Molested: A mother discovers that the legal system's nightmarish "cure" for child sexual abuse can be worse than the disease


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m o l e s t e d

A mother discovers that the legal system's nightmarish "cure"
for child sexual abuse can be worse than the disease.

BY ANONYMOUS Illustration by Melinda Beck

http://www.salon.com/feb97/molested2970228.html

Every Wednesday afternoon I find a seat in a windowless basement
room, in a circle of 25 people. The chairs are metal, hard and
cold, and the level of discomfort far more than physical. There
are eight teenage boys and two therapists, and all the rest
of us are parents and grandparents. We are bewildered, we are
depressed and we are all consigned to this room for months. I am
sick for hours beforehand and a day or more afterwards, unable
to sleep in peace, to eat, to hold a casual conversation. These
boys, including my son, are sex offenders. We, as their parents,
are complicit in crimes hard to explain or define. Recently I
asked my 14-year-old son what he's learned from the painful
events of the last year, and he said, "I've learned sex is bad.
I don't want to think about it anymore."

Several months ago, a school counselor called me at work and
told me he needed to speak to me right away. When he arrived
at my office I was braced for the worst, for injury, the
unbearable. What he told me was more unexpected than sudden
death -- that my son had confessed to molesting our other son,
who is several years younger. In the parlance of sexual abuse,
he had "disclosed," begun the slow unraveling of detail and
self-castigation. That moment began my own continuing nausea,
like a backward somersault I can't control. I swing from feeling
to feeling without warning, I swing between rage at my son and
fury at the damage done by what are called good intentions.

The day after we found out, the police came to his school
without warning and arrested him. I arrived just as they drove
him away, a shriveled boy sitting behind two armed men in blue.
And all that has happened since has been a duller and dirtier
knife digging a deeper, nastier wound.


m o l e s t e d | p a g e 2

he was jailed for three weeks. I came to visit him that first
evening, chill with shock, thinking I was done crying for a
while. I brought him the book he was reading. I pressed door
buzzers and intercoms, waited behind locked doors, spoke through
thick glass windows to curt, distracted guards. The book was
denied, without explanation, and the tears came again -- and
I've found ever since that my tears serve only to shut doors and
close faces. When I calmed down, I was given 20 minutes to speak
to him.

He came out dressed in faded, ill-fitting work clothes, pale and
embarrassed, and we huddled in a crowded room of other parents
and other boys, some of them loud and strutting, others silent
and withdrawn. I visited every day I was allowed -- which was
not every day -- and each time I left he had to go through a
strip search. He told me about the other boys, the drive-by
shootings, the rapes and the robberies about which they bragged.
He told me about recreational drugs I'd never heard of before.
He described several R-rated movies he'd seen in detention,
violent films I'd refused to let him see because he was too
young. He described the hours of mental health evaluations, the
blood tests, the interviews. He complained about the food and
the boredom, worried about his missed schoolwork, talked of
everything but what had happened, his lawyers, the hearings to
come.

I talked to lawyers, too. I wrote large checks. No one asked
about the younger boy, the victim. Two armed and uniformed
police asked him on the first day if the story was true. After
that, no one mentioned him. No one suggested a doctor's exam
or a counselor's interview. No one interviewed my husband and
me, no one visited our home. So I arranged for a lawyer for us,
and I took my other son to the doctor -- who found no physical
evidence of abuse -- and to a counselor. We never spoke with the
district attorney who prosecuted the case.

My older son stayed in jail. First one, then two custodial
hearings were scheduled and abruptly canceled without
explanation. I got lost in the unreliable labyrinth of voice
mail, lost messages, messages never returned, authority changing
hands. I grew skittish and paranoid, glancing out the window at
every car slowing down near our house, at the ringing telephone,
the doorbell -- wondering if men with guns and blue uniforms
would come for our other son without warning, take him away as
well. I didn't know what to do or who to ask. I was afraid to
tell any of my friends. We sat in the courthouse hallway before
the third scheduled hearing, sat there in stark terror. I had
asked the receptionist in the lobby what to expect. She looked
at a schedule, at my son's name and the word "sodomy," and
said casually, "He'll probably be locked up for a few years.
That's typical." The juvenile advocate came out of his office
and leaned over and told me that this hearing, too, had been
canceled. The district attorney had a conflict. I started to
cry. My husband sat motionless and silent.

"I don't know what to do," I whispered. "Tell me what to do."

He turned on his heel and walked away. "I can't talk to you when
you're crying," he said.

Next: Damned in the eyes of the world

m o l e s t e d | p a g e 3

the details of what my two sons did are not unlike the details
of what I did out of furtive curiosity with my brother many
years ago. But to many people, this is further proof of my ill
fitness to judge the situation. From the beginning, several
people voiced their belief that I "must be" a victim of
repressed sexual abuse. Why? Because I chose to fight on my
son's behalf instead of rejecting him entirely. Because I wanted
to continue to be his parent. Because I protested the endless
repetitions of "disclosure." Because I said the legal process
was damaging. In this particular world, no ambiguity is allowed.
Either one is on the side of the victim or one is on the side
of the offender; there is no place between. To question is to
betray.

Between my two sons, there was kissing, there was touching,
there was oral contact ("sodomy"). There was a lot of looking.
There was no penetration, no force, no threats. They are several
years apart in age and the contacts occurred over several weeks.
My youngest son confessed in tears that he'd enjoyed it, and
was very sorry he'd gotten his brother in so much trouble. I
have finally confided in a few friends this past year, and each
one has asked me to explain, as though I knew, the difference
between molestation and childhood sex play. "Lord, my brother
and I did more than that," one friend said, and went on to
describe it. "What's the fuss about?" asked another. "Too bad
you don't live in Europe," a well-traveled friend said in
sympathy.

I don't know if I am reassured or not -- because I still don't
know how I feel about what happened, how I really feel as a
parent, outside the Kafka-esque legal forum. The boys are too
many years apart for it to be simple childhood sex play in my
mind. It went on too long, for weeks. I am not sure it was
abuse, I am certainly not sure it was a crime, but neither am I
sure how I would define it. I wish fervently that it had never
happened, but I'm not convinced it is the worst thing that could
have happened, that it is anywhere near as terrible as many
people think.

I could not voice these doubts to the Wednesday afternoon group,
to the judge, to anyone, without threatening my entire family.
Although I secretly believe the cure has been much worse than
the disease, I am careful not to say so out loud. I know that
half the people who make their living in the "childhood sex
abuse field," as they call it, would then be convinced I was
either a victim, a molester or both.

Each of the boys in our therapy program must "disclose," again
and again, to all of us. Public confession is believed to be
more than a good -- it's considered necessary to healing, a sign
of responsibility, the willingness to take one's crimes upon
oneself. Certain stories are almost unbearable to hear; they are
thick with coercion and deception and denial. These boys, with
their pimples and sparse beards and baby fat, are all different,
and some are capable of hard things. I know why the boy who
raped is here, I know why the boy who penetrated a baby is here.
I'm not sure why the boy who touched his sister's genitals once,
one single afternoon, is here -- but I see that all are tarred
with the same brush. All are child molesters in the world's eyes
now, and it's an unforgivable sin, an irrevocable name.

I read a lot about incest now. I read about suddenly retrieved
memories and role-playing and hypnotherapy. I read about incest
fantasies and the "incest complex," all those emotions that are
exactly like the emotions created by incest, even when nothing
like incest occurs. More often, lately, I read about people
whose lives are destroyed not by sexual abuse but by the fear
of it, by accusations of it, shifting and unprovable. I wonder
where all this is coming from, what the hell is going on around
me, when it seems as though we've lost our minds over sex. There
is a letter to the editor in the local newspaper, complaining of
an art show using condoms as material: "No wonder our women and
children aren't safe in the streets." I get into a discussion of
the death penalty with a friend of mine, a friend who loves both
my children and knows nothing of what has happened to us in the
past year. "But surely, some people should die," she says, with
great heat. "Child molesters should die, don't you think?"

Maybe I don't know anything anymore. The center doesn't hold
for me now. For months I've woken at night and felt myself
sink into a swamp of guilt and shame, wondering how we could
have not known, how it could have happened here, in the house,
while we suspected nothing. My husband is almost paralyzed with
remorse, convinced somehow his tame and well-hidden collection
of naked-lady pictures is at fault. We seem unable to even
consider making love anymore. Neither of us knows how to talk to
our children now. I don't know the line between minimizing the
hurt and making it worse, between fueling the fears and guilt
and hiding them.

There is more to our son's therapy than the Wednesday group.
There are polygraphs and psychological tests and questionnaires.
He is in peer group therapy, where he learns a new vocabulary.
He speaks off-handedly about "offending" people in a whole new
way than that phrase is usually meant. He's learning about
"ownership" and "restitution" and "errors of thought." My
own
focus is on Wednesdays, when the other parents sometimes stammer
the same concerns, the same shames. ("How could we have not
known?") One father blames his son's collection of rap music.
A grandmother complains of the "plague of sex" on television.
All the boys are from heterosexual families, all but our case
involved heterosexual abuse, but one parent still insists the
cause is "homosexuality."

After he spent three weeks in detention, we had a trial on the
issue of custody, attended by social workers, a psychiatrist
and a bevy of lawyers arguing on our behalf. With their help,
our son was allowed to return home. Three months later, we
had a trial on the criminal charges, the felony charges that
cannot ever be expunged from his record, that will haunt him for
the rest of his life. Several lawyers had warned us about the
district attorney. "He's a maniac on sex charges," one told us.

We were never even introduced to him. We had not been
interviewed. He knew nothing of our backgrounds, educations,
professions, our philosophy of parenting, religious beliefs or
lifestyle. None of this was deemed relevant. At the trial he
was vehement, emotional, personal. He spoke passionately to the
judge about our "conflicts of loyalty," that our efforts to
regain custody of the one child made it clear we couldn't care
for the other. I sat there in shock and disbelief (yes, at that
late date) and scribbled notes at our own lawyer, tearing into
the paper with the point of my pencil. "That," the DA said,
pointing at me, "is a parent who blames the victim."

How in the world, I wondered blankly, do other families manage?
How do the other people mingling in the lobby manage? The single
mothers with toddlers, the less skilled and educated, the ones
with no savings account to pay for lawyers? The other parents
seem resigned to long waits and confusion; they seem to have
used up their assertiveness long ago.

Our son was sentenced to "time served," a closely supervised
probation until he reaches the age of 18, and two years of
therapy. He was given dire warnings of what would happen if he
made any mistakes at all. The DA vowed to appeal, a vow he has
kept, and we still wait our last turn in court.

"Thank you, your honor," mumbled our son, when his lawyer
prodded him.

"Thank you," I said.


Everything has changed. Our family looks the same. Only a few
people know what has happened. But we are bruised and lost, and
this town I've loved living in feels corrupt to me now. The
victim has at last been noticed, and is also in therapy -- not a
group or therapist of our choice, but one chosen by the court.
He has been interviewed over and over and over, and has offered
no new memories, no new disclosures, no new details. He openly
worries about being "taken away." Has this helped him, this
disclosing, this chaos? I have the terrible knowledge that he
has permanently changed.

He believes now, somewhere deep, that his pleasure in being
touched was itself bad, that because that touch was forbidden,
he himself is bad, that the disruptions and upsets of the
last year are somehow his fault, the fault of his finding
pleasure. It doesn't matter how many times we or anyone tell
him different. Now I'm afraid to caress him, afraid to go to
the bathroom at night because he might waken and see me in a
state of half-dress, afraid to tuck him in and kiss him when
he's asleep, lest he have a dreamy memory of being touched in
bed. He has been asked now, over and over, by many strangers, if
his father or mother ever did a "bad touch." He wakes up on the
weekend and runs into our room and jumps in bed to cuddle as he
always has, and we recoil, afraid.

I'm not afraid of our older son. He has also been examined
and prodded and interviewed and tested at great length and
expense. He shows no signs of a compulsion, or being predatory,
no signs of anything except a deep-seated shame and remorse,
and the desire to suppress his own blossoming sexual nature.
I am supposed to fear him, of course. But what I fear is the
impenetrable idiot system, the hugely tentacled and punitive
system that treats all of us as the same kind of monster.
I'm afraid of unreliable memories and long looks and loaded
questions. I know I would lie to protect my children now. I
would say anything not to have them taken from my care. Perjury
is nothing to the amputation of our relationship.

+ + + + + + + + +

"Sex offenders can't be cured," I read. "Victims of sexual abuse
are damaged forever." The world of therapy cultivates this dark
vision, relishes the notion of mortal wounds and permanent
crimes and, always, hidden details yet to be revealed. I watch
the boys in my Wednesday afternoon group, their lost, bewildered
looks, their struggles to find a way through, their ineffectual
efforts to hide and deny. I feel repulsed sometimes, horrified
by the images that some of them describe, horrified also by the
salacious intensity in the therapists' extraction of detail.

"What else, Kevin? What else did you get in trouble for?" And
Kevin glances away, distressed. Finally, he whispers, "I had
dirty books." "That's right, Kevin," nods the therapist. He
is satisfied. I keep my careful poker face. Does he seriously
believe that this is an answer to the puzzle of how we've come
to be here?

There are rules in this peculiar world. Givens. Paramount is
that a victim always tells the truth, with one exception. When
a victim tells the same story as the offender, then the victim
is wrong -- because also paramount is the rule that an offender
always lies. For many months we've been warned to expect more --
more confession, more disclosure, more details, more victims,
to accept the fact that he must be holding something back. No
confession is ever considered complete. With each repetition
of what has already been told, the boys are told to give us a
little bit more.

"Secrets are bad." So say the therapists. "Secrets hurt people."
Our son tells the same story over and over again, to one
stranger after another, on command. For many months, nothing
has changed, nothing new has come forth. For this reason he
is perceived as being more recalcitrant than the other boys,
"frozen" in his denial. Because I believe him, I am in denial,
too. Finally, in a private session, he is walked through his
story in excruciating detail: What was he wearing, what was his
brother wearing, what was said, when did he take his pants off,
what happened next, and next, and next. What did his brother's
face look like? What does he think his brother was thinking? And
then the young, attractive, female therapist makes him tell her
-- and us, who don't want to know -- his sexual fantasies, how
often he masturbates, whether he ejaculates when he does, what
he thinks about when he touches himself. He stares at the floor
and whispers his answers. And I am outraged. What has happened,
I want to scream. What has happened to him?


A convicted child molester comes to speak to us one Wednesday.
He is 32 years old. He was a teacher, and he tells us he has had
dozens of victims. "Kids loved me," he says, simply.

There is something odd about him, the way he holds himself,
the redness in his face as he explains. He cries off and on,
describing his own parents' grief, his prison term, his suicidal
fantasies. This compulsion to touch children haunts him,
constantly tugging at his thoughts. His honesty is like a slap,
an unexpected needle, and I find that I'm a little afraid of
him.

He looks at the teenage boys in the room. "You're all about the
age of my victims," he says. The boys shuffle their feet and
look at the floor. I'm glad he's not my neighbor. I would worry
about both my children.

Another week, a male therapist who works with adult women sex
abuse victims comes, and for an hour he plays a game with the
people in the room, an emotional manipulation designed to make
us all feel like victims. To be without control. I think I
know this feeling already, and his glee at our discomfiture
seems sadistic. When one of the mothers cracks under his
dark murmurings about the lifelong nightmare of the victim,
and begins to cry, begging him to give her a little hope, he
refuses. He is brooding, suave, playful.

"I invite you," he says, with a sweep of his hand around the
room, "to blame these boys for how you feel. Make them take the
full measure of the responsibility."

So I've learned another rule. I should give my son all my
anger. I should direct this undying rage at him -- rage for
the fear, the guilt, the lost privacy, the exposure and grief.
It is his fault, and I must not forgive. It doesn't matter
that he's a child, too, that he's not fully formed, that he
is at odds with his future. I don't believe that it is his
fault that the system is so cruel, the therapy so shallow, the
philosophy so unintelligent. But he's the only one I'm allowed
to blame. I have emotions I can barely glance at, geysers of
pain, shame, guilt and grief from which I shy like a horse from
a bed of snakes. I have dreams on the edge of sense that I can't
remember, don't want to remember. I am to give all this to a
boy, who is not allowed to have any goodness in him anymore.

"And what happened then, Philip?" asks one therapist, in a soft,
murmuring voice. Philip whispers back, "I touched her vagina."
And the therapist smiles slowly and says, "Yeeaaahhh. Yes,
that's it, Philip." These are the voices of lovers. Through the
constant repetition the therapists and lawyers arouse the story
to the surface, feed it, turn the confessions into fantasies,
the details into the texture of myth.

I write to a friend with several children: "If this ever happens
in your family, don't tell anyone, don't tell a teacher or a
nurse or a counselor. Don't let them into your house. You can
handle it alone, as we could have -- but we can't handle this."

My every attempt to put what happened in a social context,
a context of human sexuality and relationship, is averted.
My every effort to discuss the preoccupying sexual nature
of teenagers is met with discomfort and evasion. Real sex
is never mentioned here. Sexual curiosity, sexual pleasure,
is irrelevant. How can they find their way through the maze
without our help? I don't know why one of my children convinced
himself he had the right to use the body of someone several
years younger. I don't know why my little boy didn't tell, after
all these years of being taught to tell, to say no. But the
explanations I'm given are intellectually bankrupt and laced
with blame.

The sources of abuse, any abuse, are complex and ambiguous. The
very definition of abuse is, too. We come home on Wednesday
evening, drained, and my son collapses on the couch with a
newsmagazine. I look over his shoulder and see a clothing
ad, the model a half-naked, wet-lipped girl, beckoning and
seductive. In a world of erotic and suppressed sexuality, I
wouldn't dream of simple explanations for sexual behavior of any
kind.

One Wednesday we separate into two groups, boys and parents,
and go to different rooms. One by one the adults describe their
particular fears, and at last I hear anger like my own, a
powerful need to know why this hard thing has been made so much
harder. One couple describes the late night phone calls, the
taunts, the insults that prompted them to move and change jobs.
Another says her son's teacher told the whole school staff what
had happened. One man says both he and his son have received
death threats. People speak of lingering depression, broken
marriages, rejection by their own parents and families. Several
boys have been in foster homes for months, even years, while
their parents struggle to have them returned.

"Am I the only one who is paranoid?" asks a young mother. "I
never take my eyes off my other children now."

"I'll tell you this," says an older man who rarely speaks. "My
wife died in a car wreck. This has been worse."

What I wish I could do is somehow find a way to tell these boys
they have a future. Sometimes I wonder if they do, if they'll be
allowed redemption, or if they'll just go through life in the
stocks of societal rejection, our new lepers. Me, I hope to find
redemption in my own held counsel, my moving forward and through
and beyond this, bringing both my children and my marriage with
me. We plan to move, change neighborhoods, schools, our lives.
And if one more paid professional says to me, as I tremble on
my cold, hard chair on Wednesday afternoon, "I know what you're
feeling," I swear I'll throttle him. I'll holler with all my
strength: You don't know. You don't. You don't.

Feb. 28, 1997


Baal <Baal@Usenet.org>
PGP Key: http://wwwkeys.pgp.net:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x1E92C0E8
PGP Key Fingerprint: 40E4 E9BB D084 22D5 3DE9  66B8 08E3 638C 1E92 C0E8
Retired Lecturer, Encryption and Data Security, Pedo U, Usenet Campus
- - --

Bob&Carole threatens to 'out' me -- I challenge him to do so....

Thu, 30 Jul 2009: Tomba is next, you'll have to wait in line.

Thu, 24 Sep 2009: 56 days and counting... *STILL* *NOTHING*

http://tinyurl.com/bob-carole-lies-again

Bob&Carole is also quite the hypocrite, as well as a liar -- after some
poster threatens to expose him, bob responds with:

... FIND ME, FAGGOT...that's all you have to do to save face...
Prove yourself. Show usenet that you can do what you claim
to be able to do.

Bob&Carole in alt.politics.homosexuality 2007-06-04 01:08
Message-ID: <1180963151.720214.90530@q66g2000hsg.googlegroups.com>

http://tinyurl.com/bobandcarole-hypocrite

When confronted over his failure to do to me what he claimed _he_ would do,
all Bob&Carole does is to demand proof that he ever said he would do what
he promised in the first place. What a lying hypocrite!

Sed quis custodiet ipsos Custodes?"  --  "Who will watch the Watchmen?"
-- Juvenal, Satires, VI, 347. circa 128 AD

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Borked Pseudo Mail (25.09.2009 02:20)
Johannes von Ebersdorf (25.09.2009 13:25)