Necessity and Emergency in Sex Hysteria

A common trick in propaganda is to claim that some actions are not merely desired but rather are necessary, and urgent action is required to avoid imminent disaster. Hence there is no need to invest a lot of mental effort and energy, nor is there even time to reflect much. Scare words like “nudity” and “sex” and “children” are used to derail rational thinking and provoke quick and sloppy emotional reactions.

In news reports about accusations of rape or especially sex crimes against minors, a surprising number of anonymous people fire off comments assuming right away the accused must be guilty and should be punished severely, even though distant readers don’t even know the details of the case, let alone whether the accusations are completely true, partially true, or blatantly false.

A judge who does know the details of a case is in a bind because if he finds the defendant innocent for lack of evidence, some nut-jobs will immediately shout “Hang the judge!” or “Shoot the messenger!” or even “Castrate the accused anyway!”

In one strange case the police heard that a father had threatened a man who was “too friendly” (in conversation) with his young daughter. The police then interrogated the overly friendly man, who claimed not only that he hadn’t said or done anything to suggest any danger, but that the father was obviously drunk when he raced over to the man’s house to threaten him. A thoughtful detective replied “The father was only protecting his daughter.”

From what? The father imagined that there might be a dangerous escalation of the suspect’s friendliness some time in the future, and in the event that his imagination might be correct, an urgent confrontation and threat in a drunken rage were appropriate? Yep, that was the professional investigator’s evaluation of the situation.

In my own personal experience a prosecutor informed a judge that it was urgently “necessary” to interrogate several children who might have been the victims of sex crimes at some unknown time in the past and in some unknown place. Despite no spontaneous complaints from any children or parents, the sympathetic judge took for granted that the prosecutor was being reasonable and responsible, not hysterical. But in reality the children had been identified a year before, and the only real reason for interrogating them now a year later was precisely to confuse and prejudice the judge in the middle of a separate trial.

The police are supposed to be clever, and judges are supposed to be wise, not vulnerable to such cheap tricks. But sometimes the most important people in positions of staggering power are easily deceived by scare tactics that should actually be a red flag of attempted deception.

There is so much deception entrenched in the discourse of child safety and children’s innocence, that many people react reflexively to any suggestion of sexual danger, while completely ignoring the most frequent causes of child death and serious injuries in childhood which have nothing to do with sex.

Some individuals who claim they “only want to protect children” are willing to join a lynch mob, and that makes them normal or even heroes? Make no mistake: those individuals who assume a person accused of being a witch MUST BE guilty, are not heroes, they are cowards.