On the dobber's (/victim's) dilemma

I have previously mentioned the difficulty faced by victims of childhood sexual abuse as children and adolescents in telling someone of their predicament. They hesitate due to embarrassment, unwarranted guilt, fear, lack of understanding that they are victims to a terrible sin, and being unaware of the process, etc. Recently I’ve encountered a similar scenario, but in the adult victims of past sexual abuse.

Victims of childhood sexual abuse eventually grow up to become adults. Some become very capable adults, and a lot become crippled by the emotional and psychological scars of trauma. A lot of the people we encounter on a day to day basis have been past victims of this worst of crimes, most have never told a soul of their experiences. I want now to discuss a composite of this person, let’s call her Elisabeth.

An Unpleasant Story 

Elizabeth was sexually abused by Josef between the ages of 10 and 14. Josef was Elisabeth’s stepfather, who joined the family just before Elisabeth’s 10^th birthday. Elisabeth told Rosemarie, her mother, of Josef’s behaviour towards her, the fondling, etc. She did this when she was 14 and then the abuse stopped. Rosemarie had some “stern” words with Josef, but eventually she was a woman in love and they decided to put this “episode” behind them and move forward with family life. The “episode” was never discussed with police or counsellors or anyone else who may have cared. Rosemarie and Josef remain together to this day. Elisabeth, somehow, finally managed to escape the rape dungeon she called a home.

Elisabeth became a woman of her own, independent, self-sufficient, struggled with some things but succeeded in others; she was just a normal woman with a past most of us would never wish on our worst enemies. But the past was in the past and the past can’t hurt you, right? I don’t know that that is right. Elisabeth had managed to move ahead with her life, leaving the past behind, until one day the past came back to find her. Sounds clichéd, right? Yes, but it also sounds horrible and unfair.

One day Elisabeth found out that Josef was accused of doing some things she knew he was capable of, things she had witnessed at one time when she had been the victim of such things. But this was a separate incident, separate incidentS, things not related to her at all, but it brought to her consciousness something that she had suspected all along: that she was not Josef’s only ever victim. There had been others, there probably would be more… And whenever we read this scenario the answer seems so simple: tell. Elisabeth should tell her story, right? Elisabeth should do the right thing for the greater good, right?

Imagine yourself in Elisabeth’s shoes. In the movies and episodes of Law & Order: SVU what happens is that the Elisabeth-character tells her story, feels good about herself, saves the day, the baddie goes to prison forever, and everyone has a perfect life thereafter. Reality is not like the movies. Elisabeth knows this.

Elisabeth asks some people for advice; should she “assist” the potential case against Josef? This isn’t about her life or the things that happened to her, this is about doing the allegedly right thing. Everyone tells her, ‘yes, of course, you HAVE to tell your story’, it’s her duty. The thing is Elisabeth has a life now. She has left that past behind and she owes no-one anything for getting where she is. Who does she owe? Josef’s other victims? The “general public”? Why? She suffered too, but how does that make her anything other than a victim? And will she really feel better to tell her story, to become the hero that saves the fate of children she’s never met and owes nothing to? Doing good things makes everyone feel good, we’re told… And yet I feel that no one should feel coerced to re-live any pain except for their own self.

How do we convince Elisabeth to do the “right” thing? What is the right thing to do? This is the dilemma of knowing something that incriminates someone, but that also inadvertedly incriminates you too. I know you’re thinking ‘but how does that incriminate her if she tells her story?’ Josef maybe or maybe doesn’t get prison time. Elisabeth is punished by having to re-live pain of her story, the humiliation and embarrassment of discussing the very personal and degrading things done to her, she is faced by the well-meaning but hurtful murmurs that if she had told earlier none of those other victims should have had to suffer what they did. Is it worth it? Is the sacrifice worth it for Elisabeth? Forget for a second the “general public”, the “greater good”, is all this worth it to Elisabeth? What will she gain by telling her story?... It’s easy to answer that, but not if you’re truly only thinking of Elisabeth. The only person thinking of Elisabeth – and for a long time – has only being Elisabeth.

And if Elisabeth doesn’t tell her story and Josef goes on to abuse other children, is it Elisabeth’s fault or is it Josef’s? Elisabeth was a victim. Before we judge her, we have to understand her dilemma. Sometimes it’s enough to be a survivor without being a hero.

On what we don't know

Let me propose a very sinister scenario for your consideration. I propose it only because I don’t know exactly what to conclude from it but it raises a lot of very interesting ideas.

The scenario: There’s a 25 year old man; a man who you know to be a nice guy, who is studious, who is playful and just generally a fun guy. He is a foreigner and speaks with a somewhat funny Indoasian accent. He goes to university and he likes to tell jokes. He is respectfully religious but not over-the-top with rituals. He even volunteers in a community youth group. One day this guy is joking around, playing with a boy who is 11 years old. In the spirit of the moment he makes a penis joke and makes a move towards the child’s genitals. The child pulls away, pushes him, and the day proceeds. One day this man is accused (by a third party) of indecent sexual dealings with a minor because of this particular incident.

Now, all of which I described above actually happened, the actions are exactly as I described. You can picture the man, you can picture the child, you can picture that they were having a laugh and engaging in the physical play which all children enjoy. Even the man in question clearly admits the incident occurred as described. However, the only things we don’t know are the thoughts and intentions of the 25 year old man. The matter went to court and the man was ordered to have no further unsupervised dealings with children, especially not in institutional settings like in his university studies. He was sentenced to 12 months probation and nothing else. Now, most people’s responses to this story are either 1) ‘the pedophile got away with it!’, or 2) ‘I know that guy and he’s totally a nice guy. It is such a shame that he has had his name tarnished with such a terrible accusation’.

Further from this, let’s consider one possibility. In the case it was alledged that the man meant no ill-harm because when the child pushed him away and said ‘no’, he obeyed. It follows from this that the man was acknowledging that this contact was against the child’s wishes. They added this to his character references from people who knew the man prior to this incident to conclude that he was a good man who was innocently playing with a child, joking, and incidentally happened to have made a move towards the child’s sex organs while in the course of a non-sexually intended activity. Makes sense, right? Good guy made bad move.

But imagine for a second that he wasn’t a good guy; propose he is a big bad pedophile. What would a pedophile do in the same situation? He would play a non-sexually-seeming game with the child to “groom” him, to teach him increasingly more sexually-explicit acts that the child will not associate with “bad” (or sexual) things. In the way of this grooming he will “accidently” touch the child’s genitals or allow the child to accidently touch his. The child thinks ‘we’re playing!’, meanwhile the pedophile just scored sexual contact. As I mentioned, the “play” will become increasingly more explicitly sexual, but the grooming for the pedophile involves a bit of trial and error. Sometimes he overestimates his steps; sometimes the child is more docile than first imagined. If the child were to become uncomfortable in a situation, he knows he has to slow down – because a comfortable child is much easier to take advantage of! Can you see where I’m going with this? If the child in the scenario had not pushed the man away, what would have happened? The man would could either have just been playful with the child and possibly never meant to even touch him (like a ‘normal’ person); or he could have sexually fondled the child to his own sexual gratification (like a pedophile). So therein lies my problem with judging the man either guilty or not-guilty of a sexual crime against a child: the fact that he withdrew his attempt does not prove his actions either way.

The second question this case raises for me is which is better? When this case went to court there were four possible outcomes that could have come from a verdict of either guilty or not guilty: 1) an innocent man walks free, 2) an innocent man is punished, 3) a pedophile receives deserved punishment, and 4) a pedophile goes free. All of these outcomes have an equal probability of happening. I would hate to have been a judge in this case and have to make that very hard decision. Ideally the evidence of the case helps you make the right decision (options 1 or 3 above), but as we saw in this case, judging intention is something that maybe only God can do. So now the judge has to make an even harder decision, which is the least unjust finding: set a guilty man free or convict an innocent one? Of course, the case we are considering here is not just any case, but an accusation of pedophilia. And in fact, that is what the judge based his decision on in setting the man free. He reasoned that if the man is innocent because he didn’t actually “do anything” to the child then he hasn’t been unfairly deprived of his freedom. Yet if he is guilty then his punishment will be that his name will be always be known and associated with ‘that guy that tried to touch that kid’.

Of course, to the general population this may not seem be enough (punishment to a presumed offender). After all, don’t the courts and governments also have a duty to protect the public from exposure to harm (e.g. pedophiles and other villains)? Yes, it’s in the constitution of most countries’ governments. But before I consider this last point, you have to excuse me as I recede back a step.

The man in the scenario we discussed in the beginning in fact pleaded guilty to the actions of that day as they happened (and conceded the possibility that they could be deemed to be pedophilic in nature – thought he never said that it what he intended). So the judge never even had to make the judgement of labelling the man “guilty” or “not guilty”, he just had to decide on the punishment for the man’s actions. So in a way you could say that a guilty man walked free based on the judge’s reasoning as was discussed earlier. And maybe that is what we need to focus our attentions on: setting adequate penalties for crimes against children. I know the frustration of victims and of police officers who strive to find the bad guys only to have them go to court and receive a sentence that seems to be but a mere formality and without any intention to actually punish offenders, to rehabilitate them, or even to protect the public.

(P.S. I hope the guy whose story I based my scenario on can forgive me for using his example to illustrate my point. Only God can judge you.)

On serial killers

I’ve been reading about Jeffrey Dahmer, a reformed Christian. They analysed, or at least reported, on his childhood – it was ok! (That’s not surprise; it’s sarcasm.) He grew up and turns out he liked sex, kinky stuff, and saw nothing troublesome about consuming human flesh. The bad part is his partners, even if they had consented to the sex games, it’s believed that they didn’t consent to dying or being eaten. That’s assumed because at least one guy tried to make an escape, and most, it is believed, were drugged before being killed.

I’ve recently bought a book about male serial killers, and the grouping seems rather arbitrary. What exactly, then, is a serial killer? A person who acts or reacts with intentional killing of another human being. But that’s about where commonality ends. Motives are mostly different, as are tactics, intent, and “victims”. Do I sympathise? And if I did? What I mean to say is that I can’t and won’t judge those who aren’t me or share what is in me. People ask ‘are these serial killers evil or are they mad?’ Are there no other options?

There are a lot of people who like kinky sex. Problem? Not in this society. There are a lot of people who will consume whatever as food, regardless of other’s opinion of its taste or other aspect of its nature. Whales, snakes, endangered animals, insects, gastropods, pork, and human flesh have all been fair game (think of the Uruguayan rugby team in the Andes, as an example). Problem? No. Different cultures, different tastes, different times and circumstances. There’s a lot of people who kill – even in masses. Soldiers, victims of violence, governments, for example. Problem? People may cringe, and maybe rightly so, but history tells us that killing, if not wrong, is at the very least not uncommon human behaviour.

So is Jeffrey Dahmer so far from “normal” humans? I’d argue that he’s not all that far removed from common.

On homosexuality, the DSM, and Pedophilia...

When I was younger people used to tell me that homosexual people were bad, that they were defective, that they were evil. These people were well-meaning religious clerics, family, family friends, school teachers, and other respectable adults. I emphasize well-meaning because their attitudes were not what we now commonly refer to as homophobic, discriminatory, judgemental, ignorant, or bigoted. Their views reflected a common majority view. They weren’t bad people saying derogatory things about a minority group of people; they were just repeating what was common thought at the time. These were good people.

Now, the common view at the time –that homosexual persons were sexual deviants, less than healthy “normal” humans- was grounded in the scientific and medical descriptions accepted until very late in human history. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) classified homosexuality as a mental disorder until as late as 1973, as did the World Health Organisation in its International Classification of Diseases (ICD). Gradually in a period since the mid 1970s the classification of mental illness was ratified with increasing knowledge of prevalence and non-observance of the common disclaimer in these classification systems: “the symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning”. If a behaviour is sufficiently common and does not cause significant negative outcomes, then it is a tough call to call it a mental disorder.

Of course, the other thing that happened since the inception of the DSM and similar classification systems and the 1970s was the so-called “sexual revolution” of the 1960s. The sexual revolution abolished many taboos (or perhaps constraints) on sexual activity. One such taboo was that of sexual activity between members of the same (phenotypic) sex. As a result of the sexual revolution a lot of people came to experiment with all different forms of sexual expression, although most commonly this was frequent non-monogamous heterosexual intercourse. So one could pose the question, did this social breakdown of a variety of sexual taboos (at the time they called it something akin to generalised immorality or looseness) lead to the increased acceptance of the people who engage in homosexual activity just because homosexual interaction happened to be one of those taboos? Perhaps, but it most likely was also (at least in addition) due to the lack of findings of “dysfunction” from medical and scientific point of views.

Recently I attended a talk on psychopathology, or, actually, the classification of mental disorders. The question was posed: what is a mental disorder? Something that is inherently bad? Something bad because some scientists and medical doctors said so? Something that makes the affected person or ones associated to him or her feel bad? Something that makes the affected person unable to function effectively or satisfactorily in his micro- or macrocosm? A behaviour that is uncommon in a particular environment or situation? A behaviour politicians and lawmakers decided is bad? A behaviour that a large proportion of the person’s peers would judge unreasonable or bad? Now, regarding homosexuality and its transition in classification systems from “bad” to “normal”, we could answer this question in many of the dimensions posed above. But my point is not to argue “homosexuality: good or bad?” but rather to provide a backdrop to one scenario posed to me, which at first sight scared me deeply, so I want to finally address it and put it to rest.

Now, to speak of the scenario posed to me (and that use to plague me), I have to first emphasize I’m playing devil’s advocate here. As I mentioned before, I grew up being told that homosexuality is bad, homosexuals are deviants, abnormal, less than, etc. Gradually that story changed and homosexual persons became persons (foremost) who happened to engage in homosexual activity. What if it were possible that this happen to other behaviours currently considered "abnormal"; that they also went from being described by others as “bad” to now being described as “normal”? And this change could come about through change in social attitude or the discovery of a high prevalence of the condition. After all, if all the people of the town are crazy and the king is sane, then for being a sane minority the king will be considered crazy by the townsfolk. The scenario posed was about pedophilia.

The DSM-IV-TR classifies pedophilia as a paraphilia in which there are “over a period of at least 6 months, recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges or behaviours involving sexual activity with a pre-pubescent child or children; and the person is at least age 16 years and at least 5 years older than the child”. Of course, it includes the common DSM disclaimer, “the fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviours cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupation, or other important areas of functioning”. Now consider a world where pedophilia occurs in every culture and ethnic group, in members of different socioeconomic classes, includes members from across all professions and trades; a world where 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 7 boys are sexually interfered with by an adult; and a world where people have become too accustomed to saying “it’s OK because everyone does it”. This is exactly the world we live in! So is it purely OK, really “normal”, if prevalence rates are high enough? (I hope not.)

In a hypothetical new and vile world, imagine seeing children talking to each other in a playground. One asks, ‘so when did your daddy devirginize you’? The other answers, ‘I was six. Hurt like hell. Now we only do it in the shed every week when mum’s not home’. A third one says, ‘you’re lucky. My mum’s friend did me when I was four – and I can’t even remember the first time’. Cut ahead to a generation from that and cutting scars on human forearms have become the norm so much that you’d think this is how we were born, with multiple lacerations tracking from our wrists to our shoulders. There’s no taboo about it. The kids go out with daddy for their fishing and “playing” trips. Mum knows, dad is not ashamed, and the children all share their common carnal knowledge amongst themselves at school. The mental disorder classification books no longer include any lifestyle choices or paraphilias anymore....

But wait, to wake yourself up from this nightmare, remember that one disclaimer in the definitions of illness: “the symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning”. Despite the unfortunately high prevalence of pedophilia in this world, the fact that it is harmful makes it not classifiable as a variant of normality we will/should all just accept. Child sexual abuse has no advantages except to the perpetrator, it’s an abuse relationship, a two-party transaction with only one person benefiting. In legal terms they would equate this to at least theft. You can’t steal from a child and say he consented because he would trade in a bar of gold for a simple candy, lacking that knowledge of how things done today can affect your whole life to come. You can’t just say homosexuality is the same as pedophilia because they are both types of sexual interactions; so is heterosexual intercourse, and why do less people compare that to pedophilia? Because there are differences!

From 2006 to 2010 there existed a political party in the Netherlands (PVND) that provided political advocacy for pedophile groups and organisations. One of their agendas was to legalize child pornography and to lower the legal age of consent to sex down to 12 years old. Commonly pedophile groups argue that children have the ability (and so the right) to enjoy sexual activity alone, with their peers, or with an older adult. Consequently, they argue, if the child consents to the sexual contact, then it should be legal for the adult/s to engage so with them. They’ll go so far as to argue that sexual contact with children is “good for them” and their development. Of course the issue that is of concern to other (non-pedophile) adults is that children’s ability to consent is limited by their experience and knowledge of consequences. A child can know that candy has a pleasant flavour, for example, and he can decide / consent to eat that given to him by his parent or friend, but the consequences of eating a piece of candy (e.g. early tooth decay, or not wanting to eat the rest of his dinner afterwards) are hardly the same as “consenting” to sexual activity. The consequences of childhood sexual abuse are commonly seen in our psychiatric wards, in the patients we all struggle to interact with: the personality disordered, the limitless cases of deliberate self-injury and drug abuse, the repeat victims of domestic abuse who go around either recreating or trying to erase their childhood experiences. This is too sad – and the worst thing we can do is blame the child, say he or she “consented”.

Pedophiles abuse people; they cause harm. This is not a time- or era-dependent opinion. It is so not the same as homosexuality or heterosexuality or any other way competently-consenting adults choose to interact sexually. And I think we have all come to that same conclusion. The only thing for us as a society still to debate about this and many other negative actions towards other human beings (e.g. murder) is whether such acts constitute criminality or mental illness, and which are the best ways to decrease our childhood sexual abuse rates.

(Sorry for the discussion on homosexuality together with pedophilia, I was obviously mainly aiming to contrast not compare.)