Questions from the #whyididntreport thread

Right. So your kid goes to a party, gets assaulted, and then what?

She knows that if she goes to her parents, her parents will be furious with her, for putting herself in that position.

So what does she do? She shuts up about it, doesn’t tell anyone, keeps it a secret.

If you are a parent, and you would want your kid to come to you if they were sexually assaulted, ask yourself what messages you’re sending your kid that would make it likely for that to happen. You can say that you would protect and support your child. But does your child believe you?

If you don’t understand how a father can be, simultaneously, appalled that my daughter was hurt, and appalled that she did something monumentally stupid, I doubt I can explain it to you. Because both those feelings are real. It’s not one or the other.

Regards,
Shodan

It’s not that the people in this thread don’t understand that. What they (we) are saying is that, specially for someone who’s already frightened and having a lousy day, being very clear on the distinction between “I’m somewhat angry that you broke curfew” and “I’m spitting mad at the asshole who attacked you” is extremely important.

And a lot of parent blow goats at that. You go to them saying “I’m late because I got attacked on my way back from Janie’s party” and their response is “WHAT?! HOW?! WHY DID YOU THINK WE’D TOLD YOU TO BE HOME BY TEN DAMNIT?!” Do you understand that’s not helpful, whether it’s the actual reaction or the expectable one based on prior experience?

Pedophiles are often shrewd enough to target a child who does not have a lot of support/caring/attention/affection from hir parents. Of course it makes the kid vulnerable to being groomed, but there’s the added advantage that if they do tell their parent/s, the reaction is more likely to be, “Is this for real, or are you trying to make trouble?”

Beyond that, depending on how old the child is, and how well they express themselves, their “telling” may be just ambiguous enough that it’s not clear what happened. If the assailant says “I’m tickling you,” and the kid tells mom/dad “Uncle Chester tickled me,” that might not send up a red flag. Especially back in the day when a lot of people just didn’t know pedophilia was a thing. In a lot of the accounts in the Pit thread, we’re talking about fifty years ago or more. Children didn’t even get sex education, much less warnings about “bad touching”. So they didn’t know how to talk about it. And adults didn’t know how to listen.

How would you say your appallment (?) at her behavior would manifest itself towards your daughter? Yell at her? Tell her it’s partly her fault? Something else?

Edited to add: What Nava said.

Emphasis added. What’s making me go :dubious: here is your persistent use of the passive voice to describe this (thankfully only hypothetical) assault. You’re presenting the assault as though it was something that just “happened” as an accidental consequence of the monumentally stupid thing that your daughter did, like a car accident. The only person in this analogy who seems to end up with any agency or responsibility is your daughter.

I doubt that you mean it this way, but your analogy seems to reinforce the all-too-common underlying attitude that sexual assault and rape are things that “just happen” to (particularly) women, and “just the way life is”. When criminal acts deliberately committed by perpetrators are regarded as an inevitable and impersonal risk, like bad weather or something, that it’s up to the potential victims to protect themselves from, then we end up blaming victims and excusing perpetrators.

I think this has a bearing on the OP as well. A lot of parents, consciously or unconsciously, buy into this attitude that their daughter (or son) “got raped” or “got assaulted” by “putting themselves in harm’s way”. As though this sort of “harm’s way” is just a natural and inevitable feature of the landscape, and it’s the child’s job to avoid it, rather than the perpetrator’s deliberate choice to inflict harm on their child. In that kind of framing, the only responsible agent directly visible is the child her- or himself, so the child is the person you get mad at.

I was lucky enough not to be seriously assaulted as a child/teen, but I have no doubt that if I had, my mother wouldn’t have believed a word of it. Dunno about Dad, he’d be more inclined to believe me, but if I said one thing and Mum said something else, he’d probably pick her version. When it came to teen girl sexuality, he clearly though he was out of his depth and assumed my mother would be better at handling it.

When my mother’s friend (in his 30s) was repeatedly creepily hitting on both 16 year old me and a 15 year old employee, following us round and asking questions about our sex lives, my mother’s response was to angrily confront the 15 year old asking ‘Have you got a problem with my friend?!’ to which she got a scared no from the kid who was worried she’d lose her job if she said yes. Mum then accused me of making the whole thing up, and then, bizarrely, tried to arrange a family holiday inviting said creepy friend and wanted me to share a room with him, then was utterly bewildered when I switched from being excited about the family trip to flatly refusing to go when told who else was coming (and in my bedroom!)

When another older guy was trying to talk me into sleeping with him when I was 17, she not only was unconcerned, she actually tried to encourage me to have sex with the guy on no further info than ‘He’s 34 and he’s creeping me out’. Shortly afterwards he got arrested and convicted of statutory rape of three 14/15 year old girls I knew. Her reaction? They were silly and selfish for reporting it, they were all just upset and ruining his life because they thought they were special until they found out about each other. Oh, then she told me if I was that bothered about the age of consent I should have taken him up on the offer when he was interested in me, maybe if he’d been with me I could have stopped him. If I was good enough.

Yeah, she’s got issues. She also denies saying any of the above now, because that would have been a horrible thing to say and she’d love to think she was a great open minded parent.

I think for a lot of parents it’s far easier to think the person you remember claiming it was the cat that ate the cookie with a face covered in crumbs age 3 is simply lying to get out of/get someone into trouble than to think something is seriously wrong.

Plus people’s ideas about what’s OK can be seriously messed up.

Shodan:

It’s right to be angry at your daughter to some extent, in the hypothetical situation you described. But it might be wrong to express that to her, at all, ever. I don’t just mean not blowing up at her, I mean it might be wrong to calmly say to her “I’m somewhat angry about that”. Or perhaps to say it but not until years later. It depends on the daughter. It doesn’t depend on how you feel; you have a lot of other feelings about other topics that you don’t communicate to her either, because they’re better kept to yourself - this might be one of those.

No, I think I understand. The question is, would your daughter understand?

I think you can imagine a scenario where a parent would indeed be ready to support and protect their child, but the child might not trust that would actually happen?

Like, if the child was listening when the parents are discussing a news item. What messages does the child pick up? I understand that messages about not putting yourself in dangerous situations are intended to convey the message to not put yourself in dangerous situations. The intent is to protect the child. OK, now the child has gone and put themselves in a dangerous situation, and were harmed. Now what does the child believe about the parent’s likely reaction?

This isn’t about what the parent will do or think. This is about what the child might believe the parent will do or think.

It’s a kid’s job to do stupid things, that’s how they learn not to do stupid things. It’s the adults job to ensure they face the consequences of the stupid things they do so they learn from them. In the case of the reckless driver they’d have the natural consequences of the pain and suffering, and some artificial consequences like paying for the car and insurance hikes as a result of their recklessness. That’s perfectly acceptable parenting. If you can get through to the kids so they never drive recklessly that’s better, but some kids have to pee on the electric fence for themselves, that’s how humans work.

There’s a huge difference between driving too fast and having an accident and being sexually assaulted. The agency of the third party. If a teenager goes to a party they shouldn’t, and drinks or does drugs, then the natural consequences are things like hangovers, the withdrawal, and the shame/secrecy(which is a burden in and of itself). Reasonable artificial consequences may be getting grounded or losing phone privileges, possibly having to go to drug/alcohol counseling, etc. Being raped is not a reasonable consequence. It’s why we’ve made it illegal. It’s foreseeable, at least to a certain extent and with the benefit of life experience that most teens(by definition) lack, but that doesn’t make it reasonable. You want to be mad at a teen for making reckless decisions about a party and drug/alcohol use that’s fine, and can be good parenting. But it wasn’t their choice to be raped. The lack of choice is the definition of rape. Be mad at the rapist.

Enjoy,
Steven

I think this is a very good post. Thank you.

And assailants largely know and count on this. They purposefully talk the child into something they know they should not do - watching porn, drinking alcohol,
maybe taking drugs - in order to insulate themselves from the possibility of a report. “You know if you tell anyone you’ll be in big trouble.”

I hope you won’t think I’m trivializing the overall topic, but I have to say that “blow goats” is my new favorite phrase of all time. ROFL!

And back to the topic: I can think of a few different angles from which this behavior might originate. Please understand that I am not defending it, just trying to answer the OP’s question.

There are the parents who go through life from a “low power” perspective. They nervously avoid trouble, seek out and follow rules, and just depend upon the belief that if you do everything right you won’t bring bad things upon yourself. They are always going through life trying to do everything perfectly in order to keep themselves and their loved ones safe.

They may be very empathetic people, who can only process the bad that occurs to themselves or their loved ones by believing that something was done to deserve it. So when the child is hurt, and the pain can be traced back to that failure, they jump on the explanation. Its the only way they can make sense of it.

They are blame-oriented, rather than solution-oriented. Many people go through life thinking that if they have established blame they have magically solved the problem. There is also a deep guilt for not having somehow protected your child from this, so the excruciating blame must be shifted as quickly as possible.

They are judgmental gossips. If you have gone through life judging other people to whom this has happened, and swearing you would never allow such a thing to happen to YOUR child, then when it does, you have to defend yourself from your own judgement. “But I TOLD you never to do X . . .”

Honestly thinking they are helping the child learn this lesson. Some may just be trying to make sure the child “gets” the importance of avoiding something or someone in future. They may have no idea that they are leaving the child with the sense of being to blame for the attack.

Minimizing to prevent further trauma. One can never be certain how seriously a child will take the occurrence.(Not talking about a violent rape here,obviously) The parent may be struggling to remain calm and avoid increasing the trauma or causing a further trauma. They may not want to put the child through the horror of a police interview or court testimony.

Pure mental and emotional paralysis. The utter horror of sexual abuse is incredibly paralyzing. Knowing the probable treatment ahead of anyone who reports or confronts it will sometimes activate defense mechanisms which actually close down the brain’s processing of the information. The parent may be almost as traumatized, and subvert the memory in the same way a victim might.

The cult of virginity. There are still many societies in which virginity is a prerequisite for a good marriage, especially for females. Do not imagine I am talking about third-world countries here. There are threads of virginity fetish running through every “Fundamentalist” church in the USA. The parent’s primary focus therefore may be in protecting the child’s future from utter destruction.

Jealousy. There are women who are raised to compete mercilessly for male attention. They can and do continue this horror into their relationship with their daughters. The Mother in such a case may find the attacker attractive, and be focused on the fact that the victim was graced with his attention. He may appear outwardly to be a “good catch.” She may even hear the report as if it were a “sneak brag.”

I’m sure those who have read this far want to barf now; me too. But I could go on. I just don’t have it in me.

She would believe I would be, simultaneously, appalled that my daughter was hurt, and appalled that she did something monumentally stupid.

At least, that’s how she reacted when similar situations arose (although, thank God, no assaults).

Like I said, I don’t think I can explain what it’s like to have a good relationship between a father and a child. Maybe you can only experience it from the inside.

Regards,
Shodan

You won’t listen, so what’s the point?

Do you think she might be so scared about you being appalled at her “monumentally stupid” actions that she might not tell you about it at all?

If you are going to explain how my daughter doesn’t trust me, or did feel condemned when she came to me when she suffered the consequences of a screw-up, then you are certainly going to have an uphill climb.

If you are going to explain what it is like to have a good relationship with your children, you don’t have to - I know it already.

Regards,
Shodan

As I mentioned, she didn’t react that way with lesser situations. So no - it’s possible, of course, but I don’t think so.

Of course, she turns 27 in a couple of weeks, so if she is keeping secrets from me about her past, she has been holding the secret for a while.

Regards,
Shodan

Maybe you should ask?

I am trying to imagine what I would have done had my daughter come to me like that when she was 15. First off, I don’t think she would have concealed it from me since we always had her back and she trusted us. And I would have called the police. Then and only then, I would have gotten a bit angry at her for getting into that situation. But I don’t think she ever was in such a situation. During her first year in college, her corner of the dorm were known as the “nuns of 3 east”.

**Mid Hat On **

Let’s not hinack this thread any further about critiquing Shodan’s parenting.