From: farthing@leland.Stanford.EDU (ljf)
Subject: Re: Adults, Children and sex
Organization: DSG, Stanford University, CA 94305, USA
Date: Sat, 29 Aug 92 16:40:30 GMT

In article <1992Aug28.215525.12635@cbnewsc.cb.att.com> chapin@cbnewsc.cb.att.com ( Tom Chapin ) writes:
>ljf writes:
>>You're fortunate.  Unfortunately, some of us were approached sexually
>>by the very people who were supposed to protect us.  When you're three
>>or four and the person you love the most wants to have sex with you,
>>the chances aren't really good that you'll say no.
>
>"Fortunate" implies statistical minority.  I do not know that.  From
>my memory of my experience and those of my friends and playmates at
>the time, it would seem that my experience was the norm, while
>the experiences of harm were much less frequent, despite the impact
>of their emotional horror.  Those whose experiences were nothing
>more than a mild pleasure are less likely to have a motivation to say
>much about it (especially if they know they will be suffer emotional 
>abuse at the hands of well-meaning), even if they are the far greater
>statistical majority.

Fortunate does not imply statistical minority in my book.  I do think
you were fortunate that the person who approached you when you were 3
or 4 respected you when you said no.

I hear numbers that something like 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 7 boys are
sexually abused by the time they're 18.  While these are in the
minority, they're still sizable percentages.  By my own experiences,
I'd say these percentages are even higher, but maybe I'm attracted to
adults (as friends and/or lovers) who have been abused as children.
There's a lot of shame and confusion involved in molestation.  It
seems reasonable that most children keep quiet about it.

>Both persons who asked me for sexual activities were at the time
>in a caretaking role.  Despite their presumed "position of power"
>there still was no hint of abusiveness.

What sort of caretaking role, if you don't mind my asking?  I used the
expression "the person you love the most," while you're saying they
were caretakers.  While I don't approve of teenagers asking 3 year
olds for sex, I think there's a lot of difference between the teenager
being a casual babysitter and her/him being a beloved sibling.  I may
have been able to say no to a babysitter I scarcely knew.  I wasn't to
a man I loved like a father.

Most children who are sexually abused are abused by a family member or
a close friend of the family.  The stranger rapes of children make the
headlines. 

>The fact that sexual abuses occur does not mean that sexuality is
>inherently abusive.  The fact that some sexual abusers are gay or
>black or Catholic or older does not imply that all sexuality with
>people in those categories is abusive.  Stereotyping from an
>extremely traumatic experience to a whole category is very easy, and
>the greater the trauma, the easier and stronger the stereotype.  But
>our experiences with racial, gender, and religious stereotypes should
>have taught us the dangers of all such stereotyping.  Unfortunately,
>they haven't.  We just avoid whichever stereotypes are politically
>incorrect at the moment and make up for it by the strength of our
>stereotypes elsewhere.

Nowhere have I said that sexuality is inherently abusive.  But I have
met enough people who were sexually abused as children whose lives and
sexualities have been scarred to know how terrible sexual abuse can
be.

Remember too, that it's easy for you whose right to say no was
respected to label those of us who weren't respected as stereotyping
sexual abuse.  You saw the good side of adults asking children for
sex, we saw the bad.  Whose experiences are the stereotypes?

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