I often work with people whose presenting problem is an ego-dystonic attraction to minors. For the most part, these are people who have an appetite for child sexual abuse material, or child porn. Sometimes, these people have been arrested and charged. Sometimes, they’re afraid of being arrested and charged. I’ve worked with a few people who actually have engaged in contact offenses. They have assaulted children.
I have not yet worked with anyone for whom their attraction to minors did not present a problem. No sociopaths. No one whose relationship to minor attraction is simply inconvenient and unsatisfiable. In recent months, I’ve encountered a phenomenon that has me scratching my head a bit.
I’ve always struggled with the hegemonic thinking about child sexual abuse material: that every use of an image re-traumatizes its subject/object. On the one hand, this seems to me to be a bit of magical thinking. How can a person be re-traumatized by an incident of masturbation of which they are unaware? On the other hand, I understand. A person can be re-traumatized by the knowledge that, at any given moment, someone somewhere may be masturbating to an image of that person being abused. This presents a philosophical conundrum.
The action isn’t the problem. Its possibility, which alas can never be extinguished, at least not yet, is.
