The Car Crash Club • Monsta X

Afterward

Hey everyone! Thank you all for reading. This story is different from what I usually write, mostly concerning the content, and to be totally honest - that was all unplanned, haha. It all started when I asked myself the question, What is Hyungwon crashed the car? Then of course, I had to know why he would have crashed the car. As I started filling in the blanks, I saw the potential to shift the story into something more psychological (and that's a bet I'll take nine times out of ten), and after a phone call to my best friend to run the idea past her, I decided to see where the story would take me. So, if this made you sad, blame my best friend because she gave me the green light.

I also did a bit of research for this book because the topics of child grooming and incest are so heavy that I didn't want to run the risk of portraying them inaccurately or in any way romanticizing the devastating emotional toll and trauma they cause. Unfortunately, I didn't save most of the links I referenced, but there are a few points to my research I'll outline here for anyone curious (links at the bottom).

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1) Incestuous relationships are fairly uncommon, and father-son relationships are rarer than father-daughter relationships. In the case studies I referenced, the father-son relationships were less likely to be biological and more likely to be a step-father or temporary boyfriend of the mother. So, the events of this story are highly unlikely if you factor in actual probabilities.

2) Biological incestuous relationships are also unlikely to form if the parent in question is involved with the child in their formative years. That is to say that a parent that is active in raising their child when they are very young is less likely to engage in this behavior since they will psychologically recognize the child as their offspring. In this story, chapter 21 (the bicycle chapter) hints that the father has been absent for much of Hyungwon's life, during which he then "failed to develop a normal sense of protectiveness" (see 'The Characteristics of Incestuous Fathers').

3) The offender of sexual grooming usually manipulates the child's affection via emotional blackmail, such as "threatening to withdraw their affection or saying, 'if you loved me you would.'" In the story, the father frequently emotionally blackmails Hyungwon in this way by threatening to leave or claiming that Hyungwon doesn't love him.

Other forms of blackmail include "threatening to share secrets that the child has told them" or that "there will be terrible consequences for refusing to do sexual things." They then frequently tell the child that people will not believe them or that they'll get in trouble if people find out, which makes it extremely difficult for the abused child to disclose the abuse. Even when Hyungwon meets the school counselor, he has been so thoroughly led to believe these things that he is unable to tell anyone what's happening.

4) It's also important to keep in mind that many children don't even realize that they're being groomed or don't register the events as abuse. Even once the abuse has been discovered, they may still have mixed feelings about the offender and might keep in contact with them (see 'What is Sexual Grooming?'). You see this a little bit near the end after Mi-Yeon comes into the picture, whereupon Hyungwon is simultaneously terrified of his abuser but also jealous that he's being replaced/is losing his father's attention. This gives you an idea of how thoroughly traumatic it is for a children to go through this process because they're psychologically manipulated even after the fact to continue engaging in these harmful behaviors.

5) There are several stages to the grooming process. They sometimes give the child gifts (such as the bicycle, the video games, etc.), and there's frequently a stage in which the offender will try to expose the child to sexual topics (such as talking about them openly or showing pornography to the child, which occurs during the camping trip) in order "to make it easy for the child to accept such acts, thus the behavior" (see 'Child Grooming'). The entire idea of grooming is to normalize the abuse; if the child doesn't see anything wrong with the behavior, then they're less likely to expose the abuse to a trusted adult. Another stage involves desensitizing the child to touch via non-sexual means (such as hugging, taking a bath/shower together, swimming nude, etc.). Later on in the process, the offender "may also use threats and coercion once the abuse starts to suggest to the victim that no one will believe them, or that the minor will be blamed for the abuse because they wanted it" (see 'Grooming' and the Sexual Abuse of Children: Institutional, Internet, and Familial Dimensions').

6) I think it's also important to mention that grooming is typically the result of an outside adult gaining access to a child (rather than incestuous grooming). There have been some serial offenders that used children's organizations to gain access to children, specifically targeting ones without fathers or who had suffered previous abuse.

7) Also, I don't have the source for this, but I believe I read that the average period of sexual abuse for a child was somewhere around 2-4 years, so Hyungwon's case is exaggerated, although there may be similar cases of long-term abuse.

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Here are the only links I was able to salvage, although I referenced more throughout the writing process:

'What is Sexual Grooming?' - https://www.thinkuknow.co.uk/parents/articles/what-is-sexual-grooming/

'Child Grooming' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_grooming

'Grooming' and the Sexual Abuse of Children: Institutional, Internet, and Familial Dimensions' (Clarendon Studies in Criminology) by Anne-Marie McAlinden

'The Characteristics of Incestuous Fathers' by Linda Meyer Williams & David Finkelhor, sponsored by National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect (1992) - https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED354451.pdf

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Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought of "The Car Crash Club." :)