I have something to confess: I watch 19 Kids and Counting. And by “I watch,” I don’t mean “I caught it a couple of times a few years ago.” I mean “I totally watched Jill and Jessa’s wedding specials and Jill’s birth special this year.” I’ve known I had a problem with reality TV for years: the more “slice-of-life” it’s billed as, the more likely I am to watch. Jon & Kate Plus Eight, The Little Couple, Sister Wives, 19 Kids & Counting, Little People, Big World…I’ve watched them all…except for Keeping Up With The Kardashians, because that is not how real people live. I refer to myself (tongue-in-cheek) as a frustrated cultural anthropologist, but really what I am is a good old-fashioned voyeur. You leave your blinds open as I walk the streets of New York? I’m not going to lie, I’ll look in your window as I walk past (I’m a voyeur, not a peeping tom). Reality TV just made it easier for me to see how other people lived.

Coming from a family of two (my mom and I), I found myself especially drawn to watching 19 Kids because I had no idea how a family that large functioned. My teenage years involved a lot of screaming and retreating into my bedroom. A five-room house seemed too small for two people at times. How in the hell did the Duggars co-exist with 21 of them in maybe 10 rooms? I was curious. I watched. On the surface, they seemed like a loving, happy family.

Of course there’s a reason “you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover” is a cliché, and there were hints that the family was not as perfect as they seemed on TV. Michelle Duggar recorded a virulently transphobic robocall last summer saying trans women were “males with past child predator convictions that claim they are female.” Josh Duggar, up until the recent scandal broke, was employed by the anti-gay Family Research Council and spent a fair amount of time making anti-gay speeches around the country. And now we find out that Josh molested five girls while he was a teenager and that his parents covered the story up.

Early accounts talked about Josh Duggar molesting sleeping girls, but did not point out what was immediately obvious to fans of the show: in the strictly religious Duggar household, the only sleeping girls he would have had access to were his own sisters. Later reports made it clear that four of the five oldest Duggar girls had been Josh’s victims. And victims they were, although the family has not used that term (or indeed mentioned the girls) once. Their response to this story has been all about Josh, not his victims.

The Duggars tout “courtship” as a cornerstone of their lifestyle. Basically the Duggar children don’t date, they spend their teen years looking for a husband or wife and when they do get engaged, touch with a fiancé/fiancée is limited to holding hands and “side hugs.” On TV this seems quaint and wholesome, but this lack of sexual agency comes with ramifications. Not being taught how to deal with the changes that puberty brings or the powerful urges that come along with raging hormones will invariably have consequences. It’s saddening, but not really surprising that in a culture with no other outlets for his hormones, a teenage boy would touch family members–the only girls available to him. Call it Flowers in the Attic syndrome, if you will, but the teenage libido cannot be controlled through abstention (and no, I’m not defending Josh’s actions, I’m just saying they were a consequence of the way he was raised).

Given that the only “counseling” that Josh received after he told his father what was going on was really just shipping him away to work for a family friend, I highly doubt the Duggar girls were given any support after they were molested. In fact as this article on the ATI homeschooling curriculum the family follows points out, the standard response in the curriculum (and in the Quiverfull movement) is to blame the woman for any sexual abuse that happens. Because the concept of “forgiveness” is so big with the Quiverfull movement, I feel fairly certain that the girls were simply told to “forgive” their brother and move on. Whether they actually did or not is anyone’s guess.

The Duggar Family’s official response so far is limited to statements from Jim Bob and Michelle, and Josh and Anna Duggar. None of the girls in question (even Jessa and Jill, who have both married in the past year and moved out of the big family house) have spoken up for themselves in the aftermath of all of this. It remains to be seen if this is a choice on their parts or if their parents have told them not to give statements, but I think the latter probably plays a part–the houses that Jill and Jessa live in with their husbands are Jim Bob’s property, which means he still has a measure of control over them.

It’s those girls I’m thinking of now, girls that I’ve watched grow up over the past five years because of this strange medium known as reality TV. Girls who seemed just like any other teenagers I’ve known, in a family that put up an amazingly wholesome front for the cameras and the TLC viewing public. I’m also thinking of Josh’s wife, Anna, and wondering if she really knew what she was getting into before she married him, or if when he told her about his molestation of his sisters, he used the same words he and his parents are using now: “mistake” and “wrongdoing” and “forgiveness.”

Josh and Anna are the parents of three (soon to be four) children, and Jill and Jessa have started their own families this year. Another one of the Duggar kids, Josiah, has just entered into a courtship relationship. With all the Duggar children so far following the lifestyle in which they were raised, and no one taking steps to correct the circumstances that brought the molestation about in the first place, it seems likely that the cycle of abuse will be continued. TLC has pulled the show from its schedule, and the network executives now have a choice: do they keep it off the air or do they return their cash cow to TV (ironically centered on the Duggar daughters this year), perhaps without Josh? Viewers like myself have a choice, too: if the show comes back, do we continue to watch? I don’t have an answer for you. It’s something each person will have to decide for themselves.