| 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://www.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 wrongdoingwhenever 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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