Is it normal that my brother touched in a sexual way when we where kids ?

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  • Kids are wired to be curious. That's how we figure out the world.

    Being curious about sexual things is normal, particularly in a culture where there are all sorts of taboos surrounding the topic, and yet there is highly sexualised imagery everywhere and every second song on the radio refers to sex in some form or another.

    If your brother was eleven or so, he was starting to go through puberty and all sorts of hormonal changes were going on in his body and affecting his brain. He was probably exposed to lots of sexual talk (most of it very ill-informed) on the school playground and wherever boys his age gathered, so him being curious was perfectly natural.

    You say he did it only once. That suggests he realised that what he'd done was wrong, and he backed off. If he remembers the event at all, it's very likely that he feels ashamed about it. However, it's possible that shame has made him repress the memory, so he doesn't even remember it.

    As for you agreeing to him touching you, a kid who is five or six years old has very little understanding of what's right or wrong. That's why most legal systems have an age below which a child cannot be charged with a crime. But children are far more curious about sex far earlier than most adults are comfortable thinking about. Which is why it's a cliché that kids younger than you then were end up "playing doctor" at least once.

    In today's climate, absolutely anything involving sexual contact - even a one-off event between young children of the same age - is immediately branded sexual abuse by some people. I suspect that many of those who are quick to be outraged by trivial events have been triggered because they suffered something far worse in their childhood. The fact is that kids have always exposed themselves to each other and fiddled around with each other as part of their learning process. Adult-child sexual abuse is a very serious thing. But justified concern about that has extended so that some people believe that events such as the one you describe must have been a hugely traumatic and life-altering event that justifies talking to the police and filing criminal charges many years after the event.

    It seems to me that what you should be asking yourself is why this vague memory bothers you. Is it because you believe it has had some long-term effect on your sexuality? Is it because you've bought into the idea that any sort of sexual contact when you're young has to be damaging? Or does the idea of being the victim of sexual abuse and being able to blame that for all that's gone wrong in your life appeal to you?

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