Pedophilia and "Brain Disorders"

 CN: Child abuse, specifically sexual abuse.

This is your regularly-scheduled reminder that abuse (whether physical, emotional, or sexual) is always a choice and never a "disorder" or a consequence of something in "the brain."

There is no need to "study" what in "the brain" causes "pedophilia," because "the brain" does not cause child sexual abuse. People's choices do. Society's choices do. Even if some people were neurologically prone to sexual attraction towards children (debatable, but theoretically possible), this neurological condition would not cause people to abuse children, because acting on sexual attraction, abusively or otherwise, is always a choice.

Speculating on "pedophilia" as a neurological condition that could be "treatable" is, besides being grossly insulting in its implications about neurology and abuse, completely pointless. Brains do not cause child sexual abuse. People choose to sexually (and otherwise) abuse children for the same reasons people choose to sexually (and otherwise) abuse people of other marginalized groups, like disabled people and refugees -- because they can get away with it. Because society gives them privilege and power over these people. Because society does not see their victims as fully human.

Child sexual abuse can be prevented by empowering children and reducing the power adults have over children. Give children the freedom to control their own bodies, the freedom to say "no" to adults, the freedom to escape institutions and abusive families of origin, the freedom to be accepted as they are without being subjected to abusive behaviorism meant to change them. Believe children. Respect children. Encourage adults to believe and respect the children in their lives. Stop treating children as property, as burdens, as problems to be managed. This is how to prevent child abuse. Challenging a media culture that markets "young and hot" as the epitome of sexual attractiveness might help, too.

But just as people would rather blame mass violence on some sort of "brain defect" in the perpetrators rather than examining the bigotry, dehumanization, authoritarianism, and misogyny that actually drives mass violence, people would rather blame some nonexistent "brain defect" for child sexual abuse. It's always easier to blame neurodivergent people than neurotypical people's own choices and oppressive society.

ETA: Child sexual abuse and pedophiliac attraction should not be off-limits to academic study, and researchers who study these phenomena deserve to live in peace without harassment.

My point is to counter the narrative that the purpose of such research should be to "treat/cure" the "disorder" that "makes" people abuse children, which is not a thing.

Privacy is Safety

 Privacy rules are safety rules, and like all safety rules, they're written in blood.

It was within our lifetimes that women could not get credit cards without their husbands' permission. Still today, many doctors will not allow women to access reproductive healthcare without their husbands' permission.

People -- mostly women, queer people, and disabled people -- are regularly, routinely, endangered by their families. Privacy policies keep them safe.

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Vaccine "Mandates"

 Let's talk about vaccine "mandates" and why you shouldn't necessarily be worried -- yet.

No one should ever be forced to accept any medical treatment against their will, including vaccines. Forced medical treatment of any kind is always, always a human rights abuse. We should never lose sight of that.

Fortunately, in the U.S., that's not happening. Media coverage has hyped the idea that the federal government is "mandating" COVID-19 vaccines. They are not, and if they did, we absolutely should rise up in opposition.

What they are doing, and what some states and employers are doing, is making COVID vaccination a job requirement for certain jobs. Specifically, employees of larger businesses will be required to either be vaccinated against COVID-19 or tested for it weekly. This is to prevent potential carriers from spreading the disease to others, surely a legitimate goal.

Is this discriminatory? Not if regular testing is accepted as an alternative. People who can't, or don't want to, be vaccinated still have another option, and will not be forced to be vaccinated. They will simply have to demonstrate that they are not contagious, which is a valid matter of workplace safety. (Some fields, like healthcare, do require vaccination because the risk of transmission is too great, but that, again, is a job requirement, not a mandate.)

Short version: Vaccine mandates would be a human rights abuse if they were happening, but they're not happening, so don't worry about it (yet).

So, Hypatia, are you writing this whole post just to say that an abusive policy isn't happening and we don't need to worry about it?

Well, no. If only it could be that easy.

Employee safety requirements involving regular testing or vaccination are not, contrary to popular reporting, forced vaccination -- but people defending them are under the impression that they are forced vaccination, and that forced vaccination is a good thing. This, rather than the policy itself, is terrifying.

The U.S. government is not forcing people to be vaccinated, but, apparently, much of the population would be completely fine with it if they were. People are openly admitting that "my body, my choice" was only ever a slogan to them, and they never really meant that humans should have a general right to bodily autonomy. Their arguments are, essentially, that people who choose not to be vaccinated are bad people, so we don't need to care about their rights, and that choosing not to be vaccinated is an "irrational" "unscientific" choice, which makes it an illegitimate one. This should sound alarm bells for all disabled people, especially Mad/neurodivergent people, who are regularly told that our choices about our own minds and bodies are "irrational" and thus invalid, that choosing to reject the treatments laid out for us is "unscientific" and thus invalid, or that we're immoral for our indifference to how our "unhealthy" deviant bodyminds "affect others."

To be clear -- being a potential carrier for an airborne, contagious disease is a health issue that literally, tangibly "affects others" in a way that being Mad/neurodivergent, disabled, Fat, or Queer does not. There are competing rights between the right of the potential carrier and the right of others not to be exposed to the disease, more analogous to the conflict between the rights of someone's choice to smoke and the rights of someone to be free of secondhand smoke, and in both cases, I support public policy prioritizing the latter, generally by requiring the former to keep a physical distance to keep their germs/smoke to themselves. Being medically noncompliant Mad/neurodivergent, disabled, Fat, or Queer (among other things) only "affects others" indirectly, through their alleged emotional distress at seeing or knowing about our bodyminds and choices, or at the alleged financial cost our existence imposes (it doesn't -- money is a social construct -- but that's another day's post). But the argument that bodily autonomy is contingent on "rationality" is the same.

Nor is "But people who choose not to be vaccinated are bad people" a relevant argument. It's true that most people in the organized anti-vaccine movement aren't people I'd want to know, and most of them certainly wouldn't want to know my queer autistic liberal socialist self. But bodily autonomy is a human right for every human, not a privilege earned by being a good person.

So, once again, the short version: U.S. labor policies including vaccinations or regular COVID-19 testing are not forced medical treatment, and you don't need to worry about them. But you do need to worry about the large segment of the population who thinks that forced medical treatment is okay, and are willing to jettison the principle of bodily autonomy at the first political inconvenience.

Psychiatric Coercion Kills

CN: This involves the death of a child, and institutionalization and forced drugging.

A baby in Florida has died before birth as a result of an altercation between their mother, a nurse tending coercively imprisoned people, and a prisoner of the institution. The prisoner, Joseph Wuerz, is being charged with homicide in the baby’s death.

This case is horrifically tragic. A child is dead, apparently as a result of violence. Nothing can change that.

This individual case of tragic violence is part of a larger system of violence that is intrinsic to institutionalization, restraint, and forced drugging. Psychiatric coercion IS violence. “Behavioral health” IS violence. These things are inherently abusive and always unjustified.

Furthermore, when people are locked up, restrained, forcibly drugged, and denied their human rights, it is inevitable that some of them will fight back. People will get hurt. In this case, a baby died.

Psychiatric coercion is violence. It is violence against the psychiatrically coerced inmates, and it leads to violence against the people guarding, restraining, and drugging them.

I want to be clear that I’m not trying to cast personal blame on the mother of the child who died. She should never have been put in that position. The job of tending involuntarily committed psychiatric prisoners shouldn’t exist, because involuntary commitment shouldn’t exist.

But media outlets are using this child’s death as a hook to write about “violence against nurses” by psychiatric prisoners. The narrative is that psychiatric prisoners are inherently violent because of their “mental illness”, or because of some intrinsic bad character, rather than a result of the conditions of their imprisonment. This is being used to argue for even more psychiatric coercion.

Psychiatric coercion kills people. Psychiatric prisoners die from restraint, from forced drugging, from medical conditions that go untreated because psychiatrically disabled people are disbelieved about their symptoms, from contagious diseases like COVID-19 that inherently spread in institutions, and from the poverty that psychiatric coercion imposes on people (everything from loss of jobs and income to literally being billed for their own incarceration). The child of the hospital nurse is one more death in an impossibly long list of innocent lives lost due to psychiatric coercion.

I have no idea whether Joseph Wuertz is or should be criminally liable for the death of the baby. I’m not defending him. That’s not my point. The situation that ended this way should never have happened to begin with. There should never have been an altercation between a nurse and a psychiatric prisoner, because there should never be psychiatric prisoners. Psychiatric coercion is violence. In this case, that violence led to the death of a child. We can’t undo that, but we can end the system of violence that led to it.