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Adult women groomed by child molesters' heteronormative dating scripts
Women's Studies International Forum 56 (2016) 66–73
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Women's Studies International Forum journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/wsif
Adult women groomed by child molesters' heteronormative dating scripts☆ Helen J. McLaren Social & Policy Studies, Flinders University, GPO Box 2100, Adelaide, SA 5001, Australia
a r t i c l e
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Available online 28 March 2016
s y n o p s i s Understanding the paradox of heteronormative power in which women are forced into subjectivity and simultaneously constructed with agency as they take up available discourses is critical for breaking women's silence and for responding to child safety concerns. This paper draws from multiple interviews with fourteen women who partnered with men they later knew were sexually abusing children. Transcripts were analyzed by applying feminist interpretations of Foucauldian discourse theory that searched for repetitions of discourse in the language that women used to describe the heteronormative dating scripts used by their partners. The women indicated, once child sexual abuse became known, that the same heteronormative discourses operated to shame, blame and silence them. These discursive pressures compelled the women to maintain facades that represented heteronormative relationship ideals, which served to increase the men's control over them and strengthen the men's ability to keep their sexual abuse of children secret. © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Introduction The fundamental desirability of love and coupledom is embedded within social institutions in which the meaning of heterosexual relationships are intertwined with emotional fulfillment, personal identity and material security. Whether women mysteriously ‘fall in love’ or whether their feelings of love manifest over time, women's desires for romantic love are presented through dominant discourses that portray associations between male–female coupledom with happiness, safety, status and a sense of self in the world (Langford, 1999). These discourses are so powerful; they have dominated popular media, romantic fiction, and consumption markets and extend across cultures for more than the last century (Choi, 2015; A. Evans & Riley, 2015; Fox, 2015; Tandoc & Ferrucci, 2014; Wherry, 2013). For women, when they are perceived by others as being in an ideal relationship, women may hope that the
☆ Dr. Helen McLaren BSW PhD is a Lecturer in Social and Policy Studies at Flinders University, South Australia.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2016.02.016 0277-5395/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
attainment of love will deliver the social respect of peers and result in feelings of worthiness. However, Berlant (2011) and others (Morrison, Johnston, & Longhurst, 2013) described heteronormative love as a cruel optimism in which many women are socially antagonized into shaping their identities in response to pressures that require conformity to their world's expectations of them. When all is not ideal, heteronormative discourses compel women to invest emotional energy into fabricating outward appearances of having achieved the relationship ideal, whatever that ideal is in their own time and place. Selby (2006) proposed that ‘real’ emotional love is absent from many relationships because heteronormative conformity is an adjunct to political pressures that oblige women to have an ideal man. He wrote, “Actually, you end up selling your soul” (Selby, 2006, p. 11) and suggested that undeserving men end up with good women because they groom women with life's “niceties”, which commences when dating. As a result, women end up with “hunky men, rich, influential men, drug dealers…” (Selby, 2006, p. 9); even ugly beasts of men can be esthetically ideal when perceived as wealthy and generous. Van Dam
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(2013) argued that undesirable men draw on these social expectations and reinvent themselves with heterosexual identities to meet the approval of others. The politics of love in which women are seduced with his gifts and social respect influence women's reciprocity in an economy that demands their dedication towards him (Berlant, 2011). In this sense, social pressures make women accountable to their man and their relationship with him. This makes it difficult for a woman to seek help when her suspicions of his child sexual abusing are met by social others with disbelief. Hence a child molester's performance of heteronormative scripts when dating, in many instances, is an act of grooming whole communities into believing he is heterosexual, an ideal lover or trustworthy father. It serves to camouflage the true self and secure the adult female partner's commitment. It is acknowledged that heteronormative romantic discourses affect the nature of relationships for all couples. This paper is specifically focused on the male–female adult relationships. It draws on the notion that heteronormative love is a social construct that compels women to seek normalized forms of romance and coupledom. These forms are represented by traditional gender roles that are institutionalized, legitimized and socially privileged to such an extent that heterosexual women ‘do’ romance in ways that discourse defines as normal for women. Women's discursive conformity to these heteronormative constructs, therefore, makes them easy prey to the grooming behaviors of child molesters who mimic heteronormative love when seeking adult women as part of his cover. Of particular interest is the paradox of discourse in which women may concurrently participate in heteronormative discourse while they are also subsumed by it. For the women in this study, this paradox served to blind them for significant periods of time to the child sexual abuse perpetrated by their male partner and his power over the adult relationship. In hindsight, many of the women reassessed that the dating scripts of these men were excessive and not normal. But at the time, women expressed that his hyper-heteronormative acts flattered them; as well, it deluded them to his idealness and their compatibility. The silenced women who partner with child molesters The certainty of child sexual abuse prevalence in research and official data remains subject to question because of variation in data collection, characteristics of samples and varied refusal rates (Townsend & Rheingold, 2013). Many researchers suggest that statistics on child sexual abuse are greatly underestimated because of the known fact that perpetrators groom, deceive and/or threaten the children they abuse and others close to them into maintaining silence (Finkelhor, 1986; Leberg, 1997; Sanderson, 2006), and they locate broad societal silence as responsible for enabling abusers' secrecy (Wright & Keevers, 2014). While it is generally agreed that most child molesters are male and the majority have had significant relationships with adult women, similar dynamics involving silence and secrecy impact on knowing the prevalence of adult female partners of child molesters. Laws, Hanson, Osborn, and Greenbaum (2000) reported that 54% of their 72 participants with pedophilic interests were or had been married or involved in a commonlaw relationship. Elliott, Browne, and Kilcoyne (1995) had
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similar findings; 48% of child sex offenders were either married or had been married. Smallbone and Wortley (2001) reported from their study that 38% of interfamilial offenders, 18% of extrafamilial offenders, 24% of mixed type offenders and 31% of deniers were married or in a de facto relationship; and 53% of interfamilial offenders, 22% of extrafamilial offenders, 34% of mixed type offenders and 54% of deniers had been married or in significant adult relationships with a female adult at some time. Finally, the research of Langevin and Lang (1985) discovered that 66% of heterosexual men diagnosed with pedophilia were in or had been married, and 91% had sexual intercourse with an adult female; even of the participants who identified as being homosexual and diagnosed with pedophilia, 50% admitted having had vaginal intercourse. These early studies show that significant numbers of men who sexually abuse children have been in relationships with adult females, whatever the classification or diagnostic criteria used to describe them. Recent authorship is more descriptive in nature. For example, Hazelwood et al. (2015) interviewed 20 women partnered to child molesters, reporting women's retrospective observations that the men's sex fantasies focused predominantly on children. In another paper that appears may have been derived from the same study, Warren and Hazelwood (2002) described the adult relational patterns and suggested that some women may either exchange their compliance in return for affection or even engage in their partners' sexual aggression. However, studies that explore men's child sexual abusing from the standpoint of the women are, more or less, non-existent. Therapeutic textbooks and other writings propose that perpetrators' adult female partners may refuse to respond to suspicions of child sexual abuse because they are frightened of losing their partners if the abuse is exposed (Sanderson, 2006), gender hierarchies between family members prevent speaking out (Furniss, 2013), women may be worried about their friends and relatives knowing about it or fear guilt by association (Back, Gustafsson, & Berterö, 2014; Ullman, 2002). Even child protection workers and other professionals are not immune to the persuasive effects of societal discourses about the ‘good mother’ or ‘good wife’: The ‘good mother’ knows everything that is happening in the family, has inner strength and power to put a stop to anything that is wrong, intuitively knows how to handle difficult matters and, at the same time, satisfies her husband/male partner's needs (Breckenridge & Baldry, 1997, p. 68). Likewise Dietz and Craft (1980) studied child protection workers and, despite 78% of participants thinking that manipulation of the wife and incest happened simultaneously, 87% of workers still thought mothers were responsible for child sexual abuse through colluding with their husbands. A snapshot of authorship over the 30 years indicates the pervasiveness of mother-blame and the undercurrents in child protection work that continue to fail at holding child molesters wholly responsible for the child sexual abuse (Alaggia, Gadalla, Shlonsky, Jenney, & Daciuk, 2015; Davies, Krane, Collings, & Wexler, 2007; Krane & Davies, 2000; McLaren, 2013; Strega et al., 2008). Discourses inappropriately locate the adult female partner as jointly responsible for the child sexual abuse regardless whether the abuse is intra- or extrafamiliar. When
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lay and professional responses hold the women accountable, it offers insight into pressures upon women to remain silent. In the current study, only fourteen women participated despite nearly a year of extensive recruitment efforts. This may reflect the magnitude of shame, blame and silencing experienced by women in intimate relationships with child molesters. The power of heteronormative discourse to silence these women needs to be shared, from the women's perspectives, in order to find new ways to engage women who are the partners of child molesters in prevention and responding to child sexual abuse.
is normalized as a dominant meaning and as the ‘truth’. These dominant meanings within language become entrenched in shared beliefs and they become discursive mechanisms that imply people's talk can be a source of evidence about them and their lives (Cameron, 2001). The interview transcripts indicated how some discourses had become “established as strong, real and independent of the speaker” (Potter & Wetherell, 1996, p. 81). As a result, feminist interpretations of Foucault's discourse theory enabled the identification of the heteronormative discourses that influenced women's decisions to date their partners to become known.
Methods
Results and Discussion
The participant criteria included adult women living in Adelaide, Australia, who had been in a significant relationship with men they believed to have molested children, their own and/or other people's children. An ethics requirement meant that participants needed to have ended their relationships no less than 2 years prior to being interviewed. Fourteen Australian women aged from 32 to 58 years, and whose relationship duration with child molesters ranged from a few months to 20 years, participated in the study via multiple indepth interviews. Four of the women were not fully aware of their partners' sexual abuse of children until after their relationships had ended. The other ten women had initial suspicions of the sexual abuse at various stages of their relationships, including during dating. Four of the male partners sexually abused the women's and/or his children. Irrespective of charge, prosecution or conviction, all of the men were eventually known by the women to have perpetrated child sexual abuse. Recruitment via media advertisement, posting fliers on public notice boards, promoting the research at professional training and conference forums, welfare agency supports with recruitment, personal communications and snowballing took place for nearly a year. The fourteen participants represented 35% of women who initially responded to calls for participants. In accordance with ethics requirements and in respect of women's experiences of post-traumatic stress, others were supported to engage with professional counseling services as a more suitable alternative to research participation. The relatively high rate of women who did not engage in the research following their initial enquiries is indicative of the ongoing social and emotional pain. Multiple interviews totaled between 1 to 4 h per participant, which were transcribed and masked with pseudonyms to ensure privacy. During follow-up interviews the women were advised of preliminary analysis, which allowed for further unpacking of discursive constructions and meanings. Analysis was guided by feminist interpretations of Foucauldian discourse theory that drew from “Foucault's toolbox” (McLaren, 2009) and enabled repeated representations of heteronormative discourse to be identified across the data set. For Foucault (1972), discourses shape how people perceive, conceptualize and articulate their understandings about the world. He suggested that the regularity of discourse and the meanings manifested in them are a “violence that we do to things and, as a practice, we impose discourses upon texts in ways that ‘fixes its limits’” (Foucault, 1972, p. 72). Hence, a ‘discourse’ is a socially regulated language form that, through repeated use,
Evidences of heteronormative dating scripts aimed to deceive her Heteronormative acts performed by the male partners of participants were identifiable from repetitions of discourse across the women's narratives. These repetitions are evidences of heteronormative dating scripts, which are heteronormative romantic performances of the men when wooing their adult female partners. They provide indications of the men's acts intended to groom the women. Theses scripts also served to establish the men as trusted individuals in the women's social networks and communities. This is because they are institutionalized, legitimized and socially privileged as normal and natural and thereby were endorsed by family and friends who also encouraged the women to date with the said men. Acts of love, generosity and kindness Corresponding with child molesters' grooming of children through seducing them with attention, affection and gifts (Lanning, 2001), men who sought the cover of an adult female partner groomed women with amplified attention towards them. This study's participants advised of the men's superficial ‘worship’ of them in a seductive dating process that involved excessive gift giving and counterfeit acts of respect. This ensured that the women developed positive feelings for these men. The men's seduction techniques were strengthened by dominant discourses that informed the women of the idealness of men's dating scripts. This was because, when the women felt treasured and worthy, heteronormative ideals were confirmed by the responses received from friends and family who knew about the men's gift giving behaviors. The female's commitment to the romantic ideal was reciprocated with her promises of dedication and loyalty towards him. In so doing, his grooming enabled the winning of his prize and ownership of power over her. This was represented by one of the participants whose partner persisted to woo her until he won: I was not interested and thought it would fizzle out, but he kept ringing, sending flowers, he turned up to work and insisted on taking me to expensive restaurants and he would not give up. It was all romantic but he was very, I don't know, he wanted this relationship to go somewhere more than me. He wore me down and my friends encouraged it [the relationship] and I started to convince myself that his intensity was love (Sharon). While Sharon reported that his dating scripts were excessive, the fantasies of heteronormative romantic ideals at
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the time were reinforced by her social network. This indicated that the privileges of his power were inherent in a patriarchal world in which his grooming went unchallenged. In men's literature, heteronormative discourses suggest that they are “supposed to rush in and validate their [women's] inner vanity with compliments, gifts, and male attention. Women evaluate all gifts for that sense of emotional significance” (Ellis, 2005, p. 30). With a burning desire to escape feelings of worthlessness and shame associated with singlehood, as well as the chance to harness a man who is unafraid to show his affection in front of others, some of the women were caught up in the seduction process that made them feel better about themselves. Forward and Torres (2002, p. 26) suggested that “many women bask in the glow of their partners' gratitude” because gifts become proof that she is “truly needed and wanted”. This reward logic of gift giving is a coercive act of emotional seduction that serves to bait women into long-term relationships, which Moran and O'Brien (2014, p. 20) suggest force individuals' “inclusion across asymmetries and hierarchies of social life.” Gifts, therefore, offer seductive or otherwise predatory men opportunities to enter women's moral worlds without intention of reciprocating love. Women combined the value of gift giving seduction techniques with esthetic readings; allowing this type of seduction to outweigh body images of the men that were not ‘perfect’. In doing so, the women drew on discourses that ‘good’ men indulge in and win their women through charm and generosity, such as in the following statement: He came across as very generous and spent money on me and all that sort of stuff…. He was initially charismatic and spent a lot of money on me. I was flattered; my ego was swelled; even though my first impression of him took me back (Gina). Cowan and Kinder (1986) suggested that women make ‘foolish choices’, not simply in their selection of romantic partners, but in how they are blindly enticed by dominant romantic ideals of ‘gift giving’ and ‘pampering’ that present destructively inaccurate myths about their relationships. Women conform to these myths, or discourses, which tell women worthwhile men are generous and kind. Another example is provided: He was old fashioned, like by-the-book, like he bought me chocolates and flowers nearly every day; he would open the car door for me, and all that. He would complement my dress, my hair, my shoes, my house, my children, my intelligence…he told me that I was gorgeous. You know, I'm no beauty and I questioned it, but I stayed with him 'cos it made me feel good. He was always like that until he got what he wanted and I had no way of leaving (Doreen). Gina, Doreen and the other women consistently advised that once the dating period was over the men's behaviors changed. When suspicions of child sexual abuse first came to light, most of the men amplified their former heteronormative dating scripts. His performances and society's approval of them deluded the women into believing that allegations of child sexual abuse were not consistent with his heteronormative acts and, therefore, untrue.
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Performances of quality sex Illouz (1997) argued that love is passionate, sensual, instinctive, unplanned, irresistible and confusing. It is spontaneously aroused by the esthetic attributes of another person, such as their humor, patience, energy and recreational interests, more than financial or moral criteria. The euphoric feeling of intimate psychological and erotic bonding with someone completes the self. Alternatively, Ratner (2000) noted that hormones, neurotransmitters and autonomic reactions mediate the euphoria of love, but argues that the quality of love and frequency of sexual desire are influenced by heteronormative romantic discourses that convey cultural values and social attitudes. The qualities of romantic love are constructed discourses that stipulate that women are incomplete without a partner; that a relationship is not romantic without sexual intimacy; that love and sexual intimacy serve to transcend life's problems and make people happy; and, that intimate sex with the ‘right’ person leads to profound sharing of body and existence. Ratner (2000) described that these beliefs stipulate the manner of sexual intimacy through emphasizing the social and psychological riches that conformity to intimate love brings. However, the qualities of romantic love, particularly sexual intimacy, are a “novel creation by human agent” inspired and constrained by socially constructed ideology (Ratner, 2000, p. 16). In the current study, the women's discourses were quite diverse with respect to sex and intimacy. Five women stated that their partners pleased them with sexual intimacy, for example: I loved Ian. He was sensitive and kind to me. He was always dribbling over me and we had lots of really good sex. He knew how to make love to me and he knew how to make sure I enjoyed it. So I believed we were meant to be together (Anna). Forward and Torres (2002) suggested that bedroom behaviors provide women with confusion. Discourses tell women that if men want sex with them all the time, it means they are attractive, desirable and loved. The five women in this study, including Anna, used the quality of sex as a gauge by which to measure their attainment of heteronormative romantic ideals in the relationship. One of the women, Rita, advised that she had frequent sex when commencing her relationships with men as a means to secure their love. Despite this, she told of her own history of child sexual abuse and that she did not often enjoy sex. M. Evans (2003, p. 6) wrote that sex “is no longer held as the normal or single discourse of love…that women will exchange sexuality for love”, but “such exchanges still occur, and are still part of many people's assumptions”. Irigaray (1996, p. 26) declared, “For her, love, amounts to a duty not a right”, in which her womanly role in humankind is established to serve the male. The assumption is that within a heteronormative relationship a woman must satisfy a man's sexual needs if she wants to be loved. If he appears to have sexual needs and enjoy the offerings, then that confirms he is interested in the woman. Contrary to her former relationships with men, when Rita dated her partner he did not pressure her into having sex. Sexual intimacy was important, but her partner knew about Rita's history of child sexual abuse and did not pressure her. He responded to Rita's desire to have sex only when she instigated
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it and also wanted it. This deceived Rita into believing he loved her: With Rick that was different. I thought he truly loved me. It was about giving and taking, being kind and sensual, doing things together and respecting when each other wanted to be left alone. So when I couldn't face having sex, I though he loved me (Rita). Another woman, Kimberly, was sexually abused as a child by a man she described as ‘ugly’, ‘fat’, ‘violent’ and a ‘horrible beast’. By drawing on these constructs of a child molester, Kimberly could not conceive that her future partner could be a child molester. This is because he was good looking, which was contrary to her construct of a child molester as a ‘horrible beast’. As well, he seduced Kimberly with respect for what she called her ‘sex victim’ past. If she did not want sex, then neither did he. But he was happy to play along and present the façade of being frequently intimate when talking about their relationship with family and friends: When things moved too fast on the sexual side of things, I got cold feet and dumped my lovers. Wilbur was a family friend and he knew this and he stuck around. He was the one that knew about my past with my father and he knew that I was frigid when it came to sex…. He never initiated sex and he seemed to know how to treat me in front of others. He convinced me that sex did not matter to him, but he never told anyone that we weren't having it. Because he was just so nice, I just couldn't believe he was more interested in sex with children even when I found child pornography on his computer (Kimberly). Olivia also drew on traditional heterosexual discourses that constructed ‘good men’ as those who respect women's desires not to have sex before marriage. She did not expect materialism or gift giving as necessary for dating: Gifts…I didn't believe that those tokens were really necessary. I just wanted a man that I did not have to have sex with until we were married and he knew that. I thought he respected that. That was enough for me (Olivia). Olivia's partner aligned himself to dominant discourses that promoted abstinence before marriage. Due to this gift of respect towards her sexual ideals, Olivia viewed him as an ideal partner and the ‘right one’ for her: Through my whole life I was told that abstaining from sex before marriage was the right thing and that if your boyfriend was the ‘right one’ that he would respect that. We didn't actually even have much sex after we married. Of course, I was the ignorant fool who found a man that was happy to abstain because it allowed him to seek out his true interests with children (Olivia). Discourses of ‘safe sex’, in which women privilege prudential judgment over spontaneity, prioritize romantic ideals that favor selectivity of men over variety (Singer, 1996). For women, this serves to avoid ‘slut shaming’ as a result of social policing of their sexual behavior (Webb, 2015). However, in hindsight Olivia could see abstinence allowed her partner to
aligning his lack of attraction to adult women with a particular set of heteronormative ideals. Seduction was easy, particularly when he was not interested in sex with her anyway. Performing and reinforcing soulmate-ship, togetherness and compatibility. Dominant societal discourses perpetuate myths by characterizing the world of men ‘out there’ as predatory and aggressive, meaning that the men who become ‘known’ and ‘loved’ should not be viewed in this way (Harjo, 2001). Feminists, too, have confronted myths “that women are only at threat from predatory men they do not know” (Websdale & Chesney-Lind, 1998, p. 80). These discourses delude women to believe that the men they date cannot be child molesters; even more so when these men present themselves with similar values, life experiences and social interests as the women. Notions of compatibility provide hope of heteronormative romantic love to emotionally starved women (Burke, 2003), which may lead some women to believe that their partner is a soulmate, rather than a predator. Compatibility was expressed by most women in terms of his experiences, wants and desires that ‘coincidentally’ appeared to echo hers. In hindsight, the women expressed that their sameness was too good to be true: I thought we were made for each other because we had similar backgrounds, same experiences, hardship, bullying at school, we liked the same things, you know we were like soulmates from my point of view. A bit unbelievable now I look back (Doreen). Compatibility, as a seduction tactic, provided promise that adult women would view him in good light through presentation of life scripts that accorded with hers. When women perceived their partners as good men, this made the women feel good about themselves. Any hint of undesirability in their perceived soulmate was denied because it would negatively mirror the women's own self-image. It was not until the relationship ended that the women could see that he manipulated his life scripts to deceive her: …our likeness was too good to be true and now that I look back he constantly changed what he liked to be just like me…but I came to know more recently that it was all a ploy to win me over (Doreen). …rather strategic of him when I look back now…he did not really tell me a lot about other aspects of his past except for all the stuff which coincidentally was the same as the things I liked to do (Hanna). Buscaglia (1996, p. 53) suggested that there is “accumulating evidence” of an inborn need for togetherness and heterosexual love, which in many cases becomes “the major drive and goal of an individual's life.” This may be the case; however, such assertions concern emotions within the individual and disregard the influence of society in the constructions of love and other emotions (Scheff, 2000). Numerous research papers assert that the demonstration of love is a constructed response to either an instinctive and/or a learned emotion (Ahmed, 2013; Frijda & Mesquita, 1992; Hochschild, 2003; Morgan, 1997) that is directly related to the social networks that teach
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particular romantic ideals on how to love. One of those ideals is “that continuous togetherness is essential to love” (Simmons, 2005, p. 7):
For many of the women, they suggested that no alternatives were ever offered to them except for heteronormative dating with a view to eventual marriage:
We would go for long walks together. We both liked bushwalking and it was beautiful to just be together out in the middle of nowhere. It sounds rather romantic now on looking back. Even after we married, my love for Rick just kept on growing, as did his love for me, so I thought. We enjoyed going out and mixing when I was well, but we enjoyed being home alone together in each other's company just as much, or even more (Rita).
I didn't really need to find a husband to feel respected as a woman but I just went down the dating — marriage pathway because no alternative was ever offered to me. That is all I knew. So I snagged up any old man that came my way, especially the one that said ‘I love you’ with most vigor (Paula).
Practicing togetherness appeared to be a seductive technique used by child molesters to groom potential partners. Spending considerable time together draws on heteronormative romantic ideals and deceives women into believing their men love them and are also committed to the romantic ideal. However, the immeasurable time he spends with her during early days is more likely to be an act of control that served to distance certain friendships and to isolate her (Carney & Barner, 2012). Only the close friends and family members that he has successfully controlled to believe his version of reality will remain welcomed in their lives. This togetherness is not an act of love, or a representation of soulmate-ship, but an action that draws on love to monitor and delude her. Conformity to ‘having a partner’ and mixing socially together allow women membership to particular social groups. With membership comes a sense of belonging, power, status, value and the “psychological riches that come from possessing a[n]…identity” that is shared with family, friends and others in women's social groups (Tanenbaum, 1999, p. 185). Hence, having a male partner, provides women with the sense of ‘completeness’ because they ‘fit in’ with the ‘norm’; she is valued, respected and is ‘more of a woman’ than when she was without a man. Mary was a single mother when she met her partner, as well she felt tarnished by the discourses that looked down upon her for being a single parent. She wanted a man to make her feel loved, respected and ‘complete’ as a woman, but struggled to find the time to meet men: I can remember feeling quite isolated and actually stressed. It was quite difficult emotionally because the children were young, so you have just so much to deal with all the time and in my situation I had family members who were very sick, so there was a lot of extra stress. So yeah, there is not a lot of time to take when you are going out to meet people. Not a lot of money, so you might not have a lot of choices…. My immediate thought is, ‘Why am I not entitled to having some love and affection like anyone else?’ So yeah, I hung onto the first one that accepted me and my kids (Mary). Mary found a partner who was ‘less than ideal’, but the social inclusion and his acceptance of her children fooled Mary into believing their togetherness was love. Her ability to cope with her children and other family difficulties became easier with his support, especially when her partner took over nearly all her child care responsibilities. Mary's social opportunities increased and, as a result, she viewed her partner as a soulmate. He was simply someone to love and in return he appeared to make life easier and more meaningful for her.
Men are not typically the first one to say, ‘I love you’ and, when they do, women seem to believe it is true (Zinczenko & Spiker, 2006). When Paula's suspicions of child sexual abuse surfaced, he “held me and told me how much he loved me and only me”. In Paula's eyes, he was the ‘perfect’ lover; depicted by heteronormative romantic images of being together in a man's arms, receiving warm hugs and kisses and hearing loving words from his lips. These provided Paula with just enough feelings of security in her relationship, even if they were romanticized constructions that conflicted with her suspicions. Conclusion The genuineness of men on commencing a relationship is difficult to discern. Forward and Torres (2002, p. 19) wrote of a paradox in which “even the most destructive misogynistic relationships start out filled with just this kind of excitement”. But while both the men and women may seek social acceptance, the child molester's true intention is to deceive women who believe in the heteronormative ideal, particularly that love with him is possible. Hence the more intense the romantic dating scripts, the more likely the women in this study were subsumed by discourses of romantic love in ways that convinced them of the men's ‘idealness’ when commencing their relationships. His grooming, together with discursive social pressures, left the women with few perceived alternatives other than to keep going with their new relationships and keep maintaining the relationship ideal. Conformity to the female role through securing a loving heterosexual relationship influences women to think it will make them popular, reputable and morally worthy. Hence, the women conformed to heteronormative discourses without questioning their men's intentions because love was presented as a significant possibility and worthwhile goal (Jackson, 2001). The men's grooming, in terms of their generosity and sexual respect deceived the women into believing that life with these men would be emotionally secure, romantically gratifying and safe. Indicators of compatibility, including ‘his’ corresponding values and his willingness to spend a large amount of time together with them, strengthened the women's' fairy tale notions that soulmate-ship might exist and that their suitors were genuine. Admitting that your partner is a child molester, says Levenson and Morin (2001, p. 22), is extremely difficult when “society has always sensationalized people's problems” and demonized them. When a relationship is not well, social pressures compel women to put on a good face and build a facade of the perfect romance (Imber-Black, 1999) in response to an impossible hope for romance (Berlant, 2011). For those women who were groomed by child molesters, there was a fine line between romance, seduction and aggression that drew
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upon the women's vulnerability to romantic ideals. It is within this complexity of achieving romance that love was not only affirmed or negated by the men's heteronormative acts, but also opened up to women's infinite silent reweaving of heteronormative desires that society makes impossible to achieve. Fairy tale delusions during dating served to screen the aspects of participants' partners that were not desirable. Peer approval strengthened the women's' emotional bonds to their men. The women were, therefore, proud to flaunt their ability to harness an ideal man of which they perceived others were jealous. As the women's status increased, they moved up society's hierarchy from ‘single’ to ‘attached’. After appearing to achieve the heteronormative ideal, any indications that their relationships were otherwise was met with disbelief. Kasl (1990, p. 43) proposed that many women have sex with men “she doesn't truly desire…in order to maintain a relationship or placate a partner”, then when all is not perfect leaving is a difficult option. For women who learn that their men have immoral secrets, energy gets invested into maintaining illusions of being with a loving man who is good looking, a soulmate, or otherwise wealthy, generous, or so forth. Furthermore, because child sexual abuse is socially constructed as abhorrent, it is difficult for women to speak out and it is also difficult for others to fathom that the people they love could be doing such things (Van Dam, 2013). Even professional responses may draw on heteronormative discourses with disbelief that the women either did not know about the child sexual abusing or could not do anything to stop it. For the women, it may well be easier to find reasons to support their men's denials than to face society's cruelty towards her when accused as complicit in his abusing or when feeling like a failure at achieving heteronormative love. It is for these reasons it is critical that professionals understand the power of heteronormative romantic discourse over the women who are groomed and seduced by child molesters into partnering with them. While there remain some limitations to this study, particularly that a small number of women's narratives cannot be generalized to the whole population, this study offered insight into the experiences of a very vulnerable population of women that is not often regarded in research or gray literature as worthy of concern. Furthermore, while the women may not clearly be able to articulate how they have become subsumed by discursive heteronormative romantic constructs, the interpretive lenses used in this study respectfully add power to their voice. In being silenced for long enough, this research has allowed the women to respectfully be heard.
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Women's Studies International Forum journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/wsif
Adult women groomed by child molesters' heteronormative dating scripts☆ Helen J. McLaren Social & Policy Studies, Flinders University, GPO Box 2100, Adelaide, SA 5001, Australia
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Available online 28 March 2016
s y n o p s i s Understanding the paradox of heteronormative power in which women are forced into subjectivity and simultaneously constructed with agency as they take up available discourses is critical for breaking women's silence and for responding to child safety concerns. This paper draws from multiple interviews with fourteen women who partnered with men they later knew were sexually abusing children. Transcripts were analyzed by applying feminist interpretations of Foucauldian discourse theory that searched for repetitions of discourse in the language that women used to describe the heteronormative dating scripts used by their partners. The women indicated, once child sexual abuse became known, that the same heteronormative discourses operated to shame, blame and silence them. These discursive pressures compelled the women to maintain facades that represented heteronormative relationship ideals, which served to increase the men's control over them and strengthen the men's ability to keep their sexual abuse of children secret. © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Introduction The fundamental desirability of love and coupledom is embedded within social institutions in which the meaning of heterosexual relationships are intertwined with emotional fulfillment, personal identity and material security. Whether women mysteriously ‘fall in love’ or whether their feelings of love manifest over time, women's desires for romantic love are presented through dominant discourses that portray associations between male–female coupledom with happiness, safety, status and a sense of self in the world (Langford, 1999). These discourses are so powerful; they have dominated popular media, romantic fiction, and consumption markets and extend across cultures for more than the last century (Choi, 2015; A. Evans & Riley, 2015; Fox, 2015; Tandoc & Ferrucci, 2014; Wherry, 2013). For women, when they are perceived by others as being in an ideal relationship, women may hope that the
☆ Dr. Helen McLaren BSW PhD is a Lecturer in Social and Policy Studies at Flinders University, South Australia.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2016.02.016 0277-5395/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
attainment of love will deliver the social respect of peers and result in feelings of worthiness. However, Berlant (2011) and others (Morrison, Johnston, & Longhurst, 2013) described heteronormative love as a cruel optimism in which many women are socially antagonized into shaping their identities in response to pressures that require conformity to their world's expectations of them. When all is not ideal, heteronormative discourses compel women to invest emotional energy into fabricating outward appearances of having achieved the relationship ideal, whatever that ideal is in their own time and place. Selby (2006) proposed that ‘real’ emotional love is absent from many relationships because heteronormative conformity is an adjunct to political pressures that oblige women to have an ideal man. He wrote, “Actually, you end up selling your soul” (Selby, 2006, p. 11) and suggested that undeserving men end up with good women because they groom women with life's “niceties”, which commences when dating. As a result, women end up with “hunky men, rich, influential men, drug dealers…” (Selby, 2006, p. 9); even ugly beasts of men can be esthetically ideal when perceived as wealthy and generous. Van Dam
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(2013) argued that undesirable men draw on these social expectations and reinvent themselves with heterosexual identities to meet the approval of others. The politics of love in which women are seduced with his gifts and social respect influence women's reciprocity in an economy that demands their dedication towards him (Berlant, 2011). In this sense, social pressures make women accountable to their man and their relationship with him. This makes it difficult for a woman to seek help when her suspicions of his child sexual abusing are met by social others with disbelief. Hence a child molester's performance of heteronormative scripts when dating, in many instances, is an act of grooming whole communities into believing he is heterosexual, an ideal lover or trustworthy father. It serves to camouflage the true self and secure the adult female partner's commitment. It is acknowledged that heteronormative romantic discourses affect the nature of relationships for all couples. This paper is specifically focused on the male–female adult relationships. It draws on the notion that heteronormative love is a social construct that compels women to seek normalized forms of romance and coupledom. These forms are represented by traditional gender roles that are institutionalized, legitimized and socially privileged to such an extent that heterosexual women ‘do’ romance in ways that discourse defines as normal for women. Women's discursive conformity to these heteronormative constructs, therefore, makes them easy prey to the grooming behaviors of child molesters who mimic heteronormative love when seeking adult women as part of his cover. Of particular interest is the paradox of discourse in which women may concurrently participate in heteronormative discourse while they are also subsumed by it. For the women in this study, this paradox served to blind them for significant periods of time to the child sexual abuse perpetrated by their male partner and his power over the adult relationship. In hindsight, many of the women reassessed that the dating scripts of these men were excessive and not normal. But at the time, women expressed that his hyper-heteronormative acts flattered them; as well, it deluded them to his idealness and their compatibility. The silenced women who partner with child molesters The certainty of child sexual abuse prevalence in research and official data remains subject to question because of variation in data collection, characteristics of samples and varied refusal rates (Townsend & Rheingold, 2013). Many researchers suggest that statistics on child sexual abuse are greatly underestimated because of the known fact that perpetrators groom, deceive and/or threaten the children they abuse and others close to them into maintaining silence (Finkelhor, 1986; Leberg, 1997; Sanderson, 2006), and they locate broad societal silence as responsible for enabling abusers' secrecy (Wright & Keevers, 2014). While it is generally agreed that most child molesters are male and the majority have had significant relationships with adult women, similar dynamics involving silence and secrecy impact on knowing the prevalence of adult female partners of child molesters. Laws, Hanson, Osborn, and Greenbaum (2000) reported that 54% of their 72 participants with pedophilic interests were or had been married or involved in a commonlaw relationship. Elliott, Browne, and Kilcoyne (1995) had
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similar findings; 48% of child sex offenders were either married or had been married. Smallbone and Wortley (2001) reported from their study that 38% of interfamilial offenders, 18% of extrafamilial offenders, 24% of mixed type offenders and 31% of deniers were married or in a de facto relationship; and 53% of interfamilial offenders, 22% of extrafamilial offenders, 34% of mixed type offenders and 54% of deniers had been married or in significant adult relationships with a female adult at some time. Finally, the research of Langevin and Lang (1985) discovered that 66% of heterosexual men diagnosed with pedophilia were in or had been married, and 91% had sexual intercourse with an adult female; even of the participants who identified as being homosexual and diagnosed with pedophilia, 50% admitted having had vaginal intercourse. These early studies show that significant numbers of men who sexually abuse children have been in relationships with adult females, whatever the classification or diagnostic criteria used to describe them. Recent authorship is more descriptive in nature. For example, Hazelwood et al. (2015) interviewed 20 women partnered to child molesters, reporting women's retrospective observations that the men's sex fantasies focused predominantly on children. In another paper that appears may have been derived from the same study, Warren and Hazelwood (2002) described the adult relational patterns and suggested that some women may either exchange their compliance in return for affection or even engage in their partners' sexual aggression. However, studies that explore men's child sexual abusing from the standpoint of the women are, more or less, non-existent. Therapeutic textbooks and other writings propose that perpetrators' adult female partners may refuse to respond to suspicions of child sexual abuse because they are frightened of losing their partners if the abuse is exposed (Sanderson, 2006), gender hierarchies between family members prevent speaking out (Furniss, 2013), women may be worried about their friends and relatives knowing about it or fear guilt by association (Back, Gustafsson, & Berterö, 2014; Ullman, 2002). Even child protection workers and other professionals are not immune to the persuasive effects of societal discourses about the ‘good mother’ or ‘good wife’: The ‘good mother’ knows everything that is happening in the family, has inner strength and power to put a stop to anything that is wrong, intuitively knows how to handle difficult matters and, at the same time, satisfies her husband/male partner's needs (Breckenridge & Baldry, 1997, p. 68). Likewise Dietz and Craft (1980) studied child protection workers and, despite 78% of participants thinking that manipulation of the wife and incest happened simultaneously, 87% of workers still thought mothers were responsible for child sexual abuse through colluding with their husbands. A snapshot of authorship over the 30 years indicates the pervasiveness of mother-blame and the undercurrents in child protection work that continue to fail at holding child molesters wholly responsible for the child sexual abuse (Alaggia, Gadalla, Shlonsky, Jenney, & Daciuk, 2015; Davies, Krane, Collings, & Wexler, 2007; Krane & Davies, 2000; McLaren, 2013; Strega et al., 2008). Discourses inappropriately locate the adult female partner as jointly responsible for the child sexual abuse regardless whether the abuse is intra- or extrafamiliar. When
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lay and professional responses hold the women accountable, it offers insight into pressures upon women to remain silent. In the current study, only fourteen women participated despite nearly a year of extensive recruitment efforts. This may reflect the magnitude of shame, blame and silencing experienced by women in intimate relationships with child molesters. The power of heteronormative discourse to silence these women needs to be shared, from the women's perspectives, in order to find new ways to engage women who are the partners of child molesters in prevention and responding to child sexual abuse.
is normalized as a dominant meaning and as the ‘truth’. These dominant meanings within language become entrenched in shared beliefs and they become discursive mechanisms that imply people's talk can be a source of evidence about them and their lives (Cameron, 2001). The interview transcripts indicated how some discourses had become “established as strong, real and independent of the speaker” (Potter & Wetherell, 1996, p. 81). As a result, feminist interpretations of Foucault's discourse theory enabled the identification of the heteronormative discourses that influenced women's decisions to date their partners to become known.
Methods
Results and Discussion
The participant criteria included adult women living in Adelaide, Australia, who had been in a significant relationship with men they believed to have molested children, their own and/or other people's children. An ethics requirement meant that participants needed to have ended their relationships no less than 2 years prior to being interviewed. Fourteen Australian women aged from 32 to 58 years, and whose relationship duration with child molesters ranged from a few months to 20 years, participated in the study via multiple indepth interviews. Four of the women were not fully aware of their partners' sexual abuse of children until after their relationships had ended. The other ten women had initial suspicions of the sexual abuse at various stages of their relationships, including during dating. Four of the male partners sexually abused the women's and/or his children. Irrespective of charge, prosecution or conviction, all of the men were eventually known by the women to have perpetrated child sexual abuse. Recruitment via media advertisement, posting fliers on public notice boards, promoting the research at professional training and conference forums, welfare agency supports with recruitment, personal communications and snowballing took place for nearly a year. The fourteen participants represented 35% of women who initially responded to calls for participants. In accordance with ethics requirements and in respect of women's experiences of post-traumatic stress, others were supported to engage with professional counseling services as a more suitable alternative to research participation. The relatively high rate of women who did not engage in the research following their initial enquiries is indicative of the ongoing social and emotional pain. Multiple interviews totaled between 1 to 4 h per participant, which were transcribed and masked with pseudonyms to ensure privacy. During follow-up interviews the women were advised of preliminary analysis, which allowed for further unpacking of discursive constructions and meanings. Analysis was guided by feminist interpretations of Foucauldian discourse theory that drew from “Foucault's toolbox” (McLaren, 2009) and enabled repeated representations of heteronormative discourse to be identified across the data set. For Foucault (1972), discourses shape how people perceive, conceptualize and articulate their understandings about the world. He suggested that the regularity of discourse and the meanings manifested in them are a “violence that we do to things and, as a practice, we impose discourses upon texts in ways that ‘fixes its limits’” (Foucault, 1972, p. 72). Hence, a ‘discourse’ is a socially regulated language form that, through repeated use,
Evidences of heteronormative dating scripts aimed to deceive her Heteronormative acts performed by the male partners of participants were identifiable from repetitions of discourse across the women's narratives. These repetitions are evidences of heteronormative dating scripts, which are heteronormative romantic performances of the men when wooing their adult female partners. They provide indications of the men's acts intended to groom the women. Theses scripts also served to establish the men as trusted individuals in the women's social networks and communities. This is because they are institutionalized, legitimized and socially privileged as normal and natural and thereby were endorsed by family and friends who also encouraged the women to date with the said men. Acts of love, generosity and kindness Corresponding with child molesters' grooming of children through seducing them with attention, affection and gifts (Lanning, 2001), men who sought the cover of an adult female partner groomed women with amplified attention towards them. This study's participants advised of the men's superficial ‘worship’ of them in a seductive dating process that involved excessive gift giving and counterfeit acts of respect. This ensured that the women developed positive feelings for these men. The men's seduction techniques were strengthened by dominant discourses that informed the women of the idealness of men's dating scripts. This was because, when the women felt treasured and worthy, heteronormative ideals were confirmed by the responses received from friends and family who knew about the men's gift giving behaviors. The female's commitment to the romantic ideal was reciprocated with her promises of dedication and loyalty towards him. In so doing, his grooming enabled the winning of his prize and ownership of power over her. This was represented by one of the participants whose partner persisted to woo her until he won: I was not interested and thought it would fizzle out, but he kept ringing, sending flowers, he turned up to work and insisted on taking me to expensive restaurants and he would not give up. It was all romantic but he was very, I don't know, he wanted this relationship to go somewhere more than me. He wore me down and my friends encouraged it [the relationship] and I started to convince myself that his intensity was love (Sharon). While Sharon reported that his dating scripts were excessive, the fantasies of heteronormative romantic ideals at
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the time were reinforced by her social network. This indicated that the privileges of his power were inherent in a patriarchal world in which his grooming went unchallenged. In men's literature, heteronormative discourses suggest that they are “supposed to rush in and validate their [women's] inner vanity with compliments, gifts, and male attention. Women evaluate all gifts for that sense of emotional significance” (Ellis, 2005, p. 30). With a burning desire to escape feelings of worthlessness and shame associated with singlehood, as well as the chance to harness a man who is unafraid to show his affection in front of others, some of the women were caught up in the seduction process that made them feel better about themselves. Forward and Torres (2002, p. 26) suggested that “many women bask in the glow of their partners' gratitude” because gifts become proof that she is “truly needed and wanted”. This reward logic of gift giving is a coercive act of emotional seduction that serves to bait women into long-term relationships, which Moran and O'Brien (2014, p. 20) suggest force individuals' “inclusion across asymmetries and hierarchies of social life.” Gifts, therefore, offer seductive or otherwise predatory men opportunities to enter women's moral worlds without intention of reciprocating love. Women combined the value of gift giving seduction techniques with esthetic readings; allowing this type of seduction to outweigh body images of the men that were not ‘perfect’. In doing so, the women drew on discourses that ‘good’ men indulge in and win their women through charm and generosity, such as in the following statement: He came across as very generous and spent money on me and all that sort of stuff…. He was initially charismatic and spent a lot of money on me. I was flattered; my ego was swelled; even though my first impression of him took me back (Gina). Cowan and Kinder (1986) suggested that women make ‘foolish choices’, not simply in their selection of romantic partners, but in how they are blindly enticed by dominant romantic ideals of ‘gift giving’ and ‘pampering’ that present destructively inaccurate myths about their relationships. Women conform to these myths, or discourses, which tell women worthwhile men are generous and kind. Another example is provided: He was old fashioned, like by-the-book, like he bought me chocolates and flowers nearly every day; he would open the car door for me, and all that. He would complement my dress, my hair, my shoes, my house, my children, my intelligence…he told me that I was gorgeous. You know, I'm no beauty and I questioned it, but I stayed with him 'cos it made me feel good. He was always like that until he got what he wanted and I had no way of leaving (Doreen). Gina, Doreen and the other women consistently advised that once the dating period was over the men's behaviors changed. When suspicions of child sexual abuse first came to light, most of the men amplified their former heteronormative dating scripts. His performances and society's approval of them deluded the women into believing that allegations of child sexual abuse were not consistent with his heteronormative acts and, therefore, untrue.
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Performances of quality sex Illouz (1997) argued that love is passionate, sensual, instinctive, unplanned, irresistible and confusing. It is spontaneously aroused by the esthetic attributes of another person, such as their humor, patience, energy and recreational interests, more than financial or moral criteria. The euphoric feeling of intimate psychological and erotic bonding with someone completes the self. Alternatively, Ratner (2000) noted that hormones, neurotransmitters and autonomic reactions mediate the euphoria of love, but argues that the quality of love and frequency of sexual desire are influenced by heteronormative romantic discourses that convey cultural values and social attitudes. The qualities of romantic love are constructed discourses that stipulate that women are incomplete without a partner; that a relationship is not romantic without sexual intimacy; that love and sexual intimacy serve to transcend life's problems and make people happy; and, that intimate sex with the ‘right’ person leads to profound sharing of body and existence. Ratner (2000) described that these beliefs stipulate the manner of sexual intimacy through emphasizing the social and psychological riches that conformity to intimate love brings. However, the qualities of romantic love, particularly sexual intimacy, are a “novel creation by human agent” inspired and constrained by socially constructed ideology (Ratner, 2000, p. 16). In the current study, the women's discourses were quite diverse with respect to sex and intimacy. Five women stated that their partners pleased them with sexual intimacy, for example: I loved Ian. He was sensitive and kind to me. He was always dribbling over me and we had lots of really good sex. He knew how to make love to me and he knew how to make sure I enjoyed it. So I believed we were meant to be together (Anna). Forward and Torres (2002) suggested that bedroom behaviors provide women with confusion. Discourses tell women that if men want sex with them all the time, it means they are attractive, desirable and loved. The five women in this study, including Anna, used the quality of sex as a gauge by which to measure their attainment of heteronormative romantic ideals in the relationship. One of the women, Rita, advised that she had frequent sex when commencing her relationships with men as a means to secure their love. Despite this, she told of her own history of child sexual abuse and that she did not often enjoy sex. M. Evans (2003, p. 6) wrote that sex “is no longer held as the normal or single discourse of love…that women will exchange sexuality for love”, but “such exchanges still occur, and are still part of many people's assumptions”. Irigaray (1996, p. 26) declared, “For her, love, amounts to a duty not a right”, in which her womanly role in humankind is established to serve the male. The assumption is that within a heteronormative relationship a woman must satisfy a man's sexual needs if she wants to be loved. If he appears to have sexual needs and enjoy the offerings, then that confirms he is interested in the woman. Contrary to her former relationships with men, when Rita dated her partner he did not pressure her into having sex. Sexual intimacy was important, but her partner knew about Rita's history of child sexual abuse and did not pressure her. He responded to Rita's desire to have sex only when she instigated
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it and also wanted it. This deceived Rita into believing he loved her: With Rick that was different. I thought he truly loved me. It was about giving and taking, being kind and sensual, doing things together and respecting when each other wanted to be left alone. So when I couldn't face having sex, I though he loved me (Rita). Another woman, Kimberly, was sexually abused as a child by a man she described as ‘ugly’, ‘fat’, ‘violent’ and a ‘horrible beast’. By drawing on these constructs of a child molester, Kimberly could not conceive that her future partner could be a child molester. This is because he was good looking, which was contrary to her construct of a child molester as a ‘horrible beast’. As well, he seduced Kimberly with respect for what she called her ‘sex victim’ past. If she did not want sex, then neither did he. But he was happy to play along and present the façade of being frequently intimate when talking about their relationship with family and friends: When things moved too fast on the sexual side of things, I got cold feet and dumped my lovers. Wilbur was a family friend and he knew this and he stuck around. He was the one that knew about my past with my father and he knew that I was frigid when it came to sex…. He never initiated sex and he seemed to know how to treat me in front of others. He convinced me that sex did not matter to him, but he never told anyone that we weren't having it. Because he was just so nice, I just couldn't believe he was more interested in sex with children even when I found child pornography on his computer (Kimberly). Olivia also drew on traditional heterosexual discourses that constructed ‘good men’ as those who respect women's desires not to have sex before marriage. She did not expect materialism or gift giving as necessary for dating: Gifts…I didn't believe that those tokens were really necessary. I just wanted a man that I did not have to have sex with until we were married and he knew that. I thought he respected that. That was enough for me (Olivia). Olivia's partner aligned himself to dominant discourses that promoted abstinence before marriage. Due to this gift of respect towards her sexual ideals, Olivia viewed him as an ideal partner and the ‘right one’ for her: Through my whole life I was told that abstaining from sex before marriage was the right thing and that if your boyfriend was the ‘right one’ that he would respect that. We didn't actually even have much sex after we married. Of course, I was the ignorant fool who found a man that was happy to abstain because it allowed him to seek out his true interests with children (Olivia). Discourses of ‘safe sex’, in which women privilege prudential judgment over spontaneity, prioritize romantic ideals that favor selectivity of men over variety (Singer, 1996). For women, this serves to avoid ‘slut shaming’ as a result of social policing of their sexual behavior (Webb, 2015). However, in hindsight Olivia could see abstinence allowed her partner to
aligning his lack of attraction to adult women with a particular set of heteronormative ideals. Seduction was easy, particularly when he was not interested in sex with her anyway. Performing and reinforcing soulmate-ship, togetherness and compatibility. Dominant societal discourses perpetuate myths by characterizing the world of men ‘out there’ as predatory and aggressive, meaning that the men who become ‘known’ and ‘loved’ should not be viewed in this way (Harjo, 2001). Feminists, too, have confronted myths “that women are only at threat from predatory men they do not know” (Websdale & Chesney-Lind, 1998, p. 80). These discourses delude women to believe that the men they date cannot be child molesters; even more so when these men present themselves with similar values, life experiences and social interests as the women. Notions of compatibility provide hope of heteronormative romantic love to emotionally starved women (Burke, 2003), which may lead some women to believe that their partner is a soulmate, rather than a predator. Compatibility was expressed by most women in terms of his experiences, wants and desires that ‘coincidentally’ appeared to echo hers. In hindsight, the women expressed that their sameness was too good to be true: I thought we were made for each other because we had similar backgrounds, same experiences, hardship, bullying at school, we liked the same things, you know we were like soulmates from my point of view. A bit unbelievable now I look back (Doreen). Compatibility, as a seduction tactic, provided promise that adult women would view him in good light through presentation of life scripts that accorded with hers. When women perceived their partners as good men, this made the women feel good about themselves. Any hint of undesirability in their perceived soulmate was denied because it would negatively mirror the women's own self-image. It was not until the relationship ended that the women could see that he manipulated his life scripts to deceive her: …our likeness was too good to be true and now that I look back he constantly changed what he liked to be just like me…but I came to know more recently that it was all a ploy to win me over (Doreen). …rather strategic of him when I look back now…he did not really tell me a lot about other aspects of his past except for all the stuff which coincidentally was the same as the things I liked to do (Hanna). Buscaglia (1996, p. 53) suggested that there is “accumulating evidence” of an inborn need for togetherness and heterosexual love, which in many cases becomes “the major drive and goal of an individual's life.” This may be the case; however, such assertions concern emotions within the individual and disregard the influence of society in the constructions of love and other emotions (Scheff, 2000). Numerous research papers assert that the demonstration of love is a constructed response to either an instinctive and/or a learned emotion (Ahmed, 2013; Frijda & Mesquita, 1992; Hochschild, 2003; Morgan, 1997) that is directly related to the social networks that teach
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particular romantic ideals on how to love. One of those ideals is “that continuous togetherness is essential to love” (Simmons, 2005, p. 7):
For many of the women, they suggested that no alternatives were ever offered to them except for heteronormative dating with a view to eventual marriage:
We would go for long walks together. We both liked bushwalking and it was beautiful to just be together out in the middle of nowhere. It sounds rather romantic now on looking back. Even after we married, my love for Rick just kept on growing, as did his love for me, so I thought. We enjoyed going out and mixing when I was well, but we enjoyed being home alone together in each other's company just as much, or even more (Rita).
I didn't really need to find a husband to feel respected as a woman but I just went down the dating — marriage pathway because no alternative was ever offered to me. That is all I knew. So I snagged up any old man that came my way, especially the one that said ‘I love you’ with most vigor (Paula).
Practicing togetherness appeared to be a seductive technique used by child molesters to groom potential partners. Spending considerable time together draws on heteronormative romantic ideals and deceives women into believing their men love them and are also committed to the romantic ideal. However, the immeasurable time he spends with her during early days is more likely to be an act of control that served to distance certain friendships and to isolate her (Carney & Barner, 2012). Only the close friends and family members that he has successfully controlled to believe his version of reality will remain welcomed in their lives. This togetherness is not an act of love, or a representation of soulmate-ship, but an action that draws on love to monitor and delude her. Conformity to ‘having a partner’ and mixing socially together allow women membership to particular social groups. With membership comes a sense of belonging, power, status, value and the “psychological riches that come from possessing a[n]…identity” that is shared with family, friends and others in women's social groups (Tanenbaum, 1999, p. 185). Hence, having a male partner, provides women with the sense of ‘completeness’ because they ‘fit in’ with the ‘norm’; she is valued, respected and is ‘more of a woman’ than when she was without a man. Mary was a single mother when she met her partner, as well she felt tarnished by the discourses that looked down upon her for being a single parent. She wanted a man to make her feel loved, respected and ‘complete’ as a woman, but struggled to find the time to meet men: I can remember feeling quite isolated and actually stressed. It was quite difficult emotionally because the children were young, so you have just so much to deal with all the time and in my situation I had family members who were very sick, so there was a lot of extra stress. So yeah, there is not a lot of time to take when you are going out to meet people. Not a lot of money, so you might not have a lot of choices…. My immediate thought is, ‘Why am I not entitled to having some love and affection like anyone else?’ So yeah, I hung onto the first one that accepted me and my kids (Mary). Mary found a partner who was ‘less than ideal’, but the social inclusion and his acceptance of her children fooled Mary into believing their togetherness was love. Her ability to cope with her children and other family difficulties became easier with his support, especially when her partner took over nearly all her child care responsibilities. Mary's social opportunities increased and, as a result, she viewed her partner as a soulmate. He was simply someone to love and in return he appeared to make life easier and more meaningful for her.
Men are not typically the first one to say, ‘I love you’ and, when they do, women seem to believe it is true (Zinczenko & Spiker, 2006). When Paula's suspicions of child sexual abuse surfaced, he “held me and told me how much he loved me and only me”. In Paula's eyes, he was the ‘perfect’ lover; depicted by heteronormative romantic images of being together in a man's arms, receiving warm hugs and kisses and hearing loving words from his lips. These provided Paula with just enough feelings of security in her relationship, even if they were romanticized constructions that conflicted with her suspicions. Conclusion The genuineness of men on commencing a relationship is difficult to discern. Forward and Torres (2002, p. 19) wrote of a paradox in which “even the most destructive misogynistic relationships start out filled with just this kind of excitement”. But while both the men and women may seek social acceptance, the child molester's true intention is to deceive women who believe in the heteronormative ideal, particularly that love with him is possible. Hence the more intense the romantic dating scripts, the more likely the women in this study were subsumed by discourses of romantic love in ways that convinced them of the men's ‘idealness’ when commencing their relationships. His grooming, together with discursive social pressures, left the women with few perceived alternatives other than to keep going with their new relationships and keep maintaining the relationship ideal. Conformity to the female role through securing a loving heterosexual relationship influences women to think it will make them popular, reputable and morally worthy. Hence, the women conformed to heteronormative discourses without questioning their men's intentions because love was presented as a significant possibility and worthwhile goal (Jackson, 2001). The men's grooming, in terms of their generosity and sexual respect deceived the women into believing that life with these men would be emotionally secure, romantically gratifying and safe. Indicators of compatibility, including ‘his’ corresponding values and his willingness to spend a large amount of time together with them, strengthened the women's' fairy tale notions that soulmate-ship might exist and that their suitors were genuine. Admitting that your partner is a child molester, says Levenson and Morin (2001, p. 22), is extremely difficult when “society has always sensationalized people's problems” and demonized them. When a relationship is not well, social pressures compel women to put on a good face and build a facade of the perfect romance (Imber-Black, 1999) in response to an impossible hope for romance (Berlant, 2011). For those women who were groomed by child molesters, there was a fine line between romance, seduction and aggression that drew
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upon the women's vulnerability to romantic ideals. It is within this complexity of achieving romance that love was not only affirmed or negated by the men's heteronormative acts, but also opened up to women's infinite silent reweaving of heteronormative desires that society makes impossible to achieve. Fairy tale delusions during dating served to screen the aspects of participants' partners that were not desirable. Peer approval strengthened the women's' emotional bonds to their men. The women were, therefore, proud to flaunt their ability to harness an ideal man of which they perceived others were jealous. As the women's status increased, they moved up society's hierarchy from ‘single’ to ‘attached’. After appearing to achieve the heteronormative ideal, any indications that their relationships were otherwise was met with disbelief. Kasl (1990, p. 43) proposed that many women have sex with men “she doesn't truly desire…in order to maintain a relationship or placate a partner”, then when all is not perfect leaving is a difficult option. For women who learn that their men have immoral secrets, energy gets invested into maintaining illusions of being with a loving man who is good looking, a soulmate, or otherwise wealthy, generous, or so forth. Furthermore, because child sexual abuse is socially constructed as abhorrent, it is difficult for women to speak out and it is also difficult for others to fathom that the people they love could be doing such things (Van Dam, 2013). Even professional responses may draw on heteronormative discourses with disbelief that the women either did not know about the child sexual abusing or could not do anything to stop it. For the women, it may well be easier to find reasons to support their men's denials than to face society's cruelty towards her when accused as complicit in his abusing or when feeling like a failure at achieving heteronormative love. It is for these reasons it is critical that professionals understand the power of heteronormative romantic discourse over the women who are groomed and seduced by child molesters into partnering with them. While there remain some limitations to this study, particularly that a small number of women's narratives cannot be generalized to the whole population, this study offered insight into the experiences of a very vulnerable population of women that is not often regarded in research or gray literature as worthy of concern. Furthermore, while the women may not clearly be able to articulate how they have become subsumed by discursive heteronormative romantic constructs, the interpretive lenses used in this study respectfully add power to their voice. In being silenced for long enough, this research has allowed the women to respectfully be heard.
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