Primary Prevention Part 3: From Silence to Support

In this third installment of our primary prevention series Danny shares his experience on forums for those attracted to children and emphasizes the importance of supportive communities that encourage pro-social behavior and connect people with resources to learn what boundaries are important for their specific situation. We then discuss the need for early education and societal recognition of primary prevention initiatives. Personal stories highlight how trauma intertwines with sexuality and the challenges faced by individuals seeking help. We call for validating and respectful approaches to primary prevention, recognizing our collective duty to protect and educate the young.

Transcript

 Primary Prevention Part 3

Zurc: [00:00:00] Howdy, and welcome back to Deviants. This is the third part of our primary prevention series, and we hope you enjoy it. We'll start off with. Danny talking about his experiences on forums that are geared towards people who experience a sexual attraction to children. And then, we'll move on to some of our experiences navigating these forums.

Just to trigger warning, if this is something that's disturbing to you, you might wanna skip this one. Enjoy. And now the conclusion of. Our three part series on primary prevention.

Danny: We need to recognize the fact that most survivors of abuse don't go on to abuse others, 

Zurc: That's true

Danny: Abusers, people who abuse kids or perpetrate abuse are by and large survivors. Or victims of abuse themselves. You talked about this in our [00:01:00] last podcast about how you are a fourth generation survivor of this cycle, and that's hardly surprising because, abusive behavior, whether that's sexual or physically violent, is learned behavior.

You act in the way that you were treated as a kid.

Zurc: Yep. 

Danny: And the way the victims of that want to deal with it is not to see the people who abuse them, punished and crucified by the courts and society. There's wanting to break outta that cycle. I think that's the case with you, isn't it?

Zurc: Yes. I just want the cycle to and I need, in order for the cycle to end, what's worked for me at least, is being able to engage with people who acknowledge this sort of aspect of themselves, of myself, online. I feel like I'm heard, right? I feel like my feelings are validated.

They're not criminalized, conclusions aren't drawn. If you're like me and you're growing up and you're being exposed to all [00:02:00] this child sexual abuse material and it's, taken over your childhood the trauma gets welded to your sexuality.

 They're just completely fused and it's very hard to know where sexuality ends and trauma begins. And by talking to other people, I've been able to figure out where those boundaries are. Right? And by figuring out where those boundaries are, and for me I, there's been, I've seen comments about how I'm a eunuch and so I don't have a sexuality in all of this stuff. No, no. I have gender dysphoria. I don't want to be a man. Part of the whole trauma welded to the whole, sexuality thing is that I just don't want to be male. And that has nothing to do with my sexuality. It has everything to do with I wanna see myself.

Danny: Yeah.

Zurc: Yeah. And I wouldn't have been able to figure it out if I [00:03:00] hadn't have been able to, talk to people. It's amazing. It's honestly, incredible. It's a good feeling. And, I think other people should be able to have that feeling too, however it looks to them.

I mean, I don't think everybody has to become a eunuch. Everybody has their own interesting stories and backgrounds and ways they wanna see themselves some people don't need that. Most people probably don't need that. But for those of us who want it, it does make a lot of sense. 

Danny: But when do we start? When do we start with that process? When do we start with the awareness?

Zurc: I think the thing that has to happen is that child welfare services, child protective services, law enforcement, and law enforcement adjacent organizations have to acknowledge and validate. That communities for primary prevention exist and that they are a good thing. They are not a bad thing. They are not a risk factor. They have to be treated with respect

have [00:04:00] to be allowed. The dignity that I think they've earned, and to me, that's the first step. It has to be that my activity like VirPed is not a risk factor for my relationship with, for example, my own children.

As long as those wires are getting crossed in society by our law enforcement and by law enforcement adjacent organizations, where they're seeing activity related to primary prevention as being a risk factor for engaging in child sexual abuse, I think we're gonna have a really hard time as a society , intervening with kids and youth who are being exploited online.

Danny: And often don't realize that they're being exploited online

Zurc: No, 

But if I could have gone on VirPed when I was a kid, it's such a thing existed, okay. Or OMC or whatever, I would've realized I would've been like, oh shit, I'm being exploited. 

That's not okay. [00:05:00] But I never got to make that realization. 'cause those things didn't

exist. 

Danny: I spent over 10 years in the teaching profession. And, one of my particular responsibilities because, my degree in theology and philosophy , and I didn't particularly want to be an RE teacher. I specialized, in social education. Which includes, sex and relationship education.

And my frustration with that was that there were actual, well, there was guidance, legal guidance around it that you had to wait basically until puberty before you started teaching kids about this stuff. One of the things that has encouraged me that we might be moving as a society in the right direction is that this year there's actually been, a change in government guidelines that has allowed sex and relationship education for children, in our year three, which is, the age of seven or eight.

And the pushback against that is you don't teach the kids that age [00:06:00] about having sex. Well, of course you don't. , what we're teaching is as basic as knowing what their body parts are called. Cause people have this misnomer that kids these days, oh, they're all sitting in their bedrooms on their phones or on their laptops and or tablets and looking at all sorts of stuff.

And they're all really genned up, but they're not.

Zurc: It's an information overload. .

Danny: I've got a class of eight year olds, you know, and we're doing basic biology about what part their parts of their body are called. And most of them know that the boys bit is called a penis. They won't call it that themselves. They'll call it a variety of things. So they know the word penis, but none of them knows the word scrotum.

Very rare for a child to know that, flap of skin hanging under a prepubescent boy's penis called a scrotum. They don't have the basic knowledge and often enough they're not fully aware that these parts are private. They're your business, [00:07:00] and unless someone has a very good reason, such as being a doctor or being a parent that's cleaning them, nobody should be touching them there and they shouldn't touch anyone else's.

Kids just don't know this stuff.

Zurc: It's something you have to learn. 

Danny: Yeah. 

Zurc: That knowledge doesn't just magically operate into our brains, and for boys in particular, if you don't learn it as early as possible, you start getting path dependency on, behaviors that are dangerous.

Danny: As a practicing solicitor now in England and Wales, I see, kids being stigmatized and dehumanized, for making mistakes through ignorance. I'm not saying that teenagers can't be sexually violent and malicious in that sense. Of course they can, and there are, many examples of that.

But there are far more examples of kids who make mistakes, and particularly boys who get demonized by the [00:08:00] criminal justice system, we've got kids of as young as 10. It's rare, but certainly it happens being placed on the sex offender register and that kids,

Zurc: We have it in the US It's really sad because it discourages them from getting help. 

Danny: They'll be force fed help and resent it 

Zurc: well, forced fed help, where if you admit to anything going on in your you are doing, you're engaging in double life or you're lying and sneaking it's like you're not allowed to just talk about what's going on in your head without the person on the other end, the receiving end, assuming you are a perpetrator and you're perpetrating right now, and it's terrifying . 

Danny: The moment you get involved with the criminal justice system, you've got this brief sitting there saying, keep quiet. Say no response or 

Zurc: That's true.

Danny: No reply, no response , don't talk about it. Don't talk [00:09:00] about it. And that is such a counterproductive message. 

Zurc: I know..

Danny: And if we move up from the age of 10 to so early to mid-teens, that is when individuals are most likely to behave in sexual ways that are harmful and illegal with other children.

Zurc: And the only message they've gotten is don't talk about it. We set people like me when I was a kid up for failure before we even have a chance. And it's gotta change. 

Danny: There's also a gender imbalance here because if I go back to my. My first girlfriend and I, you know, there's no, we are still in touch, by the way, we're still friends on Facebook and all the rest of it, but if the gender roles had been reversed there and she had been a teenage boy trying to talk a reluctant girl into having sex, that would've been seen as 

Zurc: Yeah. 

Danny: if you're a boy in that situation, as I was, they, I'm supposed to be grateful, I'm like, [00:10:00] whoa. I mean, she was, she was, she was, you know, well, she was never, she was never gonna win a beauty contest, but she was a lovely girl, and, you know.

Zurc: Oh, she would've won a beauty contest.

Danny: What was I doing? 

Zurc: Your point there is, is I think really good where, when a girl does it and, and the boy is on the receiving end and the girl is the one that's kind of interested in, developing the relationship, the girl typically, we don't say they do anything wrong, we say. Somebody needs to have a conversation with them .

Danny: Yeah.

Zurc: She needs to talk to her mom, or the girls need to go out and have a conversation. Nobody would ever say that they're trying to encourage something abusive happening because they aren't. They are just, willing to talk about it and it's to their credit really.

I think women are actually pretty good at this. You know about just talking about it

Danny: I'm not suggesting that girls are oppressed in this sense because they just have different issues. An obvious example of that's been right [00:11:00] in the forefront of British news in recent months has been what's referred to as the grooming gangs.

Where they were men. Who were abusing in large numbers, vulnerable preteen and teenage girls. Another thing that tends to be sidestepped in that is that many of those girls were in care. They were in the care of the local authority, and they were targeted by these gangs of men who groomed them and effectively raped them.

But the word rape, conjures up forced activity. These girls regarded these men as their boyfriends, and these men were in their twenties Yeah thirties. Yeah.

Zurc: And that actually resonates with me.

Danny: The main thing that stands out for me from that, from, a response from the authorities is that those goals weren't seen as victims. They were regarded as child prostitutes because [00:12:00] they were getting money and favors and all sorts of good stuff from the men who were fucking them.

Zurc: Yep. And when I was a kid, I was getting child sexual abuse material. Like they were, that's what they sent in exchange. You send me x number of videos, I'll send you X number. And so it was my, I was the problem. 

Danny: Yeah, 

Zurc: It's terrifying. 

Danny: yeah. I think that's more common with girls than it is with boys.

Zurc: I think so too. I kind of straddle the gender line on that a little bit. 'cause I think my experience might be a little bit more like a lot of, girls' experiences. I've had a couple of people notice 

Danny: most kids who are trafficked are girls as you 

said, so it's, it is quite rare for, 

Zurc: yeah. 

Danny: boys to be in that. Sort of situation.

Zurc: Well, we don't really know though, do we? Because a lot of them kill themselves once they're caught because they are 

criminalized. It is just you want to talk about people who are kids that are just criminal, like there, it does happen with girls, like you were just saying, but it is [00:13:00] universal.

Any boy that has engaged in anything like this, they are a criminal they are at fault. It took me 30 years to realize that it wasn't my fault. 

Danny: having grown up surrounded by militant feminists , I remember when I was in my late teens, one of my mom's friends coming up with the opinion that all men are potential rapists. That's not an uncommon thing. And I saw that, I saw that repeated as, as something, as a therapist had said on the VirPed forum not so long ago.

My reaction to that was, what would you think if I said that all women are potential whores?

Because that is what she said was no less pejorative than my statement. I'm not a potential rapist for heaven's sake.

Zurc: Also, if we're going to characterize people, why don't we characterize them with the best parts of who they are, not [00:14:00] like. The worst parts of the human condition 

Danny: It's a sort of natural human inclination because there's no denying the fact that there are some men. Albeit a small minority , who are psychopaths, but you can't generalize that to everyone 

Zurc: And you can't take an approach on any class of people, that assumes there are a potential rapist. 

Danny: That's falling into the same trap the far right is using, in this country, you know, the Islamists are all these sexual perverts who are after young white girls. And of course that's absolute nonsense, but you can't hold that belief and at the same time say, oh, well all men are potential rapists. So that's exactly the same fallacy. 

Zurc: Right. 

Danny: It's a dangerous one. It's an extremely dangerous one, and it's stopping us from moving on. 

Zurc: When you say those words, all men are potential rapists, what you're doing is you're making it easier for people [00:15:00] who rape children to get away with 

Danny: yeah,

Zurc: yeah.

Danny: We are, as societies on both sides of the Atlantic, we're spending all this money on incarcerating people, locking people up.

Zurc: and lawsuits,

Danny: But that is all to the detriment of investing in the primary prevention techniques and policies

Zurc: Yep. All that money could go to paying our teachers more. It could go to paying our youth counselors more. It could go to paying a livable wage for daycare workers. Instead, it's going to responding to extremely traumatic, harmful experiences after they've already happened. After it's already been done without a single penny spent before it happens. 

Danny: Yep. 

Zurc: It's truly, it's madness. 

Danny: This is making me quite depressed. But I also feel quite inspired by it. You know, [00:16:00] moving onwards.

Zurc: We can have hope, right? It's very important. Throughout all of history, every marginalized class, behavior, skin color, background, religion, it, all of them have had to struggle for their ability. To be taken seriously, to be heard and to be treated with dignity and to be able to live without a fear of being robbed of that dignity or forced into poverty.

And I think there's validity to, to characterizing primary prevention as a civil rights struggle. We are struggling for our right to pursue happiness, right? We're struggling for our right to be able to get help and to be heard and heard as something different than a monster. 

Danny: That brings to mind, my experience as a teacher and school counselor, I had at least two, possibly three kids who came to me worrying about their feelings for younger children. And these were kids in their mid teens and [00:17:00] they thought that they were the only ones in this way, and that they were going to grow up to be racist rapists, not racist, rapists.

There were pedophiles, you know, the pedophile at the age of 14 or 15, 

Zurc: They're already convinced and terrified. They're a monster. 

Danny: These were, obviously, the Most candid and honest, upstanding kids seeking help with that. they thought, they genuinely believed that they were these monsters. Quite the opposite. 

Zurc: That's a hard thing. It's such a heavy burden for a child to carry that, and it was a heavy burden 

Danny: Hmm. 

Zurc: to carry that. It was impossibly heavy,

Danny: Well it was for me too, but it was lightened by the fact that I had support networks around me that saw me through it.

Zurc: It did not break me. I survived and I developed passion for primary prevention. 

We're gonna, close out here. This podcast isn't just education, it's an invitation. Okay. Oh my gosh. Ew. Ai. [00:18:00] But, but, but, okay. We don't want to just, be talking heads here telling you how it is. We wanna invite conversation from other people and we've had a couple of people that have reached out. And we're super excited about that. We will be working hopefully to get them on here. And, we want to hear from more too. This is new. It's different, and it takes an approach at this that have faith and hope usher us into something better.

Danny: If you're survivor of abuse. Then we wanna hear from you. And if you're a minor, attracted yourself, even if you've caused harm, but want to stop, then we want to hear from you too. We think, these issues matter and we can still work together. And of course, if you're a parent or a teacher, or a clinician or a researcher, whatever, we want to hear from you.

Zurc: Indeed. We're building a conversation that is hard to build, but it's worth it to build and to do it. We ourselves have to really hold tight to [00:19:00] the principle that. None of us are disposable. All of our perspectives, experiences and values and exploring this deserve to be heard.

And, we wanna hold accountability and compassion at the same time, but also recognize that, you know, this concept of primary prevention is for everyone. 

Danny: Well, we started by talking about the silence that's existed, at least since Elizabethan days, about this topic. People are scared to talk about it, people are embarrassed to talk about it. It's time to set up the systems that we've always needed. 

Zurc: It's time to have the conversation. 

Danny: Oh let's have it. let's have it.