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Anti-Empire

Anti-Empire

offsite link North Korea Increases Aid to Russia, Mos... Tue Nov 19, 2024 12:29 | Marko Marjanovi?

offsite link Trump Assembles a War Cabinet Sat Nov 16, 2024 10:29 | Marko Marjanovi?

offsite link Slavgrinder Ramps Up Into Overdrive Tue Nov 12, 2024 10:29 | Marko Marjanovi?

offsite link ?Existential? Culling to Continue on Com... Mon Nov 11, 2024 10:28 | Marko Marjanovi?

offsite link US to Deploy Military Contractors to Ukr... Sun Nov 10, 2024 02:37 | Field Empty

Anti-Empire >>

The Saker

Indymedia ireland

Indymedia Ireland is a volunteer-run non-commercial open publishing website for local and international news, opinion & analysis, press releases and events. Its main objective is to enable the public to participate in reporting and analysis of the news and other important events and aspects of our daily lives and thereby give a voice to people.

offsite link Army Sergeant Travis Decker Murdered His Three Children After Being Denied Mental Health Care at JBL... Sat Jun 07, 2025 04:52 | JBLM Whistleblowers
A corrupt military police force and incompetent Commander who denied emergency mental health care and crisis counseling to an American service member resulted in the murder of the sergeant's three young daughters

offsite link Gaza doctor grieves her nine children killed in Israeli strike Sun May 25, 2025 20:00 | imc
Israeli regime continues it's slaughter
'The children were completely charred'

Paediatrician Alaa al-Najjar was treating victims of Israeli attacks when her children were killed by an Israeli strike on their home

offsite link British doctors working in Gaza describe territory as a ?slaughterhouse? Sat May 24, 2025 00:23 | imc
There?s no food getting in so people are starving,? surgeon Tom Potokar says
British doctors working in Gaza have described the territory as a ?slaughterhouse,? where the patients they are treating are severely malnourished.

Plastic surgeons and orthopedic specialists from the UK are based at the Amal and Nasser hospitals in Khan Younis in the south of the territory.

Dr. Tom Potokar, a plastic surgeon specializing in burn injuries, has worked in Gaza 16 times but said this mission had revealed a level of destruction far greater than his last visit in 2023,

offsite link It is time to talk about the Out of Control Immigration. Mon Mar 31, 2025 22:12 | imc
For the last few years since the CV19 scamdemic undocumented immigration into Ireland has surged. No one is allowed discuss it because they do not want any rational debate about it. If you do you are labelled an extremist. However this out of control immigration is fully facilitated by the Irish government and the EU and the shady figure behind the Neo Con movement pushing for endless war, wokeism and globalist agenda.

offsite link [Dublin] National Demonstration for Palestine: End Israeli Apartheid & Genocide Thu Mar 06, 2025 22:35 | ipsc
Sat, 22 March 2025, 13:00 Assemble at the Garden of Remembrance, Parnell Square, Dublin 1
The Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign, supported by over 150 Irish civil society organisations, has called another National Demonstration for Palestine on Saturday 22nd March.

The march will begin at the Garden of Remembrance at 1pm and finish outside the D?il on Molesworth Street/Kildare Street to bring our demands to the Irish government?s doorstep.

The Saker >>

Lockdown Skeptics

The Daily Sceptic

offsite link Trump Was Right to Skewer Starmer Over Britain?s ?Windmills Scam? Wed Jul 30, 2025 07:00 | Ben Pile
Trump was right to skewer Starmer over Britain's "windmills scam" when he met him in Scotland this week, says Ben Pile. It was a cringefest worthy of The Office, but Starmer can't afford to ignore the President?s warning.
The post Trump Was Right to Skewer Starmer Over Britain’s “Windmills Scam” appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

offsite link News Round-Up Wed Jul 30, 2025 01:32 | Toby Young
A summary of the most interesting stories in the past 24 hours that challenge the prevailing orthodoxy about the ?climate emergency?, public health ?crises? and the supposed moral defects of Western civilisation.
The post News Round-Up appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

offsite link Starmer to Recognise a Palestinian State Tue Jul 29, 2025 19:30 | Will Jones
Sir Keir Starmer has declared that the UK will recognise a state of Palestine in September unless Israel makes peace with Hamas, in a move critics say treats statehood as a "bargaining chip" and "rewards Hamas".
The post Starmer to Recognise a Palestinian State appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

offsite link The NHS ?Non-Jobs? Bonanza Tue Jul 29, 2025 17:49 | David Craig
The NHS is in crisis. Seven million on waiting lists with junior doctors on strike and other staff eyeing industrial action. So why is it continuing to appoint "Environmental Sustainability Managers", asks David Craig.
The post The NHS ‘Non-Jobs’ Bonanza appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

offsite link Farage Demands Apology After Labour Minister Says He is on the Side of Predators like Jimmy Savile f... Tue Jul 29, 2025 15:32 | Will Jones
Nigel Farage has demanded an apology from Labour Minister Peter Kyle after he accused him of taking the side of paedophiles like Jimmy Savile for wanting to scrap the Online Safety Act over free speech concerns.
The post Farage Demands Apology After Labour Minister Says He is on the Side of Predators like Jimmy Savile for Wanting to Scrap Online Safety Act Over Free Speech Concerns appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

Lockdown Skeptics >>

Voltaire Network
Voltaire, international edition

offsite link Will intergovernmental institutions withstand the end of the "American Empire"?,... Sat Apr 05, 2025 07:15 | en

offsite link Voltaire, International Newsletter N?127 Sat Apr 05, 2025 06:38 | en

offsite link Disintegration of Western democracy begins in France Sat Apr 05, 2025 06:00 | en

offsite link Voltaire, International Newsletter N?126 Fri Mar 28, 2025 11:39 | en

offsite link The International Conference on Combating Anti-Semitism by Amichai Chikli and Na... Fri Mar 28, 2025 11:31 | en

Voltaire Network >>

Mr Kenny: Sexual abuse of children is NOT "human nature"

category national | public consultation / irish social forum | news report author Monday February 10, 2014 15:58author by Grace L - Centre For the Study of Women in Society Report this post to the editors

Ireland's failure to protect Louisa O'Keefe & countless others is not about "human nature":
The institutionalized abuse of children is a social ill, the holdover of a long dark age, from which society is only just awakening.

Mr Kenny: Sexual abuse of children is NOT "human nature"
Discussing Louisa O'Keefe's victory in the European Court, Taoiseach Enda Kenny called child abuse "human nature"

Last week, RTE Radio broadcast Taoiseach Endy Kenny's refusal to give assurances that sexual abuse of children by teachers won't continue, citing "human nature" as the reason.

Yet, after publication of the SAVI report ** (Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland), 12 years ago, "wipespread" molestation of students had less to do with human nature than with the nature of government.
In fact, "...the State had direct knowledge of widespread sexual abuse of children from at least the 1930s..." The State's inaction meant it knowingly permitted the sexual abuse of children to continue unchecked, with impunity.

It is no news to reserchers and activists in this issue, that countless children's natural cries for help were cynically repulsed for decades by an adult conspiracy of silence in church, school, (and sometimes even in parents); structured to conceal these crimes, and to mould children into ideal prey.

It is a truism among feminists that sexual violence is a learned behaviour. Much work, however, remains to be done in addressing the exact nature of that learning process; as well as developing strategies for how that process can be effectively dismantled.

Sexual violence is, at this juncture, a deeply-rooted cultural tradition around the world. Educational programs at the high school and college levels, while certainly necessary, are often confronting youth whose indoctrination in the secret handshakes of sexual abuse has already been long ingrained. Even the important work of confronting and changing institutions is only the tip of the iceberg.

A society based on child exploitation
Child abuse statistics in general, when viewed in the historical context of European marriage customs, should make it abundantly clear: sexual abuse of children and youth is not an unusual aberration in our society. We are only now just emerging from a long dark age in which society has been based on the sexual exploitation of children.

The buying and selling of youth into marriage to the highest bidder, as sexual slaves with no say in the choice of their life partner, was largely the norm in Europe until the 17th century, and had not died out completely by the 20th. In other parts of the world, these practices, and worse, still shamefully thrive. Even where slaves have been technically “freed”, the “tall white mansions and little shacks,” the structural power relationships, tend to hang on unchanged.

It is a system with two massively crippling consequences for society as a whole, even above and beyond the holocaust of individual suffering: First, a social structure in which the only sex that's prohibited is consensual. Where sex is a commodity distributed according to wealth; and where the natural unfolding of healthy youthful sexuality is brutally interrupted and perverted to serve adult agendas.

It is characteristic of such systems to trivialize the sexual feelings and preferences of victims, while deifying those of the exploiter: a mentality we may hear rearing its ugly head in the present debate.

Despite children’s vast capacity to accept and even idealize the worst experiences, to be raped, exploited or seduced by the very adults they must look up to for their basic concepts of good, bad, right, wrong, true and false, is a blow to the budding sense of natural justice common to all rational beings. At a tender age it can bring down the moral threshold to the abysmal low where “anything goes.”

Multiplied by the number of adults abused as children, now and in the future running our world, the damage to our moral progress toward a more just society is profoundly undermined.

When we hear today of the most heinous atrocities (the details of which the reader will be spared here,) carried out by those mysterious death squads roaming the Third World these days, one inevitably asks oneself: Who could they get to do these things? How could they get anyone to do this? Only one answer is possible: they had to get these people as children. (Born out by the astonishing percentage of soldiers, currently forced to serve in the world’s most savage conflicts, at the age of ten and even younger.)

We are only now regaining our in-born consciousness that espousification of children is an unnatural crime, because it violates the most fundamental natural justice. Children need adults to take care of them. They can’t be expected to look after adult needs: adults are too big and children too small for that. That’s not fair.

And as anyone who has followed either the church abuse scandal or child labor issues knows, the excessive burdens of adult exploitation can be fatal to children. Intercourse, with its dangers of disease and pregnancy is at all times a grave health risk. (And every pregnancy endangers a woman’s life.)

This is not the only way of organizing human sexuality. Beyond that Dark Age can be found survivals of healthier traditions; often in indigenous societies, or in pre-Roman systems such as the Brehon laws.

A new approach is needed
All that said, imprisonment is certainly a failed paradigm for dealing with sexual exploitation of children and youth. Not because abuse is "human nature," but because of society's long war on sexual choice for all.
Human sexual drive cannot be legislated away, but only understood, and accommodated with proper respect for the basic human needs of all: not only those of a priveleged few. Otherwise, unbridled abuse of one class or gender or age group by another is the result.
Without sweeping changes in our approach to the problem, adults will continue to exploit youth because they can, in a social landscape which raises more barriers than bridges to consensual relations with other adults. And youth will submit to be exploited, sometimes even without force or intimidation, because grown-ups can persuade them to, and if this is the only source of sex education their elders will offer them.

Public education programs, such as we've recently seen in driver safety and drinking issues, and including comparably well-produced, deeply affecting and high-exposure television spots, might go much further toward preserving youth's sexual health than any threat of imprisonment has ever done.

We must navigate the jungle of hysterical emotion, superstitious hypocrisy and cynical tittering to address the sexual health of society as a whole. We need to talk about these issues until we can do so without blushing and stammering. We need to discuss them with other adults. We need to become educated, and provide education, about how to discuss them with children, so as to serve their needs, rather than ours.

Which will be impossible until our general sexual health affords us the equilibrium to consider something other than pressing, unfulfilled needs of our own, for just a moment.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

** SAVI Report found that 1 in 5 women (20.4 per cent) reported contact sexual abuse in childhood and 1 in 10 reported non-contact sexual abuse. More than 1 in 20 women (5.6 per cent) – over 110,000 – were raped as children; 1 in 6 men (16.2 per cent) reported sexual abuse in childhood, 1 in 14 reported non-contact abuse; 2.7 per cent of all men were subjected to penetrative sex (anal or oral sex) in childhood.

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