| Sexual Predators And The Rest of Us |
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The issue of sexual predators and their ubiquitous presence in society has become a very hot button topic of late. Such people, almost all males, are compulsively attracted to venues and vocations that place them near and among children, women and others who are seemingly unprotected, isolated or otherwise available. Fear and anger towards these miserable men is rising rapidly in society. Government and the justice system seemingly do not know what to do with them. Once an offender serves his sentence out, he is released into the general public. People are vociferously protesting against allowing them to live in their neighborhoods. Had they their way they would hardly allow them to live at all. Lately the official strategy often is to warehouse these sick men together in half way houses. Still, neighbors protest and demonstrate to rid their area of the perpetrators. As with almost all social problems, people are reacting from their emotional distress. This, indeed, is understandable. They cannot nor do they apparently want to think rationally about what can and should be done about the problem, beyond the band-aid steps of distancing the perps or punishing them. Do we know what the cause of this tragic sickness is? Do we know what should be done to heal the sickness and make society safer? Even some in the professional psychological field seem to be lacking real insight. Yet we do know far more than we admit to, or address ourselves to. This is true not only for professionals but for many others in the general population. The knowledge comes from years of gathering empirical evidence. It is gathered from the lives of chronic abusers who are locked up in prison where they are and have been studied, assessed and documented. The knowledge has also been acquired from patients in treatment. The information is not surprising, Time and time again, case after case, it has been found that sexual offenders have themselves been sexually abused and conditioned in their own lives as very young children. What does this mean? Every human being is born innocent despite belief or bias to the contrary. There is no gene for evil or crime. The difficulty is that we are born and grow in a society that is riddled with distressful and oppressive patterns and behavior. This state of the human condition is historical. The distressful and additive chronic patterns of oppression and irrational behavior are perpetuated from generation to generation. Children of one generation are conditioned with distress and irrationality by their elders. The children grow up, have children of their own and are compelled to impose the patterned behavior onto them. The cycle continues on and on. This is what conditioning means, this is what it does. Of course, the young mind is open and ready to receive and internalize the rules and behaviors that form their own behavior and responsive system in their journey through life. The brain of the young person processes the conditioning and organizes itself into neural patterns of behavior and perception. If the conditioning is mostly benign and pro-social, the child grows into what we call a “normal” person, according to the values and norms of the society s/he lives in. If the conditioning is sufficiently oppressive and distressful, s/he will internalize and act on the compulsions of the oppressive patterns that are in her/his psyche. Sexual abuse is a grievous and universally widespread oppressive pattern in society, in the elite class of ancient Rome, and other cultures, pedophilia and sexism were accepted practices. Through the evolution of awareness and class struggle human culture has seen that such practices are hurtful and destructive to the lives of the victims of sexual abuse. Still, sexual abuse exists in families, in our educational, religious, institutional settings, on the streets. The severity of the abuse, the pathology if you will, is dependent on the severity of the oppressive behavior imposed on the child. It is severe when the child was the victim of much, perhaps continuous, sexual and deviant abuse. This, in association with other conditioning factors such as a heavy dose of invalidation of the child’s worth as a human being, results in the adult who is compulsive and addicted to sexually abusing others. We are not born with a gene for sexual abuse. It is acquired as patterns through abusive conditioning. That which is acquired through conditioning can be purged from the psyche through deconditioning, that is through deep psycho/emotional discharge and psychological detoxification. This is true for patterns of physical, emotional and psychological abuse as well. This site, particularly the document entitled “Life, Love, health and Happiness” is a profound guide to healing patterns of chronic, psycho/emotional pain. In my experience of the last thirty-five years I have seen and engaged in such healing and recovery involving hundreds of people. I am an example of this. I was sexually molested as a five year old once, almost twice (but I escaped), not enough, and not at the hands of a loved one, to internalize a pattern commensurate with the abuse. But I know the pain of such abuse, and I spent many hours healing the residual pain of the oppression. Mainstream mental health practitioners often claim that such addictive patterns are not treatable. This view is both a product of another main oppressive pattern in society: the bias against and suppression of deep emotional release, the natural process of detoxifying psycho/emotional hurt and traumatic experience. Witness how universal is the lament “No-one listens.” The other factor in this general lack of awareness is that the training institution of mental health practitioners also reflects this bias in their curricula. There are exceptions in some treatment paradigms such as Client Centered therapy, and Gestalt therapy and sometimes in Analytic therapy. Many therapists are pretty good at listening to their clients and patients, but when the patient or client reaches the point where deep emotional discharge begins, generally the practitioner is triggered to interfere with the vital process with seemingly another therapeutic tactic: a question that distracts rather than furthers the discharge, some type of “comforting,” or advice giving. In society we are almost all conditioned to shut down the deep emotional process, “’Stop that crying or I’ll give you something to cry about (they already have, haven’t they?), “Stop laughing so much or so loud!,” “Don’t speak unless you are spoken to,” “Oh, s/he is just having a tantrum (the “tantrum” is a red flag signaling something wrong is happening),” not listening at all, and so many more tactics of suppression. Like any other pattern we internalize this conditioning and then impose it on others as well as ourselves. It is this pattern of suppression that is largely responsible for the ill health of individuals, families and society itself. When the reader spends enough time reflecting on her/his own life s/he will find similar experience of repression, instead of merely automatically dismissing this information. What can we do, then, to address this problem and start to eliminate the painful propensity to sexual abuse and predation in society? Once we culturally decided that smoking was harmful, we started a universal educational campaign against the use of tobacco. We used television, schools, family education, and every means of transmitting information and education to raise people’s awareness of the threat. Almost all our institutions are involved in the education. Yes, the addiction is strong, but gains in lowering the amount of and severity of addiction to the habit are evident and growing. What information can we educate the public with that relates to sexual predation and abuse? We see from the evidence mentioned above, that it is the abuse and sexual oppression imposed on the child that eventually results in the deviant adult. And where does this oppression most often occur? In our families. Thus the information that must serve as the core of education is the patterns of dysfunctional parenting and/or child raising. Parents, prospective parents (which means almost everyone), older children in, middle and high schools must learn not only about the behaviors of bad and oppressive parenting, but also the strategies of good parenting, of good support and good listening, of validating the worth and equality of children. This is not only a powerful thing to do to lift society out of the “swamp” of pain and distress, but to foster greater safety, health, creative and contributive in our individual and community lives. This is step number one. The second step is to do what we should have been doing all along: to notice the troubled child in our school rooms and other settings, the child who is too quiet, isolated, angry, anti-social and all the signs of a distressed young person. We must enable our teachers, and interested adults to initiate action to get such children into counseling. We must recognize that something is going on at home that results in the troubled child. We must have the legal tools to investigate the home life of the troubled child and require education and counseling for the parents or child raisers. We must replace the automatic habit of prescribing drugs for ADHD and related patterns with wise awareness of the causes of such behavior. Even in “good” families, oppressive patterns exist: pressured expectations, limited attention and listening on the part of the adults, parents missing too much due to work and such. Oh, yes, parents are probably the most neglected and oppressed of all our societal groups by our institutions of government, education and work. Support and counseling for them will do much good to support and encourage parents, to contribute to a happier and safer society. When we do these things we shall cure and eliminate the offense of sexual abuse, predation and the rest of the troubling patterns that infect society: aggression, women beating, withdrawal and isolation, addiction and emotional/mental disorders as well as many of the isms that are so painful and costly to people. Yes, we must keep the current sexual predator separate from society. We must not, however abandon them to cages or to sorry warehouses where they have the opportunity to reinforce one another and/or to impose their danger on the streets. We must provide the money for humane living conditions for them, for the kind of dedicated treatment that is described above, and we must enact the legality and provide the means to initiate and sustain the policies described above. In fact, we must replace our scapegoat and punishment mentality, as relates to the issue of crime and criminals that pervades our general behavior and justice system with the kind of aware, long term policy of awareness, healing and rationality that is described above. Is there something more important to do than to support and heal our children, our families, our grandchildren and their society; to eliminate, over time, the scourge of sick abuse as well as its enabling counterpart that infests most of society, denial and avoidance, from the body and experience of the inherently wonderful thing we call humanity?
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Re:Sexual Predators And The Rest of Us
Mar 09 2010 02:39:12 To address sexual issues within society, it takes talking about sex. Which in most formats is almost an impossibility, due to the amount of heightened shame, guilt and fear associated with sex by a large portion of humanity. The act tantalizes, the variety thrills, to down right scares humans and the idea of experimenting, pushing boundaries or playing sexual fantasies, takes most over the edge. And then there is the age appropriate group, embarrassed to talk about sex, so continues to put it off. Then there is the theological perspective that serves its self, when it comes to sex. Then there are the parents that don't want the subject discussed because they are afraid that their kids might ask them a question. Then there is that segment that denies that humans are in a sexual/physical body at all. All making it a difficult subject to openly discuss. Much less, deviations from the norm.
Yes sexual conditioning is much the same type of conditioning as any other. With all of the same and even more possibilities for distortion, due to all of the heightened shame, guilt and fear surrounding sex that is perpetuated within society around the subject and act. And like all conditioning, holds the individual to the psycho/emotional age and perspective of that inconsistent conditioning. Only acting out inconsistent sexual conditioning brings with it the need to act out on someone of the same physical age, as when the perpetrator was sexually conditioned. Which is not only the problem, but the continuation of such activity within society. The correction of inconsistent conditioning within the psycho/emotional/sexual individual is much the same as has been discussed. Riding humanity of the collective shame, guilt and fear around discussing sex, which allows sexual abuse to continue and flourish, is another factor yet to be addressed. Very early, honest and continuing education on the subject of being a sexual being in a physical body should be a human right. And once again I vote for freedom of expression, including sexual, to rid society of this heightened emotional plague. Along with taking responsibility to negate damage to anyone else with the sexual actions of choice. Allowing the individual complete freedom of expression starts individuals down the path of self fulfillment, self discovery and personal evolution. Which should be the only reason, that any of us are here! |
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