Child sex abuse is one of the most heinous criminal offenses, so when a victim becomes an offender, it’s evidence of a system failure.
When a ‘victim-offender’ is sentenced in court, a University of South Australia researcher is recommending judges acknowledge the offender’s early trauma, in conjunction with the consequences for the crime, in their sentencing comments.
The call for this to become best practice, follows new research that demonstrates multiple instances where judges implicitly or explicitly assumed knowledge that a victim-offender ‘should have known better.”
UniSA researcher Dr. Bronwyn Arnold says it is important that judges recognize the unresolved trauma of child sex abuse.
“In this study I looked at the end point of the cycle—when a child sex offender is sentenced by a judge for their crimes.”
“The study found that, in several cases, judges assumed that the perpetrator should have been aware of the pain they were causing to their victims. But when the offender was also a victim of child sex abuse is this really appropriate?”
It gets a bit old… Victim, victim, victim, trauma, trauma, trauma. I may be a bit jaded by my own experience through the system but children are human beings as well. This push by the lgbtq community, the media labels as somehow “sexualizing” children is actually incorrect. It’s more of an acknowledgement of reality that children are sexual beings by the mere fact that they’re alive. I get exhausted reading about how traumatized everyone is by some sexual encounter they had early in life. Why people have to go digging it all up just to get attention is beyond me. Why there isn’t more acceptance of a sexual event and understanding to prevent said trauma completely is beyond me. Rather the narrative that gains the most attention, the most tears and inevitably the most political action is trauma. Should I go back to when I was 13 and try to find some event to gather fodder for a push for more laws named after myself? One thing that really bothered me about “treatment” is that not one single time ever (even since my arrest) did anyone anywhere ever state how what happened caused any trauma at all. It’s as though they were just saying, “hey, she was 15 and we know nothing really happened but this body part was touched by her own volition for 1 second and therefore we say it’s traumatizing, we know she’s literally sitting there laughing at all this, but we’re going to destroy your life for our own enjoyment and amusement, all while justifying it all for this manufactured trauma she doesn’t know about yet, and may never be traumatized by… Judging by her role in the event and her maturity we don’t know any of any actual harm to her at all but we’re going to destroy you, enjoy”.
It’s so ridiculous. Half the time any of these “Victims”, especially younger ones, suffer any kind of trauma, it’s because everyone around them keeps telling them that they must be traumatized, and treating them like a wounded bird.
When I was 16, living in FL. I started seeing this 21 year old girl. Things between us ended up becoming sexual and lasted almost a year. I was never traumatized by that, I was fully aware of what I was doing, and having the time of my life. Hell, to all of my highschool male buddies I was the man and was bombarded constantly with questions if she had any friends.
In my so called offense, when I was 26 I ended up meeting this girl at my frequented local watering hole. Her and I hit it off immediately and started hanging out and seeing each other regularly. We were seeing each other for a couple of months when she admitted to me that she was really 17. Of course this rattled me slightly, but then again, I had already stepped on the land mine, no use in taking my foot off now. Little did I know the world of pain that was heading my direction.
So anyways, to cut a long story short, her mother ended up reporting me after her and her mother had a very heated argument about something.
And as they say, the rest is history. My point being is that she was 17 and fully aware of her choices. She was really happy and I was too. The only trauma she suffered was knowing that she was responsible for sending a man that she loved to prison.
What’s funny is that they kept trying to say that I was grooming her, even though both of us were telling them that she was the one chasing me. But of course that wouldn’t fit their narrative, so they had to paint me in the worst possible light as some kind of monster.
My point is that the system did infinitly more damage to her than I ever could. And younger kids are resilient. They run into a wall and smash their head, they have a good cry about it and have forgotten all about it in 15 minutes.
Now I am not saying that it shouldn’t be a crime to touch little kids, and of course people that do should go to prison.
But kids take cues from adults all the time, I’ve seen a kid get knocked down pretty hard, but was more or less ok. Just after it happened he looked at his mother, and it wasn’t until she started freaking out that he started crying. If you don’t treat it as some traumatic life changing event, a lot of time they won’t see it as one and move on with their lives.
If you treat people, especially children, as victims, guess what? They are going to be victims. If you help them understand it if they have questions that’s fine, but stop treating people like they are broken.
Yes, I know there are exceptions where truly horrific things have happened to people and I sympathize with that. I am talking about the 99% of other sex crimes that make their was through the system.
Geez… This started off as a simple short response.
Unfortunately it’s true, and a lot of PFR know this to be true because they’ve experience some type of sexual abuse in their past.
90% of women involved in prostitution were sexually abused as A child.
kids never recover from sexual abuse, it always comes out in different manifestations in their adult lives, for example a friend of mine told me when she was young her older girl cousin would mess around with her, now as an adult her sexually orientation is straight and even though she prefers being with a man, she fools around with women sometimes.
She said she doesn’t know why and thinks the encounters with her older cousin when she was little played a part in it, her exact words were “it’s not like it’s something I haven’t done before”