Sexual Abuse Scandal Highlights Need for Liberation from Compulsory Education

Reports of sexual abuse of youth footballers by their adult coaches continues to rock Britain, especially since the list of incidences and clubs involved continues to grow. It is crucial that instances of paedophilia be brought to the forefront, and the enabling role played by compulsory education examined. Children are the most oppressed peoples in society and they continue, most often, to lack a meaningful voice, and are routinely and unjustly ignored.

When we consider what makes paedophilia possible, it is not just to do with the physically weaker nature of most younger children compared to grown adults, but it is also to do with the way children have been mentally and socially conditioned.

To draw an analogy, sexual abuse towards women continues to prevail in societies through varying expressions of rape culture; nevertheless, many women (victims and survivors alike) are increasingly coming forth, being open about and protesting against their experiences. However, this was far less common before women gained the right to work, the right to be educated, the right to vote, and other basic legal rights (marital rape being legal, for a long time throughout many countries and continues to remain so in many others). Indeed, this newfound empowerment came only as more women used the freedom to question, to act and to behave as they wanted — after their predecessors and allies suffered, fought for and gave their lives for these basic liberties.

Children, however, are in an arguably weaker position to communicate than women were. This is why it is particularly important to openly discuss and analyse their predicaments. Compulsory “schools” may pride themselves on their delivery of “sex education,” “consent classes” and the general imbibing of “civic morality,” but this is blatant hypocrisy. How can institutions that compel individuals to comply with their requirements be in a serious and legitimate position to educate those same peoples about consent or virtue?

As schools seek to impose a presumed, objective morality and values onto those who are drawn into its parasitic clutches, the captive children are slowly conditioned into being punished and altogether deterred from deviating from the expectations and values of the status-quo power-structures.

If, from childhood, one is forced and encouraged to obey, listen and behave whilst being punished for deviating, the world is conditioning peoples to relinquish expectancy of consent and defacing the moral primacy of free will. As such, it becomes easier for figures with malicious intent (in this case, paedophiles) to prey upon unsuspecting children who may otherwise have protested, resisted and reported such heinous acts. Indeed, many sexual abuse survivors report feeling guilty and are shamed into repeated acts of sexual abuse by the perpetrators who emotionally and psychologically blackmail them. Unquestioning deference to these authority figures is significantly and constantly reinforced through the nature of compulsory education.

Further downstream in society, the effects of such conditioning will adversely affect those who are sexually abused by their peers in higher education, by colleagues in the workplace, by managers, bosses and so on by making it harder for them to speak up. Even though they know what is happening is wrong, the mental conflict occurs in significant part due to the conditioned mindset which encourages acceptance of injustice and submission to flagrant abuses of authority.

If we believe in a society where consensual, voluntary actions begotten of free will should be of central value in relationships, we are setting ourselves up for failure through compulsory education. Anyone who is interested in tackling the roots of paedophelia and sexual abuse more broadly must recognise the formative role that compulsory education plays in perpetuating such despicable behaviours.

The Center for a Stateless Society (www.c4ss.org) is a media center working to build awareness of the market anarchist alternative