According to sexual abuse watchdog organizations, no two sexual predators think and act alike. Sexual perpetrators may be motivated by:
- A sense of excitement and satisfaction in grooming and manipulating not only the child they’re abusing, but even in deceiving the parents and community at large.
- Low self-esteem, stress, or unmet emotional needs for intimacy & affection and use sexual gratification with a child as a means of coping with it. They may acknowledge that their behavior is wrong, and may even stop if the child resists, but if the abuse continues they may rationalize their behavior and minimize the abusive nature of their actions.
- An unchecked sense of entitlement – that they are above others and have a “right” to do what they want without reproach and seek to dominate others.
- Sexual deviancy – a desire to explore a variety of sexual experiences and may exhibit an addiction to sex & pornography.
- Social Isolation – some offenders are considered eccentric, awkward loners, that don’t socialize well with others and may exhibit what many would consider abnormal behavior. Such offenders may choose to sexually abuse children because they are less-threatening than their peers.
“It teaches you to definitely be sexual earlier than you should have, than you’re supposed to,” admits Kelly. “You know, no different than putting a loaded gun in a kid’s hand—he gonna grow up being a shooter, probably. I think it affects you tremendously when that happens at an early age. To be more hornier. Your hormones are up more than they would normally be. Mine was.”
When asked if he forgives his abuser, R. Kelly says:
“I, well, definitely forgive them. As I’m older, I look at it and I know that it had to be not just about me and them, but them and somebody older than them when they were younger, and whatever happened to them when they were younger. I looked at it as if there was a sort of like, I don’t know, a generational curse, so to speak, going down through the family. Not just started with her doing that to me.”
Kelly is a man who has been accused of sexual offenses against multiple underage girls, has a catalog of some of the most sexually explicit music, and one who calls himself “the Pied Piper of R&B” (the original children’s story of the fictional Pied Piper would use music to lure children out of their homes into a cave never to be seen again). He explains that he believes the sexual abuse he suffered is something that is passed down from generation to generation, so that in each new generation, the victim becomes perpetrator.
“Well, you know, just like poverty—poverty was a generational curse in my family, too, but I decided that I’m gonna stop that curse. I’m not gonna be broke, like my mom was broke, my uncles were broke, my sisters didn’t have money, my cousins on down. Generational curse doesn’t mean that the curse can’t be broken. Just like having no father, that’s a generational curse. Which is why, when my kids were born, I was Bill Cosby in the house. You know, the good one. You know, let’s be clear there: how we saw Bill Cosby when we were coming up.”
According to the National Sex Offender directory, over 30% of those who are sexually abused have been done so by a family member. Many times that same family was also abused. It can be a vicious cycle.
Licensed counselor and founding editor of the Journal of Black Sexuality and Relationships (University of Nebraska Press) Dr. James Wadley tells BlackDoctor.org, “In cases of abuse, abandonment, and neglect sometimes people are more likely to accept or negotiate relationships that become re-enactments of the trauma that they endured as children. Dysfunctional relationships seemingly become functional based upon the familiarity of what some people experience during childhood. Some people are unable to successfully handle relational stability because they are or have continued to struggle with being gravely hurt (e.g., physically, emotionally, sexually, spiritually) as children.”
When asked about what it takes to break the cycle, Kellz simply says, “Well, it’s really not about breaking it. There’s things that you don’t want to do that you’re not gonna do. It was just as simple as that. I want to be able to be a father to my kids, where I’ve never seen my father, but my kids can see me whenever they want, so that was broken [He and his wife Andrea divorced in 2009]. The poverty part was broken. And I feel the child-molestation part, that definitely was broken. But of course you gonna be misunderstood because you R. Kelly, and the success and things get mixed up in the music, and people take the words you sing in your songs and try to pound that on your head and say, ‘Ahh! You did do it—look what you just wrote over here.’”