It is not necessarily true that all child molestation is completely nonconsensual or that the child never enjoys it. These facts are difficult for society to contemplate in our one size fits all view of the crime. I would agree that children cannot consent to sex with adults, even if they agree with it at the time, and there are a few cases where they do. It seems like most of the time, the children don’t really enjoy what’s being done to them or they are just confused. However, there are some cases where the children, often older ones, quite enjoyed the experience. I don’t think that makes it right, and it needs to be illegal whether the child enjoys it or not simply because it’s wrong, But it’s important to see that this issue is more confusing that it is usually made out to be.
I dated a woman once who had been molested at age 8 by a young man in head of a youth group at church. She had gotten over it completely. This is another difficult fact that many find hard to stomach. Not everyone is damaged permanently or in the longterm when they are molested. Now some definitely are, the long-term effects of this are serious with enough kids that we can document it in studies.
However, I have known a number of women who were molested as girls, and they all told me that they just got over it. How? They just decided that they did not want to let this ruin their lives, so they worked their way out of it. But one woman told me, “It’s hard because it feels good. The abuse feels good, but it’s wrong, and that’s hard to make sense of.” So children can find this physically pleasurable, which makes the issue even more confusing.
There are fathers who molested their daughters and seemed to be carrying on a love affair with them. It was quite clear that the daughter was definitely “in love with Daddy.” Now one could argue that even if a daughter is in love with Daddy, that still does not make child molestation correct. For one thing, society strongly disapproves.
These girls are often older, 9-12 or 10-12. However, in many cases, the girl grows up to adulthood and then has second thoughts and decides she was molested, harmed or taken advantage of. She develops a lot of psychological symptoms and is angry at the father-daughter sex.
There was a very famous series of child porn videos out there, some of the most famous ever distributed. The girl had some well-known name. The videos are named “Tracy” or whatever her name was. Of course I have not seen them. It’s illegal to even look at such a thing for even one second if you can believe that, and that stuff is almost impossible to find anyway. Right now, almost all child porn is on the Dark Net, and I would imagine there is little if any on the real Internet, so your chances of stumbling across it are almost nil.
But it appears quite a few people on the Net did view those tapes. I have seen forums where people talk about these tapes, and many of the men commenting on them do not even appear to be pedophiles. That’s quite possible, as you don’t have to be a pedophile to enjoy such material, which once again is going to be very confusing for a lot of people. Many non-pedophilic men can be aroused by such material also. However, anyone seriously collecting lots of child porn on their drive is probably a pedophile. These movies were also popular with hebephiles, as the girl may have been ~11-12 in some of the movies.
What is shocking about those movies is that the girl is reportedly enjoying herself and she is clearly quite in love with Daddy. Now that doesn’t make it right, but it’s interesting. Anyway, she became famous at some point as a child porn star, and her name was outed, so people knew about her and what she did. After she became an adult, she was ashamed of being a famous child porn star and she decided she had been molested, abused and taken advantage of and developed psychological symptoms.
Her love for her father also turned to hatred. The father was arrested at some point after the tapes were made. He was apparently not a pedophile at all. This is typically the case with familial molesters. Familial molesters are usually not pedophiles. These are called non-pedophilic molesters and they account for 92% of all molestations.
You are only diagnosed a pedophile if you mostly or only aroused by children and have little or no interest in adults. Most familial molesters are not much more aroused by little girls than the rest of us are. Instead of being pedophiles, they are best seen simply as criminals.
They are doing this for other reasons. They often have low morals and the sexual abuse occurs along with physical and psychological abuse as a general pattern of a power-hungry and controlling men who is best seen as simply a “bad person” as opposed to a sexual deviant.
Other reasons are often simply sexual. We also need to consider a common line about men a number of girlfriends have told me and that is, “Men will screw anything.” Unfortunately, this is true and even heterosexual men will have sex with other men, little girls, old ladies and gosh I don’t know, cored out melons and holes the wall I suppose. Men have their preferences, but the male sex drive is very strong and a lot of men are not too particular about which sexual object they utilize to meet their needs.
Getting back to the story about the famous child porn star, the girl’s father was a very handsome man, a bodybuilder very popular with women. He was a non-pedophilic molester. About his motivations, he said he was just in love with his daughter. Be that as it may, the court did not buy it, and he got 30 years in prison. The punishment may fit, as society is simply not ok with fathers having sex with their 10-12 year old daughters and in particular making movies out of it.
A number of men were arrested for “downloading” her videos. This is a misnomer, and downloading often just means “looked at it on a computer screen.” But many men collected her videos. About 1,500 men were found who had collected her videos and had been convicted in court over this. After the girl was an adult, she started suing the men who collected her videos. Many men were not sued at all. Instead she went after the men who had a lot of money. One man was sued for $1.5 million. I think she should have gotten money out of him, but that seems rather excessive considering the crime. And I wonder if being found guilty criminally and civilly is not double jeopardy.
At any rate, the take-home point here is that even if uncommonly children may enjoy or even consent to the molestation, it’s quite typical for them to have second feelings about it as they get older and a change of heart as this woman experienced, along with development of a lot of psychological symptoms, is quite common. So molestation is rarely if ever beneficial to children, and in many cases it is harmful even in those cases where they enjoyed it at the time because those feelings often go away as they get older.
Even in the cases I have known where women simply got over it, one would argue that nevertheless the molestation was not a good thing to have happen to them. The fact that some people can get over the bad things that happen to them does not mean that what happened to them were not bad things. Bad things are bad things whether you get over them or not.
