Jacob S - i can't help with the corroboration part.

but i can tell you that i "understand how a kid just a little older can so completely dominate." that was me at one period of my life. the step-dad had already started on me and at the age of 10 or 11 my "best friend" undertook the self-appointed task of filling in my neglected s#x education. he did a very thorough job of it and eventually brought in numerous accomplices. but i was initially vulnerable to him - not because he was older or larger or stronger. heck - he wasn't even as far into puberty as i was. but i felt weak and dumb and inferior and insecure and worthless and needing friendship and information and acceptance. all those things he seemed to offer and promise. i was putty in his hands. this is the first time i've said this - that i "could" have resisted, refused, fought him off - if it had been only a physical contest. but there was a lot more involved in the balance of power than height and weight. it makes me feel like a totally ineffectual wimp, but i didn't have a chance...

lee

I was never really sure if I was going to talk about this, even here, but.... well, yeah.

When I started 6th grade I was soon targeted for really stalker-ish bullying by a sicko trio wolfpack. I was helpless and it dawned on me after only a few months that they could completely ruin my life. Out of nothing less than desperation I "adopted" a slightly older boy who I barely knew but who lived 4 houses away from me - so we would always sit together on the bus, meaning he'd be my human shield so I couldn't get punched and spit-on. He was loud and tough and confident and he did keep me safe.

He ended up being more or less a good friend, for a number of years.

But there was a price. He insisted upon every instance of us hanging out at his house (which for a few years there was literally every single weekday afternoon) that there would be heavy contact sexualized behavior that went significantly beyond my comfort zone. There were never actual sex acts committed between the two of us, no genital contact of any kind, but I had to get used to his dick very quickly and get used to being expected to be constantly naked around him, as well as his.... something, I don't even know what it was, a fetish, at that age??... his WHATEVER insistence that we always be pressed together naked side-by-side while watching porn - like Siamese twins. Basically everything touching EXCEPT our dicks. Because that would have been gay, he'd say. Sometimes he'd arrange for us to sleep that way. One single time I refused to do that.... his response was so angry and ugly that I never refused again.

I got used to it. I was never truly happy about it, but I made a conscious choice to allow it to happen because I needed him to be my larger protector, and because his porn collection was... riveting, magnificent, hypnotic, at that point in my life my single greatest interest on Earth. Somewhere around 12ish-13ish I realized that I was just twiddling my thumbs waiting for him to demand real sexual favors from me, and, giving it as little conscious thought as I could, I decided that I'd give him anything he wanted that didn't involve physical pain. The whole reason I was DOING this was to AVOID physical pain - of getting the shit stomped out of me by the bullies he was protecting me from.

He was always in the driver's seat, anything sex-oriented that he wanted to do got done, and I knew - we surely BOTH knew - that he could have turned me out as his personal sex toy if he'd actually wanted to, if that hadn't been too "gay" for his tastes.

Looking back I don't really regret it and don't categorize it as "abuse." Some embarrassing memories, but the emotions I felt on the occasions when the bullies got me were much much stronger and worse and left far more significant emotional damage. Our arrangement was the lesser evil. But yeah... I sure as hell can attest to how a relatively young kid, less than a year ahead of you though more physically developed, can be unwithstandably sexually steering, demanding, and dominant. He basically made me his prison wife minus the wedding night.


Matt

Justice is elusive for me. The only revenge I will have is getting myself well and healthy enough to live a reasonably satisfying life. I will not quit trying for that. I refuse to let him win.

Jude

Thank you guys. I still have in my head so many lies that say my experiences are invalid and I am just weird and weak for being so messed up. Reading that others know the pain and confusion of similar-age-abuse helps me pry those lies a little looser.

been thinking about abuser #2.

been wondering about the why. And about who abused him. I'm pretty sure someone did, mostly because of the kind of language he used. Like someone had said the same things to him.

He wasn't much older than me. Found his facebook a while back.

Kid was a jerk. I didn't think of him as a kid or a jerk back then, but looking back he was. He had no others friends. I was his friend because thanks to my mom I already believed I had no value except to offer myself up to be whatever other people needed me to be, and because my mother specifically told me to be his friend while my mother was being his mother's friend. So they would go off and leave us at his grandparents house.

According to the sex offender database, just down the street from his grandparents house is where a man lives who was arrested for multiple counts of molestation 8 years after what happened to me. The newspaper real estate archives show that house has not been bought or sold since before I was born, so its possible he lived there and was the one who abused #2.

Its also possible it was his grandfather.

I don't know why it matters to me.

Jacob

I matters because we need to make sense of something that happened to us that doesn't make sense. Why would someone do that to you? It doesn't make sense - so we need to understand why they thought it was ok to do that to us. If there is a reason for their actions then it 'isn't OUR fault' .... it is someother child molesters fault .. who started the cycle.

You could be right about the man up the street or you could be wrong ... but it does sound like someone did something to him.

BTW - It was not your fault.

Lee

Also - my first abusers were boys under the age of 16 and one was only 2 years older than me. So I know how much they can mess you up. I had to understand - that is why I had to see my brother and ask him why.

So I would like to run this by you guys.

I was picked by a neighbor boy about a year older for exploration I think. I don't want to put it into the abuse category because I enjoyed the attention and the touch. Three times he got me alone, put his hands in my pants and fondel me. The second time he also had me fondel him. The third time he though I was asleep and tryed to penetrate me. I pretended to stir and he stoped. I think he was ashamed and was trying to not get caught. I must have been around 9. I told him later that morning that I new what he had done and you would have thought I killed his favorite dog or something.

Later the perp who realy mesed me up at 14 used this information he extracted from me agensed me.

I can't help to think that this kid had been molested, his step farther was likly the reason a 10 or 11 year old would have this much understanding of sex.

I wonder if I have this right in thinking this was not abuse.
I never felt used. Manipulated yes, but I wanted the atention and the touch. It felt good to be chosen. I did not encoded it as unwanted at the time.

Any thoughts would be welcomed.

SmartShadow:

Abuse has to be unwanted at the time and/or damaging and regretted afterwards. It is unavoidable, and (as I think Chase Eric aptly put it) there is a winner and a loser.

Experimentation - homoerotic horseplay - among boys of similar age is perfectly normal, sometimes even beneficial if it brings friends closer together. You don't seem too disturbed by mutual manual contact, and I think all in all you shouldn't be.

Pouncing you in your sleep and attempting sodomy, is a whole nother animal. That was abuse or at least attempted abuse, and it does raise questions of how the boy would have known how to do such a thing.

So - he attempted to transition "good" experimentation into "bad" abuse, and you escaped, fortunately.

I think that all makes sense. I supose because he was ashamed of what he was trying to do the third time and because I had grouped it all into one thing that I did not see the pieces individually. But that makes sence how you broke it down. Thanks

first - i would question whether your perceptions at the time were objective and accurate relections of what really was happening. how many of us as children - or even teens - are capable of making those judgements? there is a reason that young kids are usually not charged or tried or sentenced the same way as adults. and how much are our feelings and ideas at any age - especially when very young - influenced by others? - that "this is OK" or "fun" or "no big deal" or "what all guys do" or "you really like it."

second - and this may be a radical suggestion - i've certainly never seen or heard it anywhere else - but i think abuse can be retroactive. let me explain: some of the things that were done to me - verbal, physical and sekual abuse - may not have been too terribly severe if taken in isolation as unique, one-off events. i really think that it was the cumulative effect of all of it that made it so bad. and each subsequent episode magnified, amplified and aggravated the effects of all the preceeding events so that the total effect was greater than the sum of the parts. so even some things that may have been borderline in severity - became worse in retrospect because of what came after. the memory of the questionable events suddenly took on more connotations and implications in the larger context. i don't know if that makes sense to anyone else - but it seems true to me.

Lee