Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Why We Don’t Believe Boys: Female Grooming & the Male Teen

Transcript

Why We Don’t Believe Boys: Female Grooming & the Male Teen · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:03
  G'day humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. It is never comfortable talking about the abuse of children, especially not the sexual abuse of children, but the conversation somehow becomes even more uncomfortable. We don't really know how to navigate it.
• 0:21
  When we're talking about adolescent boys who are sexually abused by older women, especially older family members, when today's guest was 13, his stepmother initiated a sexual relationship with him that lasted for three years and made him a father at the age of 15, a secret that he had to keep, that he had to lie about the provenance of his own daughter.
• 0:51
  And the horror and confusion of feeling complicit in that relationship, of being treated as if he was the guilty party, perhaps because he was a male, perhaps it would have been different if the genders were flipped, and we discussed that in this conversation,
• 1:06
  The shame of it all, the frustration with seeing bystanders get gaslit and seeing abusers get exonerated, motivated Harry to turn this into a political cause. He launched a political campaign which was called, Hashtag Your Reference Ain't Relevant?,
• 1:26
  The reference to reference there is about good character references that are used in courts of law to try to give the sentencing judge or magistrate a more rounded idea of what an upstanding citizen, the person who's just been convicted of a crime, is.
• 1:42
  And Harry has managed to get the law changed. Just last month, in this state of New South Wales, he succeeded in having a bill passed into law, which now abolishes the practice of good character references in criminal trials. There are bills in a lot of other Australian states which are poised to do the same thing, and wherever you are in the world, this is a matter of...
• 2:04
  great importance, should it be the case that the criminal justice system takes into account letters written by powerful, influential friends and colleagues of people who've been convicted of a crime when deciding what the penalty should be. Harry was generous enough to stop by the Uncomfortable Conversations studio to talk us through the totally head-spinning dynamics of being seduced as a boy, especially by someone he trusted, and he was a man who was a man who
• 2:30
  how the sentencing of sexual and domestic violence abusers should be reformed and has been broken, and how gender expectations affect how we think about teenage victims. Harry has a new book. It's a bestseller. It's part memoir, part advice. It's called Transform Your Pain Into Purpose.
• 2:48
  As always, if you need a hand with any similar situations, if you find yourself in a situation of domestic violence or sexual abuse, there are 24-7 hotlines that you can always call. So if you're in that situation and you're listening to this, in Australia the number is 1-800-RESPECT. In the US it's 1-800-656-HOPE. And in the UK it's 0808-500-2222. I hope you enjoy as much as I did the one, the only Harry James.
• 3:25
  I mean, at what point were you actually having sex? And was that a- Oh, it was a matter of weeks from the movies. Right. And then was that head spinning? What did you feel? Oh, I felt on top of the world because I was coerced into thinking that this was love and this is how we extend out. I lost my virginity. I thought I was, you know, king of the world. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, the- And you couldn't tell friends about it?
• 3:49
  No, because I actually cut off a lot of friends and didn't have that sort of normal coming-of-age, teenage sort of stories that you hear about going to house parties and being with friends and stuff like that and drinking and stuff like that. I avoided all that because if I let down the barrier even slightly…
• 4:09
  the secret could unravel. And I felt a sense of duty to not only protect myself, but to protect my stepmother. That's how coerced and in it I was. I didn't fathom it as abuse at all.
• 4:25
  Was she, you said she was Filipino, was she born in Australia or was she born abroad? No, born in the Philippines. And did she have good command of English? Like, did you talk about things? To what extent did you have an emotional and, like, psychological affection? Yeah, yeah, no, undoubtedly. And she was an expert in being able to do that. But, yeah, it was all coercive and...
• 4:53
  I'm hesitant to use the word relationship because I don't want to instill that idea that this was a relationship at all. It was, in fact, the polar opposite. But for me to be able to relay it to listeners or people that are watching this to sort of understand what it was like, it was like a regular relationship.
• 5:10
  But obviously, there was a disparity of the... You know, I was a child and... I mean, I think that is really important for people to understand. And I remember the penny dropping when I spoke to another survivor of, like, child sex abuse about that. That we can often, in our eagerness to demonize the crime, we talk about it as a violent crime. We talk about, like... Oh, that's totally understandable. Yeah. And so, we sometimes...
• 5:38
  have an image in our head of what a child rapist is, which is like brutalizing and violent and the child cowering in fear and everything. But in a way, that's actually easier to pick, presumably, than the more insidious reality, which is that the child, you know, tragically feels complicit and feels like they have agency. And that's why there's so much shame to unpack for all those years after. Right. Because you're grappling with the idea. Oh, I was grappling with the idea of
• 6:07
  Oh, but I thought I wanted this, but I'm being told it's abuse, but I'm a guy, so I should feel lucky for getting this. And there's so much shame and so much sort of, I guess, stereotype that you have to undo, societal sort of stereotype.
• 6:27
  But you're 100% right, Josh. We do it with even, you know, adult cases of rape. We think of a rapist, you know, it happens down a dark alleyway and it's violent and it's abrasive. But that's not, I'd say 99% of these crimes do not operate like that. It is a constant erosion of boundaries. The people that perpetrate these crimes are experts at what they do.
• 6:56
  it's a slow erosion, just bit by bit, bit by bit. When you say they're experts, how are they experts? Had she done this before, or do you think that it was just innate, that it's an innate skill, if you want to put it that way? Well, no, there's an expertise in the ability to be able to perpetrate it because she got away with it for so many years. And that's what a lot of these offenders do. There's just this...
• 7:20
  there's this like sort of premeditated, coercive, calculated, sort of meticulous element to it as well, constantly sending me messages to see where my whereabouts are, constantly gauging if I'll say anything, you know, outside of just me and my stepmother and stuff like that. So there is sort of an expertise to how they do it because it's –
• 7:49
  They're just constantly gauging you and monitoring you. And did it show up in your personality in any way? I mean, you move in and then within weeks you're having sex at the age of 13 with your dad's wife. I'm being abused by my dad's wife.
• 8:07
  Yes, yes. Did your emotional response show up in the sense that did your mum or teachers or friends or anything notice that you were either withdrawn or suppressed? Not to that degree. It sort of...
• 8:27
  sort of I was running on a high, really. I mean, I was a pubescent boy who was, you know, living the ultimate fantasy in his mind, and I was running on a real high. But things just played as normal, and I just felt as though I had to keep this secret. And I think that sort of when I started to cut more and more people off and sort of isolate, it was just a gradual thing over these years that sort of faded into that for me to be able to just focus on.
• 8:56
  Yeah, my life with my stepmother and my daughter that was born. So how long did it take for her to get pregnant? So I started to be sexually abused at the end of year eight. So I was 13. And then my daughter was born in December of 2015. So just after I turned 15 is when she became pregnant.
• 9:16
  Right. So it was about a year before she became pregnant. Yeah. And was your dad around enough that he plausibly thought it was his? No, no, he definitely thought it was his. But the thing is, Josh, and this is going to sound crazy, but I detail it in the book and I talk about my father's ego and inability to come to terms with what happened. But he, well, first let me say this, and I've mentioned it.
• 9:42
  before um when i've spoken about my story but my father caught um my stepmother abusing me one time and didn't report it didn't do anything and then when she fell pregnant he just buried his head in the sand and and told himself it was his even though he had a vasectomy with um when my last sibling was born wow yeah
• 10:05
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• 10:32
  catalogue of mind-expanding, bullshit-free, uncomfortable conversations. Back to the show. And when you say that he caught you, how definitive was that? What were you doing? Yeah, my stepmother was in my bed with me, kissing me while we were watching a show, and he sort of stood there and watched it for a bit at the doorway, which was really creepy and weird.
• 10:52
  And then he just erupted and went off his brain. I slept in my bed. You mean he got angry? He got really angry. Yeah. I slept in my bed. My stepmother got out of my bed, slept on the couch. My father slept in his bedroom. And the next morning I woke up without...
• 11:12
  You know, no one was there. They'd gone. And then I'd gotten a phone call from my father. Keep in mind, I was a 14-year-old boy. And he said, if I ever catch you doing that again, you watch what I fucking do to you. And then I bawled my eyes out crying, put my school uniform on, packed my bag and went to school for ninth grade.
• 11:36
  So even then, like, if I ever catch you doing that again, you watch what I fucking do to you. That just cemented the shame.