Sexual Abuse
I didn’t want to watch the Stephen Collins interview with Katie Couric but my wife wanted to so it was inevitable. As parents we look at the issue of sex offenders somewhat differently. She would simply have all pedophiles executed. It’s pretty straight forward, gets rid of the current problem and sends a message. It’s also not going to happen. While having a similar initial reaction I know that this is a problem of society that you can’t simply weed out the offenders. You have to find a way to deal with them. Almost every day I see cases of children that are sexually abused as well as children who sexually abuse others. In some respects they are different sides of the same coin. And since you can’t have a coin with only one side, you have to have a strategy for both.
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Sexual Abuse
We’ve all had stressful job interviews. For some it’s the questions, for others it is the waiting. And every few years it’s the expectations of a billion people for you to lead them. It’s currently just over 30 days from when the Vatican says we will have a new Pope. I’m not Catholic but I still find the process interesting. And as a parent dealing with sexual abuse of a child, I see the Pope as having more potential to do something about the problem of child sexual abuse by priests than anyone else on the planet. So the question is will the next Pope live up to that potential?
As with any job interview, the decision isn’t left to the masses. Many people think because we vote for President that those millions of votes are what matters, but in reality it is this strange thing called the Electoral College. So in reality the voters that matter could fit in a typical gymnasium. The process with selecting a Pope is a much more secretive process known as Conclave. In either case it comes down to whether the needs and values of those voting are met by a particular candidate.
What is the church looking for?
So what will be Conclave be looking for in the new Pope? The Catholic Church , perhaps more than any other organization, has a history of protecting itself as an institution as a first priority. The current Pope has spent most of his tenure watching a series of lawsuits unfolding from decades of sexual abuse. Many say that this is the actual reason he is stepping down.
The problems of the church are two big and should be left to a younger man. I don’t know if this is actually true, but I would have liked to have heard that as reason. To be fair, I don’t think this is an unrealistic expectation for a Pope. They are supposed to be a spiritual leader, not the leader of a legal team. Be that as it may, such is the likely role for the next Pope. The question is will he focus on transparency and cleaning house, or will he be looking for a rug big enough to sweep all of this under. Again, a lot will depend on what the members of Conclave are looking for.
So much like our Electoral College, there is an expectation that members represent the views of those who sent them there. So if you are communicating with your local Bishop maybe you could suggest the following three things:
- The next Pope must make the Catholic Church once again a safe place for children
- The next Pontiff must find a way to let past sexual abuse by priests victims get closure
- The Pope must purge the church of abuser priests
Then maybe he can get back to the business of being Pope.
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.
Sexual Abuse
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.
Sexual Abuse
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.
Sexual Abuse
A definitive report of over 150 pages by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops basically indicates that sexual abuse by priests is a problem from decades past, and was really a symptom of societal dissent from the Vietnam era. Also, any associations of priests to pedophiles is largely a misnomer. That’s the reader’s digest version.
Self Policing
Having done research studies in the past, this one is almost comical. It sites studies from the 1930s and 1940s and then casually states that contemporary studies have found similar results. Can you think of any area of contemporary study that would use information from over half a century ago as a primary reference? The study spends most of it’s efforts showing that sexual abuse in other areas of society is higher, or at least on par with that of the Catholic Church.
We spend a lot of time and energy convincing ourselves and others that we are safe from ourselves. The fact that it is not true doesn’t seem to stop people from trying to make it that way. Saying it doesn’t make it so. Fixing the problem will.
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.
