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Child on Child Sexual Abuse
We moved from Wiki 2.0 to the new multilingual Wiki in the last few days. As part of that, I had to look at the hit counters on every wiki entry and copy them over. The survival guide is the most popular wiki article, but that link has been widely shared. The second most popular is the little article on Child on Child Sexual Assault. That disturbs me on several levels.
First, as far as I can tell, most of the hits on the COCSA wiki article were from web searches. I first thought it must be listed relatively high up in Google. It isn’t. That means people are deeply searching the topic and probably aren’t finding what they are looking for immediately. That points to a lack of proper discussion and resources.
Second, it disturbs me because we were molested as a child by a minor. It’s some of the most difficult trauma we have. It’s clear-cut when the abuse comes from an adult who is at fault. Because the abuse came from another child, we’ll probably always wonder if it started as “natural curiosity” and experimentation gone wrong.
In our case, it does become more apparent because the other child was several years older and because the abuse developed into something much more about power. That doesn’t mean we haven’t stared at the ceiling at night, wondering where this other child learned to do the things they did. Were they also abused by an adult, like we were?
But the most disturbing thought of all is – because we still have a lot of childhood amnesia, we can’t be 100% sure that we never “experimented” with another child ourselves. That is the stuff of nightmares. As we’ve gotten older and learned more about our system, we consider that less and less likely, but there is always this lingering doubt. If an adult is abusing a very young child, the child might not know any better and abuse a peer to show them that “special” kind of love. In that situation, who is at fault? And what does that say about the child-on-child abuse we suffered?
What do you think, cafe members? Do you have to deal with the complexity of child-on-child abuse?
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9 Replies
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I don’t have the ability to go into much of anything, but yes…our system has memories of this sort of thing with a few different kids. Our feelings towards each kid are vastly different, due to different circumstances…but all of them are hard
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This absolutely needs to be talked about more. I’m going to be…more blunt than might be comfortable for a lot of people? Still trying to be careful, of course. I just want to give a heads up for people before I start talking too much about this.
As I’ve mentioned in my blog posts, I was filmed in cp vidoes when I was growing up. There were other kids in the same situation with me, and in that situation, obviously, adults are going to force kids to abuse each other. I remember us trying to fake as much as possible, especially as I was one of the older kids, but there’s some stuff that you can’t avoid, because EVERYBODY gets punished for it. It’s kind of a messed-up “lesser evil” sort of situation.
I know that’s not the kind of situation that you’re talking about. And that is actually my point. Because for everything that all the kids in that situation went through, most of us tried to protect each other as much as possible. We didn’t sell each other out. We didn’t abuse each other in our free time. The older kids would try to redirect attention from the younger kids. The adults weren’t doing a thing to protect us, so we did our best on our own.
As far as I personally am aware, the ONLY two kids who sexually abused other kids when they weren’t being forced to continued to sexually abuse other people into their teens and into adulthood. So I think that child-on-child sa needs to be taken very seriously and reported immediately. When my parents found out that I was being abused by these kids, they did absolutely nothing except for talk to the kids’ parents. And since all the parents in this situation were involved in child sa, nothing changed, and we were still forced to spend time with these kids so that the adults could have their Bible study and free daycare.
It’s really difficult to process, because both of these kids were younger than me. But early on, I got in trouble with my parents for physically hurting them in the name of self-defense, so I started holding back on defending myself, and they took advantage of that. They also tended to work as a team.
When I got older (about 13), I found out that one of these two kids was sexually abusing another kid, and I told the victim to tell her parents and confronted the abuser about it. And she had NO empathy. No remorse. No desire to change whatsoever. Her lack of empathy was so absolute that multiple of our system members split just from talking to her, and we came very close to experiencing dissociative fugue (if we had a car and were old enough to drive, we would have. We experienced ALL the symptoms of it except for wandering away, and we actually were starting to walk down the road away from the house we were at, because we didn’t recognize or remember ANY of the people around us.) It literally was just that disturbing of an experience to see how much this child abuser understood what she was doing and how much she did not care.
I thoroughly believe that people who sa people purposefully and repeatedly like this know exactly what they are doing. These kids didn’t just sexually abuse people. They were emotionally abusive as well and, in the case of at least one of them, physically abusive. I didn’t know one of them well, but the one that I did know continued to be this way the ENTIRE time that I was close with her. I really believe that kids who sexually abuse many other kids on a regular basis have some SERIOUS, undiagnosed disorders. It’s not “normal”, and, in my experience, they exhibit predatory behavior that persists over time. If it doesn’t get addressed, they find more victims.
Things are more complicated in situations where children are only abused by adults that they know and trust. In my experience, abusive kids in this type of situation don’t fully understand that sexual abuse is wrong. But their behavior will mimic their parents’ behavior, and they typically stop sa-ing other kids at a young age, because their heart isn’t in it. They just think it’s how relationships are supposed to work. The hard thing is that the emotional impact on child victims is the same no matter how old the perpetrator is, or what their intentions. I don’t blame people like this who abused me, but there is a lot of healing work that needs to be done all the same.
In either case, encouraging victims to speak up for themselves is so, so important. Even if they don’t have an adult who will stand up for them (a lot of them probably don’t), at least telling trusted friends will protect other potential victims and, hopefully, teach the kids who don’t know any better that they don’t have to abuse anybody to have a close friendship with somebody. And, for the love of god, can we PLEASE stop teaching children to love people who abuse them? Boundaries are so freaking important because of situations like this. If somebody had taught me “you cannot fix or save anybody” when I was young, instead of telling me that Jesus died for our sins and that I should metaphorically do the same for any and everyone, I would have escaped a lot of abuse. I don’t even say that to hate on Christianity. My system has Christian alters, and Jesus did not take ANY shit from people. He told abusers off without holding back and he had excellent boundaries. So why in the everliving heck does the church not teach children to do the same?
The world makes me very, very tired sometimes.
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While I appreciate not wanting to talk about this kind of thing where it can be googled, I think as long as we don’t get into graphic details, the perverts out there will be bored. And, honestly, I’d rather they waste their time searching for something here that they aren’t going to find rather than consume some of the harmful trash out there.
I’d like to think that the minor who abused us grew out of it because I know they had kids, but I don’t know. I’ve spent much time staring at the ceiling, wondering if I should have complained more loudly 30+ years ago and if it would have made a difference to their children. We simply weren’t in the headspace to deal with all that back then, and now it’s too late – their kids are adults now.
As uncomfortable as it is to talk about this subject, I think it NEEDS to be discussed and brought out into the light. I didn’t even really understand it was abuse at first. Well, to be fair, I didn’t understand many things were abusive. I still remember standing in the college library, reading a book that gave examples of child abuse, and thinking, “Wow, you mean everyone doesn’t go through that?”. I thought it was normal. And sadly, for so many of us, it was.
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Survivor’s guilt is so real and difficult to deal with. I don’t want to go into too much detail on that because, for my system personally, it would deviate from the topic of this thread. But keeping a conversation about that with my therapist has helped a lot. She knows more about things like the statute of limitations and how cohesive our memory is when it comes to a specific trauma. But I would never blame anyone for not speaking up at the time. I also didn’t talk as much as I wish I had, and it’s mainly because there was nobody trustworthy for me to go to.
I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of those google searches are from kids who are stuck in this situation. I can only speak for my experience in America, but for somebody who was very stubborn about trying to get help, I didn’t see much in the way of results. A lot of kids probably go online to find help because they’ve tried other avenues. That’s what my system did, and we just ended up in more dangerous situations. So I think it’s important that topics like this be discussed openly and honestly. That hopefully will help prevent people from telling the internet that they are currently in a vulnerable situation, because that is a good way to get the attention of creeps. In fact, when I was a kid, there were people online who would promise protection in exchange for a relationship. It’s very dangerous, and I’m sure those types of people still exist.
One of the things with kids abusing other kids online is that it can become very weirdly cult-ish. In the sense that everything is turned into a “game”, and people who refuse to participate are punished and bullied. It’s important to talk about this too, so that people are aware of how much gaslighting is involved.
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I think that saying, “I don’t feel comfortable discussing this” IS a really important part of the discussion. It is without doubt an enormous can of worms, and everybody’s perspective – to include the perspective of “my boundaries say that I don’t want to talk about this here and now” is valuable.
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Well said, as always, Star Fissure. I can’t imagine how much more difficult this is for today’s generations with the internet and social media. It’s been on our list of things to do to make a “younger than 18” cafe landing page with resources for kids, but that’s really hard for us to put together due to our own history – we want to get involved, and yet just CAN’T for our own sanity a lot of the time. I have a big enough savior complex as it is; add in actual kids… well, that’s not a recipe for our own health. It still bothers me that those searches might be from kids looking for help in that situation, and not finding it…
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Yeah, we have to be really careful to not burn ourselves out. We were just talking with our therapist about how we’ve realized that we use up any energy as soon as we get it back, and we’re trying to take care of ourselves more. The list of things that could be done to help is endless, so we’re trying to remind ourselves that there are other people out there who care and are working on the issue as a whole, and that the more people who heal and get their memories back, the more people will be able to help. Especially since everybody has different strengths and can do all kinds of things that we don’t feel capable of. So I think that your system just hosting and maintaining this site and the discord server has a really big impact. Being able to meet other people who care and want things to change helps survivors feel hope and gain energy so that we can all work on ending stigma and silence.
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