i feel really weird about the mainstream ways of talking to kids about child sexual abuse. number one, i think we talk about it wayyyy too much, out of all proportion to the amount we teach kids about sexuality in general, and in ways that confuse kids and freak them out and give them fucked up ideas about how their bodies work.* and i don’t think the way we talk about sexual abuse works all that well at preventing it.
and i think it happens because we recognize that child sexual abuse is bad, but we still idealize creating abusable kids. a lot of parenting is aimed at making obedient, quiet children who respect authority. and we think of that as a good thing until it comes to sexual abuse, in which case it obviously isn’t, but instead of adjusting our overall ideas about whether obedience is best for children, we just try to create a patch to cover the specific case of sexual abuse. and the patch has enough flaws that i could devote a whole ’nother post to them.
i feel like it would be easy to misread this post as saying, “we worry too much about kids getting abused, that doesn’t really matter.” so, to be clear, that’s not what i’m saying. i think that keeping kids safe is incredibly important, and i don’t think their safety is all that well-served by talking a lot about good-touch/bad-touch and watching out for bad men who might want to hurt you.
i sort of feel like the only way to actually deal with child sexual abuse, would mean dealing with a lot more than child sexual abuse, would probably involve building a whole new way of raising children, which is something people are already working on doing. i don’t know what that whole-new-way will eventually look like. when i care for kids i try to do right by them, and i could talk way too much about that too.
anyway i’m trying to read the literature on sex abuse prevention education, and what part it makes up of sex ed in general, and what it usually consists of and how it usually works, and what the future of all of those kinds of education look like, but i don’t have super-much access
*for instance: all the kids i’ve cared for who refer to their own genitals as their “no-no’s,” as if the badness of sexual abuse is something inherent in them that just gets activated by touching, not a badness that comes from the outside.
“we still idealize creating abusable kids. a lot of parenting is aimed at making obedient, quiet children who respect authority.”
For some reason, people think having submissive children is a sign of being a good parent, so lots of parents try to aim straight for that.
There’s even one (more than one, actually, but this one is probably the worst) controversial Christian Parenting book (full text) that suggests… well, lots of really horrible things, but the core of it is the idea that good parents have to break the will of their children and make them obedient.
The problems with this should be obvious…
It’s also always worth noting how education on the topic tends to revolve around “stranger danger!” and the like, which certainly exists to some extent, but IIRC isn’t anywhere near as prevalent as abuse by authority figures and family members kids know and are expected to trust.
I feel like the attempts to fight both sexual abuse and drug use are based on scaring middle-class moms (I don’t know if that’s the only way they can get funding or what), so there’s a big emphasis on “people from outside your family/neighbourhood are out to steal your children.”
Mooncustafer 