IS PAEDOPHILIA A WHITE MAN'S DISEASE?

Many years ago, when I was an undergraduate, I remember a friend of mine telling me about a tribesman of his who was sleeping with his teenaged daughter.

Her mother knew. Her siblings too.

The tribal community in the city where they lived also knew. But nothing was ever done. My friend told me that the family would be sitting in the living room, listening to their husband and father abusing his daughter. But the girl’s mother would not react.

We all know the possibly apocryphal story of the man who was taken to court for sleeping with his young daughter. He said: man go cook soup no tast'am? (Shall one cook his soup and not taste it?).

Some of you will remember the stories some years back of a five-month old baby who was raped in South Africa. The child required emergency surgery. There were more that 50,000 cases of rape in that country in 1996, and it is estimated that only one in twenty rape cases was actually being reported. The madness was partly fuelled by the belief that if an AIDS patient has sex with a virgin, he would be cured.

Recently, there was an outcry in the Dutch and international media because a group of paedophiles formed a party. An irate public advocated lynching and all sorts of imaginative punishments. Others said it was a good thing that the perverts had come out of the closet(or should we say nursery?). Now, they said, it would be easier to identify them and keep them away from children. The party’s Internet Service Provider took their website off its server.

Some people advocated moderation. They are probably the ones without children of their own or with no connection to the children of their family members or their friends. There should be no moderation in protecting the rights of a defenceless child.

In Britain, the spectre of paedophilia has caused a form of hysteria in which previous offenders have their addresses published, in one case in a newspaper. The offender, who had served time in prison for his crimes, was hounded into leaving the neighbourhood. It is the kind of hysteria one might well give in to, if it is considered that a neighbour might get his hands on one’s children.

Paedophiles are male in about 90% of cases, we are told, but there are also known women paedophiles. As an Tammy Ruggles says in an article, “A female pedophile usually abuses a child when partnered with an adult male pedophile, and is often herself a victim of chronic sexual abuse”.

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in 2003, approximately 906,000 children were victims of abuse and an estimated 1,500 children died of abuse or neglect.

In Africa, we don’t keep statistics about these things. We don’t even want to acknowledge them.
But paedophilia is with us, and has been for centuries. In a recent write-up in a forum of which I am a member, one Cameroonian woman said:

In my days, little girls used to walk around with just their panties, and nothing else and it was quite common to have a man grab your nipples, in kind of an "how are you doing" gesture. It wasn't a comfortable experience for us girls even though it was treated so casually but by instinct we knew it was wrong. On the other hand you had[identifying information deleted]who were pathological rapists. They would lure little girls selling bananas, g[round]nuts, etc. into thinking they wanted to buy these things, and them rape them.

Does that ring a bell?

Many of us have heard stories of house-help interfering with young children. It has happened to people we know. In fact, many parents are careful never to leave their young girl children alone at home with a male employee.

Some of the children thus abused (there is no other term for having sex with a young person who cannot understand what you are doing) give birth. The youngest mother in known history was Lina Medina, who was five years old when she gave birth in 1939.

There are several kinds of paedophilia, or “intergenerational intimacy” as the whitewashers prefer to call it. What do you call a marriage to a very young girl? Tradition? How many of us reading this come from cultures where girls are married off at the age of ten or eleven? I remember a case reported to me of a former governor of a province whose daughters were studying abroad. In his seventies, he got himself an eleven-year old to “warm his bed for him at night”. Do you think the poor girl served exclusively as a hot-water bottle? Someone made a comment recently about fathers who are feminists when it comes to their daughters. That is good. We need all the help we can get. But why, in the case of paedophiles, do they not extend this to other people’s children?

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Marrying very young girls is a form of paedophilia. The age of consent in Cameroon is officially high enough not to be too worrisome, but in some of our traditional societies, all of that is ignored when it comes to choosing young girls.

What I find most distressing about this is the wall of silence that surrounds institutionalised paedophilia. People know, but no one will take action, because it is not their business. Will it become our business only when our children are attacked? What is this apathy that inhabits us?

There might be a glimmer of hope, however. I remember the story of one woman whose soldier husband came back home one day, called her to one side and announced that he had joined a secret society for the advancement of his career, and one of the initiation rites required that he sleep with his teenage daughter. Hi wife was silent. Then she said: “wait for me one moment, I’ll be back.” When she returned, she was carrying his gun. She chased him out of the house and out of their lives. If the story is true, then that is a real woman, not like those fakes who keep silent about abuses of their children because they want to stay married.

The Exclusive type of pedophile, says Tammy Ruggles, is attracted to children only. The Non-Exclusive is attracted to both children and adults. So when Africans hear stories of paedophiles declaring themselves and shudder in superior horror, we should remember what we ourselves condone.

Silence is consent.

Comments

[Cyril]

Rosemary,
that was a very good article, currently we are debating in birocol forum similar situation in Mamfe, where a child (girl) who is only 13yrs was forced to wed a 40yrs old man as a second wife.
We are told that this child is an orphan and her granduncle has been collecting bride price in the forms of gifts, cash and otherwise when this child was only 5yrs old.
All in all, 400.000frs cfa has been paid and the child has been handed over to her husband. We are also told that this child was in primary school and was pretty much clever as she has never fallen below 7th position ever since she was enrolled.
We hope by the end of our debate, we should be able to find a lasting solution to this current problems because we do have an insider who is a spiritual leader in this particular village in question.Besides, it is partly our responsibilities to put an end in such ungodly practices as ex-seminarians.

[Ma Mary]

Keep the closet on these animals wide open, Rosemary. This is the one crime for which the death penalty should remain. The difference between the West and Africa in this case is one of hunesty. They talk about it, making it likely to find answers. We pretend and hide it.

[Kwensi]

Paedophilia is a human condition not a cultural one. It takes courage to stand up and denouce it for what it and not hide behind what we consider to be traditional norms. Paedophilia is on the upsurge in our African societies, in my opinion, because the cultural taboos that protected our societies are coming down as we try to outdo one another in adapting western liberal values. Couple that to the crippling poverty of the society in general and the economic emprovishment of women in particular and you have the recipe for disaster. Increasingly we will turn our eyes away from any crime including child molestation if our lips are well oiled.

[Anike]

I was watching "oprah" deal with the child sexual abuse issue and then I began wondering if these things happen in Cameroon. Suddenly I rememebered a joke among local men ... "Man go cook chop and no taste am?" How sad!

[sokari]

Paedophilia is a global problem it is just practiced differently in different countries. As a teenager and adult in Nigeria I was always hearing about child abuse especially of young girls house servants - not only are they victims of sexual abuse but also physical and mental abuse. How many of them survive if they survive I dont know. The probelem is people accept the practice of using young children as domestic slaves as the norm - they are treated as lesser human beings therefore who cares if they are sexually abused. I have certainly never heard of a single case where an employee (and I use the term loosely) has ever been prosecuted for sexual or physical abuse.

[Martin Jumbam]

Enanga, a Limbe-based newspaper, The Eden, recently carried a story of a group of women, who are tackling the problem of teenage girls, some way below their teens, who are being forcefully married to men, sometimes as payment for a debt their parents might have incurred. I believe the story concerns Akwaya; but I doubt that it is only in Akwaya that such abominations are taking place. It's a good thing people are beginning to speak out loud against such practices. And women seem to be in the lead. Is it because they are usually at the receiving end? I don't know. Whatever the case, my praise goes to you, Enanga, and your kind for your courage.

A friend rushed to meet me the other day to complain that he had come home quite unexpectedly that afternoon and found the fellow he had paid earlier in the day to clean his yard astride his house girl, a young girl barely 13. My friend had been so taken back by this unexpected scene that he just stood there while the scoundrel gathered up his clothes and fled across the fence, as naked as a worm!

When he told me the story, I was so enraged, because I know the tiny girl, that he and I decided to go looking for that rogue, determined as we were to castrate him ourselves, tear those balls off him. But, as it was to be expected, he's now perhaps hundreds of miles away from Douala.

Had we found him, could we have really spread him out eagle-like on the floor and tore off his balls? I don't know, but that is how enraged we felt against him and we could perhaps have done it - even though neither my friend nor I are particularly violent people!

But, come to think of it, our anger was all the more intense because we knew the victim. More horrible crimes of this nature are being commited around us, and it's time we began to not only speak out, but do something about it. Those women fighting for the rights of women in Akwaya have set the pace. You are doing just that through this forum. Shame on some of us, who only seem to react when we know the victim. It's sad, indeed.

[Member]

This is one crime against which I recommend the utmost barbarity as punishment, including removing the perpetrators member with a blunt knife without benefit of anaesthesia.

[eric njumbwa]

paedophilia is an evil act which has to be denounced in all its form.in our african tradition it is a taboo.i belive to fight this cancker worm,we need to rise up as one man and bring any such case to the attention of the judiciary.also,the victims should not hide their predicament but voice it out.we do judiciary to do their job well and not with tight hands

[John Roberts]

No, paedophilia is not a "white man's disease". It is, however, a white man's invention - the word 'paedophilia' having been introduced by the 'science' of psychiatry back in the late 19th century; it simply didn't exist before then (in much the same way as 'witches' or 'God' didn't exist before religion).

Paedophiles exist, like witches, only if you believe in them (i.e. subscribe to the social/cultural paradigm in which they have epistemic value). Cease to believe in them, and like witches, they disappear.

The study, classification and cataloguing of human sexuality and the concomitant division of human sexuality into two groups, the so-called normal and deviant, is simply an attempt to control human behaviour. Cloaking it in the mantle of dispassionate, scientific enquiry is merely designed to give it a spurious legitimacy that it might otherwise be denied.

[Ma Mary]

John Roberts, let us break it down and forget about the jargon for a minute. What is your attitude towards adults who have sexual relations with children? Is it part of the spectrum of normal human behavior? Do you have any boundaries or taboos?