Just recalling some memories from age 7, wanting some clarity.
Hi everyone, first proper post on reddit and I suppose it’s a bit of a doozy :/
I am getting some memories back from when I was 7 years old. It’s a sort of blurry time in my life and now some of it’s coming back to me, I’ve been a victim of SA before, but now it’s possible that I was a victim of COCSA as well and I’d like some clarity on whether it is COCSA.
(Sorry for the poor formatting, first post, not sure how to write this well)
The ages of everyone involved: I Was 7 years old, J was 8, H was also 8.
When I was 7 years old, I had a couple friends in my neighbourhood, J and H, I’ll call them. I was mostly friends with them because I didn’t know anyone else, and J was always insistent on hanging around with me, so we slotted together in a sense. But J was always very unusual, just in his maturity or I suppose his understanding of mature topics. He used to tell me about sex and stuff just in that general area since at the time, I wasn’t too knowledgable on it. In short, most things I learned about sex at that age were from J, and he made it a habit for himself to tell me something new any time he found it out.
This led to certain things happening, which I was fine with because it was natural curiosity to begin with, like J wanting us to masturbate in the same room, or us watching adult content together, which mostly seemed cool and exciting at the time since we were young and of course many kids, like I was, are intrigued by the idea of being more mature. Now, I’m just unsure on where the boundary of it being COCSA lies; is COCSA exclusive to being touched inappropriately for example?
Or does it constitute any form of sexual harassment or advance, like the scenario I spoke about before.
There was also one more ‘incident’ I’ll call it, that happened after this, and I’m wondering if this is just a weird thing we did, or if it is COCSA. I was invited to J’s house along with two others (H and 1 other I didn’t know) around summertime, and J’s mum was home at the time, but she was a very neglectful mother (still is) and wasn’t aware of what J and his friends would get up to. That day, J locked me, H and the other person in his mum’s bedroom and forced us to strip down or else he was going to hurt us and spray deodorant in our eyes. I refused at first and was sprayed. He made us all strip down, but for some reason, I felt like it was my idea. Like I had some form of agency that I was expressing by going along with it. Whether that was a reaction to a scary situation, I’m not sure. Sorry if any of this is incoherent, I’m struggling while recounting this.
After we were stripped down, J and H were smacking and grabbing me in private areas, grabbing and forcing me to look at myself in the mirror. J eventually made H do the same, and verbally abused me with various slurs and taunts when I refused to help him.
There were some other actions that took place, but they were all quite similar, so I’d just rather not recall them all.
Was I abused? Or was it just curiosity, maybe even both?
(For a little more context, this sort of thing happened quite regularly at the time, with J usually being the one instigating these scenarios and pressuring me and others into engaging with it.)
Posted Aug 10, 2026, 4:16 PM UTC