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David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center, has devoted his career to researching child sexual abuse. He’s the author of such titles as “Sexually Victimized Children,” “Childhood Victimization,” “Child Sexual Abuse” and “Nursery Crimes.” I guess you could say he’s an expert on the topic? And this is what he had to tell me in response to claims that Dunham is a sexual abuser: “In the sexual abuse field, we generally do not consider children age 7 as sexual abusers.”
Instead, he explains, “we are concerned about children that age who are ‘sexually reactive,’ meaning sexualized in a developmentally inappropriate way” or “being aggressive toward and exploitive of” their siblings or peers. That’s because that behavior can be “the sign that they themselves has been abused or subjected to developmentally inappropriate material,” he said. As for whether Dunham’s behavior was “sexually reactive,” he says “a judgment would typically require more than a single episode, especially in younger children who may not be aware of norms.” He’s not exactly calling CPS, y’all.
But he’s only the director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center, so I decided to talk to some other sources.
Sharon Lamb, author of several research papers on child sexual abuse, including, “‘Normal’ Childhood Sexual Play and Games: Differentiating Play From Abuse,” says of Dunham, “This is really within the norms of childhood sexual behavior,” she says. “Absolutely.” When Lamb, who has provided courtroom psychological evaluations of sexual abuse in children, interviewed therapists for her other book, “Sex, Therapy, and Kids: Addressing Their Concerns Through Talk and Play,” she encountered lots of similar tales.
Lamb, a professor of counseling psychology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, notes that older siblings are often somewhat coercive of young siblings, and it’s the job of parents to help regulate that behavior. “If an older sibling was making a younger sibling drink a horrible concoction they made while pretending they were playing witches, that would be wrong,” she said. “It would be the same in imposing some kind of sexual play. It wouldn’t be sex offender wrong, it would be inappropriate and coercive and ‘you have to be nicer to your younger sister.’” Lamb notes that Dunham’s pebbles-in-vagina discovery would have been “a good opportunity to teach a little girl that you don’t play with other people’s private parts without their consent.”