Empathy for Child Sex Traffickers and their Victims

[trenton]

I notice a lot of misconceptions when it comes to empathy and compassion for child sex offenders. I have a different perspective from most for several reasons. Firstly, my father was involved with a gang of child sex traffickers and I was one of the victims. Secondly, I have done a lot of research on criminology which is directly relevant to empathy and compassion for child sex offenders of all kinds. Thirdly, pedophilia is a subtype of preferential offenders which is disproportionately likely to have multiple victims. Most child molesters are not pedophiles and they have a diverse set of motives and psychological problems that lead to this kind of behavior without being inhuman monsters. Fourthly, empathy and compassion for perpetrators or victims cannot be cleanly separated for reasons I will explain. the core reason is that to vilify love and compassion for perpetrators is to indirectly shame child victims who cover for the parents that abuse them due to loving them, such that they feel their love makes them unacceptable and unworthy of life to the point of needing to kill themselves. Finally, empathy is not an excuse for harm. At minimum, cognitive empathy is necessary to inform prevention of violence and enable the protection of child victims by understanding what circumstances lead to victimization. You don't have to have warm feelings toward child molesters and you are allowed to be outraged at the harm they cause.

Relevant to this discussion is my past thread on deconstructing monster narratives.

In this thread, I mentioned incest perpetrators and parents who sexually offend against their own children. From the perspective of the parental perpetrator, they live in a distorted moral reality in which this type of love is appropriate for their child. They have all kinds of ideas about how this isn't harmful because harm comes from discovery rather than from the act. Sometimes they rationalize this behavior with cultural relativism, arguing that some cultures allowed incest, meaning the behavior isn't actually bad. The parent does not grasp the harm caused to the child because if they did then they would not be able to live with themselves, therefore the incest perpetrator must believe that the behavior is acceptable and the child can meaningfully consent. This pattern is common in parental offenders who are living a criminal lifestyle which corrupts their sense of what kind of love is appropriate, similar to what happened with my father. To clarify, most parental offenders are not pedophiles, but rather they are situational offenders who falsely believe that this kind of love is appropriate, which is technically distinct from pedophiles who are sexually attracted to children rather than having a distorted familial bond with inappropriate forms of love in it.

Given my research into criminology, this closely matches my father's behavior and actions while being relevant to recovery. This gets very unsettling and disturbing, but it is true nevertheless. My father showed several distorted means of attempting to bond and connect with me. Firstly, he was afraid of me thinking of him as a bad person, as ironic as that may sound. Because of this he needed to change the standard of what it meant to be loveable and desirable. He was so embedded in criminal life that he had no realistic exit without permanent life imprisonment. Therefore, he attempted to recast his behavior as gangster and badass such that he would seem desirable. This included boasting about his exploits of all kinds including death threats, drug deals, prostitution, and his relationship with my grandpa who he claimed had extensive involvement in his crimes.

My moral conscience was threatening to him such that he both wanted to change my perspective and part of him seems to have convinced himself that this was cool or an appropriate form of connection. The first incident involved my unwanted participation in drug deals. I was clearly heavy and upset with what had occurred, but my father cheerfully told me to "lighten up." He insisted that I was badass like him, but the violation of my values could not be ignored when I felt intense guilt and shame in response to these situations. I knew my father had done something wrong, but I never had the courage to tell anybody at least in part because I loved him. He also showed several patterns of grooming in that he wanted to keep the nature of our relationship a secret from others while using a lot of positive reinforcement.

My father also showed apparently genuine love in response to a situation with my mother and stepfather who were drug addicts. He appeared to both want my safety and to exploit my need for safety to get out of paying child support by using me to get dirt on Mom. This included his reminders that he was involved with a violent gang that would be willing to kill my stepfather, as if I could count on them for protection when in reality I was terrified of them and my father as well. I couldn't say these things to my father or other family members as doing so would jeopardize me further. The outcome is that parental perpetrators commonly don't realize the harm they are causing their children due to their implicit theory that a child would openly complain if they were unhappy. Similar to incest cases, the victim often appears  to silently accept this kind of behavior due to coercive control which shares parallels with my case.

I detailed the trafficking incident in a separate document. The FBI expressed interest in my explanation of the evidence and how it connects to broader patterns in organized crime that often goes undetected. They said I do need a Bachelor's degree though to work in higher positions. I can post it in this thread too if necessary, but the necessary snippet is in the other thread for more context and evidentiary standards for these situations.

In terms of fathers who traffic their children out of love, this gets very fucked up, confusing, and disturbing. However, it matches my findings in criminology and maps onto all of the other patterns of my father. Part of why people join gangs is out of a sense of belonging that is being filled with a criminal group. Therefore, from this point of view, treating a child as if they belong to the gang is held as a form appropriate connection and love. This can include initiation through child prostitution in which the father is proud and excited for what is happening to his child. I was really baffled as to why my father was happy over all of this.

The overarching pattern in parental sex offenders is that they generally do not realize the harm they caused and they see their behavior as loving. They have a distorted sense of reality in which everything is perfectly fine such that their map of reality has the child's reality completely backwards as the child's behavior is interpreted through the distorted framework. This is often relevant for victims in recovery who feel that their feelings of love make them unacceptable.

One the inside as I stayed silent, my logic was as follows. By following this victim logic, it often leads victims of parental sex offenders to suicide.

1. My father did something unacceptable.
2. I silently accepted my father's unacceptable behavior.
3. My acceptance of that which is unacceptable makes me unacceptable.
4. Therefore, I am unacceptable.

This line of reasoning is often tied to survivor's guilt such as "I should have turned my father into the police" (who in reality were corrupt and possibly complicit) or "I should have protected others from my father" (even though I couldn't protect myself). These are the surface level should statements that victims use to blame themselves, but the deeper should is "It is wrong for me to love my father because of his actions, therefore I should cut myself off from love to prevent love from enabling harm." (therefore I should kill myself.) This is a common pattern in how victims of child sexual abuse think and it often leads to suicide because they feel that their love is unacceptable and they should remove themselves from love forever as a consequence. The belief is that if a child molester is unlovable, and your parent is a child molester, and you love your parent, and loving someone is supposed to be unlovable makes you unlovable, then the victim is unlovable. This is why it is important that we don't demonize compassion and love for perpetrators as it is connected directly into the victim logic leading to suicide. children often stay quiet and cover for abusers as a consequence of loving them in the secret relationship the perpetrator established through grooming.

There is also an important distinction between "accepting" as in endorsing or consenting to my father's behavior, and "accepting" as in having a freeze response as a survival instinct and therefore incurring the cost of my father's actions.

The alternative frame for victims would be as follows.

1. My father did something harmful.
2. I accepted the harm because of my desire for love.
3. The situation was logically acceptable by virtue of the fact that is was accepted.
4. Therefore I did not accept anything that was unacceptable.
5. Therefore I am acceptable by virtue of the fact that I exist and I desire to love and be loved.
6. None of this is an excuse for harm.

The core point to this connects to spirituality in several important ways. Firstly, ego is not defined just by an individual human being. The ego is relational and defined relative to other. Therefore, demonizing other beings who inform the ego identity translates into demonizing oneself, as the relational nature of ego makes self and other entangled in ways that cannot be cleanly separated. In my case, hating my father translates into hating myself because he isn't actually separate from me. The same logic applies to all human beings, animals, and objects in the universe as all of them are ultimately part of me. In that sense, I am the universe and everything in it. Self is defined relative to other within the universe and the distinction is untenable. At the same time from another point of view I am the universe experiencing itself from the point of view of a human being within the domain of separateness which itself is illusory and not separate from unity.

Leo takes this further by saying that I literally created the universe, not just that everything is connected. Oneness is deeper than just connectedness as would be the case for the relational nature of ego in which self and other cannot be cleanly separated. Either way, there is ultimately no difference between loving self and other though.

This is also crucial for forgiveness which applies even in some extreme severe cases.

1. My father hurt me to some extent out of ignorance in that he could not distinguish the harm caused from implicit theories linked to the distorted alternative reality.
2. My father hurt me out of weakness and fear such as his fear of being caught leading to threats of disownment combined with his inability to exit the criminal lifestyle without permanent imprisonment.
3. My father hurt me out of selfishness. (no shit)
4. My father hurt me out of a need for love from his son which he sought through criminal exploitation framed as inclusion, protection, belonging, and bad ass gangster identity while being severely traumatic to his son.
5. My father hurt me out of a lack of consciousness in that his dense ego was prone to severe distortions and self-deceptions such that it could spin entirely alternate realities in which the behavior was good and justified.

In the end of all of this, I hope you can see why empathy, love, and compassion for perpetrators ultimately ties back in to empathy for victims as the two cannot actually be cleanly separated due to the nature of ego, self, and other. Additionally, there is more complex information in terms of cognitive empathy for sex offenders that can be used to inform prevention. This includes situational / opportunistic offenders which are the most common, grievance based offenders such as intimate partners who rape and murder their victims, and preferential offenders which includes pedophiles who impact a disproportionate amount of victims as well as sadistic serial rapists / killers and zoophiles who rape animals believing it is an appropriate form of love. By understanding the different types of offenders and the psychological backgrounds, then at minimum it can be used to inform prevention, especially sense social isolation and feeling like an outsider in society is a common problem for criminals who might seek belonging from gangs instead. This is a big topic for discussion, but it is important for correcting the conflation between pedophiles and child sex offenders. The truth is more nuanced, and the truth is necessary for there to be any meaningful love as without truth, any love expressed is ultimately based on falsehood. In that sense it is like loving nothing.

This was kind of heavy for me to type, but I hope you find value in this kind of work. In my case it also relates to abuse from my sister who likes to weaponize my trauma around my father against me by insisting he was "loving and caring like a father" while knowing the harm he caused me. Forgiveness in this context does weaken my sister's ability to weaponize this trauma.

Perhaps the next question would be in regards to child sex traffickers who are not the child's parent and who instead kidnap other children at airports to take them to the wrong plane, leading to a gang who turns them into sex slaves for profit. This empathy and love for offenders could be expanded on that front, but it seems more difficult in some ways. I have a hard time with sadistic offenders especially who torture their victims for sexual pleasure, including children which creates an alternative sexual motive for the assault aside from pedophilia.

[enchanted]

I'm sorry this happened to you. Thanks for sharing so we all can learn about this topic in such great detail. 

[trenton]

24 minutes ago, enchanted said:

I'm sorry this happened to you. Thanks for sharing so we all can learn about this topic in such great detail. 

Apparently, most human beings cannot comprehend that a parent would do these things to their own child. It challenges their sense of reality because what is held as absolute to parents is in reality subjective. Parental love can be applied in destructive and horrific ways. Loving your child therefore does not prevent incest and rape. If you dig into sex offender typologies it might challenge your understanding of reality once you see the twisted nature of evil.

Meanwhile, I see that you are sorry this happened to me, but sometimes I struggle to comprehend what kind of empathy I would need from others. Part of the problem is that love has proven dangerous and it might make me attached to a perpetrator. It is also frustrating that those who see the pain can often do very little to help the situation somehow. This may be part of why therapy is ineffective in that the therapist does not realize that they are God and are therefore limited by the paradigms they apply to child sexual abuse.

I think it would be worth discussing, what kind of love do I need? If I have learned to numb myself to my feelings because of how overwhelming they are, then I become numb to people offering love as well. This is complicated by autism leading to difficulty understanding my emotions and is compounded by shut down when exposed to severe trauma. Eventually I just become numb because of how overwhelming it would be to feel everything. This in turn leads to chronic stress and emotional dysregulation in which death is seen as an escape from the psychological wounds and my sense of existential dread.

I will try to figure out what kind of love I need if family isn't helpful. If not family, then I thought career accomplishment would be something to pursue instead of relationships, but it was undermined by depression and educational disruptions. If career does not fill the void, then what love do I need?

I hoped spirituality would give me an alternative sense of purpose and reality, but that too is easier said than done. Ideally healthy relationships are helpful for recovery, but in reality this is hard if family has betrayed their own children.