Sexual Abuse attitudes might be infohazardous

A similar phenomenon is at play in modern Western discussion around age-gap relationships.

Anyone admitting that they experienced one when they were young is almost inevitably told that they were abused, and made to feel that they were suppressing some deep-seated trauma over any and all protestations that they're fine, no really, it wasn't that big of a deal.

In fact, on Reddit and other places, I've seen people get downvoted if they persist in claims that they didn't experience any notable negative sequelae. The same people who did the downvoting are often the ones who claim to value "lived experience" above all else, but perish the thought that your lived experience should clash with social orthodoxy.

In India, we have within living memory people who got married off at the ripe young age of 12 to 14, and grew old and have grandkids with kids of their own. The vast majority of them are well-adjusted, at least compared to their age cohort, and many of the women (because they make ever larger fractions of the population pyramid as men die off faster) had husbands who were older than them by numbers that modern Westerners would immediately see as red flags.

A funny example would be Emmanuel Macron, who was 15 when he met his 40 year old teacher who he's still married to, for all that he's pushing up against the limits of what can be called "success", he's often pointed to as a poor victim who can't even perceive his own trauma. Really headscratching that.

I studied in a Christian school, and we were sex-segregated until we made it into college. I'm intimately familiar with hundreds of adolescent boys who spent their time lusting after their female teachers, who were the only woman they saw most of their days. If anyone of them had managed to sleep with one, he'd have been receiving high-fives until the day he died, for all the protestations that he was horribly abused.

And of course, that's just for boys, who can sometimes get away with admissions of that nature. If a girl were to have the same story..

Similarly, the bigger a deal parents make out of a child's injuries (voluntarily or not), the worse the perceived pain for a child:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24494782/

"Hierarchical multiple regression and path analyses indicated that parent posttraumatic stress reactions contributed significantly to the development and maintenance of child PTSS. Other risk factors for child PTSS included premorbid emotional and behavioral difficulties and larger burn size. Risk factors identified for parent PTSS included prior trauma history, acute distress, greater number of child invasive procedures, guilt, and child PTSS."

While in the context of burn injuries, it certainly lines up with more anecdotal evidence of toddlers injuring themselves, looking at their parents, and if seeing a great deal of concern, then bursting into tears. Encouraging pain seems to exacerbate pain.

Edit:

While on the topic of more unpopular/unacceptable opinions to air in Western society, parental reactions to miscarriage or infant mortality:

Till not very long ago at all, childhood mortality was considered a fact of life. People mostly treated the death of a child as bad, but not life-disrupting as so many people do today. A miscarriage is a cause for mourning and great outpourings of social concern for the bereaved couple, who in turn display great stress and trauma from the event. This is not to minimize their pain, it very much is real, but the sheer magnitude of it is far larger than it ever was (or even is, Indian women typically don't react that way to a miscarriage, I've handled plenty, and the ones who do are almost guaranteed to be the ones exposed to Western takes on the matter.)

Of course, the death of a child is considerably more surprising than it once was, we can quite easily expect a child born healthy today to have a ~99% chance of making it to adulthood, versus ~50% at the turn of the century. But people genuinely used to accept that they might lose half their kids before they made it out of childhood, and hedged accordingly by having massively higher birth rates. They couldn't afford to shutdown and go into shock at the loss of one, and thus generally didn't do so as a matter of course nor were they expected to.

I could accept the shock easier when it happens to a once healthy child, whereas early miscarriages haven't had the same effect.

Trends in Self-reported Spontaneous Abortions: 1970–2000

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3787708/

"Little is known about how the miscarriage rate has changed over the past few decades in the United States. Data from Cycles IV to VI of the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) were used to examine trends from 1970 to 2000. After accounting for abortion availability and the characteristics of pregnant women, the rate of reported miscarriages increased by about 1.0% per year. This upward trend is strongest in the first seven weeks and absent after 12 weeks of pregnancy. African American and Hispanic women report lower rates of early miscarriage than do whites. The probability of reporting a miscarriage rises by about 5% per year of completed schooling. The upward trend, especially in early miscarriages, suggests awareness of pregnancy rather than prenatal care to be a key factor in explaining the evolution of self-reported miscarriages. Any beneficial effects of prenatal care on early miscarriage are obscured by this factor."

Even with the relative paucity of data, I would support the conclusion that this is likely due to increased maternal age more than anything else. Which is why it's all the more perplexing that miscarriages are considered to be among the most traumatic possible events in a couple's life, in what is likely a self-fulfilling prophecy.

How do we communicate that sexual abuse is really not ok, without making victims of it feel like it's worse than it actually is?

I'd distinguish between the seriousness of the crime from the suffering of the victim. I think that this distinction is common sense. I agree with you that they are sometimes conflated. It seems like you could communicate this with a message structured somewhat as follows:

"C is a serious crime. Victims of C may suffer X, Y, and Z as a result. Not all victims of C experience these consequences, and it is important to let the victim of C decide how it affected them."

This may be trivializing your experiences as well, but I think an important consideration here is that you're a man. Many of the circumstances others in this thread are citing also involve male victims.

Men tend not to react to sexual abuse the same way that women do, and there's no reason to expect that they would. Some of the reasons people aggressively protest that fact or attempt to have anecdotal evidence of it dismissed are:

• They, male or female, genuinely would be distraught if that had happened to them, and project that strong preference onto others.
• They feel it's necessary to downplay men's tolerance of sexual abuse as part of a general policy that says to downplay sex differences.
• They feel acknowledging those differences in this specific case will reduce the ability of men who actually feel sexually violated to seek help.

It's a bad idea to assume that, because a lot of men seem to be OK after being assaulted, or because a lot of people seem to engage in motivating reasoning about men being "secretly traumatized", that means there are lots of women in the same situation.

I obviously disagree with the logic that says we shouldn't talk about this, partly because it causes people like OP to become confused about their personal experiences and wonder why they're not feeling something they think they are supposed to.

You say

From a purely objective perspective, non-violent rape doesn't seem quite as bad as society makes it out to be.

I say we should stop playing this meta-game of attempting to assert or influence public perception of the "proper" emotional impact of events, and just take people at their word about how they feel. Subjective preferences are just that. If someone says that they were raped and that they don't feel very shaken up about it, I will generally assume they're telling the truth. If someone says that they were raped and that it was the worst thing that ever happened to them, I will also assume they're telling the truth. I generally don't have some comprehensive model of human psychology I can trust to deduce people's basic instincts about things like aversion to sexual violation, in lieu of honest statements from that person.

I'm aware that taking people at their word about their pains more often means you're a little more vulnerable to being manipulated for sympathy points. Personally, I'm ok with this. It seems like an acceptable tradeoff before we invent empathy links.

I've long suspected that things like this are almost entirely made traumatic by society's socially constructed ideas about them, but it's very taboo to talk about - it's a very dangerous opinion to have - and I've almost never told people I think this. Thanks for saying it for me.

I had sexual trauma as a child that didn't even involve any actual sexual event. Rather, I had and wrote down a quasi-sexual fantasy about a playmate from the playground (I was 8) and my mom found it and confronted me about it, thinking that I had been molested or something because why else would "a child!!" be thinking of such things. I felt disgusting afterward, for years, like I must be evil for thinking this way about another kid, and throughout my teenage years I would occasionally have almost panic attack like ptsd feelings when I would think about sexuality in certain contexts that reminded me of that experience.

So it seems to me that the trauma comes from believing that you have been violated, because authority figures or parents or society tell you that you have - not from being violated, itself. And what constitutes a violation is to some extent socially constructed. Sometimes, because of this, as in my case, you can feel violated when nothing has even happened to you.

This fits what I've seen from talking to women who have experienced rape/sexual abuse. 

In one case, the abuse happened as a kid and she didn't feel traumatized for many years until she heard people talking about such things as if they're supposed to be traumatic and it was helpful to her to have someone give her permission to disregard those pressures as ill informed and stupid.

In another case, the woman was much older and somewhat traumatized by the experience, but talking to her friend about it just made her feel more traumatized because he emphasized how bad the situation was even more than she did. There was actually a considerable amount of humor in that particular case, and being invited to see it and recognize that she's actually totally fine and doesn't have to freak out about it anymore was helpful.

With respect to the question of "How do we communicate that sexual abuse is really not ok, without making victims of it feel like it's worse than it actually is?", it depends where the harm is. Hypothetically, if the only harm is in the psychological trauma, and the act isn't actually psychologically traumatic in itself, then you bite that bullet and say that nothing bad happened and no one did anything that wrong. Or perhaps you treat it like drunk driving, to the extent that you believe the lack of trauma was not predictable.

However, the premise that the harm resides solely in the psychological trauma is false. Trauma serves an important function, and aiming away from experiencing trauma at all costs can be dangerous.

Imagine one day you go driving after a first rain, fail to account for the added dangers of water on the road, and as a result nearly drive off a cliff. No harm happened, and if you're sufficiently unintelligent or unobservant -- or afraid to experience fear -- you might not recognize what's scary about this and end up non-traumatized. Given the situation though, that lack of trauma doesn't mean you're "psychologically healthy" or well adjusted; it means the opposite. It means that you didn't notice the problem, and so next time it rains you're going to drive again like the roads are dry, putting yourself at further unnecessary risk. If instead you were a little more traumatized, you might be appropriately scared of driving fast on wet roads -- at least, until you learn the new limits.

You want psychological trauma to match objective threats and your ability to handle them. It's possible to be overtraumatized, or to fail to recover from trauma through more specific learning, but trauma has it's legitimate place. In the second example where the woman talked to her friend and ended up more traumatized, I don't know that the friend was wrong to do so -- certainly the two of them as a system decided that the situation was more dangerous than she had been giving credit for, and maybe it was. She got out of that one fine, but the next one she might not have and she did some dumb things to get there.

There is a more fundamental and more squishy issue here too.

In the first example I gave, society's local reaction was clearly maladaptive and just harmed the kid while giving her nothing actionable to do to either reduce risk or to get out of the trauma. I'll even hazard a guess that the initial experience wasn't particularly harmful to her in this specific case, but the squickiness I feel when thinking about those things doesn't stem from "I think it's likely to be traumatic for the kids" and the reason I think she got away from it unharmed is because such things are so frowned upon by society that it was kept from growing to a scale that likely would have been harmful to her -- even if nontraumatic. 

This stuff is all much harder to figure out so I can't point to concrete damages and justify them well, but "this stuff is all much harder to figure out" is kinda the point; no one really knows what the effects are or what the damages are, so no one really knows what's safe and what's harmful and how. "How do our early experiences (sexual and otherwise) determine who we grow up to be, and what do we want to grow up to be?" is a big messy question, and "Well, the kid didn't feel harmed" isn't very strong evidence that they weren't harmed (even if it is strong evidence that they aren't traumatized, and that you shouldn't be pushing unaimed trauma willy nilly). To give a stupid example to illustrate the type of non-obvious things that can happen, if a kid were to hypothetically "play doctor" and pick up a medical instrument fetish from it, the kid doesn't have to be traumatized and the fetish doesn't have to be morally wrong for it to negatively impact their life when their partner pool is narrowed to "People who also have medical fetishes". "What kind of people we become, and how" is just a bigger question than we know how to navigate deliberately as kids or as adults or as a society. We have a sense that certain things are not okay, and it's not entirely clear where they came from because our justifications break down here, but that doesn't mean there's no informational value there (or that it's correct at face value either).

So as the bottom line, returning to the question of "How do we communicate that sexual abuse is really not ok, without making victims of it feel like it's worse than it actually is?", it is a specific instance of the question of how to relate to people in general, and the same principles apply. We want to orient empathically both to the experience of the person we're talking to and also everything else we have that bears on the reality of what happened, and then see what happens when we integrate all of the things.

Sometimes this will simplify when it turns out that the kind of "sexual abuse" wasn't actually abusive in the context in question, and that society is wrong. Or not as harmful as it's made out to be.

Sometimes this will simplify when the causes of harm are nice and clear, and we can lead people to recognize these dangers and how to avoid them -- no (permanent or debilitating) trauma needed. Maybe that means soberly showing them that while they got away with it this time, there's this other risk. Or maybe it means recognizing that they actually have learned their lesson, and showing them that it's okay to laugh and to move on.

In the specific instances where it resolves to neither of these, and you're stuck with the apparent paradox of "Yes, that was actually very bad in my best estimate" and "I can't point to a particular harm to avoid", then until we can figure out more about where that sense is coming from and what the lurking danger is (which is a potential option to pursue), we're kinda stuck acknowledging our uncertainty. Instead of "This is super bad including in your specific case!!!" or "Don't worry, nothing at all is wrong with what happened", just stick to what is known to be true. I can't be too concrete as it will depend both on the specific situation and also what you know about it, but "There was likely nothing harmful in this case, but that's a slippery slope that most likely leads to really bad things, even if it's hard to explain exactly what those are" is one potential resolution of the apparent paradox.

Too late to the debate, but I would suggest splitting this into multiple questions:

• Is it true of human suffering in general that if you tell people "this was a horrible thing that happened to you", they will subjectively suffer more than if you tell them "shut up, that was nothing"?
• Assuming that the answer to the previous question is a clear yes, how should we organize our society to minimize human suffering?

Note that these two questions can be explored apart from sexuality. The question whether sexual abuse is different from abuse in general, could then be treated separately.

The reason I would like to have the debate about suffering in general first, is that many arguments made about sexual abuse actually are generalizable to all kinds of abuse -- so it feels like motivated reasoning to only make those arguments with regards to sexual abuse.

I mean, the point of signaling that you suffer is to elicit compassion; and the signal is more credible if you actually suffer. If you were 100% sure you would never get any compassion, no matter what, there would be no need to signal suffering, so perhaps there would be less suffering. Maybe engineering our society to eradicate compassion would lead to less human suffering! ...see, I just made the entire argument without mentioning sex at all. If it perhaps did not convince you in its general form, why does it sound more convincing if I make the same argument specifically about sexual abuse?

Sounds similar to what this book claimed about some mental illnesses being memetic in certain ways: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-crazy-like-us

Imagine a society where people considered "being exposed to the color orange" inherently very traumatic (inspired by this comment [LW(p) · GW(p)]). 

My bet is that people in that society would be a lot less traumatized if they encountered an orange bird in the forest vs. if someone forcibly takes them inside a secluded room and puts a sheet of orange wallpaper in front of them. 

The fact that some commenters don't seem to "see" this difference is IMO what's triggering about some people's attitudes to sexual abuse, etc. 

This rhymes with my experiences and thoughts. To say it another (slightly more general) way, it's often the reactions of adults that are traumatizing well beyond anything else that happens to children (and other adults). It isn't always the case that measured response produces a trauma-free experience, and some events tend to leave terrible scars. But where I see people bringing their own feelings into someone else's situation is also where I see far more of lasting psychological trauma.

Driving Under the Influence can have a similar kind of pattern where ti can be painted as a surefired way to mess up things. Then if somebody is a bit drunk while operating a vechicle and doesn't hit anybody that might lead to a "update" that its no at disastrous as advertised. It is not so that DUIng leads somebody to die but that there is a RISK of somebody dying. And this risk is sufficiently high that its not okay to gamble on it.

Being sexually manhandled likewise carriers the risk of things going wrong. Its not like shooting somebody is okay if you happen to miss any vital organs.

The fantasy that maybe a dark experience heals or goes away if it is not talked about or processed can lead to inaction where action is needed. It doesn't remove the fact that action is not always needed. Maybe you can indeed skip going to the hospital if the bullet only gave a flesh wound. And it can be hard to ascertain who is actually fine and who only thinks so (certain black knight comes to mind). So the default on erring on the side of having some people treated/processed that did not need it rather than not processing some people that needed it seems right.

Even for those that do need or benefit from being socially processed as rape victims it would be great if those burdens of having that status was lessened. The direction of it being easy so there is no threshold to speak up is probably a better direction rather than making less people speak up so that the amount of people that go throught the drama can be driven down.

It seems to me that the psychological state on burning the letter waas not being chalant about what happened. There might been a cost-benefit analysis about having little to gain and lots to lose for having that event be aired. What was the negative side for the parents knowing about the incident?

One of the reasons abusers of kids/teens aren't fully prosecuted is because parents of victims rightly predict that everyone knowing you were raped by the babysitter or whatever will generate additional psych baggage and selfishly refrain from protecting other children from the same predator.

A related point that probably bears making/repeating:

Part of the justification for statutory rape laws is that some people are in a position in which they have so much power over someone that any request from them could be inherently coercive. Some specific examples in which statutory rape may apply even when the victim is a mentally competent adult:

• Prison guards and prison inmates
• Military officers and lower ranking soldiers
• High school teachers and 18 year old students

A post making a related point: https://knowingless.com/2017/10/18/me-too-on-sexual-assault/

I am no expert in law, but to some extent we treat rape and killing someone similar. I don't know if the way I think is just fucked up or it is really this way, but breaking someone's leg and rape are probably more comparable to each other than rape and murder. So I would like to add that in my opinion even the legal code is punishing rape pretty harsh more comparable to murder than comparable to breaking someone's leg.

Tagged this post with "self-fulfilling prophecies"

Not only do people very often feel it wasn't that bad, not infrequently they remember it as a positive thing if it was mutually willing. I read a paper last year, titled "The Impact of Online Grooming and Sexual Abuse" IIRC, reporting a qualitative study based on interviews with eight British youths (six girls and two boys) to whom the researchers had been referred by police. Not one of them had a bad thing to say about what they'd experienced during the relationship, and at least one (a girl) remained resentful toward police for having interfered. Every single item the authors enumerated as a "negative impact of abuse" was plainly a consequence of negative social reactions to the relationship -- e.g., bullying by schoolmates or embarrassment that the parents found out -- rather than a consequence of the relationship itself. One of the most telling things was that, in the authors' words, "the harms of online abuse are not less than those of offline abuse," a backasswards way of saying that no greater harm was associated with actual sexual contact than with merely sharing words or pictures. This sort of inelasticity of sequelae in relation to their purported cause is typically a telltale sign of harms caused by stigma rather than by the thing stigmatized.

1. If someone had raped you, you'd know the difference between what you're describing, and rape. I don't think you're ok while feeling that the two are comparable in any way (in other words, I think you'd benefit from being one of those people who believe it's expected not to be ok) - my prediction is that normal people would be able to instantly see the vast difference between your experience and rape.
2. Just because you are fine after sexual abuse, doesn't mean everyone is, and those who aren't, benefit from being told it's normal to have psychological problems from that (but that those problems can be improved and/or removed).