I am tired tonight. More tired than I’ve been in a long time and it’s for all the wrong reasons.

You see, a while ago I promised myself that I’d stay out of the hypocritical and often hateful thickets of a society that seems to be growing more perverse every day. Any appreciation for the realness or the great potential of humanity seems to be dwindling at a rapid rate. Everything has become fattened with political, religious and psuedoreligious dogma, under which lies poorly hidden veins carrying the bile of greed, animosity, and prejudices.

It’s crazy making, really, at least for someone like me, who’s slightly left of moderate. I don’t understand how, for instance, the gentle figure of Jesus has been co-opted by a segment of society that’s strangely hoo-rah for mega-millionaires, the personhood of corporations, and the deconstruction of women’s rights — all under the New Testament-defying guise of vaguely defined values like “freedom” or “liberty”. What? Really? Jesus thought the poor should be made to jump through Herculean bureaucratic hoops to get some grain of help? He told the poor to quit complaining and just get (more) jobs? He used his considerable power to humiliate and condemn gays, oppress women, and tell the sick that they’re on their own? I’m not Christian, but I have read the book and, as I recall, Jesus didn’t do any of that and even his most conservative apostles seemed to issue more warnings to greedy rich men, backbiters, and heterosexuals than they did to the poor, the ill, and the disenfranchised.

Tell me again how “freedom” and “liberty” come by way of denying others theirs, because that seems to be the entire platform of the present-day GOP. Prevent women from making their own reproductive choices, make sure gay couples don’t have equal rights, cut services to the elderly, the poor and the sick . . . but make sure you lower the corporate tax rate (do read the link) . . . and eliminate the estate tax so that the children of the rich don’t suffer so much as the loss of a penny (did you can now inherit up to $5M without paying federal taxes? Yeah, that’s a problem most of us won’t have).

On the other side, over 84 million people, largely of the progressive persuasion, jumped on the Kony 2012 bandwagon and made it one of the biggest viral campaigns ever because hey, if celebrities are endorsing it, it just has to be a good cause, right?  Never mind the actual facts of the matter or what Ugandans themselves may feel — here, a video by the prime minister of Uganda detailing the fallacies promoted by Invisible Children has pulled in only 27K views — the important thing seemed to be that it was Hollywood, man. It was glossy and evocative, and so what if Kony doesn’t live in Uganda and his LRA army has shriveled to a couple hundred ragtag troops? The defenders will argue that “at least it got people talking”, but about what exactly?  Does the truth even matter anymore?

There’s all of that, but then there’s Trayvon Martin. Killed by a self-appointed vigilante, not arrested, still free. There’s the cry that this incident  ”couldn’t possibly” be racially motivated because Zimmerman is purportedly part Hispanic — as if no one who is not purely caucasian can be racist. The cops, it should be noted, also listed Zimmerman as “white” on their forms — that’s how they perceived him — and hell yes, it matters.

It matters that this wanna-be cop with a 9mm gun, who had previously made almost 50 calls to 911, pursued a 17 year old Black teenager against police instructions merely for looking “suspicious”.

It matters that Zimmerman first stalked the teenager from his car. Then the frightened boy began to run and Zimmerman went after him on foot, telling police breathlessly that “these assholes always get away.” There may have been a fight, the 240 pound vigilante against the 140 pound teenager, but in the end the teenager was dead and Zimmerman was left standing over the body, gun in hand.

The police didn’t run a background check on Zimmerman, have his wounds examined, or ask him to submit to a drug or alcohol test. They did run a toxicology test on Martin’s dead body, though, which is clearly a preemptive run toward a “blame the victim” defense. However, even if Martin had been high as a kite, he wasn’t the one chasing Zimmerman — he was the one being chased.

I join my name to the millions that are shocked and saddened by the actions of the Sanford Police Department. At no time was Zimmerman’s life or property in danger — he stalked this child, pursued him and then killed him — yet when he claimed self-defense, the police took him at his word, knowing full well who was chasing whom. If anyone had the right to self-defense, it was Trayvon Martin, who can be heard pleading for his life before being shot in cold blood. His family says it’s his voice. There’s no reason to believe otherwise. The screams end as soon as the gun goes off.

I don’t believe that anyone who is on top in a fight is going to be screaming like that. So was the child on the ground and did Zimmerman all ready have him subdued before shooting Martin? This is a question a jury should mull, yet whether or not there will ever be a jury is still in question.

And that’s part of what is making me so tired tonight. That sometimes assholes do get away, even with murder.

The other part, the larger part, is knowing that Trayvon Martin, like so many others before him (James Byrd, Matthew Shepard, Troy Davis, Tyler Clementi and Brandon Teena to name a few) — is destined to become a figurehead for a problem that’s not going away anytime soon, no matter how many people sign a petition, dress in hooded sweatshirts, or march in his name.

Hate is hate and it seems that we’re getting further and further away from communally pulling up the roots of it than ever in my lifetime. The idealistic promises of the 60s — brotherhood, equality, justice for all — seem to have become fodder for cynics and the religious right. Far too many others have buried their heads in the sands of a feel-good, modern-day guruism which preaches that the self is everything and everything is the self, and nothing in the world really matters because somehow everything that happens, no matter how senseless or tragic, was meant to be. There are no accidents, the gurus and their adherents preach. All is as it should be.

It’s the lies that break my heart, tear at my mind, and make me tired in a way that even the worst truth never could.

“The profoundest instinct in man is to war against the truth; that is, against the Real. He shuns facts from his infancy. His life is a perpetual evasion. Miracle, chimera and to-morrow keep him alive. He lives on fiction and myth. It is the Lie that makes him free. Animals alone are given the privilege of lifting the veil of Isis; men dare not. The animal, awake, has no fictional escape from the Real because he has no imagination. Man, awake, is compelled to seek a perpetual escape into Hope, Belief, Fable, Art, God, Socialism, Immortality, Alcohol, Love. From Medusa-Truth he makes an appeal to Maya-Lie.” — Jack London, The Mutiny of the Elsinore

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There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about a woman I knew only by way of polished misinformation, poorly written news stories, and a shoddy investigation that left her murderer free.

I think about the victim — who was poor, mentally ill, and physically abused throughout her lifetime — and it’s difficult for me to reconcile the disparity between those who are blessed in any fashion, and those who seem destined to live preternaturally challenged lives, where nothing comes mercifully, kindly, or easily, not even death. This victim was one of those people. She should have been protected, but was not. Investigators should not have failed her at every turn, but they did — and the more they failed her (and every other potential victim) the more defensive, closed-minded, and self-serving they became. The end result of that kind of arrogance is that if a suspect is ever brought to trial, barring a confession, a defense attorney will have a field day creating reasonable doubt in the minds of jurors.

Fortunately, jurors in the case of Phillip and Nancy Garrido will not know such doubt. There is no question that the convicted sex offender and his wife kidnapped Jaycee Lee Dugard when she was 11 years old. The Garridos brought Jaycee and the two children she bore while in captivity to a parole meeting recently where, eighteen years after being kidnapped, Jaycee’s true identity was discovered and Garrido confessed.

Outside of the kidnapping and multiple rapes of a child, the most unsettling thing about the Dugard case is the staggering number of times law enforcement failed in their duty to properly monitor a registered sex offender.

Contra Costa County Sheriff Warren E. Rupf did something highly unusual when he stood up and roundly criticized his own office for a failed 2006 opportunity to rescue Jaycee. A deputy who responded to a call about a “psychotic sex addict” with several tents in his backyard, who was living with children, left the scene after briefly talking with Garrido on his front porch. That deputy claims he didn’t know Garrido was a convicted sex offender, even though the Sheriff’s department had the information.

“I cannot change the course of events but we are beating ourselves up over this and continue to do so,” Rupf told the press. “We should have been more inquisitive, more curious, and turned over a rock or two.”

Rupf’s office did fail, but there were many failures before that, starting with Garrido’s early release after serving only 11 years of a 50 year sentence for the kidnap and rape of a 25 year-old woman.

Garrido has worn a GPS ankle bracelet and has had regular meetings with his parole officer several times a month since his 1988 release. He was also subject to random home searches, and the latest of these reportedly occurred about a month before Garrido brought Jaycee to his parole meeting, which begs the questions — How thorough were these searches? How could the tents in the backyard, Jaycee, and the two children have been missed for eighteen years? Did the parole officers ever talk to Garrido’s business clients, any one of whom could have informed them about the “daughters” that Garrido lived with?

The catastrophic failure of Garrido’s parole wasn’t even redeemed in the end. After receiving a report from two extra-diligent employees of UC-Berkeley — a campus officer and an events coordinator, who took it upon themselves to run a background check on Garrido when he showed up looking “weird and unstable”, with two pale, “robotic” children in tow — the parole officer did not rush out of his office to check on Garrido at home. Instead, he waited for Garrido to come to him.

What would have happened had Garrido not brought Jaycee and her children to the meeting? What might have happened had Garrido’s “voices” told him to end his crimes in a different way? Garrido started talking about the voices profusely in 2006. In 2007, he started a website, and in 2008 he filed articles of incorporation for a religious organization he called “God’s Desire”. Did his parole officer know any of this? If he did, then why was he not concerned about Garrido’s deteriorating mental status? And if the parole officer didn’t know, how could he have missed three years of such obvious and increasing zealotry?

Garrido stole eighteen years of Jaycee Dugard’s life. The two daughters she bore as his victim, ages 11 and 15, have known little of life outside of Garrido’s mad confines. Dugard’s parents, extended family, friends, and schoolmates spent years mourning her loss; haunted by not knowing where she was or what happened to her.

Sheriff Rupf rightly criticized his own deputy’s inaction, but the failure of law enforcement went much deeper than the Contra Costra County Sheriff’s Department. The full-on, pervasive failure of the parole department to competently monitor a known kidnapper and rapist over the course of nearly two decades is without excuse, and it is they who need to provide answers to the public — and to the victims of this incredibly tragic and largely preventable crime.

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After Michael Jackson died, all the usual suspects came out of the woodwork to inflame, speculate, accuse, defend, and memorialize.  Media vultures like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Gloria Allred took their well-worn places, along with ex-attorneys, autopsy specialists, and professional pundits. Hundreds of thousands of Jackson’s fans filled the internet with glowing praise and sad goodbyes.  A handful of people questioned the lofty praise being heaped upon a man based almost wholly on his entertainment value rather than the whole of his character, which was, at best disturbing.

At my neighborhood coffee shop, the young barista was crying as she wrote a Michael Jackson trivia question on the chalkboard.  She was upset that other people were not sharing her sense of loss.  “He wasn’t a child molester,” she said to me vehemently. “All those people, they just lied to get money. He was found innocent.”  Curious, I asked her how she would feel if a man in her neighborhood regularly invited pubescent boys to sleep in his bedroom — would she give the same benefit of the doubt to him?

She defended Jackson by citing his lost childhood, his purportedly abusive father, his inability to escape the chokehold of fame and its attending entourage of shady people.  My question wasn’t answered, but the implication was obvious — Michael Jackson wasn’t just a man, but an icon. A disfigured Peter Pan whose existence was warped in pain and wrapped in love.  Someone  so ethereal that he couldn’t possibly be expected to be bound by earthly rules.

I’ve known many adult survivors of childhood abuse, and even extreme poverty, who didn’t suffer the chokehold of fame, but rather the crush of invisibility.  Their lives as children, coming home to molesters and abusers, or rundown apartments with empty cupboards and absent parents, was surreal.  They watched the world as it existed outside their immediate boundaries, and couldn’t grasp the reasons for the disparity or the divide. They felt inferior, ashamed, and largely disconnected.

Most survivors entered adulthood with striking disadvantages, and far fewer resources than average, leaving them to hardscrabble their way through college or the workforce, expanding their sense of being set-apart. The gritty details of their childhoods were not memories they could casually share as others did. Instead of their feeling of  “difference” being lessened as an adult, it was heightened by the stories told by peers.  Happy tales of close families, holiday dinners, camping trips, and other fond memories can evoke a range of responses in those who were abused or neglected as children, but most often they hit a tender spot. . . an aching space left behind by the child whose prayers and wishes went unanswered, but who never stopped hoping.

Yet, unlike Michael, most survivors of childhood abuse and neglect could not build Neverland-like sanctuaries in an attempt to relive their childhoods, or to assuage the growing pains of adulthood. Some survivors, like Michael, had a difficult time being “normal” and were ostracized or labeled as freaks, adding more trauma to an already challenging life. Yet there were no walls they could hide behind — no team or staff they could call upon for protection — and most of all, there were no acceptable excuses.

Get over it, get on with it, leave the past behind, think positive, it’s not what others do to you it’s how you choose to feel about it, lift yourself up, be strong, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. . .

There are thousands of bromides spoken in the direction of everyday survivors, but there’s very little real interest or understanding shown in their lives, their struggles, or their sense of outsidedness.  The few stories told about their otherworldly existences are those that have big, splashy, feel-good endings.

Success-against-all-odds stories are popular, but in reality they are rare. Unfortunately, the pervasive messages in such stories leaves society with less understanding of lives on the periphery, not more.  And, of course, more bromides follow — if you want something bad enough it will be yours, if you try hard enough you will succeed, no one but you can stand in the way of your dreams.

The actual successes of most adult survivors tend to be much quieter, far less grand, more challenging, and many times more excruciating than the stories or the aphorisms tell.

Talent, charisma, opportunity, education, circumstances, looks, connections, resources, personality, geography — these are just a few of the factors that can effect any person’s success. Adult survivors often start at a deficit in a few different categories, and it can take years to catch up. For instance, I saw a young woman the other day, about 19, who had terrible teeth. The damage was so pervasive that it could only be attributed to years of childhood neglect.  I had a flashback to one boss of mine turning an otherwise qualified candidate away because of her mangled smile. He said, “if she can’t take care of her teeth, how can I expect her to take care of my business?”  I could only wonder about the number of social and employment opportunities this young woman would miss, and the vicious cycle she might face — the inability to get a higher paying job due to her appearance, leading to not being able to afford the dental work she needs to look more presentable.

Many such cycles exist, especially in poverty. The poor pay more for everything from their power deposits, to phones, to the car tires they have to put on buy here-pay here credit. A minor crisis, such as a broken arm or blown transmission, can set off a chain of events with months-long, even years-long, consequences.

I understand having sympathy for Michael Jackson –  not because he was an entertainer, but because he was a human being who was obviously troubled and in need of help he never received.  I believe his story speaks to so many things that should be more vigorously questioned than they are. Should public figures, especially when they are  minors, have the same right as non-public others to a reasonable amount of personal space — should California’s proposed “buffer zone” law be adopted nationally? Should sexual molestation cases involving children be allowed to be settled privately? How much non-material privilege should wealth be able to buy? Should parents of non-biological test-tube and surrogate babies be screened as adoptive parents are?

On a more personal level, what is to be said about parents who knowingly let their children sleep in the same room as an adult male because he was famous? What about America’s seemingly incessant hunger for sensational (and often untrue) tabloid stories?

Why is it that so many in society will extend empathy to the famous that they wouldn’t extend to others? Why do we so often scramble to make excuses or provide justification for the bad acts of celebrities when we wouldn’t do the same for our neighbors?

Michael Jackson will remain an icon, likely for decades after his death, just as Elvis Presley did. His albums are now topping the Billboard charts again, and his music and his style of dance will live on in many tributes, to be revered and copied by at least another generation.  He was, without question, an extraordinary talent.

My question is, how extraordinary are we as a society?  And if we’re not as outstanding as we know we should be — if we are not seeking to give our best thoughts, empathy, and support to every deserving human being, regardless of their wealth or fame — then shouldn’t we try a little harder?

This article is also on the Huffington Post for those who would like to comment.

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A seven year-old boy throws a temper tantrum in his second grade classroom, stomping on a teacher’s foot, battering a school administrator, and tearing the room apart.  The class had to be evacuated by school officials to ensure the safety of the other children, and police and the boy’s mother were called.

So why are the parents of the boy now shopping around for an attorney?  According to them, their child is “sensitive and shy”.  He has, according to his father Richard Smith,  “no mental health problems.  He’s never hurt himself. He’s never hurt anyone else.”  While mother Barbara Smith admits that her son has thrown such tantrums before, and was once suspended for knocking over a desk, she believes she should have been allowed to “defuse” the situation without police intervention.

However, police in Largo, Florida did intervene and after speaking with the boy and other parties involved, decided to implement the Baker Act and send the boy to a mental health hospital for evaluation.  The boy stayed overnight, against the will of his parents, and now the parents are outraged and looking to sue.

The police find themselves in the position of having to defend their decision to use the Baker Act — which gives them the authority to hospitalize people against their will if they believe there’s a likelihood of them injuring themselves or others — against a seven year-old.

Anyone familiar with my work knows how I feel about automatic hero status being conferred upon those in fields like education and law enforcement.  I don’t believe that a certificate or a badge makes a hero, any more than I believe that every parent does what’s best for their child.  So when I read stories like this, I’m not automatically given to one side or the other.

In this case, it’s particularly difficult because there’s a third party involved that has been rendered near-powerless by policies meant to ensure equal access to education.  School districts have little long-term authority over troubled and disruptive students, and what authority they do have is often granted by the parents in the form of an IEP (Individual Education Plan) or other cooperative program.  Parents will often resist their child being placed in “special education” due to the stigma attached, which places an extra burden on non-Special Ed teachers and their students.

So while this child’s behavior issues might have been earlier and better addressed between the parents and the school, it’s understandable to me why the police were called and why they decided to use the Baker Act.  Ideal?  No.   Absolutely necessary?  Probably not.  Logical, needs-based, and an attempt to be preventative?  Yes.

I’m not going to jump on the bandwagon of  “they must be terrible parents” because children with behavior problems can happen to the best-intentioned and most loving parents.  However, a failure to recognize recurring tantrums — especially those that involve things like upturning desks and throwing books — as problematic and unacceptable is dangerous.  It’s dangerous for the child in question, for his future, and for others in his vicinity.

What we call a temper tantrum in a young child is a fit of rage as they grow older.  The lack of impulse and emotional control shown by a screaming, desk spilling, seven year-old is not something he’s likely to grow out of on his own.

I know how easy it is for parents to disbelieve, though.  Children come to them after their bath, sweetly snuggle next to them on the couch, smile and giggle as they tell their stories, and they think there’s just no way. . . no way there’s something wrong with this child.  They hear reports, as the Smiths did from the hospital psychologist, that their child was “polite and friendly” during an evaluation and they think “See?  It was just a moment, just a bad day, something that this or that person provoked”.  They begin to believe that the incident was blown out of proportion — they find fault with others — they begin shopping for an attorney.

What they don’t do is comprehend that their child — the one whose eyes are wide with excitement on Christmas morning, the one who sits on their laps, and loves to ride his bike — is in need of help.  That while he may be sensitive and shy, he may also be unable to control his impulses or his emotions.  That while it’s unlikely any psychologist would categorize a seven year-old  as “mentally ill”,  most would believe that the child could benefit from therapy and behavior modification, and there should be no stigma, for either parents or child,  attached to that.

The worst action that could be taken is action that doesn’t address the needs of the child — such as downplaying his behavior, or attempting to sue the police for trying to get him professionally evaluated — when it was obvious that his own parents believed no such evaluation was necessary.  At what point in a troubled child’s life should a more objective authority than his parents be able to intervene?  At what point is it not enough that the mother can “defuse” the situation — when the situation shouldn’t be occurring in the first place?  Don’t teachers, (particularly those who don’t specialize in special education),  and their  students have a right to teach and learn in a safe, non-threatening environment?

This child needs help.  The police, instead of turning their backs and saying “not our problem”  did what they could to get him some.  Instead of the parents looking to cash in on what they believe was  “a total abuse of police power”, they might better serve themselves, their child, and society by getting their son the help he needs.  Before his childhood tantrums become teen or adult rage.

Sources:
TampaBay.com
10Connects.com

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A great deal of media attention has been paid to Nadya Suleman, the recent mother of octuplets by IVF.  The general consensus is that there’s something wrong with an unemployed mother of six choosing to have eight more children.  News pundits, psychologists, and the public have speculated about Suleman’s mental health, her motives, and her mothering abilities. Some have even questioned whether Suleman has had plastic surgery in an attempt to look like Angelina Jolie.

There’s no doubt that Suleman’s story is interesting, not only for its shock value, but because it opens up public debate on issues like parenting choices, child rearing, IVF, ethics, individual responsibility, and more.

I can’t help but wonder which horrific case of child abuse will open up the same kind of national debate.  How many tortured children, infant rapes, dead bodies, and light sentences will it take before the public demands substantial changes to child welfare, adoption, and foster care policies?

The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services estimated that in 2006, out of 48 reporting states, 1376 children were killed by abusive parents, relatives, and caregivers. (They estimate 1530 nationwide). In Florida, which ranks among the worst states for child abuse and welfare, 52 of the 140 children killed in 2006 had prior contact with “family preservation” (DCF) services.

Those are the children that died. 885,245 more were known to be victims of abuse in 2006 — a highly conservative estimate since many cases go unreported.

I’ve expressed my belief that child welfare agencies need a drastic overhaul before.   It is unconscionable to me that an advanced society still views children as chattel, and confers what amounts to child ownership on the basis of DNA.

“Preservation of the family” methods, such as anger management or parenting classes for abusive parents, largely fail.  The mentality of violent parents is not born of short-term frustrations.  Even though perpetrators may place the blame on any number of stressors, from job loss to drug use, the essential fact is that the ability to choke, beat, stab, burn, rape or poison another person, particularly a child, doesn’t come from stress, or even from mere ignorance, but from an ingrained mental or character defect.  Stress or lack of education does not cause people to throw helpless infants against the wall or immerse them in scalding water.  If this were the case, humankind would not have gotten as far as it is now.

There have always been violent people in society, and unfortunately they have never seemed to lack for partners.  One of the most appalling trends in child abuse has been pedicide caused by the live-in boyfriends of mothers. In many cases, women are choosing to live with men they’ve known only a brief time, and entrusting these men to care for their children.

Haleigh Marie Cain is only one of the many children brutalized by their mother’s boyfriend.   Haleigh died from massive injuries at the hands of Dennis Creamer, who was angered by Haleigh’s request for juice and cookies before bedtime.

A course in anger management or proper parenting is unlikely to change men like Creamer, or people like Kimberly Ann Trenor and Royce Zeigler, whose all day torture session of two year-old Riley Sawyers resulted in her death.

While America holds fast to the notion of parenting as a right rather than a privilege, it has yet to provide a national Bill of Rights for its most vulnerable citizens.  Individual states such as New Jersey, which recently introduced such a bill, come under fire primarily from conservative religious groups such as The Eagle Forum, which believes that giving rights to children “undermine(s) the sacred role of parental rights to direct the upbringing and education of their children“. The tone of dissent borders on hysteria that the State will interfere with the “rights” of parents to rear, educate, and control their children as they please, particularly when it comes to home-schooling.

One of the fundamental rights of children should be a well-rounded, quality education.  While thousands of homeschooling parents immerse themselves in providing this, and ensure that their children have varied academic as well as social opportunities, others are sorely unqualified, largely unmonitored, and use homeschooling as a way to control and isolate their children, rather than to enrich their experiences.

While many would disagree with the State of California, which recently upheld a law stating that homeschooling teachers must be credentialed, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to expect that parents who wish to teach at home show some qualification outside of a DNA relationship to do so.  Even the children-as-chattel mindset cannot do away with the fact that eventually children become adults.  There is no recourse for poorly educated, overly-sheltered children when they enter the world of adult work and responsibilities — if they enter the world at large at all.

Homeschooled children from religious cults, like those from the Yearning for Zion Ranch in Texas, are taught to fear the world outside of their sect. Most never attend school at all, and what little education they receive is from under-educated parents whose main concern is the indoctrination of their children into a set of cult beliefs and behaviors.

The call of neo-conservative religious groups to hold the rights of parents as “sacred” while denying children their own set of rights is transparent.  They want exclusive dominion over their offspring regardless of what society may deem harmful or contrary to the best interests of children.

Unfortunately, the rights of parents are largely put above the almost non-existent rights of children. Thousands of children spend years in the limbo of foster care, unable to be adopted into loving families, while abusive, neglectful, and otherwise unfit birth parents hold onto their legal parental rights.  Thousands more live unmonitored with people who have previously been convicted of violent crime such as rape, murder, assault, molestation, or child abuse.  Under present laws, custodial parents may live with whom they please, and non-custodial parents don’t even have the right to demand a background check on those who will be involved in the day-to-day parenting of their children.

Social services for children is a nightmare of red tape, inefficiency, and outdated, provincial policies.  Who was watching Donald Medsker, who was 26 years old in 1989 when he was granted custody of his 10 year-old half-sister?  He started sexually abusing her right away, making her quit school when she became pregnant at age 14.  Over the next 20 years Medsker’s sister, indoctrinated by him to believe that their relationship was normal, gave birth to six more children, two of whom were put up for adoption. Where were the social service follow-ups and the truant officers? How did a 10 year old child fall so completely through the cracks?  Was Medsker examined and found to be the best parenting choice or was this, again, a case where a DNA relationship outweighed consideration of the child’s best interests?

America could do so much more to prevent child abuse.  We could launch more comprehensive education and support programs for parents.  Schools could demand yearly physical exams as well as immunization records.  We could make it against the law for known violent offenders to live with children, at least without monitoring, and we could do much more for children living in isolation, such as those born into religious cults.  We could certainly rewrite the “preservation of family” standard that returns children to abusive homes.

However, as long as children are viewed as chattel, and a parent’s rights lawfully outweigh those of a child’s, we won’t.  We’ll just continue to be outraged — in the most empty way — because we’re not really willing or ready to give children a set of rights that would help ensure their dignity, education, or safety.

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This is one of the men who raped me when I was a teenager.  He was 19 then, he’s 51 now, and he is still a rapist.  I look at him and see a life gone wrong, but I feel no pity.  I imagine that at one time he was a little boy who liked action figures and riding his bike, but that something (or someone) terrible happened in his youth that robbed him of his innocence and his conscience.  Still, I feel no pity.  I wish him only a long life behind bars, where he will never again have the opportunity to lay his hands upon a child.

I feel guilty.  It would not have been safe for me then to tell my parents or authorities, so I told only my older sister, who earlier that day introduced me to him as her friend.  She didn’t tell, either.

I feel pride in the young girl who braved whatever circumstance she was in to tell her story to family, law enforcement, attorneys, and then in court.  Giving the details of a rape, over and over again, is uncomfortable for adult victims — for children it can be excruciating.  Whoever she is, she did something that likely saved other children from knowing the same kind of pain she experienced.   I wish I could have done that, but I suspect it wouldn’t have ended up the same way.  It was a different time and place.

I feel angry at the never-ending cycle of child abuse and neglect — at the society that helps perpetuate it through weak social services and laws — and at those who continue to bear children they don’t want, or can’t love and care for properly.  It is likely that this rapist, like so many others,  was sexually, physically, or otherwise abused as a child.  It may also be that he is a sociopath, and would have been one regardless of his upbringing.  In either case, it seems to me that there were opportunities to derail his sexually violent tendencies before he began victimizing children while he was still a teen himself.   The recidivism rate for molesters and rapists is extremely high, the cure rate near zero — but I can’t help but wonder what might happen if we turned more of our attention toward  preventing the causes.

I feel hopeless in a way.   We live in a time of such desensitization that child abuse and rape have become cliched topics.  The victims are getting younger and younger.  The rape of infants, once a horror story limited to third-world countries and sick child pornographers, is becoming more and more commonplace.  The sentences for child rape can range from one year to five to life in prison.  All rape is heinous, but those involving prepubescent children should be especially repugnant in a civilized nation, and there should be long mandatory sentences in place to protect society from poor judicial discretion and the plague of repeat offenders.

I feel gratefully far removed from the abuses in my own youth, but connected to those who are experiencing the same now.  I wish I could do more.  I wish I could change the laws, right all the wrongs, and make every child safe.  It’s an impossible task, but I’ll never stop talking about it, no matter how many people refuse to listen.

I feel relief knowing that, at least for now, a serial rapist who once affected my life is incarcerated.

I feel genuine joy for every child and woman left untouched by this crime.  I feel blessed for knowing that there’s innocence left in this world.

I feel strong, and alive, and lucky.

I feel like I can tell now, so I do.

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