Good thread (albeit upsetting).
twitter.com/FemmeLoves/status/1412316271698448386?s=20
This is a thread about why telling girls to “avert your eyes” when they see people with penises in the changing room is so wrong. It is a thread about red flags, and seeing no evil and why most people fail child safeguarding at the very first hurdle.
The sexual abuse of children thrives in the dark. Most abused children have multiple people in their life who “half know” what’s going on. Most people I have told as adults said something like “I had my suspicions.” Many people in authority had the chance to intervene and did not
For example, my father lost his teaching job for inappropriate sexual behaviour with teenage girls. He had three daughters at home, the oldest of which was a teenager. No investigation of his home life was done, he was allowed to retire quietly.
All a child abuser asks is that you politely look the other way. See no evil. Don’t cause any waves. Weesht. Just mind your business, wash your hands of it like Pontius Pilate. After all, it’s only suspicion. He’s harmless. Sure he does loads for the community, avert your eyes.
An abused child cries out to be heard, is desperate to be heard, but the things she has to tell you are horrific. An abused child demands action of you, action which may result in the fracturing of your family and your community. Easier to avert your eyes. See no evil.
I can feel it in me now, still, that desperate need to be heard, seen, believed. The loneliness of not being believed. The absolute betrayal of the adults in my life who should have protected me, and instead, protected the men abusing me. They averted their eyes.
I didn’t need to “tell” what was happening to me. Everybody knew. Instead of taking action, I was labelled a bad kid, a “terrible teenager,” because sexual abuse caused hypersexuality, and led to me seeking out situations in which I could be reabused. I was shamed for their sin.
I just accepted it – ok, I’m the bad guy. I’m a slut, I’m responsible, as a young teenager, for adult men wanting to fuck me. I didn’t have the language or understanding to explain any of it, and even if I had, I would have been blamed instead of helped. I just needed to be seen.
But nobody saw me, they just saw this terrible teenager, this slut, this lost girl who put herself in harm's way, who climbed out of her window and fucked strangers and got falling down drunk and didn't care what happened to her. Nobody really looked beyond that. Avert your eyes.
Averting your eyes is loaded language for abuse victims in another way, though. There’s a defence mechanism called dissociation which involves essentially averting your eyes from your own experience. I went away in my head.
I can remember very little of what I actually did not just when I was being abused, but of all the sex I have ever had with men as an adult. I just went away in my head. I have fractured, broken images, but mostly I averted my eyes, Elvis has left the building.
Victims’ tendency to blame ourselves for what happened is another way to avert our eyes. We can’t look squarely at a person who was supposed to protect us, and accept that they abused us instead. So I went back and forth between the poles of a Hobson’s choice.
My father used to make it feel like the sun was coming out. He sat me on his knee and sat me on his workbench and threw me in the air. I loved him. If he was a bad man, then one of the only bright spots in my childhood wasn’t real, and I had lived without love.
Easier to avert my eyes from evil, literally, to see no evil. Easier to take the shame on myself. Easier to conclude that it was me who was bad, that I deserved it. But if you see no evil, you take that evil on yourself, and live without love either way.
This aversion of the gaze is why abuse victims’ accounts of what happened to them may sound deceptive, even to professional lie detectors. Dissociation, guilt and shame conspire to make truthful narratives sound like lies, full of holes.
It is also why victims so often feel so desperate to speak, to tell the truth about what happened to them, and so desperate to be heard, to be believed. I used to feel like I was in a crowded room, screaming, but everybody just looked the other way.
The first rule of child safeguarding is that if you see a red flag, you have a duty, as an adult, to take action on it. A penis in a women’s changing room is the red flag equivalent of the Kremlin on the anniversary of Lenin’s death.
If you are swinging your dick in the women's changing room, you are not dysphoric. I am married to somebody who lives with dysphoria. If you're dysphoric, you want to hide. This is not a case of a trans person just wanting to get changed. Make no mistake, this is a pervert.
It is already flashing, which is a sexual offence. The men and women saying, without a hint of irony, “avert your eyes” are directly enabling sexual abuse. They are giving a free pass to flashers. They are emboldening perverts. They are feckless, thoughtless cowards.
They are averting their eyes, they are seeing no evil. They are excusing predators and perverts with whatever excuse seems most fitting to them. And they are encouraging others to do the same. I hope they are proud of themselves.
It couldn’t be me. I swore, before I had children, that little people would be safer around me. That I would see red flags and act on them, that I would not avert my eyes, not from what happened to me, and not from adults around me.
I am here, looking the truth in the face, and the truth is that defending flashers, perverts and molesters by saying “it’s a woman’s penis,” and doing it in public, is the exact same energy as moving paedophile priests to different parishes.
It is the exact same energy as failing to investigate the home life of a teacher who has teenage daughters, and has lost his job for interfering with teenage girls at school. It is gaslighting, it is covering up for child abuse. It is a cowardly, polite kind of evil
I will leave you with this. I have done a lot of reading about molestation and grooming, trying to understand what happened to me, and learning how to spot red flags, how to protect children. Of all that reading, one phrase stuck with me.
It was from a prolific abuser of children. He said that even if he didn’t actually get to abuse a child that he was grooming, he would “get her ready for the next guy.” Telling a child just to “avert your eyes” is getting her ready for the next guy.
It is breaking down her boundaries. It is telling her to ignore her feelings and her gut. It is gaslighting her. Child molesters are pure evil and fairly rare, but the kind of craven coward who covers for child molesters and blames the victim are ten a penny.
If you say and do these things, you should know what you are. You are Pontious Pilate. You are seeing no evil. You are looking the other way and allowing the sexual abuse of children on your watch, for woke points. I despise you.