When Danny was 16, she sneaked out of her house and met up with an older boy who lived in the neighborhood. She had planned to have sex with him, but in the midst of it, he penetrated her anally. She told him no, repeatedly. He ignored her. She was too afraid to yell out. She wasn’t supposed to be at his place, in his basement; she didn’t want to get in trouble. Because she’d sneaked out, she didn’t want to tell her mom. The next day, she went to school, where he and the rest of her friends would be hanging out as usual.
“I had felt, from the moment I went to bed to the time I got on the bus and went to school, my body’s not mine,” Danny told me. (Danny is trans; he was assigned female at birth, and presented that way when he experienced abuse. He agreed to use she/her pronouns when describing these incidents to more accurately portray them.) Instead of making a scene with her friends, she stopped hanging out with them. Alone and in pain, she tried to numb her feelings by smoking weed and using psychedelics. “It just felt like life was not worth it after that,” she said.
It took eight months for her to tell her mom. When she finally did, they went to the police department in East Lansing, Michigan, to file a report. The police got a detailed statement from Danny—what color were the bedsheets? the walls?—but when they asked her whether she wished to press charges, she said no. She had been advised by her therapist at the time not to. The report would be on file, the police told her, if the young man was ever accused again.
In her rapist’s avoidance of accountability, Danny is representative of victims of child sex abuse in this country, where sex abuse itself is alarmingly common: A landmark study, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kaiser Permanente, found that one in four girls and one in six boys experience sexual abuse before the age of 18; a 2013 study of adverse childhood experiences in Philadelphia found one in six adults to have experienced child sexual abuse. But few cases are prosecuted, and those that are can be slow to work their way through the court. Children, especially young children, aren’t often seen as reliable witnesses. And at every stage of a case, families drop off or prosecutors decline to move forward. One Department of Justice–backed study of more than 450 child sexual abuse cases found that nearly 30 percent didn’t get past the initial intake stage, and more than half were closed during the investigation. Out of the hundreds of cases that were analyzed, only 14 went to trial, and 10 resulted in convictions—about 2 percent.
The fact that most cases of child sexual abuse go unpunished has not stopped states from passing increasingly punitive laws related to these crimes. In 2023, Florida passed a law allowing for the death penalty in cases of child sexual abuse where the child is under 12; in May 2024, Tennessee passed a measure allowing the death penalty for cases in which a child is raped. Both laws run counter to a 2008 United States Supreme Court decision that struck down this type of legislation in Louisiana. The governors of both Florida and Tennessee, who have acknowledged this fact, are seemingly looking to bring the issue to the current conservative-majority Supreme Court. In December 2023, the Florida state attorney announced the first such case where the state would seek the death penalty. At the time, Governor Ron DeSantis wrote on social media that it would be “the first case to challenge SCOTUS since I signed legislation to make pedophiles eligible for the death penalty.” The state attorney, DeSantis added, “has my full support.”
These extreme punishments can be attributed to society’s particular ire toward adults who sexually abuse children—a rage that has reached a fever pitch in the last several years, with the rise of right-wing conspiracies about child sex trafficking and politicians redefining “grooming” as a weapon to deploy against LGBTQ people. In some ways, our horror is a recognition of the profound, reverberating violation that is sexual abuse. But the stereotypical perpetrator—a stranger lurking in a parking lot, waiting to grab unattended children—is a far cry from the family members and peers who are most commonly responsible. And the stigma we attach to the abuser can bleed over onto the victim, who may feel tainted or to blame for what they’ve undergone. “We want to express our outrage and be so tough that we deter it,” said Aya Gruber, a law professor at the University of Southern California who studies sex exceptionalism in criminal law. But the data shows that this approach doesn’t work. “If you’re too tough,” Gruber explained, “you push things underground.”
The punitive laws and the extraordinary social stigma attached to child sexual abuse are partly to blame for the failures of the justice system in prosecuting these cases. Children are often afraid of upending their lives by disclosing their abuse, and those who have been harmed by a family member or peer may feel particularly conflicted. Indeed, most of the children who experience sexual abuse don’t disclose it—one study of more than a thousand calls to a sexual abuse hotline in Germany, for instance, found that the average age of disclosure was 52 years old.
To be sure, there are other important reasons for delayed disclosure besides fears about what punishment may entail. Like Danny, many adolescents who are sexually abused or assaulted are worried about getting in trouble for being somewhere they weren’t supposed to be. Young children may not have words or the developmental understanding to process or describe their experience. And many victims are groomed with loving attention or threatened so that they won’t tell. But the profound social stigma and punitive reaction to abuse likely contributes significantly to low disclosure rates.
Those few cases that do go forward can retraumatize the victims, through grueling interviews, invasive forensic exams, and lengthy trials that can make survivors feel that their trauma is forcibly being made public.
Looked at from the point of view of the victims, it’s not an overstatement to say that America’s typical approach to child sex abuse is practically nonfunctional. Victims are not getting what they need—they’re not getting accountability, and they’re not getting healing. Vanishingly few of them feel safe enough even to speak privately about their experiences, much less publicly. Given how widespread the problem is, society’s failure to meaningfully confront it is all the more shameful. But what do these children need? What does justice—real justice, offering some measure of closure and healing—look like for the victims of child sexual abuse? Is there a better way?
When instances of child sexual abuse aren’t adequately addressed, the survivor often continues to experience abusive dynamics long into adulthood. Danny was 18 and a high school senior when the well-liked dad of two girls on her roller derby team started showing her attention. She was thrilled. He followed her on social media, and she sent him a direct message on Facebook of a dog making a kissy face. He asked if she was hitting on him. She said, “Yeah, is that OK?”
The man, who was successful and well-known in the community, was in his mid-forties and going through a divorce. She had known him for years; he was friends with her parents. But just after she turned 18, they started having sex. A month or so later, once Danny had become emotionally attached, he ghosted her. That fall, Danny went off to college, but she was suffering. When she came home from winter break, she told her mom about the affair.
Amber Paxton, Danny’s mom, was livid. This man had been to her home, had socialized with her and her husband. Because Danny was 18 when the sex happened, there was no crime to report. But the harm was deep and lasting. Danny’s experience with her classmate had interfered with her ability to discern safe sexual experiences from dangerous ones, a common problem among female survivors of child sexual abuse, who are two to three times more likely to experience adult sexual assault than women who have not been sexually abused as children.
As Amber considered what to do, she thought of a woman named Tashmica Torok, who was on the adult roller derby team. Tashmica ran a nonprofit, the Firecracker Foundation, in nearby Lansing, where she worked with kids who had experienced child sexual abuse. Founded in 2013, the foundation offered free therapy and trauma-informed yoga to children healing from sexual abuse, as well as a support group for their caretakers. Its goals were different from those of child advocacy centers, which conduct forensic interviews and work alongside police to gather evidence for potential criminal cases. Amber had heard that Tashmica had helped another young teammate of Danny’s. Increasingly worried about Danny’s mental state, Amber decided to reach out.
Although fairly benign in its official offerings, the Firecracker Foundation is undergirded by a radical political framework that is organized around the needs of the child who was harmed. The nonprofit wants to dispense with the idea that child abuse is rare, in favor of an acknowledgment that it’s incredibly common and systemically mishandled. The group is part of a loose web of activism by and for survivors of child sexual abuse across the country that aims to shift the focus away from punishing the person doing the harm and toward supporting the child who experienced it. In St. Louis, the Freedom Community Center, led by child sexual abuse survivor Mike Milton, attempts to intervene early in family and community violence, as well as implement restorative justice practices between survivors and perpetrators even after a legal case has concluded. Generation FIVE, an activist group out of Oakland, aims to end child sexual abuse within five generations. And Mirror Memoirs, founded by nonbinary survivor Amita Swadhin, has gathered personal stories of queer and trans BIPOC survivors for an audio archive that highlights these populations’ increased risk for abuse.
When Danny and Amber went to the Firecracker office, Tashmica asked Danny a question: What does justice look like to you?
“That was such a lightning bolt for me,” Amber said. “Because it didn’t matter what I needed, what Tashmica needed, what the police department might need. It mattered what Danny needed.”
Tashmica Torok came to work with children who have been sexually abused because she herself is a survivor of incest. Some of her earliest memories are of her father, an Army pilot, sexually abusing her, first in Germany, where she was born, and later in El Paso, Texas, where she grew up. Her father explained to her that he was “teaching her how to be a wife,” and made it clear that if she told anyone, she’d break her family apart.
When she was eight years old, her father died unexpectedly. Instead of sadness, Tashmica experienced relief. The relief made her feel guilty, but eventually she got angry; she hated seeing the rest of his family and friends celebrate the life of someone who had hurt her deeply.
In third grade, her teacher invited a guest to talk to the class about child abuse. For the first time, Tashmica had words to describe why what happened to her was wrong. After class, she took her teacher aside. Her teacher told her that she had been abused, too, and she asked Tashmica if she wanted to tell her mom or wanted the teacher to do it for her.
Generally, when a child discloses sexual abuse, especially to a teacher, a doctor, or a therapist, the admission automatically triggers a report to the local child welfare authorities. The idea of mandatory reporting, as it’s called, makes intuitive sense: We want kids who are experiencing abuse to be protected, and we want to push people who might feel uncomfortable about getting involved to seek help for kids who need it. But the reality of mandatory reporting is not so rosy. Studies have shown that these laws increase reports to child welfare agencies but, because of the number of allegations that are ultimately shown to be unfounded, don’t result in identifying more instances of physical abuse. Black families and poor families are reported at much higher rates, and most of these reports involve neglect, not abuse. When the child welfare system is bloated with marginal cases of neglect, made up almost entirely of families living in poverty, it is less able to respond adequately to serious cases of sexual abuse. And youths who end up in the foster system are at increased risk of sexual violence while in government care.
Although mandatory reporting exists in some form virtually everywhere in the United States, the abysmal disclosure rates point to an alternate reality, in which young people are making complicated calculations about their safety in isolation. “In some ways, knowing that the trusted adult that you choose to talk to is a mandated reporter and has no choice but disclosing what you share with them, it reduces trust,” said Mical Raz, a professor of public health and policy at the University of Rochester and the author of Abusive Policies: How the Child Welfare System Lost Its Way. “Telling a survivor you have no control because all your decisions are not in your hands and not in my hands, but are mandated by law.… It’s kind of retraumatizing.”
Despite the failings of the mandated reporting system, over the past decade, a majority of states have strengthened and expanded mandatory reporting laws, and more and more children are being reported as suspected victims of abuse and neglect. More than one in three children in the United States will be the subject of an investigation by the time they reach adulthood; more than half of Black children will. (Mandatory reporting laws vary from state to state—in some places, like Texas, every adult is a mandated reporter. In Michigan, where Tashmica now lives, these laws apply only to certain professionals.)
Tashmica’s childhood disclosure did not trigger a mandatory report, because her abuser was dead. And the reaction of the adults around her was supportive and understanding. Although her mother was deeply upset—shaken by grief, shocked at not having known who her husband really was, and struggling as a newly single parent of two kids—she provided the space for her daughter to make sense of what had happened to her. “At no time did my mother ever make me feel like talking about it was a problem,” Tashmica told me.
Had her father not died, she doesn’t know when she would have told anyone. The revelation was too explosive, and her fear of her father too great. Sexual abuse is “society’s boogeyman,” she said. Children are taught that “sexual violence is the worst thing that could ever happen to them, and that it’s basically unsurvivable.” But Tashmica’s experience speaking out—of being heard and believed, given choices about how to proceed, and feeling safe to talk about it—helped her to release her shame and begin to heal.
That’s why her organization doesn’t take the typical approach with children who have been abused. What she wants those children to know, instead, is this: “Sexual violence is absolutely a terrible thing. I want you to know … that it absolutely is survivable. That you will always have value. That no matter what happens, I will believe you, and if you are hurt, I will get you help.”
Tashmica is not a mandatory reporter, and she won’t put a child in the room with someone who is unless they are ready for the process it would trigger. “We try to be really strategic about who knows what, when, so that we can support them,” she explained.
The organization’s services are open to survivors even if they don’t want to talk about what happened to them. Some kids choose to do yoga but not therapy, and even in yoga, there’s a policy that you don’t have to do anything with your body that you don’t want to do. Some kids lie down on the mat the whole time, and that’s OK.
But for a child who does want to disclose, the group offers a process of informed consent—walking the kids who are old enough to understand and their families through the potential legal avenues. If a family wants to report, to Child Protective Services or to the police, someone at Firecracker will fill out the form with them. “We use it as a practice of self-advocacy,” Tashmica said.
For teens disclosing abuse by other teens, the mandated reporting process isn’t triggered; those who don’t want to pursue a criminal complaint might want to initiate a Title IX proceeding at their school. But offering options, and providing a safe space for children to work out their fears, help give a sense of agency back to kids who have had theirs stolen. The legal process is daunting, no matter which avenue you pursue, and Tashmica wants children to know that the courts do not always land on the truth. In the event that a report of abuse isn’t legally substantiated, that won’t affect whether the child can seek help with Firecracker. “You can still come here for treatment,” she tells them. “We don’t need the state to tell us that what happened to you is real.”
In its centering of a child’s feelings and needs above the inclination to collect evidence for a potential criminal case, the foundation’s approach is unusual. It’s even rarer that people working with children would admit to avoiding mandatory reporting; many professionals have a reasonable fear that they could lose their jobs or professional licenses for doing so. Tashmica said that her team knows and follows the laws but tries to find creative solutions within the system that privilege the survivor’s desires. “We like to use the phrase ‘the fringes of legality,’” she said. She likened her role to that of a hostage negotiator—on one side is what the survivor wants, and on the other, the available legal pathways. Between those poles, she looks to give survivors more of a voice in what happens.
When Danny, at her mom’s urging, approached Tashmica after she’d been groomed and then ghosted, she told her that she’d like to come out publicly as a survivor. There had been whispers about this man’s involvement with other young women in town, and Danny wanted to warn others. Tashmica worked with Danny on a statement over a series of weeks, but before she could put it out, other survivors took to Yelp and posted on the man’s business page about similar instances of grooming. Danny decided not to share what she’d written, since the word had gotten out.
Danny still struggled. After a year at college, she got married to a partner who was abusive; then moved to Canada and started overusing prescription amphetamines. Back in Lansing, the Firecracker Foundation held a “support circle” for members of the man’s family and people he’d harmed. Participants shared their experiences and reactions to the behavior of the man, and painted rocks to use as “worry stones.” Amber gave her worry stone to Danny. The man left town. Within a year, Danny was out of her abusive relationship and had moved home to Lansing. She came out as trans, quit hard drugs, and began to heal.
“The time and energy and attention that Tashmica gave to Danny is, I think, the reason I still have my kid,” Amber said.
For Danny, it didn’t make sense to pursue justice by way of the legal system in either of the instances he was harmed. But even when the legal system works as intended, it can still fail to give survivors the outcome they want. Such was the case with one of the Firecracker Foundation’s earliest clients, a Lansing family that had been blown apart by allegations of child sexual abuse. In 2014, Katie Anderson learned that her father had been abusing her three daughters, who were 11, eight, and two. Her youngest had told her mother at bath time, “Grandpa touched my vagina, and I didn’t like it.” (Her youngest is still a minor, so her name is being withheld; only first names of the other two girls are being used to protect their privacy.)
Katie’s mind immediately went to the worst, because she had been sexually abused by a middle school teacher for a year. When she was 13, she was raped by a neighbor in front of three people. As she was dropping off her girls to be babysat by her father, she asked her oldest, Constancia, if her grandpa had ever touched her sister in a way that she didn’t like. Constancia’s eyes widened and began to water.
“I just knew right away that something happened,” Katie told me. She confronted her dad with the kids still in the car. He instantly admitted it, she said. Later that night, with her husband, she returned and grilled him some more. He had abused all three of the girls, he told them, over some length of time. “My dad was already drinking because he had some liquor on the table, and he had his gun out,” she recalled. “He said, ‘Just kill me.’ And I was like, ‘You fucking coward. I’m not gonna kill you.’ I was like, ‘You’re gonna rot in prison, you’re gonna go to hell.’”
Katie called the police that night. At her daughters’ forensic interviews, she was given Tashmica’s contact information. Almost immediately, the girls started therapy, as did their brother, who was racked with guilt because he hadn’t noticed what was going on. Treating all four children, Firecracker helped stabilize the family.
Aubriana, who was eight at the time the abuse was discovered, told me she remembers every detail of what she suffered when her other siblings were watching a movie or taking a nap. She was too scared to tell anyone. “There was one time, during the very beginning, he took me outside and he shot a bird and said, ‘That’s what’s gonna happen if you tell anyone,’” she said. “So I got scared that he was gonna hurt someone I cared about.”
None of the sisters realized that it was happening to all three of them; once, Constancia walked in on Aubriana being abused by their grandfather, but neither child told their mom—omissions they both still carry guilt about.
When the trial started, a huge rift in their extended family emerged. Katie was one of seven sisters, and her mother had died by suicide when Katie was seven, so although the girls’ father was an alcoholic and abusive, he was the only parent Katie and her sisters had. (Katie said she was never abused by her father in that way, but she isn’t sure about her sisters.) As the trial got underway, all but two of Katie’s sisters stopped talking to her. In the courtroom, Katie and her husband and children sat on one side; her sisters sat behind their father. Constancia, Katie’s oldest, was crushed by the rift. The loss of her aunts—and of her cousins, who were too young to make their own decisions about it—left her feeling ashamed, as though her disclosure had ruined her family.
Their grandfather, whom Aubriana calls “It”—“After the movie It, like the clown that destroys kids’ lives,” she explained—was sentenced to five to 15 years. In prison, he had a heart attack, which further deepened the rift between Katie and her sisters. Five years later, he was released on good behavior, back to Lansing, where Aubriana was in eighth grade and Constancia was in high school.
Neither sister was prepared for him to be out so soon. Both girls started cutting themselves. Aubriana spent a week and a half in the counselor’s office, unable to face her classmates, many of whom had found out about the abuse. Constancia’s depression worsened. Her senior year, she attempted suicide, and spent 10 days in the hospital recovering.
After Constancia’s suicide attempt, many of her aunts reached out to her mom and began to repair their relationships. “It made me feel like it really took me trying to harm myself,” she said. “If I hadn’t tried to kill myself, would they not talk to us still?”
Constancia is 21 years old now, and a decade after the abuse was made public, she’s doing much better. She has a good job. She spends her free time at the gym. But despite her family’s ostensible success in the case against her grandfather, she doesn’t feel that she got the justice she was looking for. When she thinks back on what that might have looked like, she wishes her extended family had believed her and backed up her sisters and her. “I think the only thing that really would have mattered to me was knowing that my family would be on my side and not his,” she said.
The trial was grueling, in part because her parents were preoccupied with the legal process, and her experiences felt secondary to her grandfather’s punishment. “It just felt like we were very small, and they were only paying attention to the very, very big thing, which was the court case and making sure he got what he was supposed to get,” she said. “And we were just kind of like, there.”
Part of the reason the legal system fails in its pursuit of justice for victims of child sexual abuse is that it conflates punishment with healing, argues Staci K. Haines, the author of The Politics of Trauma and a co-founder of the activist group Generation FIVE. The conflation demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of how healing is experienced in the bodies of survivors.
“The legal system is individualized,” Haines told me. “There’s a person who did a bad act. Someone is the victim. This victim will get better, feel better, if this person is punished. That whole equation is not true. It’s just not true.” The impulse to punish makes sense, to be sure: If someone is sexually abusing children, you don’t want more children to get hurt. And for some survivors, knowing their abuser has been punished gives them closure. But for many, Haines said, punishment doesn’t provide healing. Many go through the legal process only to find, at the end, that they don’t feel better. Most don’t get the outcomes they want, and even if they do, the impacts of trauma on their bodies and minds don’t resolve just because the person who hurt them is incarcerated.
Haines is an incest survivor, and she says that the depth of harm experienced by people who have been sexually abused as children issues in part from the fact that it often happens at the hands of people they rely on to survive. “A little puppy knows that it can’t get kicked out of its pack or it will die—coyotes know that, baby deer know that,” Haines observed. “That’s a deep, profound, instinctual knowing.”
Her father was sexually abusive, but he was also a wonderful parent at times—a contradiction that she had a hard time reckoning with, given the options she had available to her at the time. She didn’t want to leave her family. She also didn’t want her father to go to jail. “I just would have wanted him to not be so violent,” she said.
A big part of the lingering trauma for many survivors is not just the abuse itself, but the way the adults in their lives handled it. Aishah Shahidah Simmons, a filmmaker and the editor of Love WITH Accountability, a collection of essays by Black survivors of child sexual abuse, was raised by parents who were active in the civil rights movement. Simmons was often entrusted to the care of her grandparents while her parents were working. When she was sexually abused by her grandfather, her mother didn’t believe her. In an essay in her daughter’s book, Aishah’s mother, Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, writes: “If it were true, massive changes had to occur; changes that would disrupt my life. I hoped that it was just a bad dream and that the matter would go away.”
When adults aren’t able to confront the reality of their child’s having been sexually harmed, Simmons said, their failure forces onto the child not just the shame of the abuse, but the shame of their betrayal by other trusted adults. She has since engaged in an accountability process with her parents, whose denial continues to affect her. Even though her mom wrote a clear-eyed essay about her failures to protect her daughter, she still struggles to witness her pain, Simmons told me. “There’s a way in which I feel like silence is enforced subtly,” she explained. “I have to decide: Do I not bring it up?” Her parents talk frequently about difficult experiences in their lives, she said, but if she talks about her abuse, she’s “somehow causing them harm.”
Another reason sexual abuse affects children so profoundly is that it happens when they’re still developing, making it hard for them to later disentangle how exactly it formed the person they became. They question, said Alisa Zipursky, the author of Healing Honestly and a survivor of sexual abuse by a parent, “Is this my personality? Or is this because I was abused by somebody who I’ve known since the second I was born?” Coming to terms with abuse as an adult can lead to the destabilizing realization of how much it has influenced a survivor’s choices and relationships—including the revictimization, abusive relationship dynamics, or substance use issues that can come in its wake.
Part of the healing process, then, involves letting go of the shame, not just of the abuse itself, but of the destructive behavior that might have followed. Survivors are often asked about forgiveness, a concept that is inextricably linked in our culture to healing. Prison abolitionists among the survivors receive particularly pointed questions about this, Zipursky said, as if taking prison off the table as a punishment requires selflessly forgiving your abuser. That question, she told me, misunderstands the problem entirely. “The forgiveness I’m interested in,” she said, “is the forgiving of ourselves for what we had to do in order to survive.”
Over the past couple of years, the Firecracker Foundation has struggled to fund its programs, as grant funding that the organization relied on dried up or came in late. This fall, Tashmica told me that it would soon close its doors. She planned to continue working on child sexual abuse, she said, but as a consultant to other organizations. The decision came about largely because she was exhausted. As she got more involved with local and state task forces and work groups aimed at improving the justice system for survivors, she explained, she felt increasingly disillusioned about making change in a system of layered bureaucracies. She wondered why, too, so much of the fight to change the way we handle child sexual abuse is left to survivors, who are already so burdened by its effects.
Justice is a tricky ideal. Usually spoken about in the abstract, it can be difficult to pinpoint in the specific. If someone being punished for what they did to you doesn’t deliver healing, then what will? And what about survivors who will never see their abuser punished at all?
Although the Firecracker Foundation is closing its doors, the effects of its approach are still being felt. A few years back, a chance encounter with Tashmica gave two brothers an opportunity to explore those questions. In 2018, 28-year-old Luke (a pseudonym) got roped into attending a fundraiser for the Firecracker Foundation. As Tashmica spoke to the audience, Luke, to his surprise, started tearing up. Tashmica spoke matter-of-factly as a survivor of incest, something Luke had never seen before. She also spoke about addressing harm in a way that manages to hold onto the humanity of the person who did the bad acts. Luke encountered ideas that night that gave a name to things he’d long been wrestling with—like restorative justice, the process whereby someone who did harm takes accountability and tries, outside of the traditional legal system, to make amends.
For years, Luke had felt like a bad person who was about to be punished—who deserved to be punished—because of the sexual abuse he had, as a child, inflicted on his youngest brother. To the best of Luke’s recollection and that of his brother Max (also a pseudonym), the abuse started when Luke was about 11 and Max was about eight, when they and another brother shared a room. The first time, Luke asked Max to put his mouth on his penis.
“I felt a level of discomfort and guilt and shame and nausea that I had never experienced in any way, that just felt like it was so viscerally wrong,” Max said about that first incident. Later that night, he told his parents, who responded by moving Luke to his own room. Luke saw the move as further entrenching him as the family outcast; Max saw it as basically a lifestyle upgrade for the brother who had been terrorizing him.
Their parents also sent Luke to therapy. In the first session, Luke said, the therapist told him that the police knew what Luke did and that if it ever happened again, the police would take him away. Rather than deterring Luke, the tough approach served only to make him feel ashamed. Luke had frequently been punished by being isolated in his room for long periods, and he now felt that his fate was sealed. “OK,” he thought to himself, “I just am a bad person; I was born a bad person.” His therapist’s reaction confirmed his belief that he didn’t have a future. “It’s like I’m just on borrowed time before I go to prison.”
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?
