Child sexual abuse

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Child sexual abuse is a form of child abuse typically defined as any sexual activity performed by an adult on a child or any unwanted or inappropriate sexual behavior by another child. The term "child" varies between jurisdictions but is generally considered to be someone who has not reached or not completed puberty. A related concept is statutory rape, which involves an adult and a minor under the age of consent (generally around 14-21, depending on the laws of different states and nations).

Child sexual assault is one of the truly taboo acts, considered morally reprehensible in all circumstances. The primary justification for sexual contact between children and adults being considered wrong is that a child cannot give full informed consent to sexual activity; being at an age where, perhaps partly as a result of cultural values of obedience instilled in them, they are likely to believe and submit to any adults they meet (particularly custodians), they are not in a position to fully understand their actions in the context that the adult does.

Child sexual abuse poses extreme and irreversible developmental risks to children. It was formerly widely believed by the public that such abuse was rather rare, but in the 1980s, large numbers of victims began coming forward with their stories, greatly raising the profile of the problem. It is now believed that at least one in 10 people have been sexually abused as a child. Approximately one-third of victims are boys, while two-thirds are girls. 93% of cases involve a person acquainted to the victim, and 34% of cases are committed by someone related to the victim.

An estimated 5-7% of public school teachers have engaged in child sexual abuse, and estimates range between 2% to 7% of Catholic clergy members in particular have engaged in child sexual abuse (with an estimate of Anglican priests finding 4% which is at parity with the estimate for Catholic priests in the John Jay Report). This may be an underestimate though, as in many jurisdictions, such as 33 of the 50 US states, teachers are legally required to report known/suspected child abuse while clerics aren't.

Technically, clinicians distinguish between child sexual abuse as a behavior and pedophilia as a disorder, though the latter can obviously relate to the former and is used colloquially to refer to it. Many pedophiles choose the route of Christian homosexuals and refrain from acting on their urges for moral or practical reasons. Some pedophiles, convicted and otherwise, have undergone physical or so-called "chemical castration" to limit the risk they present to others.

Examples of large-scale child sexual abuse

Graffiti in Portugal depicts a Catholic priest chasing two children.

Human trafficking

Worldwide, it is estimated that there are 27.6 million victims of human trafficking at any given time. The majority of trafficked children are sexually abused. Children are often trafficked by pimps, gangs, and family members. Although any child can become a victim, children who are marginalized or lack support systems are at particular risk. Victims often become hardened as a result of their experience; regardless of what they were before being trafficked, they're usually not the cute little middle class kid wearing a school uniform hugging a teddy bear who bystanders are sympathetic to (even if they were at one point), they're (sadly) usually the one with serious behavioral issues that bystanders view as a "brat" or the underage prostitute that bystanders dismiss as a "whore." This is something to consider when casting judgement on others.

Modern child brides

It has been estimated that there are over 50,000 child brides worldwide at any given time. UNICEF defines child marriage as: "a formal marriage or informal union before age 18", and many child brides are very young, not having yet reached puberty. In some places, children are married as young as 9 or 10 years old. India is often claimed to have the highest rate of child brides; however, the practice is also found in Guatemala, Niger, Pakistan, and Afghanistan; in all cases, rural, uneducated, and impoverished areas have the highest incidents of child marriage. In early 2014, the practice came briefly into the news when Iraq announced it was drafting a law that would legalize marriage as early as 9. These countries have long cultural and religious traditions of marrying young girls—marriages which today are likely to be consummated at the time of marriage and not after the child has begun menstruating. In 2016 child marriages became illegal in Gambia and Tanzania, which it is hoped will reduce the problem in those nations. This is even a problem in the United States, with it being effectively legal in 44 states and 20 states not even having a minimum age. At least 300,000 children have been married in the U.S. since 2000, most of them being young girls married to much older men.

Institutional abuse

While child sexual abuse by strangers is a serious problem, it is unfortunately small in comparison with abuse within institutions in which children should feel safe. With 34% of CSA cases involving a family member, many cases happen in a child's own home. In other instances, children are abused at school, child care facilities, groups or clubs, athletic teams, houses of worship, or places of employment.

USA Gymnastics

Larry Nassar, a former physician entrusted to care for members of the USA gymnastics team in the Olympics, was convicted for sexually abusing over 150 women and girls over the course of two decades, some of whom were minors. He was also convicted in federal court on child pornography charges. Earlier reports of the abuse were mishandled by USA Gymnastics, Michigan State University, and the US Olympic Committee. This case is an unfortunate example of abuse in both health care and athletics. Another inmate stabbed the piece of shit ten times in 2023, but he unfortunately survived.

Religious organizations

See the main article on this topic: Child sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church

In the early 2000s, multiple hundreds, if not thousands, of charges that priests in the Roman Catholic Church had committed sexual assault on children came to light. With each new story, more adults who had been abused as children stepped forward to add their voices despite pressure on them to keep silent. The vast majority of these incidents had been covered up by the Church itself. The priest was moved to a new parish, often without punishment or counseling. And often, the priest re-offended in the new parish without parents knowing he was a danger to children.

A 2023 report by the attorney-general of Illinois revealed the problem was previously drastically under-reported; it found that, in the state of Illinois alone, between 1950 and 2019, almost 2,000 children were molested by 451 Catholic clerics and religious brothers. This was in reaction to findings by a 2018 grand jury from Pennsylvania that found over 300 Catholic priests molested more than 1,000 children since the 1940s, which was covered up. An inquiry concluded in 2021 that, in France alone, about 216,000 and perhaps as much as 330,000 children were molested by thousands of Catholic clerics since 1950. That inquiry stated that there were at least about 3,000 abusers out of some 115,000 clerics. An official government commission in Spain estimated over 200,000 children were molested by Catholic clergy there, and in Italy, a Vatican official estimated the number could be as high as 1,000,000.

Several stories in recent years have demonstrated that there has been long-running abuse of young boys within the Orthodox Jewish Yeshivas and the bathhouses. It is highly alarming that the local Orthodox authority will try to pay off the families to keep them quiet. Failing that, the local Orthodox community shuns anyone speaking out about such abuse. One of the causes for the silence is rather unusual: the traditional religious prohibition against mesirah, which instructs Jews not to turn fellow Jews into a non-Jewish legal authority if that authority is considered abusive towards Jews. This prohibition appears to originate as a reaction to historical oppression towards Jews by the Persians or Romans. It's a shining example of how a rule originally intended to protect can be repurposed for abuse. The ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) Jews are uniquely disposed to interpret antique religious laws especially stringently (i.e. fundamentalism), so it makes some sense this problem might emerge among them in particular.

Similarly, in a closed, tight group like Jehovah's Witnesses, which can use threats of disfellowshipping and shunning, it may be harder to report instances of abuse. There is evidence of systematic abuse within the movement in both the United States and Australia.

In 2022, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) released a list of hundreds of leaders within its tens of thousands of churches who were either found guilty of, or accused of, sexual abuses including against children between 2000 and 2019. It was also reported that the church had previously "stonewalled and denigrated survivors of clergy sex abuse over almost two decades while seeking to protect their own reputations", and that the SBC's leaders "rejected nearly every proposed reform" that could have helped to prevent such abuses.

When valid concern turns to fear and woo

The Daily Star attacking a television show over depicting pedophilia, while also sexualizing then-15 year old singer Charlotte Church

The daycare satanic panic

In the mid-1980s, some people involved in the daycare industry (caring for other people's children while they were at work) in the U.S. were accused of various levels and amounts of sexual abuse of children in their care, often in connection with Satanic ritual abuse. Of prime note is the Amirault family daycare scandal, which put several adults in jail. Although the evidence against them has been debunked, the Massachusetts Supreme Court upheld all of their convictions on the grounds of "finality" (i.e., that reopening it would be "unfair" for the alleged victims — no concern for whether it's "unfair" to have been wrongly convicted, of course). All those convicted are free on probation or parole but still considered legally guilty and subject to being registered as sex offenders, forbidden contact with children, etc.

Another notable case was the McMartin Preschool case, which resulted in two hung juries and an eventual dismissal with prejudice.

These daycare incidents helped set off the "memory war" and scientific drama hurricane surrounding the research of Elizabeth Loftus.

The gay "agenda"

Many individuals and organizations (namely Paul Cameron, the Family Research Council, and Focus On The Family) opposed to societal acceptance of homosexuality claim that homosexuals routinely abuse children sexually as a means of "recruiting" them into the lifestyle and claim that part of the "homosexual agenda" is the reduction or abolition of the age of consent. These claims are usually justified by pointing to NAMBLA, Catholic sexual abuse cases, or other scandals involving male victims of adult male abusers (Jerry Sandusky, Mark Foley, etc.). There are several problems with this assertion:

• There are a great number of CSA cases that go unreported, which makes it difficult to make blanket claims about the demographics of CSA; nevertheless, there is no statistical evidence among cases of CSA that are reported that the percentage of cases where the victim and abuser are the same genders is greater than the percentage of homosexuals in the population at large.
• Most experts (psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers) agree that those who commit CSA do not have an adult sexual orientation and that pedophilia (or hebephilia, if the victim is an adolescent) is distinct from heterosexuality or homosexuality. Many abusers (such as Jerry Sandusky) lead seemingly normal lives with adult partners, regardless of the gender of their victims.
• Even if we assume that pedophiles can be gay or straight and that statistics are complete, we would still be seeing anywhere between 60% and 90% of CSA being committed by heterosexual males, who make up less than half of the population. While homosexual males would still be overrepresented, homosexual women would be underrepresented despite existing in pretty much the same numbers as their male counterparts, meaning that while the recruitment narrative may be feasible (although not supported by any evidence) for males, something different would have to be going on for females.
• NAMBLA is not accepted by the mainstream LGBT community and has not existed as a functional organization for decades.
• Catholic organizations were largely gender-segregated, meaning the abused boys weren't chosen because they were male but because they were what their abusers had access to.
• There is no evidence that any kind of organized "recruitment" occurs; and
• There is no known link between victimization of CSA and becoming LGBT; the vast majority of LGBT people were not victims of CSA, and the vast majority of victims of CSA grow up to be heterosexual.

Even unrelated to any sort of "gay agenda", various conspiracies that imply that homosexuals are pedophiles have been made. Another relatively popular assertion by individuals such as Mark Peeters and Laurent Louis is to claim that Belgian prime minister Elio Di Rupo, the first openly gay man to serve office anywhere in the world, is a pedophile.

Human trafficking

While child sex trafficking is a very real issue, conspiracy theorist nutjobs have unfortunately floated a lot of woo related to the issue. Perhaps one of the most infamous examples of ridiculousness lies with pizzagate, in which nutjobs assert that powerful political leaders are involved in child sex trafficking using a pizza parlor as a front. Qanon bullshit is practically inseparable from woo related to child sex trafficking. The woo often involves satanic panic. Name any famous person (including right wing figures like Donald Trump and Michael Flynn) and you'll likely find someone on the internet claiming that they are involved in satanic child sex trafficking and child sacrifices to Satan or pagan gods. It is important to distinguish internet horseshit from the real problems affecting millions of children around the world.

Psychological effects

Associations between sexual abuse in childhood and psychological problems in adulthood have been found in most papers investigating the effect of child sexual abuse. Although child sexual abuse has no characteristic outcome pattern, some abused children later suffer from depression, PTSD, drug abuse disorders, and a wide range of other problems. At the very least, half of the abused children appear to experience adverse sequelae.

No matter how clear the harm is, research on the issue has been clouded by the simple fact that the best available research methods are unusable in studies of sexual abuse. For example, it is unethical and despicable to randomly allocate children to experience sexual abuse. Not surprisingly, research on the subject is challenging. Pope & Hudson, 1995, argued that many studies "are so severely vulnerable to selection bias, information bias, and lack of consideration of confounding variables that they are rendered almost valueless." Assessing the specific harm of child sexual abuse can be obscured by the effects of a non-supportive family environment, even more so when researchers rely on small sample sizes. To counter that, large national-level samples must rely on self-reports of more broadly defined sexual abuse that, combined via meta-analysis, are further watered down.

Despite the complexity of sexual abuse research, twin studies convincingly show that actual specific harm can be tied to various levels of sexual abuse.

The research itself is too easily discounted by casual reading and methodological challenges. When, for example, a researcher shows that labeling a person as an abuse victim causes harm, a quick reader might miss that the actual findings are that the labeling harm occurs "[i]n addition to any direct, negative effects of CSA." However, as one study shows, the label a victim applies to describe the experience has very little to do with the actually experienced harm.

However, even researchers who cast doubt on the sequelae of child sexual abuse remain convinced that such sexual contact with children is wrong since "children are incapable of consent" and that "[i]t would be ludicrous to suggest that CSA, in and of itself, does not have damaging influences on the adjustment of the child".

See also

• Child abuse
• Child predators on the Internet
• Confabulation
• Crimen sollicitationis
• Informed consent
• Moral panic
• NAMBLA
• Repressed memory

External links

• Video: Panorama: "Sex and the Vatican" -- Episode from the BBC news magazine about child sex abuse coverups by the Vatican. (29 September 2006 -- 39 minutes.)
• Video: Frontline: "Hand of God" -- Episode from the PBS news magazine about child sex abuse in the Boston Archdiocese. (16 January 2007 -- 87 minutes)
• Cracked article: "5 Things I Learned as a Sex Slave in Modern America" -- A discussion of how the anonymous co-author's mother and stepfather began grooming her at age 4 or 5, then began pimping her out a few years later.