It is evident from a thread on the topic in Reddit that many– if not most people (I couldn’t find a single exception in the thread)– don’t like making distinctions among different types or levels of abuse. In fact, one poster commented that any kind of sexual abuse is always at least the same as rape. I have not checked back lately: surely some contributors will make that distinction.
We don’t regard a slap in the face the same way as a stabbing. We don’t think of shoplifting the same as armed-robbery. Why do we regard inappropriate touching as the same as rape?
In the case of the Duggars, a son, Josh, confessed to his parents that he had touched four of his sisters and one other girl inappropriately, while they were sleeping, some time in 2006, when he was 13. (Some sources say 14 0r 15, but the Duggars themselves say he told them about it just before his 14th birthday.) None of the sisters have any recollection of these incidents. They were unharmed.
The idea that they were harmed in some way that they don’t even know about is beyond contemptible. It is a stupid idea. It is dime-store psychology, or worse.
The family tried to handle the incident without unnecessarily destroying individuals or the family. At least they did at first. They prayed about it. But then they sought counseling which was probably a mistake: the event was trivial. They reported it to the police, which was a huge mistake. It was very, very trivial. It did not call for fake therapy, which is what counselling is. But they did right themselves and Josh went on to get married and have three children of his own. The sisters went on with their lives as if it had never happened.
What a terrible outcome. At least, that’s what you might think given the outpouring of outrage directed at the Duggars and TLC.
TLC had to cancel the program. Why? What exactly was the outrage about? That the Duggars didn’t have their son arrested? At 13 years old? That he was allowed to apologize and be reconciled with the rest of the family? That the sisters were not sent out for extensive therapy in order –really– to convince them that they really were quite traumatized even if they didn’t think they were?
That’s what it has come down to: the very, very bad sisters did not cooperate with this debased culture of outrage. They must be trained to have PTSD.
And here’s the thing: the sisters made it clear that they have no outstanding issues with Josh. Whatever was done was handled within the family to everyone’s satisfaction.
It was “In Touch Weekly”, an ironically-named online gossip magazine, that acquired copies of the police investigation and publicized the incident without the consent of the family or the victims .
Think about that: think about the hue and the cry of outrage on behalf of the victims without the slightest concern for the fact that an obscenely trashy on-line for-profit magazine published the story without their consent while inviting you to feel outrage at Josh on behalf of the “victims”!
Is it possible that the girls still loved their brother and their family and forgave him for the mistakes he made when he was 13, and for which he clearly apologized? And that they would prefer to embrace their own family in love instead of sending him off to prison, and possibly tearing the family apart, forever? That they believed no harm had been done because they hadn’t even been aware of the incidents until “In Touch Weekly” decided they, and everyone else in the world, just had to know?
The incidents never mattered, period.
So how do we get to be all righteous and indignant and outraged and hell-bent for retribution if the victims themselves don’t cooperate? We accuse them of being brainwashed, that’s what we do (which is what some contributors on Reddit did). And if they don’t know better, then they need to be forcibly, lovingly, compassionately, enlightened, and taught to be outraged and vindictive and depressed, and to need years and years of therapy, and to only sense “closure” when they are sure that Josh has been humiliated and destroyed, to the satisfaction of the readers of a gossip magazine.
I was stunned by the intensity of antipathy for Josh Duggar, who, remember, was 13 at the time, and the entire family. And the double-speak: “I’m not trying to tell them what they should feel. I just think it should be acknowledged that they are not feeling the right things.” And how dare they— how dare they! — express anger about the entire affair being exposed by “In Touch Weekly”, squeezed in somewhere between their stories about the Kardashians and Donald Trump’s ex-wives.
There’s a lesson about human nature here, and it’s not a pretty one. We are a lot of psychotic people. We want to see humiliation and punishment and the destruction of lives because it makes us feel good. It lets us take pleasure in emotional savagery by linking it to righteous indignation at the biggest taboo in our society. Some people will regard us as psychotic or worse if we just seem to destroy people for the fun of it, so we wait for an excuse. Ah ha! He molested his sisters! Now we can freely indulge. Now we don’t have to have one ounce of compassion or sorrow or regret for the lives we destroy in the process of shouting our righteousness’s to the stars.
This is evil and the people who joined in this puritanical jihad are monsters. It is genuinely, unmistakably, irredeemably evil. I don’t use the word lightly: what these vile people did to the Duggars was evil. I won’t even accept “good intentions”. Bullshit. It was evil.
[whohit]The Duggars[/whohit]