'Wanted, Your Teenage Son!'

Homosexuality, Paedophilia, And The Vilification Of The "Other": A Socio-Analytic View Of Some Fundamentalist Organisational Dynamics.

This paper may not fit precisely into the conventional parameters of this conference. I am writing about organisational dynamics in the wider current social context by examining an organisation‘s public representation of itself and its tasks. I am neither a consultant to this organisation nor would ever expect to be. However I believe that in the service of our work it is worth studying the institutional roles and dynamics that organisations play in our community, much as Obholser (1989) and Menzies-Lyth (1960) have done or explored. I think it is especially important to hold in mind the social function or containing roles which organisations and institutions can hold, when we work with them. Understanding the domain-wide dynamics can - inter alia - contribute to understanding their impact on internal dynamics.

Introduction

The Western Australian state government recently adopted a significant social legislative reform agenda. It reformed the laws affecting the status of homosexual men and lesbians to ensure equality in the eyes of the law. (The Acts Amendment (Lesbian and Gay Law Reform) Bill 2001) This has resulted in some of the most progressive anti-discrimination legislation in the country, promoting equality for heterosexual and homosexual people. The range of areas included  legal status of de facto relationships, recognition of next-of-kin in medical decisions and financial matters such as superannuation entitlements, equal age of consent for sexual activity (16 years), access to IVF and adoption, and others. It also provides anti-discrimination legislation in the provision of goods and services.

Western Australia has been recognised as one of the - if not the - most politically conservative states in Australia. The gay community - a loosely organised set of interested individuals and groups has lobbied for legislative changes for over three decades. The  proposed legislative changes triggered a significant backlash from conservative organisations and individuals. The most vocal and visible of these groups - the “Australian Family Association” embarked on an intensive public campaign against what they referred to as the “gay lobby”.

The “Australian Family Association” (AFA) represents itself as a guardian of the “traditional family” of mother, father and natural children. In its campaign against the Western Australian law reforms, it used newspaper adverts, leaflet drops and billboard posters inter alia, to represent its position and to try to influence public opinion and to persuade the government not to proceed with these changes. These public representations consistently focused on the "age of consent" issue and portrayed homosexual men as sexual predators against young boys - rapacious paedophiles.

In contemporary Australia conscious vilification of the “other” has been increasingly apparent  as a significant tool in stirring group fears and mobilising paranoid-schizoid anxieties. For example this has been alleged to have occurred  in the recent so-called “children overboard incident” in which the pre-election public perception of asylum seekers was deliberately (i.e. consciously) manipulated by the government to represent them as cruel,  inhumane, manipulative “undesirables” and as a serious threat to the integrity of Australian borders and the Australian lifestyle.

In this paper I will consider the possible dynamics of an organisation such as the AFA and its social role, as suggested by some public actions and representations of this organisation. I will extend my previously published hypotheses about the colonisation of identity (Shafer 1999) by exploring processes and purposes - some conscious and some unconscious - of the vilification of the  “other”, drawing on the recent overt and covert public association of male homosexuality with paedophilia in Western Australia by the AFA - and indeed in the Federal Parliament in the Heffernan-Kirby affair (Morgan 2002); and I will consider too the possible social mobilisation of projective identification and other group dynamic phenomena .

In conclusion I will offer some brief thoughts on the currency of the dynamics of vilification in the broader Australian organisational and social context and the implications for consulting work.

The “Australian Family Association” (AFA)

The AFA is a national organisation with branches in (at least) each state of Australia. The state branch in WA has taken on the most visible role of all organisations opposing the law reforms, in challenging and trying to influence public and political opinion. Hence it is relevant to understand the stated primary and other  tasks  of this organisation, its working processes, boundaries, authorisations, membership and social role.

The AFA, on its website, defines itself as : “a voluntary, ecumenical, non-party-political organisation which has been formed to provide a forum and a vehicle for those individuals and organisations in the community concerned with the strengthening and support of the family".

It defines MARRIAGE as: "the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others voluntarily entered into for life" and the FAMILY as "composed essentially of a father, mother and children; in a wider but still necessary relationship, of grandparents, grandchildren, aunts, uncles; a kinship group of human beings linked by ties of blood, marriage and adoption, structured to bear and rear children, to care for the young, the sick and the old and other human needs. The family has been acknowledged by the United Nations in its Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as "the natural and fundamental group unit of society entitled to protection by society and the State".

The website continues:

"The Association holds that the family is the basic unit on which human societies are built and is the prime agency for the total development of children, i.e. the transmission of moral, ethical and cultural values, and for the ongoing social and emotional support for all its members. Its natural purpose is to serve as the chief functioning mechanism for the primary delivery of social services in the fields of nurturing, education, health and welfare.  (my italics)

…The Association respects the sanctity of life from conception to natural death. It recognises the need for care and compassion for the broken family and for the support of all people in need. However, its activities towards the consolidation of the family unit: seeking the support of public policy so as to forestall the causes which today lead to the disintegration of the family and its fundamental role as the basic unit of our society. (my italics)

Later, it is stated that :

"the biological purpose of the family, thus defined, is to serve as the chief functioning mechanism for the primary delivery of social services. It is the unit fashioned by nature for the primary care of the young, of the sick and of the old; those who, by definition, must be cared for by others" (my italics)

Further clarification of what it regards as a "family" : "The institution commences with the marriage of one man and one woman. To create a family, it envisages the procreation of children. A marriage is thus defined as a voluntary contract between one man and one woman, which they intend to last for life, in which they assume contractual obligations towards each other and towards the children whom they bring into existence.  This being so, the law should define, create and enforce the contract. Hence, the law should define marriage as a contract; protect it in exactly the same manner as all other contracts; punish in civil damages those who, having freely entered into it, wilfully and negligently break or repudiate their contractual obligations; protect the innocent party against exploitation or wrong-doing by the guilty. Equally, the civil law may provide relief from a contract which has become intolerable for the innocent party by reason of the conduct of the other. Society may choose to give legal recognition to other forms of co-habitation, which in Roman Law were known as "concubinage", purely temporary arrangements terminable on the demand of one party alone. Even if the law gives recognition to such arrangements, they should not be confused with marriage, which envisages permanency. "

I include this much detail because these statements significantly reflect the social and political positioning of the AFA.

Law Reform

Various individuals and groups in Western Australia have been lobbying for reform to the laws affecting homosexual people and issues around homosexuality have been in the public debate for over 30 years.  This has included a Royal Commission into homosexuality and various attempts at law reform through the 1970s to 1990s. The current sweeping reforms were initiated by the Labour Government which had clearly articulated these and other social reforms as part of its electoral agenda, prior to re-election in February 2001. The process had involved extensive consultation by a Senate Committee (Gay & Lesbian Law Reform Ministerial Committee) with representatives from the community who had close acquaintance with the issues affecting homosexual people in the State. (Meyer, 2002)

Changes to the law had previously occurred when the current Opposition (Liberal Party) had been in government [Law Reform (Decriminalisation of Sodomy Act 1989)]. While those changes decriminalised homosexual behaviour, the age of consent was set at 21 for gay men and at 16 for all other people: i.e. heterosexual men and women and lesbians. There were no changes to anti-discrimination and equal opportunity legislation. A contentious element was a Preamble ^[1] to those laws (known as the Foss Amendment, Foss being the then Attorney-General)) which stated that homosexuality could not be considered a "public purpose" and that the Parliament censures sexual relations between persons of the same sex. One intention thereof was the prevention of discussion about homosexuality in schools.

The advertising campaign

In this paper I am paying attention also, to the public representation of the AFA through an advertising campaign of the AFA which was aimed at swaying public opinion and that of politicians, against the proposed reforms. In particular the AFA mounted a campaign in the print media - newspaper adverts and billboards - and pamphlet drops in targeted electorates. There were other organised protests, the most notable being an advertising campaign and public rallies by a collective of conservative churches called “Standing Together“ .

The following advertisement was placed in The West Australian newspaper (September 26, 2001). It represents the focus of concerns expressed by the AFA throughout the campaign:

This public representation and the website statements identifying the characteristics of the AFA will be examined more closely from a socio-analytic perspective later.

Colonisation of Identity

In a previous paper (Shafer,1999) I described a process of subordination of identity in the face of a dominant and dominating culture. In that paper I described how a subordinated culture collusively adopted and sustained an inferior position in support of the status quo. I demonstrated some functions of this as a social defence including how the subordinated culture was used as a vehicle for unwanted parts of the dominant culture:

 “The splitting of identity (polarisation into either/or, black/white, male/female, heterosexual/homosexual, Australian/non-Australian, Jew/Christian,  etc) has a number of socially defensive functions:

            - to provide containers for unacceptable aspects of the primary group

            - to disguise other differences which produce anxiety

            - to prevent real engagement with difference and hence with the anxiety of

              re-discovered projections”.

I also described some of the social mechanisms which facilitate these processes and which I will describe in order to demonstrate the psychological mechanisms involved in vilification. I believe these are employed - consciously and often unconsciously - by the AFA :

Ÿ         Social distance

The size of a social group or community makes personal acquaintance with any member of an identified group difficult to differentiate from the “idea” of that group. [Turquet (1975, p109) in analysing the “Large Study Group” experience of group relations conferences, similarly describes how large social distances increase the difficulty of familiarity and interferes with differentiation. This induces  homogenisation and fusion of identity.] Khaleelee and Miller (1985)  add:

In society, the combination of size and physical dispersion permits projection into whole categories of people - the young, blacks, Jews, the disabled - or whole institutions - the church, the unions - and their common characteristic for the individual is that he is personally acquainted with only a minuscule sample from them. Paradoxically, he may regard these as exceptions; but the paradox disappears if we realise that a satisfactory societal container for negative projections has to be distant and anonymous (p378) (my italics)

Ÿ         Silence

In the extreme state of fusion with a “part-group” identity the individual is alienated from the larger group although still part of its dynamic. Turquet (1975) deduces that the “silence” which results from lack of opportunity to find differentiating boundaries in a large social space or the absence of such reference by other members “has not only the meaning of being ignored but also through the concreteness of the situation, of being eliminated, rendered non-existent” (p111.) This occurs similarly with minority groups.

Ÿ         Institutionalisation of hierarchy

Turquet (1975) describes how at the group level, these threats of annihilation described above are durably defended against by institutionalisation and in the large group institutionalised roles acquire a hierarchical determination (p136).

Ÿ         Fusion words and broad classifications

 Turquet (1975) describes the processes of fusion which support these phenomena and refers to “fusion words” with which the large group creates broad categories which aggravate the struggle to find individual identity, and indeed which then can be used to label individuality as eccentricity. By eccentricity I assume him to mean that which is different, peculiar (i.e. both idiosyncratic AND strange, unusual)

It is not only the fact of difference but also the nature of the difference. ...The neighbour has first to be located, and then differentiated. Broad classifications - doctors, care-givers, industrialists, teachers - by obliterating discrete boundaries rather than discriminating and focusing on differences, inevitably hamper, even actively prevent this act of creation” (p139).

Ÿ         Religious authority
In a relevant example, Bazalgette (1984) describes how the invocation of religious authority facilitated the colonisation process in India:

“Our duty was to ensure peace and tranquillity so that the people (could) live in the security granted by British justice under the Union Jack. I learned of the ‘white man’s burden’, which the Almighty in his wisdom had placed particularly on the British, endowing them not only with the zeal and spirit of service, but with the expertise, and the economic wealth and means to bear the burden” (p246).

The reliance on the ‘wisdom of the Almighty’ (and its use as an illusion) has been used as a powerful vehicle in other similar conquests - organised and proselytising religion:

“While all these religions preach love for mankind and the unity of mankind, uphold value systems that underscore conflict resolution and peace, perhaps the most vicious genocidal activities have been going on from before history began in the name of upholding the values of those very religions” Chattopadhyay (1987).  He describes this phenomenon in India:

 “the actual White invaders from the West have almost always justified their invasion and exploitation with the rationalisation that they were bringing a ‘higher form of civilisation’ to the invaded natives. This ‘higher form of civilisation’ was represented by more sophisticated technologies that included superior means of killing people who offered resistance and the idea of saving the souls of the so-called pagans through conversion into Christianity. People of the invaded countries, and India in particular, seem to have internalised this rationalisation of the invaders in order to justify passive acceptance of and active collaboration with the invaders, once the invasion was completed" (p246).

Ÿ         Shared belief systems

Gosling (1979) describes a similar notion to Turquet (1975)’s concept of “institutionalisation of hierarchy” . He refers to three realms of reality for a group member: the incommunicable private realm; the ordinary world of common sense; and “a world of shared creations of the mind, fantasies, attitudes, values, assumptions, and misgivings, that have little that is conclusive to show for themselves objectively, but by virtue of ‘being held in common’ have a great influence on the life of the group members and are in that sense real” (my emphasis) (p81).

Ÿ        Malignant projective identification and pathological judgement
Main (1975) makes the point that when the projections which construct such a shared belief system are massive, they are difficult to reverse or question. In such ‘malignant projective identification’ there is impoverishment of the ego and consequent defective reality testing giving rise to: “unchecked and uncheckable pathological judgements” (p63). He adds that the failure to recognise the other for what he is leads to relations that are “unreal and narcissistically intense up to the point of insanity”(p64). Main (1975) emphasises the importance of opportunities for reality testing of externalised boundary contacts as a means of self-confirmation in the external world. He adds that general class statements also disguise individual origins of hostility. He describes the psychic and moral impoverishment among the German people in an example of the Nazi leaders at Nuremberg who by the projection of their capacity for moral judgement into Hitler “had lost the capacity to know that they had behaved viciously...They were psychically impoverished, morally blinded, by projective processes”.(p58-9)

Khaleelee and Miller (1985)  further suggest that the function of using negative societal containers for projection may be to facilitate “organisations to hold together despite deep internal conflicts”  - as Main (1975) had previously suggested, that “Absolute states seem preferable because integrated ones contain unbearable conflict and pain”.

“Such relations may range between friendly co-existence, as in multi-culturalist societies, through hostile separateness, as in occupation, to a situation where the peoples of the submerged culture are abused and the culture deteriorates, as in colonisation. Fanon describes the French colonisation of Algeria and the consequent loss of identity and sometimes sanity of the Algerian people. The French came to regard the Algerians as intellectually, morally and emotionally inferior, and Fanon demonstrates how the process of colonisation brought about behaviours in the Algerians that on the surface seemed to support such judgements” (my emphasis). In analysing the discourses - i.e.  “symbolic systems of signifiers” -  which may characterise particular cultures, Long (1993)  argued that there may be legitimating styles of conversing in each cultural discourse. In order to be an agent of a cultural discourse, one needs to be legitimated as such. In cultures submerged under colonisation, according to Long (1993), such roles are closed to members of the submerged culture. Illegitimate roles may flourish.

 The maintenance of such a false group identity (i.e. submerged real identity and assumed identity based on projective identifications and other mechanisms as described here) may seem expedient at the group and individual level, but the cost - inappropriate and unnecessary psychic pain, and enormous psychic impoverishment and loss of creativity for all - is incalculable.   As the illegitimacy of such a position gradually becomes apparent the split and introjected identity cannot be indefinitely sustained against an increasing discovery of the sense of self. A shift occurs during which there is a decreasing capacity to sustain the false identity and its eruption may take various forms from violent attack, descent into psychosis or widespread acting-out or hopefully to the healthier position which Turquet (1975) describes for the consultant in the large group: “participation and self-exposure is the only way to survive”. The latter seems to reflect the position taken by those activists in Western Australia who represented the gay community. The actions of the AFA can be made sense of through recourse to the mechanisms described above.

The creation of social distance; being silenced or rendered nonexistent; the institutionalisation of roles and role hierarchies; the use of fusion words and broad categorisations; the invocation of religious authority; the creation of objectively invalidated but “common-sense” shared belief systems; result in  malignant projective identification and pathological judgement which serves the function of facilitating “organisations to hold together despite deep internal conflicts” , because “absolute states seem preferable because integrated ones contain unbearable conflict and pain”.

It is in the light of these notions that I am hypothesising ways that the AFA operates at a psychodynamic organisational level, and indeed that fundamentalist organisations generally operate. The unconscious fear of disintegration, of “breaking” (in one way, in the sense of ‘broken families‘) or falling apart in the face of managing complex internal conflicts is at the heart of processes which evolve into the creation of a hated, vilified other.

“Otherness” and childhood sexuality.

The newspaper advert and other advertising material of the AFA made the following claims, alongside a pencil sketch of a trendy-looking youth of indeterminate age, but clearly boyish:

“WANTED: Your teenage son”

“More boys will be seduced by older men if Dr Gallop’s homosexual law goes ahead. Dr Gallop plans to lower the age of consent for sodomy to 16. The ‘reasonable belief’ defence would then allow 18 year old men to get away with having sex with boys as young as 13. It is also proposed to legalise both heterosexual and homosexual sex for 13-15 year old boys and girls as long as their partner is not more than 2 years older. Dr Gallop also plans to lift the ban on promoting homosexuality in primary and secondary schools.

Dr Gallop, please, for the sake of our children, STOP your plans to legalise homosexual behaviour  in primary and secondary schools.”

In a previous paper (Shafer, 1999) I described the colonisation of identity. Through analysis of this advert and the other material referred to, I want to demonstrate the attempted distortions of identity using similar group psychic mechanisms in the service of a group dynamic.

 An analysis of this advertisement, in the context of other media representations reveals the workings of the psycho/socio dynamic mechanisms described above. While exposure to a print advertisement does not occur in the usual context of a large group, in many ways it takes advantage of the lack of “skin-of-my-neighbour” and social distance which occurs when the individual is exposed to it in isolation from the group i.e. the community. This interferes with differentiation and as Khaleelee & Miller (1985) describe, induces homogenisation and fusion of identity. This is in the service of creating a “societal container for negative projections” (p378).The advert draws on the community’s appropriate abhorrence of child sexual abuse, promotes the sense of childhood innocence and associates homosexuality with such  abuse in a way that becomes difficult for many individuals to question in their relative social isolation - and indeed isolation usually from direct social experience of homosexual men. Such contact, one would expect, would have some corrective influence on the distortions of identity. However because of the other dynamic factors, this would be constrained.

By the same token these processes of ostracization often silence the voices of the “part-group“ identity. An effect of this, remember, is of “being eliminated, rendered non-existent”. (Turquet, 1975, p111). This is established and maintained through institutionalisation of roles. In the current context the AFA adopts the role of child protection agent, a role difficult to question because of its apparent moral righteousness. It does this by suggesting that the government is not only failing in its child protection role, but is actively placing children at risk: “Dr Gallop, please for the sake of our children, STOP your plans to legalise homosexual behaviour in primary and secondary schools”. It is interesting to note how the language of this appeal uses fusion words to distort the real intention of the reforms by sinister implications: “legalise homosexual behaviour” (what exactly is ‘homosexual behaviour’?) in “primary and secondary schools” - as if the reforms are intended to facilitate homosexual behaviour among “innocent” children.

• that boys are already being seduced by men (i.e. the association of homosexuality with rapacious predation) and
• that such men are to be feared because, as Morgan (2002) demonstrates : “those who are defined by sex are ‘bad’ because sex (generally) is bad. The threat of uncontrollable desire…must be contained.” (p5, my italics)
• Other such categorisations which stimulate and appeal directly to community fears are made with words and phrases like “consent for sodomy”, “get away with”, “boys as young as 13”.
  
  

“perpetuates grotesque myths and stereotypes regarding gay males and draws an association between consenting gay sexuality and child sexual abuse.

The ASB found that the advert contravened Section 2.1 of the Code, which provides that:

“Advertisements shall not portray people or depict material in a way which discriminates against or vilifies a person or section of the community on account of race, ethnicity, sex, age, sexual preference, religion, disability or political belief.” The Board opined that the advert vilified homosexual people by its implication of an association between homosexuality and paedophilia.

The AFA’s response: “We refuse to comply …and resolve to continue to inform the public of Western Australia accurately and fully about legislation regarding homosexual behaviour”.

 It is my hypothesis that powerful, primitive elements of family life, and the tremendous struggle in acknowledging and managing them, is forced into unconsciousness. The creation of a vilified “other” provides the very temporary and emotionally impoverishing opportunity for avoiding these deeply human concerns. In apparently representing “the family” the AFA unconsciously  tries to simplify, institutionalise and thus contribute to the social avoidance of these deeply complex issues. Regrettably, this profoundly defective process contributes to the impoverishment of families.

Brief thoughts on the currency of the dynamics of vilification in the broader Australian organisational and social context.

I belief that understanding these social processes can contribute to our work as consultants to a range of organisations which take on the role of or represent social institutions. To make this link, I offer some brief thoughts about the current social climate of the Australian community, and I have no doubt of other countries where fundamentalists movements seem to be in the ascendancy.

In applying my thinking I am trying to make sense of global trends towards conservatism and often fundamentalism and to consider the impact of this on organisations which might play containing roles in our communities. It would seem probable that the increasing complexity of contemporary life is a relevant factor in appreciating what appears to be a swing towards paranoid-schizoid functioning. Globalisation is one factor which appears to lay greater emphasis on material wealth than on human well-being, despite claims that is for the common good of the deprived. But perhaps it is part of a defence against the unknown.

In 1991 Michael Rustin made the point that in more recent Thatcherite times, self-interest has been prioritised over the common social good  - “ a pervasive process of privatisation and atomisation of social interests” (1991, p146).

Writing about changes that have occurred in the work place, Richard Sennett (1998) notes that : “The culture of the new order profoundly disturbs self-organisation. It can divorce flexible experience from static personal ethics…It can divorce easy, superficial labour from understanding and engagement…irreversible change and multiple fragmented activity may be comfortable for the new regime’s masters…”. (p117, my italics)

Gordon Lawrence (1995) in exploring aspects of these trends suggested that:

“This gross simplification of human life can be seen as a world wide social system of defence against acknowledging the tragic and taking authority and responsibility for exercising the human ability to discriminate between what is patently good and what is incontrovertibly evil. “ Mechanisms used by the AFA echo this failure to accurately recognise and face, understand and engage with the painful ambivalences we have to face within the human family.

As consultants to organisations - particularly those in the broad domain of human services, I believe that understanding these social dynamics lies is crucial in our commitment to assist the organisations with which we work to better “hold together despite deep internal conflicts” , and to “contain unbearable conflict and pain”.

Advertising Standards Board,  Complaint Reference No 268/01, 13 November  2001

Australian Family Association Website http://www.family.org.au/

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Morgan, W (2002) “Not in front of the children!! Sex and sexuality in the Heffernan-Kirby affair”. Word is Out: e-journal for gay, lesbian and queer liberation No. 3, June.  (Url:  http://www.wordisout.info/

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The West Australian, Wednesday September 26, 2001, p 8