Brendon Marotta

“The ‘Complicity Principle’ emphasizes that one is accountable for what others do when one intentionally participates in a collective that causes the harm together. One is accountable for the harm we do together, independently of the actual difference an individual who intentionally participates in such group action makes. Participatory intention is intention to act as part of a group in collective action of agents who orient themselves around a joint project.”

– Barbara Applebaum, Being White, Being Good: White Complicity, White Moral Responsibility, and Social Justice Pedagogy.

Who is responsible for systemic social justice issues? While no one person is to blame for society-wide injustices, many people participate in harmful systems. The Complicity Principle is a concept in critical social justice that suggests that although no single individual is responsible for systemic issues, each person who is complicit in a system of harm is responsible for their role in that system.

Take for example the issue of circumcision. Parents say the doctor told them to circumcise. Doctors say they have to circumcise because of their job at the hospital. The hospital says they have to offer circumcision because parents want it. Who is responsible?

Genital cutting is a systemic issue. No one person created the entire system that led to a child being harmed, yet they all were complicit in that system. The Complicity Principle would suggest that everyone, including parents, doctors, and hospitals, is responsible for their role in the system, regardless of how significant that role was to the harmful outcome.

Complicity in a systemic problem can take many forms. For example, suppose a parent tells children that they can’t say no to adults who want to touch them or hug them goodbye and then gets mad at the child when they disobey. If an abuser uses that cultural conditioning to tell the child “you have to let me touch you, or your parents will be mad at you,” is the parent complicit in that abuse? From an individual perspective, no. From a systemic perspective, the cultural ideas they shared contributed to the harm of children, so they were complicit in a larger social and cultural system that lead to pedophilia.

In my book Children’s Justice, I call the system that leads to children being sexually harmed systemic pedophilia. Systemic pedophilia does not describe individual desire but an entire system of culture, ideas, language, institutions, etc. While an individual might not personally harm children, they might be complicit in systemic pedophilia through the language they use, people they contribute money to, or cultural ideas they share.

The Complicity Principle explains why critical social justice activists often speak about systemic issues in a totalizing way. If social justice issues are systemic, there is no neutrality. Every choice either contributes to those systems or doesn’t. When people protest that they personally are not to blame for a systemic issue, they ignore the ways that they might be complicit in that system, even if they have no individual bad intentions. This triggered defensive reaction is an attempt to avoid seeing their own complicity in systemic issues known as fragility, and on the issue of systemic pedophilia, pedophile fragility.

Avoiding complicity in systemic issues requires developing a critical consciousness, which means seeing how every action, idea, or aspect of society you interact with either contributes to systems that harm or creates the better world we all desire. On children’s issues, this means looking at how the larger systems we participate in impact children. It means recognizing that there is no neutral, and you are either complicit or antipedophile.

One challenge I’ve found promoting my new book Children’s Justice is that people want complex ideas in a short attention span. They want mastery of an issue in a 60-second video.

This is literally impossible. Short-form content can communicate an idea, but mastery requires your time. If you want to change social issues that have existed since the earliest recorded history, you might actually have to read a book.

If I could have delivered the ideas I share in Children’s Justice in a short video, I would have done that instead of spending all the time it takes to write a book.

I recognize the need to build interest. It’s why I go on podcasts and write these articles. It’s why I’m looking into producing an audiobook and turning some of these ideas into short-form videos. However, once that interest is gained, it has to translate into action. There is no other way to get the social change desired. You must read.

If you find an idea here interesting, read the book. If you don’t understand an idea here, read the book. It’s all there. I’m not going to put every bomb in the book online. Some you will have to discover when you read.

By the way, the same is true of creating. If you want to change the world, you have to regularly create. Have you noticed these articles come nearly every day? I write that much because I care that much. If you care too, you can support this work here.

Intactivism is currently based in human rights. Specifically, it is based in the idea that human beings have the right to their own body, and to cut off a part of someone’s body without their consent is a violation of their human rights.

This argument was at one point an appeal to the shared values of Western liberalism. Now, human rights are no longer dominant shared values.

Even adults do not have the right to make their own choices about their body. The medical overstate believes that if your choices about your own body put others at risk – like choosing not to take a vaccine – that they have the right to make decisions about your body for you.

Do you see the looming threat?

If Western governments drop human rights and hold that “medical benefits” trump individual choice, the primary Intactivist argument becomes a dissident one, rather than an appeal to dominant values.

In this new medical overstate, “risks” and “benefits” are entirely socially constructed by the medical system. It doesn’t matter if an intervention does not actually prevent the disease it is vaccinating against, only that it can “reduce risk,” with “reduce” and “risk” both defined entirely by those in power.

Circumcision proponents have already argued that circumcision is a “surgical vaccine.” If the medical overstate can trump human rights in one area, then they might use the same discourse to expand their power in others. Even if you believe that one medical intervention, like vaccines, “works” while circumcision harms, it doesn’t matter – the medical overstate is the one who will define what “works” and does not work.

At the same time, a new set of values has emerged that trumps even the medical overstate: critical social justice or social justice based in critical theory. During the height of medical overstate lockdowns, mass social justice protests were allowed and endorsed by the dominant hegemony, including the medical system, even in violation of previous advice to “socially distance” and stay home.

As the threat of the medical overstate trumping human rights looms, an opportunity emerges in the form of critical social justice trumping the medical system. Every major institution has accepted social justice values. Social justice now holds so much power that it constitutes a new hegemony or dominant power.

If we want to appeal to dominant values, human rights are not the dominant values. Critical social justice is. However, critical social justice is an entirely different way of seeing the world that is explicitly skeptical of individual human rights. You would have to completely reimagine the underlying ideology and arguments of the movement against circumcision in order to use critical social justice.

Fortunately, I already have. I read all I could on critical social justice and created Children’s Justice, which views the treatment of children as a social justice issue. It uses the methods and values of critical social justice to do more than the human rights framework ever could. I believe if used, Children’s Justice solves this looming threat and ensures that the movement for children will be dominant rather than eclipsed by new powers.

Regret parents is a term used to describe parents whose children were circumcised and now regret that they were not kept intact.

Parents often come to regret the circumcision of their children due to learning new information about the harm of circumcision. Parents are given so little information by the medical system that it is a common experience for parents to not find out the truth about circumcision until after their children have been harmed.

So many parents have come to regret their child’s circumcision that these parents have formed their own online communities. Many of these parents feel grief or guilt over the role they played in allowing their children to be harmed. Since circumcision is viewed by the dominant culture as a “parental choice,” many see themselves as having made the wrong choice, which they now regret.

Yet was circumcision actually their “parental choice” or were they coerced? These parents were not acting as independent decision-makers. They were within a system.

One of the core ideas of critical social justice theory is that we are not merely individuals but interact with social systems. These systems include culture, socialization, language, etc. These parents were not just influenced by larger cultural assumptions, but in a system that literally has the word system in its name: the medical system.

The parents did not train medical students to perform circumcisions, manufacture circumcision devices, create billing codes for health insurance, place a sales funnel for circumcision in hospital birth, use high-pressure sales tactics, and frame those selling circumcision as experts that parents should trust. The parents’ only role in the circumcision of their child was to sign a consent form at the end of a large multi-million dollar cultural process that had already taken place.

If we include the medical system as a character, it is clearly the primary actor in the circumcision of children. “Parental choice” is a fiction that the medical system uses to hide their role in circumcision. The medical system is often invisible because it doesn’t act through a single person, whereas parents see themselves as the most important characters in the story of their child’s birth. And they are — just not the most powerful.

Is consent possible with this great power imbalance and this little information given? In my book Children’s Justice, I use this analogy:

Imagine if this situation was between a man and a woman instead of an institution and family. If a man in a position of authority was to repeatedly pressure a woman for sex while she was under the influence of drugs, continue asking after she said no, claimed she was required to have sex with him, shame her when she wouldn’t, prevent her from leaving, and hold someone she cared about hostage during the whole process, could we really call it “consent” if she eventually broke down and said yes? The woman might regret giving a “yes,” but we would not frame the sex that followed as consensual. We would say it was coerced. Parents are at an even greater imbalance of power in the medical system… A better name for these parents would be coerced parents.

Given the power imbalance between the medical system and parents and the way the medical system wields that power over parents, consent is impossible. These parents are not “regret” parents. They were coerced parents.

The dominant cultural narrative about circumcision is that it is a “parental choice,” when the power imbalances between parents and doctors reveal that it is a medical coercion. The medical system frames parents as the culprits for its own actions to hide their role in perpetuating harm. In doing so, they cause cultural trauma to coerced parents, who struggle with feelings based on false beliefs about who is responsible for the actions of the system. While parents are responsible for the role they play, that role is much smaller than they might imagine.

Once parents see the larger system that acted upon them, they might be able to let go of some of the regret, guilt, or shame they might feel and work towards getting justice for their children.

To learn more, read my book Children’s Justice.

Children’s Justice is not about merely changing individual parents, but changing the larger systems and institutions those parents interact with.

Many parents report becoming tense and vigilant during hospital birth to make sure the hospital does not engage in unnecessary procedures they do not want, such as caesarian section or circumcision. While this might protect their child, Children’s Justice asks: why do these parents feel they have to be vigilant in the first place?

Other parents are concerned with what their children are being taught in government schools. They attend school board meetings and engage in activism to remove material from school curriculums that they feel teaches harmful ideas. While these efforts sometimes change school curriculum, Children’s Justice asks: why is the government making their children learn certain ideas?

Some parents do not even get to stay home with their young children. Both parents have to work and it is more economical for the parents to spend their time at jobs while the job of raising their children is outsourced to daycare. While it is possible for parents to achieve an economic situation that allows them to stay at home with their children, Children’s Justice asks: why does our current economic system separate children from their parents?

Yes, it is possible for individual parents to resist all of these systems. The real question is how did they get into a bad system in the first place? Is it possible to change the system as a whole rather than placing the burden of resistance on each individual parent, who is already handling so much?

These systems often consciously try to trick parents trying to opt-out of them. For example, food companies will label processed food as having “natural flavors” when there is nothing natural about them. Parents wanting to feed their children a healthy diet not only have to be aware of what constitutes a good diet but be aware of the various ways the system will attempt to trick and trap them.

An individual framework for resistance asks a lot of parents. In order to avoid harmful systems, parents are basically required to become amateur experts in a range of fields from food science to educational theory. This is an unreasonable demand for most parents. At some point, it is actually easier to change the entire system, even for the parents with the resources to opt-out or resist.

Even alternative parenting advice, such as peaceful parenting, natural birth, homeschooling, etc. often frames change as the responsibility of individual parents. When parents hear of these options, some become defensive because they lack the time or resources to make these changes even if they might find them desirable.

Children’s Justice recognizes the pressures that these larger systems place on parents, and holds each person who is complicit in the system accountable for their role in that system. While individual change can be beneficial and empowering, Children’s Justice is not about parents alone, but change for all systems that impact children.

To learn more, read Children’s Justice.

When the trauma of circumcision is acknowledged, it is usually framed in terms of the initial pain the child experiences. Circumcision causes trauma. Studies have shown that this trauma alters brain development creates a lasting change in behavior. Entire books have been written about this trauma, and I cover it in my own documentary on the issue of circumcision, American Circumcision.

This trauma is serious. Yet there is another less understood form of trauma that survivors experience once they have become aware of the harm of circumcision. This trauma is the cultural trauma that survivors experience from living in a genital cutting culture.

Cultural trauma is understood and acknowledged on other social issues. For example, racial justice activists use the term racial trauma or race-based traumatic stress to describe the trauma they experience from racism or interacting with a systemically racist culture. To illustrate this concept, imagine a black man walking alone at night when a police car pulls up slowly alongside him. The moment he sees that police car, the man might become tense or afraid. This fear is due to the cultural knowledge of black men’s experiences with police. Even if in this particular the police officer would be nice or doesn’t even see him, the man might still experience stress due to the culture itself. Racial justice activists suggest that these repeated experiences can add up to a form of complex post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) which they call race-based traumatic stress (RBTS).

Most men I know who are aware of the harm of circumcision also have repeated stressful experiences around the issue. They are used to having their feelings invalidated when they speak about being sexually assaulted as children. They might have lost friends or family for speaking up. They have endured fragile outbursts from perpetrators when they bring awareness to the harm of circumcision. They have endured repeated body-shaming both for what they have and the body part they lost due to circumcision. They are regularly exposed to cultural propaganda telling them that the abuse inflicted on them as children is normal and that they are somehow better for it. These repeated experiences can also add up to a form of complex PTSD due to the trauma of living in a genital cutting culture.

What are some examples of this cultural trauma?

Stress around potential victims. Many survivors report becoming tense when they see pregnant women. Whereas most people experience happiness for the new life coming into the world, survivors of genital cutting perceive a potential threat to that child’s safety if they are male in a culture that normalizes male genital cutting.

Stress around family. Many survivors report becoming estranged from their family after speaking out about circumcision or questioning their parents about it. This is very similar to the familial homophobia many gay activists have written about, yet there is no word for this among survivors of genital cutting and the added component that the people they would most want support and comfort from are also perpetrators.

Stress around medical perpetrators. Many survivors avoid doctor’s visits because they do not want to be around or give money to people engaged in abusing children the way they were abused. This means when survivors do need medical care, they must choose between their psychological and emotional safety and their health.

Stress around their child’s medical needs. Some survivors also avoid bringing their children to the doctor due to the fact doctors often sexually assault intact children by forcibly retracting their foreskin. (One survey showed that 43% of intact boys have been forcibly retracted, often by a doctor.) Survivors often have to risk their child being sexually assaulted to get him medical care.

Stress around birth. Hospitals solicit for circumcision an average of eight times per mother. Hospitals have also circumcised children without parental consent. Many parents aware of circumcision report being tense and hypervigilant in hospital birth settings and watching their new baby like a hawk to ensure no harm comes to him. Even if home birthing, the possibility of any need for medical help carries with it the possibility of perpetrators entering the sacred space of the birth of their child.

Stress around sexuality. Every time a circumcised man sees his body, there is a visible scar that can remind him of his own abuse. He might feel pain during sex or erections. There might be ongoing harm due to circumcision complications. There can also be stress in relationships, especially if the survivor’s partner(s) do not understand his feelings.

Stress around media. Media often reinforces dominant narratives about genital cutting being somehow “better” or “beneficial.” Seeing media that portrays their feelings of survivors as invalid can be triggering. Even seeing the male body in media can remind survivors either of what they do not have or what is normalized in genital cutting cultures.

Stress around Jewish perpetrators. Evening mentioning this source of trauma can provoke fragility and abuse from Jewish perpetrators. Jewish perpetrators often frame survivors’ trauma and resulting feelings as “antisemitism” and use that discourse as a justification to harm and target survivors for speaking about sexual assault they endured as children. Some survivors feel rightfully tense around Jewish people because they have experienced or know they might experience harassment and abuse from Jewish people if they share their testimony. Others feel tension for the same reason any survivor might feel tension around a perpetrator.

Stress around Jewish victims. Other survivors feel tense around Jewish people for the same reason they feel tense around new mothers. They know that children born into Jewish homes risk enduring the same abuse they endured as children. Seeing potential victims or other people they know are survivors reminds them of their own trauma, even if those other survivors are in false consciousness about their own abuse.

Stress around sharing feelings. There can be cultural stress if the survivor shares his feelings and they are not seen, heard, or acknowledged by those around him. Many survivors have to be careful about who they share their feelings with due to the ridicule and verbal abuse normalized against men who share their feelings on this issue. This abuse serves the cultural function of protecting the dominant narrative around circumcision so that perpetrators can continue to say “I’ve never heard anyone complain,” since those who do complain are often abused into silence.

Stress around bystanders. In order for a child to be abused, multiple aspects of society must fail to protect him. Survivors often feel stress around any element of society they feel should have protected them from child abuse that did not, especially if that aspect of society engages in or contributes to the abuse. This can include elements of government, religion, or the family.

These are just some examples. Once survivors become more aware of the concept of cultural trauma, I’m certain they will identify more. It is important to name and talk about these traumas because acknowledging them is the first step to changing and healing them.

To learn more, read my book Children’s Justice.