respect77;4035775 said:
"Conversations With A Pedophile: In the Interest of Our Children"
It really started to intrigue me what Wade would take away from such a book and how he would try to apply its content to MJ, so I spent about $7 on it on Amazon Kindle and bought it.
I'm going to write a report later
So the book is basically a conversation between "Alan" (the pedophile) and Amy, the author. Each chapter is told from the POV of either of them. Amy is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse herself, but that's not why she met Alan. She's a music therapist and she met him in that function. They were well into their discussions that lasted for several months and years, when she disclosed to him that she's a survivor. (She was abused by her father and grandfather when she was a child.)
I'm not sure how Wade is trying to relate this book to Michael, because the pedophile portrayed in it is nothing like him. In fact, this book just shows why Michael does not fit into that so called "profile" at all. The victim (Amy) too is very different from Wade. When she was a child she kept it a secret because she thought "there was no one to rescue me".
"And I was convinced that it was a secret that could never be told, because I felt, at nine years old, that there was no one to rescue me."
She tried to tell her mother in childish ways, such as making her read a certain book to her at bedtime and telling her that the protagonist in it was "just like me" - and the protagonist was a sexually abused girl - but her mother did not or did not want to realize the clues.
Quotes from the book:
"Sometimes the most therapeutic discovery of all is the sheer knowledge that you’re not alone, that what happened to you has happened to another."
"For the victim, feeling different means feeling painfully cut off from others on a profound level. A kind of permanent loneliness keeps the victim from connecting with others and enjoying life fully. Before his child victims evolve emotionally , long before they assume full control of their own minds and bodies, the abuser intervenes and thwarts the process. These children are unaware that many other children who are also victims have experiences like theirs and share the feelings of differentness. They feel isolated."
"Sexually abused children know, of course, that other children eat, sleep, and go to school as they do, but that’s where the similarity often ends."
"Looking back, it seems to me that I swung between crying out for help and almost giving up on life altogether. I felt so different from others, so dirty and bad, that it seemed impossible even to try to relate my experiences to anyone. I had no words for these experiences anyway."
"I came to understand the feelings of difFerent-ness that are universal among victims of childhood sexual abuse through memories from my own childhood as well as through subsequent music therapy work with patients."
"Sexually abused children find it almost impossible to communicate to others about their experiences. They feel that they are to blame for what has happened to them and that they will be punished. Feelings of self-disgust run so strong that the child is certain that any possible listener will share these same feelings of repulsion for him or her. This fear locks away the possibility of communicating feelings to disclose crucial information to those who could help. For these and many other reasons, reaching out simply does not happen, and the child is self-defeated."
Obviously this does not apply to Wade, who after 1993 could not think no one would believe or rescue him or that he was alone, let alone after 2005. Yet, he still tries to apply these examples to himself on his website, when he makes claims that he felt alone and isolated. Not even realizing how just because he read it in a book that most victims feel so it does not mean it can be well applied to his alleged case. In fact, it cannot. Victims in other cases feel lonely and isolated because they think they are alone and no one would believe them. Pretty hard to sell in Wade's case considering 1993 and 2005.
As for Alan:
He abused more than one thousand young boys. When he was convicted there were dozens of his victims in the courtroom.
Quote:
"Research shows the average pedophile abuses approximately 250 children (United Youth Security, 1999)."
It's obvious from what he tells that pedophilia is a compulsive, obsessive and progressive illness, that one can never get under control voluntarely. Actually in the life of the pedophile it's all-consuming. Everything he does is done eventually to prey on victims.
"We learn from Alan that pedophilia is an orientation forged in childhood. He began sexually abusing younger children when he himself was a young child."
"He had told me that only boys between the ages of six and thirteen were appealing to him, that after puberty they no longer held the attraction for him."
I guess this is why Wade and James claim MJ stopped molesting them when they reached puberty.
Alan says that he always felt different and could not fit in with other people. This turned into always feeling a victim of his circumstances. He says:
"This self-created and self-serving sense of victimization allowed me to do anything that I desired without the slightest twinge of guilt, shame, responsibility, or remorse."
MJ was the embodiement of compassion and empathy. Pedophiles are just the opposite. They do not really feel sorry for their victims. I think this is why, if there is a trial, besides evidence it will be important to call character witnesses about MJ and to show his real personality, not the tabloid caricature that Stacy Brown and his ilk are still working on to build.
As often pointed out, pedohilia is about control and power, which Alan keeps confirming throughout his story:
"Although I felt vulnerable and incapable in the world surrounding me, I could always offset those feelings by acting out. I could, at any time, make myself feel stronger and more in control of life by forcing some even more vulnerable child into submitting to my will. This single aspect of life seemed to be the only domain that was within my control and the only activity that provided me with any sense of pleasure, power, and, in a twisted fashion , acceptance. Sexual fantasy and sexual abuse became my total panacea. I sexualized everything in life and took out all of my pent-up feelings and frustrations in sexual and sexually aggressive ways against more vulnerable victims."
Book says pedophiles are oversexualized as children and then continue to be as adults. To them "...all of life becomes one giant sexual experience".
"I didn’t see sex as a part of life but rather as the sole purpose of my existence. And, as my focus centered more and more around my sexual difference, the mental gap I felt between myself and all other people grew wider and wider."
"By judging objects in this fashion, I was filtering out any parts of life that I didn’t see as serving a sexual purpose. I was actively working to support my view of life as a totally sexual experience. Unfortunately, inanimate objects were not the only “ things” that I began to judge in this manner."
Reading the book it seemed to me this aspect of having power over someone and being able to manipulate him is a lot more important to a pedophile than the actual sex act. In fact, Alan did say that to him the most satisfying and "electrifying" moment was not that of the sex act but the moment when he saw his victim give up resistance and surrender. Once they became overly submissive he lost interest in them and moved on to the next victim, because it wasn't as exciting to him any more as when he saw a victim struggle with feelings and then the moment of giving up and surrendering. There's definitely an emotionally sadistic element here IMO.
I it seems the road to the actual molestation, the planning, the plotting, the manipulation was just as important to him - also in terms of excitement - as the actual act of molestation.
"By fourteen, I had figured out that manipulation, planning, and patience were much more effective than rushing ahead and taking unnecessary chances."
Yet acc. to Wade's story MJ molested him the first night. There was no grooming, no build-up, nothing.
"In these early years, I was already discovering that while I loved the ultimate sexual act, the real thrill lay in the planning, a thrill that equaled that of the final sexual release. Another thing I was discovering was that for me to deviate from my established plan significantly detracted from my sense of excitement and enjoyment."
So also for his "excitement" Alan needed to follow an established plan. That was part of the game, that excited him.
However with MJ, if we put all these allegations against him side by side, there is just no pattern in them (even if the accusers try to throw in some superficial elements to resemble past allegations - re. alcohol, porn etc.).
Amy again about her own abuse:
"During this time, I was exhibiting several physical symptoms. I had mysteriously contracted severe psoriasis. When I first asked my mother to examine my head, she was completely stunned that huge patches of it covered my entire scalp. There was even more alarm when a physician discovered that my genital area was also affected. Today such a discovery would warrant the attention of agencies for detecting child abuse, and the physician would be mandated to report such a case. However, this 1960s dermatologist’s interrogation was limited to a querying raised eyebrow, directed at my mother."
There ARE physyical symptoms! There is no way there aren't, especially with the things Wade claims. Any doctor who would claim now that he noticed something but did not report it (esp. with all the claims around MJ and knowing about Wade's connection to him) would be in BIG trouble and should be among those who Wade sues, rather than MJ's companies!
Will his mother now claim she noticed some physical signs? Then again, why didn't she report them? Or at least make the sleepovers stop? And why didn't she mention these then in 2005? Was she too brainwashed? And how is she getting a pass for it while MJ's companies are being sued for "turning a blind eye"?
"I was also having difficulty following instruction in class, was found masturbating in school on a number of occasions , and feigned mysterious illnesses on a regular basis. It was no surprise that I was unable to continue on to the next grade in school. Although my schoolwork was satisfactory, it was decided by the school and my family that I needed to repeat the year in order to be more emotionally secure. I changed to another neighborhood school in order to repeat without embarrassment, which constituted another disruption in this already traumatic time of my life."
Alan:
"For me, secrecy was the glue that held my fantasies together. Secrecy was the element that added a feeling of excitement, heightening the overall thrill I got from offending. It represented a twisted sense of personal power and personal worth, and ultimately it was my critical weapon both to entice and ensnare my young victims."
"My methods were not quick but designed to build, very slowly , a child's acceptance of the need for secrets. At the same time, secrecy gave me the opportunity to make a child believe that I was the only person in the world who really cared for him and looked out for him."
"As I mentioned, I usually only attempted to molest a child after getting to know the potential victim and his family."
Never immediately right on the first occasion, like Wade claims!
"Once I gained access to that circle, I would attempt to gain as complete an understanding of the boy as I could, see how he related to the adults and other family members, and if it appeared that there was a realistic possibility of success, I would then begin to groom my target. If I had determined that this child did not have the type of personality that led him always to discuss things with his parents, I knew that reluctance to communicate on his part could be developed into the keeping of secrets."
"Although I tailored my approach to suit the individual victim, the overall process seldom varied."
It's called a pattern, but in MJ's case there is no pattern at all in these stories. One alleged victim claims a slow gradual build-up to the abuse, the other claims MJ molested him immediately.
"For the next few weeks or months, I would spend every available opportunity subtly drawing the child closer and closer."
"Throughout this entire period, which might well take up to a year, I continued to draw him further and further away from trusting his parents and worked toward his ultimately seeing them as a necessity but one to be outwitted and controlled."
Wade's story is that the first night they spent on NL MJ abused him and continued to abuse him on each and every occasion they stayed alone in a room until he was 13 or 14 year old. So with no grooming, no build-up, no cautious studying of the family and the alleged victim etc., how could MJ be sure that Wade would never speak out until he's 30 and decides to file a civil lawsuit years after MJ's death?
This would be an extremely reckless abuser and if so he should have been caught much earlier and there should be actual, real evidence against him. Haters always explain the lack of real evidence by claiming he was extremely cunning and manipulative. So how was he both reckless and extremely cunning? You can't have it both ways.
"Keeping all of these seemingly minor secrets had built up a feeling of equal responsibility and equal guilt in this totally innocent child, something I had worked to achieve, and it was this inability to inform on me without having to explain his own willing participation that finally kept him captive to my sick desires."
In the book Alan explains it in lenght how it was a slow, gradual process until he built up this atmosphere with the victim that the victim felt the need to keep their secrets. Again, it requires grooming and build-up!
"Prior to my taking the first physical action against a victim, I would have spent a great deal of time getting to know both the child and his family. Before I reached the point of physically committing myself to this crime, I wanted to make sure that it was as close to foolproof as I could make it and that the victim was groomed as well as possible to keep our secret."
!!!!
Then he talks about control and power:
"Unfortunately, for many of us, the need to reprove our “power” becomes more and more constant . And frequently the level of proof we need to validate our sense of control continues to escalate."
Which is what makes pedophilia a progressive illness! To be blunt: someone who's already done anal sex with children won't be satisfied with just masturbation and oral sex with all the subsequent victims. But this is what Wade basically claims now with adding the anal sex element: MJ did it with him (and maybe with James before him - we will see what his allegations are), but then never again with either of his later victims. This notion again goes against how pedophilia works in real life. Not only the acts themselves escalate and become more and more brutal and abusive, but also the number of victims that he had at once became more and more.
In the allegations against MJ we should believe it was the opposite on each front: also in the number of victims, since 4 of his 5 alleged victims only Gavin came from a later time, all others are from the late 80s, early 90s. So we should believe that MJ molested kids in the late 80s and early 90s then stopped. Then molested Gavin in 2003. That's not how it works.
Pedophilia is progressive.
"What I didn’t see at that early age was that each time I felt the thrill that came when a victim gave in to my demands , the thrill quickly left me wanting to have it again. At first I tried to re-create the feeling by having a victim do what he had done before, but it was never the same—pleasurable but not exciting . Every time I proved that I was able to make someone do what I wanted, I found myself having to prove it again, and again, and again. I also learned that making a new victim do the same act was electric. Now I had two tools for feeling the excitement— finding new victims and making the current victim do something new."
"I need to point out that not every boy went along with all of the steps in my cycle. I encountered a lot of victims who permitted me to continue to a certain point and then flatly rejected all attempts beyond that level. This loss of control drove me crazy. I would try every manipulation, bribe, and promise I could fantasize about with those boys, but some of them still would not surrender. When I reached that point, I was frustrated and dropped him for another, more willing victim."
It's all about control for pedophiles! That is why stories like Jordan's in Gardner's interview sound so off. When he claims he did not like MJ putting his tongue in his ear and grabbing his butt and he told him to stop that and he "never did that again". Not to mention the whole ridiculousness of Jordan telling him to stop butt-grabbing, but not telling him to stop masturbation and oral sex, considering it was apparently pretty easy to tell MJ to stop certain things and he did.
"I desperately wanted to once again be in a position where I was surrounded by young boys, but I did not want to take that step until I had the entire congregation convinced that I was doing this with extreme reluctance and only because I was practically drafted by the pastor and elders. The last thing in the world that I wanted anyone to wonder was why this single young man wanted to devote so much time to being around little boys. As I had expected, the scoutmaster discussed the matter with several of the church elders and our pastor, and I was besieged with requests to get involved."
"The image I needed was now in place. Should anyone raise the question as to why this new young man spent so much time with these kids, the entire neighborhood and congregation would explain just how hard they had to work to talk me into it."
He put on a facade acting like he was not particularly interested in, and even reluctant of being around and working with children to not to raise suspicion. Now, how does it compare to MJ openly walking around with his alleged victims in front of the media and openly telling about sharing bed with them? I'm sorry, but I don't think a real pedophile would ever do that, especially a clever, manipulative and cunning one like MJ supposedly was.
"By twenty-four, I had two different means of accessing potential victims: through friendship with their parents or through the scout troop. I employed a method and pattern of abuse I’d been creating and refining for seventeen years, and I had no fear that my victims would ever inform on me. The tools at my disposal as an adult were a great deal more powerful than those I had in earlier years, and as a result, I was molesting on a scale that even I would not have thought possible five years earlier. Now I had a constant pool of young victims in various degrees of molestation, a pool that had to contain somewhere in the neighborhood of forty to fifty youngsters. I distinctly remember attending a church Christmas pageant at this time, and of the eleven boys on the stage, nine of them were current victims."
Pedophilia is compulsive, obsessive and progressive.
"Although the eleven- or twelve-year-old was totally disgusted by what he was being forced to endure, he would almost always rather submit than ever risk the mortal shame of anyone’s finding out. As these victims approached puberty, however, the growing sense of adolescent independence was making further submission more and more intolerable. By thirteen , the average victim of my abuse was searching desperately for some way to end it but to do so without having to make any of it known to anyone. In earlier years, when it took me significantly longer to totally escalate a victim, this adolescent sense of independence occurred at just about the same time that I was losing interest in the boy."
In both Wade and James story it's MJ who ends the abuse at 13, not them because of some "growing sense of adolescent independence". (And in Jordan and Gavin's stories supposedly he starts to molest them at this age, when they start to have this "growing sense of adolescent independence"...) In fact, James claims MJ started to "groom him for separation" at 12. Why do you even need to groom a kid for that? A kid would be very happy if the abuse just ended. These victims are not some eager participants who enjoy it.
Basically the sense of control and power for this guy comes from having the ability to make his victims whatever he wants them to do, despite of their disgust or fears. Once a boy becomes submissive and does not display the initial sense of fear, reluctance, disgust etc., the offender loses interest. So like he said earlier he either needed to move on to new victims or needed to make his current victims do new things that they dreaded. One of these were being photographed while doing sexual things, so that's when he started to take pornographic photos and videos of them:
"With each successive victim, regardless of the number and variety of photos I ended up taking, I took one eight-shot series in which I posed each boy naked in perfectly identical poses in the same setting. When I had completed this series with the second victim, I laid both the boy’s shots out next to each other and was captivated by a sense of power in being able to demand identical performances from each of them. In time, the number of victims in those photos as well as my sense of control grew tremendously."
"Before long, there were twenty-two medium-sized brown envelopes locked in a wooden chest in my bedroom. Each envelope contained an entire photographic record of a different victim. All of my photographed victims had now reached the point where they were no longer resisting being filmed. The most exciting part at this point was laying out one identically posed shot for each of the boys and experiencing a surge of power knowing that I had forced all of them to do exactly the same thing in
exactly the same place despite their fear of being recorded."
"I began to do things that were unnecessary in order to obtain my goal, i.e. making endless lists, notes, and forms, in order to both heighten the excitement and prolong the fantasy."
This just made me think of the lack of any such material ever found in Michael's possession. He was a graphomaniac, he always wrote notes about everything and pedophiles are obesssed people. So how came there is no writing, note or anything like that pertaining to these alleged acts?
"I became more and more obsessed with the fantasy until I reached the point, normally in the week prior to acting out, where virtually everything else in my life meant nothing to me, and I concentrated on nothing else."
"I was completely obsessed with the ritualistic nature of the actual abuse. Crucial to me was the slow and deliberate pace, the continual escalation of each phase, and especially the adamant demand that each victim play out his role precisely as I intended it."
"I saw these abuses as rituals because by the time that I actually acted them out, I had pictured them so vividly and so frequently in my imagination that their ultimate enactment had a distinctly ritualistic feeling for me. I also refer to these occasions as rituals because their implementation was intentionally prolonged by my forcing my victim( s) to submit to a series of escalating steps, all of which were totally unnecessary to obtaining my sexual goal."
So the slow build-up isn't just for caution, but also because it's part of the excitement.
"My acting out and my obsession were to continue for another twenty years. During that entire period, the frequency of my abusing and the extremes to which I went to carry out my abuses continually escalated."
Again: progressive. You will not start with anal sex and then go to just masturbation.
"Alan was eventually caught after a mother found a Polaroid of her son in a sexual position while she was cleaning his room . She contacted the police, Alan was apprehended, and charges were pressed. An investigation ensued, and many other victims came forward. Alan pleaded guilty on all charges. His charges numbered so high that he had the dubious distinction of being the largest-scale sexual offender in the area."
So once the guy was exposed, dozens of other alleged victims came forward. Not 20 years later, filing a civil suit after the guy's death...
For Wade to say this book helped him to understand the mind of his alleged abuser just shows once again how full of it he is.
unk: