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This article is from Today's Native Father, issue #103, May/June, 1999. Related articles from this issue:
The Ancient Boundaries
Why Good Kids Make Good Victims
Mothers and Daughters

“NO WAY!!” you say. “I’m going to raise my son right!”

That’s what most parents say. Still, too many sons grow up to become sex offenders. In his paper on “New Myths About Child Abuse,” David Finkelhor suggests several reasons why.

1.Tender Feelings are Sexualized.
Little boys need to be cuddled and nurtured in ways that are not sexual. They need this from their father as well as from their mother. If they don’t get this intimacy in childhood, they will find it with their friends in adolescence. As adolescents, the intimacy they find will almost always turn sexual. The young man’s mind forms a connection between emotional intimacy and sex. The only way he can think of to express his tender emotions is through sex.

This man may marry and have a child of his own. As he cuddles and plays with his child, sexual feelings come up. Realizing that this is not appropriate, the man may withdraw from his child limit his physical contact. This starts the cycle all over again. Or he may give in to his feelings and treat the child as a sexual object. Then the child learns to connect intimacy and sexuality even before adolescence.

2. The Attraction Scale.

Many cultures train women to find their appropriate sexual partners among persons who are older, larger and more powerful

than themselves. Men are encouraged to select their sexual partners from persons who are younger, smaller and weaker than themselves. This makes children attractive to men but not to women. The man’s mind forms a connection between power or authority and sex. As a result, some male doctors, therapists, pastors and employers become sexually involved with their patients, clients and employees. Children, the youngest, smallest and weakest among us, become the easiest targets for sexual abuse from men.

3. “Child Care—It’s Not a Man’s Job!”

Many men grow up not believing that an important part of their role is to care for and nurture children. “That’s a mother’s job,” they say. If they do not get involved with children, it is hard for them to identify with a child’s point of view. In addition, they lose touch with their “inner child.” They have no idea how children feel when relationships are sexualized or when they are betrayed by an adult.

To these reasons we would add. . .

4. Shifting of Boundaries (Proverbs 22:28). Recently the Supreme Court of British Columbia struck down the section of the Criminal Code which makes it a crime to possess child pornography. Our governments, schools and media seem uncertain what is right and what is wrong. No wonder so many men and boys are making bad moral choices!

In raising sons, Finkelhor recommends:

(1) Take great care to allow space for tender feelings.

(2) Encourage boys and men to choose their sexual partners from people of equal social status, intelligence and power.

(3) Encourage men to identify more with the needs of children.

And we add:

(4) Restore biblical boundaries for sexual behaviour (see Bible Study on previous page).

These will be difficult to achieve in a society so filled with abuse. If you are a man or teenaged boy, for example, it is very hard to get a job as a babysitter or daycare worker. Certainly we need the safeguards that are in place for these areas of child care. But if we don't find ways to train boys and men to take healthy masculine responsibility for women and children, and if we don’t restore moral boundaries that protect everyone, the abuse is likely to continue.

Calendar of NYM Sexual Abuse workshops
Resources on recovery from sexual abuse

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