Debate Guide: Abuse of language

See Wiki: Newspeak.

While misdefinition and rhetoric may expose some degree of abuse, this article will deal briefly with associations found within phrases (or "slogans") of the CSA advocacy movement.

Abuse of language - for example, Newspeak and phrases with false associations can often be found in the CSA and pedo-hysteria discourses. Consider, for example - retailers and advertisers taking advantage of retail therapy, which associates spending with a higher state of consciousness.

Now let's look at Child Sexual Abuse.

• Consider each word independently:

• Each of these words derives much of its meaning from social processes, which vary over time.
• Each of these words means something very definite - at least in a visceral sense. Each pulls at an emotion.
• Yet when we read it out as one, not one of these emotions is triggered on its own. We just "know" what CSA is, and know that it is wrong.

By associating these three highly emotive things (childhood, sex and psychopathy), yet rendering them as a banal, scientific/legal concept, we institutionalize a set of visceral, emotional reactions. Broken down, a term such as CSA contains far too many contingencies to be a serious, replicable scientific concept, however, it reads so easily off a page.

You might also want to consider 'sex abuse', 'sexually perverse' and 'sexually violent' along similar lines. If two different things such as sexuality and psychopathy can become rhetorically intertwined, and the phrase is repeated enough, whole ways of thinking can be altered.

See also

• List of obfuscatory terms used by authorities