Deborah LaFave
roadrunner
Registrant
John,
Thanks for taking the time to communicate with Ted Webb. I am surprised at his response - perhaps I was too quick off the mark in proposing that he is just an opportunist. At the very least, however, he is being irresponsible in writing about an important issue without having up-to-date information. His position looks to me like he holds to that old view that this kind of thing is just a boy's "initiation into manhood", i.e. men are just sexual predators anyway, so you may as well start getting yours as soon as you can.
Again to John,
I think you are right on the mark in suggesting that Webb should not be attacked about this. A better approach is to try to get him to see how things really are.
This comes back to something I posted elsewhere. Society at large "knows" at some level that CSA against boys is wrong and extremely harmful, but at the individual level people are still unable to react to it personally in a helpful and enlightened way. Relatives and friends often bungle the task of reacting to us when we disclose, and Webb is doing the same sort of thing I think. He is just reacting to the case of LaFave as an uninformed member of the public. Reading what we have now, it looks to me like at first he wasn't really talking about CSA at all, but about what he sees as an example of the law running amok - again.
So the problem is not callousness or hostility, but rather lack of awareness and personal resources for dealing with what would be, for anyone, a real challenge in sensitivity.
Larry
Thanks for taking the time to communicate with Ted Webb. I am surprised at his response - perhaps I was too quick off the mark in proposing that he is just an opportunist. At the very least, however, he is being irresponsible in writing about an important issue without having up-to-date information. His position looks to me like he holds to that old view that this kind of thing is just a boy's "initiation into manhood", i.e. men are just sexual predators anyway, so you may as well start getting yours as soon as you can.
Again to John,
I think you are right on the mark in suggesting that Webb should not be attacked about this. A better approach is to try to get him to see how things really are.
This comes back to something I posted elsewhere. Society at large "knows" at some level that CSA against boys is wrong and extremely harmful, but at the individual level people are still unable to react to it personally in a helpful and enlightened way. Relatives and friends often bungle the task of reacting to us when we disclose, and Webb is doing the same sort of thing I think. He is just reacting to the case of LaFave as an uninformed member of the public. Reading what we have now, it looks to me like at first he wasn't really talking about CSA at all, but about what he sees as an example of the law running amok - again.
So the problem is not callousness or hostility, but rather lack of awareness and personal resources for dealing with what would be, for anyone, a real challenge in sensitivity.
Larry