Castration En Vogue

Balls at Last! Castration en Vogue

PEJ News - C. L. Cook - The Italian Northern Alliance may have thought themselves ahead of the castration crowd when they tabled a bill in parliament yesterday calling for the castration of rapists, but they''re a little behind the fashion. Judicial Eugenics is already de Rigeur in Africa. -

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Balls at Last!
C. L. Cook
PEJ News, June 23, 2005

Clinging to a fingerhold of humaneness, the "centre-right" government of Silvio Berlusconi condemned a bill introduced by its coaliton partner, the Northern League yesterday calling for the mandatory castration of convicted rapists. The Italian Interior Minister, Giuseppe Pisanu rebuked the NL effort to shape immigration policy based on the alleged crimes of immigrants in wake of recent high profile rape cases in Bologna and Milan.

Sentiment in Italy towards the growing population of ecomonic and other refugees is furtile ground for the NL's expulsory message. It would be easy to discount the NL, but the doctrine of judicial dismemberment comes from more than the fringes of Italy's far-right.

In April, Kenya's parliament unanimously enacted castration legislation in hopes of stemming a perceived rising tide of rape and abuse. In AIDS wary Africa, the 'Sexual Offences Bill' provides legislators the right to lop bits off culprits. Kenya's Health Minister sums it up nicely, citing the scriptures, "If any part of the body causes you to sin, it should be removed."

Far removed from the dusty AIDS wards of Kenya, France's ministerial minions too are hard at work developing a Continental version of "surgically-determined" penal correction. True to their innovative reputation, France has developed a temporarily effective "chemical castration." The approach, explains the French Justice Minister Dominic Perben creates a "chemical straitjacket." Rather than castration, offenders would be periodically injected with a neural-inhibitor. The sublteties may be lost on the patients, though Perben is quick to remind, the prisoners involved in the drug experiments are volunteers.

A couple years ago, AIDS-plagued Zambia suffered an explosion in child abductions and sexual molestations. Activists there have called for castrations in rape cases. A twisted cultural belief that sex with a virgin would cure those afflicted with disease has naturally led to catastrophe.

These parallel yet separate assaults against human dignity in France, Italy, Kenya, Zambia, and everywhere, anathema to the human spirit, remind of our collective failure. It puts under our nose the neglected pandemics in far lands, an economic milieux satsified with the destruction of millions of souls, a necessary price of its privilege, and fear-based philosphy whose only solution is to strike out, spreading the contagion of grief and misery, and yet most turn away still while the horror of this folly escalates.

The Italian retro-fascists may install their revived regime. And, George Bush may maintain a semblance of Reich's gone by, for a time. But the scales of justice, like two unsevered balls, demand balance.



Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, a weekly public affairs program, broad/webcast from the University of Victoria, Canada. He also serves as a contributing editor to PEJ.org. You can check out the GR Blog here.