With the success of organizations like AA and alanon, why isn’t there a pedophiles anonymous? Answering this question gets to the heart of the problem of dealing with sex offenders in our society. People aren’t embarrassed to go to AA. Maybe initially, but then they learn that people are proud of them for doing it. Do you think the same would happen with pedophiles? Clearly we aren’t there yet.
My uncle was a long time member of AA. I think most of the family viewed him in context with the damage that drinking did along the way. In contrast there are dozens of members of AA that credit my uncle with helping to save their marriage, their jobs and in some cases their lives. Unfortunately, the later is the stuff you often find out at funerals. It’s hard to imagine multiple people standing up at a funeral to say how someone helped them with their sexual attraction to children. With AA people are more then willing to acknowledge those that have helped them with their addiction – and do it publicly. Sex offenders stay in the shadows, and in many cases are pushed there. It’s hard to tell which sometimes.
Bottom line is that as a society, we aren’t ready to admit that pedophiles are a part of us. The same people we want servicing our communities and teaching our children, often happen to be sexual predators. This is scary as shit! Most people’s brains can’t even get a handle on this because it doesn’t make logical sense. It’s so much easier to go with the explanation that there are good people and bad people, and good people do good things and bad people do bad things. We live in a society which actively seeks to destroy things that don’t make sense. It’s not right, but it helps us make sense of our world. And think of the time and money it saves on education.
Go to a meeting
So lets imagine you saw an ad for Pedophiles Anonymous in the paper. What do you think would happen? For the most part no one would come. And sooner or later, people that did come would probably be killed by a parent or victim looking for payback. Unlike being an alcoholic or a drug addict, there isn’t a safe place to admit being sexually attracted to children, or worse having acted on that. There is no social acceptance that this is a problem that we as a community can help someone with. It is more of a cancer that should be removed and destroyed. And oh by the way, don’t talk to anyone about either.
There’s an old joke about what do you call 300 lawyers thrown off a cliff? Answer: a good start. Substitute the word pedophiles for lawyers and you have a statement that most people would agree with. On a purely emotional level it’s hard not to feel that way, especially when you have lived through abuse yourself or as a parent. The more you learn though, the more you find that it doesn’t fix the problem. AA fixes a problem. Drug courts fix a problem. Both recognize the addiction, they understand the scars it leaves on those around them, and they recognize it takes an open and educated community to deal with the problem.
We Need to be Open
Like it or not at some point we have to look to a similar approach for sex offenders. We need to bring the problem and treatment into the open, if we want to reduce the number of victims in the future. Most people don’t know that AA has been around for almost 80 years. And it really has only been really socially accepted for the past 20 years or so. Hopefully a similar structure can come to exist for sex offenders that doesn’t take quite that length of time for society to accept.
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.
