Content warning: this essay discusses child sexual abuse and trauma.
The Florida Senate has unanimously advanced a bill that would institute the death penalty for sex crimes perpetrated on children under age 12.
I am the survivor of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of a pedophile.
I have written about my experience at great length in this essay about the absolute imperative we all have to resist the normalization of pedophilia, as well as given my advice to parents on how to help their kids not be as vulnerable to a pedophile as I was.
On balance, I think this bill is probably a bad idea. In this essay, I’m going to make my case.
First, a few things I am NOT saying.
I am not saying that my experience gives me special moral authority to speak on this.
I am not saying that my arguments are air-tight.
I am not saying that other survivors will necessarily agree with me.
I am not saying that the things I am concerned about will absolutely come to pass if the bill becomes a law.
However, I do believe that my experience of being victimized by a perpetrator of this evil gives me insight into potential unintended consequences that some may not be considering.
Thus, I am saying one thing, and one thing only: that there are very serious potential unintended consequences that should be considered here.
Unintended Consequences: Incentives, Weapons
Dead children don’t testify.
This law makes the penalties for child sexual abuse and murder the same, and thus removes all incentives for pedophiles to leave their victims alive.
The cases of violent monsters, the sort of bastards about whom old-school Law & Order: SVU episodes were written during the Elliot Stabler days, have obvious relevance here, but this problem is potentially much more wide-ranging than you might think.
Most pedophiles prey on children by grooming and emotional manipulation, not brutal violence. They want complicit and cooperative victims, children who they can abuse over and over, not victims who will be left physically broken after a one-and-done incident of violent rape. Once a child is either old enough to be beyond the pedo’s interest or old enough that the child telling on the pedo is a real risk, it is easy to count on the shame and self-blame of the emotional rape to keep the child quiet.
This law would entirely change the calculus. Once a child telling on a pedo becomes a risk, the potential consequences of leaving the child alive to tell or killing the child are the same.
The younger the child, the easier it is to cause an “accident.” The younger the child, the more credible a “kidnapping” is, along with a smaller body to bury.
Consider this scenario, which is based on how a friend of mine was violated as a child:
You have to get on a plane because your mother has taken a bad fall and needs sudden surgery. This happens the day after your spouse leaves for a three-week business trip. He or she will get home as quickly as possible, given the emergency, but it will take a couple of days.
You have a 4-year-old daughter.
You almost take your 4-year-old with you, but she has school picture day at kindergarten, a friend’s birthday party, and the dress rehearsal for her ballet recital all coming up this week. You decide the least disruptive path for your child is to have your sister come take care of her.
Your sister. Your best friend, who you would trust with your child’s life. She adores her niece, and your daughter is comfortable and confident in her care. Your sister, who is a wonderful person but has, as so many sisters do, terrible taste in boyfriends.
Unbeknownst to you, your sister just moves the plans to your house, and has the new boyfriend over on the night before school picture day. Your daughter loves the dress she plans to wear for it and insists on modeling it for her aunt and the new guy. One accidental spill later–your sister is so good with her niece but hasn’t been around little kids enough to know that this was bound to happen–and suddenly your sister leaves her boyfriend alone with your child while she goes to Target to get as close as possible to replacing the now-stained dress.
This piece of filth is supposed to be helping your daughter get ready for bed. While helping her change, he touches her inappropriately. Upon seeing the look of horror and anger on your child’s face, he shakes her and promises to hurt her auntie if she ever dares to tell.
Your daughter glares right back at him and says, “I won’t tell auntie but you just wait until my mommy and daddy come back. I’ll tell them and you’ll be sorry!”
Ask yourself: what incentive does this jerk have not to drown her in the bathtub? Claim she had another spill, needed a bath, and gosh, he only stepped away for a minute?
The clock is ticking.
He has to decide what risk to take.
The risks of the kid telling on him or killing the kid are now exactly the same.
Trauma Reactions Are Very Complex And Difficult to Work Through
Our society recognizes that violence within a family, including sexual violence, is incredibly difficult even for adults to navigate. Mandatory arrest laws were created in part because it is often too difficult for adult women to choose to press charges against a man who has just blackened her eyes or broken her nose.
We advise our children to tell us when a grown-up is doing something bad to them. What happens to a child's mind when she knows that telling will mean someone is going to kill her stepfather, grandfather, teacher, or coach? Will she tell? What will she have to live with if she does?
Do we think this will result in more children coming forward, or fewer?
I know that this may be hard for people who are blessedly free from experience with this crime to understand, but it isn’t always–or even very often–the case that children manage to instantly direct the blame where it belongs and, without any outside help, that very moment, completely stop loving the offender. Adults often need the help of a therapist to gain the freedom to let themselves feel the needed and necessary anger at the pedophile. Sometimes adults need help to properly direct the anger away from themselves and to the responsible party–even to a degree sufficient to voice these feelings aloud. Children who fall victim to a pedophile almost always blame themselves, for a long time and until they get help.
Pedophiles often maintain their hold over a child by meeting emotional needs that the child is not having met by their parents. The mass susceptibility of so many children to the manipulations of pedophiles is a consequence of the fatherlessness crisis. A child who is desperate for male attention and approval is a sitting duck for a pedophile, who often elicits the child’s cooperation by providing what feels like love and positive attention.
I know that we are in an era now where we loudly announce that children “know who they are” and we must “follow their lead,” allowing them to make all manner of choices at early ages, but the simple fact is that children are extremely malleable and easy to manipulate.
An adult with evil motives can convince a young child of anything.
Pedophiles often maintain their hold less by “if you tell anyone I’ll kill you” type threats than by giving the child incentives to stay cooperative: positive attention, gifts, treats, affection, and other types of ongoing grooming.
This is especially true when the pedophile is a parent, grandparent, uncle, or other family member for whom the child naturally has a pre-existing level of love, affection, and attachment.
This law would result in children being put in a position where their speaking up can be the reason why people that they love lose an important figure. It puts them in a position where their choice is to remain silent about being preyed upon or become the reason that their father, stepfather, uncle, or grandpa – their mother or father’s father, their beloved grandma’s husband – is killed by the state.
Surely this warrants at least some consideration.
Do we really want 6-year-olds to be told, “If you tell anyone what we do when I’m babysitting you, they’ll stick a big needle in my arm and put me to sleep just like a dog and it’ll be all your fault” and have it be the truth? For these monsters to have news clips they can pull up and prove to the child that they’re telling the truth? Do we want to cause the subsequent credibility boost the pedo will enjoy in the mind of their victim?
Really think about this: one of the most common situations of child sexual abuse is that of a stepfather perpetrating against his stepdaughter.
It is hard enough for a little girl to come forward and tell on a stepfather.
Asking her to come forward when that means she will be the direct cause of her younger siblings’ father being executed is a pretty good way to ensure she never comes forward. Eldest children who remain silent often do so to protect their mother and younger siblings. My email box is full of stories from women (and even a few men) who said nothing through years of nighttime rape visits from a stepfather because their mother loved him, he provided for the family, and they were certain he wasn’t abusing his own biological children. Adding the weight of “the man my mother and siblings love most will be dead if I speak up” is, at the very least, an unintended consequence worth considering here.
Would You Be The Reason Your Mother Becomes A Widow?
Now let us consider the consequences for others who may report a pedophile.
What if he’s your elderly father, whose pension income will die with him and leave your mother destitute?
What if the pedophile is the father of two of your three children, the breadwinner and the source of the health insurance? Are you really going to turn him in and be the reason your children plunge immediately to poverty and their father is executed? Might you not be tempted to just divorce him and keep the kids away?
What if he’s your pastor? Are you going to initiate the process that causes your pastor, the person who everyone in your community loves and counts on, to be put to death?
My point with all these “what ifs” is that this law will likely reduce reporting from friends and family. Why? Few adults have the moral and psychological fortitude to be in any way responsible for the death of another adult, especially a family member who may be a provider or an important figure to other people they care about.
What Should Be Done?
Life without possibility of parole is a fitting punishment for these crimes. And no, I’m not suggesting that because I believe that repeated rape in prison–which is the urban legend of what happens to pedos in prison, though I don’t know if it’s true or not–will make them sorry for their crimes.
I don’t think anything makes child abusers truly regret their actions, because there is no world in which adults can ever experience the equivalent crime. A pedophile father, stepfather, uncle, or grandfather who is raped in prison is not experiencing what his victim experienced, because his random prison rapist is not someone whose love, approval, and affection is a deep and genuine need.
When a child is violated by an adult they know and trust, the crime is not just the physical act, so parallel acts do not–indeed, they can not–transfer the same meaning.
Life without parole is appropriate. As a consequence of what happened to me, I am serving a life sentence with only a possibility of eventual parole–a possibility based on the hope that the brutally difficult work I am doing to try to understand and repair my own damage becomes more successful over time, that my therapist doesn’t retire or die before he works himself out of a job by helping me get to the point where I don’t need him anymore, and that I continue to find ways to grow and change in positive ways, which is a hard job in and of itself.
I am not claiming that I have all the answers.
I certainly don’t have the slightest interest in more pedophiles continuing to take up space. If I could press a button and cause everyone who’s violated a child to suddenly have a fatal heart attack, I just might sprain my ankles with the force of my jumping onto that button with both feet.
But changing the laws around child sexual abuse in this manner is much more complicated than people who’ve never faced this issue may realize. Increasing the penalties is the correct impulse, but I don’t think this is the way to do it.
Past, current and future victims deserve to have the enormous complexity and the unintended consequences of this law considered, at the very least, as this goes forward.
Housekeeping: paid subscribers can usually leave comments—almost always. I’ve closed them on this one because writing this was hard on me and I don’t have the emotional bank account to deal with comments at present. Thank you for understanding.
About My Substack: I’m a junior data scientist (two years experience and presently job-hunting if you’re hiring). My great love is mathematics, but I also enjoy writing. My posts are mostly cultural takes from a broadly anti-Woke perspective—yes, I’m one of those annoying classical liberals who would’ve been considered on the left until ten seconds ago. Lately I’ve regained a childhood love of reading and started publishing book reviews. My paid subscribers get my creative writing series, which are generally personal stories but also include excerpts from a novel-in-progress. I have a special interest in the dangers of the modern college campus, helping parents who want to homeschool but are scared they can’t handle the math, and the transgender insanity currently sweeping the West. My most important essays are this one, about the imperative to resist the normalization of pedophilia; this one, advising parents on how to protect their kids from pedophiles; and this one, about how to resist the demon of self-termination. I used to be poor, so this Substack has a standing policy: if you want a paid subscription but cannot afford one, email me at hollymathnerd at gmail dot com and I’ll give you a freebie.