Fig Leaf Forum Responds To "The Nudist/Naturist Hall Of Shame"
According to its Web site, the
Nudist/Naturist Hall Of Shame is devoted to "exposing nudism and naturism's
dirty little secrets: pedophilia, swinging, pornography and sexual exploitation."
Web site location: http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/NudistHallofShame
Visitors are invited to review
this Web site before examining the response below. This response was based
on the site as it appeared in August, 2005.
I have been aware of the
Nudist/Naturist Hall of Shame Web site for many years. The owner is certainly
a woman on a mission! I first addressed this site back in Issue 29 of Fig
Leaf Forum (September, 1997):
Regarding...the Nudist/Naturist Hall of Shame, I would offer the following observations. This site contains (1) stories about so-called nudists who were charged with child abuse, child pornography and other related offenses, (2) stories from several people who claim to have been sexually abused within a nudist environment as children, and (3) accounts of various media confrontations concerning child abuse within nudism with which the Web site owner has been involved.While I would be the first to admit that even one incident of child abuse within nudism is one too many, I think we need to take a realistic view of statistics like these. Here we have a list of less than one-hundred individuals who are purported to be in some way associated with child abuse within nudism. Now, compare that number to the over fifty thousand nudists who are members of AANR, and the additional thousands of nudists who belong to The Naturist Society and The National Nudist Council. I repeat again: One case of child abuse within nudism (or elsewhere, for that matter) is one too many, but surely numbers like these ought to give one some idea about how limited this problem actually is.... I rather suspect that the per-capita incidence of this kind of abuse within nudism is likely no greater than in textile society, and it wouldn't surprise me to learn that it's actually lower.
Remember, these comments were
written in 1997. Though the Web site owner asserts that she has "not kept
updating the page since [she] left the movement," she has in reality never
ceased doing so over the years (to see evidence of this, go to http://web.archive.org
and enter http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/NudistHallofShame into their
"Wayback Machine"). Many of the listings on her site are quite recent,
in fact, and she continues to actively seek contact from anyone with information
about cases that would merit inclusion on her site (see "Do you live around
a nudist camp, club or resort or nude beach?" near the bottom of the site's
main page). All of this is noteworthy when considering the size of the
current list of perpetrators and victims when compared to what it was when
I first encountered this site in 1997. In light of her belief that pedophilia
and other forms of sexual misconduct are "disturbingly disproportionate"
for a movement of this size, and in light of the increased vigilance and
reporting that such crimes now receive, one would have expected the total
number of perpetrators and victims in this list to have grown enormously
over the past eight years. It hasn't, and that tells us something very
important about the true scope of this problem within social nudism.
I do not fault the owner
of the Nudist/Naturist Hall of Shame for wishing to bring abuses of this
nature to light. Shameful conduct deserves to be exposed wherever it occurs.
What I do fault her for, however, is the totally negative and one-sided
approach she broadly applies to social nudism as a whole.
As a way of putting things
into perspective, I suggest that doing a thorough Internet search on just
about any widely-recognized
non-nudist group within society would
likely yield more than enough stories of abuse, betrayal of trust and scandal
to populate a Web site just like the Nudist/Naturist Hall of Shame. This
is a very sad reality, to be sure, but it's hardly an excuse for the blanket
condemnation of the entire group solely because of the sins of a small
minority within it. Neither is it an excuse, in my view, for the wholesale
disparagement of the many good people within the group — the majority —
who behave themselves and lead upstanding lives.
If it does nothing else,
the Nudist/Naturist Hall of Shame reminds us that social nudism is not
a miraculous social panacea. Nudists are drawn from all quarters of society,
and sometimes they bring society's problems with them to our beaches, our
resorts and our movement. Action must be taken against such wrongdoing
whenever
and wherever it is found. However, asking good people in the majority
of social nudism to reject any further involvement solely because of sins
committed by bad people in the minority is nothing less than a capitulation
to evil. This would be equally true if the group concerned was part of
"textile" society (where, indeed, most abuses of this nature actually occur).
I am certainly no "apologist"
for pedophiles, child molesters, child pornographers and swingers within
social nudism. Far from it. Their deplorable sins are completely at odds
with the core values and principles that have guided my life as a Christian
and as a social nudist.
Neither, it should be known,
am I a quitter. To put it in more spiritual terms, I do not believe in
a ministry of capitulation or abandonment. I have experienced far too much
that's good within legitimate family-oriented social nudism to easily relinquish
it to counterfeits who participate with evil intent. Christians are to
be "salt and light" to others around us. We simply cannot be an example
of right living or an agent of change for the better if we're only to be
found on the outside looking in.
It has been said that there
are at least two sides to every story. The Nudist/Naturist Hall of Shame
Web site has presented one view of social nudism as its owner perceives
it. Fig Leaf Forum has presented another. It will ultimately be the responsibility
of each reader to determine which "truth" about social nudism will
be their truth, for in the end we will all stand before God as individuals
to answer for what we each have chosen to believe and do in this life.
This response was written by the editor of Fig Leaf Forum. An earlier version appeared in Issue 98.
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