Saturday, June 21, 2008

Top 10 ways to protect a pedophile

  1. Frame his protection as "protecting the privacy of his victims."
  2. Willingly, although perhaps inadvertently (at least at first), enter into a never-spoken-about covenant of silence about his actions with everyone else who knows about them.
  3. Convince yourself that your particular private silence is not really changing things all that much one way or the other in terms of the 300,000 children who are sexually abused every year in America.
  4. If anyone tries to break the secret covenant of silence, bully them, threaten them, and do everything in your power to make them stop.
  5. Convince yourself that the pedophile isn't doing it anymore, even if (especially if) there's not a *shred* of evidence to that end.
  6. Convince yourself that protecting him has nothing to do with your own ongoing unwillingness or inability to face the depth of the horror of what he did.
  7. Convince yourself that sexual interaction between an adult and a child, in this particular case, didn't *really* constitute sexual abuse.
  8. Convince yourself that the only way to avoid bitterness and unforgiveness is to continue to protect the perpetrator.
  9. Convince yourself that it's actually more loving toward the perpetrator, or toward others, to continue to hide what happened.
  10. Justify yourself to yourself (and others) by using Bible verses and passages and stories to accomplish points 1 through 9.
Totally confidential professional help available for both victims and perpetrators of child sexual abuse available at the stopitnow.org helpline, which is 1-888-PREVENT (That's 1-888-773-8368)

Also: Don't wait: Everyday actions to keep kids safe

2 comments:

Joe said...

Without wanting to sound at all dismissive or accepting of truly evil behaviour, sometimes things seem to have gone a bit too far. [I don't know the full facts, but on the face of it the story sounds like an over-reaction]

I don't want anyone touching my child. But then I'm not sure I want to prosecute anyone for speaking to her.

In church today, a homeless guy came in whilst we were drinking coffee. It is a family occasion, but we graciously gave him a free coffee (!) and then avoided speaking to him at all. It was like the whole room took a collective step backwards.

He gulped down the coffee and then staggered off somewhere else. Maybe he was pissed, I don't know. But from where I was sitting, he didn't appear to be a danger to anyone. He didn't even attempt to make eye contact with anyone, and got the hell out of there as quickly as possible.

Leslie said...

I agree we can take things too far, but what I think is really important is educating our kids. Teaching them what is right what is wrong, and HOW to protect themselves. My oldest is about to be 6 and he takes karate, they teach them stranger danger, and they teach them to scream, kick speacial areas, poke eyes pull hair, the whole nine yards. I love it! I love that my son is educated, that he knows what to do if a situation arises that he knows is wrong. We can't change the others out there, you can't watch everyone, but I can keep my eyse on the 2 little ones in my house. I can teach them to fight, to stand up for themselves. I don't want to teach them fear of the unknown, I want them to have the knowledge that they can handle the unknown, thru their faith in God,and faith in themselves.