The Politics of Child Abuse and the Legacy of the 1980s in the US and UK

By Dominic Dean

In August 2020, amidst the global Covid-19 pandemic, a series of marches in major American and British cities raised banners demanding ‘save our children’. The marches, protesting alleged elite child abuse, were organisationally linked to protests against lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccines, and other measures to suppress the coronavirus. On 19th August, President Donald Trump coyly endorsed the QAnon conspiracy theory, which holds that Trump (whose first term’s cruelties are often defined, for its opponents, by the mandated abuse of migrant children) is engaged in a secret struggle against paedophilic elites. On 9th September, Netflix released Cuties, a series depicting 11 year-old girls in sexual contexts, provoking condemnation from US Republican figures, in a reaction itself characterised by some liberal publications as a cynical far-Right campaign. 

As those intense few weeks of 2020 suggest, we’re living through a period when child abuse narratives are increasingly prominent in public life, and tend to arise across political disputes and ‘culture wars’ well beyond where they might be expected. Contemporary politics have raised the stakes over the future – a gesture that always brings the child to the political forefront. 

In this blogpost, I’ll argue that these contemporary politics of child abuse are in significant respects a legacy of political and rhetorical treatments of the child established during the 1980s. I’ll suggest why these treatments have endured and been effectively reworked; finally, I’ll propose that their increased extremism tells us something important about the evolution of the contemporary Right and their logic of the child at risk.

These developments form the backdrop to my own research on representations of violence against the child in British fiction from Thatcherism to Brexit. Here I expand the focus to encompass both the United Kingdom and United States, because many of the political and rhetorical dynamics around the child and abuse have been borrowed and mutually reinforced across the Atlantic from the 1980s to the present – beginning with the close relationships between Thatcherism and Reaganism, and continuing with those between Trump, Brexit, and Boris Johnson-era British conservatism.

Today’s American and British Right owes much to the 1980s. Nevertheless, we are now in the future that the dominant politics of the 1980s failed to fully imagine, much as Ronald Reagan’s ‘Let’s Make America Great Again’ slogan laid the seed for, yet failed to anticipate, its Trumpist reincarnation. Those politics combined neoliberalism with nationalist revival, the rejection of consensuses of the recent past, and the retrieval of the future from the Left; yet they did not reach the level of dispute over the essential nature of reality – and over the realities of the emerging future – that characterises politics in 2020.  

How did we get from there to here?

First, it’s worth observing just how far the contemporary politics of child abuse remain shaped by 1980s developments. As has often been observed by others, today’s politics of child abuse echo the 1980s most closely in the Right’s rhetorical associations between child abuse and LGBT minorities. The presentation of the progressive agenda on Trans rights as a palpable threat to children, a threat itself characterised as abusive, is a direct echo of rightwing framing of the gay rights agenda in the 1980s. 

This framing, in both periods, makes reality itself at stake in the future and the child as the future’s living embodiment: The Thatcher government’s legal characterisation (in the notorious Clause 28 of the Local Government Act 1988) of same-sex relationships as ‘pretended’ families exemplifies a rhetorical tendency within Thatcherite and Reaganite conservatism to treat non-heteronormative lives and interests as simply less real than those of the majority. This distinction has been resurrected – and made even more explicit – in contemporary conservative attitudes towards Trans rights, as has the equivalence made between this alleged assault on reality with actual physical and sexual assault. Echoing 1980s homophobia, we see this renewed today in rightwing characterisations of the medical treatment of Trans children (as abuse) and of gender identity (as a fantasy or ideology into which children are indoctrinated).  

In this rhetorical environment, the future, and the child, are matters of truth versus falsehood, of life versus death, rape versus safety; and the child abuse theme condenses all this into a single ready trope.  Why, though, has the Right found this political-rhetorical tactic so useful that it has been sustained it since the 1980s and significantly revived it in recent years? Part of the trope’s efficacy lies in its seemingly non-partisan nature – the refusal of the child should be outside legitimate political dispute. This idea of the child’s rights and interests as above politics – yet nevertheless, in practice, shaping the political agenda – was emphasised in the 1980s, with the Children Act (1989) in the UK, the war on drugs and ‘just say no’ in the US, and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989). In this context, the child who embodies the future is curiously but consistently divorced from intergenerational and historical change – that is, from the future itself as meaningfully different and thus legitimately subject to political dispute.

The queer theorist Lee Edelman, reflecting on 1980s and 1990s American political culture, famously argued that the figure of the vulnerable child, by representing a permanent abstracted future, prevented serious attention to the present and thus to the interests of the adults children would grow up to be, or who used to be children themselves. In this scenario the queer operates as the child’s stigmatised doppelganger, who threatens to disconnect the future from the absolutist rhetoric of salvation and protection. The trope of the child at risk of abuse by forces and figures imagined as queer makes the interests of the future an absolute demand that effectively curtails political difference. Who, after all, could be against the child? Imagining the child’s enemy as queer – or, latterly, as a ‘Trans activist’ – allows the child’s interests to be effectively separated from issues of intergenerational change or the possibility of the future as significantly different to the present.  

Even whilst the trope of the child at risk remains politically central, though, the rhetorical and political use of the child has become more complicated and contradictory in recent years, as conflicts over the ‘reality’ of the future have intensified over issues from climate change, to migration, to gender identity. Today’s Right finds itself positioned against the figure of the vulnerable child rather often, whether in the form of desperately vulnerable refugee children, or of Greta Thunberg making demands for the planet to be saved in the name of her own embodiment of the future.

One way of deflecting this is to present such children as having already been abused by others, such as their parents, leftwing teachers, etc, and thus to retain the child’s figurative, if not practical, role as a moral and political absolute.  In this rhetoric, Thunberg is the child who has been indoctrinated and abused, and thus no longer a child in the full sense, certainly not able to speak simply and legitimately in the name of the future as she claims to do. To be a ‘real’ child, the child has to be natural, organic, unindoctrinated – which is another way of saying that the child is essentially real in ways that its abusers/indoctrinators are not. (This is the long legacy of the Romantic ideal of the child, combined with the Victorian focus on the child as fundamentally moral but vulnerable).  

The combination of these ideas is clearly visible in, for example, the visceral horror several rightwing figures evince towards medical interventions amongst children who are Trans or otherwise experience a non-normative sense of gender identity: These interventions are simultaneously conceived as an indoctrination and an abuse of the child, and as the unwarranted disruption of natural biological processes. This reflects a broader rightwing rhetorical and ideological affirmation of the natural and the organic across issues as diverse as economics, migration, and nationalism and localism.

How has the Right evolved from the 1980s to the present?

As we’ve seen, moral panic about child abuse and its equation with social and educational change is not new, and its modern formulations were in significant respects established during the 1980s. However, the contemporary Right’s rhetoric of child abuse has also moved on from the 1980s landscape in significant ways.

The Right’s organicist rhetoric has become more aggressive and absolutist in the face of an increasingly contested future, as seen in conflicts over the realities of climate change, globalisation, and migration; and in a series of crises in the neoliberal economic consensus that prevailed from the 1980s to the late 2000s. As the stakes have been raised over the possibility or necessity of a radical change between the present and the future, the tendency has been to assert – and demand that others, especially children and their educators, accept – a permanent, organic, often nostalgic version of reality.

The focus on child abuse, and the insinuation of a depth and breadth of elite child abuse that is known only to a select group, demands political engagement only in terms of revelation and exposure, not of the competition or negotiation of interests. The abuse, like the child at risk of it, can be only be revealed and recognised for what it is – anything that diverges from this can be presented as indoctrination, or as being duped. This, of course, reinforces the use of the natural and vulnerable child-as-future in the abstract to avoid the material and political need to address intergenerational changes, and fundamental changes to the human future (such as those occasioned by climate change) – that is, to avoid the realities of the child’s relationship with a future that remains disputed, dangerous, and in crucial respects unknown.

This represents a significant recent intensification of rhetorical and political dynamics that were established and emphasised in the 1980s.  One noticeable new element, though, is the intense focus on alleged organised child abuse by an elite, and the merging of wildly unlikely accounts of this (like ‘Pizzagate’) with those that have a factual basis (like the Epstein scandal in the US, or the Savile revelations in the UK).*

The abusive elite is characterised as fundamentally controlling, duplicitous and malevolent in ways that are stereotypical of conspiracist narratives in general and that echo (or sometimes openly assert) anti-Semitic tropes in particular. This accusation against the elite allows the Right to seek power without identifying with power – that is, power without responsibility, which is what organicist discourse ultimately encourages by requiring the affirmation of a natural order, rather than participation in a political and historical process. Anti-elite discourse began as a rather lame rhetorical gambit in the 1980s culture wars, with their attacks on radical queers and the educated, liberal sections of society most comfortable with them, but it is now much more central to Rightist politics – in fact, it is arguably the defining rhetorical feature of rightwing politics in both the UK and the US in the late 2010s.

This all means that people like myself who work on these issues in a scholarly context find our research interests increasingly central to public life, in ways that are simultaneously fascinating and terrifying. The ethical challenge underlying this research is, of course, to insist on the child as certainly at risk of abuse, but also as a figure representing a complicated set of interests – and to insist on the political relationship between these interests and the complexities of the future itself.

*Not only the Right is susceptible to this tendency. The revelations of child abuse by Jimmy Savile – an iconic celebrity in 1980s Britain – and those of other prominent figures of the period led to increasing allegations, during the mid-2010s, of a wider and deeper establishment child abuse conspiracy. The Labour MP Tom Watson pursued allegations against several public figures on this basis, but they were eventually debunked and the effort severely criticised for creating a moral panic on dubious grounds.

References

Michael Lambert, “Realising the ‘child and risk’, crafting neoliberal child protection: the 1989 Children Act,” in Changing Childhoods, 7 July 2020.
Dominic Dean, “Creative destruction: Fears and fetishes of children and the future in late modern Britain,” in University of Sussex CIRCY Blog, 9 June 2020.

About the Author

Dr Dominic Dean holds a doctorate in English Literature (Warwick) and regularly publishes his own research in contemporary British literature and culture, as well as teaching undergraduate classes in related fields in English and the Medical Humanities. He has published widely on these subjects in peer-reviewed journals, including in Literature and History, the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, and Textual Practice. In addition to his own research, Dean is the Academic Manager for REF2021 at the University of Sussex, responsible for developing the academic strategy for the submission and co-ordinating its content. 

Cite this article as: Dominic Dean, “The Politics of Child Abuse and the Legacy of the 1980s in the US and UK” in Changing Childhoods, 12 October 2020, https://changingchildhoods.com/politics-of-child-abuse