Debate Guide: Abuse of language

See Wiki: Newspeak.

While misdefinition and rhetoric may expose some degree of abuse, this article will deal briefly with associations found within phrases (or "slogans") of the CSA advocacy movement.

Abuse of language - for example, Newspeak and phrases with false associations can often be found in the CSA and pedo-hysteria discourses. Contrast, for example with retailers and advertisers taking advantage of retail therapy, which associates spending with a higher state of consciousness.

Now let's look at Child Sexual Abuse ( child | sexual | abuse ).

• Consider each word independently:

• Each of these words is loaded with and defined by present day social values.
• Each of these words has a definite visceral impact. Each pulls at an emotion.
• Yet when we read it out as one, not one of these emotions is triggered per se. We just "know" what CSA is (thru imagery), know that it is "wrong" and know that virtually everyone agrees that it is wrong.

By combining these three highly emotive things (childhood, sex, psychopathy), into a banal, medicolegal concept, we institutionalize a set of visceral reactions within an authoritative belief system.

Broken down into its constituent parts, a term such as ( child | sexual | abuse ) contains far too many overheated social contingencies to be a serious, scientific concept with good external validity. However as CSA, it reads so easily off a page, and we don't have to think twice to know exactly what it is.

You might also want to consider 'sex abuse', 'sexually perverse' and 'sexually violent' along similar lines. If two different things such as sexuality and psychopathy can become rhetorically intertwined, and the phrase is repeated enough, ways of thinking can be altered on a social scale.

See also

• List of obfuscatory terms used by authorities