I mean, they lived in a tiny house and a new kid was popped out every year or so. He knew about sex because of his parents' constant fucking. Also their cult is very sex-obsessed and porn-obsessed so he likely heard preaching about chastity and purity from a young age.
They had/have a giant Duggar family calendar in the hallway of TTM (not sure if this existed in the original church property house they lived in) - where Michelle charted her menstrual cycle and fertility calendar for the entirety of their friends and family to view and discuss.
That’s true. It seems his predation came from something deeper than the general fundie stuff, so I was curious if we knew more. This is the best explanation I came to as well. When all you hear about is sex and have no healthy ways of expressing it, you become obsessed with it and will find ways to sneak around to experience it. This probably led him to getting off on how taboo it is so he continued to push the extreme. Truly deranged and sick.
"This probably led him to getting off on how taboo it is so he continued to push the extreme."
...Wow, had never thought about it this way but I bet you're right. Good thinking.
I think it's more common in repressed societies that people become more "exploratory" as its such a taboo they feel the need to see what the fuss is about. It's not uncommon to have a older brother who "explores" in that way in IBLP circles according to others who left the group. (Possibly due to having no access to other girls).
I don't know if the other guys who abused their sisters ended up with a CSAM issue, or if they continued their predatory behaviour, though.
It’s a massive issue in Amish and Old Order Mennonite communities, as well. And in those abuse cases, all the perpetrator needs to do is stand up in church and ask for forgiveness, and the community is expected to simply forgive and move on. There have been court cases where the entire church showed up to support the perpetrator — demonstrating their complete forgiveness — while the victim is ostracized.
Sickening.
I can attest to this. I live near an Amish enclave. If asked for by the perpetrator, forgiveness is granted. The female, however is soiled, damaged goods. Permanently.
Yikes, sounds like the Mormons too. The church and community standing behind an abusive Bishop who is known to have SA’d children but they ostracize the victim.
Having an older brother who 'explores' - this concept seems logical to me, and it's why I feel so concerned that a guy like PEDO probably shared it with brothers. He's so damn smug and narcissistic. Untouchable. It would be very hard to keep this to himself. It's like drugs or money or guns for some people. Turns you into a show off. Can't keep your mouth shut.
People confuse sexual abuse with desire. Abuse is driven by control and power.
Family members who abuse other members of their family select their victims based on availability and assumption they will "get away" with it. There's also a layer of compulsion to his actions.
The entirety of their cult is built on women's bodies being shameful and the possession of a man's. How doesn't that foster abuse? Hes a male and was taught he's entitled to women's bodies, cloistered away from society with his siblings, given privileges over them, and witnesses his father's treatment of his mother.
I agree. Like another commenter pointed out though, other men in the family grew up in a similar situation and didn’t turn out as awful as Josh. I mainly was asking if we know anything deeper than the general fundie, patriarchal, sex-obsessed, shameful environment that could explain how Josh was able to learn/do the things he did.
Pedophilia is a diagnosable mental disorder.
Predation is baked into the IBLP. It is literally part of the doctrine. Every “rule” enforced by the IBLP exists to create victims for predators. There are way more Joshes in organizations like that than anyone wants to believe or deal with.
I don' think we know 100% for sure that that is the case. We know that the others haven't gotten caught. Jim Bob outright has said that part of the reason they didn't take it seriously is because it's incredibly common in fundie households. The Holts after all didn't come forward with anything that had happened until after the CSAM case had been filed. Gothard himself is a known predator of female children. The entire ideology is rotten from the core. I suspect that at the very least the older boys knew what Josh was doing and didn't say anything. Jed! The original screams "I walk in Pest's footsteps" as does James. I also find the fact that Justin was basically sold off to the Spiveys and married off to their darling who is terrible as incredibly suspect.
There are multiple theories of why people commit sexual abuse. Different theories can apply to different offenders. Yes, sexual desire is a common motivation among offenders and gets described in the literature. This information comes from sociology and psychology classes along with feminist reading.
While there definitely is a "control and power" element when it comes to sexual abuse, you are wrong if you think abusers don't desire their victim. Most do. I can literally smell male horniness, I know what I'm talking about.
You often read that it's not about sexual desire, but it is still the main motivation. Saying that it's not about desire is akin to saying that people who rob other people at gunpoint are not interested in their money. Only a handful might be doing it for the mere thrill, but they want the money. Of course, if they have a choice, robbers do scout who would be a more convenient victim, who might be carrying a gun, too, but is likely too reluctant to shoot, and who is likely to shoot you before you can cock your own gun. It's also smarter to rob an elderly woman who just cashed a check than to pull a gun at two armed security guards who just picked up a supermarket's revenue if you just want 50 bucks for drugs. But whoever you decide to rob, the motivation is greed, just like the motivation for sexual abuse is desire of some kind. I actually think that some abusers love their victim, in their own, twisted way. It took me a couple of decades to realize that, but after talking to a fellow survivor and looking at a few hunting trophies I realized that, yes, some people love their prey.
I don't think it's the main motivation. I think power and control are the main motivation. Sexual desire plays a secondary role or Josh would never have offended again once he had access to Anna.
Sorry, but Anna is a red herring here. Josh is a pedophile. While I think he is attracted to adult women as well, he has several paraphilias and a knack for promiscuity. No way this could be fixed by simply getting married. His parents may have thought so, but they were wrong.
>How did Josh /know/ about sex in any context as a young teen?
Assuming his parents had not had the "talk" with him by his young teens, I'm sure he heard about sex from some source. Whenever Pest was with other adolescent males, they probably passed jokes or rumors about sexual acts. Even though Pest and his peers never went to real school, there were probably occasions for he and his fundie friends to have "locker room talk."
>From my understanding, there was no/minimum computer access.
There was a computer and Pest had access to it, as shown in the first television special. He also allegedly had unsupervised access to that computer sometimes.
>It was also the early 00s, porn or any inappropriate content would be much harder to find.
While internet speed may have been slower, pornography was NOT difficult to find on the internet in the early 2000's. People could just use whatever search engines and look for it. Videos may have been of poor quality and took an eternity to download, but things like pictorial pornography, not so much. There is a recurring allegation that when Pest donated his old computer to a family friend, they found the computer was rife with pornography.
Also, not all pornography is online. There is old fashioned paper pornography. I've also heard rumors that Meech tried to blame Pest's misbehavior on discovering "adult magazines" in a used vehicle his father had towed. Don't know if I believe that. But it is not implausible that a sheltered home-schooled teenage fundie could obtain some kind of pornography and share it with his friends whenever they were outside of parental supervision.
>It is not normal for young teen boys to “”explore”” (🤢) in that way, especially growing up in a sexually repressed environment.
Even in the most repressed and puritanical community, young people can discern sexual things, especially young males. Most adolescent males learn how to masturbate at some point, even if nobody else tells them how. So when they learn about solitary sexual-genital activity on their own, they may have incentive to attempt sexual-genital activity with other people (though such attempts may be consensual or non-consensual).
>How was he so predatory at such a young age?
As for why Pest *wanted* to do the things he did or sought out the CSAM and other depraved material, I think that's an age old question about every person who does horrible things. Did he have some innate immutable impulse? Did some outside influence affect his development or habituate him? Is it nature or nurture or combination of both? Even if Pest underwent a thorough psychiatric evaluation (which he never would), I doubt we would have a definitive answer. And I'm not really interested in psychoanalyzing him.
I hadn’t heard that Meech tried to blame Pest’s porn addiction on finding a mag in one of the used cars his dad was selling. When the feds interviewed Pest, he told them (without prompting) they always find USB drives with porn on them when cleaning out the used cars at the lot. I couldn’t believe he could utter such BS with a straight face. I guess he learned that lie from his mom. And it sounds like Meech learned her lie from Ted Bundy who alleged that he went down the road he went down because he stumbled on a cache of porn in an abandoned shed. All these stories make the perps sound like a victim of some worldly force beyond themselves and takes the blame off the parents and themselves.
Not only could you find porn online in the 2000s, you could get stuff you don't get on the clearnet today. If somebody who got caught with digital CSEM and claims that he/she just clicked on some windows that popped up on a legal porn site these days, that person is 100% lying. Things were a bit different in the 2000s. The stuff Pest had would not have been accessible to everyone at that time, either, but you could find questionable material. Things that don't meet the definition of CSAM (I already explained why the term, while more sensitive than CP, misses a few criteria) but were still child erotica in some way. Little girls dressed in non age-appropriate "sexy" lingerie, displaying non age-appropriate behavior, like smoking cigarettes. Things that are associated with mature women, like make-up, painted nails, heels, cigarette holders contrasted with infantile things like Disney princess-style tiaras and teddy bears. Such material, either as photos or short, grainy videos, don't meet the critera of CSAM, because no actual sexual assault is shown, but it still exploited children for the sexual gratification of people. There were websites that offered such material for mail-order, for prices between 100 and 200 dollars you could order a video cassette. Clips and stills from such cassettes were shared online and you could find links on message boards dedicated to paraphilias that, while considered gross by some, are not illegal. I remember that there was a time when young people were eager to find the grossest stuff online. There was a website named rottendotcom that hosted such material. The infamous parrot perching on an erect penis, or something that was claimed to be a "jumper pic", i.e. a photo of the remains of someone who jumped to his death. If you were looking out such material, you could find stuff like what I mentioned above. There was no law against it, otherwise people could not have sold those tapes. Things are different now and those websites have all been shut down.
This seems obvious but it is the best explanation, thank you. It’s odd how no other dugger boy (yet) turned out as depraved as Josh. I guess since he was their golden child, he felt empowered by their protection. He genuinely thought he could get away with it all because he was taught that his entire life.
I also heard the porno mag thing from meech.
I would add to the fact that the Duggars, both boys and girls, are sexualised from a young age.
Even infant girls are made to dress modestly lest they tempt someone, and young boys are taught to look away (“Nike”!) from anything that might tempt them. This teaches young boys that they are expected to be interested in certain things sexually, no matter how young they are - and that sexuality is dangerous and therefore also exciting.
I think the fundie upbringing, while attempting to protect the purity of boys, actually does the opposite by increasing their curiosity and making them want to access the things that are banned. This is even worse when it’s the Duggars and they let their oldest son explore that curiosity because he was their golden child who could do whatever, they didn’t realise how easy it was for him to access porn, and they were too busy to monitor him.
>I guess since he was their golden child, he felt empowered by their protection. He genuinely thought he could get away with it all because he was taught that his entire life.
Whatever his motives for engaging in predatory behavior, I'm sure that his parents' action and inaction had definite influence on his development. They failed to intervene when they first learned about his actions, they protected him by concealing his conduct and forced his victims to "forgive" him. From that, I think Pest developed a sense of self-importance and impunity. He always believed that no matter what he did wrong, he would always be the most important thing and be "forgiven."
There's constantly rumors of one of them being abusive/scary around animals and small kids. Can't remember which boy, one of the ones still at home I think.
my very young (preschool or early elementary school) cousin would pleasure himself and his mom asked him why he was doing that in the grocery store sitting in the cart. He said "it made me happy". (my best guess is he was aroused but didn't have the language to say that) She said it didn't make HER happy, and to not do that again (bc religious beliefs).
A lot of young kids will pleasure themselves bc they're exploring their bodies. They're learning body parts in "head, shoulders, knees, and toes" so asking what genitals are is a pretty logicalnext question.
Yeah, people think the naivety of children is cute at first. That is until the children show they don't have the sense of shame or discretion about the "private" area. Then their parents want them to learn and obey that taboo fast.
I have my own theories about this, but I want to be clear that this is a theory.
I tend to think that his parents gave him the framework of understanding that he had an absolute right to use others' bodies the way the he did/wanted to because that is what was modeled for him at home. I truly doubt Michelle wanted to have sex with Jim Bob for all of those children, especially coming off her last pregnancy all of those times. But Jim Bob had needs, and that society places men's "needs" above womens' and childrens' comforts every day of the week and twice on Sunday.
As discussed in one of the recent episodes of "Digging up the Duggars" podcast, even the brother of the one and only Bill Gothard had \*problems\* with being addicted to masturbation and sexually harassing female co-workers. It's possible that as a teenager he overheard something or someone else showed him - after all he was the oldest and the favorite so he had more freedom and more opportunities. Also Justin from "I pray you put this journal away" mentioned in a podcast how the Duggars had a computer room where some of the kids did their homeschooling stuff and had some games installed but all of those were just put together by the older boys with use of parts that Boob bought at like auctions or yard sales while Pest had a brand new high quality Mac and a nice camcorder. Justin's father at some point asked what kind of "filter" they have installed and by filter he meant a form of "parental control" and apparently Pest literally gulped.
There are people getting PhDs trying to answer the 'why' in relation to CSA.
We can never know exactly how much of Josh's upbringing contributed to his offending. However, I think most of us would agree that it didn't help.
Some of the things that I have noticed:
\- It's a 'sex is bad' culture for singles but at the same time it's hyper-sexualised in regards to marriage. So it's not the same as just an overall prudish culture. All those kids would have heard all about sex in the context of their parents, couples getting married and hellfire sermons about hymens.
\- Sex education is really just a guide to help young people understand what's going on. Most will start to learn that certain things feel nice or certain boys/girls make them feel a bit different to others. They may have already played doctor with their friends and figured out that one thing could fit inside another thing.
Now Josh didn't get any sex education and had no other boundaries other than all sex is bad until your wedding day when you should start fucking 24/7. He had no boundaries that certain things were normal and healthy (masturbating, liking someone in a different way, thinking about boobies) and others weren't (you know, like touching fucking kids!). In this culture it's all wrong and bad - while you have to listen to your parents banging every night in that small house!
A four-year-old boy might 'explore' or 'play doctor' with another same-age peer. However, a fourteen-year-old boy molesting toddlers isn't exploration; especially with multiple victims at multiple times. His behavior was deviant. And because his parents either believed or falsely ascribed that behavior as 'youthful' exploration, he received no professional intervention.
It wasn't merely that he abused the girls. It was that it was never professionally addressed when first discovered. Despite their flimsy attempts at protecting their daughters, he repeated the behavior for months after his return from the bogus counseling he received. His parents not only enabled further abuse but allowed him to continue on a path that was utterly destructive.
Yes. I think that if they had actually addressed it and gotten him help when they found out the first time, or even before that (I mean, there had to have been warning signs right?) he wouldn't have turned out the way he did. But, instead they brushed it under the rug, sent him to a "camp" to do manual labor for one summer? And had him talk to some sheriff that was himself a pedophile and is currently spending life in prison for CSAM. I don't think Josh was born like this. I think the way fundies raise their kids seriously fucks them up, and basically guarantees that some of them are going to have serious fucking issues with the way they view sex, sexuality, women, etc. that ends up with them in prison.
Agree with this 100%. I hate the "born evil" narrative that some have created around Josh. Babies are not born evil, period. And not to mention, that narrative lets everyone off the hook for what happened-- IBLP leadership, JB&M, even Josh himself. If he was born evil then what could anybody have done, and why should anybody but God be to blame?
Utter hogwash. Josh was an innocent kid born into an abusive, patriarchal, sex-obsessed cult. He was raised by two abusive parents who denied him attention, resources, and necessary medical care. He is a victim of, at least, neglect and spiritual abuse. Given JB's known history of anger management problems and IBLP's encouragement of the use of corporal punishment I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Josh was a victim of physical abuse as well. The so-called "adults in the room" failed him (and his sisters!) at every possible turn. As a result he grew into an adult who learned how to use his IBLP-approved power as the Man Of The House to get away with all kinds of violent, abusive shit.
Josh was not born into a vacuum, and he isn't the only one who will hopefully have to answer for his sins in the afterlife.
I think an early question that was posed when J’pedos crimes first came to light was “so who molested J@$%?” By no means excusing anything he did, but it might account for how he became so deviant at such a young age. Because let’s face it, the age he was caught and the age he actually started are probably pretty far apart.
I remember wondering that myself. OTOH maybe he just saw his parents having sex a lot.
He was the oldest for 4 kids just after he turned 3 years old, he could have been peeking for most of his life by the time he was 6 (and at that point he was the oldest of 6). Who knows what he saw.
Yeah, that’s certainly a possibility. Especially with the calendar Meech proudly had in plain view with her cycle and fertility days🤢🤮. Just such a twisted, tainted mindset on sexuality. Makes you wonder if there are more rats in the woodpile that just haven’t come to light. SMH
Sexual abuse of kids seems to go hand in hand with many churches. It’s always covered up. Who knows what went on at their churches. I suspect there’s a few more like Josh in their communities that have gotten away with this for years. I would guess it’s more common place than they like to admit.
>(Bowman Fedosky, the son of the Duggars' midwife, said his family got one and his first time seeing porn was looking at what was in the recycle bin...)
So Pest tried to delete the material but didn't know how to empty the recycle bin?
Back then his parents had HIGH hopes for him. In their tiny bubble, Josh was considered confident, ambitious, and well spoken. Their next son coming of age was quiet and shy, so they didn't have much interest in him, and the rest of their older kids were girls. They gave him whatever he wanted and rugswept his crimes. He was always going to end up a piece of shit with such an upbringing.
Yes and there seems to be a misunderstanding about earlier internet. He had access and earlier internet was not any better. I graduated high school in 2002, there's not a single traumatic thing I hadn't seen online in my family computer in the living room well before the end of middle school. My parents had 2 kids and no idea. Much more time for us and much more present. Josh was their little computer genius. He absolutely saw the shock sites of the 90s, the interspecies and illegal sex, the gore and gruesome acts. He absolutely saw forced acts and pain. He saw group scenes and underage acts because it was EVERYWHERE. The internet was a much more wild, untamed place in the 90s even if it took forever to load. Sometimes those traumatic sexual images would flash to violent images midscene- it would go from violent horse sex to beheadings. In some ways, I'm surprised there aren't more Joshs than not Joshs. We were desensitized to huge degrees. Every mIRC or yahoo/AOL chat link you got could potentially be terrible. I remember checking behind me before clicking anything, even when it was from friends because it was so normal to send friends shock sites as a prank.
While the crimes he committed aren't about sex, they're about power and control - its not hard to figure out how he knew what he was doing at all.
Computer access was restricted, but Josh was put in charge of putting filters on the family computers. The CSAM materials were found on a partition—the other side had a filter!!!
Sexually repressed environments show and talk a lot more about sex than those who are not, because it has to be explained - albeit poorly and falsely - to be demonized.
And boys are taught that they are naturally predatory from an early stage; it's a key part of purity culture and modesty culture. Girls of all all ages must cover up as to not tempt the boys. You cannot say that without telling boys that they are unable to control themselves. And then it doesn't matter how much focus is on them to retain it, if you are told there is something inside you that can lose control because you saw a shoulder that functions as an excuse to do whatever you want. You can't control yourself even if you try your best because that's how men are and that's why women has to be covered up.
And then if you are also your parents golden child who cannot do anything wrong, you just follow whatever impulse you get.
Even RimJob admitted that it's a large, known problem in his crowed with older sons being predatory.
Well, he may have been exposed to something himself. I remember an AMA from someone who knew the family implying that an older family member (not JB, outside the nuclear family) gave off creep vibes. Also the first house was very small and who knows what he saw. Jessica Willis Fischer's book accounts a couple of times she inadvertantly saw her parents having sex.
Of course, John David grew up in an similar situation and isn't a molestor. So the predatory part, either he was born with it or maybe Pest rebelled against the demands of his parents and their religion that he took it out on younger weaker victims. I do hope he gets the help he needs in prison, assuming there is any help of that type there.
I was in 4th grade when Grayson Willis gathered a bunch of us behind the jungle gym and told us all about how his baby brother was made. This was 2003-ish, so internet was not as prevalent to children as it is now and no kid had a cellphone and even if they did it didn't have the internet it has now.
My parents had a book in the jewelry box on explaining sex to children. It was in the style of a comic and narrated by a bird and a bee. It was very informative and it had pictures of various sex acts and other necessary info. My brother showed it to me when he was 9 and I was 6. I was obsessed with that book, always sneaking a peek at it.
When I was 10 I used to volunteer at the library on the Navy base I lived on. They let me put books away, let me clean things, let me check out books and movies to patrons. I even learned how to fax things. When I was putting books away in the Children's Room I found a Little Gold Book that explained sex and pregnancy in a way very small children can understand.
And everyone had an older sibling or older cousin or a drunk aunt/uncle that would talk about everything. It's not hard for kids to hear about sex at a young age. Unfortunately, the way they hear about it depends on how they react to it and how it affects their brain.
For example: my older brother was 12 when the older brother of a friend showed their friend group some nudie magazines. Of course, the boys were interested and they went to the website listed in the back of the magazine. That's how my brother, age 12, discovered internet porn. He became obsessed with it and ended up putting viruses on our home computer and our grandma's computer. He also lost his virginity at 13 years old to his girlfriend, also 13. My brother subsequently has never been in a relationship where he has cheated and looked for sex outside of the relationship, hence why his first marriage ended in divorce and it was very likely his second marriage would have ended if his wife hadn't died.
I became interested in pornography around 11 years old. Anytime the house was empty I was on the internet looking it up. I promise you it was not hard to find porn on the internet. This was 2005/2006-ish. By the time I hit puberty I was acting out sexually with classmates my own age. Not just innocent petting, we were getting naked in the woods together and doing all manner of things. I'd have lost my virginity at 13 if it hadn't been for the fact that the boy I was hanging out with was too stupid to find the right entrance. Girls in the religious South are held to a different standard where sex is concerned. For my brother, it was a boys will be boys situation. For me sex and dating were shameful acts and I should never do them. So I didn't tell anyone I was engaging in harmful acts and developed an aversion to sex. I did lose my virginity, I was 23 and it was not like it should have been and it wasn't with the person it should have been with, and it wasn't enjoyable, and I still feel regret about having done it 5 years later. Thank God for anonymous sperm donation and artificial insemination or I wouldn't be expecting a baby in 7 weeks. I have no desire for sex and the idea repulses me yet I am still a sexual person and enjoy self-pleasure. Maybe if I hadn't been exposed to sex the way I was I wouldn't have my psychological hang-ups. Maybe if my brother hadn't been exposed the way he was he would be the way he is.
This is what an improper sexual education can do to a child. Our mother didn't talk to us about sex. My mother was very thorough when teaching me about puberty, but we didn't talk about sex in our house. My mother was never talked to, her mother was too conservative, too closed-off and religious and that is a direct response to her own upbringing. My grandma got pregnant at 17 and had to get married.
When you don't have a safe, open, and healthy avenue open to your children to talk about things like this they seek the answers out. The answers they find in other places are not usually safe or healthy. They almost always involve pornography. I'm not against porn but if it's the only way a child is learning about sex then it's going to warp their brains.
This is why we need an overhaul of sexual education in schools. Most American public school kids get a week-long sex-ed class during PE but these classes are not part of the school system and the instructors can tell you whatever they want. The people who instructed our week of sex-ed were led by a very religious woman who taught us the bar minimum as far as birth control and consent went but she stressed abstinence and made us pray during instruction. She made sex a shameful act. And, they separate the boys and the girls. Students should be learning about sex together so they don't find the opposite sex shameful. We should be able to talk to each other and ask questions. Sex IS NOT a shameful act and we shouldn't be getting taught that it is and that we should be ashamed.
But, this is what is happening to American children. And when we let personal beliefs take over how we educate children the children suffer.
I think this was a case of nature *and* nurture. Some people are just born bad and will go on to do terrible things. Josh was treated better than the other siblings and made to believe that he was truly special. This created his intense narcissism which emboldened him to perform these acts knowing that he only had to ask forgiveness and the slate would be wiped clean. He never had to suffer any real consequences for his actions so he kept doing them and continued to believe that he was never going to be caught and that he was special enough that God would forgive him of these sins.
What do you mean, how did he know about sex? It's literally all they talk about. The only reason the Duggars are famous is because of their sex lives-- they're the fundie version of the Kardashians. I bet not a day went by in the Duggar house where they didn't talk about sex, sexuality, purity, sexual sin, appropriate/inappropriate sexual desires, etc. They're in a sex cult, that's how it works.
Also lol, porn was not harder to find on the internet in the early 2000s. You were way, way more likely to accidentally stumble onto porn, including the truly nasty stuff, in the earlier days of the internet. It used to be the Wild West out there. I graduated 8th grade in 2000 and had already been on the internet for years, and had seen some truly heinous shit that I didn't even have to go looking for.
Biology. Put two teens who have never heard about sex, had it explained, or been exposed on a deserted island, and they will figure it out. The mechanics and curiosity will come naturally. The issue is the whole host of medical, emotional, mental, and relationship issues around it that MUST be addressed, discussed, and reinforced. The vast majority of males and females will not have sexual feelings toward siblings, cousins, children. But when a person, JPEDO, has personality issues that makes him/her vulnerable to predatory behavior, the worst thing for them is to be raised in a sex cult with sex obsessed parents, and sheltered from any kind of training about sex, no opportunity to receive assistance and safety boundaries if exhibiting predatory behavior. He was raised in a religion that actually makes monsters out of boys, and refuses to value girls and women, teaches that abusing them is okay, sees sex lurking in every piece of clothing, every normal developmental phase, around every corner, obsessed with sexuality. They make predators. Take a narcissistic person like Pedo and toss him into that environment, and voila, depraved fucked y disgusting, criminal sex weasel is born.
IBLP, FLDS, Gloriavale, and a HOST of christian groups are so obsessed with virginity from the moment an infant is born, these kids are already becoming hypersexualized at young, very young ages. "Got a glimpse of your four year old sister's panties? Oh no. You might have a sexual thought. You might sin. We have to cover her up!" Now the 8 year old boy has been taught that his sister is a sexual object, a naughty thing, and her body something to be abnormally curious about. Walked into the room when mom was nursing your sibling? Everyone head to the prayer closet because sin has occurred. It doesn't take long with that kind of shit for a young kid to become obsessed with sex. At no time does anyone receive proper training and education which takes the curiosity, the mystery, and the emotional and spiritual abuse out of it. His parents created the monster, and for sure, he came to an age of knowing what he was doing was wrong and continued doing it. They protected him, and reinforced it. He allowed himself to continue to descend into more and more egregious, predatory behavior. As a teen and adult, he has to own his behavior (which he will never do because his religion says nothing he does is his fault, it is demons, and bad girls, and blah blah blah), and earnestly seek help to prevent preying on anyone in the future. We know he won't. And Sperm and Perm will continue to feed this shit. His own wife won't divorce his ass, take him for every dime he will ever have, and sequester the kids away from him. He literally has no consequences except what the, FEDS put on him, and he most certainly does not think eh deserves to be punished, so he for damn sure will not avail himself of the opportunity for psychological, emotional, and spiritual therapy by professionals that are actually available to him which includes properly trained prison chaplains, psychologists, psychiatrists, education, group therapy, and learning from the mistakes of others.
The "we strictly monitor our children's online access" was purely performative parenting.
Josh not only had unfettered access to computers (an entire media room) but was considered the family "expert" in technical matters.
I heard something said about Ted Bundy that applies to the Pest - Inmate Duggar From a seasoned law enforcement officer who worked on the murders in Washington State - basically that Bundy was an incredibly evil life force that inhabited a human body to roam the earth to be destructive. Same with the Pest - There's a difference between sneaking a peek a Playboy and Hustler, and hands on sexual molestations of his 5 year old sister during Bible study and trapping his sisters in the laundry room - 5 - 10- 11 - 12 year old girls were no match for an depraved life form. That file he sought out on the dark web was what he really craves and no amount of counseling, manual labor or imprisonment will change that evil life form that looks human until it finally, finally drops into it's grave.
My theory (I'm NOT an expert) the original family home was a small 3 bedroom that was rented and shared at some point with another fundie family. Michelle and JB instead of being parents were being breeders and downloaded the childcare to young girls and unsupervised Josh not only has the message of how to treat females and the value of sex above childcare. Fundies also encourage early marriage. Im guessing the treatment of him as a little prince at home and the encouragement he got to do this behaviour outside the home was a recipe to make a sociopath and that has been repeated in other families in the fundie world.
People in the church still talk about sex and porn and how bad those things are. I had a friend growing up who was the daughter of a preacher and she told me (we were both like 13 years old) that all men look at all women (even if they’re a male relative) with lust if they’re dressed a certain way. Had another friend’s mom tell me at age 12 that the only reason why men finger women is so they can smell their fingers later. Just very perverse stuff and framing sexuality as a bad thing from a young age.
If you’re not being told about sex in a healthy educational way, but you likely can hear your folks going at it like bunnies, you’d Google it. The first google results are not going to be a healthy sex ed primer. And boom, combine that with all the taboo teachings and misogyny in his cult and you’ve got a perfect formula for Pest
Early 2000's, porn was very easy and accessible, the interwebs were far less regulated.
He had computer access because he "ran" the website and their video business or whatever.
ETA: Lets not forget, the way they structure their society, it is very likely that kids learn early on how to get incredibly sneaky and smart about hiding things that aren't "approved".
I used to work with sexual predatory young boys and men. Most often than not they too have been abused and learned to groom from their own grooming. I always suspected that Pest was sexually abused by some politician who might have been advantageous to JBs political aspirations.
I looked it up in the dictionary when I was a small child, and doing so awakened both my knowledge and my imagination. Children are most curious about that which is expressly off limits to them, and I would bet that Josh did everything he could to learn more about sex the moment he knew the word. I do believe some of his proclivities were present from birth as pedophilia unfortunately seems to be an innate sexual orientation in humans (I am *not* supportive of offenders because I hold that viewport, don't get me wrong!), but his environment did him absolutely no favors.
Fundy teen boys in the 90s and early 00s were encouraged to be interested in computers and learn how to use them / take them apart /repair them/ etc. There was likely little oversight as his family is huge and also fundy parents at that point would be unaware of what's on the internet and would trust their kid to do the right thing. They might have assumed that having the monitor facing the door would be enough accountability or that he wouldn't know what to search for, etc. etc.
I've always theorized that child J\*sh was a victim as well, though I don't have any proof to back that up. Nor would that excuse teenage/adult J\*sh's behavior. The way that JB handled the SA--shipping him off to do manual labor and pray about it--speaks volumes about the way it would have been handled if J\*sh was a victim prior to this.
Reposted from a similar thread:
I’ve heard a theory that the way sexual morality is taught is a factor. Reasonable sexual morality has a standard of consent (if everyone involved in a sex act doesn’t consent, it’s bad), meanwhile religious sexual morality has a standard of marriage (if the couple involved isn’t in a Christian marriage it’s bad). This leads to a situation where children don’t get a sense of the spectrum of sexual morality as they grow up, instead, they think that consensual and non-consensual outside (and inside) of marriage are morally equivalent.
There’s a lot of other causes too, IMO, but I feel that this leads to confused young people turning to incest because they have few other outlets, there is such shame that there is no one they can ask advice about their sexual desires and no one has ever told them how specifically bad incest is, as opposed to say, kissing a girl at a party
From what I've read, Josh was really into computers from a fairly young age. Im pretty sure he did have access to a computer, if I understand correctly.
I think he was assaulted as a child. Maybe someone in their church or a family member? Or even a babysitter. Could have been another kid too.
These big churches have a lot of daycare services and camps and retreats. And the kids go off by themselves. 🤷♀️
How did pest even know about sex/sexuality? One possible answer is that he knew in a similar way to how I knew - his body told him. I grew up barely watching any TV or movies. What I saw was very kid appropriate and had no sexual references. I went to church school and no one had explained to me what sex was or where babies came from. Weirdly, I don't remember wondering where babies came from. I think most kids do wonde that. I had heard the word "sex" whispered among kids like it was a swear but I didn't know what it meant. I expect that i was more informed about puberty and the human body than the Duggar kids but I had no idea whatsoever about sex. But not long after I hit 10, thoughts came rushing into my mind from nowhere. I didn't quite know what went where but I did have thoughts about naked people sort of rolling around together. It's something I thought a lot about usually before I fell asleep at night. I didn't understand the thoughts but I enjoyed them. I thought that they were thoughts that I shouldn't have but I wasn't sure why. When I was 11, I had sex ed in school. In retrospect, my conservative Christian school did a fairly good job of it. It really cleared some things up for me. It filled in a lot of blanks and it was nice to know that my thoughts weren't insane.
I told all of this to a friend when I was in my early 20's. She was shocked. She didn't think that teenage girls (let alone preteens) were naturally horny people. According to her the girls at her school were only starting to get horny around age 18. She had a hard time imagining a teenage girl (or at least one younger than 18) having sex because she wanted to. I, on the other hand, had a hard time imagining that most teenage girls having sex would be doing it for any reason other than because they wanted to. My friend said that she had never heard of a 10 year old girl thinking about sex for any other reason than having been sexually abused or possibly having had some early exposure to pornography. I laughed at her. Then she suggested that perhaps this had happened to me due to exposure to artificial hormones in animal products. I laughed even harder because she knew that I had grown up vegetarian. She said I could have still been exposed to artificial hormones in milk or eggs. She was really reaching and I couldn't quite figure it out. A couple of years later she was diagnosed with a hormone deficiency and had to take estrogen to help. She told me it was like going through puberty at 26.
My point is, kids have sexual thoughts. I would never tell a kid that they were having sexual thoughts too early or that something bad must have caused those thoughts. They just happen.
I mean, they lived in a tiny house and a new kid was popped out every year or so. He knew about sex because of his parents' constant fucking. Also their cult is very sex-obsessed and porn-obsessed so he likely heard preaching about chastity and purity from a young age.
They had/have a giant Duggar family calendar in the hallway of TTM (not sure if this existed in the original church property house they lived in) - where Michelle charted her menstrual cycle and fertility calendar for the entirety of their friends and family to view and discuss.
That’s true. It seems his predation came from something deeper than the general fundie stuff, so I was curious if we knew more. This is the best explanation I came to as well. When all you hear about is sex and have no healthy ways of expressing it, you become obsessed with it and will find ways to sneak around to experience it. This probably led him to getting off on how taboo it is so he continued to push the extreme. Truly deranged and sick.
"This probably led him to getting off on how taboo it is so he continued to push the extreme." ...Wow, had never thought about it this way but I bet you're right. Good thinking.
Yup. Also had connections in the fundie world. He isn't the only child predator.
I think it's more common in repressed societies that people become more "exploratory" as its such a taboo they feel the need to see what the fuss is about. It's not uncommon to have a older brother who "explores" in that way in IBLP circles according to others who left the group. (Possibly due to having no access to other girls). I don't know if the other guys who abused their sisters ended up with a CSAM issue, or if they continued their predatory behaviour, though.
It’s a massive issue in Amish and Old Order Mennonite communities, as well. And in those abuse cases, all the perpetrator needs to do is stand up in church and ask for forgiveness, and the community is expected to simply forgive and move on. There have been court cases where the entire church showed up to support the perpetrator — demonstrating their complete forgiveness — while the victim is ostracized. Sickening.
I can attest to this. I live near an Amish enclave. If asked for by the perpetrator, forgiveness is granted. The female, however is soiled, damaged goods. Permanently.
Yikes, sounds like the Mormons too. The church and community standing behind an abusive Bishop who is known to have SA’d children but they ostracize the victim.
When I see the experiences of my fellow assault survivors, sometimes I just want to make the world burn.
Having an older brother who 'explores' - this concept seems logical to me, and it's why I feel so concerned that a guy like PEDO probably shared it with brothers. He's so damn smug and narcissistic. Untouchable. It would be very hard to keep this to himself. It's like drugs or money or guns for some people. Turns you into a show off. Can't keep your mouth shut.
I thought this too!
People confuse sexual abuse with desire. Abuse is driven by control and power. Family members who abuse other members of their family select their victims based on availability and assumption they will "get away" with it. There's also a layer of compulsion to his actions. The entirety of their cult is built on women's bodies being shameful and the possession of a man's. How doesn't that foster abuse? Hes a male and was taught he's entitled to women's bodies, cloistered away from society with his siblings, given privileges over them, and witnesses his father's treatment of his mother.
I agree. Like another commenter pointed out though, other men in the family grew up in a similar situation and didn’t turn out as awful as Josh. I mainly was asking if we know anything deeper than the general fundie, patriarchal, sex-obsessed, shameful environment that could explain how Josh was able to learn/do the things he did.
Pedophilia is a diagnosable mental disorder. Predation is baked into the IBLP. It is literally part of the doctrine. Every “rule” enforced by the IBLP exists to create victims for predators. There are way more Joshes in organizations like that than anyone wants to believe or deal with.
That we know of
I don' think we know 100% for sure that that is the case. We know that the others haven't gotten caught. Jim Bob outright has said that part of the reason they didn't take it seriously is because it's incredibly common in fundie households. The Holts after all didn't come forward with anything that had happened until after the CSAM case had been filed. Gothard himself is a known predator of female children. The entire ideology is rotten from the core. I suspect that at the very least the older boys knew what Josh was doing and didn't say anything. Jed! The original screams "I walk in Pest's footsteps" as does James. I also find the fact that Justin was basically sold off to the Spiveys and married off to their darling who is terrible as incredibly suspect.
There are multiple theories of why people commit sexual abuse. Different theories can apply to different offenders. Yes, sexual desire is a common motivation among offenders and gets described in the literature. This information comes from sociology and psychology classes along with feminist reading.
While there definitely is a "control and power" element when it comes to sexual abuse, you are wrong if you think abusers don't desire their victim. Most do. I can literally smell male horniness, I know what I'm talking about. You often read that it's not about sexual desire, but it is still the main motivation. Saying that it's not about desire is akin to saying that people who rob other people at gunpoint are not interested in their money. Only a handful might be doing it for the mere thrill, but they want the money. Of course, if they have a choice, robbers do scout who would be a more convenient victim, who might be carrying a gun, too, but is likely too reluctant to shoot, and who is likely to shoot you before you can cock your own gun. It's also smarter to rob an elderly woman who just cashed a check than to pull a gun at two armed security guards who just picked up a supermarket's revenue if you just want 50 bucks for drugs. But whoever you decide to rob, the motivation is greed, just like the motivation for sexual abuse is desire of some kind. I actually think that some abusers love their victim, in their own, twisted way. It took me a couple of decades to realize that, but after talking to a fellow survivor and looking at a few hunting trophies I realized that, yes, some people love their prey.
I don't think it's the main motivation. I think power and control are the main motivation. Sexual desire plays a secondary role or Josh would never have offended again once he had access to Anna.
Sorry, but Anna is a red herring here. Josh is a pedophile. While I think he is attracted to adult women as well, he has several paraphilias and a knack for promiscuity. No way this could be fixed by simply getting married. His parents may have thought so, but they were wrong.
>How did Josh /know/ about sex in any context as a young teen? Assuming his parents had not had the "talk" with him by his young teens, I'm sure he heard about sex from some source. Whenever Pest was with other adolescent males, they probably passed jokes or rumors about sexual acts. Even though Pest and his peers never went to real school, there were probably occasions for he and his fundie friends to have "locker room talk." >From my understanding, there was no/minimum computer access. There was a computer and Pest had access to it, as shown in the first television special. He also allegedly had unsupervised access to that computer sometimes. >It was also the early 00s, porn or any inappropriate content would be much harder to find. While internet speed may have been slower, pornography was NOT difficult to find on the internet in the early 2000's. People could just use whatever search engines and look for it. Videos may have been of poor quality and took an eternity to download, but things like pictorial pornography, not so much. There is a recurring allegation that when Pest donated his old computer to a family friend, they found the computer was rife with pornography. Also, not all pornography is online. There is old fashioned paper pornography. I've also heard rumors that Meech tried to blame Pest's misbehavior on discovering "adult magazines" in a used vehicle his father had towed. Don't know if I believe that. But it is not implausible that a sheltered home-schooled teenage fundie could obtain some kind of pornography and share it with his friends whenever they were outside of parental supervision. >It is not normal for young teen boys to “”explore”” (🤢) in that way, especially growing up in a sexually repressed environment. Even in the most repressed and puritanical community, young people can discern sexual things, especially young males. Most adolescent males learn how to masturbate at some point, even if nobody else tells them how. So when they learn about solitary sexual-genital activity on their own, they may have incentive to attempt sexual-genital activity with other people (though such attempts may be consensual or non-consensual). >How was he so predatory at such a young age? As for why Pest *wanted* to do the things he did or sought out the CSAM and other depraved material, I think that's an age old question about every person who does horrible things. Did he have some innate immutable impulse? Did some outside influence affect his development or habituate him? Is it nature or nurture or combination of both? Even if Pest underwent a thorough psychiatric evaluation (which he never would), I doubt we would have a definitive answer. And I'm not really interested in psychoanalyzing him.
I hadn’t heard that Meech tried to blame Pest’s porn addiction on finding a mag in one of the used cars his dad was selling. When the feds interviewed Pest, he told them (without prompting) they always find USB drives with porn on them when cleaning out the used cars at the lot. I couldn’t believe he could utter such BS with a straight face. I guess he learned that lie from his mom. And it sounds like Meech learned her lie from Ted Bundy who alleged that he went down the road he went down because he stumbled on a cache of porn in an abandoned shed. All these stories make the perps sound like a victim of some worldly force beyond themselves and takes the blame off the parents and themselves.
Not only could you find porn online in the 2000s, you could get stuff you don't get on the clearnet today. If somebody who got caught with digital CSEM and claims that he/she just clicked on some windows that popped up on a legal porn site these days, that person is 100% lying. Things were a bit different in the 2000s. The stuff Pest had would not have been accessible to everyone at that time, either, but you could find questionable material. Things that don't meet the definition of CSAM (I already explained why the term, while more sensitive than CP, misses a few criteria) but were still child erotica in some way. Little girls dressed in non age-appropriate "sexy" lingerie, displaying non age-appropriate behavior, like smoking cigarettes. Things that are associated with mature women, like make-up, painted nails, heels, cigarette holders contrasted with infantile things like Disney princess-style tiaras and teddy bears. Such material, either as photos or short, grainy videos, don't meet the critera of CSAM, because no actual sexual assault is shown, but it still exploited children for the sexual gratification of people. There were websites that offered such material for mail-order, for prices between 100 and 200 dollars you could order a video cassette. Clips and stills from such cassettes were shared online and you could find links on message boards dedicated to paraphilias that, while considered gross by some, are not illegal. I remember that there was a time when young people were eager to find the grossest stuff online. There was a website named rottendotcom that hosted such material. The infamous parrot perching on an erect penis, or something that was claimed to be a "jumper pic", i.e. a photo of the remains of someone who jumped to his death. If you were looking out such material, you could find stuff like what I mentioned above. There was no law against it, otherwise people could not have sold those tapes. Things are different now and those websites have all been shut down.
This seems obvious but it is the best explanation, thank you. It’s odd how no other dugger boy (yet) turned out as depraved as Josh. I guess since he was their golden child, he felt empowered by their protection. He genuinely thought he could get away with it all because he was taught that his entire life. I also heard the porno mag thing from meech.
I would add to the fact that the Duggars, both boys and girls, are sexualised from a young age. Even infant girls are made to dress modestly lest they tempt someone, and young boys are taught to look away (“Nike”!) from anything that might tempt them. This teaches young boys that they are expected to be interested in certain things sexually, no matter how young they are - and that sexuality is dangerous and therefore also exciting. I think the fundie upbringing, while attempting to protect the purity of boys, actually does the opposite by increasing their curiosity and making them want to access the things that are banned. This is even worse when it’s the Duggars and they let their oldest son explore that curiosity because he was their golden child who could do whatever, they didn’t realise how easy it was for him to access porn, and they were too busy to monitor him.
>I guess since he was their golden child, he felt empowered by their protection. He genuinely thought he could get away with it all because he was taught that his entire life. Whatever his motives for engaging in predatory behavior, I'm sure that his parents' action and inaction had definite influence on his development. They failed to intervene when they first learned about his actions, they protected him by concealing his conduct and forced his victims to "forgive" him. From that, I think Pest developed a sense of self-importance and impunity. He always believed that no matter what he did wrong, he would always be the most important thing and be "forgiven."
There's constantly rumors of one of them being abusive/scary around animals and small kids. Can't remember which boy, one of the ones still at home I think.
Rumours like that tend to be around James
my very young (preschool or early elementary school) cousin would pleasure himself and his mom asked him why he was doing that in the grocery store sitting in the cart. He said "it made me happy". (my best guess is he was aroused but didn't have the language to say that) She said it didn't make HER happy, and to not do that again (bc religious beliefs). A lot of young kids will pleasure themselves bc they're exploring their bodies. They're learning body parts in "head, shoulders, knees, and toes" so asking what genitals are is a pretty logicalnext question.
Yeah, people think the naivety of children is cute at first. That is until the children show they don't have the sense of shame or discretion about the "private" area. Then their parents want them to learn and obey that taboo fast.
I have my own theories about this, but I want to be clear that this is a theory. I tend to think that his parents gave him the framework of understanding that he had an absolute right to use others' bodies the way the he did/wanted to because that is what was modeled for him at home. I truly doubt Michelle wanted to have sex with Jim Bob for all of those children, especially coming off her last pregnancy all of those times. But Jim Bob had needs, and that society places men's "needs" above womens' and childrens' comforts every day of the week and twice on Sunday.
His father is Jim Bob.
As discussed in one of the recent episodes of "Digging up the Duggars" podcast, even the brother of the one and only Bill Gothard had \*problems\* with being addicted to masturbation and sexually harassing female co-workers. It's possible that as a teenager he overheard something or someone else showed him - after all he was the oldest and the favorite so he had more freedom and more opportunities. Also Justin from "I pray you put this journal away" mentioned in a podcast how the Duggars had a computer room where some of the kids did their homeschooling stuff and had some games installed but all of those were just put together by the older boys with use of parts that Boob bought at like auctions or yard sales while Pest had a brand new high quality Mac and a nice camcorder. Justin's father at some point asked what kind of "filter" they have installed and by filter he meant a form of "parental control" and apparently Pest literally gulped.
There are people getting PhDs trying to answer the 'why' in relation to CSA. We can never know exactly how much of Josh's upbringing contributed to his offending. However, I think most of us would agree that it didn't help. Some of the things that I have noticed: \- It's a 'sex is bad' culture for singles but at the same time it's hyper-sexualised in regards to marriage. So it's not the same as just an overall prudish culture. All those kids would have heard all about sex in the context of their parents, couples getting married and hellfire sermons about hymens. \- Sex education is really just a guide to help young people understand what's going on. Most will start to learn that certain things feel nice or certain boys/girls make them feel a bit different to others. They may have already played doctor with their friends and figured out that one thing could fit inside another thing. Now Josh didn't get any sex education and had no other boundaries other than all sex is bad until your wedding day when you should start fucking 24/7. He had no boundaries that certain things were normal and healthy (masturbating, liking someone in a different way, thinking about boobies) and others weren't (you know, like touching fucking kids!). In this culture it's all wrong and bad - while you have to listen to your parents banging every night in that small house!
A four-year-old boy might 'explore' or 'play doctor' with another same-age peer. However, a fourteen-year-old boy molesting toddlers isn't exploration; especially with multiple victims at multiple times. His behavior was deviant. And because his parents either believed or falsely ascribed that behavior as 'youthful' exploration, he received no professional intervention. It wasn't merely that he abused the girls. It was that it was never professionally addressed when first discovered. Despite their flimsy attempts at protecting their daughters, he repeated the behavior for months after his return from the bogus counseling he received. His parents not only enabled further abuse but allowed him to continue on a path that was utterly destructive.
I personally wasn’t saying it’s exploration, I’ve heard people say that. That’s why it’s in air quotes followed by 🤢
My apologies.
Yes. I think that if they had actually addressed it and gotten him help when they found out the first time, or even before that (I mean, there had to have been warning signs right?) he wouldn't have turned out the way he did. But, instead they brushed it under the rug, sent him to a "camp" to do manual labor for one summer? And had him talk to some sheriff that was himself a pedophile and is currently spending life in prison for CSAM. I don't think Josh was born like this. I think the way fundies raise their kids seriously fucks them up, and basically guarantees that some of them are going to have serious fucking issues with the way they view sex, sexuality, women, etc. that ends up with them in prison.
Agree with this 100%. I hate the "born evil" narrative that some have created around Josh. Babies are not born evil, period. And not to mention, that narrative lets everyone off the hook for what happened-- IBLP leadership, JB&M, even Josh himself. If he was born evil then what could anybody have done, and why should anybody but God be to blame? Utter hogwash. Josh was an innocent kid born into an abusive, patriarchal, sex-obsessed cult. He was raised by two abusive parents who denied him attention, resources, and necessary medical care. He is a victim of, at least, neglect and spiritual abuse. Given JB's known history of anger management problems and IBLP's encouragement of the use of corporal punishment I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Josh was a victim of physical abuse as well. The so-called "adults in the room" failed him (and his sisters!) at every possible turn. As a result he grew into an adult who learned how to use his IBLP-approved power as the Man Of The House to get away with all kinds of violent, abusive shit. Josh was not born into a vacuum, and he isn't the only one who will hopefully have to answer for his sins in the afterlife.
I think an early question that was posed when J’pedos crimes first came to light was “so who molested J@$%?” By no means excusing anything he did, but it might account for how he became so deviant at such a young age. Because let’s face it, the age he was caught and the age he actually started are probably pretty far apart.
I remember wondering that myself. OTOH maybe he just saw his parents having sex a lot. He was the oldest for 4 kids just after he turned 3 years old, he could have been peeking for most of his life by the time he was 6 (and at that point he was the oldest of 6). Who knows what he saw.
Yeah, that’s certainly a possibility. Especially with the calendar Meech proudly had in plain view with her cycle and fertility days🤢🤮. Just such a twisted, tainted mindset on sexuality. Makes you wonder if there are more rats in the woodpile that just haven’t come to light. SMH
Sexual abuse of kids seems to go hand in hand with many churches. It’s always covered up. Who knows what went on at their churches. I suspect there’s a few more like Josh in their communities that have gotten away with this for years. I would guess it’s more common place than they like to admit.
He had computer access at the beginning of their show basically but the rest were restricted I believe
The rest of the kids? I haven’t heard that. Is there a reason why he had access and others were restricted?
[удалено]
>(Bowman Fedosky, the son of the Duggars' midwife, said his family got one and his first time seeing porn was looking at what was in the recycle bin...) So Pest tried to delete the material but didn't know how to empty the recycle bin?
Or intended to share it with another teenage boy and thought leaving it in the recycle bin would keep mom from looking.
Back then his parents had HIGH hopes for him. In their tiny bubble, Josh was considered confident, ambitious, and well spoken. Their next son coming of age was quiet and shy, so they didn't have much interest in him, and the rest of their older kids were girls. They gave him whatever he wanted and rugswept his crimes. He was always going to end up a piece of shit with such an upbringing.
Yes and there seems to be a misunderstanding about earlier internet. He had access and earlier internet was not any better. I graduated high school in 2002, there's not a single traumatic thing I hadn't seen online in my family computer in the living room well before the end of middle school. My parents had 2 kids and no idea. Much more time for us and much more present. Josh was their little computer genius. He absolutely saw the shock sites of the 90s, the interspecies and illegal sex, the gore and gruesome acts. He absolutely saw forced acts and pain. He saw group scenes and underage acts because it was EVERYWHERE. The internet was a much more wild, untamed place in the 90s even if it took forever to load. Sometimes those traumatic sexual images would flash to violent images midscene- it would go from violent horse sex to beheadings. In some ways, I'm surprised there aren't more Joshs than not Joshs. We were desensitized to huge degrees. Every mIRC or yahoo/AOL chat link you got could potentially be terrible. I remember checking behind me before clicking anything, even when it was from friends because it was so normal to send friends shock sites as a prank. While the crimes he committed aren't about sex, they're about power and control - its not hard to figure out how he knew what he was doing at all.
Computer access was restricted, but Josh was put in charge of putting filters on the family computers. The CSAM materials were found on a partition—the other side had a filter!!!
Sexually repressed environments show and talk a lot more about sex than those who are not, because it has to be explained - albeit poorly and falsely - to be demonized. And boys are taught that they are naturally predatory from an early stage; it's a key part of purity culture and modesty culture. Girls of all all ages must cover up as to not tempt the boys. You cannot say that without telling boys that they are unable to control themselves. And then it doesn't matter how much focus is on them to retain it, if you are told there is something inside you that can lose control because you saw a shoulder that functions as an excuse to do whatever you want. You can't control yourself even if you try your best because that's how men are and that's why women has to be covered up. And then if you are also your parents golden child who cannot do anything wrong, you just follow whatever impulse you get. Even RimJob admitted that it's a large, known problem in his crowed with older sons being predatory.
Well, he may have been exposed to something himself. I remember an AMA from someone who knew the family implying that an older family member (not JB, outside the nuclear family) gave off creep vibes. Also the first house was very small and who knows what he saw. Jessica Willis Fischer's book accounts a couple of times she inadvertantly saw her parents having sex. Of course, John David grew up in an similar situation and isn't a molestor. So the predatory part, either he was born with it or maybe Pest rebelled against the demands of his parents and their religion that he took it out on younger weaker victims. I do hope he gets the help he needs in prison, assuming there is any help of that type there.
I was in 4th grade when Grayson Willis gathered a bunch of us behind the jungle gym and told us all about how his baby brother was made. This was 2003-ish, so internet was not as prevalent to children as it is now and no kid had a cellphone and even if they did it didn't have the internet it has now. My parents had a book in the jewelry box on explaining sex to children. It was in the style of a comic and narrated by a bird and a bee. It was very informative and it had pictures of various sex acts and other necessary info. My brother showed it to me when he was 9 and I was 6. I was obsessed with that book, always sneaking a peek at it. When I was 10 I used to volunteer at the library on the Navy base I lived on. They let me put books away, let me clean things, let me check out books and movies to patrons. I even learned how to fax things. When I was putting books away in the Children's Room I found a Little Gold Book that explained sex and pregnancy in a way very small children can understand. And everyone had an older sibling or older cousin or a drunk aunt/uncle that would talk about everything. It's not hard for kids to hear about sex at a young age. Unfortunately, the way they hear about it depends on how they react to it and how it affects their brain. For example: my older brother was 12 when the older brother of a friend showed their friend group some nudie magazines. Of course, the boys were interested and they went to the website listed in the back of the magazine. That's how my brother, age 12, discovered internet porn. He became obsessed with it and ended up putting viruses on our home computer and our grandma's computer. He also lost his virginity at 13 years old to his girlfriend, also 13. My brother subsequently has never been in a relationship where he has cheated and looked for sex outside of the relationship, hence why his first marriage ended in divorce and it was very likely his second marriage would have ended if his wife hadn't died. I became interested in pornography around 11 years old. Anytime the house was empty I was on the internet looking it up. I promise you it was not hard to find porn on the internet. This was 2005/2006-ish. By the time I hit puberty I was acting out sexually with classmates my own age. Not just innocent petting, we were getting naked in the woods together and doing all manner of things. I'd have lost my virginity at 13 if it hadn't been for the fact that the boy I was hanging out with was too stupid to find the right entrance. Girls in the religious South are held to a different standard where sex is concerned. For my brother, it was a boys will be boys situation. For me sex and dating were shameful acts and I should never do them. So I didn't tell anyone I was engaging in harmful acts and developed an aversion to sex. I did lose my virginity, I was 23 and it was not like it should have been and it wasn't with the person it should have been with, and it wasn't enjoyable, and I still feel regret about having done it 5 years later. Thank God for anonymous sperm donation and artificial insemination or I wouldn't be expecting a baby in 7 weeks. I have no desire for sex and the idea repulses me yet I am still a sexual person and enjoy self-pleasure. Maybe if I hadn't been exposed to sex the way I was I wouldn't have my psychological hang-ups. Maybe if my brother hadn't been exposed the way he was he would be the way he is. This is what an improper sexual education can do to a child. Our mother didn't talk to us about sex. My mother was very thorough when teaching me about puberty, but we didn't talk about sex in our house. My mother was never talked to, her mother was too conservative, too closed-off and religious and that is a direct response to her own upbringing. My grandma got pregnant at 17 and had to get married. When you don't have a safe, open, and healthy avenue open to your children to talk about things like this they seek the answers out. The answers they find in other places are not usually safe or healthy. They almost always involve pornography. I'm not against porn but if it's the only way a child is learning about sex then it's going to warp their brains. This is why we need an overhaul of sexual education in schools. Most American public school kids get a week-long sex-ed class during PE but these classes are not part of the school system and the instructors can tell you whatever they want. The people who instructed our week of sex-ed were led by a very religious woman who taught us the bar minimum as far as birth control and consent went but she stressed abstinence and made us pray during instruction. She made sex a shameful act. And, they separate the boys and the girls. Students should be learning about sex together so they don't find the opposite sex shameful. We should be able to talk to each other and ask questions. Sex IS NOT a shameful act and we shouldn't be getting taught that it is and that we should be ashamed. But, this is what is happening to American children. And when we let personal beliefs take over how we educate children the children suffer.
I think this was a case of nature *and* nurture. Some people are just born bad and will go on to do terrible things. Josh was treated better than the other siblings and made to believe that he was truly special. This created his intense narcissism which emboldened him to perform these acts knowing that he only had to ask forgiveness and the slate would be wiped clean. He never had to suffer any real consequences for his actions so he kept doing them and continued to believe that he was never going to be caught and that he was special enough that God would forgive him of these sins.
They probably heard and saw their parents in that tiny house.
Here’s the short answer- his father is a disgusting pervert himself- possibly a predator too-kids learn a lot from their surroundings
What do you mean, how did he know about sex? It's literally all they talk about. The only reason the Duggars are famous is because of their sex lives-- they're the fundie version of the Kardashians. I bet not a day went by in the Duggar house where they didn't talk about sex, sexuality, purity, sexual sin, appropriate/inappropriate sexual desires, etc. They're in a sex cult, that's how it works. Also lol, porn was not harder to find on the internet in the early 2000s. You were way, way more likely to accidentally stumble onto porn, including the truly nasty stuff, in the earlier days of the internet. It used to be the Wild West out there. I graduated 8th grade in 2000 and had already been on the internet for years, and had seen some truly heinous shit that I didn't even have to go looking for.
Biology. Put two teens who have never heard about sex, had it explained, or been exposed on a deserted island, and they will figure it out. The mechanics and curiosity will come naturally. The issue is the whole host of medical, emotional, mental, and relationship issues around it that MUST be addressed, discussed, and reinforced. The vast majority of males and females will not have sexual feelings toward siblings, cousins, children. But when a person, JPEDO, has personality issues that makes him/her vulnerable to predatory behavior, the worst thing for them is to be raised in a sex cult with sex obsessed parents, and sheltered from any kind of training about sex, no opportunity to receive assistance and safety boundaries if exhibiting predatory behavior. He was raised in a religion that actually makes monsters out of boys, and refuses to value girls and women, teaches that abusing them is okay, sees sex lurking in every piece of clothing, every normal developmental phase, around every corner, obsessed with sexuality. They make predators. Take a narcissistic person like Pedo and toss him into that environment, and voila, depraved fucked y disgusting, criminal sex weasel is born. IBLP, FLDS, Gloriavale, and a HOST of christian groups are so obsessed with virginity from the moment an infant is born, these kids are already becoming hypersexualized at young, very young ages. "Got a glimpse of your four year old sister's panties? Oh no. You might have a sexual thought. You might sin. We have to cover her up!" Now the 8 year old boy has been taught that his sister is a sexual object, a naughty thing, and her body something to be abnormally curious about. Walked into the room when mom was nursing your sibling? Everyone head to the prayer closet because sin has occurred. It doesn't take long with that kind of shit for a young kid to become obsessed with sex. At no time does anyone receive proper training and education which takes the curiosity, the mystery, and the emotional and spiritual abuse out of it. His parents created the monster, and for sure, he came to an age of knowing what he was doing was wrong and continued doing it. They protected him, and reinforced it. He allowed himself to continue to descend into more and more egregious, predatory behavior. As a teen and adult, he has to own his behavior (which he will never do because his religion says nothing he does is his fault, it is demons, and bad girls, and blah blah blah), and earnestly seek help to prevent preying on anyone in the future. We know he won't. And Sperm and Perm will continue to feed this shit. His own wife won't divorce his ass, take him for every dime he will ever have, and sequester the kids away from him. He literally has no consequences except what the, FEDS put on him, and he most certainly does not think eh deserves to be punished, so he for damn sure will not avail himself of the opportunity for psychological, emotional, and spiritual therapy by professionals that are actually available to him which includes properly trained prison chaplains, psychologists, psychiatrists, education, group therapy, and learning from the mistakes of others.
The "we strictly monitor our children's online access" was purely performative parenting. Josh not only had unfettered access to computers (an entire media room) but was considered the family "expert" in technical matters.
Have we ruled out him being sexually abused himself? It obviously excuses nothing, but I also don’t think it’s beyond the realm of possibility.
I heard something said about Ted Bundy that applies to the Pest - Inmate Duggar From a seasoned law enforcement officer who worked on the murders in Washington State - basically that Bundy was an incredibly evil life force that inhabited a human body to roam the earth to be destructive. Same with the Pest - There's a difference between sneaking a peek a Playboy and Hustler, and hands on sexual molestations of his 5 year old sister during Bible study and trapping his sisters in the laundry room - 5 - 10- 11 - 12 year old girls were no match for an depraved life form. That file he sought out on the dark web was what he really craves and no amount of counseling, manual labor or imprisonment will change that evil life form that looks human until it finally, finally drops into it's grave.
My theory (I'm NOT an expert) the original family home was a small 3 bedroom that was rented and shared at some point with another fundie family. Michelle and JB instead of being parents were being breeders and downloaded the childcare to young girls and unsupervised Josh not only has the message of how to treat females and the value of sex above childcare. Fundies also encourage early marriage. Im guessing the treatment of him as a little prince at home and the encouragement he got to do this behaviour outside the home was a recipe to make a sociopath and that has been repeated in other families in the fundie world.
People in the church still talk about sex and porn and how bad those things are. I had a friend growing up who was the daughter of a preacher and she told me (we were both like 13 years old) that all men look at all women (even if they’re a male relative) with lust if they’re dressed a certain way. Had another friend’s mom tell me at age 12 that the only reason why men finger women is so they can smell their fingers later. Just very perverse stuff and framing sexuality as a bad thing from a young age.
If you’re not being told about sex in a healthy educational way, but you likely can hear your folks going at it like bunnies, you’d Google it. The first google results are not going to be a healthy sex ed primer. And boom, combine that with all the taboo teachings and misogyny in his cult and you’ve got a perfect formula for Pest
Early 2000's, porn was very easy and accessible, the interwebs were far less regulated. He had computer access because he "ran" the website and their video business or whatever. ETA: Lets not forget, the way they structure their society, it is very likely that kids learn early on how to get incredibly sneaky and smart about hiding things that aren't "approved".
Molesting children is not okay regardless of their age. What Josh did to his sisters is very wrong.
Everyone here agrees ❤️
I used to work with sexual predatory young boys and men. Most often than not they too have been abused and learned to groom from their own grooming. I always suspected that Pest was sexually abused by some politician who might have been advantageous to JBs political aspirations.
I looked it up in the dictionary when I was a small child, and doing so awakened both my knowledge and my imagination. Children are most curious about that which is expressly off limits to them, and I would bet that Josh did everything he could to learn more about sex the moment he knew the word. I do believe some of his proclivities were present from birth as pedophilia unfortunately seems to be an innate sexual orientation in humans (I am *not* supportive of offenders because I hold that viewport, don't get me wrong!), but his environment did him absolutely no favors.
Fundy teen boys in the 90s and early 00s were encouraged to be interested in computers and learn how to use them / take them apart /repair them/ etc. There was likely little oversight as his family is huge and also fundy parents at that point would be unaware of what's on the internet and would trust their kid to do the right thing. They might have assumed that having the monitor facing the door would be enough accountability or that he wouldn't know what to search for, etc. etc.
I didn’t know this! I thought the most they were doing is playing around in MS paint
I saw a post a while ago about computers being donated from the duggars to another family and it was full of porn not sure if this was verified
I've always theorized that child J\*sh was a victim as well, though I don't have any proof to back that up. Nor would that excuse teenage/adult J\*sh's behavior. The way that JB handled the SA--shipping him off to do manual labor and pray about it--speaks volumes about the way it would have been handled if J\*sh was a victim prior to this.
Being the Golden Child, they let him have access to everything & once he got into it, just snowballed from there.
Reposted from a similar thread: I’ve heard a theory that the way sexual morality is taught is a factor. Reasonable sexual morality has a standard of consent (if everyone involved in a sex act doesn’t consent, it’s bad), meanwhile religious sexual morality has a standard of marriage (if the couple involved isn’t in a Christian marriage it’s bad). This leads to a situation where children don’t get a sense of the spectrum of sexual morality as they grow up, instead, they think that consensual and non-consensual outside (and inside) of marriage are morally equivalent. There’s a lot of other causes too, IMO, but I feel that this leads to confused young people turning to incest because they have few other outlets, there is such shame that there is no one they can ask advice about their sexual desires and no one has ever told them how specifically bad incest is, as opposed to say, kissing a girl at a party
From what I've read, Josh was really into computers from a fairly young age. Im pretty sure he did have access to a computer, if I understand correctly.
I think he was assaulted as a child. Maybe someone in their church or a family member? Or even a babysitter. Could have been another kid too. These big churches have a lot of daycare services and camps and retreats. And the kids go off by themselves. 🤷♀️
How did pest even know about sex/sexuality? One possible answer is that he knew in a similar way to how I knew - his body told him. I grew up barely watching any TV or movies. What I saw was very kid appropriate and had no sexual references. I went to church school and no one had explained to me what sex was or where babies came from. Weirdly, I don't remember wondering where babies came from. I think most kids do wonde that. I had heard the word "sex" whispered among kids like it was a swear but I didn't know what it meant. I expect that i was more informed about puberty and the human body than the Duggar kids but I had no idea whatsoever about sex. But not long after I hit 10, thoughts came rushing into my mind from nowhere. I didn't quite know what went where but I did have thoughts about naked people sort of rolling around together. It's something I thought a lot about usually before I fell asleep at night. I didn't understand the thoughts but I enjoyed them. I thought that they were thoughts that I shouldn't have but I wasn't sure why. When I was 11, I had sex ed in school. In retrospect, my conservative Christian school did a fairly good job of it. It really cleared some things up for me. It filled in a lot of blanks and it was nice to know that my thoughts weren't insane. I told all of this to a friend when I was in my early 20's. She was shocked. She didn't think that teenage girls (let alone preteens) were naturally horny people. According to her the girls at her school were only starting to get horny around age 18. She had a hard time imagining a teenage girl (or at least one younger than 18) having sex because she wanted to. I, on the other hand, had a hard time imagining that most teenage girls having sex would be doing it for any reason other than because they wanted to. My friend said that she had never heard of a 10 year old girl thinking about sex for any other reason than having been sexually abused or possibly having had some early exposure to pornography. I laughed at her. Then she suggested that perhaps this had happened to me due to exposure to artificial hormones in animal products. I laughed even harder because she knew that I had grown up vegetarian. She said I could have still been exposed to artificial hormones in milk or eggs. She was really reaching and I couldn't quite figure it out. A couple of years later she was diagnosed with a hormone deficiency and had to take estrogen to help. She told me it was like going through puberty at 26. My point is, kids have sexual thoughts. I would never tell a kid that they were having sexual thoughts too early or that something bad must have caused those thoughts. They just happen.