Disclaimer: this post has nothing to do with laundry or bicycles or even unicycles, but with cycles of abuse, including sexual abuse and rape, so feel free to jump ship now.
I just finished reading Broken by Shy Keenan. It's a heartbreaking, gut-twisting, awful memoir about a girl's horrific abuse, physical and sexual, as a child. I've read a lot of books about child abuse. (Why, you ask? Because I have a gene in me that says "seek out darkness, try to understand it, try to stop it." I got mine from my mom. She got her "seek out darkness" gene from her dad, a cop. I can't explain it. It's not that I enjoy someone else's suffering. Just that I feel the need to bear witness to suffering and say to the person, I can't change this, but I hear you. I believe you.") Through decades of reading and listening to the stories of survivors, I have come to understand, as much as I can, the horrible damage one incident, let alone decades of it, can do to someone's soul.
I believe in evil. I believe sexual abuse is evil. I believe sexual abuse of children is eviler--that it is one thing for an adult to cope with a sexual attack, but for a kid, who is powerless and still coming to understand the world and their place in it, it's just devastating. And evilest...well, that's when someone, be it a priest or just some whacko with a god complex, sexually abuses a child and tells them it's God's will. Nothing like destroying their connection to the divine right along with everything else.
What I took away from this book, though, was a new understanding of the role of abuse in crime. I'd been aware of it. In fact, I overheard a conversation between my mom and one of her cop friends. They were arguing over--if somehow child abuse stopped to exist--just how much the prison population would drop. They were pretty sure that the majority of prisoners, regardless of what they were arrested for, had been abused as kids. Now, that doesn't give them a free pass on breaking laws, but...
What this book made me thing was: "What do we expect?" Kid grows up constantly sexually abused, is ignored by her mother, who is too busy shoplifting, lives in a home with no moral code, no security. Kid gets older, starts acting out. Everyone is so surprised. Kid says she's being abused, no one believes her, so it goes on and on. She gets angrier and acts out more, she winds up in reform school, where she is abused by staff, and, gosh darn it, if she doesn't get angrier. And yeah, when she gets out, she starts a life of crime. Not only is she angry, she still has no moral code. All her life what she has seen is that when someone wants something they take it. So that's what she does. But then when she wants to press charges against her abuser, she has no credibility because she is now a convicted felon with a long rap sheet, not to mention medical records stating that she's mentally disturbed. (Well, if you'd been raped daily for your whole life, and had an STD before you hit puberty, and thought it was all your fault, you'd be pretty disturbed yourself.) Unfortunately, all that gives her zero credibility, which doesn't end the abuse, only makes her angrier, and allows a pedophile to continue to prey on children.
Of course, if someone had believed her the first, or second, or seventh time, she told, and then had gotten her out of that situation and moved her somewhere safe--because way too often kids in foster care or state care wind up vulnerable to more abusers--maybe she never would have wound up in prison.
I have seen this in someone I love. Someone who was abused, and then struggled with anger and defiance, and lashing out, only to then be lectured and disciplined, which made him angrier and less trusting, which led to more discipline. What he needed was to be heard. He'd wound up in situations he didn't choose and his pain had led to anger and yes, it can be challenging to find ways to constructively direct anger, but what will not work is punishing him for anger. And it's so much easier for us to judge than it is to empathize.
I didn't really follow the Steubenville rape case. I knew it was happening and I knew a community was divided over it, and that's about all I knew. I don't know much about either the boys or the girl, so I can't tell you if these kids just had an appalling lack of judgement, empathy, decency, resulting from a break down in their childhood or families or whatever....or if they were sociopaths. The difference being sociopaths can't learn empathy. They just can't. So maybe the parents in question were sadly lacking in the conversations they had with their sons. Or, for all I know, maybe they did everything right and....their sons were sociopaths.
Anyway, where I came into the news story was when people online started posting snarky, stupid comments--and let's face it, we've all posted snarky, stupid comments, myself included--about how these young men might feel once they got to the big house and were raped themselves. I can't tell you how many times I almost puked on my computer screen. Seriously? Have we gotten to that point? I'm not saying they shouldn't have been prosecuted and done their time. I'm just saying that maybe no one deserves to be raped. Also, that maybe taking even violent offenders and exposing them to more violence, well, just maybe that makes things worse. Maybe it will just make them angry and more violent. As the Mahatma would say, "An eye for an eye will leave the whole world blind."
I'm not trying to sound like I've got the moral high ground. I mean, you should have heard me cheering for joy when Bin Laden died. And, even at the time, I wondered if I should have felt that joy at the death of another human being. I suspected I should be more evolved. But I couldn't, not for Osama Bin Laden, and I didn't even lose anyone close to me in his many attacks against the U.S. and other countries.
That said, while I shed no tears for the bullets that ended his life, I never once said "Hey, maybe you should rape him first. That'll teach him." Even Bin Laden didn't deserve rape.
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