“He Was Never Diagnosed.”

People say it like it's a mic-drop.

“He’s not a pedophile. He was never clinically diagnosed.”

I’ve heard this sentence more times than I can count. Sometimes it’s said gently, like someone is trying not to hurt me. Sometimes it’s said defensively, like armor. And sometimes it’s said as if it should end the conversation altogether. And every time I hear it, something in me tightens. Because I know what that sentence is doing. It’s not trying to understand what happened to me. It’s trying to make what happened easier to sit with.

Here’s something many probably don't know: pedophile is a clinical term. It lives in psychology textbooks and diagnostic manuals, like the DSM-5-TR. It requires evaluation, criteria and a lot of paperwork.

But, there were no clinicians specialized in sex offender treatment involved, and that's the part people skip over.

Most people who sexually abuse children are never assessed by a clinician. They don’t volunteer for that. They don't walk into a therapist's office and say "Hey, I think I am a sex offender, please, assess me." They hide. They deflect. They rely on silence, on fear, on families that would rather not know, and systems that move on too quickly.

So when someone tells me, “There was no diagnosis,” all I hear is:

No one ever really looked or paid any amount of attention to it.

Not that it didn’t happen. Not that it didn’t matter. Just that there’s no official label to make it easier for everyone else. For a long time, I thought maybe that meant I had to be careful with my words. Maybe I needed to soften things. Be precise. Be fair. But here’s what I’ve learned.

If an adult sexually abuses a child, there is a word for that.

They are a child sexual abuser.

That isn’t name-calling. It isn’t emotional. It’s factual.

Abuse is defined by what was done—not by whether someone met diagnostic criteria in a system they were never part of. When people debate labels, it doesn’t feel neutral to me. It feels like erasure.

Because while they’re parsing definitions, I’m remembering the way my body learned fear before it learned language. I’m remembering the confusion and the shame. The way my nervous system never quite forgot. Trauma doesn’t ask for a diagnosis before it settles in.

A child doesn’t experience harm in footnotes or technicalities. A body doesn’t wait for paperwork to decide whether something was real.

I’ve heard people say, “Not all child abusers are pedophiles.”

Maybe that’s true, clinically.

But I know this: whatever the reason, whatever the label, the impact is the same. The damage doesn’t lessen because someone lacked a diagnosis. Healing doesn’t come faster because someone’s motives were complicated.

What happened to me happened. I don’t need a psychiatrist’s signature to name that. I don’t need clinical language to validate my memory. And I don’t owe anyone softer words to protect their comfort.

If someone sexually abused a child, the absence of a diagnosis doesn’t make them misunderstood. It just means no one ever held them fully accountable. Calling it what it is isn’t cruelty, it’s clarity. And clarity is part of my healing.

This is the kind of truth I’m willing to say out loud now—the truth that lives behind the facade.