Beneficiary

The way I was treated by the adventist conference president, when I was 17 and tried to tell that man what my school principal had done to a number of his students, was a lesson for me about how religious organizations, and the adults in charge of them, did not care what happened to children.  The catholic church was the religious organization that received the most media attention for what priests had gotten away with doing to children, but I understood that my own church was as complicit in hiding CSA as any other religion.  Sexual predators are not limited to any certain religion.  They are everywhere, and churches are not the only organizations where children are endangered.  Church youth groups, Boy/Girl Scouts, Pathfinders, Royal Rangers, summer parks and recreation programs, music classes, skating rinks/parks, arcades and online gaming platforms, any group created that offers activities aimed at children is a group that will include predators in positions of power.  There is no distinction between affiliation with a specific religion or political party.  CSA happens wherever there are children present.

I once thought conservatives were more likely to ignore, or actively encourage, the sexual exploitation of children.  What I see happening currently is that left and right both hand children off to predators, they simply frame these exploitations diffently, to appeal to their base.  Children being raised in either environment are just as at-risk.  Each side will rabidly demonize the other for endangering children, while vehemently denying that children are being harmed within their own ranks.  Predators on all sides are the only "winners" of this selective word salad.  Blame and agency are always attributed to the children, in the end result.  Children are the ones who pay the price.

I recently interacted on a thread where a teen was describing their belief that they had been born with an inherent drive to act out sexually with adults.  The self-blaming words they were using came straight from predators.  This teen has been brainwashed to think that what is being done to them is okay, because it makes adults around them happy.  This teen has no way to understand that any adult who is "happy" when a child is displaying symptoms of having been sexually assaulted, is a predator.  Decent adults do not "enjoy" the behavior of an abused child.  This teen is only just starting to understand that their childhood is not healthy.  Unfortunately, plenty of predators, right there in that thread, tried to keep this teen from seeing the truth, by continuing to groom and SA this teen, right there on a popular social media platform.  My words in that thread were noticed by that teen.  For a few comments, that teen started to ask the real questions, started to see the truth.  But predators stepped in to intercept my comments, and deflect that teen's attention.  Predators do not want anyone reaching young CSA survivors with the truth.  

When a river is suffering the effects of being polluted, the best way to find out why that river is not allowed to be what it was naturally meant to be, is to find out who is benefitting from the introduction of pollution.  "Follow the money."  Someone somewhere is benefitting from that river's destruction.  Once the "beneficiary" is identified and held accountable, that river has a chance at recovery.  The pollution is not the river's fault.  The river had no way to protect itself from polluters.  The community around that river has to decide to stop whoever it is that benefits from that river being damaged, being defiled.  Healing that river has to become more important to everyone than whatever "benefits" a few may be receiving by keeping that river in an unhealthy state. 

Who benefits when a child is sexualized?  Only predators. That's it.