| While the physical aspects are more traumatic, verbal and emotional abuse are how the attacker keeps the victim quiet. The pedophile may tell the child, �If you tell, no one will like you� or �Everyone will think you�re a liar.� Sometimes the attacker will resort to threats. Carrie went on to tell me about her three-year-old daughter Nancy. Carrie had found out that her new husband had been beating Nancy while she was at work. As a result, she took Nancy and left. A few weeks later Nancy told Carrie that her stepfather had touched her between the legs. Carrie observed extreme changes in her daughter�s behavior: Nancy started looking out windows. When I asked her what she was looking for, she said the monster had a knife and was coming to cut her and make her bleed. I had to tell Nancy that our house was invisible to the monster. Then one day, I noticed that Nancy was singing along with the radio whenever the song �Janie�s Got A Gun� by Arrowsmith came on. When I asked Nancy about the song she said, �The monster has a knife and when he comes to cut me and make me bleed I got a gun and I�m going to shoot him and make him dead� (Carrie). Nancy truly believed that by telling her mother she had put herself and her mother in real danger. However, the song empowered her to fight the emotional fear she had. A pedophile can be anyone, a family member, a church member or your next-door neighbor. The psychological diagnosis of pedophilia indicates that a pedophile will have: �at least six months, recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, [. . .] or behaviors involving [. . .] children� under the age of 13. This means not only have they fantasized about sex with children they could have molested many children before being diagnosed. Futhermore, they have �sexual urges, or behaviors [that] cause clinically significant [. . .] impairment in [. . .] important areas of functioning,� such as normal interaction with adults. It also states, the perpetrator �is at least [. . .] 5 years older than the child� (DSM VI 528). Although a pedophile is most often thought of as a man, �figures indicated 14% of perpetrators against boys and 6% of perpetrators against girls were females acting alone� (Wakefield). A female pedophile is not likely to follow the afore mentioned psychological profile. Her motives might be: �to teach her young victims about sexuality�, she feels their lives will be improved by what she is teaching them. She might also be trying to achieve �nonthreating emotional intimacy,� she may have been in abusive relationships and feel safer with the child. �Or she might be Male-Coerced (Wakefield)�, feeling unable to stand up for herself or defend the child, she may help the male offender in order to stay on his good side. Furthermore society stresses to girls, that it is wrong for anyone to touch them in the groin area and neglects to teach boys that same lesson. When a father of two, we will call him Mark, was seven years old his babysitter started molesting him. Mark did not feel that anything was wrong with what was happening to him. So he didn�t feel the need to tell anyone. Mark had been molested repeatedly and raped at the age of nine-years-old. He thought it was cool that women wanted him. Only when he reached adulthood, did he realize that what had happened to him was wrong. If Mark had been taught, at seven-years-old, no one should touch or see his penis aside from the occasional doctor visit then he would have been aware that what was happening to him was wrong. Our goal as a society should be to protect all children equally. It is not any better for a boy to lose his virginity at a young age than it is for a girl. |
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