Handicapping
From Norman Levitt’s Prometheus Bedeviled:
[T]he authoritarian presuppositions that had to be defeated for democracy to emerge as our primary political paradigm were closely linked, and sometimes identical, with the obscurantist articles of faith that science had to sweep aside in order to gain its place at the center of our contemporary knowledge system…The entrenchment of dogmatic religion was (and, to some extent, still is) an important prop of a social order based on hereditary caste and class. Simultaneously, it was wedded to an epistemology that automatically excluded both the modes of inquiry on which science depends and the conclusions about the physical and biological universe to which it inexorably led.
This suggests, to me, a way in which religious indoctrination really can be seen as a kind of abuse – intellectual or cognitive abuse.
It’s not just the obvious: that dogmatic articles of faith represent a mistaken way to go after understanding about the world; it’s because dogma can’t be contradicted or refuted. That makes it a trap. It prevents, rules out, forbids, closes off precisely what we need, which is a permanent on-going process of questioning, examining, thinking, that goes with a sense that anything and everything can be questioned – that there is nothing walled off in a shrine, a sanctum, an ark of the covenant, a kaaba, a holy of holies.
When that is done to children, it is a form of cognitive or epistemic abuse. It trains children who are, precisely, too young to be skeptical of what they are told, to think in the wrong way – it disables a basic part of their cognitive functioning before they’ve had a chance to form it. Since they are too young even to be able to resist, this is a cheat, an abuse of power via age-difference. It’s like foot-binding in that way – like distorting young soft bones into a deformed, disabled shape.
In other words it creates an intellectual disability, a mental handicap. It’s similar to handicapping children for begging purposes, as some desperate parents do. Some former children can overcome the handicap later, of course, but many never get the chance. This is a basic injustice. It’s not one that can be fixed by laws or social workers, but that does not mean it’s not a real one.
This is where Po-Mo and ilk link up with religion, the convergence of nonsenses I love pointing out. What they all have in common is not only that certain things are not to be questioned, but also the great showy pretence that questioning is to be admired, as long as it is understood in advance in what direction the answers are going to lie. The real thing, real questioning, with no answers guaranteed, gets you excommunicated or burned at the stake or denied tenure or shunned by the clique.
When that is done to children, it is a form of cognitive or epistemic abuse. It trains children who are, precisely, too young to be skeptical of what they are told, to think in the wrong way–it disables a basic part of their cognitive functioning before they’ve had a chance to form it…
Ye, verily.
I often wonder if it’s not also the form of abuse with the longest shadow–whether, in fact, many of the irrationalities of our age are ultimately propped up by that very practice. Whether, in fact, many of them might wither and die without the support of that very core irrationality taught (implicitly or explicitly) to children: that it is acceptable to reject evidence and argumentation solely because you don’t like where their consequences lead, that it is acceptable–even quite respectable–to reject evidence because it contradicts what has been set as somehow above all that. Worse, possibly, than making that single doctrine sacred, and independent of the nature of the doctrine itself is the principle establishing that priority implicitly justifies. The principle again being: don’t believe your own reason, don’t believe the evidence…
Believe what you want to.
People would certainly do this, to some degree, with or without the reinforcements to the principle religious indoctrination provides, it goes without saying… But I have to suspect religious indoctrination accentuates the tendency. Saying, effectively: it’s okay, go ahead, we’re all doing the same, you’re supposed to think that way, has to have an effect. Quite possibly a massive one.
…And regardless of whether that, specifically, is true, I would still stand by what I’ve said on the subject previously: whatever the social effect, it certainly is a rotten thing to do to a child.
But if this is abuse similar to the deliberate mutilation of children for begging purposes I don’t see any reason why it cannot be fixed or at least countered by laws and social workers in similar ways to which we attempt to prevent or ameliorate those other kinds of abuse. Why not, in principle, remove children from parents who are abusing them in this way and place them with more ideological acceptable parents?
Sure OB, but – at least here in in the UK – religious schools esopousing dogmating teachings are in the tiny minority. I remain to be convinced that an adult’s ability to completely ignore reason, evidence, facts, and adopt huge logical falacies and inconsistencies stems to the most part, as is seemingly argued here, from the religious element in their childhood development. I am convinced that, remove that religious element to child rearing and you’ll still have all the stupidity on earth, more common than hydrogen.
What we don’t have – never have had – in education, is teaching kids how to make their own judgements and come to their own conclusions; I doubt if the drag on this progressively important, yet lamentably missing skill is down to parent’s notions on religion, at least not here in the UK, where polls frequently show that most Brits think religion causes more problems than it fixes. I hate religion for by far the most part, but then I hate all bone-headed dogma, where the mediocre and dumb can ascend into power through zealotry alone.
“remove children from parents who are abusing them in this way and place them with more ideological acceptable parents”
John M. This is a piss-take right ? It’s the most Stalinist suggestion I’ve read for a while.
Guys, enlighten me if I’ve got the wrong end of the stick.
John M.:
>Why not, in principle, remove children from parents who are abusing them in this way and place them with more ideological acceptable parents?< Nick S.:
>John M. This is a piss-take right ? It’s the most Stalinist suggestion I’ve read for a while.< In the UK local council social worker officials already have excessive powers that enable children to be taken from parents if the social workers deem there is sufficient evidence of abuse. There have, of course, been notorious cases of children removed from the care of their parents because of alleged sexual or ritual abuse that has later been found to be spurious. In some cases children were not returned for several years: Orkney abuse scandal victim to sue for lost youth
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1338842006
From his posting, I’m sure John M. was simply pointing out the logical consequences of taking the “religious teaching as child abuse” claim seriously.
No means yes when it comes to ritual sexual abuse!
http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/68172-print.shtml
[Social worker] Janette Chisholm makes it very clear that, 15 years on, her views about the case have not changed. She still believes the nine children were abused, despite their denials as children and their denials today. She still believes it was right to allow them no contact with their families while they were in care, because they could have received coded messages designed to control them. She laughs at the parents pleading innocence and maintains their denials means they are still keeping secrets. She says the children have been let down.
And:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/5272092.stm
Social workers such as Janette Chisholm, who was involved in the questioning of the W family, maintain a child’s denial is not proof.
“If it is a secret they’ll deny. As long as it’s a secret, denial will come for the same reason the secrecy is there – keeping something safe,” she said. […]
Fifteen years later though, Ms Chisholm will not admit she and her social work colleagues were wrong.
She said: “I can’t decide things happened or didn’t happen.
“But people saying things didn’t happen doesn’t affect me in the slightest.
“Because that’s my experience of what people always say. I’d be very surprised if they said it did.”
Allen
Yes, I was aware of the notorious Orkney cases; I would dispute your term “excessive powers” – childcare is woefully and chronically underresourced – and I would also refute the implication that this is anything other than a freak aberation within the profession, but all this could perhaps be spared for another dialogue elsewhere though; this is an interesting thread not least because of the unusually ardent tenor.
To recap,
A) I am not sure of the extent to which religious indoctrination features in child development, (at least not here in the UK)
B) while one can view it in the abstract as OB has “a way in which religious indoctrination really can be seen as a kind of abuse”, surely using this terminology just mires things ? It just gives the religionists the ammo to accuse atheists of intolerance associated with totalitarian secular regimes…
John M – notwithstanding all that – apologies if I read your post with one eye shut.
If I’ve missed some subtleties here please enlighten me.
You haven’t yet to linked to this (that I’ve noticed), but it seems to me to have relevance to this discussion (and if not, then certainly to B&W in general):
http://www.culturecult.com/sandall_dec06.htm
And what will the evil, deluded Janette Chisholm do when the case fianlly comes to court, and she has to face the Orkney child(ren) who are now adults, and demand money back, and apologies?
The woman is clearly insane.
Particularly when you read: …
“A list of “abuse indicators” was widely used by social workers. One of these said that if children said they hadn’t been abused, they had.”
So, if the witch sinks, and drowns, she’s innocent, and if she floats, she’s guilty.
Hmmm …..
Nick S writes:
childcare is woefully and chronically underresourced ..>/i>
True, but the main reason for this is the broken home (sorry, I mean the ‘reconstituted family’). Childcare is the business of a child’s biological parents. Hence the West’s pandemic of mass single motherhood and divorce on demand will inevitable lead to ‘woefully and chronically underresourced’ childcare.
Those damn italics. Hope this terminates them
Sorry. must try harder
Cathal, they’re under-resourced because social services are underresourced full -stop. Old. Young Mentally ill. The lot. That said, we were discussing something else… (John M introduced the childcare element as an abstraction I believe..) And also, I have posted my views about soc. services elsehwere on N&C, at length, and am more interested here to hear about the issue being discussed. Here.
Well, that’s the problem with the word ‘abuse’ perhaps – it’s just too loaded to use. But I wanted to (attempt to) make the point that the harm is real. But that’s not to say that it should be solved by interventions. Not all harms can be solved by interventions, but that doesn’t mean they’re not harms.
In fact one could think of it as a harm parallel to (or even identical with) the harm of being uneducated, which in fact was solved by a massive intervention, to wit, making schooling mandatory for all. That’s intrusive, if you like, but it’s widely accepted as necessary.
Allen, will get back when I’ve digested all that – I am at work. By the way, married to a mental health social worker of some 25 years experience and I also know a range of people within social services. I will also be interested to see what they say about competence, ritual abuse and any other issues you mentioned here.
GT – I already know what you’re going to say !
Allen,
Harrowing stuff — and I had imagined that the recovered memory scam etc. was a thing of the past.
Have just made a print-out of your posting to make sure I miss nothing.
Dissociation and…attachment theory? What is this ‘attachment theory,’ I wonder. Specifically I wonder if it’s any relation to the ‘Reactive Attachment Disorder’ for which a creative ‘treatment’ was invented: rebirthing, in which a child who ‘has’ RAD is tightly wrapped in, say, a mattress and then forced to struggle free. A therapist killed a child named Candace Newmaker in the course of such a ‘treatment,’ as I’ve mentioned here before. The word ‘attachment’ has a certain nimbus now as a result…at least I hope it does…
Ophelia:
>Well, that’s the problem with the word ‘abuse’ perhaps – it’s just too loaded to use. But I wanted to (attempt to) make the point that the harm is real.< What about the “harm” (if such it be) done by parents holding *any* fundamentalist-type belief, why stop at religion? For example, what about being brought up in a family that believed that the Soviet Union was a workers’ paradise (while Stalin was alive), and where the only newspaper available was the Daily Worker. And knowing songs such as: Soviet land so dear to every toiler,
Peace and progress pin their hopes on thee,
There’s no other land the whole world over,
Where man walks the earth so proud and free.
I rest my case.
Just to remind readers of Richard Webster’s website (already mentioned by Allen): It’s here.
Should help shatter any illusions that we may be entering the Age of Reason.
“solved by a massive intervention”
Many on the religious right consider the US to be in the midst of another “Great Awakening” – their idea of an intervention?
Allen, I’m nnot complacent about this, so – sorry but can you precis your extesnive post ? I am busy and don’t have time right now to read all the links. Specifically, how does this support your allegation, the only one which I took issue with, that Council Employees in Social Services have excessive powers that enable children to be taken from parents ?
Allen,
“What about the “harm” (if such it be) done by parents holding *any* fundamentalist-type belief”
Well that’s what I’m saying. I think indoctrination in dogmatic beliefs – beliefs that cannot and must not be questioned – is indeed a harm. Not a legally actionable harm, but still a harm.
Nick writes:
>Specifically, how does this support your allegation, the only one which I took issue with, that Council Employees in Social Services have excessive powers that enable children to be taken from parents ?< Nick, I can see it’s unfair that you can’t put your full attention to this because of being at work (leave it until this evening?), but in fact I responded to your writing in relation to my citing of the Orkney ritual abuse scandal:
>…and I would also refute the implication that this is anything other than a freak aberation within the profession…< On the more specific issue of excessive powers of social workers, this is implicit in all the ritual abuse cases where children were removed from their parents on the basis of dubious notions that the social workers in question had imbibed about the kind of evidence that points to the children having been ritually abused. On the question of powers of social workers to remove children from parents in general, there was an interesting article in The Times earlier this year: Innocent but presumed guilty
Camilla Cavendish
How many homes are broken by the closed and secretive family courts? Frighteningly, we don’t know
In the past year I have been approached by several parents who have had children taken away. Even those who managed to get them back are still too frightened to talk publicly. They describe what it is like to find yourself on the other side of a one-way mirror, innocent but presumed guilty, by professionals who are almost completely unaccountable. Your instinct is to cry for help, but you are told that talking to anyone could jeopardise your case. It is impossible for me to judge the merit of these cases, since I am not permitted to read the legal papers. Even if I could, I suspect that not all would be clear-cut…
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,23729-1981051,00.html
The terrible thing about this subject is that there’s danger either way. There’s a lot of pressure not to remove children, too, which can and does result in their being left in dire situations. But being removed for no or bad or indequate reason is also a nightmare.
Allen,
Yes, but I’m thinking not so much of substantive ideas as of a cognitive capacity, or perhaps simply a habit. If indoctrination in dogma trains children to think that certain categories of ideas or beliefs or doctrines are simply off-limits to questioning – they may hang onto that background idea forever, and simply never come to realize that they can and probably ought to think about everything. It seems to me it creates an obstacle or barrier to questioning that wouldn’t otherwise be there. Of course, indifference and lack of inclination and the like could still be there, but the actual (albeit metaphoric) ‘No Trespassing’ sign wouldn’t. A taboo is different from disinclination.
If you regard religious teaching of children to be, if not actually an abuse, a harm, then really you would abolish it – if you could. It’s only the practicalities that get in the way, not the principle.
I had suspected that many atheists only talked about toleration and Enlightenment values while they were not in the majority. Now I’m sure of it. If you had the opportunity you’d be as intolerant as the most fundamentalist member of the League of Militant Atheists.
Oh swear words, Jeffrey. For once in your life, read carefully. Read what I said, not what you in your rage-induced blur think I said. I didn’t say I think religious teaching of children is a harm. I said something much narrower than that. Read each word; sound them out one at a time if you have to.
You’ve apologized for one tantrum you had here. How about reading carefully every time in order to avoid these little fits?
Also…if you really want to argue that belief in religious dogma is compatible with critical thinking, you might want to try to do a better job of exemplifying that compatibility.
Oddly enough, I don’t think the social w*nk*rs who are leading the “Satanic Abuse” claims are liars, in the usual sense.
They are telling completely untrue stories, all over the landscape, but they Really believe those stories.
They are so seriously deluded, that I wonder if they can be regarded is insane – possibly insane enough to be sectioned.
As for the family courts, the answer is not to go into them.
It is a VERY hard decision to take, but people are slowly getting wise to the idea.
So, if accusations of this sort are made, you have to take the hard road, and demand a criminal trial.
Where the rules of evidence DO apply, and the “ritual abuse” cases collapse.
P.S.
O, please, beg, creep, crawl – can I call Jeffrey Mushens a liar?
Allen, thanks appreciate your repsonse and your appreciation I sometimes have limited time; I also appreciate that it’s not really on to enter a discussion one can’t fully engage in. Therefore, I’ll take your word this is an area worth enquriring about, although I must say that Orkney would not necessarily be the best starting point to evaluate the workings of an interdisciplinary service accross all the UK counties. I don’t at this stage know the evidence behind familly courts’ failings or otherwise to express an opinion really worth expressing, so I for one will call my end of this to a close – for now. But – it is certainly worth dicussion at a later stage. Hope this doesn’t seem too slippery !
Ophelia writes, in reply to Jeffrey Mushens:
“For once in your life, read carefully. Read what I said, not what you in your rage-induced blur think I said. I didn’t say I think religious teaching of children is a harm. I said something much narrower than that. Read each word; sound them out one at a time if you have to.”
The problem is that when discussing highly sensitive issues (such as the putatively adverse effects of religious indoctrination) it is one’s own self-interest to express oneself in a way that cannot be misunderstood — to ‘spell it out’, so to speak, so that even malevolent adversaries will be virtually unable to misrepresent your point of view.
I don’t think Jeffrey’s interpretation was necessarily ‘rage-induced’. He may have just been overly apprehensive. If atheists start thinking of comparing religious indoctrination with child abuse or harm, or even if they start thinking about thinking of doing so, it is almost inevitable that (rightly or wrongly) they will be suspected of opening the floodgates to religious intolerance and repression.
It wouldn’t be the first time. Christians, for example, will always remember the frightful persecution of their believers in the Soviet Union and other Communist countries. Why should they forget? Is it surprising that they should sometimes react in a mildly paranoid fashion? After all, atheism hardly has a perfect record when it comes to tolerance of the ‘Other’.
Tingey,
Your phrasing is frequently sledgehammer and too often you are predictable, but –
you also have made some worthwhile and interesting contributions here and I would frankly prefer it if JS didn’t contrive to prevent you accessing the site and participating.
Why the effing brinksmanship?
A small correction for Cathal.
The Soviet Union persecuted christians for the same reason that “Let there be no jews or christians in Arabia”.
Or the same reason that the Edict of Fontainbleu was signed in October 1685.
The communist church did not want a competing religion present.
The deranged Mahmud didn’t want any competing religions present in his home base area.
The French Catholic state did not want a competing, protestant religion present.
Please: communism is a classic religion.
It has its’ sects and schisms, a propaganda department and structure closely modelled on that (oddly enough – you wouod expect Orthodox) of the RC church. And heretics are even wronger than unbelievers…..
You don’t have to believe just me: try Bertrand Russell on the subject.
Jeanette Winterson has written interestingly about this. As she recounts in her book ‘Oramges are not the only fruit’, Winterson was bvrought up in an extremely authoritarian and fundamentalist Christian cult, thr Plymouth Brethren, I think (quite possibly wrong about that thought). She escaped from the cult and into the embrace of Sappho where she has thrived ever since. It is often assumed by readers of OANTOF that she is entirely resentful of her repressive upbringing but in fact she is often careful in interviews to insist on a much more nuanced understanding of her experince, pointing out that she attributes much of her success to the enormous sense of special purpose, cosmic importance, security in the love of others and moral duty imposed on her by the dour religious fanatics who brought her up. It would be hard to say that she had been abused by the limitations and intellectual orthodoxies that were imposed on her in her childhood since it is those limitations that allowed her (in her own interpretation) to achieve the heights that she went on to.
Mr Tingey
“O, please, beg, creep, crawl – can I call Jeffrey Mushens a liar?”
You’re asking the wrong person. Whilst I’m paying for this site (it’s hosted on my server), then I’m the person you need to ask.
And the answer is NO!!!
However, if anybody wants to offer server space in the US, and the transfer of B&W can be done without fuss, thereby allowing people to call other people liars – which they shouldn’t do anyway, by the way (it really is hopeless as an argumentative strategy) – without fear of libel action, then let me know.
G. Tingey:
>Oddly enough, I don’t think the social w*nk*rs who are leading the “Satanic Abuse” claims are liars, in the usual sense. They are telling completely untrue stories, all over the landscape, but they Really believe those stories.< Of course they do. Why would anyone think otherwise? >They are so seriously deluded, that I wonder if they can be regarded is insane – possibly insane enough to be sectioned.< Not only is this kind of comment, shall we say, unhelpful, it fails to get to the root of the source of the beliefs of people like Valerie Sinason. In some instances patients have produced plausible stories (for a variety of reasons), which the psychotherapist has found compelling. In other instances, the clinical procedures and belief systems (psychoanalytic interpretative in the case of Sinason) lead to the stories they hear (or, in many, cases ‘hear’ after suitable interpretation). In Sinason (ed.) *Treating Survivors of Satanic Abuse* (Routledge, 1994) one of the chapters is about a woman who, by an odd coincidence, had been the girlfriend of someone I knew. (Although he featured anonymously in the chapter, he was not accused of ritual abuse.) He gave me accounts of the disturbed woman’s behaviour that clearly indicated she was a fantasist and pathological liar, but the psychotherapists writing the chapter had clearly taken her at her word. To get an insight into the mindsets of believers in ritual abuse, I recommend this chapter (pp. 120-130). One of the contributors to the Sinason book, Brett Kahr, can be heard occasionally on BBC Radio 3 or Radio 4. Another is Phil Mollon, who, apart from his own practice, works at a NHS hospital. He finishes his chapter saying he has often been asked by colleagues whether these ritual abuse stories might not all be a delusion and whether he believes what he is told. He says he has to hold an open mind, but would rather risk being deluded by his patients than “risk abandoning the terrified traumatised child within the patient who is attempting to tell the story”. Sinason herself works with children with severe learning disabilities, and her claims are very much based on the interpretation of children’s drawings. This might seem outlandish, but a whole school of (British) psychoanalysis is built on similar interpretative methodology, that of Melanie Klein (still in favour at the Tavistock Institute in London). And going back a bit, huge numbers of people, including notable intellectuals, accepted some of Freud’s equally outlandish interpretations – his case history of the Wolf Man was widely lauded in the middle decades of the twentieth century, though my reaction to reading it in the early 1980s was “How can anyone take this stuff seriously?” And just as with the Freudians, their belief systems are insulated against refutation. In cases like the Orkneys children removed from their parents, the social workers involved [and this only applies to the small number of social workers caught up in the satanic ritual cases] could always “explain” the alleged victims denials – in fact the denials become further evidence of the truth of the stories of ritual abuse, because that is what one would expect of the ‘victims’.
“… the denials become further evidence of the truth of the stories…”
Like all good conspiracy theories, in which the absence of certain evidence one would think is mandatory to back up a claim is itself cited as proof of the conspiracy and when it is pointed out that the cover-up could not be accomplished without involving (in some cases) many thousands of people (or even absurdly larger numbers) the only thing this can mean is that the conspiracy is really, really, really big. It’s not allowed to mean anything else. That’s the starting point and when you have a starting point like that, the sky’s the limit (or, if you’re into UFOs, not even that).
A follow up to my and Stewart’s comments:
On the case of the disturbed woman fantasist I cited above, the two therapists involved “took advice from colleagues” about contacting the police in East Anglia where the woman “knew the bodies [of three ritually abused children] might be buried… She was initially frightened by this idea, and thought he [the senior police officer they contacted] might be part of one of the rings.”
You’d have thought this alone might have given the two therapists food for thought. Evidently not. They write earlier in the chapter: “By this time she had provided increasing evidence [sic!] that, from at least age six and probably age 3, she had been subjected to repeated intercourse, both anal and vaginal, by a large group of people and by animals. It also seemed that she had participated in, and possibly been made to be active in, some ritual mutilations and probably murders of three young children and one young man.”
Nowhere in this chapter is there any questioning of the reality of these “experiences”.
Incidentaly, the authors have impressive lists of credentials. Alan Cooklin was (1994) Senior Lecturer, University London and Birkbeck College London, Director and Chair of Institute of Family Therapy London, etc, etc. Gill Gorell Barnes was (1994) Senior Clinical Lecturer in Social Work at Tavistock Clinic, Senior Lecturer, Birkbeck College, etc.
I omitted the word “College” in the credentials of Alan Cooklin, which should have read:
Alan Cooklin was (1994) Senior Lecturer, University College London and Birkbeck College London, Director and Chair of Institute of Family Therapy London, etc, etc.
The question arises ( again )
Crap.
G Tingey, I think I’m just going to ask JS to block you. I don’t need you trying to get me evicted along with yourself.