
only too true – but rather because the final result is an utterly artificially
constructed person. According to Hacking, to reconstruct oneself in a
history of abuse results in an action-impaired and difficult personality of
the kind that is the starting point rather than the goal of memory work.
Hacking finally sides with those feminists who assert that the multiple per-
sonality movement in the USA reproduces and reinforces a male image of
women as passive, weak and manipulable, retrospectively producing a
narrative in which they function as mere objects.
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60 Feminist Theory 2(1)

I found Hacking’s book convincing and thought-provoking for the follow-

ing four reasons:
1. his analysis of the victim role allocated to women and children in dis-
courses and campaigns around abuse, and its detrimental effects on per-
sonality – this is not a space we can occupy without damage to
ourselves;
2. his focus on the domains of knowledge, power and control of the soul
which are occupied through research on personality disorders;
3. his intent to view campaigns associated with sexual issues as political
issues;
4. the impetus of his work to think through the politics of remembrance
more thoroughly. Is it, for instance, in our interests to build our views
of our personalities around very specific memories in a very particular
cultural context?
Just as we assume that our personalities are constituted through the appro-
priation of cultural givens – in other words, just as we think we play an
agentic role in that formation – the politics of remembrance might be more
effectively directed towards a culturally driven self-conscious construction
of a developing personality, capable of desire and co-operation, whereas
the coherence of personality within the discourses around multiple per-
sonalities is a function of a specific and damaging constellation. In short,
Hacking encouraged me to take Gramsci’s work more seriously again, and
to assume an active role in the construction of the inventory about our-
selves which we set up – in other words, to determine its emphases self-
consciously and not to allow ourselves to be ruled by what the therapeutic
institutions suggest to us about ourselves.

2. Michel Foucault and the family as the breeding ground of

sexuality
Hacking’s analysis is influenced by Foucault’s work. This does not deflect
from the need to re-read Foucault around questions of sexual abuse, which
might drive one’s disquieting thoughts about the sudden emergence of the
issue of abuse and its association with inquiries about the soul into a differ-
ent direction. Foucault relocates sexual abuse within the family into the
realm of normal sexual dispositions. He thus refocuses our view from the
deviant individual abuser and his drives to a particular institution, the
family, and the fate of the body and of desire in that context. He reminds
us that family is the place where sex is put or ought to be put into the ‘right
forms’. Although this thought already hesitates to formulate itself properly,
we are almost immediately confronted with the history of this topic in
psychoanalysis through its focus on the Oedipus complex. This was the
rather strange construction where the son desired his mother and, after
some detours, the daughter her father. Is this supposed to be part of their
normal sexual development? In the story, Oedipus, of course, killed his
father, married his mother and had four children with her, but in real
material life there is a powerful incest taboo that militates against such
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Haug: The child abuser as hero 61

desire. It is especially the parents who have the task to direct such a desire
into an appropriate and adequate desire for dissociation and identification,
bonding and separation – in short for becoming an adult.
This is one of the peculiarities in the scandal of sexual abuse, that you
meet contradictions everywhere, contradictions on the one hand reaching
into ourselves, on the other hand being out there in society, and altogether
being obstacles against clear thinking and the discovering of an appropri-
ate strategy to deal with sexual abuse. Somehow it is not only guilt, facts,
oppression and power that are involved in abuse; and laws, imprisonment
and atonement pertinent for its containment. The problematic is much
deeper, more contradictory and more fundamentally mixed up with society
as a whole, with the construction of the family, of sexuality, of childhood
and of jurisdiction. Therefore it seems to be more than appropriate to
consult Foucault, who has analysed the connections among these spheres.
Let us bring to mind those elements from Foucault that reappear in the
context of the problematic of abuse: first of all there is the family with its
deployment of alliance, entwined with the deployment of sexuality. There
is the topic of the sexuality of children. There is, above all, Sex, thought of
as the form, beginning and source of all evil and all development. And there
is finally the public, demanding confessions and the breaking of silence.
I shall provide a short summary of the different points in the writings of
Foucault that bring together the dimensions that belong to his so-called
microphysics of power with the scandal of sexual abuse. (It is obvious that
the word abuse is misleading because it implies the possibility of a correct
use, which is in itself already part of the deployment and ought to be
expressed differently.)

Family and sex with children

This formulation immediately stirs up a hornet’s nest of what Foucault
called the deployment of sexuality within the deployment of alliance. The
tradition is that children do not and should not have any sexuality:
Everyone knew, for example, that children had no sex, which was why they were
forbidden to talk about it, why one closed one’s eyes and stopped one’s ears when-
ever they came to show evidence to the contrary, and why a general and studied
silence was imposed. (Foucault, 1983: 4)

This paradoxical sentence sits at the basis of the family’s task – forbidding
sex, controlling it, preventing it and thereby inflaming it. The sentence
characterizes family as the site of morality, determined by the construction
of the innocent child, which is thereby and simultaneously constructed as
victim. To begin with, the sentence relates to the task of preventing children
from masturbation,2 to pathologizing it, thereby regarding sex as the reason
for misdevelopment, sickness and so on, a process that Foucault terms the
‘medicalization of sex’. The cases of child pornography that were brought
to light recently by the media do not contradict this view of sex; they
merely show that the control of sex is transferred ‘into the order of things
that are counted’ (1983: 4).
The family’s mission includes the programme that parents – that is,
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62 Feminist Theory 2(1)

fathers and mothers – constantly control the bodies and the desire of their
children, always with sex in mind, which has to be prevented and is there-
fore explosively moved into the centre of the family. Family equals sexual
morality or, in the words of Foucault, ‘sexuality has its privileged point of
development in the family’ (1983: 108). Controls in the family operate in
such a way
that they function as mechanisms with a double impetus: pleasure and power.
The pleasure that comes from exercising a power that questions, monitors,
watches, spies, searches out, palpates, brings to light; and on the other hand, a
pleasure that kindles at having to evade this power, flee from it, fool it, or trav-
esty it. (1983: 45)

This operation of control relates not only to the family but permeates all
sites of power that are thus uniquely enabled to support the family in its
role as controller rather than as prosecutor, analyst or site of resistance.
Let us concentrate on familial constellations in cases of sexual abuse in
the family. The transgression of fathers, committed against their daughters
or stepdaughters, is in some ways a central attack on the functioning of the
deployment of sex and of alliance. One might argue that in such cases the
secrecy surrounding children’s sexuality is used and exploited, to practise
just this sort of sex under the cloak of its non-existence. Thus family
becomes a danger rather than protection, sex deployment is executed, and,
by the very possibility that girls growing up could bear children, sex deploy-
ment threatens the deployment of alliance within the family. Strictly speak-
ing, such unruly behaviour by the fathers touches the microphysics of
power, because it perverts the very mechanisms that are the basis for modern
technologies of power by claiming them in an antiquated way. In the age of
the droit de seigneur power meant the right to use the body of others. But
this was before other techniques of power moved the body into the centre
by way of intensifying and controlling desire. Here violation seems to be
obvious; the culprits have to be punished; the laws to be strengthened. The
sides seem to be unambiguous or, to use Foucault’s words on the science of
sexuality: ‘It thus became associated with an insistent and indiscreet
medical practice, glibly proclaiming its aversions, quick to run to the rescue
of law and public opinion, more servile with respect to the powers of order
than amenable to the requirements of truth’ (1983: 54).
And, in relation to the father, Foucault states: ‘On the one hand, the father
was elevated into an object of compulsory love, but on the other hand, if
he was a loved one [German: became a lover], he was at the same time a
fallen one in the eyes of the law’ (1983: 130). Such certainty in moral judge-
ment meets a strange ambiguity in the way in which the media deal with
abuse. There is a righteous indignation and a cry for law and state against
such deviants, perverse exceptions in our society, who are supposed to
come from socially low classes and broken families. Side by side with such
views we find an overwhelming number of reports in the media doubting
the amount and the type of abuse, the truth, the guilt, and claiming them
to be just fairytales of hysterical children who, in addition to this, are
misled by feminists.
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Haug: The child abuser as hero 63

The German news magazine Der Spiegel, which has focused its news
strategy around sexual abuse on collecting and voyeuristically presenting
cases where fathers or male educationalists were accused of sexual abuse
and thus – possibly unjustly – ‘ruined’ (see Haug, 1994; Holzkamp, 1994),
quoted the archbishop of Paderborn as saying:
If young men are more and more responsible for child-care and have to see, touch
and clean naked bodies all the time, there is the great danger that they cannot
resist their desires. This amount of bodily contact is fatal. Therefore we think that
the inclusion of fathers into the household, the making of housemen will have
negative consequences. (Der Spiegel, 1994: 109)

Birgit Rommelspacher takes up this view and puts it into its socio-
cultural context: ‘The demand for men’s equal participation in child rearing
cannot be raised if men are not simultaneously willing to question their
socially endorsed and expected violence, aggressive sexuality and mascu-
line self-image’ (1994: 26).
Strangely enough, the moral puritans, who want to strengthen the family
to prevent such things from happening, unite against those who also object
to the father’s right to have access to the child’s body in a feudal way.
Whereas the latter plead for better fathers, the former plead for better
families. In effect both aim at the strengthening of a family with a domes-
tic mother, an absent father and a well-protected daughter. But it is the
relationship between sexuality and family that is misunderstood in all
three cases. On the one hand it is true that it is the role of the family ‘to
anchor sexuality and provide it with a permanent support’ (Der Spiegel,
1994: 108); but on the other hand,
in a society such as ours, where the family is the most active site of sexuality, and
where it is doubtless the exigencies of the latter which maintain and prolong its
existence, incest – for different reasons altogether and in a completely different
way – occupies a central place; it is constantly being solicited and refused; it is
an object of obsession and attraction, a dreadful secret and an indispensable pivot.
(Der Spiegel, 1994: 109)

The campaigns concerning sexual abuse and especially feminist initiat-

ives challenge a key dimension of this ‘microphysics of power’ in an explo-
sive way. The hope that only the lower classes are the sites of such
trespasses is historically nourished by the late inclusion of these classes
into the complex of the modern construction and control of sexuality.
An entire politics for the protection of children or the placing of ‘endangered’
minors under guardianship had as its partial objective their withdrawal from
families that were suspected – through lack of space, dubious proximity, a history
of debauchery, antisocial ‘primitiveness’, or degenerescence – of practicing incest.
(Foucault, 1983: 129)

Feminists who concentrate on showing that those involved are ‘normal’,

well respected members of society therefore work on an important point of
resistance. But this is not enough, if it does not aim at how sex is dealt with
as a whole within the nuclear family and the total economy. It is possible
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64 Feminist Theory 2(1)

that the very relations of power that determine sex deployment are no
longer tolerable in their current form.

The secret and the silence

Foucault has pointed to the special role that both the secret and silence
play historically and in a changed form even today in developing modern
techniques of power. He has especially shown how the ‘confession’, the
will to know, and the search for truth in whatever form, are themselves
stages of developing power. All these elements are participants in the cam-
paigns concerning abuse. Silence occupies a strange position: it is enforced
by the father and is in itself a point of support in the control function of
the family and therefore strictly followed. This is one reason why mothers
usually play such a sinister role in this drama. The confession (in German
Geständnis, Bekenntnis und Beichte) is no longer just a means of power,
which keeps the whole apparatus of surveillance running and thereby
intensifies it, it is at the same time the necessary liberatory step, which
wants to make public another ‘truth’ of the deployment of the family. It is
also very often the one possibility to escape the relationship of power,
which is not only ‘discursive’ but also material. But all confessions come
before a public that is well prepared for sexual confessions because it is
permeated by the very microphysics of power. The confessions do not deal
with one’s own desire, the truth of which has to come to light, to be treated
and brought into the right form, to be given therapy, but they provide evi-
dence of the fact of being desired and taken by the very persons who were
supposed to prevent just that. The operational points have switched sides,
but their language has remained the same (see Alcoff and Gray, 1994).
Therefore they are used in well-rehearsed ways: the whipping up of sexual
desire by a detailed description of what happened, the production of the
‘truth’, the construction of the innocent child as the victim, the isolation of
a single culprit and, above all, the discovery of sex as the beginning and
the reason for all pathologies in the individual and in society. The efforts
of liberation are incorporated into the original deployment, and the control
function of the family is sustained either by publicly denying it to be
impure or stained, or by propagating individual culprits and thereby
strengthening the normality of all other families. Into this strays the girl as
victim and always as Lolita as well, spoilt innocence, who is the reason
that fathers cannot easily stand the difficult task of controlling the desire
of the growing girl. After the children’s sex has been pedagogized, ‘parents,
families, educators, doctors, and eventually psychologists have to take
charge, in a continuous way, of this precious and perilous, dangerous and
endangered sexual potential’ (Foucault, 1983: 104).

Sex as basis
Foucault has pointed out that modern technologies of power have one
element in common: they claim sex to be the original source of all prob-
lems, a constant danger, a pathology and the goal of all desire – in short,
sex as the essential dimension of life. This is in itself a construction. Sexu-
ality as ‘a domain susceptible to pathological processes, and hence one
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Haug: The child abuser as hero 65

calling for therapeutic or normalizing interventions’ (1983: 68). Foucault

thought that it was the sexuality-discourse that brought ‘us almost entirely
– our bodies, our minds, our individuality, our history – under the sway of
a logic of concupiscence and desire. . . . Sex, the explanation for everything’
(1983: 78). We can easily see that public campaigns against abuse, and in
this case especially by feminist therapists (experts), share this idea with
modern technologies of power. Where there was previously a revolution
levering women out of the continuously constructed status as victim, there
is now a new victimization. Beyond all constructions of the innocent child
or the pathological sex, the abused girl again is declared as a being whose
fate is determined by the consequences of sex. It is useful to read the coun-
selling and diagnostic texts from feminist therapy, which reduce almost
everything to such, sometimes even forgotten, childhood experiences. It is
not only this mechanical logic of cause and effect that is deplorable but also
the total misappreciation of the general and normal deployment of sexu-
ality in the family and in society. This very thinking and resultant behav-
iour is in an especially tight union with the bigoted guardians of the puritan
order, who take from the deployment of sexuality hygienics and order, and
turn them against bodies as if these were indeed something totally exterior
to their very desires.

Strategies of resistance
Although Foucault shows very exciting shifts by introducing a positivity
of power, the network of supporting and resisting points is so tight that
there is no escape. It is a network of domination that is woven and main-
tained in participation with the oppressed themselves; in such construc-
tions every exit seems to be blocked, there is no space for any intervening
thinking and action that is not at the same time the back side of the very
power against which it proceeds and therefore a supporting part of it.
Foucault himself suggests a different movement, which first follows the
logic of the ‘strategic break’, then of the ‘leap’. Or how should we consider
the following ideas?
Hence they too are distributed in irregular fashion: the points, knots, or focuses
of resistance are spread over time and space at varying densities, at times mobil-
izing groups or individuals in a definite way, inflaming certain points of the body,
certain moments in life, certain types of behaviour. Are there no great radical rup-
tures, massive binary divisions, then? Occasionally, yes. But more often one is
dealing with mobile and transitory points of resistance, producing cleavages in a
society. . . . And it is doubtless the strategic codification of these points of resist-
ance that makes a revolution possible, somewhat similar to the way in which the
state relies on the institutional integration of power relationships. (1983: 96)

Unfortunately there is no indication in the whole book of how such a

‘strategic codification’ might be achieved. Instead we find this logic of drop-
ping out or of the ‘leap’:
It is the agency of sex that we must break away from, if we aim – through a tacti-
cal reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality – to counter the grips of power
with the claims of the bodies, pleasures and knowledges, in their multiplicity and
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66 Feminist Theory 2(1)

their possibility of resistance. The rallying point for the counterattack against the
deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures.
(1983: 157)

The proposal seems to be radical and is very vague at the same time. Would
it not be more adequate to start the ‘counterattack’ via different ‘deploy-
ments’ instead of simply announcing entities that are, although discur-
sively disposed in a network of power and domination, all of a sudden free
from a discursive integration for unexplorable reasons (bodies and pleas-
ures)? Here I think first of all of a shift in focus: away from the power-net-
works with reacting individuals, towards civil forms, which are lived and
shaped by groups of people, by associations – as Gramsci would have called
this. To prevent this idea from remaining vague as well, I use sexual abuse
by way of illustration. Trapped in the deployment of the family including
the role of the father, the girls’ effort to step out into the public and address
state-apparatuses like the court of law, social work, therapeutical insti-
tutions is once again trapped in the named deployments of sexuality and
family with the strange self-positioning of innocence and of victim. The
actual move beyond these deployments would mean questioning almost
everything that has been valid until now: the family, language, the public
and with this the abandonment of the deployment of sexuality. Such a step
not only shows growing girls as at the mercy of sexual trespasses by father-
persons – the latter are, furthermore, a form that indicates the girls’ prin-
cipal state of being at the mercy of family and society.
Countermodels as such can come only out of a movement – from initiat-
ives, from groups, not from individuals. They can form networks, where
other possibilities of growing up, other ways of dealing with the body,
another language, are cultivated. And they have to address a public, which
is not formed and inflamed by the deployment of sexuality and the family,
and which is necessary, to transgress silence in a direction in which speak-
ing out is a communication with others on the road to more self-determined
forms of individuality and forms to live another kind of society from below.

Crisis of society
The scandals concerning sexual abuse indicate the crisis of the family. They
question the domestic deployment of sexuality. They also make it possible
to show and visualize the general state of growing up children at the mercy
of incompetent and overstrained parental persons and in society. It is
unlikely that abusing behaviour from father- or mother-persons has devel-
oped only in the past 10 years and suddenly attacks a formerly healthy
society with pathological peculiarities. In his History of Sexuality Foucault
points to the extension of the domestic sex-deployment into a microphysics
of power with all its contradictory forces; this refers to a long history of the
behaviour that we call sexual abuse against children. But the fact that this
can be led as a campaign today, determined by quite contradictory forces
of liberation and restoration, shows a sort of rumbling of thunder in the
technics of power in society: ‘Power is not an institution, and not a struc-
ture; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name
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Haug: The child abuser as hero 67

that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society’

(1983: 93). We experience breaks in the field of labour through the micro-
electronic mode of production and associated breaks in the organization
and the conceptions of selves; we experience the dismissal of the male
breadwinner, which comes along with the forced abandonment of a life-
long job. And it is only now, at the threshold of their being deprived of
economic control and power, that the position of the father figure in the
family becomes a scandal. As much as campaigns about the deployment of
sexuality (like violence against women, abuse, sexual harassment) conceal
or hide the ruptures, rejections, breaks, crises and breakdowns of the old
order at large, they are at the same time an indicator that a certain type of
power, a dominant deployment of ruling and order, is breaking down:
The ‘right’ to life, to one’s body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of
needs, and beyond all the oppressions or ‘alienations’, the ‘right’ to rediscover
what one is and all that one can be, this ‘right’ – which the classical juridical
system was utterly incapable of comprehending – was the political response to
all these new procedures of power which did not derive, either, from the tra-
ditional right of sovereignty. (1983: 145)

The important question is how much this crisis of the former ‘new pro-
cedures of power’ can be used to come closer to these human rights.

3. Dutroux as hero in neoliberalism

On 17 April 1997 the final report concerning the Dutroux case was debated
in the Belgian Parliament. A final legal judgment has still not occurred,
even in 2000. The case of Dutroux – the man who as a paedophile, sex
offender and pervert kept the news media busy for months and caused an
unprecedented mobilization of the Belgian public, including a protest
march of 300,000 people – reveals itself as a product of the disintegration
of the Belgian state. Let us reconstruct the process, conduct a politics of
remembrance and not be discouraged by a recent gesture of pacification
from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ; a leading German broad-
sheet) in the context of a new detective novel dealing with the corruption
of the Belgian state:
If a trial against Dutroux and his fellow criminals should occur within the year,
Belgium will once again be confronted with the depths of the disintegration of its
state, even if nobody today assumes anymore that all the awful facts concerning
those who aided and protected the murderer will ever be known. (FAZ, 8 Febru-
ary 1999; the detective novel was written by Jef Geeraerts)

I am not reading the hundreds of thousands of pages of case notes con-

cerning Dutroux because I am less interested in the man himself than in
the power structures and political culture that enabled his crimes. I there-
fore start once again with the question of the definition of sexual abuse –
abuse as a problematic that has only recently become the object of scien-
tific, political and medical inquiry, and discourses which are entangled, on
every level, with our everyday common sense. How has sexual abuse been
defined? The easiest thing is to adopt a minimal position. It is abusive and
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68 Feminist Theory 2(1)

sexual at the same time to have sexual intercourse with children, either
one’s own or others’. The difficulty lies in defining sexual abuse in the vast
arena before actual penetrative intercourse, where all forms of bodily
contact are classified in terms of either being sexual or being simply an
expression of tenderness. But penetrative intercourse with children is the
warning sign and endpoint inscribed into relations between parents and
children, and results, at least in our culture, in unquestionable, general
disgust.
The Belgian scandal of 1996 concerning sexual abuse showed that the
issues, definitions and classifications surrounding sexual abuse, including
the debate about the actual numbers of children and in particular of girls
living in abusive scenarios, as previously established, was insufficiently
thought through. Since the beginning of the 1990s abuse has been a con-
stant theme in the public arena but in 1995 the social scandal of abuse had
become all but invisible in the media. Then, in August 1996, it suddenly
flared up again, feverishly, like a terrible illness which has not been brought
under control, keeping the public occupied until it vanished once more
towards the end of that year, with only a brief resurgence in April 1997
when the investigative report on Dutroux, that is to say on Belgian justice
and politics, was published.
These sexual and political scandals and the politics they have inflamed
coincide with a time when neoliberalism is generating global change on a
scale not dissimilar to the industrial revolution. There is mass unemploy-
ment among peoples, an extensive impoverishment of whole nations and
an amassing of riches by the few as never before. The state as regulator
limits its activities to making the conditions for the movement of roving
capital as attractive as possible. Any ethical project – the notion of a ‘good’
society, as it belonged to the liberal aspects of political thinking – has van-
ished. The citizens of the global society act as individuals, responsible for
their lives. Everyone is culpable only in relation to himself or herself. Thus,
everybody’s failings may be read as a moral warning to others. The outrage
against individualized misdeeds masks large-scale crime as it currently
occurs under the heading neoliberalism or liberalization of the markets. Is
there a relationship between the decline of the welfare state, for instance,
and the sexual abuse of children by their parents and others, mostly rela-
tives? One needs to consider the 1996 media campaigns around abuse,
especially the Dutroux case, in the light of this disquiet.3

The paedophile child abuser

I therefore consider the Dutroux case in the context of looking for cultural
shifts and issues of hegemony. A series of horrible news stories reached the
public towards the end of 1996. The corpses of two eight-year-old girls are
dug up in the garden of a man who is described in terms of predictable
attributes: previous convictions for paedophilia, a recipient of social
welfare, an unemployed electrician, sexually deviant. The reports in the
news media can expect public support and general outrage on the subject
of the sexual abuse of girls, free from all doubt because the victims were
murdered and there is no family connection between abuser and victims.
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Haug: The child abuser as hero 69

Additionally, it happened elsewhere, in Belgium, rather than in our own

country. The man is without question a ‘child abuser’.
Child abuser is a new phrase in this context. It sounds strangely inade-
quate and is at the same time already intent on the generalization that all
child abusers should be punished. I had never heard the phrase ‘Kinder-
schänder’ (‘child abuser’) before the Dutroux case.4 The German terms
Schande (abuse) and Schänder (abuser),5 yes, but these terms were so
closely aligned with notions of shame and dishonour, a certain kind of
morality and propriety and its violation, rather than with the actual sexual
abuse of children or indeed murder, that they seemed quite inappropriate.
Duden, the standard German dictionary, offered no further insights. It talks
of dishonouring the family and places the word in relation to moral outrage
and the feeling of shame. To describe someone who has murdered children
after sexually abusing them as a Schänder (abuser) may have a political
intent. It seems to me that it moves attention away from the psychology of
the abuser to the fate of the victim. It seems to suggest that there are in our
society people who will have shameful exchanges with children. This dis-
placement of meaning not only has the positive effect of depsychologizing
the abuse in the short term but also implies a simultaneously more extreme
and less harmful dimension to the act. Everything, from stroking and invi-
tations to have an ice-cream to rape and murder, is encapsulated without
differentiation under the term Schande (abuse; ‘shame’). This abstraction
is the final judgement.
Thus we hear in August 2000 that the editor-in-chief of an English news-
paper (the News of the World) has as good as incited people to mob rule
and the lynching of all those who might be considered a danger to their
children – lists of the names and residences of sex abusers (of the ‘110,000
child abusers living in England’), complete with photos, are published.
Among those lumped together in this process are exhibitionists, consumers
of child porn and rapists of small children. In view of the extremity of some
of the cases it is taken as a permissible sin that some will be named based
on hearsay only, rather than on fact. The paper incites to a vigilante men-
tality, a clearing of the neighbourhood of any pervert who might reside
opposite you. It was a lucrative business for the newspaper. Citizens
changed into a form of Ku Klux Klan and fire-bombed, upturned cars and
drove neighbours away based on a rumour. It was only when one of the
men who had been accused of child abuse in the paper committed suicide
that the paper called a temporary halt to its hysterical campaign. In the
meantime a second suicide had occurred, of a man who was being investi-
gated for interfering with two 15-year-old boys. Whereas in many contexts
15-year-olds are talked of as ‘men’, the perspective changes when older
men’s approach to younger ones is considered. Here the focus is on ‘our
children’ who occupy the place of greatest need of protection in the
symbolic order of our society. The fact that children are far more under
threat within the family than from ‘paedophiles’ is here simply cast aside;
the public is always already a fertile ground for the lynch mob mentality,
goaded by its role in relation to the family and sexuality. The explicit aim
of the newspaper campaign in Britain was to equalize English law with US
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70 Feminist Theory 2(1)

law. In the USA, sex offenders are divided into various categories before
their release. These categories determine the amount of information about
them given to communities and parents. People can only be reminded of
certain historical parallels when they learn that in Oregon paedophiles’
homes have been daubed with the sign ‘M’(olester) and offenders in
Louisiana are even compelled to signal their offence through the clothes
they are forced to wear. It is obvious that such Draconian laws force identi-
fied sex offenders underground and that the hitherto usual control through
the relevant institutions is thus circumvented. In the case of Dutroux, the
publicity generated offered the defence the chance to have the whole trial
deemed null and void because of breach of confidentiality (reported in
FAZ, 8 August 2000; 10–12 August 2000).

The accomplices
In Dutroux’s case the news media created uncertainty among the public for
a while. They fed the public with bits of information that completed the
picture of the paedophile and simultaneously produced evidence that was
incompatible with that picture. For Dutroux had accomplices, there was a
gang, and it gradually emerged that the political justice system was impli-
cated in the case. How can you have accomplices if you are a secret sex
offender? The obvious thought that we are dealing with a paedophile ring
is cast aside through the use of words such as accomplice and gang. But it
seems even more peculiar that the police and prosecution service too are
somehow implicated in the sexual abuse of girls. It is difficult to make sense
of these news items in terms of the reports and discussions that usually
govern debates about sexual abuse. In the search for abusing fathers and
silent mothers the piecemeal news items that emerge seem to distract rather
than illuminate. In the context of these crimes, estate agents, detective con-
stables, prosecutors, a warehouse owner, an insurance agent and finally the
murder of a top politician are all implicated. In contrast to this, a more con-
ventional, but in some ways slightly unusual, version of Dutroux as sex
offender re-emerges for one more time. On 27 August 2000 the FAZ reports
that in 1989 Dutroux was convicted of child abduction and paedophile
offences and sentenced to 13 years’ imprisonment, but that, inexplicably
and contrary to the advice of psychologists and against the recommen-
dations of the prosecution, he had been released prematurely in 1992. In
the meantime the child abuser had confessed to the murder of two further
children. Again, the details don’t seem to fit. The new victims of the
‘paedophile’ were 17 and 19 years old respectively.

Child prostitution
At the same time, on 25 August 2000 in Stockholm, UNICEF opened its first
organized conference on the sexual exploitation of children. Here explicit
terms are used to discuss exploitation and profit, trade and material gain,
children as goods and chattels. The conference is about child prostitution,
the trade in children, child pornography, in particular the trade between
‘first’ and ‘third’ worlds. That this conference is taking place at all is a
welcome sign of a civilizing global progress. An agreement against the
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Haug: The child abuser as hero 71

marketing of children at the end of the second millennium is reached; it

can henceforth be invoked. Of course this does not do away with child
prostitution, just as violence is not eradicated through a law against vio-
lence. But, none the less, the news media are full of facts and figures about
the extent of child prostitution. Estimates suggest that India and Brazil have
half a million child prostitutes, and the much smaller Thailand even more;
there are ever-expanding markets for this. The causes: the number of
abused children is growing where poverty, hopelessness and deprivation
are rife, where AIDS is assumed not yet to have taken hold of children
(although it is in fact spreading like the plague among children and adults
alike). UNICEF estimates that about two million children are sexually
exploited, sold by their families, abducted by traders or enslaved by pimps.
The language used at the conference is unambiguous and clear. More than
1000 delegates from 130 countries demand that the abuse of children, child
pornography, prostitution and sex tourism are named as such and acted
against. Sex tourists, it is emphasized, are not so much paedophiles as
opportunistic offenders who abuse children as a kind of sex toy. What
becomes abundantly clear is that this is not about perverts but about
markets and profits; about exploitation and children as objects of trade. The
Swedish prime minister calls the sexual exploitation of children a plague
and the commentator states that such exploitation is becoming more and
more rampant in Germany too. Causes are cited as growing poverty all over
the world and the lack of a child-specific politics.
On 28 August 2000 the FAZ reports on its front page that neither the
tightening up of the law nor moral condemnation will stop the sexual
exploitation of children. Thus in Germany, where sex with children
(people under the age of 14) is an indictable offence, there has been only
one conviction in such a case despite continuous trials. The way forward
is to deal with the root of the problem, which, besides poverty and the
sheer need to secure one’s survival, is constructed as the lack of education
of children. The Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes detailed in an edition of
El Pais of 2 March 1999 that the annual bill for cosmetics in the USA
would be enough to counter illiteracy across the world and that the
money spent on ice-cream alone would be sufficient to pay for the edu-
cation of all third world children. The trade in children is presented as
an international business with high profit margins and an underpinning
technical proficiency: videos, for example, are used to record the brutal
abuse of children for pornographic purposes. Such videos are made in
their thousands every day – traded, smuggled, bought and sold. To
counter this, the business of the child traders, brothels, pimps and sex
tourism must be eradicated, and it is in this context that, in the FAZ’s
reporting, the Dutroux case reappears.

Belgian conditions?
From the position of profit on the world market the mysterious Dutroux
case is easily decipherable: we’re dealing with an internationally operat-
ing, lucrative business which combines with other kinds of criminality. In
the case of Dutroux we’re dealing with cross-border trafficking in stolen
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72 Feminist Theory 2(1)

cars, with investment fraud, with political murder and with a gang of crim-
inals who deal in child pornography, child trafficking and prostitution on
an international scale. Political justice – which has become embroiled in
these crimes in the form of individuals who are part of the justice system
and have become involved in one or other of these crimes – covers up all
of these crimes because it cannot allow Dutroux to be made an example of
without being simultaneously uncovered as implicated. Thus a neighbour
of Dutroux’s, who complained to the police about digging going on in
Dutroux’s garden during the night (Dutroux was burying the corpses of the
girls referred to previously), was ‘let off’ by the police with a caution for
defamatory behaviour. Prosecutors who attempted to investigate the case
properly were suddenly moved to new positions or removed from the case.
The news media, in the meantime, entertained the populace with rumours
about supposed ‘ethnic’ wars (Flemish vs Valoon) between the judges. One
prosecutor was even arrested by the police when he tried to investigate the
trafficking in stolen cars more closely. Later we learn that the police were
able to rescue two girls who had been ‘held captive’ in Dutroux’s house
without this having the least consequences for Dutroux.

Mr Average
It is obvious that the question whether or not Dutroux is a paedophile and
has socially unacceptable interests in children is of negligible interest
within this morass of exploitation and profit; presumably it is better for
business not to have such ‘leanings’ oneself so as to be able all the better
to exploit other people’s lusts. Thus we learn retrospectively and by the by
that at the very least the first two murders of the eight-year-old girls were
less the work of a perverted sadist than that of respectability. A junior
school teacher (the paper indicates that it was Dutroux’s wife), who was
supposed to take over the ‘care’ of the girls while he served a short spell in
prison, left the girls to starve to death because she could not ‘bring herself
to go to the house’. In this context Dutroux is presented as highly intelli-
gent and completely calculating.
But how did Mr Average – in the form of a letter to the editor of a news-
paper – respond to these deeds that were increasingly revealed as moti-
vated by sheer greed? A reader complains that such a man as Dutroux
received social benefits when he owned properties and land in South
America, and argues for the need of social services to have greater surveil-
lance powers to contain such benefit fraud. The disquiet about the perva-
siveness of child abuse is put into the usual context: those on benefits must
be mistrusted and treated with caution. In the midst of all the news and
trials concerning the million-dollar business of children and sex, a further
Mr Average in the shape of a satirist for the Neues Deutschland (10 Sep-
tember 1996) ‘confesses’, under the heading ‘Balls off! is what is required’,
that he himself abused his daughter by changing her nappies at five in the
morning. He continues jokingly: ‘verbally more children were abused
between August and September than in decades’. His parting shot: the
newspapers have been trying to awaken the paedophile in everybody for
weeks but in the former GDR nobody who was a pederast had to fear any-
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Haug: The child abuser as hero 73

thing as long as they were loyal to the party. In their denial and exaggera-
tion these jokes miss the mark completely.
At the end of August and the beginning of September of 1996 the public
is kept captive with a whole series of articles about the Belgian case and
about the conference against the commercial exploitation of children.
These leave no doubt that financial greed and sexual drive have conjoined
in a profitable union in this case. At the conference the Belgian foreign min-
ister emerges as one of the strongest supporters of the rights of children and
re-emphasizes the connection between the Dutroux case, sickness and
torture. Networks devoted to pornography are spreading throughout global
society like cancer, and child abuse is a deathly disease. Given such un-
animity of opinion in condemning the case, only the newspaper Der Freitag
feels compelled to strike a somewhat different note. No conclusions are
drawn from the similarity of the Belgian case with child prostitution in the
third world but, rather, the dramatic effects that the coincidence of the
UNICEF conference and the case Dutroux promotes are critiqued. The
paper then goes on to denounce the global outcry against the case as pious
cant, for: ‘The prostitution of children in contexts where third world coun-
tries have to sell pineapples under intense competition is only one point
on a sliding scale which includes prostitution in general.’ This mock-
explanatory opinion – which seems to have forgotten what body, lust, the
senses, torture, hurt and so on mean, and which seems not to have under-
stood that children made to prostitute themselves get AIDS – then wags its
moral index finger: these children do not prostitute themselves because
they are poor but because they long for the luxuries that western tourists
seem to have. In the view of the paper, western outcries about child prosti-
tution thus amount to a form of colonial disempowerment of the third
world.

Perversion and trade

On the same day that Der Freitag thus opined about the dignity of children,
the FAZ attempted the difficult task of redirecting the obviously enmeshed
cases of a criminalized politics and organized crime into the less problem-
atic arena of psychological problems. Dutroux is recast, again, as a pederast,
a perverse criminal, even if treated as the darling of the justice system. In
the attempt to direct common sense towards him as an individual and away
from the trade in children and profit-driven business, he is even ascribed
a ‘normal sexuality’ as well as a pregnant partner and thus the possibility
of receiving bail on humanitarian grounds. Mixed in with this are further
news about doing business with key politicians in Europe, lists of cus-
tomers of child pornography including names of those who occupy the
highest social positions, backhanders for governmental contracts worth
millions, and unsavoury business regarding the buying of helicopters. The
author finally concludes as follows: ‘We are obviously not dealing with a
perverse serial abuser who puts fear into society because of the anonymity
of his deeds. Dutroux marketed his sadism across Europe in a calculated
manner.’ The ‘serial killer’ has political justice working for him. We are
thus dealing with a ‘synergy between individual and state perversion’
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74 Feminist Theory 2(1)

which went far beyond the times when the Duke of Kassel would abduct
his subjects like cattle in the American War of Independence. Following
these analyses we are unexpectedly directed towards a political economy
of power. Such deeds – that is, such synergy or collaboration – are likely
to occur everywhere where there is a power-political vacuum because of
state debt. In short, the bankrupt states that have relinquished their power
to vagabonding capital are the breeding ground for organized criminality,
which in turn knows how to use the justice system to its advantage. In the
decline of state power the political subjects left on the horizon are families.
In the Dutroux case they form a counter-government that demands a func-
tioning constitutional state, speaks in public, does its own detective work
and writes in newspapers.
During the last few months of 1996 the attentive public is able to follow
the spread of the profit-oriented version of child abuse across various coun-
tries: a child porn circle is uncovered in Austria, collaborating with a
similar circle in Slovenia; two men in Berlin are accused of the abuse of
Thai children, apparently for the commercial distribution of child porn
films and with the intention of setting up a German–Thai business to dis-
tribute the material (their range of products includes 51 photo sequences
and five videos, among them a film in which a boy is tortured); in Bran-
denburg a woman kidnaps her 10-year-old niece, seemingly – so the papers
suggest – to send her to a brothel in the Netherlands. Polish children seem
to line the Warsaw-Berlin motorways, offering themselves as wares.
Berlin’s baby streetwalkers include 100 Polish boys. Women, we learn, are
frequently the last ‘raw material’ a poor country has to offer. The same is
true for the former Soviet satellite states where women have lost their jobs
in droves since 1990, so that even well-educated women have to sell their
bodies for sex. Eastern Europe is considered a ‘growth area’ for child abuse.

Family
The objectification that precedes the marketing of female bodies and those
of children reveals the structural problem. Women and children are con-
sidered property, wares, things, without rights; mere bodies that have to be
pressed into service for maximum profit. This structure allows the return
to our usual ways of thinking about the abuse of children in families and
away from the international trade in children. We don’t need to take a
theoretically sophisticated road to get there. Material reality forces us to see
these matters as they are. In the third world families sell women and chil-
dren because it is their only means of survival. They effectively act as slave
traders. Young women fetch between £1000 and £2000. In Germany several
sets of parents get together to expose the 12 children they have between
them, ranging in age from 22 months to 17 years, to abuse by third parties.
They too make pornographic movies which they then sell at a high profit.
The first trial in this case, involving three sets of parents from the catholic
town of Worms (who were accused of having sexually exploited, in a total
of 80 instances, seven children aged between six months and eight years –
the prosecutor demanded sentences of between 8 and 14 years’ imprison-
ment), was terminated towards the end of December with the release of the
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Haug: The child abuser as hero 75

accused at the third stage of the hearings because of difficulties in proving

the case. Although there were unambiguous testimonies from both the
medical profession and other specialist witnesses, the case was compli-
cated by the mutual accusations of the defendants, who had become deadly
enemies in the meantime. The children’s accounts were treated as dubious.
One psychologist complained (lasciviously?) that the accounts lacked
vividness, detail and did not allow for re-enactment; in particular he was
missing an ordered account of what had happened. The prosecution stated:
‘Whilst there could be no doubt that the boys and girls had been abused
and severely damaged, the level of proof was such as to be insufficient for
a conviction and sentencing.’ A key issue was that it was not possible
without reasonable doubt to be certain that every individual had commit-
ted the specific deeds of which s/he stood accused. After the release of the
accused, the judge was elected mayor of Mainz. In the meantime, the third
trial in this case has also ended with the release of the accused.

Back to the psyche

This accumulation of news about the sex industry in families was pre-
sented by the FAZ without further comment, the silence allowing, most
prominently, room for outrage. This despite the fact that the same paper
used psychological finesse to obscure, once more, the illumination regard-
ing the sexual exploitation of children that the UNICEF conference in
Stockholm had brought about and that had made it possible to rethink the
Dutroux case. On 24 September F.K. Fromme ruminates about the ‘growing
sensitivity’ regarding the punishment of people who rape children. He
focuses, again, exclusively on the psyche of the criminal who, driven by
unhealthy impulses, does not know what to do. Fromme reminds the
readers of the purpose of punishments which, in our society, are not meant
to constitute an act of retribution but are intended to reintegrate socially,
and therefore to improve the criminal and the safety of the general popu-
lace. After all the lessons we have learnt about the connection between
child abuse and poverty, greed and corruption – in other words, about the
material foundations of the issue – Fromme opines that Marxist-based
theories that view criminal deeds as the inevitable consequence of a
warped social order are now outmoded. With great sensitivity he embeds
the question of the normalcy of abusing people (in the main women and
children) functionally and commercially in the demand for sympathy with
perversity. This is a matter of inappropriate drives, which the abuser
himself has not chosen to be the object of – in other words, a proper sick-
ness.
Two days later the lead article in the same paper completes this version
of events with reasoned explanations designed to distribute outrage and
acceptance evenly and appropriately. Although the female author argues
for viewing abusers as ‘ordinary citizens’ who require more and more hard-
core porn in which children are shown screaming, for example, because
they are not only abused but tortured, she also maintains that the ‘general-
ized accusations of feminist sociologists that all men are potential sex
fiends are not convincing’. Such accusations lead to social hysteria and the
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76 Feminist Theory 2(1)

formation of taboos. The author writes too that the debates about the esti-
mated figures regarding abuse are not helpful because quantification is
obscene in such cases. She asserts with great certainty that stepfathers are
more likely to be abusers than biological fathers because the latter are more
subject to the incest taboo. Simultaneously she reasserts emphatically that
abusers are not ill, are not overwhelmed by uncontrollable urges or out of
their senses, but are men with ordinary sex lives and are often also caring
heads of families. In complete contrast to Fromme she views sexual abuse
as a function of the power differential between men and women, adults and
children, and pleads finally for the strengthening of children’s personali-
ties as much as for the therapizing of the abusers.
Tilman Moser strikes a similar note in Neues Deutschland. He wants to
distinguish absolutely between abuse in families and commercialized
forms of abuse, although even he cannot have escaped recent reports of
commercialized abuse within families. Within the family he diagnoses
psychological impoverishment, loneliness and abuse as an expression of
the derailed communication structure between father and daughter. In con-
nection with abused children he warns of the havoc that such poisoned
love causes and argues for the abusers seeking help. The social ground on
which this problem grows he describes as: war, dehumanization, disregard
for minorities, poverty and exploitation.

Power over people

The randomness with which Moser conjoins economic circumstances, atti-
tudes and generalizing judgements has the consequence that the seeming
normalcy of power of people over other people, the degradation of people to
mere objects of desire and lust, is no longer viewed as a structural problem
of capitalist societies which, through the release of market forces and the
letting-go of ethically based preventative measures designed to regulate
market forces, has turned the whole world into a warehouse of raw materi-
als for the benefit of investment-ready capital. Within this, the trade in
human beings, child pornography and prostitution becomes a fertile ground
where individual entrepreneurs as well as organized gangs may reap the
profits on a grand scale. The trade in human beings, child pornography and
prostitution are, furthermore, an important stake in the modelling of drives
(which I have discussed elsewhere) as a practical retreat from a notion of
desire and the simultaneous investment in the imaginary, whose effects con-
stitute the drive for profit. Where abuse is conducted in the family without
pecuniary gain, we may at the very least assume that the power to gain
without fear of the damage that this might do to others is operant. The basis
for abuse is in all cases viewing other people as property who may be used
and who have a use value, rather than as persons in their own right with
dignity, a right to self-determination and desires of their own.
It is still the case that we need to overthrow all those conditions that
make human beings lead a degraded, enslaved and humiliating existence.
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Haug: The child abuser as hero 77

Acknowledgement
This article was translated from German by Gabrielle Griffin.

Notes
This article is taken from the forthcoming book by Frigga Haug (Duke
University Press).

1. Translator’s note: Marc Dutroux kidnapped and sexually abused a number

of young Belgian women over a period of years in the 1980s and 1990s.
When the case was uncovered in 1996 it generated public outrage in
Belgium and was widely reported in Belgian, French and German
newspapers. For further details see Liz Kelly (1997/98) ‘Confronting an
Atrocity’, Trouble & Strife 36 (winter): 16–22.
2. Since the publication of Foucault’s work there has been a liberalization of
sexuality which includes a less persecutory view of masturbation. This
may suggest that the role of the family in the control of sexuality as
detailed above is altogether out of date. Not so. This is evidenced by the
case, much publicized in the USA in 1999, of the 11-year-old boy who was
accused of sexually assaulting his sister. Reporting of the case in the media
allowed us to witness the boy being taken away in handcuffs and foot
restraints, his being sent to prison, and then sought to incite our disgust at
the parents’ behaviour. They fled to their home country, Switzerland, so as
not to lose the care of their other three (adopted) children, thus effectively
abandoning the boy.
3. I have analysed about 50 articles from the period 24 August 1996 to the end
of December 1996, principally from the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung, the Neues Deutschland, a paper that considers itself left wing, and
from Der Freitag, also left wing. In addition, my overall argument is based on
further intermittent reporting on the case until August 2000.
4. Translater’s note: Child abuse has a relatively long history in British public
thinking and the term is therefore not as novel in the UK as it may seem
elsewhere.
5. Translater’s note: ‘Schande’ (abuse) and ‘Schänder’ (abuser) in German
have multiple and more diffuse meanings than abuse/r. Specifically, they
are associated with the notion of shame and dishonour, of violating a moral
code rather than interfering with somebody abusively.

References
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Kritische Psychologie 33: 100–35.
Amann, Gabriele and Rudolf Wipllinger, eds (1997) Sexueller Missbrauch.
Überblick zu Forschung, Beratung und Therapie: Ein Handbuch (A
Handbook on Research, Counseling and Therapy). Tübingen: DGVT-Verlag.
Foucault, Michel (1973) Archäologie des Wissens. Frankfurt-am-Main: Merve-
Verlag.
Foucault, Michel (1983) Sexualität und Wahrheit. Vol. I, Der Wille zum
Wissen. Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp.
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Gramsci, Antonio (1991) Gefängnishefte (Prison Notebooks). Kritische

Gesamtausgabe in 10 Bänden (esp. Vol. 6). Hamburg: Argument Verlag.
Hacking, Ian (1996) Multiple Persönlichkeit: Zur Geschichte der Seele in der
Moderne. Munich and Vienna: Carl Hanser Verlag. (Trans. of Rewriting the
Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1995.)
Haug, Frigga (1994) ‘Versuch einer Rekonstruktion der
gesellschaftstheoretischen Dimensionen der Missbrauchsdebatte’, Forum
Kritische Psychologie 33: 6–20.
Holzkamp, Klaus (1994) ‘Zur Debatte über sexuellen Missbrauch: Diskurse
und Fakten’, Forum Kritische Psychologie 33: 136–57.
Rommelspacher, Birgit (1994) ‘Der sexuelle Missbrauch als Realität und
Metapher’, Forum Kritische Psychologie 33: 21–32.
Der Spiegel (1994) Das Deutsche Nachrichten-Magazin, No. 25 (20 June).
Frigga Haug studied sociology and psychology at the Free University of
Berlin, and is Doctor in social sciences and Professor at Hamburg University
of Economy and Politics. She has been a visiting scholar in Denmark, Austria,
Australia, Canada and the USA. Her main fields of research are women, work
and methods. She has produced numerous publications and books in English
including Female Sexualization: A Collective Work of Memory (Verso, 1999),
Beyond Female Masochism: Memorywork and Politics (Verso, 1992). She is
co-editor of the journals Das Argument and Forum Kritische Psychologie and
is on the editorial board of the Historical Critical Dictionary of Marxisms.
Address: Krottnaurerstrasse 72, 14129 Berlin, Germany.
Email: FriggaHaug@aol.com