Rights

I think alot about the rights of children and how grooming by pedophiles often involves giving them the illusion of having adult-specific rights and privileges to gain their trust. For example, one of the men who molested me allowed me to call him by his first name, despite the fact that he was a 54 year old adult and I was a 9 year old child. In my mind, this meant that he thought I was an equal.

I remember watching a Lifetime movie about a girl being sexually abused by a teacher in her high school. The teacher allowed her to do many adult-specific things but at one point, she lights a cig in front of him and he says, "you shouldn't smoke". She responds with, "yeah well, I'm doing alot of things I shouldn't be doing, aren't I?", he shuts up. That sums up my experience with feeling equal/superior to the person abusing me because I could blackmail them with what they were doing to me. I knew that I could get away with swearing, smoking or doing other things I shouldn't have been doing because he was getting away with doing things to me that he shouldn't have been doing and that gave me a false sense of equality because I thought I had some power over him. It worked wholly to his advantage, however, because it also gave me a false sense of responsibility for what he'd done.

I believe that, had I been treated as a worthwhile human being with rights, by other adults, I wouldn't have fallen into his trap. As it was, my controlling and abusive parents and the responses of the school staff to my repeated pleas for help taught me that I was worthless and that no one but my abuser would allow me to speak freely or have negative emotions about the other adults in my life. My abuser took away what was left of my understanding of boundaries and my right as a human being to choose without coercion or force who I did sexual things with and what sexual things I wanted to do at any given time, but it felt like he'd given me something in return where other adults didn't. I know now that it was a token to placate me, like my mother's gifts, while other, more important things were taken away. The reason I didn't see it then was that I was a child and that proves, more than anything, that I can't bear any responsibility for what happened because I didn't fully understand it.