03-17-2024, 05:27 PM
Mason Hall-McCullough Wrote:Why do Westerners who were abused at a young age so commonly grow up into malformed adults? Lots of women pretend to have been raped, but the ones (and men too) that were actually raped seem to suffer a lot, for reasons that I don't understand. Through what mechanism is rape harmful in these cases? Rape is more common in third world countries, but as far as I know they don't have this issue. I can't make sense of it, but maybe there's a simple explanation I haven't considered.
There's the simple answer to the question (BillyONare's rhetorical question “Why does being damaged damage things?”) and another that might still leave some things unresolved. The latter is what I thought of first, and I'll try to give the best explanation possible for the alternate answer.
This is what Adam Lanza had to say on the matter, which is comparable to other claims mentioned by Susan A. Clancy in her book "The Trauma Myth" (and maybe other authors too, but I have not delved too far into the subject):
Quote:Adult panic or disgust about young people's seeking pleasure for themselves is responsible for much of the trauma that minors experience when they are caught behaving “inappropriately” for their ages, even in a consensual context.
[...]
The response of the criminal justice system both to the ‘victim’ and ‘offender’ in adult-child cases is counter-productive. We have already seen that the older male is treated with contempt by both the police and the courts and little sympathy is shown towards the way he will be treated in prison. Similarly, the young male’s treatment bears a remarkable similarity to that received by incest victims. In both paedophilia and incest considerable distress to the boy or girl occurs when parents, relatives or the police themselves discover the relationship. Constant and often insensitive questioning adds to this distress and it is not unusual to find that many researchers have noted that far more damage is caused by the confrontations the child has with his parents or the legal authorities than by the act itself.
In the conclusion of Susan A. Clancy's book:
Quote:What hurts most victims is not the experience itself but the meaning of the experience—how victims make sense of what happened and how these understandings make them feel about themselves and others and subsequently impact their emotions and behaviors. In short, an event does not have to be traumatic when it happens to cause harm later on. It is the retrospective interpretation of the event that mediates subsequent impact.
I would suggest the meaning aspect in Clancy's book (italics mine) has a significant role in how these people are perceived after the incident (and, if current times are any proof, the incident is detached from the foundation of pedophilia and more onto bad behavior arbitrarily decided by the supposed victim). The people we could consider legitimate victims in the West feel a millstone around their neck throughout most of their adolescent and adult life, usually having a poor upbringing. I wonder at times if half the struggle of determining these people's character is a result of a category-mistake: sex abuse studies viewing their subjects as mainly a product of the incident, and not of the general environment; the details of their life are obscured, and so an accurate account of their stresses, misfortunes, etc. are erased from the record. In the eyes of someone concerned only about the act of rape or precocious sex, the emotional implosion of a subject is only associated with the original event, but one must wonder hundreds of incidents that transpired over the course of their life that resulted in their psychic breaks/hard drug addictions. The trauma model would have it only one way.
It is a truism at this point that the Western population has a greater capacity for introspection than those in the Turd World, and when one encounters the insistence of sexual trauma, the implied meanings transfer over to how they perceive their life trajectory. Traumatic events act as a demarcation of time in the inner lives of these people and, as such, it has the potential to change all self-perception once they perceive the larger implications of trauma. "Retreating into oneself" is a common characteristic if you find such people in real life, especially so if they claimed to realize what happened a decade or so after: the idea of the self has been unraveled, and because the events are supposed to incur incredible turmoil on the victims, the unintentional result is to view themselves as a bearer of pain. [Note: Susan Clancy does not believe in repressed memories in the conventional sense, whereas I mostly do and am just using this as an example]. "I thought I was a normal person but found out later I am only just barely functional", "It was only later that I realized how awful it really was", or "Sometimes I am in a normal setting, remember what happened, and stop to think 'I wish I was more like them'" are all things these people might say. Personal observation not backed by any available evidence right now: those who discuss their event frequently tend to experience more nightmares about it than those who seldom discuss it at all. The CBT practice of making patients relive trauma seems very retarded to me compared to something like EMDR.
Onto the subject of arbitrarily decided bad behavior: I believe that there is a gradual shift in how trauma is perceived to the point where people could authentically feel the same thing from incidental occurrences. So long as trauma is considered applicable to more innocent events like catcalling, a three to five year age difference ("grooming"), etc., the reasonable reaction is to consider this as a cynical ploy — they might feel scorned by the end of the relationship and begin a crusade against the boyfriend for their perceived wrongs. That is true in a lot of cases. What I'd also argue is that, on some level, certain people genuinely believe the ordinary events are traumatic, and a network that facilitates these thoughts assists in re-conceptualization, just the same with cases we would consider more extreme. We have yet to see the full implications of this, but given that gender relations have taken up a hostile character, we can suppose that women en masse are beginning to perceive themselves as essentially traumatized.