Here is Richard Seymour, writing in the wake of the Jimmy Savile revelations, in 2012:
The politics
To satirise a familiar way of speaking, one might say there is a problem with the culture and values of a small minority of rich white men, whose habitus and socialization have inclined them to see preying on the vulnerable, children or the mentally ill, as simply a part of their way of life. It is a culture of entitlement, the ability to dispose of others simply a part of their birthright. This might even sound vaguely plausible, more so than when the pseuds were offering glib insights into the quirks of Pakistani culture to explain the Rochdale child abuse scandal. But it doesn't really tell us anything.
'Paedophile' scandals in this country are strangely both hysterical and complicit. By this I mean, they often add garish embellishments, target innocent people, totally mislead the public about the real nature of the problem, exaggerate, racialise, etc. And yet the real underlying problem, which is that most rape and other abuse of children takes place in the context of the family, is neglected or repressed, and thus perpetuated. The problem is presented as one of individual weirdos, Mac-wearing loners loitering outside school gates, strangers who persistently seek out and prey on vulnerable children. This has led to all sorts of real witch hunts, as people seek out this obscure figure: windows being smashed, people being hounded and burned out of their homes, or killed - anyone who seems a bit 'weird', whether because they're mentally ill or just seemingly a bit odd. It certainly wouldn't be out of character for people in this country to target gays under the self-righteous guise of purging nonces, beasts, paedos, and so on.
Moreover, there is a certain strand of right-wing politics in the UK, sometimes with a decidedly Ickean flavour, that is always bellowing about paedophile rings in the heights of power. They now stand 'vindicated' to a certain degree, like the proverbial stopped clock. The only social structure they are interested in is the network of conspiracy and, insofar as it segues into this, the institution. Institutions and networks of power are exactly what are most palpably collared here, so cases like this give these reactionaries a fresh wind. Of course, the details of illicit networks and institutional complicity must be investigated and understood, but this has to be distinguished from and articulated with structural causation.
The question then is whether, instead of hysterical and complicit, we can have an approach that is historical and literate. Instead of infotainment, which reinforces moral panic, repression and witch hunts, can this particular scandal be pushed toward a more adequate structural analysis, a focus on power relations - not just in their institutional embodiment but in their systemic logic?
Feminist analysis offers some ways forward here. I referred to the concept of 'rape culture'. This has always seemed to me quite nebulous, incorporating an incredibly diverse array of practices and significations that contribute to the normalisation, rationalisation, and implicitly justification of rape, under one indeterminate conceptual canopy. It is perhaps a concept 'under erasure'. It stands in for something else more definite, something for which we don't yet have a term, so we must use it. And the advantage of it is that it doesn't identify its problem as individuals or institutions, but by addressing practices governed by social structure, it adverts to social relations. It identifies rape, in this respect, not as an isolated moral offence, but as a form of terror within a systemic context of subordination and domination (in this respect it is "like lynching", Catherine Mackinnon suggested - albeit most rapes are not collective or public symbolic actions). It identifies the axis of domination as patriarchy, a concept that I think historical materialism is quite right to annexe.
Why patriarchy? We understand that classes are reproduced not only in workplaces, but in communities and homes. The domestic space is as critical to reproducing labour as the market place. The sexual reproduction of labour takes place in families. There, gender ideology is conveyed as the primary form of socialization. There, patriarchy is experienced in its most direct form as the political, economic and ideological control of women and children by husbands and fathers. I am not saying that this adequately characterises how all families work today. Molecular economic change, social democracy, neoliberalism, the feminist movement, and so on, have all transformed the nuclear family unit and relationships between men and women in various ways. And families look very different in different class contexts. Moreover, while capitalist production relations prohibit other family types, they do not actively encourage the traditional nuclear family. The wage system cannot provide the security needed to support such families. This is where political and ideological superstructures come in, and where the social wage is indispensable. The point is that patriarchy is a paradigm of sexist oppression (not the only type) rooted in the family forms and gender ideology of capitalism, and it is involved not only in sexist oppression but in the organisation of families as productive units and property forms, the formation of gender roles in children, and so on. The concept of patriarchy thus grasps conceptually the relationship between families and rape which the empirical data already supports.
The extended reproduction of gender roles, of gendered labour and gendered property, necessarily takes place outside of families, in what one might call the 'ideological state apparatuses' - schools, media, political parties - and to a lesser extent in the 'repressive state apparatuses' - police, courts, armed forces, etc. Each of these apparatuses are sites of struggle to different (very different) degrees, but the dominant ideology within them so far as women and children are concerned will reinforce and abut patriarchy. The social categories produced in official statistics, policy documents, media representations, court judgments, law statutes and so on would consistently reproduce the extant gender relations except to the extent that ongoing struggles inscribe their effects (which they constantly do).
Even within such a general way of talking about the subject, however, it would be a mistake to ascribe too much unity to state discourses. At a certain level, the state is a 'centralised unity', inasmuch as the executive is in a privileged position to unify and cohere fissiparous apparatuses. But a degree of relative disarticulation, and room for internal struggle (produced by the social division of labour within the state, by its hierarchies, and dysfunctions), localised initiative, illicit action and so on, must be included in this picture. Some apparatuses of the state, some 'social categories' working in it, (say police, judges, etc) will have quite a different role in the reproduction of gender, and the socialisation of children, than others (say nurses, teachers, etc). The upholding of a general discourse and ensemble of practices that subordinates women and children, then, allows for quite different implementations depending on the context.
But it also, in various sites of power (as we have seen, hospitals, schools and care homes), reproduces that subordination in such a way as to facilitate the organised sexual coercion and exploitation of those who are most vulnerable. And this vulnerability is not chiefly physical, though it may seem to be. It is not even mental, where the victims are cognitively out-matched by the predators. It is mostly a 'status' vulnerability. These are people who are accorded a low esteem in our society, whose word means little even when they can speak up, whose suffering is of little importance to those in charge of them. Their disadvantage is not just physical or mental, but based on class, gender, race, ability and so on. They lack social power, and this is what makes them potential victims. A corollary is that although most child rapists are not senior politicians or celebrities, with policemen and other politicians abetting them, or journalists indulging them - as I say, it is mostly family members using the social power over children at their disposal condensed within the family form - those who can systematically organise to rape children over a long period of time will tend to have a great deal of social power.
This social power would do a lot of their work already: yielding 'consent' where it is sought, ensuring the silence of the victims, gaining complicity from others who could have said something (one thinks of the family who have reacted so bitterly to one of their relatives complaining that 'Uncle Jimmy' was allowed to molest her in their presence), extracting purblind ignorance from some (the headmistress of the school who is now bitterly lambasting former students as troublemakers for alleging abuse at Savile's hands), gaining the benefit of the doubt or jovial indulgence from some, and so on. This social power is sometimes alluded to in the language of privilege. I have reservations about this - it doesn't seem remotely adequate on the one hand, and on the other doesn't seem sufficiently differentiated. Nonetheless, the concrete effects it is alluding to, the intersectionality of class, gender, racial and other power relations, are important and account for some of its resonance. And this is how we have to see the power of the rapist, and particularly the child rapist. The esteemed 'family man' may have patriarchy on his side, but you have to be Jimmy Savile or someone like him to have the police, journalists, politicians and others covering up your trail of sexual violence.
So, this is not just about 'paedophilia' and 'paedophiles'. That way of talking about the problem won't do any more; the language is too corrupted, even if it might mean something as a clinical category. Nor is it just about an elaborate (endlessly entertaining in its disclosure) conspiracy. It is about the organisation of society in ways that reproduce such subordination, that legitimise it, and that empower people to exploit it.
