From: chapin@cbnewsc.cb.att.com ( Tom Chapin )
Subject: Re: Adults, Children and sex
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 1992 02:43:34 GMT

ljf writes:
>You've used the term emotional abuse a lot (e.g., you feel emotionally
>abused by me for not agreeing with what you're saying).  

I never said that you committed any acts of emotional abuse.  I have
said that of only one poster in this thread.  I feel you have
specifically tried to avoid abusiveness.

>I wasn't sure
>if you were referring to jail and/or prison or the fact that
>pedophiles are "emotionally abused" by being treated for sexual abuse
>of children.

I was referring to those perverted sexual deviates who feel that an
abuser can be cured by putting them in jail where they will be anally
raped twenty times a night.  Those who I think are guilty of the
felony of conspiracy to commit rape, but who feel themselves to be
paragons of holy righteousness.  Those who take someone guilty of
lesser offenses and destroy them until there is nothing left of them
but an automaton of horror and destruction, and who then piously
speak of the futility of reformation and reconciliation.

>>When I was sixteen or seventeen, a friend related that a few nights
>>previously his brother, age 5 or so, came into his bed and performed
>>fellatio on him.  He pretended to be asleep and did nothing.
>>
>>Just where was the harm located, and who harmed who?
>
>I think the right thing for the older brother to have done 

...but you didn't answer the real question.  Where was the eternal
trauma and torment caused by the incident?  Where were the evil
motives on the part of the almost-adult?  Where is all the evil
inevitably to be found in the incident of activity between 5 year
old and 18 year old?

>I find
>it hard to believe that the younger brother thought up fellating his
>brother on his own.  Many sexually abused children act out sexually.
>My suspicions are that this is what the younger brother was doing.

Your "suspicions"??  If you cannot find evil intent on the part of
the older brother, you have to shuck and jive to look for some evil
from some other source?  It would seem that the reason you have
never seen any examples of nonharmful sexuality in such situations
is because your prior bias is to accept the validity of "11, 12 or
so" but refuse to accept any situation otherwise.  An intellectual
self-fulfilling prophecy.

I see absolutely no problem in the kid coming up with it on his own
or from discussing it with his young peers.  I came up with a helluva
lot more intense ideas than that before I was four.  Some people
just don't wait until they are thirteen before having sexual
feelings.  I was masturbating from age three (that I can remember,
probably earlier in reality), and I sure as hell was not molested
by any adult no matter how many fantasies I had about it.  And if
an adult had fulfilled my fantasies it would NOT have been
molestation.  (If there were coercion, it would stand on its own
terms, as coercion due to coercion, not coercion due to age
differences.)

>It would have been easy
>enough to say, "This isn't appropriate, but it's not that I don't love
>you."

Uh...the kid wasn't looking for validation of his brothers love, he
already had that.  He was looking for validation of his sexual
desires.  Maybe people don't like that, but that's for religious
reasons, not psychological ones (even if the religious reasons
try to put on psychological trappings).  Children (at least some)
have sexual desires.  Not "acting out," but genuine sexual feelings.
If it is assumed by the well-meaning that sexual desires can only
come as the result of molestation, then the attempts to coerce the
child to reveal a nonexistent coercion will cause grave psychological 
damage to the child.

-- 
	     tom chapin                tjc@hrcce.att.com
Newsgroups: soc.men,alt.child-support