Some truths:
1.) Josh Duggar was 15 or older when he committed his crimes. Some of the siblings he victimised were children far younger than himself. Furthermore, they were sleeping and his behaviour continued over 3 years making it clear that it was a repeated, predatory pattern.
The people posting here seem to fall into two camps.
a.) those posters who had similarly involved sexual contact (genital touching; etc.) with younger siblings or another child when they were much younger than 15 - say, 6 or 8 or 10.
If you fall within this category, it is very important to note that neither morality nor the law judges a child of 10 or under in the same way they would judge an adolescent child of 15, 16 or 17. Sure, both are children but they are not exactly the same and you know that in your hearts. You wouldn't judge a tiny child or toddler really harshly for doing things that you know are wrong but they don't fully understand so please don't judge yourself. Why should you be an exception to the compassion and care we show towards little children? You were a little child yourself. Furthermore it is simply not fair to judge an adult, or even an adolescent, in terms of what they did when they were very young and had yet to develop a full moral system. You are literally (on a physical, biological, neurological level) not the same person you were as a child.
b.) those posters who were older adolescents with a young child/s or sibling/s whose acts did not involved genital contact, deliberate stimulation, or really anything close to the penetrative acts committed by Josh Duggar.
What you did was not molestation or abuse... or, if you feel that you must hold to these categories, please recognise that your acts were towards the very lightest end of the spectrum. Legally what you did would not be put within the same category as what John Duggar did. Morally they are not the same either. It is highly likely that your "victim" does not feel whatsoever traumatised or even vaguely consider themselves in victim. In many cases, you know this for a fact to be true. You feel like an outsider/ a monster/ evil already in-and-of yourself and you are latching onto something to prove and justify this intuitive, emotional feeling as being true. If you were bullied or abused yourself, this would likely explain this feeling and tendency.
2.) For both a.) and b.) many posters either positively identify as having OCD or seem highly likely from how they have described their thinking patterns to suffer from OCD. Please consider it a very real possibility (and not just something that "lets you off the hook") that OCD might be the cause of all this guilt and remorse - that OCD itself might be the hook!
3.) Part of why people are so, so angry at Josh Duggar and have made death threats and calls for him to be executed and calls for him to be imprisoned forever etc. etc. are because he's a monumental bigoted hypocrite who has previously called gay and trans* individuals child molesters; he claims to be remorseful and yet focuses only on himself not his victims and seems to have avoided any kind of accountability or even real treatment; he's famous and has an irritating, smug face.
I think people are also legitimately angry and disgusted by child molestation and rightly so. I think most people reading about the case feel legitimately horrified. I think it's really sad that he did such things to young girls who were then not supported and had to live in a house with their abuser. That's horrible. I also think people are angry for the reasons above. Hypocrisy is a particularly irritating human trait because it seems so manifestly unjust. Also, not only will many commentators be survivors of abuse/ incest themselves, many will also be gay or trans* or part of the broader LGBTQA+ community. And having someone on TV getting paid lots of money to say that you are sub-human and are a risk to small children and then turn out to be a child molester... well, I would feel really ######6 angry if I was in America and had watched such bigoted and hateful idiocy.
BUT YOU - YES YOU - READING THIS ARE ***NOT*** JOSH DUGGAR
(well, you're very unlikely to be.. I just can't imagine him reading PsychForums somehow)
And if you think: 'That intense and wordy Sprock moderator bloke is talking about all the other poor remorseful people on this board who didn't do anything nearly as bad as what I did' and yet you know at heart that you fit within category a.) or b.) (scroll up and check them again)
then I literally am talking about You and I strongly, strongly believe that You don't deserve the amount of inner torture you are going through.
P.S. I will of course try to respond more personally to the threads yet to be approved. I like to give considered answers if I can that are morally serious and realistic so I tend to agonise over them a bit and take a while.
Apologies. I genuinely hope this message is helpful.With kind (and always anxious) regards,
-Sprock
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