Perverts & Prisons: Madeleine Holden on John Grisham

by Madeleine Holden

The internet throngs daily with bad opinions, but every few weeks an argument will emerge that’s so thoroughly wrongheaded and deeply reprehensible that we’re all forced to engage with it. Last week it came in the form of statements made during an interview with once-popular crime novelist John Grisham. Grisham, in case you missed it, issued a suspiciously impassioned defence of middle-aged white men who are imprisoned for accessing child sex abuse images, arguing that these men are harmless because they don’t physically touch children and should therefore be receiving more lenient punishment; and and if that sounds like an alarming position for a best-selling author and lawyer to hold, that’s because it is. Grisham’s stomach-dropping defence of white sex offenders his age has rightly enraged advocates for child abuse victims (as well as most other basically decent people), and while he has since apologized for his statements in the wake of widespread criticism, the damage is more or less done. Here’s a rundown of the most galling elements of Grisham’s wholly indefensible thesis:

Prisons are full of sixty-year-old white men “who’ve never harmed anybody,” yet receive excessively long sentences for accessing child abuse images.

It is mendacious for any lawyer worth his salt to argue that U.S. prisons are full of middle-aged white men who have been convicted of crimes relating to child abuse images. Any discussion of overrepresentation in the prison population should centre on the well-documented facts: young black and Hispanic men (and increasingly women) are imprisoned at grossly disproportionate rates; many of whom are locked up for low-level non-violent offending and, unlike abusers of children, can genuinely be said to be harmless. A war on drugs, racist stop-and-frisk policies, over-surveillance of black communities, and sentencing double standards all ensure that black kids who behave no worse than their white counterparts are funnelled into and kept within the criminal justice system; and this occurs at rates so alarming and manifestly racist that Michelle Alexander has argued, persuasively and without hyperbole, that the United States justice system is a 21st century extension of Jim Crow-era segregation.

Grisham, however, pays only lip service to the real and pressing issues of racism in the justice system before throwing the full weight of his advocacy behind white men his age who access child abuse images. Grisham claims that prisons are “full of” these men and objects to the way that they are rounded up and labelled as sex offenders, separated from the general prison population “like they’re a bunch of perverts.” (It’s hard to imagine what would counts as a pervert in Grisham’s book, but evidently it’s not old men who get their dicks hard looking at children.) The idea that prisons are packed with middle-aged white men is straightforwardly false (white men are underrepresented in prison compared to the general population, and inmates over the age sixty make up a small percentage of prisoners), but Grisham goes so far as to call his drunken mates who access child abuse images harmless — -upstanding white men who don’t touch kids but who simply sit down with a glass of wine after a long day at the office and jack off to them being abused from a distance. It’s staggeringly irresponsible and downright reprehensible to say that men who access child abuse images “have never harmed anybody”. Sorry to state the obvious, but they caused harm to those children. Abusive material featuring children isn’t created to be sent into a void; it’s created because there’s a demand for it fuelled by the same wine-swilling old white men that Grisham felt so moved to defend. That is, there’s a direct causal link between these “harmless” men and children being abused in a way that make your guts clench to think about, but Grisham thinks that we should treat them more leniently. Which brings us to the next limb of his argument:

We’re not talking about ten-year-old boys, though! Just sixteen-year-old female “wannabe hookers” who “look thirty”, who are easy enough to stumble across if you’ve had too much to drink.

Here we arrive at the most insidious element of Grisham’s argument: that there is a difference between “real pedophiles” who touch ten-year-old boys and his stupid but harmless friends who drunkenly download child abuse images of sixteen-year-old girls. Grisham has no sympathy for the former group, whom he agrees should be locked up, but so long as the victims are slightly older and female, Grisham can empathise with their abusers and would prefer that they avoid harsh punishment. It’s a spectacular failing of empathy for teen girls, who Grisham explicitly posits as less deserving of our protection than young boys, and Grisham tacitly blames these girls for their own abuse by claiming that they “look thirty”, a totally disingenuous and suspiciously flippant claim.

The awful thing, though, is that Grisham’s fanciful distinction between “real pedophiles” and men who abuse teen girls will persuade plenty of people, because we’ve so thoroughly normalised the idea that teen girls are fair game for grown men. We’re all wading waist-deep in a culture that normalises the sexualisation and abuse of teen girls, from the relatively low-stigma schoolgirl fetish, to the glaring age gap between Hollywood leads and their love interests, to countdown sites and public dick-jacking over teen celebrities like Kendall Jenner. We strip teen girls of their blamelessness by insinuating that they “seduce” older men with their youthful beauty, and we offer it instead to the men who “can’t help” but prey on them. We also mix these misogynistic ideas about teen girls with racist tropes about women of colour (black women as hypersexual jezebels; Asian women as horny man-pleasers; Latinas as insatiable sex vixens) that leave teen girls of colour even more likely to be victimised and even less likely to receive empathy. If the men who abuse teen girls are not “real pedophiles”, as Grisham argues, then the implication is crystal clear: Grisham thinks that teen girls are not real victims.

It’s no accident, either, that Grisham labels these teen girls “wannabe hookers”; an effective rhetorical device for further stripping any empathy we had left for them. Sex workers have long been treated as cultural shorthand for the most despicable type of woman: one who decides for herself exactly who she will fuck and on what terms. Whore stigma keeps all women on a tenuous spectrum of respectability, with pure women who fuck only the men who lay claim to them on one end, and prostitutes and other sluts with autonomous sexual habits down the other end. The dehumanisation of sex workers in our society is so routine it’s ambient — from tired dead hooker jokes to newspaper articles which repeatedly clarify that murder victims were “only” prostitutes — -and so if you wanted to argue for your cohort’s right to participate in the abuse of 16 year old girls, you would do exactly what Grisham did: you would lump them in with sex workers, and let the cultural scripts do the rest.

It’s not okay for men to participate in the abuse of children, whether they’re ten year old boys or 16 year old girls. It’s not okay to minimise the abuse of teen girls by relying on cultural tropes that sexualise them and by comparing them to other types of “bad” women who we wrongly believe don’t deserve our respect and care. And it’s not okay to claim that sixty-year-old white men are being persecuted by the criminal justice system; eliding the people of colour who genuinely suffer from its overzealousness. It would be difficult to imagine a less persecuted cohort than middle-aged white men: there’s nary a demographic freer of harassment from police and few can claim the same level of institutional power and representation; from the Senate to the Principal’s office to the Judge’s seat, one finds a lot of men who look like Grisham and his friends. Contrary to what Grisham claims, middle-aged white men are not being over-punished by the justice system, and we should pause when he exhorts us to go easier on those of them who participate in the abuse of children. Our empathy is better spent elsewhere.

Madeleine Holden is a lawyer and writer from New Zealand but currently based in London. She’s on Twitter.