I think forms of sexual assault leave more mental/emotional scars than other “just” physical forms of assault. My dad was just talking a guy who he saw for the first time in a while, who was supposedly raped in prison (maybe many times, who knows). Getting in fights, getting jumped, getting beat up when they were in high school didn’t throw him off too much. You take it, you move on. (Note: a teenage boy/grown man losing a fight is very different from a young child being physically abused for years on end and starting at a young age.) Getting raped, being violated in such an intimate yet violent way, has changed him. He probably won’t ever get over it.
I’ve known kids who were abused very badly. One girl I went to high school with used to have her fingers held over a lighter by her mother. She (the girl, not the mom) got into drugs as hard as heroin, and I believe tried to committ suicide, maybe multiple times. She is now, thankfully, doing pretty good. She’s trying to get her GED, has a job, has a good, albeit small, support system that she can turn to. Most girls I know of who were sexually abused have not made similar levels of recovery. This isn’t always this way - plenty of physical abuse victims don’t recover, and plenty of sexual abuse victims do. It’s just what I’ve seen.
Sex is intimate. I believe it’s pretty much the strongest form of intimacy that two humans can share with one another. Cultural norms are changing but for the most part, I believe that (at least most) humans go into sex wanting things more than just some quick physical pleasure.
Some men I know who have slept with many girls aren’t just 100% emotionally healthy people who simply enjoy sex, they’re looking for some type of ego boost or sense of power or to feel like they’re good enough for someone. (Not every guy, again, these are all just personal observations.) Some women I know who have slept with a lot of guys are looking for someone to care about them, to feel like they’re beautiful and worthy of love and affection, etc.
So, sex is complicated. It’s done by human beings, who are complicated. For most humans, most of time, throoughout most of the world throughout most of time, sex is to show some level of care. From young people who think the other person is hot and it’d be so cool to tell their boys that they banged Melissa from English class all the way to couples who’ve been married for 50 years, it’s used to show some form of “we want each other.”
Rape and all forms of sexual abuse are the complete opposite of what sex should be. It turns it from a loving display of intimacy to a show of power over another human being. Fighting is fighting. Beating a child is beating a child. It’s wrong, it’s evil, but there’s not a good form of it and bad form of it, it’s just bad. There’s no confusion as to what’s going on. Rape/molestation is taking a good thing and making it bad. It’s defiling something that can be quite pure.
Sorry, I keep jumping in conversations I wasn’t a part of. I apologize if my description’s of peoples’ lives and experiences is coarse or blunt. I promise I feel quite strongly about the pain they have gone through. I have never been a victim of anything that’s been discussed but it is a rampant problem in communites that I have great love for (look up the MMIW movement for details), so I have strong feelings about it. My religion plays a part as well.
