Children as victims of superstition

Conjecture, bias, superstition, fossilised cultural beliefs, skewed interpretation of the scriptures and information deficits continue to inform attitudes toward new ideas.

Dear Tingasiga:
There are some who were shocked by the news that children were sexual beings just like their parents. Some considered my report that masturbation was a perfectly normal activity even among infants to be blasphemous.

To underline their vehement disagreement, some spared time to call me names, a welcome indicator that the message had shaken their beliefs.
Conjecture, bias, superstition, fossilised cultural beliefs, skewed interpretation of the scriptures and information deficits continue to inform attitudes toward new ideas.
Prejudice conspires against scientific evidence, oftentimes with disastrous consequences. Fear of the unknown is a particularly powerful emotion, made worse by pronouncements by the powerful and influential.

Scientific inquiry is relegated to the shadows. Personal opinion becomes received wisdom, amplified in a market too lazy to engage evidence, preferring to embrace speculation as truth.
We find an example of this in the myths that were engendered by fear of masturbation in 18th and 19th century Europe and North America. One of the experts on the subject published a volume called “The Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution”, in which he assured young lads that continued indulgence in masturbation would unman them and render them “ridiculous to women”.

In fact, all sexual activity, not just masturbation, was considered dangerous to one’s health. Sylvester Graham, the best- known American merchant of this opinion, assured his contemporaries in 1834 that most treacherous of the sexual acts was what he called the “solitary vice”, his term for masturbation. Why, the practice was a guaranteed cause of insanity!

“This general mental decay,” Graham wrote, “continues with the continued abuses, till the wretched transgressor sinks into a miserable fatuity, and finally becomes a confirmed and degraded idiot, whose deeply sunken and vacant glassy eye, and livid, shriveled countenance, and ulcerous, toothless gums, and fetid breath, and feeble broken voice, and emaciated and dwarfish and crooked body, and almost hairless head – covered, perhaps, with suppurating blisters and running sores – denote a premature old age – a blighted body – and a ruined soul!”

There was only one cure for this – circumcision for males and removal of the clitoris for women. Many doctors believed it and brought out the scalpels.

Meanwhile, writing in 1828, Dr. Reveille Parise declared: “In my opinion, neither plague, nor war, nor small pox, nor similar diseases, have produced results so disastrous to humanity as the pernicious habit of masturbation. It is the destroying element of civilised societies, which is constantly in action and gradually undermines the health of a nation.”

Throughout the 19th Century, masturbation was cited as a frequent cause of heart disease, epilepsy, consumption (tuberculosis) and, of course, insanity. A good parent was one who made unannounced visits to his children’s bedrooms in the hope of catching the rascals in the act of self-pollution in which case the recommended treatment was circumcision of the boys or clitoris removal “without the benefit of anesthesia.”

An even more fascinating development came with the advent of the bicycle, introduced in England in the late 1860s.
Dr S.A.K. Strahan, the Assistant Medical Superintendent of the County Asylum, Northampton, England pointed out some “alarming evils” of bicycle riding in the Sept. 20, 1884 edition of the Lancet: “ The pressure upon the perineum must be injurious especially to growing boys. It must cause irritation and congestion of the prostate and surrounding parts, tends to exhaust and atrophy the delicate muscles of the perineum, and also call attention to the organs of generation, and so lead to a great increase in masturbation in the timid, to early sexual indulgence in the more venturesome and ultimately to early impotence in both.”

We look back at these beliefs with incredulity and a knowing smile. Yet the folks back then were as sure of the dangers of bicycle riding and masturbation as many Ugandans are of the horrors of little children doing what we in medicine know to be normal.

None of the above will sway the minds of those who are terrified of new knowledge and better understanding of the human being. Only time will show them that human biology has no racial prejudice.
Only time will reveal to them that denying reality does not change that reality. Only time will reveal that the normal sexual developmental pursuits of children will neither ruin them nor destroy Uganda’s morals.

It took them more than a century, but the Europeans and North Americans eventually discovered that adolescent self-stimulation did not cause insanity or other disease. Science will overturn the myths and superstition that inform a large section of Ugandan society.
My heart goes out to the families of the little girls who were thrown out of Gayaza Junior School. My prayer is that the headmistress will reinstate them to their school.
Dr Mulera is a Daily Monitor
columnist based in Canada.
muniinikmulera@aol.com