Scapegoating, sexual abuse, and trauma: A vicious cycle

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The Daily Beast recently reported that a prominent QAnon conspiracy movement leader groomed and had an inappropriate relationship a minor.

If you’ll remember, QAnon adherents believe that the US government is run by a secret cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles. I’m no psychotherapist, but it sure seems like there’s a whole lotta projection going on.

Thinking through this, I believe I’ve come to a better understanding of how scapegoating, sexual abuse, and trauma all contribute to a vicious cycle that ends up supporting authoritarianism.

I recently wrote about the Evangelical concept of “sin.”

The term “scapegoat” comes from the practice of sacrificing animals to God in order to be forgiven for sins. Scapegoating is a hallmark of authoritarianism. The authoritarian personality deeply dislikes diversity. This is partly because people with more authoritarian personalities tend to have difficulty with complexity and are more likely to feel a strong need for safety, which homogeneity provides.

Authoritarian leaders take advantage of this desire for sameness by blaming marginalized groups, usually sexual and ethnic minorities, for elite wrongdoing. People in power convince “the people” that persecuting outgroup members is not just morally justified, but morally required. The resulting acts of terrorism encourage members of scapegoated communities to escape or go underground to avoid being killed. The result is a more homogeneous-seeming society and less accountability for elites.

This is exactly the cycle behind the LGBTQIA+ “groomer” discourse. Elites are accusing sexual minorities, in this case trans and gay people, of attempting to sexually assault children.

There exists tons of compelling evidence that gay and trans people are no more likely to sexually abuse children than straight, cis people. Exactly zero children have been sexually assaulted at a drag event.

You know who sexually abuses children? People who have lots of access to children and little accountability. It’s parents, pastors, camp counselors, coaches, Police. Police. POLICE.

You know what causes sexual assault?

The rigid gender hierarchy promoted by Evangelical Christian leadership is associated with rape.

I mean, it’s not exactly subtle:

Jean-Michel Connard @torriangray

It’s almost time for the worst evangelical tradition.

(As an Exvangelical, let me assure you: This isn’t in the top five worst Evangelical traditions.)

Sexual shame causes rape. The majority of child sexual abuse survivors in this country never tell anyone about their abuse. Some of this is because kids pick up from adults that anything related to sex is shameful. Part of it is because kids aren’t taught about consent. A lack of comprehensive sex education — itself both a cause and a result of sexual shame, stigma, and ignorance — causes rape. Without any education around sex or consent, survivors often don’t understand what happened to them. They just know it was shameful and often believe they’re to blame. When kids do come forward, the adults often don’t believe them.

In this way, our sexist, sex-negative culture encourages sexual assault, discourages survivors from coming forward, insulates abusers from accountability, and forces kids to suffer alone, nearly ensuring that childhood sexual abuse survivors end up fully traumatized.

One thing that’s so tragic about trauma is that it, like the authoritarian personality and conspiratorial thinking, is also associated with difficulty with complexity.

It’s possible that trauma might actually cause people’s personalities to become more authoritarian and thinking to become more conspiratorial.

And certainly people who are more susceptible to conspiracy theories and have more authoritarian personalities are easier to manipulate. So when Tucker Carlson encourages them to protest drag queen story hour instead of the Southern Baptist Convention, even though all the evidence indicates the latter is a much bigger threat to children than the former, they comply.

I have no doubt that the vast majority of Evangelicals, QAnon believers, and people who protest drag brunch genuinely believe they’re fighting child sex abuse.

But they’re wrong. And they’re hurting people, especially kids and sexual minorities. And who benefits? Elites. People who sexually abuse children.

The problem impacts every level of society. So I think the solutions must as well.

In our schools and homes, we have to start teaching people that sex is consensual by definition. Teach people that all sex is inherently morally neutral. Gay people and trans people aren’t moral miscreants looking to harm kids. If elites can’t stigmatize sexual minorities, they’re going to have a much harder time turning them into scapegoats. Eliminate sexual shame to make it safer for survivors to come forward, integrate their trauma, and identify abusers.

Start removing abusers from positions of leadership. Start believing credible reports. Stop punishing people who come forward. Ask your church leadership how they handle reports of sexual misconduct.

Fight sexist gender norms in your churches and communities. Support gender egalitarianism. Support universal, comprehensive, medically accurate sex education.

Sex-positive feminism isn’t about merely allowing you to have your weird sex in peace. Though I obviously very much support that. It’s about preventing rape, healing trauma, and fighting fascism. It’s about identifying how fascists use sexual repression and abuse to achieve their aims and pushing back, hard. It’s a wholesale rejection of a viewpoint that says it’s okay to marginalize, scapegoat, and violate people because they like to fuck differently than you do. That says it’s okay to lie about people and get them killed because they make you uncomfortable. Fuck that noise. Fuck fascism. And fuck how you want. That’s sex-positive feminism.

Header images come from me putting the headline text or a snippet of body copy into OpenAI’s DALL-E.