What a horrific thing. I can understand how this is so damaging for someone to experience because of the additional layers of shame that your child is a sexual abuser or rapist on top of the shame about being raped or sexually abused commonly felt by people who experience it (not that they should be ashamed in either case, it’s just a reality of how things are), plus the doubt about whether you did something wrong while raising them, and the desire to protect them warring with the desire to talk about it. My heart aches for Lucy and I really respect that she’s trying to help others in that situation.

Pegs, a social enterprise (the acronym is for parental education, growth, support) for people affected by child to parent abuse (CPA)

Well that’s an unfortunate name choice.

As well as interviewing mothers and practitioners, she analysed data from 2,000 parents who sought help from a UK-based support service for CPA in 2023, and found that 13% had experienced harmful sexual behaviour from their child.

Of these, 96% were mothers and 4% were fathers. The children, aged five to 31, were 66% male and 33% female.

It’s strange that only 13% of the people reaching out about CPA were determined to have experienced it, I wonder if it’s super narrowly defined. The fact that it includes behavior from at least one five year old is hugely concerning combined with the above statistic.

Parents reported their children making sexual noises and simulating sex acts, making sexual threats, being physically violent including touching, grabbing and thrusting, and also carrying out non-contact behaviour such as voyeurism and exposure.

That doesn’t clear it up at all. A five year old exposing their genitals is not parental abuse, but if one were to make sexual threats and grab at their parent while doing so and understanding the full weight of what they’re doing, it is. Given that only 13% of the people seeking help about this were determined to have experienced CPA, I have to assume it was closer to the latter, which is really worrying.

“The mothers I interviewed talked about how they’d sought help for quite a long time because their child had shown what they thought were quite worrying signs of sexualised behaviour before it was actually targeted at them. But often it was minimised, they were told to just get on with it,” she said.

That’s even more devastating. I now feel bad about questioning the case of the five year old, but it’s just so shocking. I guess I can imagine how common people minimizing it is, when I’m literally doing it while reading about the worst cases. How do kids so young get to a place where that’s possible?

John said many of the parents Pegs spoke to were fearful their children were being exposed to harmful sexual and misogynistic content online that could be influencing their behaviour.

That I can see. If a kid gets into something like 4chan really young, that could warp their view of the world. It often doesn’t, and I know a bunch of people who grew up on efukt and the like who are ethical and have respectful sexual relationships today, but they weren’t also being targeted by the manosphere as children.

“They’ve reported their children making indecent images using ChatGPT,” she said. “Parents are putting safeguards in place, but children are finding different ways to go around it. We’re supporting some parents that don’t even have access to wifi because of this.”

Hmm. That makes it seem like they’re exploiting this horrible thing to manufacture consent for age verification laws.

That said, what can you do if your child refuses to follow your rules or listen to your reasoning about internet usage and actively seeks out harmful content? I’m not that tech savvy, especially compared to the average fediverse user, but I assume it’s possible to disable Wi-Fi in your home and still find devices with their own internet access within a certain distance to locate any phones or tablets they might have acquired and brought home, but if they leave it at school or with a friend, how do you deal with that? I’m also not a parent, and I know that ideally you don’t get to this point because you communicate with your child about the internet from a young age, but I also hid a lot about my internet usage from my parents, even though they explained why I shouldn’t (though to be fair, I didn’t really do chatrooms or anything actually dangerous because of us talking about the internet, I just read a bunch of pornographic fanfiction)