Can A Child Molest Another Child?
I think that my socially awkward nature as a child and teenager made me a favorite target of predators.
I never spoke up when I felt like someone was bothering or harassing me.
When I was small, one of my older brother’s friends used to do some really weird things to me. I’m going to call him Todd because this blog isn’t about blasting anyone out of the closet or making them face belated consequences for messing with me. I’m just try’na share some stories.
It started unremarkably enough with him flashing me when no one else was looking. We would be hanging out in the basement or the backyard and the moment my brother and everyone was distracted, Todd would pull his pants down and show me his bare white ass. The first time he did it, I just stared wide-eyed and confused. He stuck his tongue out at me and winked. I was eight. He was twelve or thirteen. I thought he was just being a jerk until he started flashing me his penis too.
The first time he showed me his penis, it was in our downstairs den. We were all heading upstairs to get some snacks and me and Todd ended up being the last two to get to the stairs — which I’m sure he orchestrated so that he would have a moment alone with me. He blocked the stairs and when everyone was up and out, he pulled his pants down and swung his hips around. I remember thinking that his penis was pale, floppy, and disgusting. He didn’t do anything to me then, just swung it around for a few seconds then ran upstairs. I wasn’t afraid or anything, just confused. I went up after them and pretended like nothing had happened.
He did that a few more times, growing more and more brazen, until it escalated one night during a sleepover. I didn’t say much when my brother had sleepovers, but I shared a bedroom with him, so it wasn’t like I could disappear either. I loved being around him and his friends anyway because all we did was play video games, eat snacks, fight in the backyard, and talk about teenage stuff (which I was fascinated about). This one particular night, everyone was fighting in the dark and it was a lot of fun. When it was decided to return to the television and a new episode of Jonny Quest, I was wary of Todd and tried to get out of the room before him. He knew what was up and made sure that we were the last two out. When we were alone, he grabbed me and pushed me down against the wall. He sat on top of me and started grabbing, squeezing, and pinching my penis through my shorts. I screamed because it hurt. He ran out of the room. I cried. My brother came back, turned on the light, and started asking me what was wrong.
“What happened? Did Todd hit you? What you do to my brother?”
Todd was vehemently denying anything, but everyone knew that he was the last one out of the room. I forced myself to stop crying because I felt embarrassed. My brother tried to get me to tell him what was wrong but I just kept saying that I was fine and that nothing had happened. I probably should have told the truth, because I think Todd took my denial of his assault as complicity.
It got really creepy the next morning when I woke up to him playing with my ass. I don’t know what he was doing, but my shorts were down and he was spreading me. When he saw that I woke up, he was grinning, sticking out his tongue, and winking like a complete lunatic. I thrashed away, pulled up my shorts, and ran out of the room. I stepped on one of our friend’s legs on the way out and I heard him moan “What the heck?” I sat outside of the room listening to their conversation for a while and wondering what Todd had been doing to me. Whenever he flashed and pinched me, I was disgusted and confused, but what he did that morning made me feel very different. I had my own psycho-sexual trauma and abuse to work through, and I wasn’t prepared to compound that or let him think that what he did was okay. That would have been too weird. So I stayed outside of the room until I heard my brother’s voice, then I came back like nothing had happened. Todd looked scared. I liked that he was scared.
He didn’t stop doing weird shit after that. He did that penis-pinching thing a few more times but I had started trying much harder to avoid being alone with him. He and my brother had a falling out one Halloween over a dispute about candy and that was the last we saw of Todd for several years. He re-entered our lives when I was a bit older (10, which was light years ahead of eight in my child-mind). I remember being alone with him in his bedroom (his house was a ten-minute walk from ours), but I think that he had outgrown whatever weird shit he was into by then. He showed me his indiscriminate card collection (I can’t even remember what kind they were, or if they were cards at all — very well could have been Pogs or Slammers), and was very friendly. He did not try anything weird, but I lingered in the room for a while anyway, wondering if he would.
I’ve never admitted this to my brother and if he ever reads this then I think he’ll know exactly who Todd was. My brother was always protective and I think that it would hurt him to know that one of his friends had been bothering me like that. But I’m alright, man. I don’t have any bitterness toward Todd. He knows who he is. He was just a kid too. Sometimes kids become predators when they’ve been preyed on.
This is a blog post that originally appeared on my site Metallically Black under the title Diary Of A Socially Anxious Introvert III.
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