From: Louise <malenfant@powersurfr.com>
To: donna laframboise <dlaframboise@nationalpost.com>
Date: Sat, 17 Mar 2001 12:02:35 -0400
[It
appears as if an email titled 'the last word :)' was originally sent by the
reporter and that Ms. Malenfant replied to her by hitting the
"forward" button instead of "reply". (Email programs don't
allow one to forward unsent messages of one's own in that manner. Oddly, however, this "Fw" email
contains no content from such an original; that content must have been erased
by one of these two persons.) If so, this would be a sixth known email from the
reporter to her.] [Next]
Dear Donna
I am wondering why I am so horrified by this book while you are not, and
what I have come up with is that I have read the entire thing. [Whether the reporter saw no grounds at this point to attack me over my book because she hadn't yet read the five pages, or whether her anger at those pages developed only after encouragement from Malenfant, would be revealing to know.] You see, the
first time I read it, it was so filled with mash that, although I knew it
troubled me, I didn't exactly know why. When I went over it again more
slowly, I realized that the tenets FC holds regarding child sex and child
porn are spread in bits and pieces, small ones, throughout the entire book,
so it doesn't have the big impact, and it also doesn't overwhelm the whole
book.
Please don't think that I continue this discussion because of some desire to
get it published, because that is not my reason for being, or for being
concerned about this little treatise. As a person who has studied child
sexual
abuse for the past decade, I know too well that the tenets described
here
are the underpinning rationalizations commonly used to legitimize
pedophillia: child sex is good, children want sex, child
sex is good for
them,
stopping child sex is bad, stopping child sex hurts children, stopping
child
sex causes pedophillia, coercing children into sex is no worse than
stopping
children from having sex, and finally, we should teach children to
have
sex, and show them porn, so that they will not be deprived of having
orgasms
later in life. [I
hope it is clear how these claims distort my words.] [Back]
A rather painful little summary, and my quotes back
up each of these ideas, when you put all of his scattered little bon mots
together in one place. Add to this FC's inability to bring himself to say
that any kind of child sex is bad, even coercive sex is only bad in our
"present social conditions", and what you have is a peon to childhood sex.
When I ran these selected passages by a prominent law professor, he took the
time to let me know that he felt the same way about this book, and he has
also studied child sexual abuse extensively in his career. Perhaps that is
why he and I are horrified by this book.
A final word relating to your comments on the phone: while it is true that
children touch themselves and explore their own bodies in a natural way in
childhood, there is a big difference between this behaviour and the
masturbation that arises following a child's "awakening" - the latter child
who has been introduced to sex will demonstrate knowledge of the mechanics
of orgasm, the dedicated friction required to achieve it, as FC would say,
and this is different, far different than the natural touching of the
average child. Children must be taught the mechanics of orgasm, they do not
come by that knowledge naturally. Indeed, when a child knows the mechanics
of sexual orgasm, it is one of the prime indicators that they have been
awakened to sexuality. Any expert on child sexual abuse will say this. I'm
not talking about teens, here, I'm talking about kids ten and under.
[As
my book says nothing whatever about orgasm in children, this passage
illustrates how wildly Ms. Malenfant
read
things into what I actually wrote.]
The hard and indisputable fact is, that when a child displays sexual
knowledge and the genital fixation consistent with having been "awakened",
they become vulnerable prey to other pedophiles, who look for these children
in their travels. That's all I will say on the subject, and I hope you can
appreciate that I will not stand by and allow a person who holds such views
to continue to represent the constituency of the falsely accused. With or
without the media, his days as a leader in the father's rights movement are
numbered.
Now that we have cleared that up, I am giving great thought to the idea that
I may have allowed my intense hatred of the author to cloud my objectivity;
these ideas are in his book, though, and they do make me very sick. It fits
right in that Ferrel would have so many disturbed cases floating around him
and mixed in with the solid falsely accused cases; since he draws no
distinction between the sexually deviant and the falsely accused, this now
makes perfect sense to me. You know, the last thing I wanted is this
battle; I tried to walk away, but after several months, my conscience and my
duty to the desperate people in family court would not let me. The recent
election was just the absolute limit for me.
Louise Malenfant
Family Advocate
Parents Helping Parents