Share Facebook

Twitter

Whatsapp

Mail

Whatsapp Should we move away from a culture that supports taboo?

Taboos have existed throughout history and across cultures. They are forbidden behaviours, whose perpetrators fear the most extreme form of social exclusion if they get caught. What if society could benefit from breaking the culture of taboo? Wendy Zukerman investigates.

How much money would you accept to sell your child?

‘The right answer is not, “How much are you offering?”’ says Harvard’s Professor Steven Pinker. ‘It’d be, “I’m offended that you would ask; I refuse to even consider that question.”’

Unless you understand why people do something, you’re not going to be very effective in getting them to stop.

According to Pinker, the idea of a parent who does not assign infinite value to the life of their child is the perfect example of a taboo—it’s a topic that may not be discussed, considered, or even thought about.

Throughout history and across cultures, taboos have emerged. They are forbidden behaviours, discouraged with fear of the most extreme form of social exclusion. In Australia today, those who engage in paedophilia, bestiality, infanticide or incest are shunned.

Our disgust at the perpetrators of these acts can be so profound that we believe taboos are innate—part of being human. Taboos, however, have changed over the course of history. Pederasty was the norm in the ancient cultures of Greece and Rome. While in the west today female genital mutilation is a taboo, in parts of Africa the opposite situation has emerged: ‘You’re not allowed to not have it,’ says Dr Tane Luna, a gynaecologist working with Doctors Without Borders. ‘You cannot discuss it, it is a fact and you have to go through the process, you’re not allowed to challenge that.’

It appears that the purpose of taboos is to discourage certain acts, but what is the ultimate effect of forbidding these behaviours with such vigour?

‘The history of taboos shows that periods of censorship, whether it’s full blown sanctions or just social niceties, only ever seem to provide a more fertile breeding ground,’ says Kate Burridge, a professor of linguistics at Monash University and author of Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language.

According to Burridge, when laws against blasphemy and profanity on the stage were introduced during the Renaissance, artists merely became ‘more cunning’ with their heresy. So-called ‘disguised language’ emerged. Instead of saying ‘God’s wounds’, words such as ‘Zounds’ appeared. ‘Every part of God’s anatomy was sworn upon, but always done in heavy disguise,’ she says.

From the relatively benign banning of words to once-unmentionable practices of sexual abuse, we now have centuries-worth of evidence showing that taboos do not stop behaviours.

Read more: The psychology of paedophilia

Dr Amy Lykins, a clinical psychologist and human sexuality researcher at the University of New England in Armidale says the taboo around paedophilia has also increased the likelihood that people will offend.

‘It has meant that those who feel sexual desires towards minors have no place to seek help, and that increases the risk that they’ll act out on those feelings,’ she says.

If we cannot discuss the sexual abuse of minors, how can we protect children and confront the difficult questions that paedophilia poses: why are people attracted to minors? Do paedophilic tendencies have origins in the brain? If attraction towards minors is not a choice, how do we deal with it?

According to Pinker, answering these questions will help prevent further abuse. ‘Unless you understand why people do something, you’re not going to be very effective in getting them to stop,’ he says. ‘You’ve got to be clear that the morality and the science are two different things; we can understand what makes paedophiles do their thing, and still condemn it as exploitation of the child.’

Despite this, the power of taboos trickles into laboratories, and can make it difficult for scientists to research certain areas. Pinker describes a ‘built-in tension’ between scholarship, science and society’s taboos: ‘If you’re a committed scientist or an analytic scholar more generally, you want to understand how things work; there’s no idea that cannot be thought. So the value that certain ideas may not be thought pushes in the opposite direction to scientific enquiry.’

‘[Scientists through history] have found themselves at the wrong end of societal taboos and have found themselves the target of moralistic outrage,’ says Pinker. In ancient Greece and Rome there was a taboo against desecrating the bodies of the dead, but early anatomists broke the proscription to probe flesh and reveal the workings of the human body.

Given that harm can be reduced, how do we move away from a culture of taboo? Professor Kate Burridge isn’t sure that we can. ‘We will never lose taboos,’ she says.

‘[Taboos are] a little bit like glue that sticks members of a society together,’ says Burridge. ‘So we’ll always have these for that reason I think—solidarity.’

Some may find it disappointing that taboos persist, not to protect people, but to bind the majority. Still, perhaps we’ll find a time in the future where we start talking about these dark corners, as uncomfortable as they may be.

Future Taboo Listen to the full episode of Future Tense to find out more about the history and future of taboo.

Exploring new ideas, new approaches, new technologies—the edge of change. Future Tense analyses the social, cultural and economic fault lines arising from rapid transformation.



