This fits what I’ve seen from talking to women who have experienced rape/sexual abuse.
In one case, the abuse happened as a kid and she didn’t feel traumatized for many years until she heard people talking about such things as if they’re supposed to be traumatic and it was helpful to her to have someone give her permission to disregard those pressures as ill informed and stupid.
In another case, the woman was much older and somewhat traumatized by the experience, but talking to her friend about it just made her feel more traumatized because he emphasized how bad the situation was even more than she did. There was actually a considerable amount of humor in that particular case, and being invited to see it and recognize that she’s actually totally fine and doesn’t have to freak out about it anymore was helpful.
With respect to the question of “How do we communicate that sexual abuse is really not ok, without making victims of it feel like it’s worse than it actually is?”, it depends where the harm is. Hypothetically, if the only harm is in the psychological trauma, and the act isn’t actually psychologically traumatic in itself, then you bite that bullet and say that nothing bad happened and no one did anything that wrong. Or perhaps you treat it like drunk driving, to the extent that you believe the lack of trauma was not predictable.
However, the premise that the harm resides solely in the psychological trauma is false.Trauma serves an important function, and aiming away from experiencing trauma at all costs can be dangerous.
Imagine one day you go driving after a first rain, fail to account for the added dangers of water on the road, and as a result nearly drive off a cliff. No harm happened, and if you’re sufficiently unintelligent or unobservant—or afraid to experience fear—you might not recognize what’s scary about this and end up non-traumatized. Given the situation though, that lack of trauma doesn’t mean you’re “psychologically healthy” or well adjusted; it means the opposite. It means that you didn’t notice the problem, and so next time it rains you’re going to drive again like the roads are dry, putting yourself at further unnecessary risk. If instead you were a little more traumatized, you might be appropriately scared of driving fast on wet roads—at least, until you learn the new limits.
You want psychological trauma to match objective threats and your ability to handle them. It’s possible to be overtraumatized, or to fail to recover from trauma through more specific learning, but trauma has it’s legitimate place. In the second example where the woman talked to her friend and ended up more traumatized, I don’t know that the friend was wrong to do so—certainly the two of them as a system decided that the situation was more dangerous than she had been giving credit for, and maybe it was. She got out of that one fine, but the next one she might not have and she did some dumb things to get there.
There is a more fundamental and more squishy issue here too.
In the first example I gave, society’s local reaction was clearly maladaptive and just harmed the kid while giving her nothing actionable to do to either reduce risk or to get out of the trauma. I’ll even hazard a guess that the initial experience wasn’t particularly harmful to her in this specific case, but the squickiness I feel when thinking about those things doesn’t stem from “I think it’s likely to be traumatic for the kids” and the reason I think she got away from it unharmed is because such things are so frowned upon by society that it was kept from growing to a scale that likely would have been harmful to her—even if nontraumatic.
This stuff is all much harder to figure out so I can’t point to concrete damages and justify them well, but “this stuff is all much harder to figure out” is kinda the point; no one really knows what the effects are or what the damages are, so no one really knows what’s safe and what’s harmful and how. “How do our early experiences (sexual and otherwise) determine who we grow up to be, and what do we want to grow up to be?” is a big messy question, and “Well, the kid didn’t feel harmed” isn’t very strong evidence that they weren’t harmed (even if it is strong evidence that they aren’t traumatized, and that you shouldn’t be pushing unaimed trauma willy nilly). To give a stupid example to illustrate the type of non-obvious things that can happen, if a kid were to hypothetically “play doctor” and pick up a medical instrument fetish from it, the kid doesn’t have to be traumatized and the fetish doesn’t have to be morally wrong for it to negatively impact their life when their partner pool is narrowed to “People who also have medical fetishes”. “What kind of people we become, and how” is just a bigger question than we know how to navigate deliberately as kids or as adults or as a society. We have a sense that certain things are not okay, and it’s not entirely clear where they came from because our justifications break down here, but that doesn’t mean there’s no informational value there (or that it’s correct at face value either).
So as the bottom line, returning to the question of “How do we communicate that sexual abuse is really not ok, without making victims of it feel like it’s worse than it actually is?”, it is a specific instance of the question of how to relate to people in general, and the same principles apply. We want to orient empathically both to the experience of the person we’re talking to and also everything else we have that bears on the reality of what happened, and then see what happens when we integrate all of the things.
Sometimes this will simplify when it turns out that the kind of “sexual abuse” wasn’t actually abusive in the context in question, and that society is wrong. Or not as harmful as it’s made out to be.
Sometimes this will simplify when the causes of harm are nice and clear, and we can lead people to recognize these dangers and how to avoid them—no (permanent or debilitating) trauma needed. Maybe that means soberly showing them that while they got away with it this time, there’s this other risk. Or maybe it means recognizing that they actually have learned their lesson, and showing them that it’s okay to laugh and to move on.
In the specific instances where it resolves to neither of these, and you’re stuck with the apparent paradox of “Yes, that was actually very bad in my best estimate” and “I can’t point to a particular harm to avoid”, then until we can figure out more about where that sense is coming from and what the lurking danger is (which is a potential option to pursue), we’re kinda stuck acknowledging our uncertainty. Instead of “This is super bad including in your specific case!!!” or “Don’t worry, nothing at all is wrong with what happened”, just stick to what is known to be true. I can’t be too concrete as it will depend both on the specific situation and also what you know about it, but “There was likely nothing harmful in this case, but that’s a slippery slope that most likely leads to really bad things, even if it’s hard to explain exactly what those are” is one potential resolution of the apparent paradox.
This fits what I’ve seen from talking to women who have experienced rape/sexual abuse.
In one case, the abuse happened as a kid and she didn’t feel traumatized for many years until she heard people talking about such things as if they’re supposed to be traumatic and it was helpful to her to have someone give her permission to disregard those pressures as ill informed and stupid.
In another case, the woman was much older and somewhat traumatized by the experience, but talking to her friend about it just made her feel more traumatized because he emphasized how bad the situation was even more than she did. There was actually a considerable amount of humor in that particular case, and being invited to see it and recognize that she’s actually totally fine and doesn’t have to freak out about it anymore was helpful.
With respect to the question of “How do we communicate that sexual abuse is really not ok, without making victims of it feel like it’s worse than it actually is?”, it depends where the harm is. Hypothetically, if the only harm is in the psychological trauma, and the act isn’t actually psychologically traumatic in itself, then you bite that bullet and say that nothing bad happened and no one did anything that wrong. Or perhaps you treat it like drunk driving, to the extent that you believe the lack of trauma was not predictable.
However, the premise that the harm resides solely in the psychological trauma is false. Trauma serves an important function, and aiming away from experiencing trauma at all costs can be dangerous.
Imagine one day you go driving after a first rain, fail to account for the added dangers of water on the road, and as a result nearly drive off a cliff. No harm happened, and if you’re sufficiently unintelligent or unobservant—or afraid to experience fear—you might not recognize what’s scary about this and end up non-traumatized. Given the situation though, that lack of trauma doesn’t mean you’re “psychologically healthy” or well adjusted; it means the opposite. It means that you didn’t notice the problem, and so next time it rains you’re going to drive again like the roads are dry, putting yourself at further unnecessary risk. If instead you were a little more traumatized, you might be appropriately scared of driving fast on wet roads—at least, until you learn the new limits.
You want psychological trauma to match objective threats and your ability to handle them. It’s possible to be overtraumatized, or to fail to recover from trauma through more specific learning, but trauma has it’s legitimate place. In the second example where the woman talked to her friend and ended up more traumatized, I don’t know that the friend was wrong to do so—certainly the two of them as a system decided that the situation was more dangerous than she had been giving credit for, and maybe it was. She got out of that one fine, but the next one she might not have and she did some dumb things to get there.
There is a more fundamental and more squishy issue here too.
In the first example I gave, society’s local reaction was clearly maladaptive and just harmed the kid while giving her nothing actionable to do to either reduce risk or to get out of the trauma. I’ll even hazard a guess that the initial experience wasn’t particularly harmful to her in this specific case, but the squickiness I feel when thinking about those things doesn’t stem from “I think it’s likely to be traumatic for the kids” and the reason I think she got away from it unharmed is because such things are so frowned upon by society that it was kept from growing to a scale that likely would have been harmful to her—even if nontraumatic.
This stuff is all much harder to figure out so I can’t point to concrete damages and justify them well, but “this stuff is all much harder to figure out” is kinda the point; no one really knows what the effects are or what the damages are, so no one really knows what’s safe and what’s harmful and how. “How do our early experiences (sexual and otherwise) determine who we grow up to be, and what do we want to grow up to be?” is a big messy question, and “Well, the kid didn’t feel harmed” isn’t very strong evidence that they weren’t harmed (even if it is strong evidence that they aren’t traumatized, and that you shouldn’t be pushing unaimed trauma willy nilly). To give a stupid example to illustrate the type of non-obvious things that can happen, if a kid were to hypothetically “play doctor” and pick up a medical instrument fetish from it, the kid doesn’t have to be traumatized and the fetish doesn’t have to be morally wrong for it to negatively impact their life when their partner pool is narrowed to “People who also have medical fetishes”. “What kind of people we become, and how” is just a bigger question than we know how to navigate deliberately as kids or as adults or as a society. We have a sense that certain things are not okay, and it’s not entirely clear where they came from because our justifications break down here, but that doesn’t mean there’s no informational value there (or that it’s correct at face value either).
So as the bottom line, returning to the question of “How do we communicate that sexual abuse is really not ok, without making victims of it feel like it’s worse than it actually is?”, it is a specific instance of the question of how to relate to people in general, and the same principles apply. We want to orient empathically both to the experience of the person we’re talking to and also everything else we have that bears on the reality of what happened, and then see what happens when we integrate all of the things.
Sometimes this will simplify when it turns out that the kind of “sexual abuse” wasn’t actually abusive in the context in question, and that society is wrong. Or not as harmful as it’s made out to be.
Sometimes this will simplify when the causes of harm are nice and clear, and we can lead people to recognize these dangers and how to avoid them—no (permanent or debilitating) trauma needed. Maybe that means soberly showing them that while they got away with it this time, there’s this other risk. Or maybe it means recognizing that they actually have learned their lesson, and showing them that it’s okay to laugh and to move on.
In the specific instances where it resolves to neither of these, and you’re stuck with the apparent paradox of “Yes, that was actually very bad in my best estimate” and “I can’t point to a particular harm to avoid”, then until we can figure out more about where that sense is coming from and what the lurking danger is (which is a potential option to pursue), we’re kinda stuck acknowledging our uncertainty. Instead of “This is super bad including in your specific case!!!” or “Don’t worry, nothing at all is wrong with what happened”, just stick to what is known to be true. I can’t be too concrete as it will depend both on the specific situation and also what you know about it, but “There was likely nothing harmful in this case, but that’s a slippery slope that most likely leads to really bad things, even if it’s hard to explain exactly what those are” is one potential resolution of the apparent paradox.