Is "rape culture" responsible for child rape, incest and pedophilia?

[thucythucy]

169. For a culture that "dictates that it is not acceptable to victimize children"

a hell of a lot of children sure do seem to get victimized in that culture.

For instance, the National Center for Victims of Crime says that 1 in 5 girls and 1 in 20 boys will be or are the victim of child sexual abuse. And that's only sexual abuse. Physical and emotional abuse that isn't sexual is even more prevalent. Hell, there are entire religious denominations that still preach "spare the rod and spoil the child."

Now, there's a lot of controversy on the exact statistics, given that even today many instances of child sexual abuse are not reported (since it often occurs within families, and children are often either threatened with retaliation if they report, or told they are to blame, or feel they are to blame, or are conflicted about causing the arrest of a parent, family member, or family friend). But it's still a significant number of children.

Culture is not a monolith. Within the larger polyglot culture there are many distinctive cultures or sub-cultures--sports, church, fraternities/college campuses--that all have a role in how the mega-culture deals with a particular issue. And so there were times when the same priests who were sexually abusing children were also hearing confessions and counseling adult women and men who had been raped (or, for that matter, children seeking to flee abuse within their families). Don't you think their status as rapists, within a culture that countenanced the rape of thousands of children over the course of many decades, had an impact on how they related to adult survivors of rape, or child victims seeking help for abuse within their families? You don't think this had an impact on those individuals, which may have had a further impact on how other victims dealt with their experience? A subculture that treats rape, of adults or children, as anything less than a crime of violence almost inevitably impacts the larger culture, unless the larger culture takes explicit steps to counter that impact. In the case of the Catholic Church, the larger culture only BEGAN to respond to the abuse at the end of the 20th century.

There is STILL widespread child sexual abuse--though some reports have it declining, along with other sorts of violent crime.

As I said, for a culture that "dictates that it is not acceptable to victimize children," an awful lot of children still end up getting victimized. So either the culture has little impact on how many adults relate to many children, or the culture isn't as unaccepting of child victimization as you'd like to believe.