Why do we bring pedophilia to topic on the march 8th?
English (translated) version of our text. The portuguese version can be found in here .
On March 8th, 2020, Sangra collective’s crew went to the streets of São Paulo to add the pedophilia survivors’ voices to the fight of working class women. It is very important the rape of girls being on topic on the international women’s day because the forced reproductive work of girls was responsible for Brazil’s demographic explosion in the past century, and this story has not yet been told as it should. Both governmental and non governmental institutions have been treating pedophilia in a depolitized, liberal way, assigning the “desire to rape children” to a mental disease, or even to a sexual orientation, as if this “desire” had its origin in the mind camp of “sick individuality” or in an “individual sex fetish”, paralel to the heterosexual norm, when in fact, this very “desire” was the engine of the country’s modernization and industrialization, being intrinsic to the heterossexual political regime. By analyzing the story of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers, we’ll come to the conclusion most of them were impregnated as a child or adolescent, in the middle of Brazil’s modernization, which happened justly in the moment the country borders’ were open to white immigrants by the then dictator Getúlio Vargas, because eugenics was believed to be a model of both civilization and progress for the nation. Which means girls were raped, impregnated and taken as domestic slaves, as a legitim way of family’s formation. It was such a common practice that such act was legally ampared, because in the article 107 of the 1940 penal code the punishment for the crime of rape was extinct in case the rapist agreed to marry his victim.
This pact, still little debated in the movement for women’s emancipation, a pact between men and the State, was for a long time called “good manners”, but it was the power of a father all along, that is, the collective property power of men over women, institutionalized by the government. The “good manner”, moral control for the human female and moral permissibility for the human male, means maintenance of the female sex as property of their father or husband. One of the pact’s darkest sides institutionalized child marriage in Brazil as a policy, at the beggining of the 20th century, configurating the collective sexual hierarchy of one sex and the State over the other. The kidnapping and forced impregnation of girls became a habit, and so, entire generations were originated. Black and indiginous girls were raped by european immigrants and their descendents, forcing upon these girls the miscegenation and ethnocide. White girls were also raped by white men, but as a way of raising the white population’s number. When we affirm white men raped all ethnicities of women and girls in Brazil, we do not want to imply black and indigineous men did not practice such violence over time: we want to give visibility to the fact that the only ethnicity that raped as a way of exercising race supremacy over the others was the caucasian, which is a fundamental, yet invisibilized, trait of eugenics. The rape-based policy forced into indigineous, black and white girls generated domestic labor to the families and to the factories as well, making it possible that the heterosexual family generated through domestic exploitaition of females, free time for men to produce economically while women were sexually and laborally ensalved. This exploitation hierarchy of men by the industries’ owner and of the girl by the men — without forgetting also of the exploitation of indigenous and black or white working class women by the white heiress — therefore promoted the enrichment of industries owners, the generation of PIB and wealth concentration, lands and properties on the hands of the white, male elite.
In that way, we, as members of Sangra Collective, have the comprehension of the necessity to fortify the perspective of daughters, granddaughters and great-granddaughters of survivors, by defining pedophilia as a political project. We take a position contrary to the liberal logic — which analises the problem by an individual perspective — giving place and form to a radical analysis, that is, analyzing what’s wrong by looking at its root, understanding pedophilia as a practice is far from being executed in an individual sphere, being in fact a collective practice that maintains the power of men and the State over women in the most coward way possible: targeting child wombs, because girls are more easely manipulated and domasticated than adult women. Brazil is the 4th country in the world when it comes to child marriage, and not because the country’s masculine half is insane, ill, or “perverted”; men, in reality, are being legally ampared by the State, by laws and by their own project of reproductive and ethnic domination.
The domestic labor forced upon women, as we know, creates an economy of approximately 11 trillion dollars a year: this number is bigger than the very high annual profit of the technology market. Girls and women are the ones who sustain the profit in question and all the others as well. The devaluation of domestic labour, as if the kitchen, hygiene and other cares were inferior occupations that need to be done “because of love”, with no financial transaction, has a direct relation to the exploitation of female labor and the production of free time for men to occupy high positions in companies. Pedophilia, in turn, is a political project of ethinic and reproductive control in order to carry out the intergenerational maintenance of female vulnerability through the naturalization of girls’ exploitation, and these girls grow up becoming women who are desensitized from their own reality. We, from Sangra Collective, want to disseminate among working class women the visibility of this story of reproductive and ethnic control as the origin of all labor available in Brazil. A story that has been erased not only from far right, but also by the liberalism of the fake left wing, as if the sexual hierarchy wasn’t a far right policy that persists until the present days.
The sexual hierarchy persists and continues to be configured by the State. The ideology of sexual biological essentialism continues to teach the female sex the destiny of giving birth and obedicience to the male supremacy belongs to them. passivity, servility and motherhood are still considered as a biological destiny of the female class. The private property continues to be considered a biological right of the white male, who’s rarely punished for sexual crimes, having in mind girls and women are seen as male property.
The sexual hierarchy persists and the control’s project still exists. Proof is that Brazil has public politics to protect pedophiles, such as the Parental Alienation Law, but there isn’t any public politics to assist rape victims from intrafamily rape, from child marriage, child prostitution and now from the brand new and each day more crescent form of child sexual exploitation: child pornography. Therefore, bringing pedophilia to topic on march 8th and make it the root of all female emancipation’s movement is a necessecity that each time grows stronger. It is a necessity for any woman who wishes to fight for the true liberation of our sexual class.
Written by Natacha Orestes | member of Sangra Coletiva
Translated by Anya | member of Sangra Coletiva
