Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Michael Keefer
John Fekete's Moral Panic incorporates three distinct literary genres: it is at once a
jeremiad, a martyrology, and (somewhat less obviously) the testament of a strong cultural
theorist fallen among neoconservatives. My own reactions to the book are no less
multiple: they include respect, exasperation, and (since I remain an admirer of Fekete's
previous work) a certain sadness. This book, I would insist, merits close readingnot
least by those who will find themselves, as I do, in sharp disagreement with most of its
conclusions. However, Moral Panic also exemplifies to an embarrassing degree the very
condition it sets out to analyze. And, since its arguments are marked by serious and
systematic failures of understanding, the book cannot be accepted as an adequate guide to
the complex issues with which it engages.
In his first chapter, Fekete informs us that Politics has historically begun where
biological factors and the demands of the body give way to the common concerns of a
cultural community, a body politic (22). What he calls biopolitics is thus by definition
a kind of anti-politics, a regression from politics to a new primitivism which promotes
self-identification through groups defined by categories like race or sex (22). This
rhetoric, it would not deserve our attention. However, Fekete's charge that Biofeminism
has much to answer for, for hijacking the discourse of women's 'liberation,' diminishing
and redirecting the concept of liberation to aim at 'equity,' and deforming and abusing the
goals and practices of equity to assault all the libertarian principles that could provide
meaning and moral value to it (14) is backed up by five chapters that criticize recent
studies of violence against women, and by a further three that explore the impact of
feminist advocacy on Canadian universities.
The main target of Chapters 2 to 6 of Moral Panic is the 1993 Report of the
Canadian Panel on Violence Against Womenwhich as Fekete demonstrates engages in
statistical panic-mongering on a grand scale. For example, the Panel's claim that 80% and
50% respectively of Canadian Native girls and boys under the age of eight are sexually
molested turns out to be derived at third hand from an estimate by one physician
practising in the Mackenzie Delta (122-30). The no less distressing claim that 83% of
disabled Canadian women will be sexually assaulted during their lifetimes is again
derived, at several removes, from a single source: a study that reports interviews with
fewer than three dozen institutionalized mentally handicapped women in California (13844).4 And the report from which the Panel drew its most sensational resulta lifetime
prevalence figure for sexual violation of 98%is revealed to be both incomplete and
methodologically chaotic (147-61).
Fekete's work in tracing these and other instances of irresponsible generalization is
clearly valuable. However, his own wrestlings with statistics need to be approached in the
same spirit of intelligent scepticism (40) that he recommends we bring to the work of
social scientists. Fekete is right to note errors like the one by which prevalence figures for
rape (26%) and for attempted rape (20%) in an American study were transformed in a
Canadian pamphlet to the information that 47% of all women will be raped in their
lifetimesthus doubling a rape figure that is arguably already too high (44, 48-50).
However, when he turns to consider claims as to how many charges of sexual assault and
rape are falsehe cites figures of 14%, 40%, and 60% (the latter derived, at second hand,
from an investigation conducted by the U.S. Air Force)the scepticism he applies to
other cases in which one might suspect ideologically driven statistical inflation is quietly
4 Not content with generalizing from this tiny sample to the Canadian population at large, the Panel
subsequently inflated the prevalence of sexual abuse figure to 90% in its training video Without Fear
(144-45). (The term prevalence in crime statistics refers to the percentage of a population victimized
in a particular manner over a long period, which may range from ten years to a lifetime; incidence
figures indicate the percentage of a population victimized in a given year.)
7 Leon Kamin, Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics, in Russell Jacoby and Naomi Glauberman, eds., The
Bell Curve Debate (New York: Times Books, 1995), pp. 102-03. Gross's article is The Case of Philippe
Rushton, Academic Questions 3.4 (Fall 1990): 35-46. Academic Questions is the journal of the
neoconservative National Association of Scholars, an organization of which Gross is Treasurer.
8 See Breaking Anonymity, pp. 61-170; esp. pp. 137-42.