Hi everyone. I'm sorry to have to report there is no "Tell" video today. It was not for lack of trying. I have several friends (and friends of friends) who have shared that they are interested in guest blogging their stories, but none is actually quite ready yet. I totally respect that, and can also relate to how scary this all is. Your words, your voice.... your time :)
In the meantime, someone sent me this incredibly interesting piece: https://medium.com/matter/youre-16-youre-a-pedophile-you-dont-want-to-hurt-anyone-what-do-you-do-now-e11ce4b88bdb
What amazing information the interviewer gleaned for us! So many times throughout my family's journey, I've wondered about this exact topic... "Where are all the offenders who haven't yet acted out?" I mean, we know they're out there, right?
This article is about pedophiles, which is different from a child rapist. My son raped my daughter. I don't believe he is a pedophile (someone who finds children attractive). I think he is a rapist who offended to fill his need for power and control (nothing at all to do with attraction to his victim, except that he had easy access to her, and she was easily manipulated by him).
Either way, I don't believe that pedophiles nor child rapists typically wake up one day, out of the blue, age 60-something, and decide they're going to act on a sexual urge against a child. No, the arousals and thoughts presumably must start earlier than when the offender first acts out. In my son's case, he was molested as a child and then became a perpetrator himself (as a child). The fact of his prior abuse is notable as a probable "impetus", but he still presumably thought about this long before he acted out against my daughter. What *if* resources had been available during that "thinking phase", before he actually perpetrated? What if he had felt free to talk about such a taboo topic as this?
Just reading about the lack of resources for this demographic of potential criminal is so disheartening. Wait until you get to the part where people were excused from reporting on cases acted upon by pedophiles. I would be livid if people knew my child had been victimized, and yet I was not told. How are we protecting the survivors of child sexual abuse from being revictimized if we don't know they were victimized in the first place? How do we protect subsequent victims if we don't know about first victims. At what expense are we protecting predators (just to learn more from their true stories)?
Quite a lot to think about in the article. How do you feel about what you read? What about the mom's response to her son's admission? Quite a different feel, I'd imagine, than being the mom of someone who DID perpetrate. No less awful, though. I certainly wish, as the mother of both a perpetrator and survivors, that my son had told someone that he was thinking about acting out. Statistics suggest that once someone takes that step and becomes a sexual offender, the likelihood of re-offending is extremely HIGH. So, I guess in my case, it's very much on my reality radar that my son is likely to act out on someone else at some point in his life. This is what is so frustrating about our justice system....they think he won't re-offend, and they were willing to gamble EVERYONE'S kids on that thinking (by not making him a registered, trackable offender). While the mom in the article may still have at least a flicker of hope that her son will be able to reign in those demons and successfully *not* act out, I don't have the luxury of that kind of hope for my son.
~Mags
MagsKarn.com
No more silence. No more shame.
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