Why does child molestation happen?

Great Debates
1

I was reading a discussion on another website about sexual assault, and I was floored by the prevalence of stories where people - especially women - had been molested as children, almost always by a stepfather or their mother’s boyfriend. I am just wondering why this occurs. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I put it in Great Debates because I know it’s an emotionally-charged question that does not have one clear factual answer. Far from.

These are the theses I’ve come across:

*Rape is about power, not sex.
Okay, so why do people assert power by sexually abusing children? Adults already have power over children because they are authority figures.

*Rape happens because alcoholism and other drug abuse make people violent.
This still doesn’t explain why people sexually abuse children rather than breaking glasses.

*Rape happens because rapists want sexual gratification.
But why, especially if you’re married or dating a woman, would you try to get more gratification by forcing her children into unwanted activities? Abused kids are not consenting and they’re certainly not going to try to give their rapists pleasure. I find it hard to believe that the male erection is such a powerful force that it turns a man into a brainless, slobbering beast who will have intercourse with anything he sees.

*Rape happens because some people are just nasty and enjoy inflicting pain on easy targets.
I’m starting to think this is the only solution. But is this really true about that many people? I thought sociopathy was relatively rare.

So I’m at a loss.

2

This is the closest, but also people can relieve their pain by inflicting it onto others, causing them to bear it. Child can easily accept that they did something wrong to deserve it. The child bears the weight, and shame of the molester, and the molester gets relief. It’s a effect of soul ties, the act forces the 2 to become 1, the more powerful takes possession of the innocent child spirit and leaves the child with theirs.

When that child grows up, bearing the guilt and shame, and seeking relief, finds a child victim, and the process is repeated.

3

I don’t think anyone can claim to know what’s going on in a child molester’s head while he/she is committing the act. As far as I know, not even the rapists themselves can explain just what the fuck they’re doing and why.

4

This doesn’t mean that sex isn’t involved in the act. This idea is mainly a counter to the old Victorian idea that men were barely contained cauldrons of lust that occasionally boiled over, where rape occurred because their animal instincts couldn’t be contained–i.e., that rape was caused by an uncontrollable excess of normal sexual desire, and was thus, to some degree, understandable and forgivable, just boys being boys.

5

My response to your latest pearl of wisdom, sir.

6

Well, some people are sexually turned on by kids. So even if they’re married or dating, they don’t get sexual gratification from their partner.

7

Kanikbird, people might be a little more receptive to creepy pasta here.

8

I think it’s a combination of 3 and 4, with some of 1. I bet a lot of molestors didn’t have a sex life that met their needs, and/or they can still be turned on by doing things to a child. Add in the general nastiness/lack of care for other human beings, and you’ve got a child molestor.

9

I don’t think there’s any one reason; I suspect it’s more like a “syndrome” with many possible causes. Certainly there are people who are simply attracted to children, just like there are people who are attracted to men or women . . . and we really don’t understand why. But there have to be other factors in play in addition to the attraction, causing someone to actually act on their feelings.

I don’t believe that child molestation happens as a conscious act of wrongdoing. By that I mean that the person somehow rationalizes his actions and convinces himself that what he is doing is not harmful to the child . . . that the child may even be enjoying it. People in general have an amazing ability to rationalize just about anything, and I believe child molesters have perfected this. Once you get past the idea that you are harming the child, there’s no longer anything holding you back.

I wonder whether anyone has ever done a study of criminals (of all crimes), to find out whether they, at the time of committing the crime, actually believed that their action was wrong, or whether they were able to rationalize it.

10

Are we talking kiddy diddling or statutory rape here?

For statutory, its just that we’re hardwired to find youth attractive, and plenty of guys common sense is temporarily clouded by their dick and a willing teenager.

For the preteen stuff, no clue. I can’t imagine its all about power and wanting to harm someone though. At least not at first… Its easy to understand how violence and threats can come into it, what with the extreme penalties if caught.

I’ve personally always thought it was sorta like the gay/straight thing… Can’t help what you are attracted to, and these guys(and a few ladies) just happen to have the extreme bad luck of being attracted to kids, with no hope that it will ever be legal, and knowing that they will be social pariahs if they practice it, and probably with the knowledge that they are sick if they do.

Can’t be a fun life.
But what do I know? It could be they are just violent sociopaths who want to rape someone who can’t fight back.

11

Is most molestation rape? I would take rape to mean, at a minimum, vaginal or anal penetration, but my impression is that molestation is more usually a matter of feeling up, or perhaps getting the child (possibly, but by no means necessarily, with a threat of violence) to perform a hand-job or blow-job on the adult. While it is plausible that penetrative rape has a lot to do with aggression or dominance, that is much less obvious to me in these other sorts of cases. (Not that I have any positive explanation of the behavior to offer.)

12

Unlike conventional rape, I don’t believe child molestation is about control.

13

Most child molesters aren’t psychopaths (aka sociopaths), but you’re conflating two concepts there: sexual sadism and psychopathy. A psychopath may use violence to acheive sexual gratification (or money, or whatever else he wants), but it may simply be the means rather than the end - he has no conscience and isn’t particularly troubled by the infliction of pain and harm so long as he gets what he wants out of it. With a sexual sadist, the pain and harm is what he wants. Comorbid psychopathy and sexual sadism is the truly dangerous combo; that’s where you’re getting into Ted Bundy territory.

Child molesters usually aren’t psychopaths - when they are they’re particulalry dangerous, but they’re usually not. They may have some sort of conscience, but they can justify their behavior to themselves through all sorts of cognitive distortions, reasoning that looks completely bizarre to us but is absolutely airtight in their own minds (child came on to me, parents tacitly approved, I’m not really hurting him). Some may enjoy the victimization and nonconsent aspect to some degree, some may even be sexual sadists, but that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. Some may be so completely socially inept that a child is the only person they can relate to sexually. They come in many varieties.

14

I think pedophiles are attracted to children in a sexual way the same way normal people are atttacted to the oppsoite sex or gays to the same sex.

I never chose what sex I would be attracted to it just happened during puberty. I wonder if some of these pedophiles were molested themselves as children?

Trying to get them to not act out their normal sexual cues is always going to be a problem just as if someone told me it’s wrong to be attracted to men. I would have to deny my attraction to men. So I would have to become celibate or risk being locked up.

15

Very good points by pravnik. Some of them don’t think they’re doing anything wrong. Some of them don’t care if they are or are not doing something wrong. Some of them know they’re doing something wrong and go ahead anyway. some of them get off on the fact it’s wrong.

Lovely, isn’t it?

Watch it: in a self-reporting environment you may get the impression that the prevalence of a conduct is far higher than it really is. And one predator will often account for multiple victims.
As it stands, the incidence of child sexual abuse IS dishearteningly high (and the only tolerable rate would be zero), but one has to take such things into account.

16

Gee, you really think so?

17

I recall an article once where a psychologist was dicsussing sexual orientaton and attraction, etc. He mentioned something called “sex maps” - basically, what is it that turns someone on? This is believed (by most psychologists?) to happen very early in life, if not before birth.

Basically, we all recognize patterns; it’s a feature of evolution.This is young, this is old, this is healthy, this is not. “Pretty” vs. “Ugly” is a form of this. There are cues that (most of us) recognize, child vs. adult, male vs. female characteristics, etc. Psychologists love those experiments where they have a whole range of pictures and ask someone to rate the person for A, B or C based on facial appearnce, for example. There’s a whole separate discussion on faking cues -e.g. lighter hair usually happens in childhood for Europeans, so blonde is a trick to make the person look younger and therefore more appealling.

So I suspect that a lot of child molestation is simply that their “what turns me on” part of the brain is connected to the wrong “recognizers”; just as with gay men and women, they also have their gender rather than the opposite connected to their “what turns me on” brain section.

(OK, this is NOT the gay=child molester argument. It’s a discussion of what makes a person attracted to what).

There was an earlier thread (GQ?) asking what the ratio of girl to boy molestors was - IIRC,about somewhere between 4 to 1 to 10 to 1. An interesting question is why the men who were molested (presumably by men) as children would molest girls, not boys, if this is a “Pass it forward” response. And also - why do most such molestors have a preferred gender? Rarely do you hear of equal opportunity molestors.

I suspect more likely it’s a side effect of the way our brains may develop randomly to be attracted to something different. Like “in the closet” gays, the molestor may sometimes have no problem having an adult hetero relationship but likely finds the one he’s wired for more satisfying. Children, especially stepchildren, are an easy target. It would not surprise me to find they may often even initiate relationships to get at those stepchildren.

What strategy they use to coerce their young partner determines exactly how serious the damage they inflict. Like normal people, they likely range from the sweet seduction to the nasty bully, with varying “I’ll show you” reactions when rebuffed. THEN the power and domination may come into play.

Then there’s the whole discussion about how initially Freud found that the patients he was treating in Vuenna were traumatized victims of child molestation. He later realized that accusing prominent Viennese families of child molestation was a career-limiting move, and dreamed up the crap about Oedipus and Electra which sent modern psychiatry on a 100-year wrong turn.

18

Thanks everyone for your answers…I just want to clear up a couple of things:

a) I’m not talking about pedophiles, I’m talking about people who sexually abuse children. While those groups overlap they are not the same thing.

b) If there is a difference between penetrative rape and unwanted genital contact, I DO NOT CARE. Any kind of sexual abuse of children is an attack and if we start creating a hierarchy of less and more severe acts things will get troublesome quick.

19

Sorry to refer to them as pedophiles. I prefer it to child molesters.

I am just of the opinion that that they may just have “bad recognisers” as MD2000pointed out. I am with her or his post 100 percent.

20

a) I’m not sure I understand the distinction. A pedophile (who acts out) is by definition engaging in child abuse. A child abuser that is not a pedophile? Huh?

(If they don’t act out, who cares? I imagine there are all sorts of people with all sorts of warped urges who control themselves all their lives… That’s what being civilized is all about - controlling your urges.)

b) Sorry but yes, there are ranges. The perv that takes pictures of kids in the playground; the one who tries to hug little girls or boys; and the one who fondles; and the one who penetratively rapes; and the guy about 10 or 20 years ago who ended his little “episode” by chopping off the boy’s penis; not to mention how many who killed their victims.

There is a range of severity of offenses; not to suggest that any offense is not extremely traumatic for the person who suffers it. That’s why sentences for such offences can range from suspended to death; however, the current hysteria about the sex offender registry, basically lumps an 18yo with a 17yo girl friend in the same category as a mass child rapist. Anything that dilutes the meaningfulness of that registry detracts from its real purpose and need.