In any setting in which teenage sexuality and gender expression are under moralistic scrutiny, you will find predators like this.
I’m working on several essays that I plan to share here over the next month. Rather than go silent while I’m working on them, I’m sharing a short piece, lightly edited, that I wrote and shared on social media in August 2020.
Some Context: At Least They Did the Story
I published a version of this piece on Facebook ten days after the New York Times printed a feature about sexual abuse perpetrated by Catholic composer David Haas, featuring a number of my advocacy clients.
As grateful as we were for the Times coverage, the story that I hoped for alongside the survivors who agreed to be interviewed was much different from the one that was published.
There were no active lawsuits, no criminal charges–almost nothing that would appease the Times’ legal department. The story probably prevailed due to the shocking number of victims, the points of corroboration between their stories, and the actions of the dioceses that banned the perpetrator’s music. But I felt so keenly what was missing or painfully minimized (through no fault of the journalist; the omissions were out of her hands).
In the context of that moment, I think most of the people who read both the Times story and my subsequent piece correctly associated it with Haas. But Haas was neither the first nor the last perpetrator reported to me who fits nearly everything in this description of a predatory adult targeting adolescents.
Youth ministries, summer camps, arts programs, and Christian colleges are incubators for this kind of grooming and abuse. In any setting in which teenage sexuality and gender expression are under moralistic scrutiny, you will find predators like this.
And because liability culture prioritizes institutional risk management over curiosity about the lived experiences of survivors, it presents few obstacles for a predator who does the things I describe below.
Content warning: There are some briefly explicit descriptions of sexual assault in here, so please care for yourself in accordance with your own needs.
The Premise: The legal demarcation between “minor” and “adult” has become a tool for minimizing the damage of sexual violence done to both children and adults.
Learning
Imagine a man who begins his adult life as a rapist who preys on teenage children. He doesn’t get caught, not really, not by anyone who can or will do anything about it. But he has some close enough calls that he learns the logic of that somewhat arbitrary line. He moves in religious or professional circles that foster a secretive culture of abuse, where certain kinds of men teach each other how not to get caught, how to become more skillful predators.
He learns.
He learns how to make himself ubiquitous to first-year college students. And he learns that he doesn’t need to force intercourse in order to achieve the rush that he clearly gets from sexually dominating another person. He can force them against a wall and shove his tongue down their throats. He can ask them out for what seems like a platonic conversation and then refuse to take them home, capitalizing on their terror of rape to leave them thinking maybe they should count themselves lucky that they were coerced into giving him a blow job or a hand job rather than forced into intercourse. If he does get caught, it will be described as “inappropriate behavior,” “unwanted advances.” No one thinks those things are “that bad.”
He will learn to say things like, “they misinterpreted my hug/kiss/attention.” Why wouldn’t he learn? People believe him.
When he’s traveling, in the professional circles where people know and respect him, he will beg his targets to accompany him to his hotel room, because once they’re inside, he knows it will be that much harder for them to say they didn’t consent to whatever he does to them or forces them to do to him. He just has to break down their will; he is insistent.
Behind the door, he can be plenty violent. Because if you’re someone who is targeted by a predator, rape culture dictates that passing through a hotel room door—or going to his house, or getting in his car—means you consent to whatever happens next.
You don’t believe in rape culture, you say? He doesn’t either. He also knows exactly how it works.
At Least It Wasn’t ___
Sometimes the legal adults he targets are very, very young, people he may have known since they were children. He meets them in a mentorship setting; he learns about their lives; he makes them feel special, chosen, wanted. He promises them career opportunities. He showers them with physical affection, wears down their boundaries, and—key point—if they pull away from him, he punishes them. He will ignore them, mock them, deny them opportunities, make them feel that they’re betraying his trust with their discomfort.
He will even cut them off as though they are dead, in a social milieu in which others will follow his lead. Children will want to be in his inner circle so badly that they’ll appease his supposedly hurt feelings, because that’s what the adults are doing, too.
He trains the communities around him to say stuff like, “don’t worry about it, that’s just the way he is.” So you, the kid, you go along with it. You want to be included. Later, you’ll wonder if that was consent.
When he lavishes this attention on children, people won’t think it’s sexual, because obviously he’s someone who cares deeply about mentoring young people, and shouldn’t they be grateful for that? Are we going to be paranoid about every person who mentors young people now, just because of a few bad apples?
My colleague Hilary Jerome Scarsella has written about how the monstrous figure of “The Pedophile” protects the people who actually abuse children. One way that protection works is by creating a reaction to the overreaction: supposedly everyone around us is overreacting to pedophiles, and thus we must be cautious not to join them.
And so we return to our predator. Whether or not he fits the definition of “pedophile” is a distracting question, because the point is that he preys on vulnerability and he learned how not to get caught. After his victims cross that line we call “age of consent,” a line determined by lawmaking bodies that inevitably contain sexual predators, no one will care anymore because “at least it wasn’t children.”
How to Stop Being a Child
It is literally impossible to adjust in real time to the new reality that a person presents to you when he goes in a heartbeat from being a mentor and quasi-parental figure to being a person who is shoving his hand up your shirt and forcing his tongue down your throat.
And yet. “It was just a kiss.” “He’s just affectionate.” “At least it wasn’t rape.”
If he groomed you as a child and somehow you managed to avoid his sexual aggression later, you count yourself lucky. You try not to take up space with the psychological and emotional damage he inflicted on your fragile adolescent sense of self, because you know that “others had it worse.”
The older you get, the less it matters. “At least it was just adults.”
An 18-year-old who gets caught having consensual sex with a 17-year old is more likely to be on the sex offender registry for statutory rape, to carry that stigma for the rest of their life, than is this predator who learned, through trial, error, privilege, and endless enabling, how to play the liminal space between “child” and “adult” to his own sick advantage.