Celebrity, Pedophilia, and Ideology in American Culture By Jason ...

made gendered judgments about the credibility of sources, with accused parents seven times more likely to be quoted in newspapers than the person recalling their abuse. For Kitzinger, in the early 1990s there was a form of “child abuse fatigue,” with journalists becoming bored with actual child sexual abuse stories, particularly numerous celebrities saying they had been abused. The media now sought another slant on this contentious topic, hence the rapid growth in the reporting of false memory. Reports in the media in 1994 spoke of a “shift in the collective psyche” and a “child abuse industry,” “in an age of matriarchal terror squads” hell-bent on accusing everyone of being a sex offender.⁵² Kitzinger rightly attacked the gendered ideology of the media, but the child sexual abuse “industry” has not disappeared, with therapists still wrongly diagnosing child sexual abuse. People are still paranoid about their interaction with children in case of false allegations, frequently avoiding helping children, even if it is blatantly clear they need it, for fear of being accused of molestation.

Kincaid impressively teased out the legal and philosophical paradoxes: Because the child is supposed to be completely honest, this means the child is incapable of being honest because truth is not something that is occurring consciously. There can be no choice in this, no selection of right or wrong, truth or falsehood. The child is seen as an automaton, functioning like a machine. This links the child to the pedophile, in that the pedophile is frequently represented at one with the machine, possessing supernatural powers beyond mere mortals. “The prosecution’s child cannot write, cannot read; the child of molestation is functionally and conveniently illiterate, not because the pedophile wants it that way but because we do.”⁵³ The child’s psyche is supposed to exist independent of the text (all ideology), and this psyche then for many becomes the text, the Truth. Despite the astonishingly bizarre content of confessions of abuse, it was initially believed that children do not lie about abuse. This reflects the need to have purity, in terms of not only a physical purity, but also a mental one, uncorrupted by any text. The child is worshipped because he/she is supposed to be outside ideology, outside the realms of influence, as if the individual is from another planet.