The packing list came in the mail about three weeks before camp.
Sleeping bag. Flashlight. Bug spray. Bible. And then a section on clothing, with rules in it, measured in fingertips and finger widths and inches. If you compare the boys’ list and the girls’ list from the same camp in the same year, one of them is noticeably longer.
That list went out to fourth graders.
Purity Culture Effects on Children Can Begin Years Before the Rings
Most people date this to tenth grade, to the pledge card and the ring and the retreat, because that is where the language finally showed up. The groundwork was several years old by then. It went in through clothing rules, at an age when nobody was saying the word sex at all.
What the Rules Taught Before Anybody Mentioned Sex
The rules themselves often looked ordinary. Plenty of institutions have dress codes, and plenty of those have done harm of their own, so the trouble is not that a rule existed.
What made these different was the reason attached. A school says a rule is about tidiness or safety or not distracting the class. These rules came with a theological explanation, and the explanation was about other people. What somebody else might think. What somebody else might struggle with. Whether she was helping or hindering somebody else’s inner life.
Two things get taught that way, and both of them land years before the child has any framework for evaluating them.
The first is that her body is a thing to be managed. Not enjoyed, not lived in, not ignored the way a nine year old ought to be free to ignore it. Managed, daily, with reference to a rule she did not write.
The second is that she is responsible for what other people think about her. That one is the serious one, and it is the reason this post exists.
Women tell me they can still recite the rule word for word. Almost none of them can recite the verse it was supposedly based on.
The Part That Made Children Less Safe
Sit with the second lesson for a minute, because it is worse than it looks and it is rarely named plainly.
Teaching a child that she is responsible for other people’s reactions to her can feed self-blame, and self-blame is one of the things that makes disclosure harder. It is one factor among several. Fear, threats, confusion, loyalty, not having the words yet, and the plain fact that the adult holds all the power are all in that mix, and no single one of them explains why a child stays quiet.
What this particular lesson adds is a head start. If something happens, one of the questions that can surface is what she was wearing, or what she did, or whether she brought it on. That script can arrive before she has any idea where it came from, and a child who has been running some version of it since fourth grade did not have to be taught it in the moment.
That is not the outcome anyone was aiming at. Many of the adults enforcing those rules believed they were protecting children, and a fair number of them would be horrified to read this paragraph. Some of those rules had other things running underneath them as well, including institutional reputation, and both can be true of the same packing list. Week 5 covered how that works, and it applies here as directly as anywhere in this series.
If your child has been harmed, or you think she may have been, this post is not the resource you need. That belongs with a professional and, depending on what happened, with the people whose job it is to receive a report. Do not work it out privately inside the family, and do not start with theology.
Boys Got a Different Version of the Same Thing
Most writing about this concentrates on girls, for good reasons, and it leaves half the audience without much to work with.
The version many boys got was that they were a danger. Not something that might develop under particular conditions. Something already true of them as a category. Their thoughts were the problem. Their attention was the problem. Men were often described as one lapse away from something, and a boy sitting in that room could take it as a forecast of his own next fifty years.
A boy raised on that can conclude that he cannot be trusted with his own interior, which is not a useful thing for a person to believe about himself. It also, and this is the part that connects, teaches him that the girl across the room is a category rather than a person.
If you are raising sons, that material is yours to interrupt as much as any of the rest of it.
What to Teach Instead
The replacement is not a better set of rules. It is mostly plain information and one clear line about who is responsible for what.
Ages 3 to 6. Use the real words for body parts, in an ordinary voice, the same voice you use for elbow and shoulder. Teach her that her body belongs to her and that she does not have to hug anybody, including relatives, including you. And teach the secrets rule early, with the distinction inside it. A surprise is fine and it has an end date, like a birthday present. A secret about bodies, or touching, or anything that made her scared or uncomfortable, is a different thing, and no adult gets to ask her to keep one of those from you. If somebody does, she comes and tells you, and she will not be in trouble.
Ages 7 to 12. This is the age the old rules were aimed at, so this is the age to put the responsibility back where it goes. Say it directly. You are not in charge of what anybody else thinks or feels about you. If a grown-up ever tells you that you are, that grown-up is wrong, and I want to know about it. Say the last sentence more than once, in a calm voice, on an ordinary day.
Ages 13 and up. Give her the honest account, including your own. Tell her what you were taught and how old you were and what you have decided about it since. Then give her accurate information about her body and about sex, from you or from a good book or from a clinician, without shame attached to any of it. Week 42 goes into this at length, and the first part of that work is usually the parent’s rather than the child’s.
One thing to watch across all three. Do not build the replacement around appearance at all. The old system ran on evaluating how a child looked, and a new set of opinions about how she looks is the same arrangement with better manners.
You Are Not Behind
If she is nine already and none of this has come up, you have not missed the window.
These lessons went in by repetition rather than by ceremony, which means they come out the same way. There is no conversation you have to get right on a particular evening. Say the true things in an ordinary voice, more than once, over years, and understand that she will test whether you meant them.
If you find you cannot say any of it without your voice doing something odd, that is ordinary and it is not disqualifying. Say it anyway, badly. She is not grading the delivery. She is finding out whether the subject is allowed in this house.
And she may end up with a stricter view of all this than you have, or a looser one. Week 41 takes up the larger question underneath it, which is what happens when a child is trained that obedience is the highest virtue. That one has consequences well beyond this subject.
Next week we go after the verse itself, the one about children obeying their parents, and what it was doing in the letter it came from before it turned into the architecture of Christian childhood.
About Pastor Brad Jagger
Pastor Brad Jagger is Senior Pastor of Windermere Union Church (UCC) in Windermere, Florida, a community committed to Love Above All. He writes about faith, doubt, deconstruction, belonging, and raising children who never have to be afraid of God.
If you are raising kids after leaving the faith you grew up in, and you want a church where questions are welcome, people are affirmed, and nobody has to pretend to have it all figured out, learn more at windermereunion.org.
Pastor Brad Jagger | Windermere Union Church | Love Above All