If I were a juror listening again to that interview, JD's voluntarily offered statement "I'm not denying guilt" would be ringing in my ears, and extremely hard to get past. Who says that when questioned by police, if they are innocent and unaware of wrongdoing!?!
People tell you who they are, and I feel in Josh's case, he quite literally TOLD the jury he was guilty.
I feel JD was (possibly) inadvertently coached at a very young age into his perversions by witnessing or being shown sexual violence against children. The adviser his parents sent him to, the family friend, after the initial molestation admissions, was later convicted of CSAM charges. Just how long had this family friend had access to JD when he was young? I believe some of this deviance is imprinted by early exposure, and modeled from that point on. I'm not accusing any particular person, but I do think it's no coincidence that "trusted family friends" turned out to be involved in the same form of behavior later emerging as a pattern in JD. Children get warped quite often by what they see and learn while too young to properly process the experiences.
I'm also wondering if JD's Ashley Madison and cheating scandals were actually attempts by JD to NOT act out his desires on children (even his own.) I think these infidelities and addictions could very well have been desperate efforts to keep his pedophilic urges at bay. He may have been desperately trying not to be a monster, which would show some hint of self-consciousness and self-rejection. (But IMOO it was too late and too misguided; he was already a monster.) The fact that he was accused by one of the AM women of a violent assault says to me that violence in sexual expression is one of his secret needs, which he may have been trying to spare Anna in his mind by looking elsewhere.
If this post breaks rules, I apologize. Please leave in the parts that don't. All of this is MOO, and just me trying to understand the things that shape human behavior. With compassion and a sense of tragedy for all involved, and sadness (with anger) for the brutal systems and schemes that people continue to adhere to at the expense of children. As long as these systems persist, there will always be a market, unfortunately, for CSAM.
I hope that Josh is found guilty on both counts, given max sentences, forced to register, and never sees his children again. I also pray that Anna will find her way out of her own chains, if not for herself, then for her kids. These things have a way of repeating through generations, and I fervently hope Anna will stop the buck in time, if it's not already too late.
Great post!
I try to learn as much as I can about these perverts but it turns out much more complicated than I thought when I first started researching. Pedophilia is a diagnosis that has to do with exclusive attraction to children. I have a feeling he is not exclusively attracted to children. I think he may be attracted also to sexual violence, domination and destruction of innocence. So mostly children but he probably also accesses adult
, showing women being abused and degraded. But that’s not illegal so they have no reason to show that if that was found.
In any event, he’s a child molester and a danger to children. And how that comes to be is an interesting issue for me. For most of us I imagine as crimes are something that we seek to understand and prevent.
IMO, the environment in general in which he was raised is one riddled with predators. Besides Gothard and the state police officer now serving 56 years for CSAM, there is also good Duggar friend Doug Phillips, Vision Forum founder, who was accused of sexual harassment and assault of a young “mother’s helper” who moved in with his family at age 15.
Sadly, tons of research shows that child abuse of all kinds, sexual assault, and domestic violence is pervasive in fundamental, religious patriarchies. All kinds. So these types of things occur at higher rates in such communities due to literal or legalistic approaches to religion that create gender and age inequities. Women and children are seen as needing to blindly obey their male authority and as almost property of such authority.
We find these attitudes and the resultant abuses in strict Islamic cultures, Ultra Orthodox Judaism, fundamentalist Mormons and various fundamentalist Christian sects.
I do believe it is possible he was exposed to child sexual abuse or sexual assault of females as a young person. But I also think that it’s the attitudes about the value and rights, or lack thereof, of children and women, as well as the attitudes about the supremacy of males, that enables certain abuses and the desire to abuse to escalate in certain communities. Especially when you add in super repressive attitudes about purity and pollution, expecting adolescents and young adults to repress all sexual feelings, to not even masturbate, as indulging in any of that is sinful, and requiring this in an environment in which there’s an almost hyper sexuality and obsession with sex (constantly discussing it as taboo but then married couples displaying a lot of sexual attraction in front of others, parents making their reproductive cycles known to the whole family, etc.) it’s like a tinder box.
Add in any accidental head injuries among children/teens in a group, physical abuse of a child, etc., as well as a total rejection of psychology as a means to help people with issues, and the chances of such a creature being created increase.
