Child Abuse Survivor Blog

  • Following My Own Advice – Calling Out False Pedophile Stories

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 4 minutes

    I have been on record saying that if you truly believe in a cause, and the importance of it, you need to be the first to call out untruths.

    I’ve said it about false rape allegations, false child abuse allegations, fake hate crimes, etc.

    If you believe rape, abuse, and hate crimes are big issues that our society needs to be concerned with, and that the victims need to believed, you need to be the first to call it out when someone undermines the issue by spreading false stories.

    So, while it may cost me some followers, let me just say this. If you believe QAnon conspiracy theories about elite pedophile gangs and sex trafficking rings with zero proof aside from some seeming coincidences with a bunch of half-true facts, and go spreading them around, you are undermining the very serious issue we have in society with actual, real pedophiles, elite and otherwise, and real, true to life, sex trafficking.

  • Quick Thought #14 – When it’s Someone You Know, You Know.

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    Why do I see these two things as related? Well. let’s start with Sean Astin. It’s hard not to think that he has lived an amazingly privileged life. He’s been famous since he was a little kid, after growing up part of Hollywood royalty. If anyone has the means to shelter himself away from the harder topics of life, he’s one of those people. But he chooses not to, because he’s seen first hand what it is like to life with, and love someone with, mental health issues. That experience drives him to advocacy. He wants to share what it was like, and help others watching a mental health condition tear apart their own family.

    In short, he gets it because he knows.

    The same seems to be true when it comes to how serious COVID-19 really is. It seems to me there are a lot of people thinking it’s not very serious because well, no one they know has died or anything serious. 130,000 “other people” have died in the US. On the other hand, there are those of us who do know people who’ve died, or spent time hospitalized, tend to take it very seriously. Because we know. We’ve seen it. We’ve grieved because of it.

  • Another Birthday and Another Reminder That We Are Not Alone

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 3 minutes

    Last year, on the day after my birthday, I was writing about how it wasn’t exactly the birthday I would have planned, spending the day flying home after my Mom’s funeral but it wasn’t all bad. . My wife and I will both be dealing with our losses for awhile, and there will be times…

  • How Much Blame Should We Really Get for not Picking up on Grooming?

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 4 minutes

    Think about it. Right now, this very second, you are reading this post because either you found the headline intriguing and clicked, or someone shared it with you and said you should read it, and you clicked. In both cases, you were persuaded by another person to do something. If you saw it on Facebook or other social media platform, there’s a Facebook algorithm watching you and trying to give you more stuff you like, to persuade you to keep coming back to Facebook, and you’re reading it on a device that you were persuaded to purchase by some other factor in your life. 

    Not to mention the fact that parents, teachers, or someone, somewhere, persuaded you to learn to read. You were persuaded, even manipulated, to go to school, study, become the sort of person who could get a well-enough paying job to own a piece of technology and pay for an internet connection, and all of that wound up with you, right here, right now. 

    You were “groomed” to do what you are doing right now. And yet, so many want to look at children, and make them responsible for knowing which persuasion is good for them and which isn’t. 

  • Quick Thought #13 – More Trauma Makes More Problems More Likely, and This is Trauma

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    All of the caveats aside about ACE scores that I’ve written about before, (tl;dr – Yes the more childhood traumas you’ve had, the more likely you will deal with various issues as an adult, but it’s not a set fate for everyone.) I think we can, however, accept that children who dealt with more traumatic…

  • Just Stop – The Universe did not Cause My Abuse For My Greater Good

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 5 minutes

    I was abused by people who made the decision to abuse me. I did nothing to cause it, and there was no lack of purpose to which I needed to be directed. I was a little kid being beaten, and eventually molested, for years. My purpose in life was to be a little kid. There was nothing fair about it, there was no sense to be made of why it happened, it was the result of another person’s actions which happened to be directed toward me because I was there. And, I was there by chance. Not by divine interference, just random chance.Â