{"id":17445,"date":"2012-10-24T08:49:32","date_gmt":"2012-10-24T13:49:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=17445"},"modified":"2012-10-24T08:50:18","modified_gmt":"2012-10-24T13:50:18","slug":"frank-furedi-on-the-culture-of-abuse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/10\/24\/frank-furedi-on-the-culture-of-abuse\/","title":{"rendered":"Frank Furedi on the “culture of abuse”"},"content":{"rendered":"

In sp!ked<\/em>, Frank Furedi<\/a> talks about the ongoing investigation into the late British TV personality Jimmy Savile in the context of applying today’s cultural standards to the past:<\/p>\n

Back in 1997, when I wrote my first book on the sociology of fear, I argued: \u2018The theme of abuse has become one of the most distinct features of contemporary Western culture. The frequency with which the term is used and the growing number of experiences that are defined as abusive are symptomatic of the significance of this artefact of contemporary culture.\u2019<\/p>\n

Even in the late 1990s, it was evident that people regarded one another with a level of suspicion that was historically unprecedented. If parents are continually concerned about the motives of carers looking after their children, and if adults must be vetted by the state before they can come into contact with youngsters, than the following question will always emerge: \u2018Who can you trust?\u2019 It is precisely because this has become an unanswerable question that British society will continue to discover more and more Jimmy Saviles.<\/p>\n

The current fascination with abuse is not confined to relationships between adults and children. Any interaction that touches on the emotions, or which involves physical or sexual experiences, can be potentially labelled as abusive. There are claims that \u2018peer abuse\u2019 is the key problem of our time; others demand action against \u2018elder abuse\u2019. And for good measure, the alarm has been raised about \u2018pet abuse\u2019 and \u2018chicken abuse\u2019. There is little resistance to the depiction of most forms of human relationships as potentially abusive.<\/p>\n

The metaphor of abuse has a quasi-religious feel to it, signifying a morally corrupt act which brings about the moral pollution of the innocent victim. The implication is always that, through being abused, a person\u2019s very being is invaded, to the extent that he will never be the same person again. So professionals and experts tell us that acts of abuse inflict a legacy of life-long suffering; they talk about people being \u2018scarred for life\u2019 or \u2018damaged for life\u2019.<\/p>\n

Traditionally, the word abuse meant misuse, improper use, perversion; it also carried connotations of violation, pollution and defilement. In the eighteenth century, the term self-abuse was defined as \u2018self-pollution\u2019. In the twenty-first century, the emphasis in discussions of abuse is not on the pollution of the self but on the defilement of others. The main achievement of the abuse narrative is that it has redefined relations of conflict through the metaphor of pollution. Like the effects of toxic waste, the effects of human pollution are long-term, apparently. That is why many believe that the causes of our present-day distress can be located in the distant past. Memory is believed to have the power to discover the truth that evades us in the present, and so the official inquiry becomes the institutional setting through which the ritual of revelation is conducted.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In sp!ked, Frank Furedi talks about the ongoing investigation into the late British TV personality Jimmy Savile in the context of applying today’s cultural standards to the past: Back in 1997, when I wrote my first book on the sociology of fear, I argued: \u2018The theme of abuse has become one of the most distinct […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,28],"tags":[262,424,42,101],"class_list":["post-17445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-media","tag-culture","tag-morality","tag-sociology","tag-tv"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4xn","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17445"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17445\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17447,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17445\/revisions\/17447"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}