Given names, narratives, and abusers

a pigeon ruffling it’s feathers

As a culture, scientists are in the process of renaming things. But I see no ruffling feathers in my world, so let me open the cabinets and start throwing things on the ground for sorting.

Let's talk about philias. Well, one sec, let's talk about a handful of philias because I do not have a problem with that, I have a problem with how we misuse it to the aid of the predator.

See, a philia is a love for. And if you are not Ptolemy, you recognize that love is local and therefore a deliverable that can go wrong. The term everyone misuses these days is pedophilia. That one in particular means a love for prepubescent children by the millennias-old language structure we draw from who were child rapists by our standards and standards of their day, despite their normalization attempts that clearly stuck. In healthy societies, we recognize that safety and autonomy are prizes for our growing children so we do not view sexually harming them as an act of love. This is humane.

wrenches on a wall in a workshop

So let's all agree that this framing has no place in modern theory. I do however value the dynamacy of the terms telio, infanto, pedo, hebe, ephebo, etc and, as a scientist and someone expected to stake my reputation on whether or not someone will go on to offend. Would you go to a mechanic and say they can only use one size wrench? And an even better follow-up to consider about your language use - do you know that there are different size wrenches? Then why would you not need to know these words properly too? 

So the categorizer portion of the word stays because we need those for a lot of reasons. To ensure we aren’t wasting resources keeping people completely isolated from society, where there is no risk, to be able to categorize and force dangerous people into treatment, and to empower children with knowledge so they can recognize that their being pursued is wrong and easily categorizable as regressed, developmentally stunted behavior that is deserving of that person being aided in keeping themselves safe until they can do it on their own. 

two one-way road signs facing different directions

But that's not enough. In my world, we have the 50/50. All have the attraction, but only half will ever act on it. We have drastically different ways we interact with each population and it matters because we know if you penalize the non-offenders, they crash out and are more likely to become offenders. The public lashing out contributes to the creation of victims that would not have existed had they been left alone and that is unacceptable.

The push to introduce the term Minor Attracted Persons, came from inside the house so people reacted poorly to it. There are a lot of men that use it to justify they aren’t as bad as pedophiles too, but all of that is disingenuous because if that were the real point we would all know the term and hate infantophiles the most because they steal the most innocence and do the deepest harm. But we don’t, do we? Maybe that lack of alignment is a sign that the narrative has been successfully hijacked by the abusers. But luckily for us, they started a thread we can use to our advantage. 

We should change the language to include specifiers at the end of the original age bracket terms. 

scaffolding on a skyscraper

We could begin with a model as follows:

CATEGORIZERS

Telio- attraction to the sexually mature (adult spectrum bodies, not including elderly)

Infanto- attraction to infants

Pedo- attraction to prepubescent children

Hebe- attraction to children showing signs of puberty

Ephebo- attraction to post-pubescent children

SPECIFIERS

Att- attraction; no offense

Off- offender

Coof- convicted offender

Sadist- someone who is acting out pathology other than attraction (this isn’t my world, better words will be found by the right people)

Non/***- (specified further OCD, intrusive thoughts, trauma response, etc)

For example, an infanto-att is a person who has attraction to an infant, but does not act on it. A hebe-inth would be a person who has intrusive thoughts of roughly 11-14 years old associated with pathology other than attraction.

fish swimming upstream

This all matters because there are predictable patterns to outcomes. Behavior and trauma responses guide us to the solution of the problem if you just swim upstream and deal with it. It literally is a “cry for help” situation except as a society we have chosen not to help it. 

We also need to get serious and rigid about our use of language because from where I stand, needing nuance to move forward, pretty much all the research is useless for direction because they didn't start with the end in mind. We have found ourselves in a chaotic state of alignment. Entropy has ensued. 

What it looks like in practical application is if I want to look something up, the definitions of words are so all over the place and devoid from any attachment to the dictionary definition and therefore common language, that the public has no clue how to conceptualize anything because we name things so poorly. We end up with emotion driven research that doesn’t help as much as it could because there was this weird charge attached to a word, usually one that we all struggle with as a society dealing with religious trauma, so we get nowhere. 

“goals” written at the top of a page on a typewriter

A lot of people don’t realize, when we are talking about these attractions and offences, that we approach them as two entirely different things. The therapeutic goal cannot be to make the attraction go away because if it is, outcomes always worsen. That trait, for better or worse is a part of the person so it kind of needs to be thought of like any other trait that has propensity to be damaging. I have the reaction speed and motor skills to be great with knives, doesn’t mean I stab people over my feelings. That level of control is not impossible for them to achieve. 

Another thing most people have never considered is that it is not just MAPs offending against children. Half of it is done by sadists. Those are the people who will abuse a child just because they can, and then they will get online and dehumanize MAPs and giddy themselves a second time because this time they got you to participate in the distraction that keeps them safe. Feels familiar, if you think about it, you see the way the power works, right?

greyscale dna strands

I said a bit ago that there is the attraction, and that is different from the offending, explorative states, generational trauma, and stored traumatic energy that also occurs. I believe we should treat people who ask for help with respect because that was brave of them, but I also especially think that even if you can’t personally stomach working with abusers that you have to have the stomach to at least help point someone to a competent practitioner.

I push this line even with people who hate offenders because no one wants to hurt a victim, yet everyone forgets about people with OCD, intrusive thoughts, and those who are working out stored traumatic energy. It is a common experience for the remembering of repressed memories of abuse to go as such:

hands extended out from the body displaying fear

• The remembering of a disturbing event

• Pushing it down because it was uncomfortable

• The remembering of a nondescript child in the field of vision and sensations of attraction in the body (a memory of sexual attraction systems turning on at a developmentally inappropriate time in response to a trauma but on a same-aged peer, which is not pathological, but a trauma response)

• An overwhelming surge of emotions that causes them to seek care so they make sure they aren’t becoming a monster who hurts a child

Now, say they go and walk into the office of a person, like one of the ones who responded to my dissertation and said that they would call the cops on a person who walked into their office and said “I had a thought of being attracted to a child”. What did we all accomplish there with this circus of a system we have built? A highway to victims dying by suicide? Seems like a system that serves the abusers. 

“do something great” in neon lights

A hateful uninformed practitioner or just friend could destroy a life with a poor response. And we all know abusers know that serves them because then they never get in trouble. So to the people who serve the system of this cycle churn of trauma in the United States of America, is this where you want to be when baby Jesus comes back?

Just like with people who don’t carry the attraction, once lasting impacts of their abuse is successfully processed, and their development properly supported to a safe level, they can function just fine in society, especially if supported to remain stable. So from there, we have a duty as a society to make sure people aren’t left to run around carrying the burden of childhood sexual abuse. I know it is hard to empathize with them and certainly to sympathize with them, but I can because I read enough research to see what is going on, so I can say that from here, it’s a lot easier to see a clear solution to the problem and just get along with it. 

My concern, and everyone’s should be, the prevention of the creation of new victims over blood lust. When you inform yourself it becomes clear that this has all just tragically been the abusers winning forever, but I am over that now. Do you see the ways you were programmed to be are adding to the creation of victims? Do you see how you are forced to participate?

pressure valve

I am here to change the pressure. I hope you will begin to verbalize differently. I want to see people do better. The researchers, the public, everyone. I want people to stop and realize that if we are going to rise to the occasion of this moment in history, it is going to take a concentrated effort of warriors standing their ground, holding space for the children of the other side to run behind us and find safety. Will I see you there?