Why Do We Avoid Calling Child Sexual Abuse Rape?
(No images accompany this piece. In a discussion about whether child abuse should be named as rape, any picture of a child risks being read as sexualized, so none were used.)
I started turning over the language we use around child sexual abuse and noticed something: we almost never call it childhood rape. Think about what is actually happening. A man has anal sex with a boy. A man works a girl's genitals until she reaches orgasm. A woman starts intercourse with a boy or a teenage male. A woman has a girl touch genitals, either the woman's or the girl's, to produce her own arousal or climax. Strip away the softer vocabulary and each of these is rape.
Consider the FBI's revised wording. Its current summary definition reads: penetration, however slight, of the vagina or anus by any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ, carried out without the victim's consent. That covers a lot. But it leaves a question hanging about rape committed by proxy.
For this conversation, I'll define rape as the use of an innocent victim to reach orgasm or a high state of sexual arousal. When a child's sexual feelings are stirred, or the child is brought to orgasm, the law already holds that a child cannot consent. What makes it worse is the secrecy. The behavior is hidden to escape detection, and the hiding plants a guilt in the child or adolescent that was never theirs to carry. That misplaced guilt is a big part of why so many victims say nothing for years. And there's a further layer: does the child even grasp what is being done, or understand that none of the responsibility belongs to them?
Child pornography fits this idea of rape by proxy too. The offender masturbates to orgasm using what amounts to an unwilling participant. Refusing to name it rape makes it sound like something smaller than it is. An adult reaches climax by means of a child who did not agree to any of it. And then there is the question of how the children are handled while the pictures are being made. Tell a child the filming is a game, and the game ends the day that child finally understands what the footage was for.