News Woody Allen Is Not A Monster. He Is A Person. Like My Father.

[ms spock]

Compassion is good, but let's also be realistic and have adequate safeguards. How we do all those things together is rarely discussed.

I am not really interested in compassion @Hashi. I am interested in full disclosure so that family, friends and neighbours are told what has happened. And then they are all trained to note what grooming behaviours - so they don't just protect their kids against the known child rapist but the many others that are are either in their families or friends of the family. There is the thing of five solid attachments for each child. So they are constantly protected and have their emotions cared for.

 

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In fact, I took her approach to be essentially the same as this one - not to see people in only one light, and that how other people accepted Woody Allen made her fear being disbelieved.

And this is very hurtful to me still. The scary thing is that he has had a child with his former adopted step daughter and has lots of access. So that is what hurts too - you speak up and despite all the pain your hard yards do not protect the other children nevertheless the next generation.

It doesn't address all sorts of related and difficult questions. Why do some survivors go on to perpetrate abuse themselves, and other survivors don't?

I have no idea

How do we deal with questions of responsibility? However compassionate we might be about someone's own psychological damage, what do we do about the need to keep others safe from them?

We put them under surveillance by the whole community. We train people about grooming behaviours. We train people about real attachment with their kids. We have it broken up to the light of day. Rather than putting it in the too hard basket.

It may have been enough for the writer to understand his Dad's history and hear his Dad acknowledge the truth to him. If his Dad is still around children, that isn't enough for me. And I think that's the problem for me with the whole article.

I have seen this again and again. The children might not be around the child rapists in the family but other child rapists quickly work out the parent is a sexual assault survivor and the child gets sexually abused anyway. So why (if people are willing) not work this out in the family of origin. So Susy can say you know how you said Pop is not meant to do X, when Bob from down the street tried to do X. There has to be communication and training and total transparency.

Both research studies and anecdotal evidence (for example, the project workers and prison officers I know who run programmes for sex offenders) repeatedly show that many paedophiles simply don't think what they did was wrong. They realise that other people think it's wrong, they understand that it works for them to say they realise they have harmed others, but they often don't believe it themselves.

It is a very common problem. I don't know what to do about. But doing very little or nothing is not working either.

So their actions after release are driven by a) finding ways to continue their behaviour and b) being better at hiding it. How do we make sure we don't enable both those things, through acceptance?

This is a real worry that therapy enables them to work out how to go undetected and how to continue their behaviour without detection. I have read a few articles that talks about this particularly in regards to female child rapists. I met a few of the people who worked at a place in Sydney that existed for awhile that worked with child rapists. They had various programs in place but they tried to get the male child rapist to see it from the child's point of view. One of the male child rapists they thought they had made great progress went out groomed and sexually assaulted a child. They were all gutted and the program no longer runs.

 

[ms spock]

So their actions after release are driven by a) finding ways to continue their behaviour and b) being better at hiding it. How do we make sure we don't enable both those things, through acceptance?

With rigorous surveillance, group therapy for all family and extended family members. By learning all the grooming behaviours, the manipulation, the priming up techniques and everything.

It is not a passive acceptance that lets child rapists, it is a gutsy acceptance that rigorously acknowledges that this child rapist is to be monitored at all times.

 

[ms spock]

I have over the last almost 30 years identified both male and female sexual predators and told communities and families and have been kicked out for warning people. And then had people come back to me angry because I should have made more of a point of it. I should have said more, because their kid got sexually abused. Then I move to another community and I warn people and I get kicked out and then people are angry a few years later. It has happened so many times I wonder why I bother reporting to the welfare or warning the families and communities because people really DON'T want to know. They have a choice to do something and rather than think about what type of child protection to put in place. They get angry and say so and so is too nice a person to do such a thing. How dare I suggest it? I point out the raft of behaviours which set of red flags in my head. Oh I am oversensitive and over reacting until the kids in that community start disclosing and then I am a right B+itch for not talking up more.

In one way I keep reliving the trauma by telling and getting kicked out of a social group.

I avoid having friends with kids like the plague, with a couple exceptions.

And that recently broke my heart. A woman* with a PhD in psychology, who has done specialist training in complex trauma, because of her own sexual abuse cut off her family. They had a no dude in the house rule or around the family. I said what about the female sexual predators? Anyway the little girl went to preschool and was sexually abused there by one of the owners, a man. This is the third one this has happened on the North Shore, that I have heard of. And her trauma professional asked her what did that child rapist see in her that he knew he would get away with sexually abusing her little one? And it is a fair enough question and she can see that. Until we can answer those questions then it just goes on and on.

Another thing is I am not for people who are sexual abuse survivors working in children's services - for their training as children make them not idea for that type of work. You know and sometimes you think should I be discussing this stuff because if a perpetrator read this it can give the more ideas and clues. But then I couldn't live with myself if I didn't speak up. I don't know.

It is easier to say they are monsters and then let them fly under the radar and basically do what they want rather than do some real intergenerational social change. Rather than support people who make those hard decisions one way or the other, and then have to negotiate those tricky waters.

Even just think what we are doing is not working. So what could help? What could we do? What would we actually do?

I have seen women cut off their families only to have one turn up out of the blue and leave devastation behind them.

There are no easy answers but this kind of cultural amnesia and blind spot needs to be looked at. Do we as a culture want to stop child rapists? If so, are we actually prepared to look at the cultural structures within our own families and our communities that enables this behaviour to continue? Or do we put it in the too hard basket.

Or will we just mock anyone searching for some type of idea of how to manage child rapists and the cultural phenomenon of child sexual abuse that is so entrenched across our society?

I was so naive at 15 to think that telling everyone in my family and extended families what my father did to me in order to protect the children and the next generation. I was always thinking about that. And I got trashed.

My sister screamed at me that for a whole month she was terrified that she would become a sex offender like our father. She screamed for hours on a Xmas Eve many years ago.

I was in the gifted classes and when the psychologists and youth workers dealt with me they said the other kids didn't even have an idea of intergenerational social change or any of the other stuff I said. They weren't really of much help to me.

And what annoys me is that I have done so much around this issue and I have stood up and spoken up when so many have turned and looked the other way. I am thinking of a guy "having sex" with 14 years old at one of the local youth refuges. Many people knew what was going on but did nothing. I did something and it affected my job situation, but ah well you get that I guess.

What I resent is that people who have not put in the hard yards or had to put up with the disbelief or lose out so much can try and shut you down for even daring having opinion outside of oh they are all monsters and are you crazy. And by that very response they are actually enabling the child rapists a type of free pass.

I was talking to a woman today who I concluded would not get it, but she got it, she doesn't want to have to live through what I have lived through.

*I have changed just enough of this to protect her identity

Then I was of the camp that I am criticising as well. But unlike many, I just never shut up and always kept warning people. Which caused immense pain but not much else it seems.

 

[Pencil]

five solid attachments for each child

Ms Spock, could you explain?

 

[ms spock]

I believe it is important to still hold someone responsible for their actions

Absolutely crucial.

 

[ms spock]

Ms Spock, could you explain?

Really simply that each child has five people that they are attached and bonded to - that know by looking at them how they are going type of connection. That those people are not nominal in the child's life but connected to be able to see if something was actually effecting the child.

 

[Pencil]

In response to several posts above:

I get the impression that not everybody gets the irony / sarcasm and horror in the title of the article. I also don't see the writer advocating compassion or even understanding.

When my daughter was 6 a 14 yo boy (who had the build of a 16yo) exposed himself to her and asked her to touch him. What's worse - we were all inside my home. I had gone upstairs to the loft to check my email and within 10 minutes it happened. She came to me, saying 'Please promise you won't be angry with me'. After she told me what had happened, I asked her why she thought I'd be angry, and she said the boy had told her I'd be very angry with HER. The parents were in the process of moving to another a province, and so, when I confronted them I demanded that the boy be removed from the premises the same evening. I agreed not to contact the police, which might have been a mistake, since my daughter said that he had said it was ok to touch him as his sister (11yo) 'did it all the time'.

I contacted his school principal, who was NOT helpful. I spoke to the other mothers in the complex, who seemed to regard my talking about it as distasteful, at best. So, in line with what Herman says - people don't want to know.

But this issue raises a whole lot of issues: Do I have compassion with him? On a certain level - not at all. On another level I do, for if I don't I 1) become like him, 2) it seems as if he was molested (the classic: 'don't tell your mother or she'll be angry' makes me suspect that) 3) I forfeit any right to compassion myself for my own damage. The fourth, and most important reason: If I now see him as a monster only, and totally forget the charm, vulnerability, sense of humour, or whatever other human qualities I saw in him, I limit him, his humanity, his chances of healing. And then what do we do with him? Shoot him? Castrate him? Brand a sign on his forehead? What do we DO with him? When I contacted the school it was with the request to ensure he and his family get some sort of therapy or something. But I also realize it might not work.

 

[Abstract]

There were no charges or evidence of him being a child abuser.

Although I can see why someone would be drawn to do what he did considering his past and I don't think it is the same as him personally interacting with children he was a child abuser. Every time someone views child pornography they re abuse that child. That's why it is a crime.

And he was excusing his behaviour.

I do think it's very telling that he imagined himself in the role of the victim and not the perpetrator. Or that's what he said anyway. Remember he only had anything to say at all after he got caught.

 

[ms spock]

@Pencil I would advocate the police in that situation.

I don't think there is anything we can do with child rapists. They don't change. They don't get well. But we can make sure that everyone knows about - which you bravely did.

And we can train people in protective behaviours and in attachment and in everything else we can pack in there.

 

[Pencil]

BUT, do I have compassion with Woody Allen? No. Zero.

 

[ms spock]

Jesse Ryan Loskarn's Last Message
The first time I saw child pornography was during a search for music on a peer-to-peer network. I wasn’t seeking it but I didn’t turn away when I saw it. Until that moment, the only place I’d seen these sorts of images was in my mind.

I found myself drawn to videos that matched my own childhood abuse. It’s painful and humiliating to admit to myself, let alone the whole world, but I pictured myself as a child in the image or video. The more an image mirrored some element of my memories and took me back, the more I felt a connection.

This is my deepest, darkest secret.

...

I understand that some people – maybe most – will view this as a contrived story designed to find some defense for defenseless behavior. That it’s an excuse. In some ways I feel disgusting sharing this truth with you because in my heart I still struggle to see my five-year-old self as a victim. But I’m sharing this with you because it is the truth, not an excuse. And I believe it played a role in my story.

http://www.jesseryanloskarnslastmessage.com/333880300

I don't buy this for a second. I think it is a great and manipulative cover story. But absolute bullsh*t. If he saw child pornography then he is to report to the police immediately or he is one of them. Maybe he shocked to see it once but what he did? No way.

It is a contrived story. If you ever do court support the child rapists come out with it - Oh I was sexually abused as a child as well. Luckily in this case the judge said "If it happened to you, then that is more of a reason that you shouldn't have done it."

If we are going to really make a difference to the ongoing nature of child sexual abuse then you have to call out the BS immediately.

And this is going to sound really harsh, but robust compassion and acceptance is one thing in order to train the parents more to train the children in protective behaviours, but being gullible and naive to believe this? No way. People have to be trained to differentiate what is a manipulative cover story.

It would seem that a bit of court support/watching five or six trials of a child rapist going through the system would be necessary to innoculate people from believing this total and utter garbage.