Ethics and the Endangerment of Children’s Bodies

286 Pages·2017·3.62 MB·English

by  Günter Graf

Ethics and the
Endangerment of
Children’s Bodies
Gunter Graf &
Gottfried Schweiger
Ethics and the Endangerment
of Children’s Bodies
Gunter   Graf • Gottfried   S chweiger
Ethics and the
Endangerment of
Children’s Bodies
Gunter   Graf Gottfried   Schweiger
Centre for Ethics and Poverty Research, Centre for Ethics and Poverty Research,
University of Salzburg University of Salzburg
Salzburg , Austria Salzburg , Austria
ISBN 978-3-319-40212-3 ISBN 978-3-319-40213-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40213-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016954255
© Th e Editor(s) (if applicable) and Th e Author(s) 2017
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Acknowledgements
Th is is the second book that we have written together and we can more
or less replicate the acknowledgments of the last one. Th is book is the
product of hard work over a long period of time. We thank our colleagues
with whom we discussed our ideas and arguments and who helped us to
write a better book. In particular we want to thank our dear colleague
Mar Cabezas for her support, her help, her thoughts, and her encour-
agement. Without her this book would not have been possible. We also
want to thank our home institutions, the Centre for Ethics and Poverty
Research (CEPR) at the University of Salzburg and the international
research center for social and ethical questions (ifz). We received much
support from these institutions and the people working there, especially
the current head of the CEPR, Andreas Koch, and its former head and
current deputy head, Clemens Sedmak. Th ey supported us to pursue this
work over the past months and we hope that the product justifi es their
trust in us. We also thank the reviewers, who provided us with helpful
feedback. We further thank the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) for fund-
ing our research project “Social Justice and Child Poverty” (P 26480).
Although the issues in this book extend the focus on child poverty, we
see it as a natural part of this project, not only because poverty is one
important social factor for the violation of children’s bodily integrity.
v
vi Acknowledgements
We also want to thank the people at Palgrave Macmillan, Grace Jackson
and Brendan George, who supported this project. Finally, we hope that
our work is a contribution to the philosophical discussion but also helps
to make the world a better place for children.
Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Children’s Bodily Integrity: Justice and Child Well-Being
in Affl uent Societies 19
3 Body and Eating 77
4 Body and Sexuality 143
5 Body and Violence 207
6 Conclusions: Ethical Policies for Safeguarding Children 265
Index 281
vii
1
Introduction
Th is book is concerned with the endangerment of children’s bodies in
affl uent societies. It aims to analyse and address injustices that threaten
the b odily integrity of children and to discuss the societal responsibili-
ties that follow. Children’s b odily integrity is an important part of their
physical and mental well-being and well-becoming .1 However, it can be
severely violated through various threats during childhood. Children’s
bodies are particularly vulnerable and bodily damage not only aff ects
children’s short and long-term physical health but can also cause mental
damage and lead to distortions in the development of the self. Th is book
comprehensively reviews and criticizes these violations of children’s bodily
integrity, with the aim of contributing to our understanding of them as
forms of injustice, and hence moral harms. It is as such a philosophical
book on ethics with a normative scope and not a piece of quantitative
scientifi c literature that presents original empirical data. In this introduc-
tion we will answer two questions before giving a brief overview of the
structure of this book. Th e questions are: What are our aims and what do
we want to achieve? How do we proceed in order to achieve them?
1 We will defi ne both terms in the next chapter.
© Th e Author(s) 2017 1
G. Graf, G. Schweiger, Ethics and the Endangerment of Children’s
Bodies, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40213-0_1
2 Ethics and the Endangerment of Children’s Bodies
1.1 T he Aims and Scope of this Book
Our book is focused on ethics and thus our main aim is an ethical one:
we seek to clarify what is morally wrong about the violation of children’s
b odily integrity as it happens today in affl uent societies. Th is is a very
broad fi eld of enquiry and thus we decided to focus our discussions
around specifi c examples of violation. We have clustered these examples
around three topics: eating, sexuality, and violence. Within the topic of
eating we will focus on obesity and eating disorders, within sexuality we
will focus on sexualization and sexual abuse, and, fi nally, within the topic
of violence we will focus on physical abuse and violence between children.
We are well aware that these topics only represent a small selection within
the broad of fi eld of injustices that children face today. We selected these
topics in order to have enough room to examine them in detail—our aim
for depth—but also to cover a spectrum of the threats to bodily integrity
that children face—our aim for width. With our selection, we do not
make any judgement regarding the ranking of severity of these viola-
tions, in the sense that we view them as more severe than, for example,
child poverty. However, as we will show, all the chosen topics represent
in themselves severe injustices in that they violate the bodily integrity of
children and cause long-lasting eff ects on their well-being. Th at makes
them worthwhile subjects for a thorough ethical evaluation, with a strong
focus on counter-measures to secure and protect children from them. We
assume that most readers will agree that obesity and eating disorders, the
sexualization of childhood and sexual abuse, as well as physical abuse and
violence between children, all constitute a moral imperative, and that
we, as individuals and as societies, ought to do something about them.
Why then write a book about something where we fi nd almost universal
agreement? Should we have not focused on moral dilemmas which divide
opinion, or issues that are underrepresented in the literature, that people
care less about?
Our answer is twofold: the fi rst part refers to the fact that even though
there is universal agreement that these violations of children’s bodily
integrity are immoral there is a philosophical need to substantiate this
common understanding. Th is is especially important since we fi nd that
the answers become more diffi cult as one looks closer at the details. Also,
1 Introduction 3
within the moral consensus on children’s bodily integrity we can fi nd
many questionable assumptions, for example about the nature of child-
hood, the value of the family, and the tasks of the state. A philosophical,
in this case ethical, examination digs deeper into the human instinct and
aims to present a coherent and detailed argument as to why these issues
represent violations of bodily integrity and what moral responsibilities
follow from this. Th e second part of our answer is that especially in regard
to the responsibilities and obligations that come with these injustices it
is very likely to fi nd disagreement in the public view and also among
policy makers (and philosophers). Yes, most will agree that a child that is
sexually abused is wronged, yet what follows from that? Most will agree
that the perpetrator should be punished, but what other claims does the
child have? Does the state have an obligation to compensate the child and
support him or her throughout his or her life? Furthermore the causes
are disputed: can we really claim that child abuse is detached from the
societal environment in which it happens? What responsibilities of pre-
vention exist? How do we balance such prevention measures with other
values such as privacy? To say that the violation of children’s bodily integ-
rity is morally wrong is only the fi rst part of the answer that we need to
give, and the issues go beyond that. Over the course of this book we will
show that affl uent societies fail children in many ways, and this cannot be
attributed only to the anomalous misbehaviour of individuals—rather, it
is the society, the state, and its institutions that fail children on a large
scale. Another issue that we are interested in is to critically examine the
moral panics that surround children’s bodies in modern affl uent societies.
A n ethical evaluation of any kind demands the existence of an ethi-
cal framework which is based on normative reasoning. Such reasoning
is distinct from all other scientifi c enquiry when it comes to its rela-
tion to the real world. As Onora O’Neill—as well as many others—has
suffi ciently argued, normative theory is interested in the world because
it wants to change it and not to explain (“Erklären”) or to understand
(“Verstehen”) it (O’Neill 2 009 ). Furthermore, while for all other lines of
scientifi c enquiry the world can be used to test underlying assumptions
and theorems, this is not possible for normative principles. Such princi-
ples are not falsifi ed if the world is diff erent. Nonetheless, the relationship
between ethical theory and the real world is not a one-way street, in that