Preying On Our Fears

From this week's Time magazine, an amusing and perceptive piece on the Foley scandal by media critic, James Poniewozik. He claims that Foley’s sleazy advances to a young Capitol Hill staffer have played into the contemporary obsession with pedophilia, giving the events a resonance far beyond the usual government sex scandals. In Poniewozik’s words “It's the difference between “The G.O.P. leadership messed up in a sex scandal” and “The G.O.P. leadership went soft on one of those monsters who are out there waiting to prey on my kids.””

To make his point Poniewozik points to the saturation of mainstream media with pedophilia horror stories, paying particular attention to the Dateline series 'To Catch a Predator'. On this show (for the benefit of our international readership), men are invited to rendezvous with the teenage girls they believe they have been courting online. Needless to say, the ‘girls’ are in fact decoys, and upon their arrival at the specified location, the men are confronted first by Dateline’s presenter Chris Hansen, then by local law enforcement officials. As Poniewozik puts it, the show is “ratings gold, a jaw-dropping combination of public service and blood sport that lets viewers indulge their voyeurism righteously--like the Colosseum, if the lions were allowed to eat only the really, really evil Christians.”

Poniewozik is sensitive to the fact that the contemporary pedophile obsession has been sustained by our politicians; keen to connect with the voters on what seems like an entirely uncomplicated issue. Indeed, Foley himself was chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children and Poniewozik quotes him in that capacity, ““Now, more than ever…we need to stand together and unite cities, communities and states in the effort to stop the assault on America's children,”” before cynically retorting “An assault on our children: that's a consensus builder if ever there was one.”

It is here that a parallel with the war on terror starts to emerge. Politicians seize on the highly unusual phenomena of predatory pedophilia, and elevate it to the proportions of a crisis. This imbues their actions with a sense of urgency and necessity, establishing the agenda they sorely lack. Yet this can unleash a social force that runs out of their control. As mentioned above, Poniewozik correctly points out that, while Foley’s actions might always have attracted attention, the extreme outrage they have provoked is the result of an obsession with pedophilia that men like Foley himself have propagated.

Also analogous to the war on terror is the way in which the perceived crisis is used to stifle political discussion. Poniewozik notes that “arguing in the name of ‘the children’ is an irresistible device” through which numerous authoritarian measures have been adopted. The worst case scenario (child abuse or terrorist attacks) becomes a moral absolute which trumps any defense of even the most fundamental freedom. To leave the last word to Poniewozik (and Foley):

“In 2002, Foley was furious when the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional to outlaw computer-generated animations—not actual video—that depict underage characters having sex. “The high court sided with pedophiles over children,” Foley blustered. Or it sided with, you know, the First Amendment. Tomato, tomahto.”