David QuinnThe old sexual norms could be cruel but so can the new ones, writes David Quinn
One of the books I’m currently reading is called In the Family Way: Illegitimacy between the Great War and the Swinging Sixties, by Jane Robinson. The title is self-explanatory. It looks mainly at how illegitimate children and their mothers were dealt with in Britain in the period in question, but also has a look at Ireland.
To cut a long story short, for the most part, these children and their mothers were dealt with cruelly, and sometimes extremely so.
It’s interesting, by the way, to read in detail how organisations like Barnardos and the Salvation Army did their best (according to their own lights) to ensure that the children and their mothers were dealt with less harshly than many in society wanted.
In a column for The Sunday Independent recently, Gene Kerrigan condemned what he called ‘the Marriage Police’ and how liberal campaigners saved us from them.
There is not the slightest doubt that the norms around marriage were sometimes very harshly enforced, and not just here, but in many other countries also.
We were determined to ensure that children were only born within marriage and woe betide the person who broke that rule, and woe betide their children. It was believed that the only way to keep rates of illegitimacy down was to make an example both of the mothers and their offspring. It worked insofar as only a small minority of children were born out of wedlock until comparatively recent times, but at what a cost.
Punitive attitudes
So liberal campaigners did, indeed, rescue women and children from those harsh and punitive attitudes.
However, to think that the only two alternatives we face are between the harsh attitudes of the past and the present one that seems to say marriage hardly matters at all is false and misleading. We have to find a way of saying marriage matters and that it benefits children to be raised by their own mothers and fathers without returning to the former cruelty.
We can concede that the norms we created around marriage in the past were extreme, but we also need to be honest about the failing of liberal morality when applied to marriage, sex and human relationships. If traditionalism can lead to the harsh enforcement of certain norms, the liberal attachment to notions of ‘autonomy’ and ‘freedom’ can lead to a sort of normlessness, a world without any rules to speak of, that also ill serves people.
There is, of course, one great liberal rule that is applied to sex and human relationships and it is this; anything goes between consenting adults. But a report came out in England a couple of weeks ago that shows where this can lead.
The report concerns the city of Oxford. It details how a gang was allowed to sexually exploit and abuse 300 girls, some as young as 12.
This was happening right under the noses of social workers, police, doctors and nurses. How can this have happened?
The report explains that there was a reluctance to condemn underage sex as “wrong”. It says there was a “well-meaning” desire to be “non-judgmental”.
As The Daily Telegraph reports: “It criticised a widespread belief that the children’s ‘self-determining choice’ should be respected in sexual matters, pointing specifically to the way contraception is readily distributed to girls from a young age.”
It said that there is a “professional tolerance” to underage sexual activity in a culture “where children are sexualised at an ever younger age”.
In other words, it is precisely the liberal commitment to the notion of freedom that helped to land these girls in such trouble at the hands of older men.
Then there is the fact that the surrounding culture has become so heavily sexualised that people are having sex for the first time at younger and younger ages and in response to this school nurses are handing out contraception to young people who are often well below the age of consent.
This then blurs the whole notion of an age of consent, and who can and cannot be considered an “adult” for sexual purposes.
And so we have a complete mess that leaves younger people wide open to sexual exploitation at the hands of older adults with social workers, police and doctors so determined to be “open-minded” and “tolerant” that they turn a blind eye.
In response the British government has announced that children as young as 11 will have to be taught the difference between rape and consensual sex because the line between the two is sometimes so blurred, especially when drink is involved.
This isn’t confined to children either. American universities, for example, are going beyond ‘no means no’ to advocating that unless there is explicit consent to sex, any sex that occurs can be considered rape. The British Director of Public Prosecutions, Alison Saunders, has said something similar recently.
What we are seeing is the strain that even the minimalist sexual morality embodied in ‘anything goes between consent adults’ is coming under when the notions of who is an ‘adult’ and what is ‘consent’ are becoming so blurred.
The norms that existed around sexual morality in the past were cruelly enforced but the new sexual morality is producing huge problems of its own from very high levels of family breakdown, to high levels of abortion, to the sort of sexual exploitation of children found in Oxford, and a few months ago, in Rochdale.
It should be clear to any sensible person that what we need is a balance between the old norms that took marriage seriously and the new norms (such as they are) that has placed freedom above any other value.