I think the OP’s neighbours, co-workers, and relatives should be warned that he stays with a wife who associates with a woman who is married to a pedophile.
Maybe I should leave this board before someone finds out I exchanged messages with the husband of the acquaintance of the wife of the pedophile.
To be honest I would play safe and avoid your wife. Just in case she has caught paedophilia.
Sadly, it is too late for you. We all know now.
I agree with muldoonthief. I’m surprised that so many people in this thread are feeling sorry for the pedo’s wife. By staying with her pedophile husband, she is in essence condoning his crimes. And for that, she is a despicable individual.
So she is willing to condone child sexual abuse because she doesn’t have a job and needs the child abuser’s money – this makes it OK? This makes her worthy of our sympathy?!
I don’t think so. This makes her worthy of our scorn.
I would gladly go into the poorhouse to avoid being with a child molester.
How so? I have all kinds of friends who do all kinds of stuff I don’t approve of. Not shunning someone does not mean you approve of them.
This thread is really upsetting me because I don’t know the answer.
My Mom remained married to my abuser for years after I told her, and during occasional moments of lucidity admitted she knew what was going on, even corroborated some of my memories of abuse. I didn’t feel the need to punish her for staying with him, but it was impossible to have a relationship with her because she kept forcing him on me, saying I was selfish and immature not to move on and let go. The power of denial is quite strong. She’s ranged from trying to convince my doctors that I was completely delusional to saying she just let it happen because that’s what she thought every family was like. Denial is an incredibly strong human ability, and the lengths that some people will go to conceal the truth from themselves is staggering. I don’t hate her, but I do pity her for being too weak to embrace reality.
Having said that, I don’t know why so much of the outrage against pedophiles and pedophile’s wives rings so false to me. I get the impression that many people refuse to see child abusers as actual human beings, which I regard as a fundamental cause of my mother’s denial. If child abusers were regarded with more humanity, fewer kids would get the shaft when they came out about their abuse. My Mom essentially had the choice between her teenage daughter being a liar and her husband being an inhuman monster. Guess which she picked? Society never sees rationally when it comes to this issue, and it hurts the victims.
I’m sure this is the position that this guy’s wife is in. Her husband can’t be an inhuman monster because she’s seen him be goofy and silly and romantic and human. The only default choice she has is that everything else is a lie, and her relationship the only real truth. This is a dichotomy forced by the prevailing attitude about child abusers, so prominently displayed in this thread and in every mainstream media publication, and I will be very happy when it dies.
I know as well as anyone about the real damage that abuse can cause, but people keep missing out on the fact that abusers are human beings capable of doing both good and bad things, and this can make for a very confusing reality for anyone connected with the abuser. So many well-meaning people want to focus on the horror of sexual assault, the visceral revulsion associated with sexual contact between an adult and a child. But my pain, my grief, is first and foremost about having lost one of the most important people in my life, the guy who made me tiny pancakes every morning to make me giggle, who made a silly video of me dressed up as a cow for Halloween, taught me archery and martial arts, who challenged my default assumptions about politics and war, and who was a huge and fundamental part of my life in ways that had nothing to do with being abused. Last year’s election was hell, because I wanted so badly to ring him up and argue with him about politics, but I can’t, because every time I’m around him I have nightmares and flashbacks and fall apart. Because of a choice he made I have been punished with the loss of him as my Dad. That is a grief at least as profound as death but society will not validate my loss of this human being, they are much more interested in the grotesquery of the abuse itself.
This woman, because of a choice he made, was faced with the loss of him as her husband. Her experience negated society’s ‘‘truth’’ that he is a monster, and rather than constructing her own, individual, much more nuanced and painful reality, she made the default assumption that society is a liar. Can I pity her for not forcing herself beyond this dichotomy and exploring alternative narratives, however difficult? Sure. But I don’t think I can hate her for it, any more than I can hate my own mother.
Wow, you put it very eloquently. Those thoughts have been kind of bouncing around in my head but I can’t say them right. I guess part of my thinking is that treating this woman with total hostility isn’t likely to make her think that anyone is going to accept her, whether she stays or not. Obviously something is very wrong, but it seems to me that giving her hell tells her that society is not going to give her any hope, and she’ll feel that she can’t change anything regardless.
You make many good points. I also want to point out that it sounds like the arrest and conviction just happened–within the last few months. It takes time to process something like this and to come out with real understanding. It seems particularly harsh for the OP to think she should have processed and reacted to this so quickly. If I found out something like this about my husband . . . god, I think I’d be shellshocked for at least a year. This is like a death. People aren’t rational for a while after something like that, and you cut them slack.
There’s a big difference between “stuff you don’t approve of” and your husband molesting the children in your care. It’s not a matter of the wife disapproving of her husband’s actions – it goes way beyond that. He committed a terrible crime against children she was caring for. Her staying with him constitutes a tacit approval of his actions. That calls her character into question.
That said, I don’t think anything should be said to this woman. She should be left alone. Having a pedophile husband is punishment enough, I am sure.
Yes pedophiles are humans, and they need help. Absolutely. But I just can’t comprehend a woman staying with a man who abused children in her care – whether they be kids at her day care or her own kids. Mothers who stay with their children’s abusers – like olivesmarch4th’s mom – are betraying their children and are complicit in the crimes against their kids if they do nothing to stop it.