This is not the basis for a celebrity death match. It’s more an observation on who is better at dealing with sexual abuse. The NCAA definitely gets points for decisiveness. Their decision in the Penn State case clearly sends a message that the NCAA will not tolerate sexual abuse within the realm of college athletics. The Catholic Church has yet to make any gesture that even comes close to having the same impact. In reality it’s probably not a fair comparison.
The Catholic Church has been quietly dealing with (or not dealing with) the issue of abuse within the church for decades. The strategy has been one of containment. Move problem priests to places where they are less likely to abuse. Hire a bunch of lawyers. Issue a policy statement ever so often. And write a bunch of checks as they watch churches go bankrupt around the country. A few select victims get large paydays, but most still suffer in silence feeling forsaken by their church. This cycle repeats itself over and over. The problem with the Catholic Church’s approach is that they are a self policing organization. How do you take a hard line at disciplining yourself?
Catholic Church Oversight
The NCAA has the advantage of being an oversight organization. Amongst other things it’s mission is to ensure fair competition, academic standards, and other standards for all collegiate athletics. Colleges aren’t an extension of the NCAA, they answer to it’s authority. The Catholic Church tries to be in both roles and fails in the process.
To be fair, the church has made some progress over the year. They are getting better at dealing with the problem, but they still aren’t where they need to be. Some of this is because they are fighting wars on multiple fronts. Abuse cases are global, and they are quickly followed by lawsuits and diminishing membership. Where the church has taken a band-aid approach to the cancer in their midst, the NCAA has gone for the shock and awe strike on Penn State. This full nuclear strike totally eclipsed the results of the sexual abuse case against the diocese of Philadelphia just 100 miles down the road. Point NCAA!
Advantage NCAA
Media attention aside, this doesn’t actually push a win over to the NCAA side. The NCAA response is on the scale that we wish the Catholic Church would take, but in reality a more measured approach would have probably been more appropriate. Much like parents that kill their children’s abusers, the NCAA reacted with as much force as they could, dealing with a problem they had never deal with before. In some respects the Catholic Church’s approach of pressing buttons to see what works may have actually been a better approach (even though the Church doesn’t do it well). The Church does have the advantage of experience. If it were not for the covering up that has gone along with experience, they might have actually come up with an approach that works by now.
I would like the NCAA to reconsider and take a step back from certain parts of their ruling. Somewhere between the two approaches is something that makes sense. Many of the sanctions impact the athletes which seems contrary to the goals of the NCAA. Yes make Penn State an example, but don’t just make it the Nuremberg trial of collegiate sports. Make Penn State the center for how to deal with sexual abuse in organizations of all types. Make Penn State fund the initiative at the same level of the sanctions they are imposing. Create policies that all employees or contracts at NCAA sanctioned schools be mandatory reporters of sexual abuse. Establish national sanctions for violations of non-reporting. Etc. Etc.
Finding Solutions
This is somewhat of a half baked idea, but I’ve had 10 years to think about how to deal with sex offenders, so I’ve at least had time to think about it. The NCAA took a bold step, that was largely driven by public pressure rather than a strategic approach to an organizational problem. This maybe the first college sports sex abuse case to hold center stage on all the major news outlets, but it is probably not the last. The NCAA has the advantage of being an oversight organization. They have the potential to succeed at addressing a problem that the Catholic Church is still likely to fail at. By having Penn State create a center that focuses on developing solutions that work, it could result in successful preventive and appropriate abuse response approaches for all organizations. Everybody wins!
Let us know if we can help you dealing with your family’s sexual abuse victim situation. For ideas to get started please check out our book on what to do during the early days after disclosure.
Most of you will notice that your child before and after their sexual abuse is different. Your child has an altered future. The change may be subtle so you may not notice right away, or you may just think it’s a phase. Their perception of the world has been changed, and their actual brain chemistry has been changed. (Feel free to look up the impact of trauma on the hypothalamus ) The end result is often ADD or ADHD like behaviors (PTSD is frequently misdiagnosed as ADD or ADHD). Bipolar behavior is also pretty common. There are also a variety of negative side effects that can lead to antisocial or self destructive behavior.
It’s Not All Bad
The flip side of these conditions is that people with ADD, ADHD and Bipolar disorder go on to do other things like found Apple, Microsoft, Netscape, etc. Maybe you’ve heard of some of them. I don’t know if any of them were actually sexually abused, but the behaviors can lead to greatness. The question is whether your child will descend into a life of self destructive behavior, or change the world? There are no guarantees either way, but safe to say, you child is probably not going to fit into the world the way you may have originally thought. I don’t know if there have been any formal studies, but if your child has some of the classic symptoms of sexual abuse, they may be destined to be entrepreneurs. Here’s a short video that might give you some ideas.
Let us know if we can help you dealing with your family’s sexual abuse situation. For ideas to get started please check out our book on what to do during the early days after disclosure.
Most little girls at some point in their childhood want to be a princess. Sexual abuse often dashes those dreams and leaves many victims settling for less than they deserve. The reality is that sexual abuse robs many children of their dreams, and aspirations to make anything of their life. It’s important for children to know that they can grow up to be just like their heroes. Sometimes it seems more possible when you know that their heroes were sexually abused as well.
If your child is missing a hero they can relate to, I would like to recommend one – although you will probably know her name in the next three weeks. She was born Quanitta Underwood, but everyone just calls her Queen. Her and her sister were both sexually abused by her father. She wasn’t able to fight back as a child, but she is more than making up for it as an adult. She began boxing in 2003 and is now on her way to London to represent the United States as a member of the Olympic Team.
Live Your Dream
Here’s a great quote to from her “One day I’m going to be ‘Queen of the Ring’ and no one will ever hurt me again. One day, I won’t be 12 years old and feeling helpless; One day I’ll be strong and unstoppable.” Maybe your child has a dream like Queen’s?
For now, you can see what it is like to live that dream in the Olympics in a couple weeks. You can follow Queen Underwood at http://livingoutthedream.org?lrRef=W17mk
I recently got sent this picture and it a reminder of the impact children have on our lives. It’s also a benchmark for those of us who’s lives are thrown upside down by sexual abuse. Raising a child has it’s own pressures and sexual abuse only makes it more challenging, and expensive. The cost of abuse to a family can easily add tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of raising a child, and even more over the lifetime of a victim.
Back on Track
Whether you like the “ounce of prevention” analogy, or if you have been around projects you may have heard that identifying problems early makes them cheaper to address. Getting your lives back on track as quickly as possible after the abuse is going to be much less expensive than ignoring the problem. The temptation may be to avoid the problem and try to put it behind you. This is the mistake that many families make. Long term this can be a costly approach since victims can easily descend into addiction, depression, or worse. Families can easily come apart at the seams ending in divorce. Life is complicated enough without having to deal with sexual abuse, but this is the hand we are dealt.
You don’t need to spend years in therapy, but you do need a plan. It doesn’t need to be a good plan, just a plan. You will quickly find that it needs adjustment. Sexual abuse is going to have a cost on your life, but with some planning you can minimize the cost and damage it has on your lives.
Let us know if we can help you dealing with your family’s sexual abuse situation. For ideas to get started please check out our book on what to do during the early days after disclosure.
Chances are, your sexual abuse situation will have at least one element that you couldn’t have possibly imagined. Or more likely 5 or 6. Occasionally these head scratchers make the news. Over the past couple of years the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office has had a policy to not disclose the names of Orthodox Jews arrested on sex offense charges. There have been various requests to get the names and details of 85 offenders during the past 3 years which have all been rejected. The rational is that due to the close knit nature of the Orthodox community, that disclosure of the offenders identity could in turn reveal the victim’s identity. Interesting!
The reality is that every community is close knit. In roughly 97% of sexual abuse cases, it is someone the victim knows well. If you take almost any victim and make a list of the people they interact with for at least an hour a few times a year and the name of their offender will be on the list. Orthodox communities are no different. Shielding the names of offenders doesn’t protect the identity of the victim. It allows offenders to be dealt with without public input, and in many cases that structure which allowed the abuse to take place acts to protect itself. Charges are reduced, offenders don’t show up on sex offender registries and abuse is likely to continue.
Protecting who’s identity?
Protecting the identity of offenders also often has a negative impact on the victim as well. Every day the news has stories of victims coming forward years after the abuse. Disclosure doesn’t happen easily for most victims. Usually it takes an event to push them to come forward. Usually it is knowing that someone else is at risk, or that someone else has come forward. It’s often easy to dismiss the claims of one person. It becomes harder when it’s 2,3, or 4 that come forward. This generally won’t happen when details are kept quiet. Offenders are much more likely to be released, charges dismissed, and the victims are left feeling cheated by the system.
Silence in abuse cases allows the conditions that allowed the abuse to continue. Basically the problem doesn’t exist if no one talks about it. In so doing, the reality of the problem continues, and nobody knows how big the problem is. Only about 15% of abuse cases are reported in the first place. Hindering the flow of information only helps keep that number low. This creates a false sense of security for the general public who doesn’t think they have a problem. In reality the only way to not have a problem, is for proper disclosure so the problem can be addressed.
Let us know if we can help you dealing with your family’s sexual abuse situation. For ideas to get started please check out our book on what to do during the early days after disclosure.
If you are a clinician there is an actual answer to this. But if you are a parent, or a victim, the better question is “does why matter in sexual abuse to you?”. Before I go down this path lets look at a somewhat related example. Recently, Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales was charged with 17 counts of murder for killing civilians in Afghanistan. Evidence is pretty clear, but at the same time Sgt. Bales has no memory of the event. The average person hears the last part and generally thinks that’s a convenient excuse. While it may or may not be the case in your circumstances, sexual assault victims often don’t remember significant aspects of the abuse experience. Additionally, victims will often do things they have no memory of when triggered by some event.
I once dated a girl who tried to get out of the car at 60 mph. I later learned that I had driven by a place where she had been raped several years before. When I told her what she did, I basically got, “I did what?”. Aside from the simple fact of it happening, it was also strange in how it happened. She undid her seat belt and opened the door as casually as if we were parked. I’m sure that me grabbing her and pulling her back in the car was as much of a shock to her as it was to me. At that moment she wasn’t riding in my car, she was somewhere else.
So where was Sgt. Bales when he killed all those people? Was he a trophy hunter out for a little payback? Or was he reliving an incident that happened months ago? Forty years ago, there were more than a few Vietnam Veterans who returned from the war and woke up one morning with their spouse shot or stabbed to death lying next to them. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is the common label these days, but it has had various names over the years.
There’s still a lot of legal debate as to whether it is an excuse or a reason. As we learn more, we are likely to have a better understanding of what is actually going on in the brain. But try explaining this to an Afghani who’s children were murdered. Diminished capacity caused by PTSD is not an explanation that is likely to play well in that part of the world.
Sexual Abuse Responsibility
So what is an appropriate legal, or moral, response when someone does something unimaginable when their sense of circumstances or reality is altered based on PTSD? I don’t have the answer to this. It creates some legal challenges. As soon as you acquit someone for doing something like this, it quickly becomes the defense of the month for everyone out there trying to get away with crimes. Conversely, if you punish someone for unconscious actions, who are you benefiting? Occasionally you will hear stories of people getting pulled over and arrested for driving naked. They are asleep! Should people be responsible for things they do when they are asleep?
This particular case could get interesting since there are some military regulations that limit personal responsibility if someone has been on duty more than 16 hours. I don’t know if that applies here. I only ever encountered that once while in the military. On the first day of the gulf war I was actually on duty longer than 16 hours and was told that I had to go home. The more you know, the more complicated the issue gets.
Complexity
As complex as the conditions are for PTSD, the conditions as to why someone sexually abuses a child are even more complex. In cases where the abuser is a teacher, priest, or someone else outside the family it’s easy to find blame and to see that person as a predator. In cases of adult child incest, the blame is still there but we tend not to see the predatory aspect of the abuse. It was opportunistic more than planned. The latter of these two examples is actually the more common. Statistically in terms of number of abuse cases, incidents involves siblings, cousins and close friends are actually in the middle of these two groups. This is where things get really muddy.
Lets say that your 7 year old son is being molested by his 11 year old cousin. In most states, juvenile sexual offenses are evaluated on several criteria. These include past incidents, history of abuse, age difference, and degree of planning. I’m greatly oversimplifying but I’m not a clinician, and I’m just trying to make a point. In this example, 4 years difference is often the cutoff when courts look at inappropriate sexual contact as more of a behavioral problem and less of a criminal act. Over the course of the investigation you learn that your nephew is being regularly beaten by your brother-in-law. This is often the most common cause of juvenile’s abusing other’s sexually.
Sexual Abuse is about Power
It has nothing to do with sexual preference or interest in children for sex. It is about reclaiming power by exerting it over someone else. In your case, the older boy isn’t trying to manipulate the people around him to spend time with children, but every time he is beaten, he takes it out sexually on someone younger. This is one of many forms of sexually reactive behaviors. Victims of both sexual and physical abuse are frequently known to simulate sex acts or engage in sexual acts that are non-age appropriate, or out of context with what should be their knowledge of sexual activities at their age. In many cases the victim in one set of circumstances becomes the offender in another.
Regardless of your circumstances, it is probably as complex as any scenario I could outline here. In almost all circumstances involving adults, my personal feeling is that “why” is not important. The difference between us as adults, and lower forms of animals is apposable thumbs and the ability to control our sexual impulses. Adults should be held responsible for their actions.
The line is less black and white when it comes to children as the offender. If this applies to your situation, you may or may not come to see more than one victim. Children are rarely predatory, most times they are just acting out a response to their own abuse. I don’t know if that fact is likely to make you feel any better about the event. It may make you see that it is part of a more complex series of events. You may even be able to believe that your offender is sorry.
Let us know if we can help you dealing with your family’s sexual abuse victim situation. For ideas to get started please check out our book on what to do during the early days after disclosure.
