The Boys Next Door: How Young Predators Fool the Media

To be sure, my previous experience with this population granted me access into the personal lives of the offenders, and, in an indirect way, with their victims. Looking back on my experience with working with adolescent sexual offenders I only shudder to think of all the victims we’ll see in the future. The television episodes you see on sexual predators are not even the tip of the iceberg as to what is really happening in America.
For example, the television shows only depict adult male predators, but what you don’t see are the children, the teenagers, the boys next door, who are out there looking for an opportunity to sexually assault the unsuspecting and innocent. And no matter what excuse or reason we give for these children behavior, whether they are victims who are only repeating the behavior done to them, or whether their undeveloped minds were contaminated by the insidious and pervasive trends in America culture, the fact remains that the offender, for the most part, is responsible for his own behavior.
For example, we can blame mom or dad for not blocking internet porn sites on their computers. We can blame the record companies for bombarding our children with continual doses of sexually and lyrically explicit music videos, which at one time would have been considered soft porn. Or we can blame the perpetrator for creating and establishing in the mind of the victim a pattern of sexual abuse which will play out in his or hers own life.
The bottom line is this:the adolescent sexual offender’s behavior is criminal. He may only be twelve or thirteen or perhaps younger, but the courts will order that he be place in treatment because he has committed a felony. He’ll be read his rights, and probably have to submit to taking a polygraph, and he’ll have to be locked up until he complies with treatment.
In addition, the state- or shall I say you and I-will have to foot the bill because the offender’s parents can’t afford the $400-$500 daily rate( this was the going rate over 5 years ago. I'm sure that we could tac on another hundred or so today.)that many of these facilities charge for his room and board, and his therapies.
If it sounds like I’m bitter about this let me assure you that I’m not. I would much rather have my tax dollars going for treating our children than to fund a dome stadium for a football team. However, I will make this point; it is a travesty to pay for the offender’s treatment for six months to a year or more and leave the victims and their family, who lives, are forever changed, to fend for their selves by using their own insurance to pay for what little counseling they can afford.
On the whole, the long termed dynamics and consequences of a person who is sexual abused, molested or raped, will be seen in every relationship the victims enters into. And this brings us to the purpose of the book (which you are reading as a blog), which has really has nothing to do with treating adolescent or adult male sexual offenders. This is a blog is about you, the sexually abused boy who became the emotionally abused man and the sexually abused boy who looking to make sense of the world and himself.

How does the boy who became a man deal with something he has never told anyone? How does the boy who has been sexually abused deal with something he is just now coming to grips with? Or, to put it another way, how can the man who was sexually abused as a child finally come out the closet, so to speak, and began his journey toward recovery? And what kinds of tools can the sexually abused male use to help him on his road to recovery.
In searching for the answers I will defer to those professionals who specialize in working with the victims of sexual abuse. However, to remain true to intent of the blog so that it will not be bogged down by what the professionals have to say, I want a male victim to tell his own story. I want a victim to tell other victims who are reading this blog how they are working through this issue. It is one thing for someone to write a book about how men feel about being victimized as a child and it is quite another to let to let them speak for themselves. With that in mind, throughout the course of this blog, I will often act as merely as an interpreter or transcriber of a story, a story which is beginning to come to the attention of mainstream society.
Also, this blog will be divided into to two sections. In the first section I will be speaking to men. The information contained in this section can not be understood by victims who have not reached adulthood. The second section is written for boys and adolescents who have been sexually abused. We will begin in the next blog.