Re: Ping: lee lette (continuing the debate)

"Yes, I understand that many victims feel extremely guilty, like their bodies betrayed them. "

Susan Clancy addresses in The Trauma Myth how the narrative does a disservice to those who were abused. The Trauma Model is based on the way that the real threat of imminent death or physical suffering is processed as if they were death and physical suffering. Getting you leg shot to pieces and seeing your buddies head shot off are processed much the same.

Of course all Trauma is intensely painful in the moment it happens ( albeit emotionally painful in psychological Trauma. )

What she found out about CSA survivors was that excepting the rare cases of violent force, they experienced a mix of bafflement and pleasure. "Why is he touching me there? Hmmm, that feels funny."

Clancy herself is no believer that Adult-child sexual contact isn't inherently harmful. However even she recognizes that the Trauma Model tells the "victims" that they were supposed to suffer horrifically. It leaves those who didn't feeling that their experience may be wrong somehow, or even collusive if they found what they're told must be painful to be mildly pleasurable at the time it was happening.

For the record, she sees Adult-Child sex as a betrayal of trust in which a child's understanding of sexual gratification doesn't allow them to understand how what they do affects the adult who is pleasured by the contact. And that the actual harm occurs when they understand enough to realize that they were exploited. Clancy's patients almost uniformly agree that the beginning of their hurt was when it dawned on them what had transpired.

So the dominant narrative actually alienates and disempowers those who are struggling, because it tells them that the way they experienced it was inauthentic.

In much the same way the crime-scene-photos narrative of CP disempowers those who are turned on but who want to be law-abiding Pedos. It suggests that if they aren't looking at pictures of Child Sexual Abuse, then its not Child Sexual Abuse Imagery. The narrative deceives, and does a disservice even in those things it claims it wants. ( Obedience of the law and the empowerment of victims respectively. )

Dante