The Survivors of Child Sex Abuse Who Don’t Want Their Abusers Punished

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Luke’s negative self-image persisted, and so, too, did his abuse of Max. Max described living in fear at home, particularly at times when the rest of the family wasn’t around. Luke would corner Max, exposing himself and sometimes groping his brother. He’d follow Max into the pool, or take the towels or toilet paper from the bathroom so that Max would have to ask for them, creating a moment for Luke to get in the bathroom with him. “It was just a constant,” Max said.
“I had found a bunch of different ways to try to approach him,” Luke told me. “Varying in, like, something you could potentially dismiss as innocuous, to things that were more direct.” When Luke was more direct, Max was direct that he wanted Luke to stop. “After that first time, he was like, ‘I don’t want to do this,’” Luke remembered. “And most of the time it was me, you know, not hearing that, and just being, like, coercive and either trying to convince him, or just pressure him, or wear him down.”
After his parents failed to stop the abuse, Max gave up on trying to get help. He became an overachiever in school and tried to limit the times he was alone with his brother. As he entered high school, he realized he was gay. As a Roman Catholic, he felt shame about his sexuality, but his brother’s abuse added a deeper layer, pushing him to question whether the abuse was the reason. “I’m very publicly out, I’m gay,” Max said. “But for many, many, many years, I thought and only understood that to be a result of what [Luke] had done.”
The abuse declined in frequency as the brothers became teenagers. The last time it happened, Max was visiting Luke for siblings weekend at Michigan State. In the bunk bed next to Max, Luke exposed himself and began masturbating. Max exploded at him, then left. He also told his mom again. The abuse, he revealed, had continued throughout his childhood.
Max now knows that his brother didn’t make him gay, and as he’s released his shame about his sexuality, he’s been able to embrace his identity. Still, because his earliest sexual experiences were abusive, they continue to affect his relationship to sex in painful ways. After the period of shame around his sexuality, he swung in the other direction to what he describes as a sex addiction. Now, living with a partner, he struggles to find a healthy balance in his sex life.
When Luke started volunteering at Firecracker Foundation and began extolling the virtues of restorative justice, Max became increasingly conflicted. He was happy that his brother was doing positive work in the community, but did Luke not realize how painful it was for Max to see his brother being publicly lauded for working with survivors?
As for his brother’s enthusiasm for restorative justice, Max was skeptical. “It’s like rose-colored glasses, like ‘We have this beautiful framework that can solve all the world’s problems and we’ll apply it to my brother and his trauma, and we’ll move on from it.’”
Max was also wondering why, if his brother believed in these principles, he hadn’t reached out to talk about what he’d done. In 2021, Max sent Luke an email. He told him he was proud of him for the work he was doing, but he admitted to feeling “increasingly confused and pained.”
“How am I supposed to be proud of you for your work to help victims of sexual assault and harassment when it was you who sexually harassed and assaulted me over the course of years?” Max wrote. “When it was you that irrevocably changed my views of sexuality, who made me hate everything related to sex for the majority of my life, who made me afraid to be alone with you for much of my childhood and young adult life?”
Max asked Luke to take part in a joint therapy session with their respective therapists. After prepping extensively, the four of them met for a two-hour session in the city where Max lives. “My primary goal was to let him know how much he hurt me,” Max said. He wanted to feel that Luke really understood, without making excuses or justifications, how much the abuse had altered him.
Max has never considered cutting contact with Luke—not least because his dad left his mom for another woman when the boys were teens, and he didn’t want to cause another rupture in their family. But even though both brothers felt good about the joint session, it didn’t fix everything. Max still lives with the impact of the trauma. And even though he has gotten more from Luke than the vast majority of survivors get from their abusers, the relationship costs him. “It’s not enough,” he said. “I’ve gotten everything that I could from him, but … it won’t ever be enough.”
As a society, we deal with child sexual abuse in one of two ineffective ways: throwing perpetrators one by one behind bars, or ignoring their harms altogether. We imagine abusers to be aberrant monsters while systemically minimizing and covering up actual child sexual abuse by powerful people—from priests in the Roman Catholic Church to gymnastics coaches to generations of Boy Scout leaders. And even when these widespread abuses are made public, our focus is trained on the people who did the harm. Often the children are an afterthought, trotted out to tearfully recount their pain at press conferences.
Activist-survivors like Tashmica see child sexual abuse as the source of a violence and destruction that ripples through generations of families. Many of them came to their politics because of, and not despite, their early experiences of abuse. Their worlds were colored by injuries at the hands of those who had power over them. Their identities were shaped by it. They know that punishing someone won’t solve their problems. However society chooses to deal with the people who have harmed them, wounds like theirs may never heal. But what if, these survivors ask, we shifted the view to them, and their needs? Could we lessen their shame, could we witness their grief? Could that, in itself, allow them to begin to heal?