By Blab Befuddled

Words cannot take us everywhere, nor should they. Before the most sublime truths, we grow reverently still. Confronted with bestiality, we shudder at the unspeakable. But in the Age of Blab, everything must be talked about.” Indeed, modem journalists consider it progress to be able to chat endlessly about depravities our wiser ancestors refused even to name. So we must contend with productions such as John Crewdson’s book on the sexual abuse of children.

An industrious researcher, Crewdson has interviewed dozens of victims and perpetrators of child abuse, has consulted scores of professionals, and has pulled his findings together in a crisp and readable book. Indeed, the breezy clarity of style symptomizes the fatal deficiency of this book. In treating sexual abuse as one more social problem to be solved through public discussion and policy reform, Crewdson hopelessly trivializes his subject.

Something of the horror of sex abuse does break through the journalistic banality in the interviews with victims. As voices of deep suffering, they deserve a hearing. But that hearing ought to come from those who love the speakers and have a long-term commitment to them. To put the sordid past of the sexually abused on public display for the scrutiny of strangers is to foster both exhibitionism and voyeurism. I felt dirty and defiled reading some of Crewdson’s interviews.

Crewdson congratulates himself and others for daring to “speak out” on sex abuse. Yet it is an odd sort of courage to speak candidly and graphically about the most gruesome acts, but to be unable to manage more than a faint whisper when considering the cultural causes of sexual abuse. Perhaps it is too much to ask a metropolitan newsman for The Chicago Tribune to fathom the mystery of iniquity, but Crewdson betrays an absolute blindness to moral issues when he declares that “the sexual abuse of children is the pure product of an emotional disorder.” Even worse is the pronouncement that “the pedophile’s logic is in some sense ultimately correct. Sex with children is wrong because society says it’s wrong. No better reason is required.” A writer willing to reduce fundamental taboos to mere social conventions can hardly be trusted, even if he reaffirms those taboos.

Not surprisingly, the silence that Crewdson does not—and dares not—break is the silence surrounding the pretensions of modernity. These pretensions deserve closer analysis, since sexual abuse appears peculiarly linked to a modernizing culture. Although Crewdson too credulously accepts some inflated numbers, he is probably correct in suggesting that the sexual abuse of children—not just reports of such abuse—has risen in recent decades. To his credit, Crewdson traces sexual abuse to “the disintegration of the nuclear family, an increase in the numbers of working couples and single and divorced mothers, more second and third marriages, [and] the emergence of a permanent underclass.” He acknowledges that day-care centers—distinctively modern institutions—often attract pedophiles as employees. He even takes a harder line than some congressmen against soft-porn magazines. But to probe much deeper into the causes of sexual abuse is to question the very foundations of our world of secularism and individualism—too frightening a task for this writer.

Despite its importance as a cause of maternal employment, divorce, and poverty, Crewdson never challenges feminism. Despite the frequency with which he identifies homosexuals as perpetrators of sexual abuse, Crewdson never confronts the issue of “gay rights.” Despite the many cases of sexual abuse in which government social workers, therapists, and public school teachers were themselves the culprits, Crewdson still acts upon the modern reflex of looking for solutions provided by the state and its natural allies in academia, the media, and the social-therapy industry. As remedies to the problem of the sexual abuse of children, Crewdson endorses federally-funded research, prevention programs in the schools, “long-term psychotherapy” administered by licensed therapists, stricter state screening of day-care workers, and public-service broadcasts on the media. Crewdson may perceive that family decay causes sexual abuse, but he has not yet supposed the unthinkable: that the rise of the welfare state is itself a cause of moral confusion in the family.

Within this statist perspective, the problem of unjust accusations of child abuse receives only scant attention. In citing a study that found that 65 percent of the child abuse cases in the country proved “unfounded,” Crewdson stresses that “unfounded did not mean untrue, but only that the allegations in question could not be proved.” It is odd that in a book filled with interviews with the victims of sexual abuse, the reader finds not a single interview with a family traumatized by state intervention on a false accusation of child abuse. Crewdson does worry that new judicial procedures for dealing with sexual abuse—including videotape testimony and admission of hearsay evidence—are eroding the defendant’s Sixth Amendment right “to be confronted with the witnesses against him” and to cross-examine them. He likewise expresses reservations about proposals for extending the statute of limitations for sexual abuse to longer than that for other serious crimes. After all, “a child who makes an accusation years after the fact may not remember details about who did what to whom.” But the new assumption of “guilty until proven innocent” has so insinuated itself into the author’s mind that he can write approvingly of how “children can be taken from abusive or neglectful parents who have not been charged with any crime” by state officials (emphasis added).

Even further removed from Crewdson’s analysis is any consideration of how the extirpation of religion from public life has helped cause sexual abuse. Since the media have collaborated with government in the secularization of public life, an analysis of this question would require more self-scrutiny than most journalists can manage. Yet recent work by Yale historian John Demos indicates that the place of religion in a society may affect the incidence of child abuse. Although his concern is physical rather than sexual abuse, Demos has suggested that child abuse (as opposed to harsh discipline) is distinctively a modern phenomenon, caused by urbanization, industrial development, unemployment, on-the-job alienation, and the collapse of “the ‘providential’ world view of our forebears—their belief that all things, no matter how surprising and inscrutable, must be attributed to God’s overarching will.” Because he fails to explore such cultural issues, Crewdson gives only an expose wrapped in an editorial.

No doubt Crewdson is right that many children have been “betrayed” by the silence of those who knew of or suspected sexual abuse but said nothing. But a book like this one simply adds to the senseless din making it impossible to reflect seriously upon our crisis of culture.

[By Silence Betrayed, by John Crewdson (Boston: Little, Brown) 267 pp., $17.95]