Letters to the Editor
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Actually
I was blaming all of us for the attitudes that lead to sexual assaults, not just men. I was also very careful to use the term "abuser" precisely because women can also commit this type of crime (against girls as well as boys, I might add).
And given that a huge proportion of the men who I see in therapy were molested as children, have told no one else about it their entire lives, and continue to suffer serious consequences as a result, I agree completely that it is a huge issue deserving way more attention. Our culture is definitely complicit in hiding men's traumas -- it is one of the great injustices that gender role constiction does to males.
However, the legal issue here hinges on the adult/sexual clothing that the girl was wearing, and I have never heard of a case involving a male victim where his clothing factored into the determination of guilt or the harshness of sentencing. So the cultural criticism I was suggesting about the fashion industry doesn't seem to me to be applicable, or at least not the same. The activism that needs to be done to respond to these two problems does not seem to me to be identical, either: for male victims, what is needed is more awareness raising and advocating for greater sentencing parity. For female victims, it has to do with changing attitudes about what it means to dress "provocatively" and finding ways to encourage our culture to stop sexualizing little girls.
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Parson Jim, do you have a personal story to tell us? Or some particular statistics?
There are women child molesters, but they are far outnumbered by men who molest children. In no case should the molestation of any child be ignored; therefore please give us your information.
In my experience as a CASA, the problem with some women involved in the issue is not molestation of children but a tendency to go into some strange state of catatonic denial when they are confronted with evidence that their spouses, boyfriends, or family members molested their children.
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you must be literally referring to "America" as the continent rather than as the U.S., as is so commonly done
Sighhh...
I'm completely off topic here but I just can't control myself.
There is no continent called "America". There are two continents, North America and South America.
If you must refer to the entire landmass as "America" and this causes you confusion or stress with "America" in reference to the United States of America just try and think of it this way...
Does anyone talk about Eurasians? (Hey, its two continents on one land mass -- and they don't even have an isthmus to make some tidy little splitting point!) Would someone be making a political point by talking about all the jurisdictions in Eurasia and all hundred some-odd countries it encompases? Or would they be talking about just one country?
If the context seems to imply just one country and not dozens you can safely assume that, in this instance, "America" refers to "The United States of America" just as "Mexico" refers to "The United Mexican States"
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@DonaQuixote:
While I will not deny that our culture sexualizes little girls, I don't see that as the main problem here. Can it be that the judge in the case has his own problems seeing childhood as a should-be protected state? No matter what a ten year old wears, I still have little trouble recognizing her as being not sixteen.
Of course our culture sexualizes little girls and it is evident in any fashion magazine. However, that does not mean that normal healthy people see little girls as available for their sexual exploitation. The problem lies not in the observed but in the observor. I was once told by a woman who worked for CPS that some pedophiles actually saw THEMSELVES as younger and that most were quite arrested in their emotional development. She also said that some child sexual abusers saw their victims as older than they were. In others words, these guys can't SEE reality. They are seeing what they want to see because their fixation is young girls.
To give a couple of examples: I once had a sex offender tell me that a little girl (age 3) who sat in his lap was sexy and wanting sex because she squirmed against him. Many years ago, I read about a US judge (Colorado, if I remember) correctly who let a sex offender go because he judged that the preschooler this guy had molested was "a very sexy young lady."
Hello?
I don't think, given the prevalence of child sexual abuse, that it would be at all surprising when molesters make their way into law offices and onto the bench and onto juries.
I confess that I see apologists for sexual abusers as a bit weird themselves.
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judge the judge
So why is this Judge still on the bench? HE is either very senile and unable to perform his duties, or he himself is a paedophile - and therefore, why isn't he under investigation? These are not reasonable comments and his sentences seem to show a great deal of empathy for the perpetrator....WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON THERE? get rid of this F***Wit and make the world a better place for kids in unfortunate circumstances!
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Jules T,
I don't know how things work in England, but here it is extremely difficult to get rid of judges. Suppose this judge IS a pedophile. One would have to prove he had committed a crime, which would require an investigation where there is no accuser. That's not really possible. If he holds his position by appointment, he would have to be proven to commit some judicial impropriety, wouldn't he? Theoretically, he could let sexual abusers go or give them light sentences for an endless variety of reasons. Nothing could be done as long as he was functioning within the law.
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@ AKA Smith
Good points. I have heard similar descriptions of pedophiles from people who have been treating them for years. I also agree that the direct complicity of many women in the sexual abuse being perpetrated by their male family members is it's own disorder, and ought to be its own crime.
(And how did I somehow miss that you are a fellow CASA?)
However, I'm not so sure about the relative statistics for the gender of sexual abuse victims. There is so much that goes on that we don't know. We can't assume that the proportion of male and female abuse victims who are helped by CPS represents the proportion who are actually being victimized. I really do think there are far more male victims of this type of crime than our culture imagines. I have no idea how common it is relative to victimization of girls, and I don't know how to begin finding out, because male victims (at least from what I can tell) are even less likely to talk about it than females.
To clarify, I was not claiming that the sexualization of girls in our culture leads to pedophilia, just that it leads to some judges trivializing pedophilia and that it leads to a general confusion over what is a child and what is an adult that non-pedophiles who are nevertheless statutory rapists can exploit. It also leads to fewer people taking notice and doing something to intervene when a child is acting out sexually because of past abuse (I have myself missed the first signs of this type of problem in one of the girls I've worked with).
I can also imagine that every once in a while it might lead someone who isn't intentionally criminal but just willfully creepy to think he or she is having sex with a consenting, "barely legal" adult (or at least to be in convenient denial about it). I'm not sure that should let anyone off the hook, though.