Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id MAA00394 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Mon, 24 Jul 2000 12:40:42 +0100 Message-ID: <2D1C159B783DD211808A006008062D310174594D@inchna.stir.ac.uk> From: Vincent Campbell <v.p.campbell@stir.ac.uk> To: "'memetics@mmu.ac.uk'" <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> Subject: RE: Memes and sexuality Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2000 12:38:08 +0100 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2650.21) Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
That's very interesting.
It seems to me that this is an area where public perceptions of risk play a
part as well. For example, currently in Britain, a young girl has been
murdered by an as yet unknown assailant, and has generated massive media
coverage. One tabloid sunday newspaper, prompted by this terrible crime,
yesterday printed photographs, and named the towns of residence, of 50
convicted sex offenders who are on the sex offenders register (the UK
version of Megan's Law in the US)- even though, so far, there's no evidence
that a previously convicted offender committed the crime.
In fact, I'm not sure of the actual figure, but the vast majority of child
abuse incidents, and child murders, are perpetrated by relatives, or by
people known to the victim. The odds of a stranger taking someone's child
and killing them are literally millions to one against.
It seems that there is always a knee-jerk response to crimes that capture a
nation's attention- one is to change some aspect of law (superficially on
occasion, or fundamentally on others), the other is to go into a kind of
mass delusion where the incident is dismissed as a one-off, the perpetrator
is defined as pure evil, and the event is not seen as indicative of any
underground aspect of that nation. Sometimes, paradoxically perhaps, both
things happen, as in the case of the Dunblane shootings a few years ago (a
gunman killed 15 children and their teacher, and then killed himself) where
handgun ownership was banned, whilst at the same time the gunman was
portrayed as a figure of pure evil.
Vincent
> ----------
> From: Kenneth Van Oost
> Reply To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> Sent: Friday, July 21, 2000 5:04 pm
> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> Subject: Re: Memes and sexuality
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Vincent Campbell <v.p.campbell@stir.ac.uk>
> To: <memetics@mmu.ac.uk>
> Sent: Monday, July 17, 2000 5:53 PM
> Subject: RE: Memes and sexuality
>
>
> > Just to interject here,
> >
> > You don't have to go that far back in history to get to a time when
> marital
> > rape wasn't illegal, and as such wasn't constituted as 'rape' at all.
> Given
> > things like that, it's no wonder that the incidence of sex crime appears
> to
> > be on the increase.
>
> << Given other things, in Italia a judge ruled that offering no resistance
> against the advances of a man is a ground to let the man free on charges
> of rape.
> Also, judges ruled that there was no way that a girl could be raped
> wearing
> a jeans, because of the impossibility that the man could have undressed
> her
> without her help. >>
>
> > IMHO, the important point relates to the discussion about taboos that
> > Kenneth and I have been engaged in. What is clearly different in
> > contemporary society is the notion that sex, including sexual abuse
> (whether
> > rape or incest), as a subject to be discussed in public has gone from
> being
> > an almost absolute taboo, to something more evidently accepted. With
> that
> > acceptance has come a big explosion of reports of sexual abuse on women
> and
> > children-
>
> <<note, however, the situation of woman and children are improved over
> the years, they have rights and a voice now !! We are bound to listen !!
> We can 't put them off with fair words... >>
>
> >
> > The strategies for trying to pretend such things don't happen can have
> long
> > terms consequences of course. Am I right in saying, for example, that
> one
> > intepretation of Freud's concept of the Oedipus complex is that it
> stemmed
> > (at least in part) from his inability to accept the possibility of
> > widespread sexual abuse of children by polite Viennese society as
> reported
> > by his female patients?
>
> << In the famous X1 witness cases, in Belgium, there was talk about a
> widespread network of childabuse /-rape and -murder by high ranked
> politicians, buisnessmen etc. The investigators never found any clue about
> such network, but in all the us surrounding countries police found one or
> more. It was like the networks stopped at the Belgium border.
> IMHO, a clear case of what I call ' an emotional barrier ', we could not
> believe, and people do believe still, that above the Dutroux case there
> were networks where children were raped, sexually abused and murdered.
> Dutroux was worse, even one thing more worse would have meant the
> end of the country. In some way we areased the possibility that such
> networks could exist out of our collective memory.
> Vervloesem, a fellow who investigated such possibility in his own free
> time, was brought into discredit, after a while he was accused of having
> sex with under age boys and having put the pictures on Internet... >>
>
> Regards,
>
> Kenneth
>
> (I am, because we are)
>
>
> ===============================================================
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