The History of Childhood As the History of Child Abuse
by Lloyd deMause
ABSTRACT: The historical record points to childhood being a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. Children have historically been killed, abandoned, terrorized, and sexually abused by their caretakers. Children are routinely used as poison containers by adults, i.e., they are used to "absorb" the bad feelings and anxieties of their caretakers. Rather than the incest taboo being universal, it is incest itself that is universal. This pattern of abuse is at a high level currently in the West, but it is even higher, even routine, the further back in time and the further from the West one looks. The evolution of childhood from incest to love and from abuse to empathy has been slow and uneven but is both unmistakably progressive and is an independent source of sociocultural evolution. This evolution is characterized by six childrearing modes—infanticidal, abandoning, ambivalent, intrusive, socializing, and helping. All social violence is ultimately a consequence of child abuse, and we are likely to continue our periodic sacrificial rituals of war if the infliction of childhood trauma continues. A parenting revolution is needed to stave off the periodic destruction of our resources, both material and human.1
During the past two decades, I have spent much of my scholarly life examining primary historical sources such as diaries, autobiographies, doctor's reports, and other documents that reveal what it must have felt like to have been a child—yesterday and today, in the East and the West, in literate and preliterate cultures.
History Founded Upon Abuse of ChildrenIn several hundred articles and books published by myself and my associates in The Journal of Psychohistory and by our Psychohistory Press, we have documented extensive evidence that the history of childhood has been a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes—and the further away from the West one gets—the more likely children are to have been killed, abandoned, beaten, terrorized, and sexually abused by their caretakers.
Indeed, my conclusion from a lifetime of psychohistorical study of childhood and society is that the history of humanity is founded upon the abuse of children. Just as family therapists today find that child abuse often functions to hold families together as a way of solving their emotional problems, so too the routine assault of children has been society's most effective way of maintaining its collective emotional homeostasis. Most historical families once practiced infanticide, erotic beating, and incest. Most states sacrificed and mutilated their children to relieve the guilt of adults. Even today, we continue to arrange the daily killing, maiming, molestation, and starvation of children through our social, military, and economic systems. I hope to summarize here some of the evidence I have found as to why child abuse has been humanity's most powerful and most successful ritual, why it has been the cause of war and social violence, and why the eradication of child abuse and neglect is the most important social task we face today.
The main psychological mechanism that operates in child assault involves adults using children as what I have termed poison containers—receptacles into which they project disowned parts of their psyches, so they can control these feelings in another body without danger to themselves. In good parenting, the child uses the caretaker as a poison container, much as it earlier used the mother's placenta as a poison container for cleansing its polluted blood. A good mother reacts with calming actions to the cries of a baby and helps it "detoxify" its dangerous emotions. But when an immature mother's baby cries, she cannot stand the screaming; she strikes out at the child. As one battering mother put it, "I have never felt loved all my life. When the baby was born, I thought he would love me. When he cried, it meant he didn't love me. So I hit him."* Rather than the child being able to use the mother to detoxify its fears and anger, the mother instead injects her bad feelings into the child and uses him to cleanse her of her depression and anger. Children Used As Poison Containers
Consider a typical infanticidal and incestuous preliterate culture, the Bimin-Kuskusmin of New Guinea. As is typical in preliterate cultures, the mothers sleep naked against their children until they are about six years old, and they regularly masturbate them "to make their penises grow." One three-year-old boy describes how whenever his mother was sad or angry she masturbated him so roughly that it hurt him, and he struggled to get away, complaining of a pain in his penis. "It hurts inside," he told the ethnologist. "It goes 'koong, koong, koong' inside. I think it bleeds in there; I don't like to touch it anymore. It hurts when I pee...." Sometimes, after his mother hurts him while masturbating him, he wounds himself in the thigh and abdomen with a sharp stick and draws blood, looking at his penis and saying, "Now it hurts here, outside, not in penis. Look, blood. Feels good...." Although he is only three years old, he understands quite well that he is being used as a poison container by his mother to relieve her depression. He says, "Mother twist penis, tight.... Hurt inside.... Mother angry, hurt Buuktiin's penis. Mother sad, hurt Buuktiin's penis.... Mother not like Buuktiin's penis, want to cut off...."*
In my study "The Universality of Incest," I concluded that rather than the incest taboo being universal, as is commonly held, it is incest itself—direct and indirect—that is universal for most children in most cultures in most times. A childhood more or less free from adult sexual abuse is in fact a rather late historical achievement, limited to a few fortunate children in a few modern nations, mainly in the West. To give you some idea of the extensive evidence I have gathered for such an unlikely conclusion, I begin by summarizing the statistical evidence that exists for the sexual abuse of children around the world today. Incest Is Universal
High Incidence in the West
In America, the most accurate scientific studies, based on lengthy interviews, report that 30 percent of men and 40 percent of women remember having been sexually molested during childhood—defining molestation as actual genital contact, not just exposure. About half of these are directly incestuous, with the immediate family; the other half occurred with neighbors, but with the complicity of caretakers in at least 80 percent of the cases. These experiences of seduction are not just pieced together from fragmentary memories but are remembered in detail. They usually occurred over an extended period of time. They have been confirmed by follow-up reliability studies in 83 percent of the cases. All things considered, they are unlikely to have been fantasies. Furthermore, the seductions occurred at much earlier ages than had been previously assumed, with 81 percent occurring before puberty and an astonishing 42 percent under age 7.As high as these molestation rates seem, however, they represent only a portion of the true rates. Those interviewed did not include populations that have been shown to have extremely high rates—i.e., criminals, prostitutes, juveniles in shelters, psychotics, and so on. But more importantly, only conscious memories were counted, and the earliest seductions of children are almost never remembered except during psychotherapy. Adjusting for these additional factors, I concluded that the real sexual abuse rate for America is 60 percent for girls and 45 percent for boys, with about half that being directly incestuous.
Other Western nations have made fewer careful studies. A recent Canadian study by Gallup of two-thousand adults has produced incidence rates almost exactly the same as those found in the United States. Latin American family sexual activity—particularly, widespread pederasty as part of macho sexuality—is considered even more widespread. In England, a recent BBC "ChildWatch" program asked its female listeners—a large though admittedly biased sample—if they remembered sexual molestation. Yet of the 2,530 replies analyzed, 83 percent remembered someone touching their genitals and 62 percent recalled actual intercourse. In Germany, the Institut fuer Kinheit recently concluded a survey asking Berlin schoolchildren about their sexual experiences. Eighty percent reported having been molested.
Routine Molestation Outside the West
Outside the West, the sexual molestation of children is a routine practice in most families. Childhood in India begins, according to observers, with the child being regularly masturbated by the mother; the girl "to make her sleep well," the boy "to make him manly." The child sleeps in the family bed. He or she witnesses and most likely takes part in sexual intercourse between the parents. The child is often "borrowed" to sleep with other members of the extended household, leading to the Indian proverb that "For a girl to be a virgin at ten years old, she must have neither brothers nor cousin nor father." Childhood is so eroticized that, as one Western observer put it, "The little Hindu girls are deflowered by the little boys with whom they play, and repeat together the erotic lessons which their parents have unwittingly taught them on account of the general promiscuity of family life throughout India. In all the little girls of less than ten years of age the complete hymen is wanting.... Incest is often the rule rather than the exception."Of course, child marriage was also a long-standing Indian practice. When laws were passed in 1929 trying to outlaw it, the government was overwhelmed by men insisting that early marriage was an absolute necessity, since children were naturally very sexual and have to be married if they are to be restrained from seducing adults. "Cupid overtakes the hearts of girls...at an early age," they said. "A girl's desire for sexual intercourse is eight times greater than that of males." Indian mothers as well often supported early marriage, frankly admitting it was necessary in order to protect their little girls against rape. They claimed, "they were afraid to leave their daughters at home, even for one afternoon, without a mother's eye and accessible to the men of the family."
Childhood in China has historically had the same institutionalized rape rituals as in India, including the pederasty of boys, child concubinage, the castration of boys to be used sexually as eunuchs, marriage of young girls to a number of brothers, widespread boy and girl prostitution, and the regular sexual use of child servants and slaves. So prevalent was the rape of little girls that Western doctors found that, as in India, few girls entering puberty had intact hymens. Even the universal practice of foot binding was for sexual purposes. A girl underwent extremely painful crushing of the bones of her feet for years solely in order that men could make love to her big toe as a fetish, a penis-substitute.
Childhood in contemporary Japan—although somewhat more Western than that of other Eastern nations—still includes masturbation by mothers "to put them to sleep." Parents usually have intercourse with the children in bed with them; and "co-sleeping," with parents physically embracing the child, often continues until the child is ten or fifteen. One recent Japanese study found daughters sleeping with their fathers over 20 percent of the time after age 16. Recent sex surveys report memories of sexual abuse even higher than comparable American studies. "Hot lines" of sexual abuse report mother-son incest in almost a third of the calls, the mother saying to her teenage son, "It's not good to do it alone. Your IQ becomes lower. I will help you," or "You cannot study if you cannot have sex. You may use my body," or "I don't want you to get into trouble with a girl. Have sex with me instead."
The sexual use of children in the Near East is as widespread as in the Far East. All the institutionalized forms of pedophilia that were customary in the Far East are documented extensively for the Near East as well. The list includes child marriage, child concubinage, temple prostitution of both boys and girls, parent-child marriage (among the Zoroastrians), sibling marriage (quite common among Egyptians), sex slavery, ritualized pederasty, and child prostitution. Masturbation in infancy is said to be necessary "to increase the size" of the penis, and older siblings are reported to play with the genitals of babies for hours at a time. Mutual masturbation, fellatio, and anal intercourse are also said to be common among children, particularly with the older boys using younger children as sex objects. The nude public baths (hammam) are particularly eroticized. They are notorious as a place of homosexual acts, both male and female, where boys attend with their mothers and sisters until puberty. Girls, of course, are used incestuously even more often than boys, since females are valued so little. One report found 80 percent of Near Eastern women surveyed recalled having been forced into fellatio between the ages of 3 and 6 by older brothers, cousins, uncles, and teachers. The girls rarely complained, since "if there is any punishment to be meted out, it will always end up by being inflicted on her."
Arab women, of course, know that their spouses are pedophiles and prefer having sex with children to having sex with them. Their retribution comes as follows: When the girl is about six years old, the women of the house grab her, pull her thighs apart, and cut off her clitoris and often also her labia with a razor. This usually ends the girl's ability to feel sexual pleasure forever. One Egyptian woman relates her memory of how it happened to her. After being used sexually by the men in her family during her early childhood, she says,
I was six years old that night when I lay in my bed, warm and peaceful.... I felt something move under the blankets, something like a huge hand...another hand was clapped over my mouth to prevent me from screaming.A recent survey of Egyptian girls and women showed 97 percent of uneducated families and 66 percent of educated families still practiced clitoridectomy. Nor is the practice decreasing. UN reports estimate that more than 74 million females have been mutilated, with "more female children mutilated today than throughout history."They carried me to the bathroom.... I remember...a rasping metallic sound which reminded me of the butcher when he used to sharpen his knife.... My blood was frozen in my veins...my thighs had been pulled wide apart.... I felt that the rasping knife or blade was heading straight down towards my throat. Then suddenly the sharp metallic edge seemed to drop between my thighs and there cut off a piece of flesh from my body.
I screamed with pain despite the tight hand held over my mouth, for the pain was not just a pain, it was like a searing flame that went through my whole body. After a few moments, I saw a red pool of blood around my hips.
I did not know what they had cut off from my body, and did not try to find out. I just wept, and called out to my mother for help. But the worst shock of all was when I looked around and found her standing by my side. Yes, it was her, I could not be mistaken, in flesh and blood, right in the midst of these strangers, talking to them and smiling at them.
Like all sexual mutilations, clitoridectomy is, I believe, an act of incest. If it is incest when a father rapes a daughter, it is also incest when parents assault their children by cutting off, sewing up, burning, flaying, or gashing their genitals. In all these cases, the child is being used for the sadistic sexual pleasure of the parent. Therefore, the practice of sexually mutilating children's genitals—one of the most widespread rituals in the world—by itself makes incest a near-universal trait.
Historically, the use of children as poison containers to prevent adults from feeling overwhelmed by their anxieties has also been universal. My work on the history of childhood regularly encounters children routinely used to "absorb" the bad feelings of their caretakers. Newborn infants, in particular, were perfect poison containers because they were so "unpolluted." The newborn then became so full of the parents' projections that it had to be tied up—tightly swaddled in bandages for up to a year or more—to prevent it from "tearing its ears off, scratching its eyes out, breaking its legs, or touching its genitals." Sacrificing Children to Appease the Gods
Children were particularly useful in early societies when adults felt anxious about recent or impending success. Success stirs up superego retaliation, and the sacrifice of children to appease the gods—that is, the punitive parents—was an extremely widespread guilt-reducing device. Most early states practiced child sacrifice. Typical was Carthage, where a large cemetery, called The Tophet, has been discovered, filled with over twenty-thousand urns, deposited there between four hundred and two hundred BC. The urns contained bones of children sacrificed by their parents. Often the parents would make a vow to kill their next child if the gods would grant them a favor—for instance, allowing their shipment of goods to arrive safely in a foreign port. Some urns contained the bones of stillborn babies along with the bones of two-year-olds, indicating that if the promised child were not born alive, an older child had also to be killed to satisfy the promise. The sacrifice was accompanied by music, wild dancing, and riotous orgy, and probably also included the ritual rape of virgin girls, as it was with the Incans. Plutarch told how the priests would "cut their throats as if they were so many lambs or young birds; meanwhile the mother stood by without a tear or moan [while] the whole area before the statue was filled with a loud noise of flutes and drums...."
Whenever new ventures were begun, children would be sacrificed. When a new building or bridge was built, a child would be buried within it as a "foundation sacrifice." Children who today play "London Bridges Falling Down" repeat the catching of the sacrificial child in their game. Whatever one's physical ills, a child could be used to "absorb" the poison that was responsible for the disease. When one wanted to be cured of leprosy, one was supposed to kill a child and wash one's body in its blood. When one wanted to find out if a house whose previous occupants had died of plague was still infected or not, one rented some children to live in it for several weeks to see if they died—rather like the use of canaries in mines to detect poisonous gas. When one was impotent, depressed, or had venereal disease, doctors prescribed having intercourse with a child. As late as the end of the nineteenth century, men who were brought into Old Bailey for having raped young girls were let go because "they believed that they were curing themselves of venereal disease." Raping virgins was particularly effective for impotence and depression. As one medical book put it, "Breaking a maiden's seal is one of the best antidotes for one's ills. Cudgeling her unceasingly, until she swoons away, is a mighty remedy for man's depression. It cures all impotence." And, of course, whenever a parent had a disease, they always had their children handy to absorb its poison. Thus British doctors in the nineteenth century, when visiting men who had venereal disease, regularly found that their children also had the same disease—on their mouths, anuses, or genitals.
No matter what anxieties one had, one had children always at hand to use as poison containers. The evolution of childhood from incest to love and from abuse to empathy has been a slow, uneven path; but it is one whose progressive direction is, I think, unmistakable. This evolution of parent-child relations is an independent source of historical change, lying in the ability of successive generations of parents to live through their own childhood traumas a second time and work through their anxieties in a slightly better manner this second time around. It is in this sense that I say that history is like psychotherapy, which also heals through revisiting one's childhood traumas and reworking earlier anxieties. If the parent—the mother, for most of history—is given even the most minimal support by society, this evolution of childrearing progresses, new variations in historical personality are formed, and history begins to move in new, more innovative directions. The Evolution of Childhood
The crucial relationship in this evolution is the mother-daughter relationship. If little girls are treated particularly badly, they grow up to be mothers who cannot rework their traumas, and history is frozen. For instance, although China was ahead of the West in most ways during the pre-Christian era, it became "frozen" and fell far behind the West in evolutionary social change after it adopted the practice of footbinding girls. Similarly, the cliterodectomy of girls in Moslem societies has inhibited their social development for centuries, since it likewise put a brake on the ability of mothers to make progress in caring for their children.
Generational Pressure for Change
The "generational pressure" for psychological change is not only an independent historical force—originating in inborn adult-child striving for relationship—it occurs independent of social and technological change and can be found even in periods of economic stagnation. My psychogenic theory of history posits an evolutionary historical tendency to move from need to love and from symbiosis to individuation, with new variations of historical personalities selected by local environmental conditions. This theory suggests that a society's childrearing practices are not just one item in a list of cultural traits, but—because all other traits must be passed down from generation to generation through the narrow funnel of childhood—actually makes childrearing the very basis for the transmission and development of all other cultural traits, placing definite limits on what can be achieved in the material spheres of history. Regardless of the changes in the environment, it is only when real progress in childrearing occurs that societies themselves begin to progress and to move in unpredictable new directions that are more adaptive.
Six Stages in Childrearing
The stages in the evolution of childhood have been traced by psychohistorians. I will summarize the six childrearing modes I have suggested are common to all groups that have traversed the entire path of evolution so far. These modes are, in fact, quite independent of technological development—there are loving families in some preliterate groups as well as among some sections of economically developed nations. However, they are achieved by only a portion of each society during the period I assign for their first appearance. Indeed, our own nations today contain parents at each of the six levels of childrearing. But the overall evolutionary direction of parent-child relations is evident in the historical record, regardless of which labels one chooses to put on its stages.
Infanticidal Mode
By the time historical records begin, the sexual use of children is well documented. The Greek and Roman child lived his or her earliest years in an atmosphere of sexual abuse. Girls were commonly raped, as reflected in the many comedies that have scenes that are supposed to be funny of little girls being raped. Both Greek and Roman doctors report that female children rarely have hymens—just like the Indian and Chinese girls I mentioned earlier. In order to find out if your young wife was really a virgin (girls usually married before puberty to older men), one had to use mystical religious tests for virginity, since intact hymens were so rare.
The earliest childrearing mode I have called infanticidal, to highlight the constant presence of infanticidal wishes in the parent. Actual infanticide is, of course, common in most preliterate cultures even today, and evidence remains of widespread infanticide among all historical records. Even Pleistocene skeletons show evidence of differential female infanticide by the presence of more boy skeletons than girl, indicating far more girls were killed at birth than boys. By historical times, census figures from antiquity show boy/girl ratios as high as four hundred boys to one hundred girls. This is an astonishing but believable figure since, as Poseidippos said, "even a rich man always exposes a daughter." I have estimated that about half of all children born in antiquity were killed by their caretakers, declining to about a third in medieval times and dropping to under one percent only by the eighteenth century. Since these skewed sex ratios do not vary by economic class—the rich did away with their children at the same rates as the poor—the evidence suggests that parents were coping with the emotional anxieties of childrearing in doing this rather than those of economic conditions, as is usually claimed.Boys, too, were regularly handed over by their parents to neighboring men to be molested. Plutarch has a long essay on what kind of person a father should give his son to for buggering. The common notion that this occurred only at "adolescence" is quite mistaken. It began around age seven, continued for several years, and reputedly ended by puberty, when a boy's facial and pubic hairs began to appear. In actuality it ended at about age 21—very late, since children suffered from "psychological retardation" from being so severely abused. Child brothels, rent-a-boy services, and sex slavery flourished in every city in antiquity. Children were so subject to sexual use by the men around them that schools were by law prohibited from staying open past sundown so that their pedagogues—slaves who were assigned to protect the children against random sexual attack—could try to see that their teachers did not assault the students. Petronius, especially, loved depicting adults feeling the "immature little tool" of boys. Tiberius was said by Seutonius to have "taught children of the most tender years, whom he called his 'little fishes,' to play between his legs while he was in his bath. Those which had not yet been weaned, but were strong and hearty, he set at fellatio...."
That the sexual use of children was traumatic cannot be doubted. It even affected the physical development of children. Like so many victims of severe abuse and neglect, children in antiquity suffered from emotional dwarfism. Even the children of rich parents, who were better nourished than children today, were much shorter and did not enter puberty until several years later than now.
This understanding of the prevalence of childhood abuse and molestation makes sense of some of the grander social themes we have observed historically. Locating the origin of Christian anti-sexual attitudes in childhood sexual assault is more credible than attributing it to a small group of religious fanatics who inexplicably appeared on the historical stage and then faded out of fashion after nearly two millennia. So, too, the history of Western social violence and continuous warfare can be traced to the violence with which children were treated.
Abandoning Mode
Despite the advance that abandoning rather than killing children represents, most of the other childrearing practices of antiquity continued alongside it. The sexual use of boys—even in monasteries—continuing to be widespread and even accepted by society. By the time boys were in their teens, they were so addicted to violent sex that they formed adolescent raping gangs that grabbed and raped any girls or young women they could find unprotected. This occurred to such an extent that the majority of women in some cities would be raped by these gangs at some time in their lives. Parents even gave their young girls over to the local priests for sexual use.
Although Christianity attempted to reduce the outright killing of the newborn, thus moving beyond the infanticidal mode, it substituted for it the abandonment of children. Whether by child sale or by sending to wet nurse, monastery, nunnery, foster family, or to other homes as servants, children were frequently rejected and disposed of elsewhere—which is why I labeled this second stage the abandoning mode.The erotic beating of children became, if anything, worse, as the anxieties of living with a child who is so full of one's projections became evident. Children were experienced as always about to turn into changelings—those who, as St. Augustine put it, "suffer from a demon." However, what this undoubtedly means is just that they cry too much. For in the Malleus Maleficarum it says that one recognizes changelings because they "always howl most piteously"; likewise Luther says they "are more obnoxious than ten children with their crapping, eating, and screaming."
That children with devils in them had to be beaten goes without saying. A panoply of beating instruments existed for that purpose—from cat-o-nine tails and whips to shovels, canes, iron rods, bundles of sticks, the discipline (a whip made of small chains), the goad (shaped like a cobbler's knife, used to prick the child on the head or hands), and special school instruments like the flapper, which had a pear-shaped end and a round hole to raise blisters. The beatings described in the sources were almost always severe, involved bruising and bloodying of the body, began in infancy, were usually erotically tinged by being inflicted on bare parts of the body near the genitals, and were a regular part of the child's daily life. Century after century of battered children grew up to batter their own children in turn.
Public protest was rare. Even humanists and teachers who had a reputation for gentleness approved of the severe beating of children. Those who attempted reform did so only to prevent death. As a thirteenth-century law said, "If one beats a child until it bleeds, then it will remember, but if one beats it to death, the law applies." As Batholomew Batty put it, parents must "keep the golden mean," which is to say they should not "strike and buffet their children about the face and head, and to lace upon them like malt sacks with cudgels, staves, fork or fire shovel," for then they might die of the blows. The correct way, he said, was to "Hit him upon the sides...with the rod, he shall not die thereof."
Ambivalent Mode
These childhood reforms immediately preceded—and I believe pro-duced—the humanistic, religious, and political reforms we associate with the Renaissance and Reformation. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Western Europe represent the great watershed of psychogenic change. The much-improved childrearing allowed the schizoid and borderline personalities of antiquity and medieval times—who regularly heard voices and hallucinated visions—to move on to the more integrated and less split modern neurotic personality more familiar to recent times. This sixteenth-century watershed is equivalent to the movement from the Kleinian paranoid-schizoid position to the depressive position. Depression as a characteristic of this time is witnessed by both the prevalence of Renaissance melancholy (as in Hamlet's depressive guilt) and the ability of Protestants to end the good breast/ bad breast splitting of Mary/Eve and begin to internalize the projective panoply of Catholic saints and devils.
By the thirteenth century in the West, abandonment via oblation—i.e., the giving of young children to monasteries for sexual and other uses—was ended. At the same time, the first disapproval of pedophilia appeared; the first childrearing tracts were published; and some advanced parents began to practice what I have termed the ambivalent mode of childrearing. From this viewpoint, the child is not born completely evil but is seen as being still full of enough dangerous projections so that the parent, whose task it is to mold it, must beat it into shape like clay. Church moralists first began to warn against sexual molestation of children by parents, nurses, and neighbors. The length of time of swaddling was reduced from a year or more to only a few months. Pediatrics and educational philosophy were born. Parents of means began suggesting that perhaps rather than sending their infants out to be wet nursed in some peasant village—and thereby condemning over half of them to early death—the mother might herself nurse her infant. According to some mothers who tried nursing their own babies, the infant even responds to this care by giving love back to the nursing mother, stroking her breast and face and cooing. And if the father, as usually happens, complains that his wife's breast belongs to him not the baby, it was suggested now that he should be allowed to hold the baby too!
Intrusive Mode
Similar uses of punishment can be seen in relation to masturbation and were championed by child-training literature since Tissot. Prior to this, children were masturbated by adults and even licked as though they were substitute breasts. Little Louis XIII, in 1603, was described by his pediatrician as having his penis and breasts kissed and played with by everyone in the court, and his parents would regularly make him part of sexual intercourse in the royal bed. But childrearing reformers beginning in the eighteenth century began to try to bring this sexual abuse under control; only now it was the child who was punished for touching its own genitals, under threat of circumcision, clitoridectomy, infibulation, and various cages and other genital restraint devices.
By the seventeenth century and particularly in England, America, and France, the intrusive mode of childrearing began. In this mode the child was seen as less full of dangerous projections. Thus it could be unswaddled and not given regular enemas (which had been until then given regularly from birth to remove the bad contents felt to be inside the infant); it could be toilet trained early rather than late and hit but not regularly whipped; and it could be punished for masturbation rather than being masturbated by adults. It was becoming no longer acceptable for men to go about with a mistress on one arm and a catamite on the other. Intrusive parenting, in essence, began to substitute psychological pressure for physical abuse. Rather than whipping the child to prevent it from sin, it was shut up in the dark closet for hours or left without food in a room for days. One mother shut her three-year-old boy up in a drawer. Another had a house she described as "a sort of little Bastille, in every closet of which was to be found a culprit—some were sobbing and repeating verbs, others eating their bread and water...." Another five-year-old French boy, in looking at a new apartment with his mother, told her, "Oh no, mama...it's impossible; there's no dark closet! Where could you put me when I'm naughty."These terrorizing warnings and surgical interventions only began to die out at the end of the nineteenth century, after two hundred years of brutal and totally unnecessary assault on children's psyches for touching themselves. Even so, progress was so uneven that one British journalist could write in 1924 that "cases of incest are terribly common in all classes. [Usually] the criminal...goes unpunished.... Two men coming out from [an incest] trial were overheard saying to a woman who deplored there had been no conviction, 'What nonsense! Men should not be punished for a thing like that. It doesn't harm the child.'"
Socializing Mode
By the nineteenth century the socializing mode of childrearing began. Some parents no longer needed to terrorize, beat, and sexually seduce their children; and more gentle psychological means began to be used to "socialize" them. The "socializing" mode is still the main model of upbringing in Western nations. The mother is featured as trainer and the father as provider and protector; the child is seen as slowly being made to conform to the parents' model of goodness. Many of the abusive practices now move from the home to elsewhere in society. While Elizabeth I was sexually seduced as a girl by her caretakers and Louis XV had Madame du Barry procure little girls for the King to rape in his royal bedroom, by the nineteenth century parents would less often commit incest themselves. Instead they were content to send their children to schools where they were erotically whipped on the bare buttocks and usually buggered by the older boys and masters.Helping Mode
In the latest childrearing mode—which I have termed the helping mode—both parents try to help their children reach their own goals at each stage of their lives rather than to socialize them into adult goals. What kind of society might be envisioned by children brought up under this mode is yet to be seen. I suspect it will be far less class-centered and more empathic of others than is the socializing-mode modern world with which we are familiar. From watching the anti-war activities of my children and their friends, who have been brought up by other helping-mode parents, it is also becoming evident that helping-mode children grow up to be incapable of creating wars.For war, I have found, is only understandable as a perverse sacrificial ritual in which young men are sent by their parents to be ripped apart and killed as representatives of the independence-seeking parts of themselves. War, I believe, is a defense against annihilation anxiety, caused by early failures in the individuation process. This is evident from my study of the shared national fantasies in the media occurring prior to wars. What one regularly finds is that images on magazine covers and in political cartoons in the months prior to wars are dominated by images of dangerous mommies threatening to engulf and castrate men. These deeply regressed group-fantasies eventually produce so much anxiety that a sacrifice of innocent victims is deemed necessary, and a warring partner—who also needs a sacrifice—is located. Periodic Sacrificial Ritual of War
So regular are these group-fantasies in the media that we were able to predict the Persian Gulf War months before Iraq invaded Kuwait by monitoring the American media; although, of course, the exact location of the war was not predictable. Fantasies of dangerous mommies and of children being sacrificed were both floated in the American press for nearly a year before Hussein's invasion could provide a location for the sacrifice—a difficult choice, after all, since the Evil Empire had just disappeared and an inconvenient period of peace had broken out around the world.
That periodic sacrifices are in fact lawful is suggested by the regularity with which they occur. Nearly every state produced a major war on the average of about every 25 years throughout the past two millennia. In between wars, periodic economic sacrifices serve to relieve our guilt for too much prosperity and to cleanse us of our dangerous economic and social progress. In individuals, all progress toward individuation and success produces fears of leaving mommy, regressions to early maternal insufficiencies, wishes for maternal re-engulfment, and fears of thereby losing one's self. In nations, the same thing occurs after periods of rapid change and prosperity, and is defended against by the ritual of self-sacrifice of war.
That all social violence—whether by war, revolution, or economic exploitation—is ultimately a consequence of child abuse should not surprise us. The propensity to reinflict childhood trauma upon others as an adult in socially-approved violence is actually far more able to explain and predict the actual outbreak of wars than are the economic motivations that are usually looked into for such understanding. We are likely to continue to undergo our periodic sacrificial rituals of war if the infliction of childhood trauma continues.
The human race is now quite able technologically to satisfy its needs if we can live together without violence toward each other. But unless we employ our social resources toward consciously assisting the evolution of childrearing, we will be doomed to the periodic destruction of our resources, both material and human. As Selma Freiberg told us, "Trauma demands repetition." I would add, "repetition through social action." We cannot be content only to continue doing endless repair work on damaged adults, with our therapies, our jails, and our political movements. Our task now in addition must be to create an entirely new profession of "child helpers," who can reach out to every new child born on earth and help its parents give it love and independence. A Parenting Revolution Needed
This new child-helping profession is already beginning to form. I think of Child Watch in England and Child Assault Prevention groups in the US that teach children in their schools how to protect themselves against assault. I think of a few hospitals in New York with outreach programs visiting each of the homes in their areas and teaching parents how to parent. I think of the Healthy Families America Initiative, which is setting up home visiting services for new parents in several states. I think of a group of Community Parenting Centers in Colorado, who are trying to contact every new parent of a child born in their community with child-care information and help, and which has a volunteer child-care center with support groups, family therapy referrals, and talks on child development, on how to set limits, on how not to hit children, and so on. In fact, members of The Institute of Psychohistory and I have submitted a proposal to the Clinton administration for nationwide community parenting centers that would operate across the nation, mostly with volunteers and interns from local schools and colleges.
To those who object to the cost of helping parents, we can only reply: can we afford not to teach parenting? To what more important task can we devote our resources? Do we really want to have armies and jails forever? How better can we achieve meaningful political and social revolution than by first achieving a parenting revolution? If war, social violence, class domination, and economic destruction of wealth are really revenge rituals for childhood trauma, how else can we remove the source of these rituals? How else end child abuse and neglect? How else achieve a world of love and laughter of which we are truly capable?
It appears we have our work cut out for us.
This article is based upon primary source material fully referenced in the 594 footnotes contained in the following sources:
Note: Click on book title or its cover icon for more info on book or reference, including how to purchase.Reference Note
deMause, Lloyd. (1982). Foundations of Psychohistory. New York: Creative Roots.
deMause, Lloyd. (1988). On writing childhood history. The Journal of Psychohistory, 16, 135-171.
deMause, Lloyd. (1991). The universality of incest. The Journal of Psychohistory, 19, 123-164.
Other books by Lloyd deMause include:
The History of Childhood (The Master Work)
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LLOYD DEMAUSE is Director of The Institute of Psychohistory, Editor of The Journal of Psychohistory, President of the International Psychohistorical Association, and author of The History of Childhood, Foundations of Psychohistory, and Reagan's America. He has established a 100-plus page Psychohistory Website at www.psychohistory.com. It has articles from his journal, his new book Childhood and History, as he writes it chapter by chapter, and other material of scholarly interest. Lloyd deMause can be e-mailed at psychhst@tiac.net Biographical Note
1. This article was originally published in Aesthema: The Journal of the International Primal Association, #11, July 1994, pp. 48-62. [return to text]
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