Why Fight It?

Virus: Any morbid corrupting quality in intellectual or moral conditions; something that poisons the mind or the soul.

Disease: A condition or tendency, as of society, regarded as abnormal and harmful.

The Plague

Today I visited the news websites of NBC, ABC, CBS, and FOX. I typed “child abuse” into the search engine on each site and found countless articles and videos detailing missing children reports, offenders being brought to trial and police investigations into cults. What I was unable to find was a single article focusing on child abuse prevention.

It’s amazing what a runaway train this has become. Our media is saturated with it. Law makers, non-profit organizations and pro bono lawyers everywhere are actively attempting to create the perfect piece of legislation, a magic law that will keep all sexual offenders in check. They want to maintain constant surveillance of their movements and prevent them from living near parks and schools. Why parks and schools? Because children are there. Forget the fact that a vast majority of abused children know or live with their abusers. And constant surveillance? Longer prison sentences? Great. Now we’ve got an “extreme punishment” - the perfect excuse for defense attorneys to negotiate a lesser charge for their clients and put them back on the streets again all the sooner. Right on track.

And while we’re all focusing our energy on how to stop abuse once it starts, children are being victimized all around us. Children we know.

The Symptom

Think about where we are today. Out of control, chasing each individual “bad guy” hoping to catch them all and pin them down so they can’t hurt anybody anymore. We are so distracted. We forget that those who have already been abused are more likely to repeat that pattern than those who have never been victimized. So for every offender we manage to put behind bars, we’ve completely ignored countless others popping up all around us. We don’t see the real problem; we are trying to solve a symptom. And that simply can’t be done.

Changing Focus

We must start at square one. Close your eyes. Imagine a clean slate. Don’t think about numbers. Don’t think about punishment. Just think about the children you know. Can you see them? Are they strong, healthy, happy? Do they maintain appropriate boundaries with people they’ve just met? If your answer was “no” to either of those questions, then the child you see is in danger. He or she may have been abused. And if not, there is a strong possibility of it happening. We have to acknowledge that. We must learn how to create and maintain healthy environments for our kids because they just don’t know how to do that yet. A child who feels lonely or neglected is far more likely to be vulnerable to a potential abuser. So pay attention to them. Play with them. Show them what love is. If you give them a good example now, then they will be less likely to confuse it with something else down the road.

Healing

When you think back on the times when you’ve been punished, how often do you remember feeling guilt? Guilt is a powerful emotion. It has the ability to lower your self esteem immensely. Guilt makes you seek comfort wherever you can find it, even in the unhealthiest of places.

All survivors of sexual abuse feel guilt. It doesn’t make a difference if they know that it wasn’t their fault. The guilt is there anyway. The only thing that has proven itself time and again to be able to heal all the negativity that guilt creates is therapy. I encourage everyone dealing with this issue and these emotions to seek professional guidance whenever you can. Because when you embrace the possibility that they can help you, then they will.

I’ve read in so many places that a majority of sex offenders were at one time victims themselves. Can you imagine the level of guilt they must feel every second of every day? Not just living with the memories of their own abuse, but knowing that they’d been the cause of pain in so many others. It must be overwhelming. I am going to make a radical statement now and say that punishing them the way we have been is not going to make them stop. There must be another solution out there. There must be some way to reach a person who is already in too deep. Should we give these people a chance to overcome the illness that has plagued them their entire lives? Or have they actually gone from being victims to being monsters?

I’m not sure what the answer is. But I have a strong feeling that if we all take a good, hard look with open minds- we will find it.