Suppose someone who hates being tickled is pinned down and mercilessly tickled over and over against her will. No matter how much she detested the ordeal, she would involuntarily laugh. It would be gross ignorance about the normal human reaction to tickling to presume that her uncontrollable laughter indicates that deep down she wanted it. Likewise, when one’s body involuntarily sends pleasure signals to the brain in response to sexual molestation, it says nothing about one’s morality or attitude toward the offense.

Everyone knows that a molester might be a violent, terrifying beast of a man. What is difficult for most of us to grasp, however, is that those who sexually interfere with little children range from this extreme through to trusted care-givers and – as we will discover below – sometimes even loving mothers. A molester might be such a crazed monster as to leave every victim highly traumatized. There are others, however, who are so gentle, gradual, comforting and trusted that any normal infant could not help but regard the sexual interference as being as natural and as nice as breast-feeding.

A child’s reaction depends on the molester’s method, not the victim’s morality. And pleasurable feelings are not limited to children. You will find below a link to the tragic story of an adult traumatized by the fact that she could not help but experience orgasm while being gang raped. Despite having been married for years, this was her first orgasm ever.

If one were forcibly injected with heroin and the result were nothing but pain, terror and repulsive feelings, it would be a horrific experience but it would end up far less torturous than if the result were pleasurable. Ironically, a “bad” trip is much more preferable than a “good” one, because “good” trips lead to the horror of addiction. Pleasure drives victims to perpetuate the torment and to reel in the agony of being at war with themselves, with one part of them irresistibly drawn to the drug and every other part of them repulsed by it. Just as no one can control whether drugs produce a “good” trip or a “bad” trip, so sexual assault victims have no control over how much pleasure is inflicted upon them. But as with heroin, the more pleasure the assault produces, the greater the long term torment for the hapless victim.

This is an agonizingly difficult subject. How can I mention pleasure without readers wrongly supposing I am referring to something desirable? How can I explain that the presence of pleasure only magnifies the offense? A rapist or child molester is so perverted that almost everything that person does turns upside down normal human reactions.

My longing is to condemn the actions of predators while ensuring that the victims feel nothing but comfort. If I don’t achieve this, please let me know.

I regularly find abuse survivors who, in response to their suffering, end up addicted to masturbation or promiscuity or to hating certain people (especially their abuser). Their pain touches me, even if their actions are sometimes less than commendable. My heart breaks when they find themselves trapped in destructive behavior that they hate. I long to assist and support all such people in whatever way I possibly can.

Tragically, yet another undesirable response to sex abuse is for some former victims to end up sexually interfering with others, and they can end up as addicted to it as others become addicted to masturbation or to hating their abuser, or to being in love with someone who will end up harming them. It would be hypocritical of me to claim that my heart breaks for every person who has suffered sex abuse if that did not include those who in response to their own criminal violation have ended up violating others. I strongly object to victims responding to their own pain by abusing others – and they should certainly be brought to justice – and yet I cannot help but feel compassion over the fact that they have not yet been healed from their own suffering. So even with offenders, it is their actions that I condemn, not the entire person.

Because predators differ in their methods, their victims’ experiences differ. So in an attempt to help all readers, only parts of this webpage will apply to any one person. Please disregard those parts that do not gel with your experience.

Victims of sexual crime often suffer horrific, but quite unnecessary pangs of guilt over being forced to experience pleasure. Having a nice feeling in the midst of rape or molestation is usually no more than a bodily reaction like bleeding. It in no way suggests the person is immoral or subconsciously wants to be abused. And any skilled seducer of children will have much about him or her that normal children are drawn to.

Suppose someone buys me an ice cream and while I am eating it, he picks my pocket and steals my credit card. By the time I realize what has happened I find myself in a desperate predicament, with my bank account stripped. When I report this crime to the police, I would have every right to feel grossly insulted if asked if the ice cream tasted nice, as if that had anything to do with the magnitude of my loss!

No matter how distorted sex becomes, and no matter how horrific the overall effect, it is not easy to remove every pleasurable sensation from it. After all, sex is divinely designed to be exceedingly pleasurable, and hence highly addictive. It is intended to be so addictive that it binds a husband and wife together for life.

We readily acknowledge how rare it is for anyone to succeed in blocking all pain from one’s consciousness so that a person feels no pain when physically assaulted. And we realize that whether or not someone achieves this feat has nothing to do with morality. So why should we apply different expectations when it comes to blocking pleasure signals being sent to the brain? Both pleasure and pain signals are morally neutral nerve impulses. Morality is about choice; not about uncontrollable bodily sensations.

If drugs brought no pleasure, the horror of drug addiction would not exist. The pleasure of a drug-induced high that drug pushers give their victims does not justify their actions; it is what makes their actions despicable. Likewise, any pleasure rapists and child molesters give their victims in no way justifies their actions. It merely increases the harm they inflict and is further proof of their depravity. Neither does the existence of pleasure hint that the victim might be perverted or immoral.

Few people who have not suffered it, can understand the dynamics of non-traumatic sexual molestation. Some of those blissfully ignorant of this horror, however, can understand how someone can innocently discover self-stimulation and eventually become strongly addicted, even after developing pangs of conscience over the habit. To these people I say, imagine the consequences for someone whose introduction to sexual pleasure comes not through self-stimulation but through someone else stimulating him/her. A girl about thirteen years old in a class for the intellectually handicapped revealed the dilemma many face. She told her teacher, “My mother said it is not nice to let someone touch you down there, but she doesn’t know how nice it is!”

The myth most people would like to believe is that babies enter the world with no more sexual feeling than a china doll and remain that way until puberty. Many parents hope against hope that ignorance keeps children innocent. In reality, ignorance only makes children more vulnerable to predators who deliberately create – and then exploit – false guilt over their victims having normal feelings. Seldom do victims realize that the only ones who should feel abnormal or perverted are the predators.

Everyone needs to realize that from a very young age, normal children have genitals that send pleasure signals to the brain when stimulated in certain ways. Babies just a few months old are capable of orgasms. (For more, see Infant Sexuality.) We must not confuse biology with morality.

Literally millions of people have suffered incalculable damage because of the common failure to understand the dynamics of sexual abuse. It was not so long ago when, in their ignorance, most parents used to presume they were adequately protecting their children against sexual predators by warning them only against contact with strangers. The average person had no idea that most sexual abuse of children comes from trusted family members or family friends or other children. Tragically, countless thousands of children have innocently concluded, “This is clearly not one of the terrifying strangers I was warned against, so what this person is doing to me must be acceptable.”

An equally dangerous misconception that is even more prevalent is that people have ignorantly assumed that child molestation always inflicts pain or suffering. As a consequence of this grave mistake, children have not been adequately warned and protected. Moreover, this common presumption has left most of the vast numbers of boys who have been indecently assaulted with not even the awareness that what they have suffered is sexual abuse. Even when they grow into adults the confusion usually remains. They were subjected to little discomfort until they were well and truly trapped into thinking it was all their fault. The gross sexual abuse they suffered does not conform to the average person’s uninformed presumptions about sexual abuse. This tragic situation is like what would happen if everyone assumed that to be robbed involves being bashed on the head. This misconception would mean that, no matter how much was stolen, if you are not bashed on the head no one believes you have suffered loss. And you yourself would barely be aware that what you have suffered is criminal. You would think you have no option but to blame yourself for being robbed and suffer in silence.

For purely physiological reasons it takes less skill to seduce boys. For example, a mother confided that despite wanting it never to happen, when she bathed and dried her three little boys, each of them would occasionally show signs of sexual arousal. Despite her utmost efforts, she found it impossible to consistently avoid this unwanted consequence of her motherly duties. If you think this unusual, click here.

Forgive me for raising distasteful matters, but ignorance causes untold suffering. A few years back, I was horrified to discover an example of how mothers seem able to get away with almost anything in the area of sexual molestation of their boys. A respected women’s magazine, not given to emphasizing sex, printed a letter from a woman explaining how it had seemed her little boy would need circumcision for medical reasons. She claimed to have avoided this by regularly masturbating the boy until he was old enough “to do it himself.” This was published without comment, thus implying approval of her molesting this little boy.

There are cultures where it is considered good parenting to masturbate one’s little children and especially for women to masturbate their infant sons.

Until recently, even experts had no idea that almost as many boys are sexually abused as girls. (In fact, I wonder if it will eventually be uncovered that when one includes all sources of molestation, more boys than girls are sexually abused.) The grave failure to even detect the problem arose because survey questions were determined on the dangerously false assumption that children feel uncomfortable about sexual seduction.

Writes a convicted pedophile who admits to having over seventy victims:

In general, I found that more children were triggered by sexual curiosity than by the need for affection. Few were sexually experienced prior to their first contact with me. . . .

Adults weave romantic notions about children’s innocence, conveniently forgetting their own curiosity and sexual excitement in childhood. It suits parents’ own needs to imagine that children are deaf, blind and totally insensitive to the highly sexual environments in which they live.

Adult society refuses to recognize the fact that children do not necessarily view genital touching as bad, unpleasant or unsafe . . . and so children enjoy it. Until that simple fact is recognized and incorporated into child protection programs, children will remain vulnerable to people like me.

Source of Quote

Other pedophiles, drawing upon their horrifyingly vast experience, have said similar things. I must, however, clarify his comment on innocence. Little children are innocent in the sense that they have no idea that certain types of touching are wrong. Innocence, however, has nothing to do with an abnormal inability to feel sexual pleasure.

Since pedophiles usually specialize in entrapment, they are forced to bait their trap with things most children find pleasurable. So it is normal for child molesters to give their victims pleasure. The pleasure often includes gifts they bribe children with or the attention they give love-starved children. If pedophiles are sufficiently skilled at seduction, there will also be a degree of sexual pleasure their victims suffer (yes, I believe “suffer” is a most appropriate word in this context). Rapists can even force adult victims to experience pleasure and this very pleasure inflicts enormous suffering and emotional damage.

We can hate the context in which pleasure occurs and we can hate the consequences, but it is humanly impossible not to like pleasure. And yet victims feel they should have done the impossible and somehow hated the pleasure that was inflicted on them or suppose that by some superhuman miracle they should have broken into abnormality and stopped themselves from feeling pleasure.

When Starving, Even Rotten Apples Are Irresistible

Children – in fact, all of us – have a deep need to be loved and to feel special in someone’s eyes. So intense is this craving that if we are cruelly starved of it we could become so desperate as to end up emotionally entangled with whoever seems to offer the best substitute we can scrounge, even if we recognize the substitute as despicable. Unfortunately, it is not uncommon for that inadequate substitute to be a sexual predator. Consequently, emotional bondage to an abuser – often a devastating mix of love and hate for the abuser – is not uncommon.

A woman, who as a child was molested by her father, loathed her sexual abuse so much that she was sometimes overwhelmed by raging hate for him. Although her father repeatedly molested her, he did not actually penetrate her, whereas he penetrated her sister. Anyone ignorant of the powerful, conflicting emotions that incest triggers would be staggered to learn that not being penetrated had a strongly negative effect on her, causing her to feel rejected by the man she hated. This feeling of rejection drove her to despise herself even more.

Her deprivation of parental love sent her need for genuine love exploding until she ended up like a starving person almost insanely desperate for anything with the remotest possibility of satisfying her gnawing craving. This, however, was just the wounded, love-starved part of her screaming in agony. The rest of her would have simply found penetration reason to hate him even more.

So what a conflict this dear person suffered! She found herself desperately craving something she loathed, from a man she hated. Struggling to survive with this full-scale war within her personality would be devastatingly difficult but it was much worse than so far described. There was yet another part of her at war with not just one but both of the other parts. We all have a moral side and that part of her was certain that both incest and venomously hating anyone was shamefully wrong. The highly moral part of her hated herself, both for wishing she had been penetrated and for hating her father.

Tragically, among abuse survivors, there is nothing unusual about this woman’s almost intolerable turmoil. Crippling emotional conflict is the inevitable consequence of a father perverting the most powerful forces within humans by doing what no father should ever do.

Another Devastating Source of Emotional Conflict

We earlier noted that it is the very nature of sex to be so pleasurable as to be highly addictive. The tragic implication is that when one’s introduction to sex is less than wholesome, there is a strong possibility of becoming addicted to some form of sex that is destructive.

This can manifest itself in many ways. For example, it is quite common for abuse survivors to become not just addicted to masturbation but to masturbation combined with fantasies about being raped or molested. They end up perpetuating their own abuse by deliberately combining sexual pleasure with fantasies of being abused. These destructive fantasies persist despite them loathing the sexual abuse they suffered. Others become addicted to promiscuity and/or seek out people who end up sexually abusing them. Still others end up driven by a compulsion to sexually abuse other people.

Then there are those who become so addicted to hate that they cannot stop hating their abuser, even though that person might have died years ago. In sexual abuse, the victim’s suffering is often much more severe than the abuser actually wants the victim to suffer. It is sobering to realize that victims can fill with self-righteousness and yet be so driven by hate for their abusers that they end up with a greater desire to see someone (their abuser) suffer than their abuser ever wanted them to suffer. Most who feel this way, however, have a part of them that does not want to hate. Many hate themselves for being addicted to hating their abuser.

No matter what the addiction, almost every addict is in a frustrating state of conflict. Part of the addict passionately loves what he is addicted to and part of him detests it.

The only way to resolve the conflict of a love-hate affair with over-eating, tobacco, or a sexually-related addiction is to break that addiction. That, of course, is a most painful and difficult thing but it is the only road to peace and freedom.

Suppose a little child with no concept of the danger or morality of drugs is introduced to hard drugs and given a regular supply. By the time the child learns that hard drugs are both unwise and morally wrong, he or she is in the viselike grip of addiction. Given the circumstances, the child is not responsible for becoming an addict. Nevertheless, addicts eventually reach the age of accountability and then assume the responsibility for whether they remain addicts. But what a devastating battle they must face to break free! My heart goes out to all who have suffered so greatly that they are now addicted to hating someone or to unwholesome sex. Nevertheless, as Jesus hung naked on the cross, the Innocent suffered the ultimate violation of his person to ensure each of us can break free.

The Story So Far

There is just one reason why normal, healthy little children will not enjoy sexual interference so much that they want more. The sole reason is that their molester was not good at seduction. If the sexual predator is the same gender, it in no way implies the child is gay; it simply means he or she has a body that responds normally to sexual stimulation, just like a normal child cannot help liking the taste of chocolate, even if it were laced with tasteless poison.

Even by itself, sex is so addictive that it needs to be treated like nitroglycerine. Any ignorance typical of children, or any loss of choice (such as implied threats or use of force), or the slightest craving for love or attention adds still more danger. The tragedy is that sexual crime victims of all ages and both genders often misunderstand their normal, bodily reaction or emotional needs and wrongly conclude that they are perverted. Their completely normal response to a highly abnormal predicament leads them to mistakenly conclude that they are wicked and beyond hope of ever being sexually normal. As would be expected of anyone who feels so doomed, they slide into destructive behavior until they discover the liberating truth. In reality, the only abnormal thing was the offender’s action, not the victim’s reaction.

High morality does not cause sin to lose its pleasure; it just causes a person to refuse the pleasure if such a choice is possible (there is no choice in rape) and if that person has gained the understanding that certain behavior is wrong.

I have endeavored to show that for you to think of yourself as evil or perverse is almost certainly no more than a tragic misunderstanding of what you suffered and an underestimation of how cunning the real offender was. Should you still be unconvinced, however, you still have all the hope in the world. Ultimately, it would not be the end of the road if survivors of regrettable sexual encounters were perverse. No one who wants it is beyond the transforming power of God.

The fact is that no matter what, through God you can be restored to holy purity and achieve enormous good. To discover how this is possible, see The Perfect Partner.

Infinitely Better Proof of Innocence

I have provided what I suppose to be the most powerful possible presentation of the truth that the presence of pleasure need not detract from a person’s innocence. For me to leave your sense of innocence dependent upon this flimsy approach to such a vital issue, however, would be grossly negligent of me.

To cling to the fact you were just a child or were forced, or whatever, is like shivering in the pouring rain, huddling under an old, leaky umbrella that threatens to rip to shreds in the next gust of wind, when you could immediately trade that umbrella for the warmth and luxury of a magnificent palace. That’s the magnitude of what is available to you.

“No one is perfect,” we glibly say. It is equally true that no one on this planet is innocent – outside of God. But the staggering truth is that no one has to remain outside of God. When God’s Son became the only truly innocent human and swapped places with us on the cross, taking upon himself the full punishment for every sin any human has ever committed, something of stupendous significance occurred. Through Jesus we can connect with the infinitely Holy God and instantly gain the innocence and moral perfection of God himself. Then we can truly look ourselves in the mirror and know that we are not merely no worse than most other respectable sinners, but we are totally innocent, crystal pure, outshining any virgin who is outside of Christ.

I beg you to explore this in depth because it is the most liberating, healing and life-transforming truth in the universe. To discover this empowering truth of eternal significance, please read A Life Transformed. (Part of a larger webpage called “Cure for Self-Hate” but deserves a much wider audience than that title suggests.)

Related Pages:

I Had My First Orgasm While Being Gang Raped!

When Being an Incest Victim Does Not Feel Real or Bad

“I had always thought it was my fault!” Why children mistakenly believe they “seduced” sex offenders

When Sexual Abuse Causes an Unhealthy Craving for Sex

For Personalized Support: E-mail Grantley Morris, healing@net-burst.com

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Not to be sold. © Copyright 2004, Grantley Morris. May be freely copied in whole or in part provided: it is not altered; this entire paragraph is included; readers are not charged; if used in a webpage, the new page is significantly different to this one. Many more compassionate, inspiring, sometimes hilarious writings available free online at www.net-burst.com  Freely you have received, freely give.