I'm feeling slightly sick
 

I have just discovered that a past boyfriend (about a 3 year relationship, around 15 years ago) has been convicted as a serial child sex offender. Victims include immediate family members and it has been going on since WAY before I knew him.
So far so bad, and I am appalled and so so sorry for the victims and their families.
What is really making me feel sick, however, is that I recall that he asked and I let him completely shave my fanny once before lovemaking. I thought it odd, but clearly it was a symptom of his sexual preferences. In a strange way I feel violated, but I cannot share this with anyone because ... well, TMI for my current partner, or anyone else I know IRL.

:vomit:

Owwww. Yeah - that's kind of icky.

Oh wow. I can absolutely see how you feel sick over that. Here is something that might mitigate it (not his crime, but your yuck factor): maybe he was trying, in his own weak way, to stop what he was doing. Maybe by getting you to shave, he was trying to recreate his kink with an adult woman in a way that would be satisfying enough that he could stop doing what he knew was horrific. He only did it once because obviously it didn't work. But maybe he hated himself, as many pedophiles do, and wanted in his heart more than anything for you to be enough to magically "cure" him.

Or it could be he just prefers shaved or found it to be otherwise interesting and all that other stuff has nothing to do with it.

That just makes me want to cry, Clodfobble. And yes, Undertoad, that is what I thought at the time.

Some time after we split (because I can't transit from lovers to friends without a break) the culprit and I became friends again and he was very kind and helpful to me at a very traumatic point in my life. You could not imagine a less devious, kinder person, less likely to put his own interests over those of others. Or so I thought. So I am also grieving for the loss of a friend.
And then I find myself in church this afternoon (not my belief system, but an obligation to others took me there). It is the culprit's belief system and I begin to wonder how you square off the two in your head. He was, by all accounts, full of remorse and basically gave himself up at the first indication of the accusations; is now imprisoned for four years (at least two), with corrective treatment and a ban on contacting the victims for life afterwards. And then there is all this talk of forgiveness around me and I think: "Poor bastard. He has lost his family (all of it), friends, job, everything. What he needs is a friend". Part of me wants to be that friend - who has continued to see all the good in him (which there was).

I would say there's nothing wrong with being that friend, assuming you have no children. You are not at risk of being victimized yourself. And you're certainly not going to legitimize his behavior. And if everyone else leaves him, the only people he will have left when he gets out are people who would legitimize the behavior, and he will end up in their company eventually. Better to be a checkpoint of sanity for someone who needs it, if you think you're up to the task.

How does your current partner and everyone else you know IRL fit into that?

There you go dragging logic and reason into it.

;)

The only bit I cannot share with my current partner and friends IRL is the fanny-shaving episode because, well, TMI.
Partner knows all of the people involved and the whole story. I have mentioned continuing the friendship to partner, and we're both thinking about it, but his initial reaction was neutral-to-sympathetic.
As to my other friends IRL - very few of them know culprit so I don't see that as an issue, and there are even fewer (one, in fact) that I would even think of discussing it with. Among my acquaintance there is a victim's parent (also an ex-partner of culprit, and who told me of these dreadful events), and that victim. But I do not see these people at all frequently and it would be easy for me not to share with them my continued friendship with culprit. Indeed victim's parent expressed, amongst many other things, pity for culprit, but I still would screen them from my contact with culprit, if I chose to get in touch with him.

Sounds like a catch 22. To make an informed choice, you need to answer a key question. To answer a key question, you need information that you may not be able to get because it constitutes TMI. Did culprit; or, did culprit not shave his other ex-partner's fanny too?

You seem to have missed the fact that the conversation has moved on a bit from the fanny-shaving. More central to my thoughts now are whether or not to extend friendship to culprit.

Au contraire, the conversation has moved on to acceptable substitute behavior that may help culprit stay on the wagon post incarceration. Why else extend friendship to a registered sex offender if not to that end?

I'm not offering him, nor interested in his, "acceptable substitute behavior". I'm offering friendship.

Ah, a passive enabler, of course.

Have you considered that culprit may be better off without your friendship. It didn't previously work for him with his affliction, which is central to his life now, even if in other ways it worked for you.

Umm....different context and an entirely different relationship founded on entirely different expectations and levels of self-knowledge and for an entirely different purpose.