Sexual Abuse
A recent incident with a Connecticut football team sharing pictures of girls has gone from a slap on the wrist and a forfeited game, to potential charges of child pornography. I don’t know who first came up with the idea of teen sexting. It was probably inevitable given the available technology. Then you have magazines like Vogue and Cosmopolitan giving you helpful tips to make your sexts tantalizing. Officially these magazines are targeting professional women between 18 and 30 something. But whether it’s teenagers reading mom’s copy, or girls wanting to be older and like the women in the magazine, you now have a problem.
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Sexual Abuse
If you are wondering if there is such a thing as police sex offenders, the answer is yes. This is probably the ultimate contradiction. Sadly, we are no longer surprised when another priest is found to be abusing children. When a police officer is accused of being a sex offender, it brings to mind a whole bunch of questions.
Don’t they screen police officers? Of course they do. But only based on known activities and how you might do on various standardized tests. Most sex offenders do not have the same sense of social conscious that the rest of the population has. They are much more likely to beat polygraphs and not feel remorse about their actions. Sex offenders generally feel entitled to their personal pleasures regardless of social norms, laws, or the impact on those around them.
Justifying Abuse
Imagine you were given a gun and told you could cure cancer, but you would have to kill a room full of kindergarten children to do it. Most people would have difficulty justifying murder for the good of society. Sex offenders regularly craft their world so they can make a positive impact on the world around them. They teach children, they volunteer for charities, they are active in their church, they raise money, and they hold prominent positions in their community. In their mind, this veil of public trust gives them the rights to take liberties from time to time. And why not, they give back far more than they take. Such is the logic of a sex offender.
So back to the police issue. Earlier this week, the captain of our police department was arrested on child pornography charges. He was a 30-year veteran of the police force as well as husband and father. By most accounts he was a pillar of the community and a model police officer. Then he made a mistake that opened him up for an investigation, which has mushroomed into a Pandora’s box. The encrypted files on his home and office computer held over 100,000 sexually explicit images and videos of infants and children.
Why?
It makes you wonder why someone would risk everything to do something that is totally unforgivable in the eyes of most people. A larger percentage of the population would be able to accept them killing the kindergarten students. Since I do not have an advanced degree in psychology, I am not even going to try to explain it. Trying to understand this behavior will just make your head spin. The thing to understand is that sex offenders are the best and worst of us. They can be anyone, and it is much more common than we would like. Once people can stop pretending it doesn’t exist, we can start having constructive discussions about how to address the problem.
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.
