(NOTE: This week’s edition of My Two Cents addresses the subject of child sexual abuse. The ideas presented here are in no way an attempt to excuse or justify the sexual assault of children by adults, but are rather meant to spur consideration of how changes in social mores and practices may contribute to an increase in the activity.)
If you paid close attention to WHBY News lately, you may have noticed a lot of stories dealing with the sexual assault of children, or inappropriate behaviors by adults dealing with children. In just the last couple of months we have had an Appleton mother sending a man in Texas lewd pictures of her young daughter, a Fond du Lac County woman taking cash from a man to have sexual contact with her pre-teen daughter, a police resource officer in Kewaskum sending videos of himself taking part in beastiality to a high school girl, a teacher at an Oshkosh school walked off campus for an inappropriate relationship with an 18-year old student, a tennis coach in Green Bay taking upskirt pictures of his juvenile female students, and two teachers in Janesville that resigned after evidence surfaced that they sent photos of themselves in lingerie and underwear to students–kissing one of them on a class trip as well. That is all in addition to the assortment of men arrested after showing up somewhere thinking they were about to meet a girl for sex, and it turned out to be an undercover cop.
This is a trend I don’t recall being so prevalent in my 25+ years of doing local news in Northeast Wisconsin. There have always been stories of the “dirty old man” touching kids inappropriately or the boy past the age of consent getting a girl below the age of consent pregnant, and the parents of the girl demanding that criminal charges be filed. But the child sex offender of today encompasses both genders and all ages. So what has changed recently?
For starters, the way we look at adult sexual activity with children has changed. I was going to paste in the definition of “pedophilia” from Wikipedia, but came to realize, it is no longer what I thought it was: Sexual attraction to children. It turns out that the “modern” definition of pedophilia is now “sexual attraction to children that have not started puberty”. Wikipedia even comes with a “warning”:
In popular usage, the word pedophilia is often applied to any sexual interest in children or the act of child sexual abuse, including any sexual interest in minors below the local age of consent or age of adulthood, regardless of their level of physical or mental development.[1][2]: vii [6] This use conflates the sexual attraction to prepubescent children with the act of child sexual abuse and fails to distinguish between attraction to prepubescent and pubescent or post-pubescent minors.[7][8] Such use should be avoided, because although some people who commit child sexual abuse are pedophiles,[6][9] child sexual abuse offenders are not pedophiles unless they have a primary or exclusive sexual interest in prepubescent children,[7][10][11] and many pedophiles do not molest children.[12]
What you will notice in this Wikipedia entry is that all of the sourcing footnotes link to articles written in the last 20-years, as there appears to be a concerted effort to diminish the stigma of sexual attraction to children. The new “acceptable” names for sexual attraction to kids that have reached puberty–which, in a related note, is starting earlier and earlier in American girls every generation–are hebephilia and ephebephilia. The first condition applies to attraction to kids up to 15, the latter for the attraction to kids from 15 to 19. There are even arguments that this type of attraction is “normal in healthy males”.
If we are going to create new “less stigmatizing” names for conditions that until a few years ago were considered to be criminally deviant behavior can I suggest hebephilia and ephebephilia be replaced with “Peeriphilia”–a condition where an adult sees a child as a sexual equal, regardless of their physical age? This would accurately reflect the changes in social mores, parenting, and education that seek to present a child, no matter what their physical development level is, as a perfectly-formed sexual being–complete with a self-developed gender identity and sexual orientation.
The teachers and the police officer in the stories I mentioned before are immersed in an education system that actively encourages its adults to engage students in conversations about sexuality–their own or the child’s–in classes as young as kindergarten. Furthermore, adults in the system are held up as “safe” to confide in–and are bound under district policies not to share any details of such conversations with parents. It’s a setting that creates an emotional intimacy between a child and an non-parental adult that can easily foster a desire for physical intimacy as well. And given the ages of those involved in the stories above, they themselves came through the same “I won’t tell anyone” type of system too.
It should also be pointed out that Second Degree Sexual Assault of a Child in Wisconsin is a Class C Felony punishable by up to 40-years in prison. Sexual Assault of a Child by School Staff is a Class H Felony punishable by up six years in prison. Even the justice system treats teacher/coach/volunteer sex with kids like a much less serious offense.
And then you have the parents I mentioned before treating their children’s sexuality as a commodity to be openly traded and sold. And they are not alone. Back in February, the New York Times published one of the most-disturbing articles I have ever read. It detailed the practice of parents (usually mothers) maintaining Instagram accounts featuring their daughters, whose main followers were adult men.
The premise of these accounts is that the girls featured are “influencers”, paid by companies to wear and rave about a certain clothing or dance shoes or gymnastics costumes. They have thousands of followers. But the Times investigation found that in many cases, most of those followers–and those that interact with the accounts the most–are adult men. Comments posted under pictures focus almost exclusively on the physical appearance of the girls, while direct messages request specific poses or camera angle shots in the future–or to be sent the actual clothes worn by the girls.
Unbelievably, the parents interviewed defend the accounts and the interaction with adult men–pointing out that banning followers hurts you with “the algorithm”, while “liking” or responding positively to them boosts your chances of being “recommended” to followers of similar accounts (who are also mostly adult men). One mother even admitted to sending her daughters clothes to men for “extra revenue”. Each parent insisted they were not sexualizing their daughters and that it would only help them achieve their dream of “influencing” as a career.
One thing that I have learned in all my years in journalism is that you cannot predict what the news of the day is going be every day. But so long as society insists on treating children like miniature adults and “friends”, we are going to have plenty more stories like the ones I mentioned at the start of this feature.
