Dr. Sophie Lewis, the author of “Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care,” as well as “Liberation and Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family,” recently made the bold and erroneous claim during an interview that the nuclear family is the greatest threat to children’s sexual innocence.
Lewis, who also once penned an op-ed for The Nation titled “Abortion involves killing — and that’s ok!” in which she justified mothers murdering their born children as “necessary violence,” argued that the desire to protect children’s sexual innocence is nothing more than a conservative moral panic.
“The fear that comes with the suggestion of sort of, you know, sexual threat to children, a weaponization of the sexual innocence of the child, is something that back then in the early 80s and still today we do not have a brave, united, kind of left response to, right?” she said. “So when someone gets called a groomer in this weaponized, organized way — the template for which was laid by Anita Bryant in the 80s of the sort of Reaganite campaign of sort of organized homophobia and sort of Christian Evangelical capitalism on steroids, you know, yeah — we lose an enormous amount of movement memory about where the location of sexual violence actually is in the world, right, and in the fabric of capsular social reproduction where the threat to children actually is is the private patriarchal immediate household, right? And when we set up capitulate the sorts of moves that make a kind of threat and a social, you know, terror out of the figure of the queer, we throw out an indispensable component of utopian wisdom.”
While this seems a bit like word salad, it isn’t. What Lewis is claiming is that a child’s parents (their nuclear family) are a greater sexual threat to them than an outside “groomer.”
Katy Faust, founder of the child rights organization Them Before Us, responded to a now hidden tweet regarding Lewis’ comments, saying, “This is literally the most untrue statement you could make about children. A child’s own married mother and father — the nuclear family — are the least likely to abuse and neglect them.”
“Where the threat to children actually is, is the private patriarchal nuclear household.”
This is literally the most untrue statement you could make about children. A child’s own married mother and father- the nuclear family- are the least likely to abuse and neglect them. https://t.co/y7qZinBKgl
— Katy Faust (@Advo_Katy) June 25, 2024
Exposing children to sex-driven events
Lewis wants us to believe that the nuclear family is the societal structure in which children are most at risk of being sexually abused and that the so-called conservative push to ‘make a threat and terror out of the figure of the queer’ is unfounded and goes against her idea of “utopian wisdom.” This is either a statement made from pure naivety or it’s a carefully calculated move to manipulate American parents into sacrificing their children’s innocence for the sexual desires and fetishes of adults.
Abolish the family advocate, Dr. Sophie Lewis, explains that the desire to protect children’s sexual innocence is a moral panic derived from Anita Bryant and that the true threat to children is the nuclear family. https://t.co/gFdIixquSy pic.twitter.com/a3xnRMOD0m
— Melanie Bennet (@finkledusty) June 24, 2024
Either way, American parents are falling for it. Believing they are raising their children to be more sympathetic and loving individuals on a path to this “utopian wisdom” of which Lewis speaks, American parents are exposing their children to a sex-driven culture while their parental rights to protect their children are being eroded. It’s all part of a planned, sex-focused utopia in which children are left unprotected from predatory adults — one that is becoming a reality in states like California, where children can now be sexually abused by adults who might not be penalized at all, under the guise of “consent.”
It is, of course, not an agenda that every person who identifies as gay or trans is behind — as is made evident by the group, Gays Against Groomers — but this threat to children does exist. Lewis is using the new false idea that parents who don’t expose their children to LGBTQ desires are the abusers, and is spreading a bald-faced lie that most sexual abuse happens by way of the nuclear family. She and her allies are the shepherds, she says, while parents are wolves in sheep’s clothing. (This is similar to how the abortion industry paints Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry as the protectors of minors, while portraying parents as those seeking to harm minors; the abortion industry stands firmly against parental involvement laws related to abortion.)
Pro-abortion, anti-family advocates like Lewis claim it to be “fact that child sexual abuse still now occurs overwhelmingly within cisheteropatriarchal family structures…” This is a total fabrication.
READ: ‘The Truth About Sex’: Fatherlessness is a crisis impacting human lives and human flourishing
Who abuses children?
According to the U.S. Department of Justice’s report on Sexual Assault of Young Children as Reported to Law Enforcement, 34.2% of child (children aged 0 to 17) sexual abuse offenders are a “family member” of the victim. That is a tragically large percentage, but it is certainly not the ‘overwhelming’ majority. Nearly 60% of perpetrators are acquaintances of the child. The rest are strangers. Plus, “family member” does not mean immediate nuclear family member. The term “family member” includes uncles, cousins, and distant relatives — and could also include step-family members.
This is a likely scenario behind the statistic that 1/3 of sexual abuse happens at the hands of a family member because research shows that children who live with a stepparent or a mother’s boyfriend are at an increased risk of abuse. Children of divorce and remarriage are twice as likely to struggle academically, behaviorally, and socially compared to children being raised in first-marriage biological parent families. In addition, research published by Ethology and Sociobiology by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson found that “[i]f their parents find new partners, children are 40 times more likely than those who live with biological parents to be sexually or physically abused.” (emphasis added)
Further research noted by The Children’s Assessment Center revealed that children in foster care are at an increased risk of sexual abuse, but children who live with one biological parent and that parent’s live-in partner are at the greatest risk of sexual abuse.
“Family structure is the most important risk factor in child sexual abuse,” it said. “Children who live with two married biological parents are at low risk for abuse. The risk increases when children live with step-parents or a single parent. Children living without either parent (foster children) are 10 times more likely to be sexually abused than children that live with both biological parents. Children who live with a single parent that has a live-in partner are at the highest risk: they are 20 times more likely to be victims of child sexual abuse than children living with both biological parents (Sedlack, et. al., 2010).”
Lewis completely ignores all of the evidence that the nuclear family is the safest place for children to be raised while criticizing the idea that a “queer” living arrangement could pose a threat to children. She prefers a world in which gestational surrogacy is the ideal way to have and raise children (despite a potential risk of sexual abuse), in part because it makes it challenging to pinpoint the “biological mother” with absolute certainty. She argues that wealthy families have the “polymaternal” ideal, with the means to buy surrogates and hire “wet nurses, nannies, ayahs, and mammies.” She thinks this should be the child-creating, child-rearing norm.
But the “utopian” commune-type “family” she seems to envision has been proven an ineffective, dangerous, and often cult-like way for children to live — and she’s trying to walk children right into it.
