The person who sexually abused me when I was 5 years old is someone I could describe as a “groomer,” a “pedophile” or a “child molester.”
I couldn’t find these words for over 20 years, in part because I didn’t understand what happened to me — I was so young — but also because I had to first reckon with the pain, horror, and shame I felt. Once I started therapy, it took me six months to share my abuse for the first time. Another two years passed before I was able to talk in generalities about my experience with my family. This is the norm for child survivors of sexual abuse. Our words carry weight, and we fight to say them out loud.
As we head into the 2022 midterm elections, calling someone a “groomer” or a “child abuser” has become the conservative attack du jour. What once felt like language reserved for the followers of QAnon, a fringe community united by a central conspiracy theory that America is run by an elite ring of pedophiles, has seeped into the mainstream. The use of these terms has even sparked the anti-gay slur “OK, groomer,” a play on the phrase “OK, boomer,” which is often used by young people to disregard or mock retrograde arguments made by baby boomers.
Anyone who opposes Gov. Ron DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill in Florida is “probably a groomer,” according to his press secretary, Christina Pushaw. Anyone pushing back on conservative ideology is a molester. With that logic, roughly 50 percent of the American electorate are “pedophiles.” Most recently, Mallory McMorrow, a Democratic state senator running for re-election in Michigan had to publicly denounce baseless claims from her opponent that she was a groomer.
If the politicians making those accusations were actually concerned about ending child abuse, the kinds of institutions they would be challenging would include religious organizations, youth sports and even the nuclear family — systems that exert control over children and their bodies. These are the venues where child sexual abuse commonly occurs. The misuse of these words is not about stopping abuse, but rather a reassertion of homophobia, gender hierarchy and political control.
Abusers often seek to gain the trust of their victims and, in time, use that trust to assert control over them. In my case, a medical professional used my reliance on health care, as a child with a life-threatening illness, to take advantage of me, stripping away any remnant of bodily autonomy I had left.
When I think about the root of that violation, it reminds me of what we are seeing conservatives do to the most vulnerable among us: proposing and passing laws that ban health care for transgender children or strip us of reproductive care. Our bodily autonomy is being ripped away by the same people who are crying abuse.
Calling political opponents “groomers” is clearly the latest in an unoriginal conservative strategy to name-call and character assassinate the opposition, it’s that exact frivolity that is so dangerous and corrosive to the very real and devastating experience of sexual abuse. To use these words in this way voids them of their real meaning and desensitizes civil society to bodily harms, especially those carried out under a shroud of secrecy. To weaponize this claim casually in a political debate is to degrade the lifeline of vulnerable children. When an adult uses your 6-year-old body for sexual gratification, words are the only power you have left.
A study by Child USA, an organization that investigates child abuse, found that survivors were 52 years old, on average, when they first reported childhood sexual abuse. To make matters worse, Department of Justice data suggests that 86 percent of this kind of abuse goes unreported altogether. Reasons for the delay or lack of reporting stem from a fear of not being believed and a pervasive devastating shame.
The poet and author Maya Angelou was raped by her mother’s boyfriend at age 7. Days after she reported her abuser, he was found dead. The experience was so traumatic that she refused to speak for nearly five years. Finding and sharing words is excruciatingly challenging for all survivors, but especially for children.
In her new book, “The Trayvon Generation,” the poet Elizabeth Alexander writes: “For all of us, language is how we say who we are and we cannot solve our problems without it.” Terms like child molester are not the only ones fraught with conflict these days, but the stakes with these words are higher than most. The victims are children who cannot fight back. Words, in this case, are the mechanism of action. A child in danger cannot find safety if the language we use to define abuse is diluted. Language is also what helps survivors find some semblance of healing; it’s our only way out.
Trauma of any kind, but especially childhood trauma, is splintered and stored in the brain in fragments. The memories are often so overwhelming that they simmer under the surface for years, creating chaos in the body and a sense of unrelenting threat.
For me, this manifested as the visceral desire to hide under desks and tables when the television screens in my office broadcast the testimony of gymnasts who had suffered abuse at the hands of Larry Nassar. It appeared as the inability to hear when I was stressed, because of the way my reflexes were trained to block out sound. It appeared as the inability to be in an intimate relationship without panic attacks or dissociation. And it appeared as a chronic and pervading distrust of authority that has followed me ever since.
Only in constructing language around my experience could I access help, release myself from a long-harbored and isolating secret, and create a narrative that put the disparate pieces of my trauma back together. I finally have ownership over my experiences, and therefore my life. I can see a future for myself that I once could not, one that is free of harmful physical and emotional reactions and full of meaningful relationships.
No anti-LGBTQ education bill, book ban or health care ban, would have prevented my abuse or helped me in its aftermath. What could have helped me was comprehensive sexual education in which I would have been taught age-appropriate language around consent, like “good touch” and “bad touch.” That language would have also helped me understand that what happened to me was wrong and that it was not my fault, ideas that I have grappled with since that day and have still not settled all these years later.
One in four girls and one in 13 boys will endure sexual abuse before their 18th birthday. That is far too many children to sacrifice for the sake of salacious political rhetoric.
Language doesn’t just create meaning; it helps us make sense of the world. If we can’t agree on the meaning of sexual abuse, I fear for our future and our ability to relate to one another. If we can’t agree that the use of these words is sacred and worth protecting from daily politics, we are telling one another that our deepest, most intimate, heart wrenching wounds are empty — and that we may as well be, too.
Kendall Ciesemier (@kciesemier) is a writer and producer. She is the host of the A.C.L.U. podcast, At Liberty. The author is writing as an individual, not for the ACLU.
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