Johnathan Self stated in his autobiography that he “had an affair” with Clement Freud’s wife when he was 16 and she was 47 (stating they had an open marriage).
So it is quite possible she didn’t recognise abuse when she was around it, and didn’t see it as different from other sexual relationships. Until people explicitly said publicly they were hurt.
This information was published during their lifetimes and not denied.
Neither Clement nor Jill Freud appear to have been significantly motivated by Christianity, so this seems to be getting a bit tangential to the thread. (Jill did, however, take a housekeeper's job at The Kilns in Oxford in her youth, which means she was living in the household of C S Lewis, on whom she developed a "tremendous crush" after she discovered that "Jack" was in fact the same person as her favourite author at the time…)
Johnathan Self stated in his autobiography that he “had an affair” with Clement Freud’s wife when he was 16 and she was 47 (stating they had an open marriage).
So it is quite possible she didn’t recognise abuse when she was around it, and didn’t see it as different from other sexual relationships. Until people explicitly said publicly they were hurt.
This information was published during their lifetimes and not denied.
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However, she died this year age 98. if she was 47 at the time she was alleged to have had such an affaire, that was 51 years ago, 1974. Deplorable though this might sound to modern shipmates, it was part of the fantasy world of many spotty adolescent boys then to emulate the character played by Dustin Hoffman in the Graduate, to be initiated into adult life by an affaire with a friend's mother or the art mistress.
To quote, once again, L. P. Hartley, "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there".
Older men seducing under age girls though, was always regarded as seriously abusive.
My understanding is that "historical abuse" usually refers to abuse that happened to a living adult when they were under 18, and is abuse by definition, judged by today's standards but also subject to whatever specific laws might have been in effect at the time.
As I think has been mentioned on one of the threads, abuse experienced by people who lived years ago can still be relevant because of the possibility of intergenerational cycles of family abuse.
Something being abusive, and something being illegal, are overlapping but not identical categories. What happened to Self would nowadays be described as grooming - but would only be illegal in certain circumstances - for example if she had been his teacher at the time.
It is also the case that at the time, teenage “groupies” of pop groups were not seen as vulnerable and if they ended up having sex with a rock star that would not often be identified as abuse on the part of the celebrity. Forexample.. It is likely that - if she thought it was ok for she herself to sleep with a teenage boy - she might well have thought it was ok for her husband to sleep with a teenage girl - if she wasn’t actually physically trying to fight him off at the time (as far as she knew).
It is also possible that with passage of time she came to have a different understanding of past events.
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So it is quite possible she didn’t recognise abuse when she was around it, and didn’t see it as different from other sexual relationships. Until people explicitly said publicly they were hurt.
This information was published during their lifetimes and not denied.
Self didn’t characterise their relationship as abusive - however, I am not sure I trust his judgement.
However, she died this year age 98. if she was 47 at the time she was alleged to have had such an affaire, that was 51 years ago, 1974. Deplorable though this might sound to modern shipmates, it was part of the fantasy world of many spotty adolescent boys then to emulate the character played by Dustin Hoffman in the Graduate, to be initiated into adult life by an affaire with a friend's mother or the art mistress.
To quote, once again, L. P. Hartley, "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there".
Older men seducing under age girls though, was always regarded as seriously abusive.
My understanding is that "historical abuse" usually refers to abuse that happened to a living adult when they were under 18, and is abuse by definition, judged by today's standards but also subject to whatever specific laws might have been in effect at the time.
As I think has been mentioned on one of the threads, abuse experienced by people who lived years ago can still be relevant because of the possibility of intergenerational cycles of family abuse.
It is also the case that at the time, teenage “groupies” of pop groups were not seen as vulnerable and if they ended up having sex with a rock star that would not often be identified as abuse on the part of the celebrity. For example.. It is likely that - if she thought it was ok for she herself to sleep with a teenage boy - she might well have thought it was ok for her husband to sleep with a teenage girl - if she wasn’t actually physically trying to fight him off at the time (as far as she knew).
It is also possible that with passage of time she came to have a different understanding of past events.