A similar phenomenon is at play in modern Western discussion around age-gap relationships.
Anyone admitting that they experienced one when they were young is almost inevitably told that they were abused, and made to feel that they were suppressing some deep-seated trauma over any and all protestations that they're fine, no really, it wasn't that big of a deal.
In fact, on Reddit and other places, I've seen people get downvoted if they persist in claims that they didn't experience any notable negative sequelae. The same people who did the downvoting are often the ones who claim to value "lived experience" above all else, but perish the thought that your lived experience should clash with social orthodoxy.
In India, we have within living memory people who got married off at the ripe young age of 12 to 14, and grew old and have grandkids with kids of their own. The vast majority of them are well-adjusted, at least compared to their age cohort, and many of the women (because they make ever larger fractions of the population pyramid as men die off faster) had husbands who were older than them by numbers that modern Westerners would immediately see as red flags.
A funny example would be Emma...
As I understand it in India the parents are very involved in who are the individuals involved in the marriage. The minors are not the ones seeking out their suitors.
For statutory rape purposes the consent of the minor carriers little weight. Thus there is increased responcibility on the behalf of the teachers to keep things proper. Such an exploitation without the target feeling exploited doesn't make it okay.
As I understand it in India the parents are very involved in who are the individuals involved in the marriage. The minors are not the ones seeking out their suitors.
Today? It's 50:50, and even then, arranged marriages aren't usually anything similar to the popular misconception that the bride and groom see each other for the first time when they're underneath the pavilion. It's far closer to dating, but with parents assisting in the search for acceptable suitors, the kids still have a say and (usually) a veto. Think of having your friends setup a date for you with someone else they know is looking, but soliciting a larger section of the social web.
Before the 70s, it was much more dictatorial of course.
For statutory rape purposes the consent of the minor carriers little weight. Thus there is increased responcibility on the behalf of the teachers to keep things proper. Such an exploitation without the target feeling exploited doesn't make it okay.
I don't agree with the is-ought implication you're presumably making here.
A large degree of the harm of "exploitation" is the perception of said exploitation. If you're working a summer job and see the owner's kid making double per ho...
How do we communicate that sexual abuse is really not ok, without making victims of it feel like it's worse than it actually is?
I'd distinguish between the seriousness of the crime from the suffering of the victim. I think that this distinction is common sense. I agree with you that they are sometimes conflated. It seems like you could communicate this with a message structured somewhat as follows:
"C is a serious crime. Victims of C may suffer X, Y, and Z as a result. Not all victims of C experience these consequences, and it is important to let the victim of C decide how it affected them."
Yeah, I think the reason sexual abuse is wrong is because it has an unacceptably high risk of traumatizing someone, not because it always in all cases does. (Sort of like drunk driving.)
I find this a helpful distinction!
Recently someone did something to me that would have been a very serious violation of trust in ~50% of worlds (involving taking some private feedback I'd written for someone and sending it to them), but on reflection I was happy with what I wrote, so I didn't mind. But I told them that had it gone wrong (which it easily could've) they wouldn't have had any defense and I would have been absolutely furious with them. They realized how close they came to doing something exceedingly costly and changed their policies going forwards, but I did not actually punish them in that instance because nothing bad happened.
This had a similar distinction, where the seriousness of the crime was high, but the severity of the case was low, so there was nothing to punish.
This may be trivializing your experiences as well, but I think an important consideration here is that you're a man. Many of the circumstances others in this thread are citing also involve male victims.
Men tend not to react to sexual abuse the same way that women do, and there's no reason to expect that they would. Some of the reasons people aggressively protest that fact or attempt to have anecdotal evidence of it dismissed are:
It's a bad idea to assume that, because a lot of men seem to be OK after being assaulted, or because a lot of people seem to engage in motivating reasoning about men being "secretly traumatized", that means there are lots of women in the same situation.
I obviously disagree with the logic that says we shouldn't talk about this, partly because it causes...
Not sure if a single anecdote is worth anything at all, but I am a woman, and I experienced what is legally and culturally considered rape at least twice (arguably 3x), and it really didn't bother me very much (though I think different versions, e.g. more violent ones or one perpetrated by people I looked up to, would have been much more damaging). One of the people who technically raped me (it was a very drunken screwup with, I believe, no malevolent intent) is still a friend of mine. I feel scared about people finding this out about our friendship, mostly on his behalf.
Notably, I think it was way less traumatizing than several experiences I have had for which I've never been able to garner 1/10th as much sympathy; a trusted close friend failing me in a time of need, a painful and embarrassing medical experience, a pet dying.
I share the view of the OP that there's something off here; I think the combination of a pretty wide range of disparate acts being considered rape/sexual abuse + rape/sexual abuse being considered among the worse experiences a person can have, is pretty unhealthy for the reasons described and some others. I also think it drains social energy from recognizing other kinds of trauma people can experience and helping them with it.
This is may be trivializing your experiences as well, but I think an important consideration here is that you're a man. Many of the circumstances others in this thread are citing also involve male victims.
Agreed, from an evolutionary standpoint rape is vastly more impactful for women than men, in a world with no abortion or contraception, rape means the removal of a woman's procreative agency, while it's merely very unpleasant for men, maybe on the level of being humiliated in a fist fight. The closest thing that I can think of to make myself (a man) have an emotional reaction equivalent to what I observe women having to the concept of rape, is cuckolding. A woman lying to me about the genetics of her child, and making me unknowingly raise the child, that is what elicits the white-hot, primal rage that our society seems to feel about rape. No woman that I've talked with has understood my reaction to cuckolding, because in the ancestral environment there was no possible doubt that the child growing in her womb was hers, just like there's no chance of me getting pregnant from being raped. So for men, translate "raped" as "cuckolded" to elicit something like the equivalent emotional reaction.
I think this is a solid point, and that pointing out the asymmetry in evolutionary gradients is important; I would also expect different statistical distributions for men and women here. At the same time, my naive ev psych guess about how all this is likely to work out would also take into account that men and women share genes, and that creating gender-specific adaptations is actually tricky. As evidence: men have nipples, and those nipples sometimes produce drops of milk.
Once, awhile ago and outside this community, a female friend swore me to secrecy and then shared a story and hypothesis similar to the OPs (ETA: it was also a story of sexual touching, not of rape; I suspect rape is usually more traumatic). I've also heard stories of being pretty messed up by sexual abuse from both men and women, including at least two different men messed up by having, as teenagers, had sex with older women (in one case, one of his teachers) without violence/force, but with manipulation. My current guess is that adaptations designed for one sex typically appear with great variability in the other sex (e.g. male nipples' milk production), and so we should expect some varia...
I've known several men who had sexual encounters with women that... labeling them is hard, let's say the encounters left them unhappy, and would have been condemned if the sexes had been reversed. These men encountered a damaging amount of pushback and invalidation when they tried to discuss their feelings about those encounters. One was literally told "I hope you were grateful", for others the invalidation was more implicit. For at least 2, me saying "that sounds fucked up" and then listening was an extremely helpful novelty. So I'm really nervous about pushing the wider cultural narrative in ways that would reduce the ability of male victims to be upset.
OTOH, one of those dudes had his complicated experiences with a same-age girlfriend, and had nothing but good things to say about losing his virginity in high school to a woman twice his age. You definitely couldn't help him by creating and enforcing general rules about what counts as bad.
I agree that this is probably a reason for the greater harm to women, but I don't think it gets to the heart of it.
Suppose that instead of rape, our culture portrayed some benign, non-sexual experience as deeply harmful. Say, being exposed to the color orange as a kid. In that case, would you predict men or women to be more harmed by having seen orange? If you predict women (as I would), then the explanation has to be more general than evolved attitudes towards sex.
My theory is that it comes down to influenceability. When an authority figure says that something is true, a man is more likely to note that he must act like it's true, but reserve an inner skepticism; whereas a woman is more likely to accept it wholeheartedly.
For example, it's easier to imagine a man proactively (without outside influence)...
I've long suspected that things like this are almost entirely made traumatic by society's socially constructed ideas about them, but it's very taboo to talk about - it's a very dangerous opinion to have - and I've almost never told people I think this. Thanks for saying it for me.
I had sexual trauma as a child that didn't even involve any actual sexual event. Rather, I had and wrote down a quasi-sexual fantasy about a playmate from the playground (I was 8) and my mom found it and confronted me about it, thinking that I had been molested or something because why else would "a child!!" be thinking of such things. I felt disgusting afterward, for years, like I must be evil for thinking this way about another kid, and throughout my teenage years I would occasionally have almost panic attack like ptsd feelings when I would think about sexuality in certain contexts that reminded me of that experience.
So it seems to me that the trauma comes from believing that you have been violated, because authority figures or parents or society tell you that you have - not from being violated, itself. And what constitutes a violation is to some extent socially constructed. Sometimes, because of this, as in my case, you can feel violated when nothing has even happened to you.
I agree with your point and you give a very convincing example. Still, I object quite strongly to the phrasing "[...] that things like this are almost entirely made traumatic by society's socially constructed ideas about them."
Why "almost entirely"?
Here some ingredients to my view:
Now, looking at the example in the OP with the above background assumptions, I form the following view.
I (maybe) agree directionally but I'm again irritated by the lack of nuance here ("100%").
This fits what I've seen from talking to women who have experienced rape/sexual abuse.
In one case, the abuse happened as a kid and she didn't feel traumatized for many years until she heard people talking about such things as if they're supposed to be traumatic and it was helpful to her to have someone give her permission to disregard those pressures as ill informed and stupid.
In another case, the woman was much older and somewhat traumatized by the experience, but talking to her friend about it just made her feel more traumatized because he emphasized how bad the situation was even more than she did. There was actually a considerable amount of humor in that particular case, and being invited to see it and recognize that she's actually totally fine and doesn't have to freak out about it anymore was helpful.
With respect to the question of "How do we communicate that sexual abuse is really not ok, without making victims of it feel like it's worse than it actually is?", it depends where the harm is. Hypothetically, if the only harm is in the psychological trauma, and the act isn't actually psychologically traumatic in itself, then you bite that bullet and say that nothing bad ha...
Too late to the debate, but I would suggest splitting this into multiple questions:
Note that these two questions can be explored apart from sexuality. The question whether sexual abuse is different from abuse in general, could then be treated separately.
The reason I would like to have the debate about suffering in general first, is that many arguments made about sexual abuse actually are generalizable to all kinds of abuse -- so it feels like motivated reasoning to only make those arguments with regards to sexual abuse.
I mean, the point of signaling that you suffer is to elicit compassion; and the signal is more credible if you actually suffer. If you were 100% sure you would never get any compassion, no matter what, there would be no need to signal suffering, so perhaps there would be less suffering. Maybe engineering our society to eradicate compassion would lead to less human suffering! ...see, I just made the entire argument without mentioning sex at all. If it perhaps did not convince you in its general form, why does it sound more convincing if I make the same argument specifically about sexual abuse?
If we first figure out how things work in general, and then check whether the conclusion also applies to sex, we can find out how much is the same and how much is different. Maybe it is different a lot! But if we start with sex, then the conclusion "sex is different" is kinda already assumed.
I suspect that the real answer will include a lot of "people are different" and "it depends". If one victim is traumatized, it does not necessarily mean that all must be. If one victim says is was no big deal for them, it does not necessarily mean everyone else would also be okay except for having been programmed by the society to react strongly. -- I felt the need to react, because it seemed to me that this debate had a vibe of "one victim said it was actually no big deal, therefore everyone who complains is... oversensitive; hey I am not blaming them, of course, I am only blaming the society that made them so sensitive!"
Context probably matters a lot; whether it was "it happened in a special situation, but I am no longer in that special situation so now I am safe" or "it happened out of the blue, it could happen anytime again" (or "it happened in a special situation, and I am still in that sp...
Imagine a society where people considered "being exposed to the color orange" inherently very traumatic (inspired by this comment).
My bet is that people in that society would be a lot less traumatized if they encountered an orange bird in the forest vs. if someone forcibly takes them inside a secluded room and puts a sheet of orange wallpaper in front of them.
The fact that some commenters don't seem to "see" this difference is IMO what's triggering about some people's attitudes to sexual abuse, etc.
Sounds similar to what this book claimed about some mental illnesses being memetic in certain ways: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-crazy-like-us
This rhymes with my experiences and thoughts. To say it another (slightly more general) way, it's often the reactions of adults that are traumatizing well beyond anything else that happens to children (and other adults). It isn't always the case that measured response produces a trauma-free experience, and some events tend to leave terrible scars. But where I see people bringing their own feelings into someone else's situation is also where I see far more of lasting psychological trauma.
Parents really need to realize - or be taught - that they are exocortices for their children, one of whose primary roles is to process things that the child cannot and be a sink for big emotions, NOT a source of them. When parents push their own emotions onto a child, that invariably is traumatizing - as in the case of parentification or "emotional incest", or narcissistic abuse, etc. This is another example of that. Arguably, telling a child they ought to feel worse about something that has happened to them is itself a form of abuse.
Driving Under the Influence can have a similar kind of pattern where ti can be painted as a surefired way to mess up things. Then if somebody is a bit drunk while operating a vechicle and doesn't hit anybody that might lead to a "update" that its no at disastrous as advertised. It is not so that DUIng leads somebody to die but that there is a RISK of somebody dying. And this risk is sufficiently high that its not okay to gamble on it.
Being sexually manhandled likewise carriers the risk of things going wrong. Its not like shooting somebody is okay if you happen to miss any vital organs.
The fantasy that maybe a dark experience heals or goes away if it is not talked about or processed can lead to inaction where action is needed. It doesn't remove the fact that action is not always needed. Maybe you can indeed skip going to the hospital if the bullet only gave a flesh wound. And it can be hard to ascertain who is actually fine and who only thinks so (certain black knight comes to mind). So the default on erring on the side of having some people treated/processed that did not need it rather than not processing some people that needed it seems right.
Even for those that do need or benefit...
So the default on erring on the side of having some people treated/processed that did not need it rather than not processing some people that needed it seems right.
Medicine long operated by that paradigm and did all sorts of harmful treatments. Maybe the person doesn't need bloodletting via leeches but why take the chance?
https://www.racgp.org.au/afp/2013/september/psychological-trauma is an article about the current state of the knowledge we have.
It says "Structured psychological interventions, including psychological debriefing, are not routinely recommended in the first few weeks following trauma exposure."
Psychological debriefing is one of the things someone who thinks that the victim might need to be processed might do, but it's not helpful.
Instead, the sense that's helpful to communicate is:
General practitioners can be guided by five empirically derived principles in their early response: promoting a sense of safety, calming, self efficacy, connectedness and hope.
Telling people that they are likely going to need a lot of therapy to deal with their experience is the opposite of providing a sense of self-efficacy and hope.
Basically, you are telling people "you should not ...
A person who's suggestible and who you tell "You are not competent to evaluate whether or not experience X damaged you psychologically" might regularly go back to thinking "Did X damage me psychologically?" and suffer psychologically from that. To the extent that there's a strong cultural push to the suggestion or it's given by people with a lot of authority like parents, it might even have an effect on people who are not very suggestible.
The advice seems to say "room now, debrief later by somebody else" which seems to suppose that that later application elsewhere is actually beneficial.
It suggests that if someone suffers from distress it's useful to give them therapy to help them deal with their distress.
There are many different ways to do therapy with many different theories of action. Research suggests that attributes such as the empathy of the therapist and the relationship between the therapist and patient are more important than the theory of action of the therapy. As such it doesn't make sense to rule out trauma-based therapy. As described in one podcast from Spencer Greenberg, that trauma-based therapy just might not be any better than therapy that's about banis...
One of the reasons abusers of kids/teens aren't fully prosecuted is because parents of victims rightly predict that everyone knowing you were raped by the babysitter or whatever will generate additional psych baggage and selfishly refrain from protecting other children from the same predator.
A related point that probably bears making/repeating:
Part of the justification for statutory rape laws is that some people are in a position in which they have so much power over someone that any request from them could be inherently coercive. Some specific examples in which statutory rape may apply even when the victim is a mentally competent adult:
I am no expert in law, but to some extent we treat rape and killing someone similar. I don't know if the way I think is just fucked up or it is really this way, but breaking someone's leg and rape are probably more comparable to each other than rape and murder. So I would like to add that in my opinion even the legal code is punishing rape pretty harsh more comparable to murder than comparable to breaking someone's leg.
Not only do people very often feel it wasn't that bad, not infrequently they remember it as a positive thing if it was mutually willing. I read a paper last year, titled "The Impact of Online Grooming and Sexual Abuse" IIRC, reporting a qualitative study based on interviews with eight British youths (six girls and two boys) to whom the researchers had been referred by police. Not one of them had a bad thing to say about what they'd experienced during the relationship, and at least one (a girl) remained resentful toward police for having interfered. Every s...
Content warning: sexual abuse, rape, arguably trivialising thereof.
When I was 11 an older boy used to pull me behind a door in one of the school corridors, trap me there, shove his hand down my pants, and touch my penis.
This happened about once a week for a couple of months, until I moved to a different school (for non-related reasons).
I knew it was taboo, but I didn't yet know about sex, and didn't really understand why. I never thought about it again till a few years later when he sent me a letter apologizing. My parents were extremely curious about what the letter was but I burnt it before they had a chance to read it.
I never told anyone about this until now, and even now I'm writing this pseudonymously.
Not because I'm ashamed or embarrassed. I'm not - I didn't do anything to be ashamed of. But because I'm fine.
I really am. I don't think this made any lasting impact to my life. I'm happy, well adjusted, married, successful etc. I just don't really think about what happened very much, but then again I rarely think about anything that happened to me when I was 11.
And yet I feel like society is telling me that I ought to be broken. That I've been sexual abused. That recovering from this will be a difficult painful process, probably requiring therapy. And I fear that if I tell someone that, they'll treat me like that's the case, and I might end up believing it about myself.
From a purely objective perspective, non-violent rape doesn't seem quite as bad as society makes it out to be.
It's obviously unpleasant and frightening, but we treat rape as one of the worst things that can possibly happen. We expect "rape victim" to become someone's whole identity. We expect them to need intensive therapy to put themselves back together.
And I'm sure for plenty of people that's true. But for plenty of others it's true only because we expect it of them. People fill the social role that's been made for them, even when that's not ideal for them.
I don't know what to do about this. How do we communicate that sexual abuse is really not ok, without making victims of it feel like it's worse than it actually is?
But at the very least, when you hear somebody's abuse story don't jump straight into treating them like a victim. Find out how they feel about it, and if they don't feel like it was that bad, there's really no need for you to make them feel like it was worse.