Why?

I wonder about him sometimes. I wonder about what happened to him to turn him in to the man that he is. What causes a man to find children attractive? What causes a man to be so selfish that he thinks nothing of destroying innocence?

True, when he raped me I was 17. I was hardly a child. But the abuse started long before that. He sought me out as a child, he found me attractive as a child. I was a child. I was 12 years old - how can a man be attracted to a 12 year old?

I try to forget what happened between those years of meeting him and him raping me. Sometimes it's easier to think of the rape, than the years of abuse. It's difficult to think that not only am I a 'rape victim' (or 'rape survivor') but I am also a victim of child sexual abuse. Sometimes the weight of that weighs heavily. It's difficult to think about my childhood, because the abuse was interlinked with almost everything.

Don't get me wrong, the rape was horrible. It was devastating. Not just because he was my first, but because I knew then that I had no control of my body, that people are capable of taking with no regard for others. Those few hours haunt me, and I don't think I will ever quite 'get over it'.

But he tainted every part of my childhood. I have happy memories of my childhood, of course I do. But at the edge of every happy memory, he is lurking.

And I wonder, what made him become so evil? What made him not care that he was hurting me? I know people are selfish, I understand that. But what makes someone so selfish that they can abuse and hurt another human being for years? What makes someone so cold that they don't care about the damage that they are causing?

This man is a father himself. I think that's what gets to me the most. He has a daughter. How can he hurt someone else's child the way he did, when he would lay his life down for his own child?

What went through his mind as he was hurting me? Or did I just truly not matter to him at all. Was I completely inconsequential to him? Did I not even register as human to him?

I want to know why he did it. Because the answer that he is a pedophile just isn't enough.

Me