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The New MoralityAwake!—1982 | June 22
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Youths are imitative, and they note the examples or role models that adults are providing. What adults do has far more impact than what they say. And that impact is frightening! In the United States one out of every five children has had sexual intercourse by age fourteen. Half have had it before they finish high school. Three out of ten sexually active girls become pregnant. In the United States unwed teenage mothers have 600,000 babies annually, and 9,000 of them are born to girls eleven and under. Added to all of this are unreported pregnancies and those terminated by abortions. A million and a half runaways annually flee their homes to live on the streets, and thousands end up as male or female prostitutes controlled by pimps.
“A basic tenet of modern developmental psychology,” Dr. Sam Janus says in his book The Death of Innocence, “always has been the belief that between infancy and adolescence, sexuality goes underground—becomes ‘latent’—in the interests of psychic and physical growth.” He then observes that this latency period “is a thing of the past, and that our children are going straight from babyhood to puberty as fully sexual beings, with no intermission. The eroticization of children is becoming a fact of life in modern society.”
Janus later elaborates on this loss of childhood: “Gone are the halcyon days when little boys had time to join boys’ clubs, build clubhouses, and play ball. Some, of course, still do but the numbers decline. The same goes for little girls, who once played with dolls and hoped some day their knights in shining armor would come along, marry them, and live happily ever after with them.”
More and more children are being robbed of these years needed for physical, intellectual and emotional growth. Television commercials push kiddie cosmetics—lip gloss, nail polish, powders, perfumes and other like products for girls three to fourteen years of age. Ads for designer jeans show ten-year-olds bumping hips in discotheques. Calvin jeans commercials have Brooke Shields provocatively posed and asking, “What comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing!” and “If my Calvins could talk, I’d be ruined.” The experts—psychiatrists, pediatricians, teachers—all agree that preteens are striving to look and act older, reacting to an environment saturated with sex, materialism and drugs. The childhood years are being telescoped, passing too fast too soon, and the child is being cheated out of one of the most delightful periods of life.
One psychologist said: “We dress our children in miniature adult costumes with designer labels, we expose them to gratuitous sex and violence and we expect them to cope with an increasingly bewildering social environment—divorce, single parenthood, homosexuality. Many adolescents feel betrayed by a society that tells them to grow up fast but also to remain childlike.”
The most appalling proof of the decay of values is that there are obscenity laws, but the courts can’t decide what is obscene. Many judges are so busy wringing their hands over freedom of speech and press that they cannot discern the difference between legitimate ideas and opinion on the one hand and obscenity on the other. They cannot see that hard-core pornography, even showing on film or in print small children engaged in sexual acts, is totally without “redeeming social merit.” It’s like saying strychnine in meat must be allowed, since the meat part has “redeeming nutritional value.”
Previous to the new morality there were principles of right and wrong. Now it is the era of permissiveness. Now saying No is the no-no. Now the fad is, ‘Do your own thing. Forget love of neighbor, even if that neighbor is a six-year-old child. Now it’s self-love, all the way!’
The new morality that many extol as liberation is actually exploitation. In The Death of Innocence, Dr. Sam Janus asks: “Has liberation become libertine? Has the vaunted liberation of children turned them into sacrificial lambs on the altar of the sexual revolution?”
There are strong reasons for answering both questions, YES!
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“Chickens” and “Hawks”Awake!—1982 | June 22
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“Chickens” and “Hawks”
The New Morality—Harvesting Its Crop
“Just as it occurred in the days of Lot.”—Luke 17:28
HAWKS swoop down on chickens, and farmers keep loaded shotguns handy to blast the hawks. Today, however, those words can carry a different connotation. The “chickens” are young boys, the “hawks” are adult homosexuals, but the analogy ends there. The farmers are missing. The laws are inadequate, enforcement is poor, the judges are lenient and the “chickens” become victims. This problem is not new. It goes all the way back to Sodom and Gomorrah. But the last decade has seen an increasingly aggressive pursuit of “chickens” by the “hawks.” Their brazenness has scandalized those elements of society still able to be scandalized.
In both New York City and in Los Angeles some claim that boys are more in demand than girls. A Los Angeles police sergeant who works with child vice says: “The figures for this area show that it’s between 70 and 75 percent boys to 25 percent girls.” In Massachusetts a call-boy operation was discovered, where 250 boys were available for sex anywhere in the state for $50 and up. It turned out to be, however, only a branch of a national network headquartered in Houston, Texas. “Hawks” could call there from anywhere in the country and order “chickens” by telephone. Within half an hour a boy would be at the caller’s door, provided the “hawk’s” credit card cleared.
The “hawks” have formed groups and demand respectability. The Rene Guyon organization, based in California, boasts 8,500 members. Their motto is “Sex by eight or it’s too late.” Numerous other man-boy sex organizations exist. Lists are compiled that show where boys can be picked up in every state. One such organization has headquarters in London, with branches in the United States and other countries. The homosexuals are pushing for changing the laws to lower the age of consent and to legalize sex between adults and children. They are fighting for children’s rights, they say, and make themselves out to be crusaders. The Gay Community News said:
“The gay liberation movement is fighting not merely for the rights of adults to engage freely in homoerotic acts, but also for the millions of our society’s children to enjoy a free sexual life . . . and [for] the rights of children to control their own bodies. At a time when abuse of children by their parents is epidemic, it is ironic that it is men who love boys who are made into the ultimate criminal.”
Children’s rights to be abused, prostituted, sodomized? Their proclaimed concern for children’s rights is a cover-up for men whose only interest is gratification of their own sexual perversion. When the children become a little older these “loving” adults dump them back on the streets and pick up new victims. Willing or not, children at these tender ages are unable to understand the choice they are making or to foresee the consequences. They are victims. They are vulnerable. Misguidedly they seek affection from a homosexual and are psychologically devastated when they are cast off. Some are murdered. One homosexual man killed thirty-three boys and buried them under his house. Where has all that supposedly great love gone?
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“Baby Pros” and “Kiddie Porn”Awake!—1982 | June 22
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“Baby Pros” and “Kiddie Porn”
The New Morality—Harvesting Its Crop
Pimps and pornographers prey on the young and helpless
THE fastest-growing industry in America today is a brutalizing and depraved business—child vice. It employs more than half a million youngsters. Most of them are runaways, from homes to big cities, where they become vulnerable, easy prey to pimps and pornographers.
“Baby pros,” child prostitutes, are used and abused by pimps. In the Times Square area of New York city 800 pimps control thousands and thousands of girls. Records disclose that hundreds and hundreds of these children have been brutalized, beaten, tortured and raped by their pimps. Some prostitutes end up murdered. Yet prostitution is called a “victimless crime.”
Pornography dips into the even younger age brackets. Children as young as three and four years of age—who often end up in mental institutions or hustling on the streets—can be found doing unbelievable things in front of cameras. But if seeing is believing, then it must be believed, because it is there to be seen in pornographic movies and magazines. Five- and six-year-olds are exploited, engaging in every imaginable sexual activity and perversion, including masturbation, sodomy, sadomasochism and even incest.
Pornography started out comparatively mild, but quickly escalated to meet the increasing demands of quickly jaded perverted appetites. It began with nudity, which moved into simulated male-female intercourse, and from there to actual intercourse. Then came homosexual activities, men with men and women with women. Bestiality was next. And, finally, child pornography, called “kiddie porn.” Children were shown in both homosexual and heterosexual activities, sometimes children with children, sometimes children with adults. By now “kiddie porn” has skyrocketed into a multibillion-dollar business, and yearly uses 300,000 children under sixteen.
Why such interest sexually in young children? They have been promoted by the media as sex objects. Advertisers pose them with their products, provocatively so, with windblown hair and pouting, promising lips. The young especially attract men who are afraid of adult women, psychiatrists say. The modern woman, the liberated female, equal and even a competitor, intimidates these insecure men. But the young girls, sexily attired and posed, look vulnerable, are nothing to fear, and are therefore inviting to such men. Presented as sex objects, these youngsters become sex targets.
Derek Eaves, a forensic psychiatrist who works with sexual offenders is worried: “There is an enormous increase in crimes against children.” He considers society to be in a moral crisis. A Columbia University professor says that provocatively posing little girls means “they are for sale” and is a step taken toward the destruction of Western values. Daniel Cappon, analytical psychotherapist, says: “We’ve entered the new Dark Ages of society. We’re living through the black ages of degeneracy. Darkness has descended on our psyche; people are more brutalized now than ever before.” Strong language, but maybe not too strong, when you read of a thirty-three-month-old girl assaulted by a fifty-one-year-old man. Or consider the sickness that’s evident when pornographers photograph and pedophiles (those who lust after children) buy pictures of a seven-month-old girl with her legs spread apart.
Psychologists Victor Cline and Frank Osanka scoff at the idea that pornography is a “victimless crime.” Osanka says: “Child pornography is nothing less than the photographic record of the sexual abuse of children, and the severe psychological effect of that has been clearly established.” Cline says: “The potential for real psychological harm from continual exposure to pornography is significant.”
The pro-pornography groups, of course, see no harm in their sickness. Several groups, such as the Pedophile Liberation Organization, the Pedophile Information Exchange and the Childhood Sexuality Circle, are mounting a counterattack against opposers. They maintain secret underground networks that operate nationally and allow them to barter and exchange millions of dollars’ worth of filth. Some of these national and international organizations are now surfacing to push for their “rights.” Pedophiles see no harm in “kiddie porn,” only because they are blinded by their own lust.
But the children used in it are harmed, often ending up peddling sex on the streets and having trouble seeing themselves as desirable in any way other than as a commodity, a sex object with a price tag. Here again, as in the case of small boys sodomized by grown men, the courts have problems seeing “kiddie porn” as obscenity. “There is a widespread fear that prohibiting a ten-year-old from appearing in a pornographic film might violate that child’s First Amendment rights.”
Incredibly, even some parents appear in “kiddie porn” films using their own children! And that brings us to the subject of the next article—INCEST.
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Rape at HomeAwake!—1982 | June 22
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The writer of the article in Psychology Today does not agree with these pro-incest arguments. He says: “To be loved for oneself, for what one is rather than for what one can give or become, is for a child as urgent a longing as that for physical nourishment. But few children can know from infancy the difference between being loved for oneself and being used . . . to serve an elder’s sexual appetite.”
Time magazine of September 7, 1981, also published pro-incest propaganda, titled “Cradle-to-Grave Intimacy”:
“Very young children should be allowed, and perhaps encouraged, to conduct a full sex life without interference from parents and the law.” “Human beings, like the other primates, require a period of early sexual rehearsal play.” “Children really are a disenfranchised minority. They should have the right to express themselves sexually, which means that they may or may not have contact with people older than themselves.” “Such sex is basically harmless to the child.” “Incest can sometimes be beneficial.” “We believe children should begin sex at birth. It causes a lot of problems not to practice incest.”
The Time article concludes with some statements by psychiatrists. One said: “Premature sexual behavior among children in this society almost always leads to psychological difficulties.” Another who works with children concludes: “Childhood sexuality is like playing with a loaded gun.”
The popular slogan, Do your own thing, is also a loaded gun. The pimp may be doing his own thing, but it isn’t his “baby pros’” own thing. The sodomist may do his own thing, but it isn’t his young victim’s own thing. An incestuous parent may be doing his or her own thing, but it is hardly the small child’s thing. A child’s own thing is to be a child, to be secure in his childhood, to be loved by married parents. Love is thinking of others; doing your own thing is thinking of self.
Incest is probably the most selfish and reprehensible kind of child abuse. It is a grotesque violation of the child’s trust and dependency. It is the child’s closest protector that is turning on it. And the child is a damaged victim. “I have never knowingly talked to a happy, well-adjusted, unconcerned incest victim,” said Dr. Suzanne Sgroi, former chairman of the Sexual Trauma Treatment Program.
Dr. Judianne Densen-Gerber, director of Odyssey Institute in New York city, says: “In my own practice I have the hardest time imaginable treating these children who suffer from incest, even more than the kids who are battered, abused, set on fire, and whipped because at least those children don’t confuse what’s being done to them with love. The parent who sexually uses a child while telling him, ‘I love you,’ is raising a child who will be afraid to establish rapport, trust, and engagement with anyone else in his life, even with the therapist, because unlike the beaten child, he doesn’t seek affection, he fears affection and becomes extremely isolated.”
On page 129 of the book The Death of Innocence, we read: “Among prostitutes, the frequency of sexual molestation in childhood is 92 percent; 67 percent of them experienced some form of incestuous assault. . . . At least 75 percent of the runaways, on the national average, are escaping incestuous abuse. The same figures apply to cases of adolescent drug addiction: About 70 percent are victims of incest.”
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To End Child AbuseAwake!—1982 | June 22
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THE new morality is not new. It is only a new name for the old immorality. The tree is still rotten, its fruit still worthless. Its wisdom is unrighteous, its “children” prove it so. As it occurred in the days of Noah and in the days of Lot, so it is occurring in these last days of another immoral system. The crop being reaped is the same, only this time it’s a bumper harvest. And not at all practical—very, very impractical. Especially so for the children.
The Bible’s remedy is practical, for children and everyone else. Even the professional people who are involved with the problem of child abuse offer similar solutions, up to a point. They know that bad family conditions cause children to run away from home, and that a high percentage of runaways end up on the streets and in prostitution and pornography and suffer appalling abuse. Some are escaping incest at home, homes broken by divorce, chronic conflicts with parents, lack of loving attention, and some are swayed by their peers. Whatever the specific causes, the remedy is the healing of family breakdown. So say the experts.
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To End Child AbuseAwake!—1982 | June 22
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Psychiatrists agree. They say parents must be fair and set good examples, but children need regulations and discipline. One psychotherapist confirms this, saying: “We abandon our children also when, hoping to make ‘friends’ of them, we renounce our responsibilities as models and as law-givers. This is a betrayal that children feel acutely because no need is stronger to a growing child than the sense of boundaries and limits. The child experiences them as love.” The Bible confirms this. “The one whom Jehovah loves he reproves, even as a father does a son in whom he finds pleasure.”—Proverbs 3:12.
Some say that more sex education in the schools is what is needed; others contend it’s already too explicit and goes too far. One illustrated booklet for children, prepared by a Syracuse University professor, says: “All thoughts are normal.” “Masturbation is a normal expression of sex for both males and females at any age. Enjoy it.” Homosexuality is your business, “so choose the sexual life you want.” “A lot of people wonder about oral and anal sex, and some think it is ‘perverted.’ We think there is nothing wrong with any kind of sex.” “Pornography is harmless.”
Perhaps Johnny can’t read or write because his teachers are too busy indoctrinating him with the “normality” of sexual perversions. Sex instruction for children can be too much too soon. Dr. Greenwood warns: “Parents in their efforts to be liberal often overeducate, and they may be giving their children material they’re not yet ready to cope with.” Regardless of the pros and cons of sex education, the hard fact is the tremendous increase in child prostitution, sodomy, pornography and incest.
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