Full disclaimer: I have never watched a second of the Duggars TV show. All I know is that they breed like rabbits and are deeply religious.
But you’ve hit on the problem I have with reality TV shows focused on families with children. Kids do stupid things. Most of us may not have sexually abused our siblings, but we all did stupid shit growing up. Fortunately for the majority of us, we didn’t have a TV crew following us around to document it. And we don’t have to worry about dirty laundry like this coming out and ruining our lives well into adulthood. What happened in adolescence should stay in adolescence, but that doesn’t happen if you are on a TV show.
The Duggar kids didn’t ask for celebrity, and now they’re paying the costs. Maybe it’s only fair that they suffer a little seeing as how they’ve benefited from it? I don’t know.
This is well outside the category of “kids doing stupid things.” He wasn’t a 3-year-old playing doctor. Josh was old enough to know right from wrong. He molested several of his sisters, some of them while they were sleeping. His sisters may claim to have forgiven him, but I can’t imagine the pain and fear of having to live in the same house with him.
The Duggar parents share some of the blame for creating an environment of intense sexual repression. These kids aren’t allowed to masturbate or look at scantily-clad women, and they are taught that having sexual urges towards anyone besides your spouse is evil.
I don’t even follow the show that closely, but it’s trivially easy to look at the ages in relation to what we know of the siblings birth order and spacing between ages. They’d have been between 8 and 12.
The worst part is that JimBob and J’chelle believe that if a woman is sexually assaulted it’s her fault for stirring up desires in the male. I can fully believe that they would have blamed their daughters for all of this. They are truly sickening people.
How long until TLC cancels the show and the gravy train is over? Right his moment TLC is airing a rerun of an interview with the family by Erica Hill.
The most recent episode of the show featured Michelle describing how girls should dress modestly so as not to inflame male desires. She loves to tell the story of how, as a teenager, she would mow her lawn wearing a bikini (this was before she found Christ). All of her neighbors’ wives hated her and she couldn’t figure out why. After she became a fundamentalist she decided that she was guilty of “defrauding” their husbands.
Given the attitudes of their parents, it’s highly likely that Josh’s sisters feel partly responsible for what Josh did to them.
It’s the belief of the cult of Gothard, who coincidentally is also a sexual offender. Woman and girls must keep covered, lest they stir up feelings of desire in men, that cannot be righteously fulfilled outside of marriage. They refer to it as defrauding the man. That comes right from the mouths of JimBob and Michelle.
I’m a bit behind the curve here. How does it come to pass that this is being revealed NOW?
Also I confess to being mildly curious as to whether the FRC was kept in the dark about the situation while Master Duggar was negotiating the terms of his employment.
According to their statement the family got counseling for “those affected,” but I’m sure it was church counseling, not trained professionals for helping victims of sexual abuse.
I assume that it came out now because Josh was set to become executive director of the FRC and people looked much more closely at his background. When he was just a reality TV participant, he didn’t have the level of scrutiny that he has now, and people who were content to sit on this decided it was now time to talk.