Interfamily rape situations are always difficult. The parent has to decide which is true: Is one family member a liar, or is the other family member a rapist? If you have no reason to believe one over the other, which do you think is more likely? Family members lie about each other all the time for various reasons, so this is naturally the first assumption in most cases. In a case where the rapist is an authority figure, the tendency to jump to the “liar” conclusion is even stronger.
Immediately call the police. Request a full psychiatric evaluation if they don’t do this as a routine procedure. Hope he is incarcerated or otherwise institutionalized for a very long time.
Therapy for everyone else. Clearly establish it is no fault of the daughter’s.
Probably want to die.
(I don’t have kids and this sort of thing makes me not want to.)
If your son denied it, would you automatically take your daughter’s word for it?
If the situation was reversed, which one would you be more likely to believe?
Something a lot of us are faced with other than rape is a situation where the children start to experiment sexually with each other. How do you deal with this? I would think the first time just have a good talk with them and address some of the things they may be curious about. But not make too big of a deal out of it. If it happens again, then maybe some counseling, I personally don’t have faith in going to a counselor I don’t know. The Martin pre school scenario was a good example of what councelors can do.
It’s not difficult to find better counselors than that. I’d be looking for advice from counselors and lawyers before going to the police, they could easily take this from disaster to catastrophe. No matter what I’d be looking for advice rather than rely solely on my own judgement in something so personally anquishing.
It would depend on the circumstances. If I did have a son and daughter I would probably be more emotionally similiar to my daughter enough that I would be more likely to know when she was lying. Therefore, if my hypothetical daughter told me her brother attacked her and nothing set off my lying to mother meter, I would believe her.
I have found peace elsewhere, thank you.
Because you consider someone trying to shake your hand to be equivalent to rape. But apparently rape isn’t a problem if it’s among family members; you learn something new everyday.
OK now that’s unfair. She considers an unsolicited offer of physical contact from those outside her family or primary group to be a violation of her dignity and made an (intemperate IMO) equivalence to rape (which she obstinately refuses to walk back). But it does not follow it works the other way symmetrically.
Honestly people. You’re making ZPG look like the calm and reasonable one. Maybe you should reevaluate your lifestyle or something.
International Church of Christ?
No, I don’t. And I would not EASILY disown an offspring, or want to kill one. But for rape, it might be a possibility.
Sometimes I can’t understand how someone can have such experiences and still be such a kind, wonderful person. Because you are. I don’t know how you made it through, but it leaves me in pure awe that you can be the way you are.
For me it’s clear. My son would have been raised well knowing what rape is, and raised knowing that all actions have consequences. He would not escape the consequences of his actions. I’d be pretty suicidal from my own fundamental failure as a parent, but I’d have to pull myself through to support my daughter.
This is the time when both of your children will need you, probably more than they will at any other time in their entire lives.
I don’t know what I’d do in a case like this* but I can understand the disowning reaction. It is reasonable in some cases not to care whether someone needs you or not. It’s not implausible that a case like this could be an example of that. If nothing else, clearly what I’ve been doing as a parent so far has completely backfired in such a case as this, so for all I know, disowning him is what’s best for him anyway–if I care about that.
*It’s even harder for me to imagine because knowing my kids… well… my son’s less aggressive in general, and my daughter more aggressive in general, let’s just leave it at that and not imagine horrific things.
What if the daughter sexually abuses the younger son? (hypocrites)
People put too much value in giving their children over to the cops. What’ll happen? They go to a horrible juvenile prison which will just mess them up even more and when they get out of there they’ll cause plenty more problems for people or other women. Don’t put any faith in the justice system. You have to figure it out yourself.
All these earnest proclamations in this thread about the police being called immediately don’t align with how these scenarios usually play out in the real world.
When blood related sibling sex happens in the real world, even if coercive, the authorities are rarely if ever called by the parents or blood relatives. That may be the initial inclination of one or both parents, but they usually change their minds when they weigh all the ramifications of it being made public and try for more private solutions. If the sex is with a step brother or step sister the odds are much higher the police will be called, generally by the bio-parent or step-relation who is not on site.
One of the reasons I’d want appropriate societal institutions involved is that I do know how those things usually play; I’ve been on the receiving end of it. It’s not going to change unless people make the specific choice to change it.
Another reason is that, having such a history, I doubt I’d have the serenity to find all available resources re. counseling and so forth without the help those institutions provide.
Take into account that I’m from one of the countries where cops are supposed to be on your side: some more than others, true, but still, even the worse ones are good at pointing people at the right resources. And calling them doesn’t equal “making things public”, at all.
In my case (although I’m a guy) it was my older brother who molested me, my younger brother and several other boys, it wasn’t handled particularly well by my parents. Of course, our family set a standard for dysfunction which most would be hard pressed to match. If they were able to handle it better then they wouldn’t have created the environment which fostered it in the first place.
I didn’t find this our for decades, but my older brother “Stan” was caught molesting a boy at the YMCA camp where Stan was a counselor. My father “handled” it, although I have no idea what he did.
This is the same man who molested his own daughters and at least a couple of nieces, and whose sole “talk” about sex to me was when he told me, as a too young 13-year-old in complete details about how he had molested my oldest sister and why it wasn’t really his fault, girls just like to be touched like that.
My mother asked me one day if Stan had done anything to me. Looking back it must have been just after the YMCA incident. However, the way she approached it, it was painfully obvious that it was a good idea to not say anything so I said he had never done anything.
Sometime after my father died my younger brother “Mike” apparently confronted Stan about it. I heard about it afterward from Mom and I asked her what she had done. Nothing. She was just out of sight and she left before hearing anything else. Obviously, she didn’t want to know. Just like what happened with me.
I didn’t tell her for years, and then I finally did. I confronted Stan and his response was that I had not idea how much that had hurt him over the years. When I pointed out that I wasn’t hearing an apology, he gave a pretty classic non-apology. He was sorry that “that had happened” to me. Not that he had done it or that he had caused me any pain. :rolleyes:
He also said that he thought his actions didn’t cause any particular grief to my younger brother. Fun, huh? After a few years of no follow up from Stan, I told him to fuck off and never contact me again.
I told my mother about it, and was unset that she wasn’t any more interested in being unhappy with Stan. The next day, she told me that all of her children had disappointed her in some way. Stan by raping Mike and me and me by no longer belonging to her church.
The church didn’t handle it particularly well either. Stan claims that he went through the repentance process while he was a missionary, but the process should have involved asking for my forgiveness, which he never did. He should have been excommunicated and he wasn’t so either the church relaxed the protocol or he didn’t really admit what he had done.
When growing up in that particular hell on earth, the one bright spot had been my older brother. We were really close. We did everything together. I think that he did help me survive the brutal abuse from my father and emotional neglect from my mother. So, his violation was not just physical. The broken trust was something which has been really, really hard to recover from.
Both Stan’s and my father’s actions were also difficult in that we grew up in a very conservative Christian environment and the conflicting messages were crazy.
The aftermath of all that shit was years of attempting to deal with it through drinking and anonymous sex. I wouldn’t recommend that particular attempt at self medication and self therapy.
Things were really bad in the past, but I’m making peace with my past.
This is one situation where I honestly don’t think any parent can think of an answer. Turn the rapist over to the cops? Entirely possible, even likely. But not inevitable.
One thing I’m fairly certain about is that I would not disown the rapist. I think it would be possible to explain that to the victim. He’s still your brother*, but that’s just a fact; I made him.
But what if the victim is begging you not to because it would break up the family or just because they don’t want to go through a trial? That’s not an unlikely scenario. Do you go to the cops regardless of your child’s wishes? Wouldn’t that be adding more pain? Why should the victim’s wishes be ignored - wasn’t that the problem in the first place?
It does happen sometimes and I guess the OP was thinking of news stories where it had happened. Obviously, they’re only the ones that came to court.
I do have a little personal experience here - just groping and stroking, but extremely inappropriate given our age difference; I mean, it wasn’t young kids experimenting beyond the usual bounds.
The last time it happened, I was a teenager, the first time of being alone in a room with him after years of not doing so; worried about his step-daughter, who I know he also physically abused (I witnessed him pushing her down the stairs) - they were already under investigation - I did consider reporting it, but fortunately his wife left him and kept him away from the daughter. And he was physically disabled, and gave off “bad vibes,” so I decided he wasn’t a risk.
I met him again this year and he might have changed. I’ll never let him be around my daughter alone, though. I doubt anyone in my family would let him be around a young girl without supervision.
*Change genders as necessary. It’s not like your daughter raping your son would be better.