I have been meaning to write this post for a long while now. I know I don’t post so much here any longer. A lot is trying not to bore people, trying not to sound like I am whining all the time and some is just trying to stay afloat in my own mind.

I was in a class a few weeks ago, we were studying sex offenders. I was a little anxious when the class began, I didn’t know what to expect and worried the class might trigger me. It maybe did in a way, but perhaps a good way. We studied people who sexually abuse children as part of this class. I am not going to call them paedophiles. I feel that is like saying that is all they are, but I am not defending them either. The act they commit is wrong.

We were learning about why. Why do they do this? Because when people here about it, the first thing they think is that sick bastard. Should be shot. Should be hung etc.

Why is probably one of the hardest questions I have. Why me? What was it that caused it? Why not my brother? So many whys that plague me for so many years and the answer came in this class. It is hard to explain, but I will try.

Many people who sexually offend against children lack social skills. I don’t mean that they can’t be social, or can’t talk, but something about them is different. They lack that thing that connects them to another. So their relationships feel empty. Usually this comes from things in their own childhoods. Not abuse, but maybe an overly strict parent, maybe a parent who didn’t hug them. Something that meant they didn’t quite learn how to connect with others. So they feel different.

My father’s parents weren’t abusive, but his mother was a gambler and his father worked a lot to pay for that habit, this meant that my father didn’t have much parental time, which meant that these skills never developed in him.

So he met my mother, and what he got was someone who was domineering, didn’t listen to him, wasn’t the same as him. People like my father have problems with peers. They just can’t fit in with them. Then this child comes along. Not just any child, but one that the adult can connect with, intimately and when I use that word, I don’t mean sex. I mean like a close friend. That’s what the child becomes. And this was where my why is. My father likes to read. He likes science. He is intelligent, but he had these parts missing and then I came along. Someone who is so similar to him in mind. Quiet, a reader, someone who likes to think. I was reading by the time I was five, suddenly my father has this connection with a human that he has never had before. Someone he can talk to, but also because this someone was a child, there was no fear of rejection, he was at the top and I was at the bottom in the hierarchy. So he had control. And this is generally what it is. So how does it get from having a friend to sex? I guess this is the part where it gets screwed up. Where the adult wants to get closer and closer to the child and they do, the child becomes like a relationship partner and sex is generally a part of that. Suddenly the child is no longer a child, not in the eyes of this adult at least.

I realised in this class that it wouldn’t have mattered if I was the first born, or his tenth child, he’d have picked me every single time, because it was something about me, but not something that was bad. It was because I was the one he connected with the most, because I was the one who was most like him.

In some sick twisted sense, it feels like a compliment.

I am not saying what he did was right, but this, if you can understand what I am saying, it is the answer to that question. Why?