Recently, on a social site I frequent, there was a thread about paedophiles and what the people responding to the thread would do to a paedophile if they caught one. As you can imagine, some suggestions were pretty gruesome.
I was a bit conflicted about whether to respond. Emotions tend to run very high around this issue, and I really do not need to be the target of a flame war, nor have I any interest in starting one. After thinking about it for a while, I felt I owed it to the abuse survivors I have worked with to post the following message:
“The kind of display of self-righteous outrage exhibited in this thread harms sexual abuse survivors. PLEASE think twice before posting this kind of shit. None of us have any idea who may be reading it, nor who among our regulars may be a survivor themselves.”
One of the posters asked me (bless her heart) to explain. So, here’s my attempt.
You see, I have had more than one client tell me that the abuse was nowhere near as bad as having to deal with the reactions of other people who learn of their experience. The anger, the revulsion, the ranting can actually make them feel far worse than the abuse ever did.
One told me that the sexual acts themselves felt strange and shameful, but the reaction of people toward her abuser (the case was in the media) made her feel as if she were diseased, dirty and ruined forever. Why else would people be so vile and spiteful?
To me, that was a clear case of a survivor being re-abused by people who used her experience to vent their own anger and outrage.
This is very similar to the stigma and shame attached to rape in many countries. Including our own countries here in the West. I have a client who was sexually assaulted as a teen. She stopped telling people. They would get so worked up, so violently outraged that they literally scared her. Worse, it wasn’t what she needed. And when she told people that, they’d look at her differently, treat her differently. So, it took her years to seek counselling, to get the courage to ask for what she needed. I often wonder how many abuse survivors out there don’t seek help for the same reason.
I remember the transcript of a case I read during my training. The woman, who’d been abused by her father, felt a tremendous sense of guilt over what happened to him after her abuse came to light. He went to prison where he was badly beaten by other inmates (on a side note, I’ve always wondered how convicted felons get to be society’s morality watchdogs), was divorced by her mother, and lost everything. To her, the people who punished him forgot one thing: he was still her father and she still loved him. There was nothing “wrong” with her thinking. She understood that he’d done wrong, but “the abuser” was not all there was to him. Even while working through her anger and hurt, she felt that, aside from his criminal assault on her, he was a very good father, hardworking, generous, nurturing.
Contrary to the popular stereotype of the paedophile lurking in the bushes, most children are assaulted by a loved one; a parent, sibling, grandparent, relative, close friend, or clergyman. And, not always, but far more frequently than most people seem to realize, the abuse survivor does not lose their feelings for their abuser, and does not want to have their abuser out of their lives forever.
Many survivors have a great deal of sympathy for their abusers. More than once I have been greatly humbled by the depths of compassion and forgiveness of which human beings are capable.
During the Catholic Church paedophilia scandals, film-maker Dino de Laurentis disclosed to an interviewer that as a boy he had been kissed and fondled by his parish priest. He said that he felt no animosity toward the priest, but that even as a youth he felt that he was simply a lonely old man, and pitied him.
Now, let me be clear, every person deals with the experience of abuse in their own way. Some with tremendous anger, some feel an overwhelming need for revenge. That is something they work thorough in therapy. The aim is NOT to make them feel sympathy for their abusers. Far from it. An earlier part of the therapy is usually to help the person identify the extent of the wrong that was done to them. The aim is to help them to deal with their anger in useful and constructive ways. Becoming a person who commits assault themselves is not considered a helpful or constructive way of dealing with their (very justified) anger.
Nor are mob “justice,” castration and torture-fantasies. Angry mobs have, on occasion, tried to burn houses where paedophiles were reportedly living. One mob in the UK reportedly succeeded in killing a 14 year old girl who was staying in the house they burned. A mob in the U.S. reportedly torched the house of an innocent 78 year old woman because a “paedophile watch-list” posted by a community group got the address wrong.
This is not a responsible way for adults to deal with injustice. And the more it happens, the more it’s advocated, the more it “normalizes” the use of violence, the idea that “right” and “might” legitimize the abuse of other human beings. And that is exactly what survivors have experienced at the hands of their abusers.
Perhaps worst of all, there are many people who, acting from ignorance* and misinformation, believe that those who have been abused go on to become abusers themselves. this is simply not so. There has never been any credible information to suggest that rates of offense among sexual abuse survivors are any higher than among the general population. So, again, these people find themselves unfairly stigmatized, and re-abused.
Ignorance and misinformation also feed into one of the most persistent myths about paedophiles: that they cannot be effectively treated. Psychologists, psychiatrists and criminologists who work with paedophiles consistently dispute this claim. In fact, convicted paedophiles who receive treatment have the lowest recidivism rates of all criminals. The fear industry, however, doesn’t like that fact, and they systematically shout it down with distortions and counter-claims.
The very best treatment that paedophiles can receive, the factor that as been shown again and again to lower their risk of re-offending, is the one thing that most people are opposed to giving them: a community that provides a network of support. Instead, they are released after serving their sentence and then ostracized, hounded, driven from one community after another until they can find a way to slip under the radar and go underground.
So, it was with great admiration that I attended a presentation by a church group from a small city in Western Ontario who set themselves up as a community network for convicted paedophiles. Church members would sign up to volunteer to be available to the released paedophiles 24/7, in eight hour shifts. They’d be available to talk, to accompany them on trips to the shopping mall (where there might be children present), to keep them from drinking. Lonely, friendless people will often drink, which impairs their judgement. That puts them, and the community, at risk. Here was a community that really was living its faith: to hate the sin, but love the sinner. Once again, I find myself in awed admiration for their courage and dedication.
Regarding the thread that started this, that was not the first time I’ve seen such posts about what to do to paedophiles. You can find them all over the web. Participants usually try to outdo each other in inventing new forms of torture and cruelty to punish offenders. The rationale is the horror the poster feels for the crime and the sympathy they feel for the victim.
But it also serves as an outlet for sadistic aggression, and for claiming the moral high-ground. The poster is able to assure themselves of their “righteousness.” (That, I think is part of what motivates those convicted felons I mentioned earlier.) “We,” the righteous, get to look down on “them,” the despicable, the repugnant, the sub-human. But in so-doing, the survivor is made to feel that instead of being the victim of wrong done to them by an irresponsible and flawed person, they have been ravaged by monsters and forever despoiled.
No wonder so many of them find it impossible to sleep at night, to feel sexually normal, or worthy of being loved.
It is fairly common for survivors to say that the worst part of abuse was not the sexual acts themselves. The worst and most lasting effect is the breach of trust, and the experience of being used and controlled, without their consent, by another person for their own purposes. That, they say, is the real abuse. When they encounter the outraged diatribes of people who would like to torture and castrate paedophiles, they encounter that same dynamic all over again: other people are taking control of and using the survivor’s experience for their own purposes.
And so, if we are sincere in our sympathy for the victim, then we must remember that when we whip ourselves into a frenzy about what we would do to paedophiles, we are actually re-abusing their victims all over again.
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(*The dictionary definition of ignorance is, “a lack of knowledge.” That is the sense in which the word is used here; not in its pejorative sense.)
