When I first came to Japan in 1989, a few Japanese actually told me that there was no child abuse in Japan. That shows that there was little consciousness of this social problem in those days. But I would guess that most people in the U.S. and Japan, of my generation at least, have been abused by a man or an older boy at some time in their life, either as children or as adults. That might sound like an unsupportable claim, but consider the wide range of types of abuse, what is considered abuse today, including violence, sexual abuse, and neglect. Ask yourself, for 20 seconds of silence with your eyes closed, “Have you ever been abused by a man, or an older boy, in one of these three ways?”
Then, watch this 5-minute film: “Short Film on Corporal (Violent) Punishment: But I Grew Up Fine…Didn’t I?”
The Japan Times tells us that in 2024, a total of 52 children in Japan were killed, and 2,700 were abused. But surely, the true numbers are larger. The research of Lloyd deMause tells us that, throughout human history, the vast majority of children have been abused. It is only in the last few decades in rich countries that the problem of child abuse has really begun to be tackled.
Even Sigmund Freud was unable to openly and consistently tackle it. In fact, he denied his own pathbreaking research, after discovering that most of his patients who were suffering from “hysteria” had been sexually abused by men, usually their fathers. (Judith Lewis Herman, Father-Daughter Incest, Harvard UP, 1981, pages 9-10).
In the little experience that I have with talking about the issue of sexual violence and child abuse—and that is not very much because I cannot say that I have really studied psychology—women have more experience talking about it than we men do. One reason for this, I guess, is that women, and girls, have suffered more often and more deeply as victims of sexual violence, and due to their positions in the hierarchies of society, they have thought more about the problem of patriarchy. But men and boys are also victims of patriarchy.
Let me state from the outset that in my view, patriarchy is not good for humanity and must be abolished, just as war must be abolished.
“Men are not doing very well”
As the feminist bell hooks has written, “To take the inherent positive sexuality of males and turn it into violence is the patriarchal crime that is perpetuated against the male body, a crime that masses of men have yet to possess the strength to report. Men know what is happening. They simply have been taught not to speak the truth of their bodies, the truth of their sexualities.” (bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, 2004).
Bell hooks taught that the goal of feminism must be to end patriarchy, that the goal must go beyond merely achieving equality before the law. Even if all the laws were changed, and men and women were legally equal, patriarchy would remain. Patriarchy must be pulled up out of the ground like a weed.
After reading bell hooks, I truly believe that to let women speak, to listen to the stories of women from their perspective is a revolutionary, political act. Mainstream cultural taboos silence women. Perhaps this is why few of the insights of feminism have escaped the confines of academia. Feminism is an extremely valuable set of writings, speeches, music, art, and cultural practices that must be liberated from the closed world of academia. Now and in the future, everyone who has benefited from feminism, especially men who are feminists, must help bring it out of the shadows and share it with the world in general.
When introducing feminism to others, bell hooks’ writings are very useful. She once quoted Olga Silverstein, a therapist who wrote a book The Courage to Raise Good Men (1995), when explaining a social problem that should concern men. The following words from Silverstein were published decades ago:
“Men aren’t surviving very well! We send them to war to kill and be killed. They’re lying down in the middle of highways to prove their manhood in imitation of a scene in a recent movie about college football. They’re dying of heart attacks in early middle age, killing themselves with liver and lung disease via the manly pursuits of drinking and smoking, committing suicide at roughly four times the rate of women, becoming victims of homicide (generally at the hands of other men) three times as often as women, and therefore living about eight years less than women.” (bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love).
We should stop and listen to these words of a feminist who cares about men. It should be obvious from this quote at least, that not all feminists hate men. (In fact, most do not). Men, please listen to this insightful feminist who raised the alarm for us with her words, “Men aren’t surviving very well!” She was trying to help everyone.
Why are men so violent?
Most people have probably heard the “common sense” idea that the boys are naturally more violent than girls. Really? Are we just born with a desire to punch and stab and kill others? Is it biological? Or is it the way that we are raised? As for me, I agree with bell hooks, that, in any case, we must take the first step toward a less violent world by changing the way that we raise children. I would suggest that U.S. society today would have been very different if parents of children of my generation had not
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Beaten boys with a belt when they told a lie
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Said to boys that we must not cry, because we are a boy
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Neglected boys’ emotional and physical needs
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Looked the other way when fathers committed sexual violence.
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Let us experiment with a new way of raising children. My goal is not to make people feel ashamed. We have had enough of shaming. My goal is to stimulate changes in society, changes that will make us all less violent, changes that will prevent wars.
Please pause and think about these facts.
Most readers have probably never heard of Lloyd deMause, although he was an influential psychoanalyst and social historian, and did pioneering work in the field of “psychohistory.” He was born in 1931 in Detroit, Michigan. He studied political science at Columbia University and became a famous historian and psychologist, but he was not completely accepted in academia. The goal of his research was to “understand the emotional origin of the social and political behavior of groups and nations, past and present.” Everyone who cares about peace should try reading at least one of his essays.
Here is a quick summary of just a few of his provocative claims.
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Children are abused in all countries and in all communities. DeMause demonstrated this in shocking, extreme detail, using the work of anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and others. In the U.S., in Japan, in India, even among indigenous peoples. It was one of his main arguments that child abuse is a problem that people in all countries, in all communities in the world, must think about.
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Our mothers, like our fathers, told us to “Grow up and be a man.” Well, what is a “man”? How do you prove that you are a man? By causing yourself and others pain, of course.
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Even women support violent politicians. Nazi violence was backed by most German women under the Nazi regime. Women “in fact voted for Hitler in even greater proportions than men.”
According to the Center for American Women in Politics, 41% of U.S. women supported Trump in 2016, especially white women, non-college-educated women (i.e., working class women), evangelical women, and older women. Other research tells that “during the 2016 elections, 53% of White women voted for Trump, and during the 2020 elections, 53% of White women once again cast ballots for him.”
This is despite the fact that Trump is notorious for violence against women. He said, “I just start kissing them… I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. … Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
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According to deMause’s research, in the U.S. when he was doing this research, boys were given less care and support, from everyone in the family and in society, and they/we suffered far more physical violence than girls, so by the time they/we were three years of age they/we became twice as violent as girls.
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Research shows that mothers look at their boys less than at their girls.
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Boys are more violent than girls. They form dominance gangs and endlessly “play war.” Maybe this is not nature; maybe it is because boys face more violence than girls, because boys are told to “grow up,” to “be manly,” to “not be a crybaby,” and to not need emotional attachments. (Being in a gang is a way to build emotional attachments and gain protection and physical security).
I would add the thought, “What is a nation-state but a ‘dominance gang’”? Remember John Lennon’s words, “Imagine there’s no countries”? Without these dominance gangs called “nations,” there is no need to build up a military.
Consider the case of the Prime Minister of the U.K., Keir Starmer. In late October he said, “We are moving to war readiness.” Hearing that, I immediately worried, “Oh no! Danger! War! Death! Destruction! Tragedy!” But seconds later he spoke of “peace through strength” and “…drones, destroyers, AI, aircraft… to create an army which is 10 times more lethal by 2035.” His logic is along the lines of, “We are going to be safe because we will be so lethal.” Many feminists would immediately see the stupidity of such statements, the blind “toxic masculinity” of it, but I imagine that British men today, who have been indoctrinated in toxic masculinity from the time they were little, and who do not remember The War, just like men in the U.S., believe in Starmer’s tough talk.
Side note: One of the thoughts that led me to join World BEYOND War was the thought that the powerful weapons of today, especially weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, biological, chemical, AI, nanotechnology weapons, killer AI drones, etc.), are no longer realistic in militaristic nation-states. We must get rid of war and its accomplice the nation-state. Abolishing nuclear weapons will not bring us peace. War is inherently dangerous and unrealistic with today’s technology. In order for us to live safely and healthfully, we must make war both illegal and make it very very difficult to start wars. It is easy to start a war, while difficult to end wars, in the present organization of society, but we have to turn that around, such that peace is easy to maintain and wars are difficult to start.
- Back to deMause. He pointed out the importance of the fact that “in 1979, Sweden passed a law saying that hitting children was as unlawful as hitting adults! Imagine the audacity! Children were people, just like adults!” Maybe this is why three decades later in Sweden (in 2011), research based on 2,500 parents showed that only 3% of them had “struck their child at some point in the last year.” This tells us that Sweden is doing something right.
- Generally, child abuse was worse in poor countries than in rich countries in the 1990s when deMause was writing (according to him), but a map at the End Corporal Punishment website shows that many non-Western, and in fact, poorer countries, have made corporal punishment of children illegal.
The countries that have banned corporal punishment of children seem to have been the countries that have engaged in war less frequently, in recent decades. Just a quick glance at this map will confirm this.
According to the World Childhood Foundation, that was founded by the queen of Sweden Silvia Renate Sommerlath, “In 2024, the first reliable global estimates on the prevalence of child sexual abuse were published by our partner Together for girls. It shows that 1 in 5 girls and 1 in 7 boys will experience sexual violence before their 18th birthday.”
Patriarchal Science
If people would read deMause’s research and take a look at recent research on child abuse, I think they would conclude that we have to change the way we educate children. Recalling my own education in working-class San Diego, California, I remember being told that the highest achievement in life, especially for a boy in that community, was to become a scientist, a doctor, or a scholar. (Engineers and soldiers were very respected, too, but highly educated men such as that were like high priests in the world that I grew up in).
But what is “science”? Vandana Shiva, the Indian scholar, environmental activist, food sovereignty advocate, ecofeminist and anti-globalization activist tells us, “What we call science is a very narrow patriarchal project for a very short period of history.” Good science, we are taught, is that which is “mechanistic and reductionist.” That was the kind of science that people like Bacon and Descartes established: “Domination of nature, exploitation of nature, declaring that nature is dead.” Indeed. That reminds me of what I learned in high school classes in the natural sciences, such as in physics.
Toxic Masculinity
We are taught that lethality = safety. Men above all believe in this sort of logic. That is the whole idea of a gang, i.e., “Don’t f… with me!” That was the kind of language that working-class boys used to ward off threats of abuse from other boys in my neighborhood. Many people in the U.S. surely have experience with the archetypical American tough guy, who thinks he is safe because he has lots of guns and ammunition.
But this is a misconception, isn’t it? You are safe when you have good relationships with your neighbors, when you trust your neighbors and they trust you. When I was a child in a mostly white and Latino working-class area in San Diego, we left our windows open everyday in the summer. The lock on our front door for a few years was broken, so we had trouble locking it, and in fact, we often left it unlocked. (For a while we did not need a key to the front door because an old credit card would work just fine). We never locked the backdoor. In those days we trusted our neighbors. Nobody thought of carrying a weapon. We had good relationships with our neighbors and never worried that someone might invade our home with a gun in their hands (although some of our neighbors did have BB guns or rifles). Just as one must not threaten one’s neighbors, one’s government must not threaten other neighboring countries (as Trump has threatened Canada and Mexico).
Thinking about the latest Epstein files release, I recall the words of the American psychiatrist and researcher Judith Herman:
“In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure no one listens.” (Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror).
One of Herman’s conclusions after many years of research is that we can only prevent trauma, whether that be the trauma of war, or the trauma of sexual violence, through a political movement.
Soon it may even become clear, after the recent release of the Epstein files, that patriarchy and sexual abuse have even been used to control the direction and development of U.S. politics and society.
Take-aways
Number one: Patriarchy is just a bad habit, like child abuse and war. We must break it. When parents are violent with children as they grow up, the children learn violence.
Number two:
“Resistance, at root, must mean more than resistance against war. It is a resistance against all kinds of things that are like war. Because living in modern society, one feels that he cannot easily retain integrity, wholeness. One is robbed permanently of humanness, the capacity of being oneself…” (Quoted in Hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love).
Number three: To end war, we must end child abuse. We must make the trauma of the home a public issue, just as the trauma of war is a public issue. Virginia Woolf wrote, “The public and private worlds are inseparably connected… the tyrannies and servilities of one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.” (Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas).
The post In the Wake of the Epstein Files Release, Remember that Abuse Is Everywhere appeared first on Dissident Voice.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Joseph Essertier.