Be Careful Around Those With A History Of Sexual Abuse
To be clear from the start: I am writing about the abuser here, not the victim. When someone has offended, the odds that they will do it again run very high, and they have usually offended before the time they were finally caught. Offenses also tend to grow worse as the years pass, because it takes a bigger and bigger charge for that person to feel the same thrill. Some people still shield offenders and speak up for them, convinced they deserve another chance and wanting to believe the person has changed.
Keeping possible victims safe demands constant attention. If you know about an offender, you and any other responsible adult who also knows should try to stay close to that person and make sure they are never left alone with a child who could be harmed. The uncomfortable part of doing this well is that you have to imagine how an offender thinks.
Abuse usually grows out of a near full-time preoccupation: finding ways to reach potential victims and gathering whatever information makes that access easier. No offender ever announces the plan. Nobody walks up to a parent and says, go ahead to the grocery store, I will look after your child, and while you are gone I will have the child undress and play a fun little game that gives me sexual pleasure. The deception is the whole point.
Do I expect you to take my word on this? Yes. I have sat with many people who were abused as children, often working through play therapy and through the drawings they make. One rule I hold to is never planting an idea in a child's mind that was not already there, and never adding more trauma on top of what happened. A frightened child often carries a sense of guilt, and that fear and guilt are exactly what the abuser relies on to keep the child silent with everyone.
Children find all sorts of ways to cope once abuse has happened. Some stop trusting their own feelings or their gut sense of things. Others push most of it out of awareness because it is simply too much to hold. The memories rarely vanish, though. The unconscious tends to keep them, along with the feelings attached, tucked away somewhere. Think of a splinter. Leave it in and it aches a little; pull it out and the pain can spike for a moment. After that, the pain can finally fade.
What can follow abuse includes confusion about sexual identity, a libido that drops off or disappears, and a feeling of being less than everyone else that never quite lifts. So do not sit back and wait for somebody else to step in. That waiting is precisely what the abuser is counting on.