Crusaders
By Serge Kreutz
Ron O’Grady, the founder of ECPAT, wrote: “If you can help save one child from the violence of sexual abuse, your life has had meaning and purpose.” (Child Advocates Unite against a Global Rise in Child Exploitation, Printscreen )
Exactly.
Crusades to rescue child prostitutes are not about suffering girls. Crusades to rescue child prostitutes are about adding meaning to the life of the crusaders.
The crusaders are fanatic Christians and feminists from the richest Western countries. They have everything else. Now they want a genuine purpose in life.
Sympathy for those who suffer, and taking action to help, whether humans or animals, is a noble character trait. Even more so, if those who act out of sympathy forego modern comfort and put their own lives in danger. Help for those who suffer can add a lot of meaning to a life.
But to claim such noble altruism, the worst suffering, not pet issues, ought to be priority.
For example the dying, from malnutrition and easily preventable disease, of millions of African children every year. Or the suffering in countries ravaged by civil war. Or the suffering in dictatorships where the police abduct, rape, and torture at will.
Whether a priest and a feminist hop on a plane to Manila or Phnom Penh to protect street children from sex tourists, or whether they board a flight to Khartoum or Kinshasa to help the children of the poorest families with basic nutritional and medical care, or demonstrate publicly against disappearances, or work to help prisoners, tells a lot about whether sympathy for those who suffer is the motivation, or whether it’s about fighting sex, or about settling scores, or about playing games to give one’s own life some meaning, without putting oneself at risk.
Few people are willing to dedicate their lives to those who genuinely suffer, or to even just forgo modern amenities.
For those who want to feel as if they are dedicating their lives to a noble cause but nevertheless want to avoid danger and discomfort, it’s a smart choice to join crusaders like ECPAT who target Western men who go for sexual relationships in Third World countries, and may have them with somebody below the age of 18.
Targeting can be done from home or comfortable hotel rooms, and those targeted, Western men in Third World countries, are largely defenseless, and not violent towards those who target them. That traditional media worldwide will give a lot of coverage, and portrait the crusaders as heroes, is an additional benefit. Even a UN stage is possible.
That is why groupings such as ECPAT have so much appeal. They now translate their acronym as End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography, and the Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes, sometimes also as End Child Prostitution and Trafficking.
But the initial meaning was End Child Prostitution in Asian Tourism.
ECPAT stands for End Child Prostitution in Asian Tourism (now End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and the Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes)
Fighting Western men who travel to Asia to seek sexual relationships, and may have them with women under the age of 18, is an ideal give-meaning-to-your-life agenda for fanatic Christians with a deep-seated fear of sexuality, and sex-negative feminists.
Public support for crusaders comes from Western women who understand that their own sexual market value goes up by whatever limits competition from females in Third World countries.
Campaigners against Western men seeking sexual relationships in Third World countries, and possibly having them with females younger than 18, do not act to diminish suffering in the world.
If all the energy and funds directed at tracking down and fighting Western men who have sex in Third World countries with somebody below the age of 18 would be put at use to protect young children in poor countries from malaria and diarrhea, then tens of thousands of young children wouldn’t die every year.
More than a thousand people are murdered worldwide every day. Many of them are murdered gruesomely. Strangulated, drowned, burned alive, tortured to death, not just killed. Most are men. ECPAT activists reply: yeah, sorry, but not the issue of our concern.
In Third World countries or traditional societies, almost all sexual violence against women, or females below the age of 18, or much younger, is perpetrated NOT by male tourists from Western countries. The percentage is almost negligible. In Third World countries, or traditional societies, almost all sexual violence against women, females below the age of 18, or young children, is perpetrated by local men. ECPAT activists reply: yeah, very sad indeed; something should be done, but it’s not within our scope.
Christian fanatics and feminists could try Yemen or Pakistan. Or gang-dominated countries in Latin America. Uganda or Zimbabwe. A lot of severe violence of local men against local women and children everywhere. Domestic and sexual violence is so commonplace that to deal with it as crime is a luxury the legal system of poor countries can’t afford. ECPAT activists won’t go. It’s too dangerous to confront local men, whether Muslim or Mafia.
The purpose of organizations such as ECPAT isn’t the welfare of children or women. The purpose is to target Western men, and to entangle them in judicial proceedings, having them convicted to lengthy sentences, and ruined for life. That is why the ECPAT acronym stood for End Child Prostitution in Asian Tourism.
Until now, as a Google search for “ECPAT extraterritorial laws” shows, the main lobbying of ECPAT is for extraterritorial legislation in Western countries so that men going to Third World countries for sexual relationships and having contact with females under the age of 18 can be convicted in courts at home.
If ECPAT activists indeed would want to help Third World women who suffer, instead of seeking for themselves a comfortable but nevertheless exciting purpose in life, they could campaign to have their countries’ restrictive immigration policies changed.
Canadians, Scandinavians, and Australians have seized a huge chunk of the world’s best land, rich in natural resources and largely free of climate-dependent diseases. Share!
They should let an unlimited number of African families with children in danger of starvation, or daughters in danger of sexual violence, migrate into their beautiful lands.
They won’t. In fact, while they are willing to sometimes make handouts so they themselves feel good, they don’t want to share.
Hypocrites on an ego trip to add meaning to their lives.
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It is now known that a large number of pedophile homosexuals have become Catholic priests because of the sexual opportunities the profession silently and secretly affords them.
It’s furthermore obvious that the best cover for viewing child pornography is to be an anti-child pornography campaigner (or a NGO detective on a mission to catch people involved in child pornography).
Of a Catholic priest, one would normally assume that he concerns himself with what, according to his religion, is the most important aspect of life, which is the afterlife. Catholic doctrine assumes that what happens after death is more meaningful than what happens before. After death, a person either goes to heaven or to hell. Heaven is sweeter than anything a person can experience before death, and hell is worse suffering than anything a person could experience before death.
A considerable number of simple minds still take Catholic dogma for truth. But priests and bishops are not simple minds. Even just to comprehend Catholic dogma already requires dialectical reasoning: mercy as ideal for a human nature inclined to the opposite; agape instead of sex. To integrate oneself in such a system requires even more dialectical intelligence. To what extent priests and bishops believe what they preach, and to what extent they are just career-concerned pretenders, they will never tell us.
Priests enjoy plenty of privileges, and a position of authority on matters of life and death. That must be flattering.
And when they involve themselves heavily in worldly matters, such as community projects or efforts to improve life (this life, not the afterlife), if feels that they are priests not because they are exceptionally religious, but because they want to feel important.
It doesn’t make sense that while Catholic doctrine says that salvation after death is more important than whatever happens before, they nevertheless dedicate most of their efforts at worldly problems in their communities, and not at securing that their flock makes it to paradise as safely as possible.
But being a priest in order to be important (a community leader and an authority on morals) is only the first level of pretension.
The second level is reached when a priest who is on a “help the poor and the weak” ego trip is choosy with those whom he wants to help. Such a priest leaves the realm of moral proportionality.
For example, it may be a noble cause to campaign against alcohol and tobacco consumption by young people. To campaign against alcohol and tobacco consumption may be a noble cause, even when those addressed are adults.
But how to view such a campaign if it happened in Nazi Germany during World War II, when millions of innocent people were murdered in concentration camps.
From a moral perspective, the anti-alcohol and anti-tobacco campaign would be out of proportion.
Proportionality is an important aspect for though constructs on justice and morality. Moral concerns cannot be claimed as motivation for ameliorating a bad situation, if by a moral’s own standards, an even worse situation should be addressed first.
Millions of children die each year of malaria, diarrhea, and other causes that could easily be prevented. Moral priests, too, see children suffer to death from a plain lack of nutrition? Documentation is just a few clicks away.
In many regions of Africa, children are brutally murdered… day by day, now, as they were 10 or 100 years ago. North Uganda, East Congo, South Sudan. Monstrosities like Nazi Germany are not a matter of the past. They happen in the world today, in many parts of the world.
Ears cut off, people roasted alive, drowned for the fun of onlookers. Mutilated, dragged to death, stoned to death, suffocated in excrements. In some parts of the world, kids torture kids to death, just as they play video games.
Priests and other campaigners who want to address these moral problems personally will need a lot of courage. It’s dangerous out there. A priest or campaigner may be tortured and murdered himself or herself. But if “helping children” is a priest’s or campaigner’s genuine concern, that is where he or she should go.
Somebody who is picking social problems that he wants to deal with, while side-lining problems that are much worse, is displaying favoritism towards hobby issues, and cannot claim to act morally per se.
Now what do I make of a priest who for decades is doing social work with child prostitutes? While child prostitution is a social problem, it is, by far, not the worst. Contrary to the impression created by Christian and feminist campaigners, most child prostitutes are not forced into providing sexual services. They live on the streets after having run away from home, and learn their trade from their peers. Many of them enjoy their freedom, and the money they can make.
The rage Catholic priests feel when being confronted by sexual conduct of youngsters, especially when it happens with adults is irrational. If anything, it indicates a corresponding deep-seated but suppressed affinity on their own part. They do not want to see others enjoy what they themselves, maybe, normally, deprive themselves off.
Child prostitution is a good topic for the profit-oriented media because it sells. Children dying of hunger or from minor diseases is not a topic people buy newspapers for. It’s not even a topic people want to read about.
And what is the reply rhetoric of Christian fanatics? They claim that death stares at them out of the eyes of child prostitutes. They claim that child prostitutes, because of their lost innocence, are empty inside, just like zombies. They seriously express the opinion that for a youngster to have sex is more destructive than to starve to death or to die from a preventable disease. Anyway, priests don’t starve to death; they only theorize that it can’t be that bad.
What kicks do they get out of all of this? To be motivated by wanting to help can only be claimed if those who need help the most are helped first. If that isn’t done, than obviously, activism is a matter of personal favorites.
Some Catholic priests have been working in Southeast Asian red-light towns for decades. Their focus was, and is, to rescue child prostitutes. They document cases in great detail, and then involve the international media. They rise to fame, and enjoy the respect expressed in traditional, politically correct media. They collect donations. They use the funds to built shelters for child prostitutes. Shelters of which Catholic priests are directors. And they interview ever more young girls on their sexual abuse. Now, if working with child prostitutes is such a pronounced personal favorite of a Catholic priest, what does this suggest about his psyche?
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Here some links on child torture and child murder in Africa.
Compared to this much worse moral problem, all the attention on a few child prostitutes is but moral grandstanding. Grandstanding, too, because working on the moral problem of child prostitution guarantees huge publicity and media fame with an absolute minimum of effort and danger. We all know that the media anywhere in the world loves sex topics. But if readers are presented with real moral problems, they may not have the appetite to buy a newspaper the next day. Cheap trick number 1 if anybody wants international fame on the moral front: deal with the juicy topic of child prostitution.
Children suffer torture, rape and cruelty, NGOs report Amnesty deplores African rights record Mauritania’s deadly daily poverty Ethiopia’s children dying from malnutrition
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No, not priests who preach sex. Unfortunately.
But priests who are not allowed to have sex. As a consequence, their minds are all clogged up with wicked sexual thought.
How can they be both, sexual and anti-sexual? They can, if they are moral campaigners against sex. Preferably as rescuers of underaged prostitutes.
That’s hot. Interviewing young girls about sexual encounters with presumed perverts. “More detail, please… And then, what did he do then… And next, what next… Now, let’s pray together, to Holy Mary, to Lord Jesus… “
After a few days, the presentation to the media. The priest in the press and on TV. The hero who single-handedly took on international sex syndicates where the police with all their firepower were afraid.
Baloney of course. No syndicates, a fabricated context, blown out of proportion. And it only works because the traditional media makes money of the topic. “SEX SCANDAL!!!” has always been the best-selling headline.
The traditional media doesn’t care about what is really scandalous, they only care about selling copies, selling advertising.
Scandals far greater than underaged prostitutes, the dying of millions of children every year in Third World countries, primarily Africa, because of malnutrition or easily preventable diseases, are not a good topic for the media. It is unappetizing.
Everybody knows that it is ongoing, and that it is preventable. Everybody with a moral sense knows deep inside that he should donate half his salary for children dying of malnutrition or malaria in Africa. But people want to spend their money, not donate it, and they want to eat delicious food and have entertainment.
It is well-known in the media that if stories are run repeatedly about world hunger, or the ongoing suffering of children in Africa from malaria, readers will buy other newspapers. People don’t want to be reminded of such stuff. They want to enjoy their meals without having pictures of starving children flashing before their inner eyes.
If a junior editor pushes topics such as children in Africa dying from malnutrition, he or she will never become editor-in-chief, and if an editor-in-chief doesn’t keep such topics off the front page, he or she will sooner or later be fired by the publisher because the circulation of the newspaper drops, and that is contrary to the duties of the editor-in-chief.
Better to lift juicy stories about tourists in Asia who get caught with child prostitutes. For tabloid buyers who are not satisfied with their own sex lives, nothing is a better read than stories about other people who are in real trouble for having sex. It’s the ultimate vindication for those who don’t have sex.
Which is why a British tabloid spent a lot of money on the tracking down of a former rockstar in Vietnam.
It’s not that the newspaper acted out of moral concern. It’s the story. If they would be concerned with genuine moral issues, they would send their reporters to Africa to produce stories about children who suffer to death on a teaspoon of nutrition a day, which feeds intestinal worms more than it feeds the children.
Sex priests in Southeast Asia are very important for the media, and they are instrumental in creating severe distortions in the moral perception of the media-consuming public.
If sympathy for the needless suffering of other beings is the foundation of modern ethics, than there are millions of worse fates in this world, here and today, than the fates of some underage prostitutes who roam the streets of Third World cities and enjoy a high degree of personal freedom and a good amount of money which they typically perceive as easily earned.
Among the many worse fates that do not get attention from moral crusaders:
1. The plight of children dying of hunger and easily preventable diseases in Africa.
2. The suffering of those in captivity and tortured in prisons anywhere around the world. In most countries of the world, prison guards have a free hand in mistreating inmates.
Russia on way to legalising prison beatings
3. The slow and painful deaths from diseases, even in Europe and North America.
4. The suffering of people who are paralyzed for decades and forgotten in some closed institutions.
5. The suffering of the mentally ill who are maltreated by their guardians.
The fact that there are prostitutes under the age of 18 in Third World countries is a minor ethical dilemma, which is exploited by sex-negative feminists and their natural allies, the priests of religions that teach that sex is the root of everything evil. Their concern of such priests is not sympathy for girls under the age of 18. The concern is to experience sex by fighting sex.
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No other country in Asia has as colonial a mentality as do the Philippines.
Filipinos regard themselves as “natives” of the Philippines. While it is grammatically and semantically true, that they are the natives of the Philippines, it is also strange that they regard themselves as natives, and it is a clear linguistic indicator of the typical Philippine inferiority complex.
“Natives” are second-class citizens in their own country. American natives, or the small number that hasn’t been murdered by European immigrants, are those who live in reservations. In the United States, these reservations typically are located in the most useless stretches of land. It’s the same with Australian aboriginals.
If one asks a Thai or Indonesian person, or even a Cambodian or Vietnamese, what he considers himself, any of them would never come up with stating that he is a Thai native, or an Indonesian native, or a Cambodian native, or a Vietnamese native. He will identify himself as Thai, Indonesian, Cambodian, or Vietnamese. No “native”.
So, what is a “colonial mentality”? A colonial mentality is characterized by a willingness of its holder to consider himself inferior to the colonial masters. Filipinos never objected to being typified as “little brown brothers” when in fact their colonial masters where overweight pale grandpas.
The terms “natives” and “little brown brothers” fit exactly the idea of “the white man’s burden”, used as an ideological justification by Western powers to colonize the world.
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936, Nobel prize 1907) coined the term precisely for the US colonization of the Philippines.
White man’s burden In accordance to the white man’s burden political theory, Western powers had a moral obligation to colonize the world (even if they would not have wanted to) in order to bring proper moral standards to the barbarians everywhere else. Which is why colonizing armies where always accompanied by hordes of missionaries.
While the US bases in the Philippines have been closed down, a leftover of the “white man’s burden” in the Philippines are missionaries involved in bringing proper moral standards to natives, for example by rescuing child prostitutes in Olongapo.
It is doubtful whether such priests are guided by sympathy or a moral of helping those who suffer. Anybody who is guided by a moral of helping those who suffer would feel a need to address the worst suffering first, for example in Africa where millions of children live and die in agony, or in a country ravaged by civil war. Non-dangerous assignments are suspect, which is why the Catholic Church canonizes martyrs, and not those who preach morals from a safe distance.
Catholic missionaries in the Philippines are on a comfortable posting, and in a Catholic country with a colonial mentality, they are respected and unassailable. One can even nominate oneself, through obedient flock, for the Peace Noble Prize.
Furthermore, a self-elected assignment of rescuing child prostitutes is not only comfortable and safe, but also interesting. Who knows what goes on in the mind of a Catholic priests interviewing underage girls on their experience with sexual abuse. If such confessions would be written as fiction, they would be classified as child pornography. But for Catholic priests, the potential kick is not only legal but even moral.
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Every healthy human being has a sex drive. It appears with the onset of puberty. While girls typically enter puberty slightly earlier than boys, the male sex drive typically is more aggressive.
Young and old, male and female, can keep a lid on their sex drives. A lid means: keep it to oneself.
Up to the 19th century, boys were beaten up when discovered masturbating. Repeat offenders were put into restraining jackets.
The principle effect was that most boys found ways not to be caught. And never talked to anybody about it. And would swear they never do it.
Many priests are like boys. It is questionable that they believe in God. But being a priest is a good cover for a comfortable life. Even a sexual one.
Many men, especially in the US, have become Catholic priests because it used to be a perfect cover for homosexual, pedophile inclinations.
Men with forbidden sexual inclinations can be quite imaginative in finding covers for sexual satisfaction without having to fear punishment. That is why businessmen go international (but not to Saudi Arabia), and why anywhere around the world, the percentage of sadists is higher among prison wardens than the general population.
Prisoner Abuse: How Different are U.S. Prisons?
When certain sexual deeds are prohibited, humans with an inclination towards them will work on alternatives where the dangers of getting beheaded or incarcerated are reduced. That is why there is pornography. And when pornography is prohibited, people still have their fantasies.
Who wants to guess how many people imagine something different when they have intercourse with a spouse?
Many people want more than their fantasies. Some at least want pornography. And those who get a kick only out of child pornography will go a long way to set up an appropriate cover.
For those who derive pleasure from looking at child pornography, being a police investigator on child porn would be a perfect cover.
Of course, not every man who realizes that being a police officer on that beat would be the perfect cover, will be able to join the police force. Typically, if one doesn’t decide to become a police officer in one’s early 20s, the chance for that kind of a career has passed for good.
But then, one can still become an anti-child pornography and anti-child prostitution activist. Or even better: a private child prostitution and child pornography investigator in an exotic land. It’s the dialectics of being able to be a preferred consumer of something that one pretends to work against.
What goes on in the head of a Catholic priest who migrates from Europe to Southeast Asia to work with child prostitutes? Sexual stimulation and sexual satisfaction do not require physical contact. Some men can derive a lot of sexual stimulation from being in a sexual environment that matches their sexual inclinations, but they always finish off masturbating alone.
For a man with such a mind architecture, nothing would be more suitable than being a priest, working with child prostitutes in Southeast Asia. He can ask child prostitutes to relate to him all they experienced, and maybe they even show him something. Under the pretext of working on legal charges, he can request that the same story be told again and again, with ever more colorful detail. He also can set up a shelter, so that he can have the victims around him for much of a day.
While a large number of child sexual abuse cases have been uncovered in orphanages and shelters for children, a priest may consider it too risky, to touch the child prostitutes he rescued. But then, one also can’t touch the girls shown in child pornography. And who says that that having a 12-year old girl in front of you, telling her rape stories would be less stimulating to a man whose sexual fantasies thrive on such stories.
A crying shame: sexual abuse in children shelters
1997
http://www.irinnews.org/news/2003/06/18/children-suffer-torture-rape-and-cruelty-ngos-report
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3749633.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/4219104.stm
http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/ethiopia_26181.html
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/209518