I think it would be hard to imagine a more ethically irresponsible claim than that. Frankly, attitudes like that may well have the potential to do more harm in the world than actual child molestation.
Actually, it is germane to society to be able to determine whether the molester is an inadequate personality who sexualizes children because he is incapable of an adult relationship. Or has a brain tumor. Or a personality disorder. Or mental illness.
Currently there is still a hope to treat these people and it would be important to know from where the behavior originates before attempting that.
Sexual abuse - the gift that keeps on giving.
Frankly, you’re wrong. Research conducted on victims of sexual trauma who have developed PTSD has found that the severity of the event is actually a very small predictor of whether someone will be psychologically damaged as a result of sexual abuse or assault. The factor with the greatest effect size (and thus the single greatest predictor of PTSD) is social support immediately following the event. Other significant factors are whether the victim was experiencing other life stressors at the time, whether the trauma was repeated, and how the victim knew the attacker. People frequently make the mistake of assigning lesser damage to ‘‘lesser’’ crimes of sexual trauma, but frankly the evidence isn’t there to make this claim.
ETA: OP, are you looking for anecdotal experience here, or what? I think I could shed some light on this conversation, but I’m not sure how direct experience is valued in the context of a Great Debate.
I am quite prepared to believe what you say here about the predictors of psychological damage. I do not, however, see how it makes the ethical point I was making in any way wrong. In fact, it is pretty much irrelevant to it. I did not say anything about the psychic damage that might be caused. Indeed, in the wrong circumstances, perfectly blameless or even well intentioned actions (nothing to do with sexual molestation) can cause someone psychic harm in later life. That is not wickedness, it is bad luck.
Suppose I stare briefly at a woman’s cleavage in the street (to construct an example that has a sexual component, and is, at least arguably, something that is wrong to do) and she happens to be a paranoid schizophrenic (“experiencing other life stressors at the time”), and she panics, runs into traffic and is killed. Am I responsible at all? Maybe, a teeny bit. Am I a criminal, a murderer? I think not. Am I as bad as someone who deliberately shoves someone in front of a speeding car? Hell no! Heck, I am nowhere near as bad them even if the person they shoved survived with only trivial injuries.
Uncle Bob giving his little niece’s crotch a rub through her panties, though certainly wrong, is not nearly as bad as him, or someone else, hurting and injuring her by forcing their adult sized penis into her tiny, undeveloped vagina. It is certainly conceivable (though, I should think, unlikely) that the first event, badly handled, could give rise to more psychic distress in later life than the second if handled very well, but that is not Uncle Bob’s fault, it is the fault of the people who handled the situation inappropriately. (Frankly, I am inclined to think that the best, least traumatizing, response to the crotch rubbing incident might be to say nothing, and simply never give uncle Bob the chance to be alone with her again. Clearly the penetration incident would demand a very much more serious response, with regard to both victim and perpetrator.)
Your assertion that one kind of abuse is worse than the other is not grounded in empirical evidence. The empirical evidence on the psychology of sexual trauma basically indicates that it’s very hard to predict whether or not a given victim will develop PTSD (which is IMO the best indicator of psychological trauma we’ve got). Even the effect sizes for social support/stressors are only moderate. Your attempt to make a distinction between example one and two, though well-intentioned, will likely end up causing more harm than good, especially if Girl A is unlucky enough to be significantly affected by the event.
Saying nothing is the worst possible thing you could do to a child who has had such an experience. Children who experience sexual abuse of any kind often have irrational cognitions about what happened – believing they caused it, rationalizing or minimizing its effect and therefore self-downing when they feel pain associated with it, etc. To not even address those irrational cognitions significantly increases the chances of PTSD and also increases the chances the child will be abused again.
That’s my intellectual argument–the one based in research, and science. I know that some people tend to place more weight on anecdotal evidence. My anecdotal evidence is that I was sexually abused by my Mom’s 2nd and 4th husbands. The first was an incident more along the lines of what you’d probably consider egregious – he was an outright pedophile, I was a toddler, he confessed, he went to jail. I remember testifying in court and I remember losing my ‘‘Dad,’’ but not much else. I didn’t understand that toddlers don’t have good memories; I thought for years that the reason I didn’t remember is because it didn’t happen and I had lied and destroyed my family and put an innocent man in jail. I did have nightmares. I dreamed I was an infant and a man was breaking into our house and I couldn’t stop him. I was afraid of other men. It did affect me.
The second occurred repeatedly over the course of about 5 years between the age of 12ish and 17 and is more comparable to your Uncle Bob example, only instead of Uncle Bob, it was my adopted father, a man I idolized and depended on to protect me from my mother. Any time I contemplated telling, I remembered exactly what happened last time I told. The consequences of revealing sexual abuse were very concrete for me – they meant I would lose my father and my mother would lose her mind and yet another chance at happiness. So I dealt with it. Because nothing was worse than losing my father.
By your logic, my Mom should have ignored the 2nd instance (she did.) But frankly, that’s the one that caused me unspeakable pain and horror and I feel violated my trust in every imaginable way. That’s the one that fucked up my sexuality and haunts my dreams. That’s the one that ruined my reputation and life as I knew it, that ended my faith in God, that took away the only man I’ve ever considered a real father. That’s the one where I had no proof, where he had plausible deniability, where people asked me relentless, suspicious questions about the details and asked me why I couldn’t just get over it. That’s the one where I have spent the last 10 years punishing MYSELF for being so upset over something ‘‘so minor.’’ That’s the reason I’m still shelling out hundreds of dollars a month and the reason I’m awake right now and the reason that after 10 fucking years of therapy, my primary diagnosis is still PTSD.
Obviously there was a context that significantly magnified the damage. But if you think the first guy is more reprehensible then the second, well, you’re wrong.
As one who was molested as a child of 4, I believe it starts out because the older person has not been taught correctly about it’s sexuality. They use a child to satisfy their curiosity and know the child will not tell because they are too young to understand. It is easy(in their minds,I think), to get by with it. At least in my case this seems to be the reason. The person who molested me was such a person and he ended up marrying a girl much younger than himself. A lot of it had to do with his religious traing that sex was bad, even to think of it or to masturbate. I do not believe they think of the harm they are doing to the child and think only of themselves at the moment. This person also molested my younger sister, and she was a mess because of it. In my case when I tried to tell my mother she beat me, she caught me looking at myself because I was trying to see why I hurt. I later realized her ideas about sexuality were not healthy and that also (I believe ) was because of her own religious beliefs, that even a thought of sex was sinful. never blamed the person who molested me as much as my mother. I later learned through counceling that it was not unusual because it was easier for her to deal with me than with the peratraitor.
I guess that’s the eternal question about justice and the law - are you punishing someone based on the severity of their actions, or the ultimate trauma that resulted.
The mind boggles at trying to establish the latter. In a non-sexual context, there have been many instances where one person’s off-hand dismissive comment had a severe and traumatic impact on another’s life. That’s covered by free speech…
To follow on your example along with the posting, the comments and actions of others, even after the event, were as much or more traumatic in effect than the actual act; they made a more lasting impression and did more damage. To what extent is a molestor responsible for what others do?
This is not to say anyone who does this is innocent, they are not, but we can only judge them based on what acts they themselves perform. Callous mishandling or failure to provide comfort by third parties may severely compound the damage. Sadly there’s no law requiring anyone to be sensitive and compassionate - or else our jails would be ten times as full.
You might ant to check out the website of Andrew Vachss, an attorney who works with the victims of child sexual abuse. He probably knows more about the subject than anyone else.
I understand the point you are trying to make, but I think one thing is often overlooked in these cases, especially where family is involved. Regardless of the severity of his actions, my relationship with my adopted father would have to end. Even if my entire family had embraced and supported me, I would still have lost my Dad. What people don’t get is that these are people, not monsters. This is the man who taught me martial arts and cooked me pancakes in the morning and attended all of my band concerts. And because of what he did–not because of how my family handled it, but as a direct result of his own actions – I lost him forever. AFAIC he’s guilty of murder. He killed my Dad.
As for the distinction between pedophiles and child molesters, there is a very clear one. The dude who messed with me when I was 2 was sexually attracted to children. My adopted father was not. I had the body of an adult at 12, he somehow rationalized himself into believing that because of this, and because of my relative maturity, and because we had a strong bond, this somehow meant I was ‘‘really’’ an adult. He told me more than once that he wished he had married me instead of my mother, and people in public assumed we were a couple when we were out together alone.
I’m not saying he wasn’t sick – just that the circumstances were different. My mother was abusive to both of us, and we related strongly to one another for that reason. He was just psychologically messed up enough and dissatisfied with his marriage to justify abusing me. And I want to be clear–living with my mother would mess anyone up. She was prone to paranoid delusions, violent, impulsive, and egregiously emotionally abusive. While I want to make it clear that I hold him responsible for his actions, I don’t think you can discount the effects of this kind of stress on someone psychologically when considering why the abuse happened.
I don’t think you can generalize about child abuse. Some dudes are sexually oriented toward pre-pubescent children. Other dudes confuse minors with adult bodies for adults. The damage can be profound either way, but there IS a difference in sexual orientation.
As for some of the assumptions identified by the OP – abuse is about power, not sex, I don’t buy it. It sounds like something that came out of the feminist movement but was never actually verified and is now considered common knowledge. Most of the so-called experts who hold these opinions don’t have the scientific evidence to back it up. No doubt for some abusers this is true, just as for some it is about causing pain, but I don’t think you can generalize.
My personal impression is that abuse is about opportunity and gratification. It requires an extreme form of narcissism to pull off and a heaping dose of denial and rationalization, but human beings are excellent at rationalizing abhorrent behavior. In my adopted father’s case, he could not relate to my mother, he believed that my mother was exactly like his own, and therefore that he and I shared a special bond. Did he manipulate and take advantage of me? Hell yes. But did he really believe all that bullshit he told me? I think completely.
Not to get all “Won’t somebody PLEASE think of the children,” but this is one of the worst ideas I’ve read on this board. (OK, that and pan fried semen.) The onus for preventing future abuse shouldn’t be on the victim/victim’s family or on getting them to avoid the abuser. The law should punish the abuser.
As has been pointed out, people can feel traumatized and disturbed no matter what is done–whether the abuser is jailed or even if no one knows. And how do you “say nothing” while making 100% sure that the uncle isn’t around her? If I knew there was a member of my family, “Let’s make sure he doesn’t stay around” kids right after I learned he abused someone just wouldn’t be enough.
And finally, that’s related to my last point–why would you want to be around that kind of person? You’re basically saying that their behavior is fine because they didn’t actually rape the kid. I wouldn’t want that person to think they were an accepted member of my family/circle of friends, though. I’d never want to associate with them–not out of fear of them, but out of disgust.
Hmmmm, I would never presume to divine the psychology of a child molester, not even as a child molester (which I am not). The OP is a ridiculous premise…IMHO.
Just ignore him. He used “psychic distress” in his post. 
Regardless of the age or circumstance the person who molests a child is wrong and should be punished for it;it is a crime. Years ago it was just let to pass. Because in my case my mother was also wrong and did nothing to stop it. Perhaps it was ignorace at the time, but now days that can not be an excuse, as it is well known that it is harmful to a child one way or the other, just as rape is for an adult!
I can be wrong, but I believe a person should be taught from an early age that a person who touches another improperly is acting in a criminal manner, and should tell a respected adult; if they are afraid of punishment them selves. We teach them stranger danger, we should also teach them if a person tries to do something with( or to) them that they wouldn’t do in front of another respected adult it is wrong!
Like the RCC, some worry more about the scandle, than the child’s welfare!
Why? Just because you’re not interested in this? I’m not getting this…
Thanks olivesmarch4th, you’ve defended my points better than I could. I also want to add that in situations like the ones described in your posts, the person is having a sexual relationship with an adult and still molesting children, so I don’t think they’re a pedophile in the sense of ‘only sexually aroused by children’.
Mince, I don’t think that understanding why an action is committed is the same thing with empathizing with the person.
Yeah…I like to think all the psychologists studying pedophilia aren’t…well, pedophiles.
I don’t study them in any official capacity but it’s a topic that’s long fascinated me. Definitely not trying to empathize with them. I, too, always wondered why. I remember when I was in fifth grade we saw this stranger danger type video except it was a boy whose uncle was sexually abusing him (fondling) him, and he didn’t know what to do…my reaction was just why. And no one’s ever really been able to explain it.
I mean, I know some of the theories. The whole, they are uncomfortable around adults or they were molested themselves or it’s a power thing. Or that they’re just born that way. But that’s so intellectual. I just want to know on the base level, what are they thinking or feeling when they do it. What’s going on, what is it satisfying?
And with the ones who aren’t even raping, where it’s touching…I wonder about that, too. If someone fondles a child, they are committing a great wrong, but for what? You can’t even say it’s for the orgasm. Is it just being near to something they’re attracted to or is it that they’re trying to make the kid feel bad and getting off on that…or…? I mean, there’s no one pedophile person. I’m sure they all have their different motivations. But I can’t get into the head of someone like this. Maybe I don’t want to…but it’s just frustrating to know that people are doing these things and to not really know why.
Yeah, it’s even more frustrating when you’re trying to figure out how your family was destroyed. I had a very strong confidence in my own judgment as a child, and my adopted father undermined all that, because he somehow convinced me he was the best father in the world. When he started touching me, I assumed it was something I was bringing on myself, some signal I was giving off, something I’d said or done to create some kind of misunderstanding between us, and I was terrified, utterly terrified that if I spoke up not only would he be hurt, but that he would be angry with me and want nothing to do with me. It never even occurred to me that it was something he was doing wrong.
So I dealt with it by ignoring it. I shut down when it was happening – didn’t move a muscle, didn’t say a word, just froze up completely. I thought about it at night when I let my mind wander, I dreamed about it, and as his actions gradually escalated, I came to the conclusion that eventually we were going to have sex and there was nothing I could do about it. For me, everything was spinning out of control. By the end I was so afraid of being alone with him that I believed he might be a serial killer. I wondered if every trip we took would be my last. Every time we climbed into the truck I imagined him driving to some abandoned field, raping me and stabbing me to death and leaving my corpse in the woods.
I was a worrier. And something… happened. I went on a vacation with him alone and we were in a cabin in the woods. I don’t remember very much except afterward my Mom began grilling me about our trip and asked me if there was something I was not telling her. I asked her, ‘‘Mom, are you happy?’’
And she said, ‘‘Yes, but I want to be happy based on reality, not based on lies. If he did something to you, you have to tell me.’’
I wanted to tell her so badly. But I couldn’t take her happiness away from her. I just couldn’t. I had to be, what, eleven? I could have saved myself so much grief. Instead I just kept my mouth shut and endured the next six years.
But when I finally got out of that house, and I began to come to terms with the reality of what had happened, it was like someone had just called to tell me my father had been killed in a horrible accident. I was a senior in high school at that time, and I had to leave class and go out in my car and just cry for hours at a time. And I realized that, contrary to my expectations, I had terrible judgment about people and didn’t know who to trust. That I had been played the fool for so long by someone who purported to have my best interests in mind was an unbearable thing to have to accept.
Maybe those kinds of abusers convince themselves because it’s not outright rape, it’s ‘‘not that bad’’ a notion they apparently got from some members of the Dope. Because when they get caught, they can explain it away. Mom can explain it away and stay married to the fucker another five years. The rest of the family can pretend it never happened.
To sit here and listen to people say this experience is ‘‘not so bad’’ makes me want to vomit.
Olive… god, you’re breaking my heart. I’m sorry you had to go through that.
Almost all of my old highschool girl-friends had been molested by some uncle or mothers boyfriend or something. They all seemed to be fine in spite of it, which always blew my mind.
It’s a sad world where I have to say that I’m LUCKY to have escaped my childhood without such an experience.
I have a 3 year old son, and one of my biggest worries is that someone will hurt him like this.
Yeah, I know a lot of people who went through different child abuse experiences and they all deal with it in different ways. Some are complete messes, and others seem to have come out relatively unharmed. Personally my roughest spot was young adulthood, say age 17 to 23. I ended up having to withdraw from college for a couple years to get myself together. I’ve been a lot better over the last 4 years. There is still work to be done, but the worst is over. It’s just a chronic PITA now more than anything else.
It’s like roulette; you can never really predict how any degree of abuse is going to affect any given child. To me I really don’t think it would have made a difference exactly what happened – the painful part was the betrayal and the loss.
Perhaps if that were the only trauma I had experienced it would have been different. But my life was full of unsettling and frightening experiences and I lived in an extended family where abuse, domestic violence, drugs, alcohol and mental illness were the rule rather than the exception. This combination of experiences makes trauma harder to treat–I don’t know if people realize it, but PTSD often manifests itself in ways that seem to have nothing to do with the trauma.
Sometimes it’s just a general feeling of being unsafe no matter what situation. My greatest chronic fear is having someone break in at night and stab me to death. Over the last week I’ve been unable to sleep because of anxiety around every little noise I hear in the house. It’s been getting increasingly worse – I have to shut and lock the bedroom door. I’ve never had anyone break into my house or stab me for that matter, it’s just the weird way my trauma has managed to manifest. And obviously I couldn’t tell you what particular event precipitated that fear.
I know there are probably a LOT of people on this board who have had comparable experiences. People underestimate how many people live through abuse because survivors don’t generally want to talk about it. There is a stigma. When I first joined the board a couple of years ago, I used to post about these experiences extensively because I was in desperate need of validation, and in fact I probably lacked the self-validation ability as recently as last Fall. But I did 3 months of prolonged exposure which involves sitting for an hour a day every day reliving traumatic experiences until they gradually become less distressing. When I first started I was bawling and hyperventilating for an hour straight. Prolonged exposure is weird because you’re reliving your experience as a kid but you’re filtering it through your adult brain – you can think everything through in a more rational way than you did as a child.
I don’t feel the need to minimize OR exaggerate what happened any more, because I know firsthand that what I went through was absolutely horrific for me at the time, and I also know it only felt like the end of the world.
I realize this discussion doesn’t really shed any light on the ‘‘why’’ of child molestation, though it might help you to understand the CHILD’s role in this business.
I respect the decision of other survivors not to share so openly, but I’ve made the decision that I’m going to keep right on posting about it until it stops happening to other kids. The idea that I shouldn’t talk about it, to me, implies that I did something wrong, and I didn’t. I lived in shame about this for 16 years; I am never going to feel shame about it again.
good for you. It’s refreshing to see someone come out of an experience as traumatic as this… let alone someone coming out of this with the intent to help others.
My first reaction as to why people do this is that some adults are so inept with their ability to handle “adult” interaction (be it situations of socialization/conversation/romance), that they get a child who they can feel superior to.
But fuck, I may be wrong.