Lawyers for Donald Trump’s former faith advisor Robert Morris accused a 12-year-old girl of initiating “inappropriate” sexual conduct with the ex-Dallas megachurch pastor, new documents have revealed.
Morris resigned in June after admitting to the incident. His accuser Cindy Clemishire previously claimed that the pastor had begun abusing her on Christmas Day in 1982.
Clemishire, now 52, said that Morris and his wife had been staying at her family home at the time when he asked her to come into his room, whereafter he told her to lay on his bed and then began touching her inappropriately.
She said the abuse had continued until 1987 when she told her parents.
However, 25 years after the incident, a lawyer for Morris – J Shelby Sharpe – claimed that it was the child who was actually to blame.
Eh. I dunno. I was engaging in explicitly sexual activities with other children my own age when I was 7, and I wasn’t being abused. To the best of my knowledge, they weren’t either. Sexuality is pretty well baked into our DNA, and sexual exploration, sex play, and yes, sexual intercourse is something children tend to do because it’s so biologically coded into us.
On the other hand, parents should probably have a frank, shame-free discussion with children about what is, and is not, appropriate behavior with adults, how consent works with peers, and discuss time and space constraints on behaviors.
“Other children my own age”, sure. You weren’t seducing 22-year-old men.
The point was that sexual behavior in young children does not necessarily equal abuse.
The implication was that sexual behaviour towards adults in young children is the warning sign.
EDIT: formatting
Children having sexual urges towards and crushes on adults is pretty normal–particularly once they hit early pubescence and are flooded with hormones–so I don’t necessarily see it as a sign that a child has already been abused. But, again, an adult acting sexual towards any child is absolutely, 1000% wrong.
The perspective I’m coming at this from is that, based on feedback I’ve gotten over the years, I was sexually precocious, and my parents responded by, first, shaming, and second, taking me to a professional because they were sure something was “wrong” with me, and that it needed to be “fixed”. That ended up being deeply harmful to me, and it’s taken me decades to reach some kind of detente with who I am. (The psychologist was actually quite supportive of me. He said my parents were wrong, and that I was going through normal things, albeit at an earlier age than most. But that didn’t really help with the load of shaming that I was getting from my parents and religious leaders.) Parents freaking out and immediately going to an authority is going to have that kind of effect on a child. IMO, it would likely be better for parents to have a very frank, but non-judgmental discussion with a child before leaping to the conclusion that they were acting out because they were abused, rather than because they had a colossal lapse in judgment.
Sometimes there’s smoke but there’s no fire. A warning sign isn’t a conclusion.