Jim Bob Duggar, the paterfamilias of the infamous family from 19 Kids and Counting, has 10 sons. With the latest arrest of the 31-year-old Joseph Duggar, 20% of those 10 sons have now been arrested and charged with sex crimes involving prepubescent children.
The Sheriff’s Office of Bay County, Florida, alleges that Joseph Duggar has been charged with two counts of lewd and lascivious behavior over a 2020 incident, during which he, then 25, “manipulated the victim’s underwear and grazed her genitals” and rubbed her thighs. The alleged victim was 9 at the time.
The reality television show that made the family a household name has been off the air for over a decade, but the family managed to foray the cancellation of the original series into TLC spin-offs, brand deals, and social media fame. The original, of course, was canceled upon the discovery that the eldest son, Josh Duggar, had molested five children, four of whom were his prepubescent sisters, when he was 14 to 15 years old in 2002 and 2003.
Jim Bob Duggar salvaged the family’s reputation by claiming that when he found out in 2003 about his son’s malfeasance, he technically reported them to law enforcement, but it was a state trooper who was a personal friend of the family and would later be sentenced to a half-century in prison for child pornography charges. Furthermore, the elder Duggar waited a full year until 2004 to do so, or right when TLC began airing its first individual specials about the family.
Having skirted any real responsibility for his actions, Josh Duggar would go on to be arrested in 2021 and then convicted for receiving and possessing child sexual abuse material, including some depicting the rape of infants. Duggar is currently five years into a 12 1/2-year prison sentence.
Because the Duggars adhere to a fundamentalist fringe of evangelicalism, the liberal media are often quick to use the family’s failings as a cautionary tale about Christianity in general, and conservatives can be too quick to interpret criticism of the family as criticism of the church. The behavior Josh Duggar demonstrated and then Joseph Duggar learned from — that, contra the very clear diktat of Jesus, men can get away with harming children scot-free — is not only the opposite of Christian teaching, but rather, it’s more a lesson of the horrors of reality television.
The dismissal of Josh Duggar’s initial infractions did not happen in a vacuum, and they certainly didn’t happen with the pure parochial backdrop of some small-town Baptist family just trying to get by with what limited means and dreams they had. Rather, the Duggar patriarch, who had tried and failed to foray his state congressional career into a national Senate bid, was actively pitching the family to television producers. It took five successful television specials across four years before TLC picked up the family for a full series, so naturally, the Duggar elders understood that any wrongdoing would have to be handled silently or, lest news of delinquency make it to the network, not handled at all.
The Duggar family farce is less a tragedy about tens of millions of Christian clans who don’t sire multiple accused sex criminals per generation or even one about their fundamentalist fringe, and more about the occupational hazard of turning children into content for public consumption.
It’s a story we’ve seen time and time again, and well outside of the scenery of rural religion. The now-notorious Gosselin family of Jon & Kate Plus 8 was secular to the point of the titular couple divorcing, and multiple Gosselin children have since leveled horrific allegations of abuse against their mother. Even outside of traditional television, the reality TV model has made millionaires of even more toxic matriarchs such as Ruby Framke, who amassed over 2 million YouTube subscribers by pimping out her children for clicks while criminally abusing them in secret.
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And it’s not as though the networks have learned their lesson. ABC decided to collide reality TV worlds for the first time ever for its flagship reality contest, The Bachelorette, hiring Hulu star Taylor Frankie Paul of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. The only problem? Paul, who had already been hired by Hulu for the latter after being charged with aggravated assault, child abuse, and domestic violence in the presence of a child, is being investigated once again for a new slew of domestic violence allegations against the father of her third child.
So long as we keep clicking, streaming, and tuning into publicity hounds who see profit in exploiting their children for content, the cycle of abuse will continue. How many more survivors of Gen Alpha will have to come forward before we stop and unfollow the “influencers” serving their children up for sport?