Joanna Schroeder looks at a program that identifies early sexual behavior in young children, and attempts to treat them before they become offenders.
Last month, a few of my friends posted this news story on Facebook, about children who were caught playing “Rape Tag” on the playground. Some of my friends took this as a sign that Rape Culture is alive and thriving in the United States.
A new game played in at least one Minnesota schoolyard is upsetting parents and teachers with its “disgusting” premise. “Rape tag” is just like freeze tag, with one alarming difference: Participants need to be humped to be unfrozen.
This seems like a horrifying skit from Saturday Night Live, doesn’t it? And don’t we all agree that there is a major problem when our children are talking about rape as a game? Both boys and girls?
But does that mean that Rape Culture is alive and thriving? No, I don’t think it does. While I believe that there is such a thing as Rape Culture, I actually think the story of this playground conundrum shows that society’s acceptance of rape as being just a part of life, or the fault of women who act or dress provocatively, or even just “boys being boys” is on the decline. The parents and school admins in this community in Minnesota were horrified, and reacted swiftly. There seemed to be no “boys will be boys” attitude here—an attitude that damages everyone, boys included.
My first thought upon reading the case of “Rape Tag” had nothing to do with Rape Culture, in fact my first reaction was that sinking pit in my stomach that always comes with the suggestion or mention of children being sexually abused. In the perfect world we all dream of, and should be working toward, children of this age shouldn’t have any idea that rape even exists.
Children displaying highly sexualized behavior at a young age is a sign of abuse, or at least of neglect, and it is something that should not be ignored or dismissed in either gender. A new program, called RISK, is aiming to identify sexually inappropriate behaviors in young children (regardless of sex) and to give them help. An article in Southern Oregon’s Mail Tribune explains:
“Sexually reactive children are doing sexual acts on younger, weaker kids because they are acting out what was done to them or what they have seen. The acts, though sexual in nature, may not be sexual to the child doing them,” Mish said. “No one wants to label a child so young an offender, but that doesn’t mean that the child can do no harm to others.”
Mish said most of these children were victims of sex abuse, saw pornography or saw adults in sexual situations. They were not perpetrators, “but if no intervention took place, they might indeed end up as a 12- or 13 year old in juvenile detention because they were now offending,” she said.
Regardless of what anyone believes about Rape Culture, one thing I think everyone can agree on is that identifying, addressing, and treating children who display signs of sexually inappropriate behavior is one major way in which we can stop the horrifying cycle of sexual abuse in all forms. We can only hope that programs like this, which approach children with compassion and an aim to heal them, catch on.
Photo courtesy of andrewmalone
Yeah, I don’t know about this. It depends on what is and isn’t considered to be normal childhood behavior which can sometimes be subjective. There is also the problem with competence of evaluators in leading questions and planting ideas. I was naturally curious with my friends when I was young and we played kissing tag, which the girls really liked chasing us. Yet if a kid is saying that they watch porn regularly with an adult then that’s certainly something to be concerned about. Funny that about “rape tag”, there’s a new game now called “pedophile tag”, I was watching… Read more »
Do we have a murder/kill culture when people freely use the word Kill? Kids have played cowboys and indians, KILLING each other in make believe games. Do we assume our kids are all out to start killing each other? This could just be an extension of that. It could also be self-discovery of bodies, part of the “playing doctor” path to growing up, or they might not realize what rape is and to them it’s an innocent game. There are plenty of possibilities and we shouldn’t jump straight into the OMG the kids want to rape each other thoughts. There… Read more »
Ok… I didn’t play rape tag at school, but there were other pseudosexual games. Me and the other kids only had a vague idea of what they meant, we were just acting out another element of a confusing adult world. Maybe rape tag was invented by a kid who was being abused and wanted to act out sexual aggression on other kids, or maybe someone got bored with regular tag and threw in something they’d heard their parents talk about, or had an older sibling explain to them in some kind of half assed manner. Do we assume kids are… Read more »
Because it displays a fundamental lack of understanding as to what rape is and that it is bad, much in the way that a child who terrorizes neighborhood pets–thus displaying a lack of respect for living creatures–has a higher risk of growing up to be a serial killer than others.
Shaughnessy, the two situations are not remotely similar. All the kids did was use the word. As far as the article says, none of them hurt anyone or forced anyone to play. The game is just a rather adult variant of freeze tag. I think we need to be careful about jumping to conclusions. Maybe some of the kids involved are abuse victims. Or maybe they were just doing something “naughty.” I know people do not like to hear this, but kids do not think of sex the same way adults do. Plenty of kids play these kids of games.… Read more »
If the kids were actually raping people, then yeah, but they’re clearly not. I also don’t think its a bad thing for very very young kids not to know what rape is. Why do they need to know? Why can’t that come later, when we teach them what sex is?
Nick. CW says we repress horribly today. Only thing is, when convenient, we repressed even worse back in the old days. So why does this show up now? WTF did it come from? Likely, one kid with some social influence started it and it seemed like fun to the rest. The rest of the kids were so unrepressed that they didn’t freak. Sounds like progress to me. No, wait…. How does this work now? We weren’t getting bj sex in classrooms when I was there. Got a step grandkid who says kids have been havng sex in the middle school… Read more »
I was putting on war paing over the gendered “male=perpetrator / female=victim” perspective of the article, and thea I read this:
“Children displaying highly sexualized behavior at a young age is a sign of abuse, or at least of neglect, and it is something that should not be ignored or dismissed in either gender.”
You are correct. This is a very important and neglected datum. Important enough to let the rest of the article’s problems go, because I don’t want to derail something this critical.
Richard, please explain what you mean by linking your granddaughter and your patella here.
I thought I said my “daughter”. My son will teach my granddaughters about the benefits of applying the patella to the groin. Empowering as all hell.
I don’t think we know this at all (about highly sexualized behavior at a young age.) Frued thought there was a period of normal early childhood sexuality, and it seems to have been true of me. I’m suspicious of fads and fantasies in the therapy world, having been a therapist.
There’s an automatic incentive for therapy entrepreneurs to do case finding (even if the “cases” are baseless.) I lived through the multiple personalities and nursery school abuse eras (both were marked by finding false cases) and am afraid it could happen again.
I’m not a Foucauldian, but this treatment discourse is a little scary. I was never abused nor saw porno as a child, but did play doctor occasionally. I think that’s natural, even good. I can easily see us developing a “zero-tolerance” attitude toward this, and having the unintended consequence of screwing our kids even more than they are. In my mind, it’s the repression that’s the problem. We tend now to see abuse everywhere, and screw our kids up by overscheduling them and “helicoptering” them beyond belief. If the kids are playing “rape tag,” indeed, stop that. But we need… Read more »
Henry, your comment reminds me of Skinner’s book Walden Two which addressed the subject of sex play among kids directly. The problem we have is that unlike the free exploration of sex that is set out in Skinner’s utopia, the rape tag game of which Joanna writes seems to be born from this repression. I’m not sure how we escape the spiral of repression and acting out we’ve gotten ourselves in.
I just think we need to be careful of taking this sort of thing too far. Yes, we want to be aware of the signs of children acting out based on their own abuses, and treat it. But we can’t just see all sex play as evidence of abuse.
Good thing we nipped ‘rape tag’ in the bud.
Isn’t it funny more’s being done about a kid’s game then the sexual abuse of minors in juvenile prisons?
I guess the difference is that one’s scaring the crap out of a bunch of kids and the other would require actually questioning our institutions.