A Gender Perspective on Abuse

Power, Shame, and Human Dignity

There are subjects that cannot be approached quickly. Subjects that require silence before words can emerge. Sexual abuse of children is one of them. Through many years in social work, teaching, and conversations with people who have carried such experiences throughout their lives, I have often felt how difficult this field truly is. Not primarily because we lack knowledge, but because the knowledge challenges our understanding of human beings, culture, and ourselves.

Some themes create unease simply by being named. They disturb our sense of safety. They force us to ask what kind of society we actually live in. What kind of culture is formed around children. What kind of understanding of gender, power, and sexuality slowly enters the way human beings learn to see one another.

When a child is sexually violated, it is never only the body that is harmed. Something also happens to the child’s experience of the world. Trust is disrupted. Language becomes more difficult. Many children lose not only their sense of safety with other people, but also their connection to themselves.

Perhaps this is what makes sexual abuse so deeply destructive. It does not merely wound a moment. It enters the self.

Over the years, I have met people who told their stories very late in life. Some spoke for the first time as adults. Others only when they had become old. Many had lived an entire lifetime in silence. Not because they had forgotten, but because their experiences lacked words. Shame had settled quietly over their whole way of being in the world.

Sometimes I think shame is one of the heaviest burdens a human being can carry. Not the healthy shame that helps us understand boundaries, but the destructive shame that makes a person feel that their very existence is somehow wrong.

I remember a woman once saying to me:
“The worst thing was not what happened. The worst thing was that I slowly began to believe there was something about me that made it possible.”

That sentence has stayed with me ever since.

For one of the most devastating aspects of abuse is precisely this: the guilt is transferred. The child begins to carry what the adult should have carried alone.

In the lecture material underlying this text, sexual abuse is described as “the exploitation of another person’s vulnerability and the misuse of power.” I believe this is essential to understand. Sexual abuse is not fundamentally about sexuality. It is about asymmetry. About power. About the right some people assume they have to use another human being to satisfy their own needs.

This must be said clearly.

For our culture has often attempted to explain abusive behavior in ways that simultaneously weaken responsibility. “He was sick.” “He could not control himself.” “He was abused himself as a child.” Such explanations may contain elements of truth. Human beings are shaped by experience. Psychological conditions matter. Trauma can be transmitted across generations.

But when explanation becomes excuse, something dangerous happens.

Responsibility dissolves.

Several times I have witnessed perpetrators attempting to rewrite reality in ways that make the child appear partly responsible. In the lecture, adult men describe children’s “magnetism” or claim that the child “seduced” them. This is not merely moral distortion. It reflects a deeper cultural mechanism in which the powerful attempt to move guilt onto the vulnerable.

And this is precisely where a gender perspective becomes important.

Historically, women and children have, in large parts of the world, existed under male authority. Not only socially, but legally, economically, and religiously. Many ancient cultures regarded women and children as the property of men. This can be seen in legal systems, religious texts, and cultural traditions.

When we read such texts today, we often react with distance. We tell ourselves that this belongs to the past. But culture does not disappear. It changes form.

That does not mean our time is identical to the past. But traces remain.

They remain in pornography’s objectification.
In the sexualization of young girls.
In language that still asks what the victim was wearing.
In the idea that men “cannot control their urges.”
In advertising industries teaching young people to see the body as value.
In social media, where children’s self-understanding is shaped through the gaze of others.

Human beings learn to see themselves through culture.

And if culture teaches girls that their value lies primarily in physical attractiveness, while boys learn that masculinity means control, conquest, and dominance, a dangerous landscape begins to emerge.

Not because sexuality itself is dangerous.

But because sexuality without responsibility can become brutal.

Practical philosophy is often about learning to see the human being behind the categories. Not merely as woman or man. Not as object. Not as role. But as a living person with vulnerability, boundaries, and dignity.

Martin Buber wrote about the difference between “I–Thou” and “I–It.” When a human being is no longer encountered as a “Thou,” but reduced to an object for another person’s needs and control, something deeply inhuman takes place. Sexual abuse may be one of the most extreme expressions of this.

The child is no longer encountered as a subject.
The child is used.

And when a human being is used long enough, they often begin to doubt their own worth.

I have met adults who still, decades later, carried this doubt in their bodies. Some struggled with intimacy. Others with trust. Some never fully believed they deserved to be loved without having to give something in return.

This is how violation often continues long after the acts themselves have ended.

That is why the struggle against abuse is not only about punishment and control. It is also about our understanding of what it means to be human.

What do we actually see when we look at a child?

A child is not an object for adult needs.
Not an extension of adult loneliness.
Not a body.
Not a fantasy.

A child is a human being who must be protected.

It sounds obvious when stated this way. Yet history shows that it has never truly been self-evident.

The original lecture draws long historical lines from antiquity, the Bible, the Roman Empire, and into modern times. Many of the examples are painful to read. Women and children treated as war trophies. Sexuality connected to ownership. Girls married off as children. Sexual exploitation legitimized through religion, economy, and power.

It is tempting to turn away from such material. But perhaps we must dare to read it precisely because it reveals something essential: human civilization is not only the history of progress. It is also the history of resistance against brutality.

Some people have always protested.

I often think of Josephine Butler, who fought against the sexual exploitation of women and children in nineteenth-century England. She lived in a time when prostitutes were subjected to forced medical examinations by the state in order to protect men from venereal disease. Women lost their freedom. Men retained power.

Butler refused to accept this as normal.

Such people change the world.

Not merely through power, but through moral courage.

And perhaps this is precisely what we still need today. Not only knowledge. Not only debate. But human beings willing to protect vulnerability even when culture moves in the opposite direction.

For our own time is not without problems.

We live in a society where children are exposed to sexualized imagery at increasingly early ages. Pornography is available within seconds. For many young people, pornography has become a form of sexual education. The body becomes a commodity. Attention becomes currency.

At the same time, loneliness grows.

This is one of the paradoxes of our age:
Never has sexuality been more visible.
And perhaps never has genuine intimacy been more difficult.

For intimacy is not primarily about sexuality.
Intimacy is about being present with another human being without using them.

That is a distinction our culture easily forgets.

Martin Heidegger wrote that human beings can lose themselves in “the They” — the anonymous social world in which no one truly takes responsibility anymore. Perhaps something similar can be seen in today’s sexualized culture. No individual person feels directly responsible, yet the totality of images, language, and attitudes still shapes how people learn to look at one another.

And children grow up inside that gaze.

That is why I believe the struggle against abuse is also a question of formation and education. What kind of human beings are we teaching children to become? What understanding of masculinity and femininity are we passing on?

I believe boys need to learn that strength is not dominance.
That sexuality without empathy becomes destructive.
That true maturity involves responsibility.

And I believe girls need to learn that their worth never depends on how attractive they are to others.

Human dignity is something deeper than the body.

When I look back on all my years in social work, I often think that one of the most important things a human being can do is simply remain present when another person is suffering. Not flee from pain. Not become emotionally cold. Not reduce suffering to theory.

Simply remain there.

Sometimes healing begins precisely in such moments.

In a room where a person finally dares to speak.
Where someone listens without turning away.
Where guilt is slowly placed back where it belongs.

For no child carries responsibility for adult sexuality.

None.

Perhaps that is the most important sentence in this entire essay.

And perhaps all practical philosophy begins precisely here:
In the way we encounter the most vulnerable among us.

Not as statisticians.
Not as ideologues.
But as human beings.

For a society is judged not primarily by how it treats the strong, but by how it protects those who cannot protect themselves.

That is why we must continue speaking about these things.
Calmly.
Honestly.
Without sensationalism.
Without hatred.
But also not without truth.

For silence never protects the child.

It only makes the adult safer.

References

Aristotle. (2008). Politics. Oslo: Vidarforlaget.

The Holy Bible. (1988). Oslo: The Norwegian Bible Society.

Buber, M. (1970). I and Thou (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). New York: Scribner.

Galbraith, J. K. (1983). The Anatomy of Power. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell.

Hildebrand, E. (1983). Therapy for Adult Women Who Have Been Victims of Incestuous Abuse in Childhood. Copenhagen: Danish Psychological Press.

Levinas, E. (2006). Humanism of the Other. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

NOTA. (1993). Reports and legal commentary concerning sexual abuse of children. June 1993.

Rossman, P., & Parker, A. (1976). Sexual Experience Between Men and Boys. New York: Paperback Library.

Sætre, M., Holter, H., & Jebsen, E. (1986). Coerced Sexuality. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.

For silence never protects the child.

It only makes the adult safer.

The text is mine and written on the background of my many lectures on this subject over the years. It is written also in a conversation with OpenAI/ChatGPT, which also made the illustration.