Do you ever wonder...

If there are people that have done anything similar to what many of us on the remorse have done and not felt any remorse or guilt whatsoever? I have a friend that is 23 and has a nephew that is around 10 years younger, and he said that he would grab his thigh really hard as a prank to startle him. I know that his intent isn't sexual, but I would feel suicidal guilt and feel like a monster if I was him.
90% of posts on here are made by people feeling as if they engaged in misconduct as children or teens.
I wonder how other people - people outside of Psychforums - don't feel guilt over these things.

I'd expect that most people who do more serious, genuinely abusive things (as some on here, including myself, have) do. Not that you'd know because, understandably, most people aren't really gonna talk about something like that.

To be honest, I read some of the things on the forum that people feel guilty about and I wonder why they feel guilty. I think there is a difference between children having sexual curiosity with one another and sexual abuse or assault.

I had some experiences as a child that one could class as sexual, but honestly, those things have never majorly bothered me. I had a friend who told me if I showed her my penis she would give me candy, lol, so I was ready to do it and then she changed her mind. I mean, yeah, I thought it was weird but I never gave it much thought. And I had a neighbour who wanted me to lay on the grass so we could rub our penises together, and I did, and I can still remember his little dink being there above me lol and he was lowering himself down towards mine. I got grossed out so I stood up and went inside and that was that. I remember not wanting to go back outside until I knew he didn't want to do it anymore. So I was probably a little rattled, but I think back to it and I am not bothered at all. I don't think "oh man Ben was trying to take advantage, I feel molested!" I recognize that Ben was 2 years older, yes, but he was a child and he was curious.

Now if he forced himself on me it would be a different story, I might have some trauma. But he was just curious. He said he saw his mom and dad rubbing their "pee pees" together and so he wanted to try too. I don't believe he had ill intentions and when I got up he didn't try to convince me to stay or anything.

Even with a girl I was friends with, we showered together when we were 10 or so, so on the cusp of puberty, and I looked down at her vagina by mistake and she asked me to stop and said it wasn't right. So I did and we carried on like nothing happened. I don't feel guilty, I don't think she looks back and thinks I was inappropriate, because I was respectful of her wish to stop.

souvlakispacestation wrote:I'd expect that most people who do more serious, genuinely abusive things (as some on here, including myself, have) do.

Personally (and in answer to the OP's question) I would say that it highly depends on context and framing.

*Trigger Warning for discussion of different forms of abuse*

Thinking back to my time in secondary school (now over a decade ago) there was quite a lot of abuse - including sexual abuse - that went unreported because it was framed as boys just being boys, joking around, pushing boundaries, being playful. There was one 16/17-year-old lad at my school who was known for grabbing female students' breasts. It was just seen as something he did. It was understood to be inappropriate and that he was a bit of an idiot. It really upset some of the victims. But never, never would it have been framed as sexual assault. It just wasn't part of the students' collective vocabulary... it didn't meet the framing.

Likewise, guys sharing naked photos of classmates leaked by boyfriends; teenage boys badgering and bullying their girlfriends into making out for the pleasure of a party of lads; guys grabbing the genitals of other guys as a "joke"; my year 9 form tutor making the whole class play a Christmas game of spin-the-bottle (no, really!) ... all of this consisted sexual abuse - some of it serious and criminal - but it wasn't recognised as such.

A powerful and sadly almost unknown study by Struckman-Johnson et al. (2003) illustrates the prevalence of sexual abuse powerfully. The study is called 'Tactics of sexual coercion: when men and women won't take no for an answer' and examines what they call "post-refusal sexual persistence" i.e. cases in which a victim clearly indicates that they are not interested in sexual contact and the perpetrator persists despite ~ a pretty-clear cut definition for sexual abuse as post-refusal there is clearly no consent. At best any continuation is sexual harassment, at worse, sexual assault or rape.

The researchers interviewed 275 men and 381 women at Midwestern and Southern universities to access both victimisation and perpetration.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12806533

40% of men who took the study self-reported being guilty of 'persistent attempts to have sexual contact with someone who has already refused' - that's 40% of male participants admitting to sexual abuse.

Yet when you read the study it becomes clear that very few of the guilty participants would view themselves as 'rapists' or 'abusers'. Rather, they would frame their behaviour as "seductive"... maybe even pushy but since the vast majority of this behaviour took place within already established romantic relationships or close friendships, they would have been able to mentally differentiate themselves from "real" offenders who attacked strangers etc. etc.

But that's nonsense! Of course they are just as culpable and just as evil as any other sex criminals... but they have a wider cost of socially-sanctioned excuses and self-justifications to fall back upon.

It is worth stressing that 40% is still a minority of men. Also, perhaps there just haven't to be a higher number of sexually predatory guys in the universities and classes from which participants were taken. But even the personal accounts in Struckman et al.'s investigation provide more than a handful of examples of people who, though guilty of similar or even worse behaviour than many on the Remorse forum, were clearly able to avoid feeling guilty by reframing their behaviour as acceptable or normal...

The place I see this the most often is quite possibly in autobiographical comics/ graphic novels.

The most egregious example of this comes from Joe Matt's friend Chester Brown who in Paying For It details his decade's experience as a 'john', paying prostitutes for sex. Brown openly admits he only wants to pay for sex with younger women, often adolescents or those in their early 20s. At one point in the comic, Brown doubts that the girl he is to sleep with is over 18, believing that she is probably younger, with a fake ID, however he shrugs off his concerns and pays her for sex anyway. The same happens when he believes that a girl has been pimped out by a sex trafficker. These scenes are passed over briefly, so we cringe or laugh at them in a way which would be inconceivable had Paying For It taken the form of a documentary. Similarly, scenes in which Brown insists to a madame that he wants to sleep with a young woman who is resistant and doesn't want to go with him, or in which Brown pressures a prostitute to show him her breasts, which she usually keeps covered, are not coded as abusive, because they are sanctified by the fact that Brown is a paying customer and because we are dealing with goofy little comic book characters, not real people (despite the comic being autobiographical and, according to Brown, accurate).

(links to images from comic which though non-explicit are definitely NSFW and likely triggering for survivors)

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y273/the_associate/chester2_zpsada90882.png

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y273/the_associate/chester1_zps57d6c545.png~original

Anyway, it's a topic I've thought quite a lot about and I don't know if there are any easy answers.

TL;DR: Depends on context and framing. It's definitely possible in several cases though.

I'm sure there are many people out there who do bad things and don't feel remorse. But it's difficult to say whether these people outright lack the capacity to feel remorse (i.e. psychopathy), or they're just burying it in their unconscious because it's too painful to observe.

On that second point...

A lot of harm in this world is caused by externalities (or "collateral damage") from institutional behaviour, where liability is spread across a faceless organisation or the veil of social acceptability.

Think of an employee working for a bank who invests in the arms trade, or a government officer who carries forward policies that severely disadvantage thousands of people, even drive people into depression and suicide. You may say there is no ill intention on a personal level there, but it demonstrates how a lack of understanding, or ignorance of the consequences of one's actions, no matter how convoluted, can be linked to a lack of remorse.

Every day, what we label "ordinary law abiding people" do things that will ultimately result in harm. This could be as "innocent" as voting for a government whose policies negatively affect the most vulnerable in society, or the war monger who thinks nothing of ordering bombing campaigns in far away lands (out of sight, out of mind).

As a society we focus heavily on individual actions and consequences - those between which we can see a clear link. But rarely do we question the capacity to feel remorse in an institutional or socially acceptable setting.

Someone once likened the modern corporation to an "immortal psychopath". For the person who has the capacity to feel remorse, it is their ignorance of what causes real harm in the world that closes the door to those feelings of remorse.

So while you may feel suicidal over an action that harmed one person, how do you reconcile that with the collective action of groups of people that harms thousands, perhaps millions in the long term, yet is considered just "another day in the office"?

Until we can gain a wider perspective on the causes of harm in this world, remorse will be a very limited, selfish and hypocritical concept.

While you wallow in the despair of remorse from your actions against another person, are you not ignoring the bigger picture of how the society you're a part of is blindly harming the lives of many more people, the only difference being you can't see the consequences of those actions?

sprock wrote:

souvlakispacestation wrote:I'd expect that most people who do more serious, genuinely abusive things (as some on here, including myself, have) do.

The most egregious example of this comes from Joe Matt's friend Chester Brown who in Paying For It details his decade's experience as a 'john', paying prostitutes for sex. Brown openly admits he only wants to pay for sex with younger women, often adolescents or those in their early 20s. At one point in the comic, Brown doubts that the girl he is to sleep with is over 18, believing that she is probably younger, with a fake ID, however he shrugs off his concerns and pays her for sex anyway. The same happens when he believes that a girl has been pimped out by a sex trafficker. These scenes are passed over briefly, so we cringe or laugh at them in a way which would be inconceivable had Paying For It taken the form of a documentary. Similarly, scenes in which Brown insists to a madame that he wants to sleep with a young woman who is resistant and doesn't want to go with him, or in which Brown pressures a prostitute to show him her breasts, which she usually keeps covered, are not coded as abusive, because they are sanctified by the fact that Brown is a paying customer and because we are dealing with goofy little comic book characters, not real people (despite the comic being autobiographical and, according to Brown, accurate).

(links to images from comic which though non-explicit are definitely NSFW and likely triggering for survivors)

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y273/the_associate/chester2_zpsada90882.png

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y273/the_associate/chester1_zps57d6c545.png~original

I recently found a really, really on-point article about Paying For It that makes a lot of the points I was trying to make, only better.

http://ferretbrain.com/articles/article-781

If this was a searing analysis of abuse and hypocrisy, about how an ordinary man can talk himself into doing reprehensible things, it would be remarkable. But is isn't. Chester never presents himself as part of the problem, not least because he refuses to acknowledge that there might be a problem.