Nobody’s telling you what to think, but I wanted to share the biblical viewpoint, in contrast to the common American viewpoint, on child sexual abuse.
It is a sin — but not for the reasons most Americans assume. It’s a sin for the same reason the vast majority of human sexual activity is a sin. The Bible promotes sexual intimacy for one case only: husband and wife committed for life. There are a few exceptions and they are well established. The point is that God’s ideal is very clear, and anything less risks pulling away from shalom.
As a secondary issue, it is not healthy for children to engage in sexual activity. This is not as critical, but it’s a sin against the child. I do not hold with the harsh doctrinal assumption common in psychology that children cannot recover from sexual abuse. They can, and often do, but nobody wants to talk about how that works. They fear it will somehow serve to justify child molestation, and that’s just not true. If you defend the biblical standard for sex in the first place, you have child molestation well covered. It’s an attack on shalom.
The issue of what constitutes a “child” in biblical terms is not so easily nailed down, and it’s definitely not the same as it is for the US. There is no such thing as “age of consent” in the Bible. There is only arranged marriage, and it was a matter of community consensus when the male or female was ready.
We do know that men seldom got married before 30 for purely economic reasons. The wealthy could afford to marry younger, and frequently did. Females were seldom less than 10 years younger than their husbands, and it was common to have up to 20 years difference. The whole focus of life was different in the Bible, and it’s not just a matter of context. It’s based in part on fundamental assumptions about human nature after the Fall. We won’t expand on that here.
The point is that the Bible doesn’t look at the issue of adult sexual desires for children the same way Americans do. Americans tend to have this frantic obsession with how awful it is, whereas the Bible considers it pretty typical of fallen people to want things that threaten shalom. It’s not some deep taboo or violation of anything sacred. Nothing in the Bible promotes the American idolatry of youth, as if childhood is something sacred. This attitude is flatly evil.
If anything, this perverse cultural element makes the whole situation worse. The visceral hatred for pedophiles masks an obsession with youth, which in turn masks a dread of death. Granted, we know the flesh fears death, but we should seek to rise above the concerns of the flesh.
It serves little purpose to demonize pedophiles; it’s far more prevalent than anyone wants to admit. It is appropriate to distinguish between pedophilia (the desire) and child molestation (the act). There are a great many pedophiles who don’t allow themselves to indulge. It doesn’t make them evil to desire it; the hysteria about that is evil.
Child porn is another issue. Simple nudity in images is exploitation, but there’s no way to make images of sexual acts without breaking the law in the US. Still, the biblical perspective is not to be horrified by such things, but to condemn the whole gamut of sexual immorality. Take it home or do without. Child sexual abuse is not somehow more threatening to shalom than adultery. The problem with America is that we don’t condemn the latter nearly enough.
We know what would go a long way to reducing this problem, but the biblical solutions will never happen in the US. The only thing we can do is stand on the truth of divine revelation. Meanwhile, I would most certainly work to reduce child sex trafficking, simply because the victims are utterly helpless. The Bible hammers home the idea of defending orphans and widows as the image of those most helpless in Hebrew society; children caught in sex trafficking in the US fall into the same category. It does matter, but not for the reasons assumed by most Americans.
Not just limited to childhood sexual abuse, but with recovering from trauma in general. The path to recovery could be relatively easy, or automatic, in a sense, within a long time frame, but it’s the case now that too many other half-solutions are presented.
This is coming from someone who has next to zero experience dealing with stuff like that, however.
But you are correct. Recovery from trauma is handled quite poorly in most programs I’ve seen. There are good things in most of them, but the whole gamut of psychological services is a twisted knot of nonsense at the fundamental level.