The Duggars' Defense of Josh's Molestations Is Disturbing — But Not Unusual

More often than you’d think, the offender in cases of abuse is a family member. Jessa Seewald, left, and Jill Dillard in a promo for their interview, which airs Friday on Fox. (Photo: Fox News)

“I do want to speak up in his defense, against people who are calling him a child molester or a pedophile or a rapist, some people are saying,” says Jessa Seewald, née Duggar, in the teaser for the interview that will air Friday night with Fox News’ Megyn Kelly.

The Duggar family sat down with Kelly for a two-part, exclusive special in which parents Jim Bob and Michelle and sisters, and victims, Jessa and Jill defend their son and brother Josh, whom it has been revealed molested five young girls when he was a teenager — four out of five victims who were his own sisters.

Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar during their interview, which aired on Wednesday. (Photo: Fox News)

Just like Jessa, Michelle and Jim Bob made clear in their interview, which aired Wednesday night, that their purpose in speaking out in their own words was to defend their son and his behavior.

It is far from unusual for victims and their families to stand up for the abuser.

“We see this not only in familial sexual abuse cases, but in partner cases and domestic violence cases as well,” explains Jennifer Marsh, vice president of Victims Services at the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN), to Yahoo Health.

“We even train our staff in situations where they’re talking to a victim who has been abused by a loved one — whether a family member or spouse — never to direct negative attention toward the perpetrator because of a frequently knee-jerk reaction from the victim to defend or protect that person,” adds Marsh.

Over and over again, Jim Bob and Michelle sought to minimize their eldest son’s behavior by explaining that their daughters were mainly unaware of the abuse when it had first occurred, explaining that all but two instances of abuse happened when the girls were sleeping, and thus they did not realize they had been molested until their parents explained it to them. “They didn’t even know he had done it,” said Jim Bob at one point in the interview, while at another point, Michelle echoed this sentiment, saying, “As we talked to them, none of them were aware of Josh’s wrongdoings.”

Related: The Worst Part of the Josh Duggar Child Molestation Situation

Some experts have said that their comments reflect a troubling defense mechanism, countering the inarguable fact that their son had molested their daughters by insisting that it couldn’t be all that bad if his victims were unconscious. There was no follow-up by Kelly on the psychological implications of preying on victims who are asleep, unaware, and thus unable to defend themselves or protest against what is being done to them.

Furthermore, the Duggars also repeatedly stressed that the majority of the incidences of abuse involved touching over the girls’ clothes, as if that somehow made Josh’s behavior — motivated, he had told his parents when he initially confessed to them, by his general curiosity about girls — less offensive.

“This wasn’t rape or anything like that,” Jim Bob told Kelly. “He touched them over their clothes, and there were a few incidents where he touched them under their clothes.”

“We frequently hear from both parents as well as children on the National Sexual Assault Hotline about the minimizing of abuse,” Marsh says, noting that parents and victims alike “may try to explain it away” or defend an offending family member’s behavior, such as in the Duggar case, as expressing “typical sexual curiosity.”

Related: 10 Questions That Tell If Your Childhood Was Bad for Your Health

Marsh adds, however, that “these kinds of actions do have an impact both short- and long-term on victims. Resources should be provided to [victims], whether it’s counseling or professional support, regardless of whether or not a parent sees [the abuse] as significant.” She adds that although many parents may see abuse as “normal behavior” and fear “making a big deal out of nothing,” it’s important to remember that abuse is always relative to each individual victim.

Jim Bob, who did the majority of the talking in the one-hour interview, continued to defend their son and the seeming lack of action they took to protect their daughters by explaining to Kelly that “as parents, we’re not mandatory reporters [of abuse], so we did what we thought was best for our child.”

What was best for their son, they seemed to think, was sending him to go do construction work for and receive Christian mentoring from a family friend. Marsh, however, explains that it is, in fact, very important for parents to reach out to law enforcement or child protective services, especially if a sex crime has been committed. In these situations, parents can express to law enforcement what steps they have already taken on their own to “ensure [their household remains safe,” but that there is “a obligation,” always, as parents to report abuse “even if it is not a statutory obligation.”

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This kind of reporting is not easy for parents, though. “It’s important to acknowledge how heart-wrenching these situations can be for parents and for the entire family,” says Marsh, “including the victims who may not disclose their abuse for fear of breaking up their family, forcing their family to take sides, or not being believed.” Marsh explains that at RAINN, the counselors encourage parents who suspect that one of their children might be harming another one of their children to first address the situation with their children individually, letting the child who may be experiencing abuse know that if something is happening, he or she can safely talk to their parents about it and that they have their support and help.

“A lot of other families’ stories are even worse,” Jim Bob also told Kelly, further minimizing his son’s actions and the abuse his own daughters suffered as a result.      

It is essential, Marsh says, for parents to “reach out to professionals in youth and child offender treatment centers” as soon as they learn of abuse within their home, as “children have different motivations than adults when they commit sexual offenses. You need to connect that child who is offending to those resources so they can be assessed and evaluated so that the right form of therapy for them can be put into place.”

Jim Bob also insisted to Kelly that it is wrong for Josh to be categorized as a pedophile by the media since “a pedophile is an adult that preys on children. Joshua was actually 14 and just turned 15 when he did what he did. And I think that the legal definition is 16 and up” to legally be classified as a pedophile.

It was an odd distinction to insist upon, watching a father insist that his teenage son was not a sex offender when he preyed on his single-digit age sisters.

“That’s why it is so important when you suspect or know your child has been harmed” by a sibling “that you connect to professionals who can assess” the perpetrating child, Marsh explains. “Children may have issues with impulse control and all sorts of things — that’s why it’s important to have that evaluation come from someone who is skilled and specialized to make that determination.”

On one of the few occasions when Michelle did speak, always turning to Jim Bob for reassurance first, she added that the fact that their son had molested their daughters “doesn’t mean we weren’t good shepherds” and that the worst part of the entire incident was having her “children’s trust betrayed by having juvenile records leaked” to the media. “As a mom, that breaks my heart for my girls. And honestly, they didn’t even understand or know that anything had happened until after the fact when they were told about it. And now [because of the media], they have been victimized.”

“Having victims’ personal information, narratives, and trauma made public can be horribly traumatic in itself,” Marsh adds. “It really disempowers the victim and takes their story, their trauma, and their narrative out of their hands and allows everyone else to dictate their experience.”

And yet, it was a disturbing assertion to hear from a mother that true abuse isn’t being violated by a family member, but by the media — and that a violation of trust from the media is far worse than the violation of trust one imagines these girls must have felt after being molested in their own home.

If you or someone you know has been affected by sexual violence, it’s not your fault. You are not alone. Help is available 24/7 through the National Sexual Assault Hotline: 800-656-HOPE and ohl.rainn.org/online/, y en español: rainn.org/es.