Is Lloyd DeMause right that before the 19th century most of the children were severely neglected and abused? He says so in in The Origins of War in Child Abuse.

by EasternEuropeanIAMA

There are a lot of extraordinary claims in The Origins of War in Child Abuse, but I guess just enough truth that I know of, to make the rest at least worth thinking about and researching.

I live in Eastern Europe, I have also spent time in several 3rd world countries working with NGOs and I work in a prison now. So I'm familiar with some practices regarding child rearing that are described in the book. Those would be quite disturbing for any person in Western Europe: infanticide as a tradition (yes, even today), binding of baby's limbs, severe beatings as a standard of childcare, sexual molestation from very early age. I'm not talking about some rogue behavior, condemned by the larger society, but of widespread and widely accepted practices in many communities. These experiences have made me kind of wander if things were not much, much worse centuries ago.

For those of you who are familiar with DeMause's work, how much of what he describes as the lives of children of antiquity and the Middle ages is true?

Mоre specifically, he makes the claim that he has researched hundreds of letters and other document regarding people's relations with their young children and has found almost no evidence of any love and care as we would understand those concepts today. Quite the contrary, he says most documents describe what we would characterize as child abuse, but earlier researchers "sweep it under the rug" or justify and excuse it, for ex. "the father beats his son because he loves him", etc. What's your take on this?

DaSortaCommieSerb

So, I also stumbled upon this DeMause guy a few months back, and while I am no historian, I have rummaged through some of his footnotes, and I can tell you that his scholarship is extremely poor, at least based on the few publications he cites that I can find online.

He does 3 things that are appallingly dishonest and unscholarly, and that's just what I've been able to find out, and I'm just an incompetent student who isn't even studying history:

  1. He uses good sources, but twists and misrepresents his sources in extremely dishonest ways,
  2. He uncritically swallows the most absurdly untrustworthy publications you could possibly imagine, so long as they conform to his monomania, and dutifully conceals from his readers that he has gotten that particular data point from the 1880s equivalent of a 4chan board.
  3. He regurgitates obscenely outdated but popular historical falsehoods that have long been debunked by historians in their respective fields, if they can be instrumentalized to support his narrative.

Just to give you a taste of each of these three things that I have been able to find:

  1. He cites "The Baiga" by Verrier Elwin to claim that the Baiga completely normalize incest. These are his exact words from "The Universality of Incest": In some endogamous Indian groups, such as the Baiga, actual incestuous marriage is practiced between men and their daughters, between women and their sons, between siblings, and even between grandparents and their grandchildren. “My impression is that most of them have little or no innate repulsion towards incest,” Says Elwin, their ethnographer, the viability of their society disproving by itself all theories about the impossibility of incestuous marriage.
    The rest of the Elwin quote, as well as many anecdotes Elwin goes on to describe, make it clear that incest is a stygmatized exception, not the rule, that there are real social punishments for incest, which are collectively enforced by the community, as well as showing that the community has a decent grasp of sexual consent and the moral depravity of raping anyone, but children in particular.
    At least in the abstract, the Baiga believe that incest is a sin that brings on its perpetrators disease and suffering, or invites natural calamities on the society that tolerates it.
    The book is available online if you want to rummage about it yourself, and I made a blogpost showcasing some anecdotes the Baiga told about incest and rape, which convey a much more realistic and much more humane and sane society than DeMause would have us believe exists among the Baiga. Just scroll downwards until you get to the screenshots from the book which I inserted directly into the blogpost. It also contains a lot more general debunking, but it's very poorly organized, since I respond haphazardly to various claims of DeMause's made in various pieces of his writing. I only critiqued where I could get my hands on his sources, which only happened on occasion.
  2. He claims that doctors once advocated for fathers to "have sexual intercourse with their three-year-old girls “in order to familiarize them with carnal matters"."
    His source for this particular claim is: A Woman Physician and Surgeon, Unmasked, or, The Science of Immorality. Philadelphia: William H. Boyd page 88.
    Now, this book really does claim this, but it cites absolutely no names, no specifics beyond "it happened in New Orleans" no witnesses by name, absolutely nothing. We just have the anonymous author's word for it. This is generally the level of DeMause's scholarship, and it's bad enough, but when you actually rummage through the book, you will find an absolute plethora of comically inaccurate absurdities which reveal it was written by someone who had absolutely no idea what they were talking about.
    Basically, at the very beginning of the chapter DeMause cites, which is entitled: "Social Evil" the anonymous author lays out her theory of sexuality, work and morality, which sounds like it was made up by a 12-year old boy from 4chan, occasionally blending with some sort of superlatively anti-sex feminist: "Women spread their legs for easy money, but this damages their brains and "nervous powers" making them ever more incapable of productive work. Also, dresses compress blood-flows unnaturally, which causes lots of blood to go through womens' vaginas and wombs, which also makes them, like, super-horny. And they also become super-horny and sex-crazed if they don't constantly wash their pussies... while also avoiding all stimulation of them!
    Oh! Oh! I almost forgot, when men cheat on their wives, with younger girls, the hornieness infects their nerves, which then infects their wives through sex, which makes them insane. And this guy called Barnum paid some worn-out hookers to get fucked by horses, and the horses totally fucking died. It happened twice! Trust me bro, I seen it! Also, this one time, a queen from the Pacific Islands grew teeth inside her vagina, to protect herself from excessive dickery. It's just nature taking revenge for the oppression of women, bruh!"
    These are the kinds of publications DeMause freely cites to bolster his worldview.
  3. He rehashes the tired, old idea that everyone was overjoyed to join WWI, that people went happily to their deaths, because dolce et decorum est, pro patria mori, which, supposedly, was a result of social psychosis stemming from childhood abuse*.* Michael Neiberg absolutely eviscerates this idiotic old trope about giddy, suicidal WWI militarism, and explains much better than I ever could that people back then knew how horrific the war was going to be, and were horrified of it, but thought for a wide array of reasons that they were being forced to defend themselves from external aggression.

Again, these are just representative samples from one blog-post I wrote. There's plenty more where that came from in the aforementioned blogpost. And that blog-post is just based on the stuff I found on the internet, before losing interest.

So be extremely weary of absolutely anything you read from this DeMause prick.