I challenge the prevailing thinking about pedophilia and the penchant for grouping together all child-sexual-abuse perpetrators in one category. I challenge the helping profession to recognize the humanity of the perpetrator. I don’t think it is to society’s advantage to throw away human beings because they do bad things.
Let me be clear about my view of child sex abuse. I believe that it is wrong, just as I believe that any abuse of power is wrong. My fear, however, is that in Western society’s Victorian view of all things sexual, the corporate reaction to child sexual abuse is not always in the best interest of the child, the family, or society.
In a well-intentioned effort to protect the young, we teach them about “good touch/bad touch.” It is a mixed message. Children are sexual beings, and they fully recognize “bad touch” is in fact pleasurable.
Further confusing our children is the onslaught of media messages. In our electronic age, children are routinely exposed to implicitly sexual messages.
Many children and caregivers may take exception to my premise. They are convinced that they supervise and control what their children are exposed to. This, of course, is pure fantasy. We are surrounded and overwhelmed by media entertainment and advertising that uses sex in amazing ways to sell the marketer’s product. It is so pervasive that we are almost unaware of its insidious influence.
I don’t believe we will go back to a simpler time. We have to deal with life as it exists today. It is time for open and honest dialogue about human sexuality, including the twenty-first-century sexual issues of our children.
In the United States, we used to believe in something called rehabilitation. I don’t know exactly when or how we moved to a mind-set of vengeance and retribution. Perhaps it began with the “war on drugs” and the “three strikes and you’re out legislation.” Perhaps it began because we lost our national courage and just got scared, so we started locking everyone up. Perhaps it started with movie pap like Walking Tall and the subsequent vigilante affronts that followed. Anecdotes suggest we now build more prison cells than family homes. Whether they are drug abusers or sex abusers, we lock people up, destroy their dignity, deny simple human comforts, and fail to make any attempt to rehabilitate them, after which we release them back into society. This policy is not working, yet in some insane reflex, we go right on doing the same things over and over again.
It is time to treat drug abuse and sexual deviant behaviors as mental health problems rather than criminal activity. It is time to start channeling some of the incredible amounts of money being spent building more prisons to providing therapy, drugs, research, residential placements, and rehabilitation for addicts of any kind. We, as a society, have to decide that all our citizens are valuable and deserve help, not just those with many resources.
Poverty has become a crime in our nation. Poor people are looked down on and considered less than valuable, and rich people are automatically exalted. I sat next to a man at a social gathering and mentioned that I had attended a fund-raiser for the homeless in a couple’s home that exceeded 25,000 square feet. I commented on how ludicrous I found this. He responded, “Those who work, get.” His answer didn’t make sense. The man who owned the enormous home started out with family money and made even more as a defense contractor, building weapons for killing that were produced by hard-working laborers making humble wages on the production lines.
Wealth and social standing must not be the criteria for receiving mental health services. We will become a more resilient society when all of our citizens have the opportunity to heal and improve.
Epilogue
Eileen Brand is my girlfriend, my aunt, my coauthor, and my muse. This book may well never have been written without her. Leaving my job as executive director of Tennessee Valley Family Services and striking out on my own was a momentous decision for me. I confided my fears and insecurities to Eileen, and she responded with the following letter. It is an affirmation of her indomitable spirit and an inspiration to me. I share it with you.
August 20, 2003
Dear Karen –
That was a wonderful visit. Thank you for coming. I hope it wasn’t too stressful or too hard on the pocketbook for you. Thank you for bringing Judy too. I think it made it all the more fun.
I will try to make this an inspiring retirement letter.
I am proud of my United Labor Party organizational days, but I can’t see any positive results other than that they enriched my mind and my life. I am proud of my kids but I’m not entering any sweepstakes for Mother of the Year, which is to say that I probably came fairly close to doing as well as I could in the circumstances, but it wasn’t very good. The one thing I have spared them is that I didn’t sacrifice myself so much that they feel any duty toward me beyond doing whatever they really want to do.
Looking back, I can say that life in many ways began at sixty-five. That’s when I moved to Charlottesville and where I lived for almost nineteen years. It was a great place to be. I managed quite a bit of enjoyable travel in that time and built the Big House on the Hill that I’d always sort of wanted (meaning my Willow Lake townhouse), volunteered at Recording for the Blind for a couple of years (intermittent assignments), tutored individual first-graders in reading twice a week for five years, made enough impact in two years of working at a Charlottesville law firm that they invited me to firm parties and picnics for eighteen years, had some memorable Celtics parties, edited some fairly good books, and did the big nix-the-hockey-fields-save-the-trees crusade, organized the largest meeting the Senior Statesmen ever had to that date (it was “Pigs, Poultry, Pollution, and Politics” in opposition to hog-raising and chicken-raising factory farms), got myself elected President of the Home Owners Association and replaced a very poor Association manager with a good one, campaigned for Ralph Nader and did some very useful publicity work for his campaign, and somehow in an anarchistic way did a lot to keep our local book group alive and well.
Along the way I had the little old stroke and got a splendid Pacemaker, but they were details.
And moved in year 2000 to Connecticut for a year, back to Charlottesville for two years, plus a move to Florida in June 2003, and a move to the building next door October 2003.
However, at eighty-five I feel that the best is yet to come if I can help you use your rich life experience and resilient mind to produce a blockbuster book that will change some minds and make some social improvement, however small it may be.
So, don’t feel sad about no longer getting a paycheck and being a Guntersville celebrity. Who knows what wonders lie ahead for you?
Lots of love,
Aunt Eileen
Prescription for Resilience
A sense of personal competence
Consistent emotional support from one or more caring adults
A sense of playfulness
A spiritual connection to something greater
A capacity for learning and creative expression
A willingness to work on problems with reasonable perseverance
The ability to positively reframe
Copyright
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Girl Called Karen Page 11