Presentation (Generation Five)       Apresentação em português

One hundred years ago a man’s virility was affirmed by his ability to maintain a wife at home, a mistress on the side, and controlling both of their lives. The infraction in those days was not adultery, but a passionate, spontaneous public kiss.

Women today, by and large, have control of their lives, although still excluded from positions of power and equal pay. One hundred years ago it was unimaginable to see a woman showing any part of her legs in public without her reputation being permanently destroyed.

We are not living in a post-discrimination era. By the contrary, we have just begun to become conscious that, whatever discrimination has been overcome, is merely the surface of much more structured and profound problems only now beginning to be perceived by us – not because they are new, but because they were hidden; because they were the foundations of what as been only temporarily resolved.

Sexual abuse, and, above all, the sexual abuse of children, is a good example of what is entering our awareness; finding ourselves at the same time surprised by human perversity, the candid complicity of our own good conscience in the face of that perversity, and the cover-up by the state and all responsible entities (often highly moralistic) – such as the courts, religious institutions and organizations dedicated to aid the needy and vulnerable.

Modern incarceration practices, allegedly organized to put an end to torture, in fact perpetuate it, arguing to function in pursuit of justice, but promoting scandalously obvious gender and social discrimination, minutely thought-out through detailed regulations that are impossible to respect. These practices can be the other side of the coin of sexual abuse. Prisoners see it as convict morality to punish with their own hands the sexual abusers thrown in with them – as if they had abused those avenging prisoners’ own mothers; or some collective mother whose abuse disqualified them as much as a child or a woman in one of the more radically patriarchal societies.

 Generation FIVE, a North-American association, proposes a social project (to begin at once) which is to span one hundred years. In a document also titled “Toward Transformative Justice”, they set forth and reflect on the outline of a strategy to transform the social conditions at the collective root of the sadistic pleasure of abusing women and children in private, and men in situations of judicial sequestration – acquiesced by a silent public , bothered but passive in face of such inhumanity.

We appeal to the participation of all those who may be interested in understanding and translating this Generation FIVE text in organizing reading, study and translation groups as per the schedule that follows, toward getting us closer to putting the project into practice. We appeal also to the cross-sharing of knowledge, opinions and dialogue between those interested, taking into consideration that the period of globalization through which we are living demands that we open our senses to other histories and circumstances; namely those brought to us by Anglo-Saxon or Lusophone languages, imperial and colonized, in Great Britain and the USA, in Portugal and Brazil, without excluding any other cultures and nationalities, of course.