MOVE Child Abuse Revisited

(Ramona Africa)


The recent controversy over Roman Polanski’s arrest in Sweden based on a crime he admitted to committing several decades ago brought me back to thinking about MOVE’s crimes against children. For those of you who have steered well clear of the Polanski debacle, he is the famous film director who gave a thirteen year old girl booze and a qualude, and than proceeded to rape and sodomize her. After things went south for Polanski in a court of law, he decided the best thing to do was to leave the country to live in a kind self-imposed exile where he could be revered for both his artistry and for thumbing his nose at American jurisprudence. Polanski is facing deportation back to this country, something that the revered film-maker wants desperately to avoid.

Polanski is not without his defenders. Immediately after his arrest, his Hollywood friends jumped to his defense, appearing on television and signing petitions demanding that Polanski be allowed to go free. Soon after, however, a backlash against this kind of Hollywood exceptionalism arose from people who were not so comfortable with the rape of a child by someone who happened to be able to make a decent film or two. Those who would defend Polanski cling tenaciously to the idea that the girl he victimized and who is now a woman has offered him forgiveness and wants the matter go away, however as columnist Christopher Hitchens pointed out in a recent column “strictly speaking it's of no more relevance than if she had said the same thing at the time. The law prosecutes those who violate children, and it does so partly on behalf of children who haven't been violated yet. We take an individual instance, whoever the individuals happen to be, and we use it for precedent. And we do not know how lucky we are to be able to do so.”

We are certainly lucky, but children in MOVE are not so lucky. This is because they have the misfortune of not only being born in a cruel and authoritarian sect that has girls as young as 11-12 years old being raped with the intention of them being impregnated, but also to have this victimization compounded by the fact that the city of Philadelphia will do nothing about it. Philadelphia’s unspoken, but well understood “hands off” policy towards the cult that was started after the 1985 “incident” with MOVE has the unintended consequence of enabling the abuse of children.

However, before I get too far ahead of myself I want to make it clear that my allegations of MOVE’s abuse of children stems not only from my own experience, but also stems by MOVE’s own admission of the crime. Back in 2006, Ramona Africa made the mistake of spelling out MOVE’s policy regarding the impregnation of young girls in an email, where she admits without hesitation that "Women in MOVE do marry and have babies at what this american society might now consider to be a young age but we follow the coordination of Mother Nature who coordinates it such that she determines when a woman is ready for marriage and babies, which is when a woman has her monthly period, then she is ready to have babies and be married. It's just that simple."

One should read the above statement carefully in order to understand the full implications of what is being said. Notice that Ramona uses the phrase “when a woman has her monthly period” Say what? Little girls are not “women” when their periods start; they are still little girls, who are on the path to becoming women. The distinction should be clear to anyone with an ounce of decency and who remains off of the sex offender registry. That Ramona Africa and company find acceptable the idea that little girls are under the “coordination” of some kind of mythical force that decides that it is ok for them to be raped is indicative of a savage backwardness. From my view, MOVE is no better than the child-rapist who stalks playgrounds for victims or the creep in his mom’s basement plodding through the internet trying to hook up with barely teenage girls. In fact, MOVE is worse for the simple fact that they have institutionalized this barbarism and have attempted to use their crude theology as a means of justifying it. They are worse because not only do they force young girls to become pregnant and “married”, but because they also deprive these same girls of any semblance of a meaningful education. This enforced intellectual deprivation allows for the sexual domination of children, which gives rise to a “Stockholm” type syndrome where the girls in this situation will defend to death their position in MOVE. And more than that, they will more than willingly subject their own children to this very same level of abuse. What began as the abuse of individuals turns into a crime that transcends generations with an ever expanding circle of victimization.

Cultural relativists have a point in that different cultures maintain different values and should therefore be afforded a degree of latitude, however when it comes to children, we are supposed to live in a society that does not tolerate sexual abuse. Yet, in MOVE’s case it is allowed. And let it not be said that I have not done my part in spreading the word against this. I write this blog, but I also went to the authorities with the information that I have obtained and was brushed aside. I went to the mainstream media and was similarly ignored. And don’t get me started on the so-called “alternative” media outlets. None of them dare offer any criticism of MOVE on any level, lest they be labeled as “reactionaries”.

It is good for people to not want a man who raped a young girl thirty years ago to avoid punishment. Is it also not a good thing to stop the institutional rape of children that goes on today?