Category Archives: Law

God Looks Away, Youth Minister Sex Offender Publishes Self-Serving Article (TW)

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At the core of “My Easy Trip from Youth Minister to Felon,” an article posted in the online version of Christianity Today’s Leadership Journal, is an odd and self-serving theological point: that God does not look upon sin, and that when sin continues long enough, God gives us over to it so that we might hit rock bottom and then seek redemption. God turning away is, according to the anonymous author, a convicted sex offender still in prison, the reason Jesus felt God had forsaken Him while He was on the cross—God could not look on His Son/Himself as His Son/He took on the sins of the world. It is God’s looking away, the author suggests, that allowed King David to embrace selfishness and send Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah, into battle to die, so that David might have sexual access to Bathsheba. In this same fashion, the author contends, God looked away so that the author might plunge deep enough into sin to be made to answer for those sins.

The author provides no theological discussion of why God also looked away from the victim of the author’s sin, implying (through the author’s shaky theological discourse, and his frequent use of “we” and “our”) that the teenage girl who had been manipulated into a sexual relationship with her youth pastor, shared in the sin, or simply had to be sacrificed so that the author could be redeemed. Without ever naming his actual crime, the author crafts a tale of a sexual predator in need of redemption, and a sexual assault victim as sacrificial lamb, all with God’s blessing/God’s inability to stomach what was happening. But if we are to look at God as incapable of looking on sin, or even the victims of another person’s sinful behavior, then it seems only right to assume God looked away throughout the process that led to the publishing of the article.

The article, taken down from Leadership Journal after much public pressure, can be read from an alternate site here.

I’m a bit torn about whether I think people should read it—not in the sense that I think it deserved to ever be published in the first place—it didn’t—but because it provides an interesting look into the kinds of self-centered justifications, and victim-blaming that sex offenders will endorse in an effort to convince people around them that they’re sorry and won’t ever do anything like that again, because, boy, they’ve learned their lesson, and (in this case) Jesus forgave them, so you should, too.

What was meant by the editors to be taken as a moving story of sin and redemption was, instead, merely a continuation of the abuse, prettied up with self-aggrandizing mock-contrition and Bible verses. And, sadly, the editors saw fit to tag it with the “related topics” of Accountability, Character, Failure, Legal Issues, Self-examination, Sex, and Temptation. Of those tags, “Failure,” and “Legal Issues” seem the only appropriate ones. “Sex” only fits in the broadest definition; whereas “Sexual Assault” or “Sex Offenses” would have been much more fitting. “Temptation” is little more than a label that normalizes the sexualizing of underage girls.

It's not somebody who's seen the light...It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah

It’s not somebody who’s seen the light…It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah

What I keep wondering in all of this is how the article came to be posted in the first place. Did the editors of Leadership Journal coordinate with prison officials to approve the project, or did they just accept it from some inmate, insisting via e-mail that he had a unique tale of a fall from grace and a re-acquaintance with God? Did they know the author prior to his incarceration? Is the author in a treatment program in prison? If so, were his treatment providers at all aware of what he was doing? Were lawyers for the author, lawyers for the victim, or the judge in the case aware of the intent to publish such a piece? And, perhaps most importantly, was the victim, or the victim’s family aware that any of this was happening? And did she/they have any say in the matter?

I ask the above questions because I cannot imagine that, prior to publication, the article was examined by anybody with any clinical knowledge of offender behavior—or, for that matter, by anyone with any sense of the damage done to victims of sexual assaults. If I give the editors the benefit of the doubt, then maybe I can view them as possibly well-meaning, but definitely confused/ignorant people looking to generate an attention-grabbing conversation about statutory rape. And while, it certainly grabbed plenty of attention, that was because it took a story of sexual assault and transformed it into a discussion about how easy it is to be seduced by a teen when one takes one’s eyes off of God, and vice versa. The sexual content is so subdued/obscured that it comes across as if it is intended to describe temptation only—definitely much more so than if it was labeled appropriately as child molestation, pedophilia, hebephilia, exploitation of a minor, statutory rape, or rape.

Any sex offender treatment provider who knows anything at all about what she/he is doing certainly would never have approved of the article as it appeared. Offenders in treatment (in or out of prison) are often given writing assignments wherein they are required to relay details of their behaviors and thought processes and demonstrate an understanding of the damage they caused, as well as the way they convinced themselves it was okay. And while I recognize that it wasn’t specifically crafted as a treatment assignment, the Leadership Today piece reads like an eloquent first draft of such an assignment, crafted with care before a treatment provider and/or members of a treatment group demanded changes due to the author taking a victim stance, failing to acknowledge the actual crime or its impact on anyone other than himself, and refusing to incorporate even the most rudimentary sense of understanding about how he built up to the offense and kept it secret for as long as he did.

Or perhaps it’s more like a second draft, after the offender removed most of the overt blaming of the victim, and switched, instead, to implied mutual blame or implied consent for the crime.

I have heard hundreds of variations on the same basic story told in the article, from the mouths of offenders, emphasizing the frustrations in their lives, the reasons they had contact with the victim to begin with, and the reasons they are not to blame (and, yes, a lot of them invoke religion as part of that). It is rare to come in contact with an offender who, from the beginning (not of the offense, but of contact with the justice system and the need for an evaluation for sexual deviancy) is capable of outlining how he (or occasionally, she) manipulated the victim to engage in sexual acts and to keep it a secret, how he justified the crime to himself, and what specifically happened (in clinically appropriate and criminally accurate terms), without putting a large portion of the blame on the victim for somehow enticing or seducing him.

Despite the author’s claim, added after the controversy erupted, that he takes 100% of the blame for the crime, and recognizes that what he once viewed as a consensual relationship was no such thing, the article itself tells a much different story—of a man who worked hard to build something up for the glory of God (and how he was really amazing at doing that work), and then how he accidentally broke it because he was being selfish. Without ever acknowledging the severe harm he did to the victim, harm that is likely to last a lifetime, he signals that he has returned to a life of service to God because he is involved in leading a ministry group in prison (another thing I have a really hard time with anybody allowing).

And while the author touches on one of his justifications for engaging in his behavior—that his wife was paying too much attention to their children, and not enough to him—he is only able to acknowledge the impact on his wife in the form of the fight they had when she found out about the crimes, and how she left in the middle of the night with the children. The author laments that he has not seen his children since, but doesn’t even mention the extreme embarrassment and devastation he caused his wife and children. Nor does he ever fully indicate that he recognizes how childish his justifications for his behavior were, or how those justifications were merely the starting point for a cycle of lying and manipulation committed for the sole purpose of having repeated sexual contacts with a minor.

In a truly terrible minimization of his behavior, the author compares his repeated sexual abuse of the victim (while implying she shared in an identical struggle with him) to the difficulty of smokers trying to turn away from cigarettes.

From the complete dearth of information in the article, if this really were a treatment assignment, once all the extraneous details, self-promotion, and claims to deserved forgiveness are removed it might sound a little more like this:

“In my 30s, I accepted a position with a church as the coordinator of youth ministry. I built up the group from just a few members until it was one of the largest youth groups in the region. I realized I was experiencing sexual attraction to one of the underage members. I manipulated her into having sex with me, and justified my sex offenses, in part, by blaming my wife for not paying enough attention to me. I had sex with the teen repeatedly. When my wife found out, she took our children and left. I was convicted of sex offenses and sent to prison. I am currently still in prison. I will be a registered sex offender for the rest of my life.”

And, if the author began to actually include the most obvious missing items, the skeleton of a real assignment, or perhaps a combination of real assignments, would start to look like this:

“In my 30s, I accepted a position with a church as the coordinator of youth ministry. I built up the group from just a few members until it was one of the largest youth groups in the region. I realized I was experiencing sexual attraction to one of the underage members, and that she looked up to me in a way that made it possible for me to manipulate her. I set about grooming her. I justified my sex offenses, in part, by blaming my wife for not paying enough attention to me. I managed to work up to the point where I convinced the girl to have sex with me. I then had sex with her repeatedly while convincing myself that she wanted to have sex with me as well, that she was mature enough to handle a sexual relationship with an adult who is an authority figure in her spiritual life, and that I was in no way manipulating her. I managed to keep her from telling anybody about our relationship through various forms of coercion, and went to great lengths to keep anyone from finding out about it. We eventually got caught. My wife, understandably, left me and took the children with her. I was arrested and convicted of sex offenses. I am currently in prison. I will be a registered sex offender for the rest of my life. The teenager I manipulated and raped will need a great deal of therapy and other supports in order to cope with the aftermath of my actions. My wife, my children, and numerous other people impacted by my behavior will also need support to attempt to repair the damage I caused. I recognize that I need to stay away from minors for the rest of my life, and that I can never be placed in any kind of position where I might have authority that can be abused, particularly over any people who could be considered ‘vulnerable.’ I also manipulated editors of Leadership Today into publishing an article I wrote that completely justified my behavior, and suggested that the victim was equally to blame for my sex offenses.”

The assignment would be given back with numerous, specific requests for much more “self reflection,” “accountability,” and actual identification of his specific behaviors and thoughts.

Becoming a sex offender isn’t an “easy” path as the author’s title suggests. It is one that is pieced together with care by the offender, and crafted to secure the cooperation of the victim(s). It is not, as the author portrays it, a little trouble in a marriage, a dash of arrogance, and some innocent flirtations evolving over time into mutual passion—passion that makes God look away, as if God were easily embarrassed. Such a description may be a very simplistic explanation of how an extramarital affair (the words the author uses along with “adultery” to describe his sexually exploitative behavior of a child under his care) evolves.

Unfortunately, by diving into this discussion, without any sense of just how manipulative the author was, and how harmful his words are, the editors of Leadership Journal have put themselves in a place where they must now back away from this discussion entirely. Rather than promoting a meaningful dialog about forgiveness and redemption, they allowed a sex offender to promote himself as a victim of the temptation to have sex with minors.  They allowed him to promote his story of redemption—a story that rings as false as any rapist having the arrogance to compare himself to Christ on the cross, as he suggests that God’s mercy has saved him, all while implying a teenage girl entrusted to him for guidance and education was just as responsible for being raped as he was for raping her.

 

THE Mental Health System Fix to Curb Gun Violence

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The National Rifle Association (NRA), having confused “the mental health system” with the Pre-cog arm of the FBI’s Future Crimes Division, has endorsed the idea that mass shootings, as well as shootings of the non-mass-variety, are the responsibility of said mental health system. It is with the NRA’s assigning of responsibility for gun-related violence, and the attendant assignation of authority to resolve the problem, that I present the following mental health assessment tool: the Gun Violence Prediction and Prevention Mental Health Assessment Protocol, version 1 (GVPPMHAP-I)

The following assessment tool is to be administered any time a person wishes to purchase a firearm of any kind, regardless of how many firearms those people may already own. In addition, all current firearm owners are required to submit to the assessment by, oh, say next week. Scoring and outcomes of scores are presented at the end of the assessment.

Overcompensation? What overcompensation?

Overcompensation? What overcompensation?

THE GUN VIOLENCE PREDICTION AND PREVENTION MENTAL HEALTH ASSESSMENT PROTOCOL, VERSION 1 (GVPPMHAP-I)

Instructions: Complete each of the following statements with the response that most closely resembles your own thoughts.

1. When you hear the phrase “assault weapon,” you think of…
a) a culturally accepted and understood term for certain kinds of weapons.
b) how you are so angry at peoples’ ignorance of gun specifics that you want to shoot somebody.
c) a pepper spray, a cumin pistol, a thyme bomb, a rosemary clooney, a mickey rooney.

2. Entering a fast food restaurant carrying an assault rifle…
a) causes other people to instantly perceive you as a threat, as it is a very irrational thing to do.
b) is my God-given right—you got a problem with that?
c) is a good idea given that a dimensional rift could open up at any time, leading to enormous, human-eating insects storming into our plane of existence, and it would really suck if you didn’t have your assault rifle with you when that happened.

3. The greatest American president of the 20th century is…
a) FDR, because the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
b) Ronald Reagan, who in one fell swoop proved he could take a bullet, and that mentally ill people are the real problem…not guns
c) Thomas Whitmore because he gave those aliens what-for.

4. Despite all evidence showing that women are much more likely to be the victims of gun violence when they have guns in their homes or on their persons than when they don’t…
a) women should be allowed to buy guns under the law just like men, much the same way women should be treated equally under the law in all ways.
b) the real problem is that women just don’t have ENOUGH guns.
c) women are the last, best hope for defeating the impending robot insurrection, so need to keep guns at all times, whatever the cost.

5. Guns don’t…
a) have any purpose being brandished at peaceful political rallies other than to intimidate people who disagree with those showing off their guns in public.
b) kill people; people with mental illness kill people!
c) get to tell me what to do. I tell them what to do.

6. Of the roughly 19,000 suicides in the United States each year, half of them are completed with firearms, suggesting that…
a) guns allow for impulsive, violent suicide attempts that are far more likely to be lethal than any other method.
b) See, I told you the problem is with the mental health system.
c) if I’m really serious about killing myself, I should probably get a gun.

7. We don’t need new gun laws, we just need…
a) to reinstate the old ones that were made unenforceable through the lobbying efforts of the NRA.
b) to get rid of all gun laws.
c) more mystery-flavor Doritos so that we may learn to thrive on the toxins in our environment and become one with cancer.

8. School shootings could best be stopped…
a) with a combination of measures, including reasonable gun control policies; working to get school staff, parents, and students engaged in the school community; and educating parents about the potential dangers of keeping weapons in the home when children/teens might access those weapons.
b) by displaying the Ten Commandments in the classroom.
c) by attractive teens who are able to resolve society’s ills through the power of dance.

9. Smart gun technology…
a) is a reasonable way to limit who can and can’t use a particular weapon.
b) is just another tool of the fascist government to prevent me from shooting any gun I can get my hands on.
c) is a bad step in the direction of weapons gaining full consciousness and realizing the threat posed by their human masters.

10. Each year in the U.S. there are roughly as many deaths by automobile as there are by guns, leading to the conclusion that…
a) guns should be regulated at least as heavily as automobiles and subject to similar controls, such as training in appropriate usage and safety prior to licensing, gun registration, and requirements for gun owners to purchase insurance to pay for any damages resulting from the use of said weapons.
b) automobiles are just as deadly as guns (false equivalencies and misunderstandings of statistics be damned).
c) Pixar should make a “Guns” movie, similar to their “Cars” movie, which tells the tale of waning small-town America through the eyes of a cocky AR-15, Blasty McRatatat, who becomes stranded in a sleepy, little community on the way to a gun show. Through their obvious goodheartedness, the quirky, adorable townsweapons teach the AR-15 to slow down and appreciate life one short burst at a time.

11. Banding together with other assault-rifle owners in order to intimidate government employees who are attempting to enforce a penalty against a racist rancher who has been stealing from the commons for decades…
a) makes you one of those outlaws with a gun, who needs to be stopped by law-abiding citizens with guns.
b) makes you a patriot who believes in the true values of America.
c) Cows are pretty cool. I could hang out with cows all day. It’s only good manners to always say, “Hi, cow!” every time you see a cow, although most of them would prefer if you called them by their proper names. I once knew a cow named Sister Maria Theresa Fortenzia. Isn’t that a funny name for a cow?

12. People who live in fear that the government is coming to take all their guns away…
a) are paranoid and creepy and should probably have their guns taken away.
b) are the only real Americans who are truly awake to the reality of the one-world-government dystopian hell soon to be visited on us all.
c) should know that the loss of their guns is the last thing they should be worrying about in the face of the one-world-government dystopian hell soon to be visited on us all.

13. The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is…
a) another bad guy with a gun, a cop, a good guy with pepper spray, a good guy who knows how to tackle a bad guy with a gun, reasonable gun control measures making it much more difficult for bad guys to get guns, enabling law enforcement to track suspicious purchases of guns and ammo, a good guy with a crossbow, a good guy with a knife, a good guy with an apple…sorry, that was several things that potentially have the power to stop a bad guy with a gun…but, y’know, if people are gonna kill somebody or stop somebody, they’re going to find a way to do it, and guns aren’t really necessary, right?
b) Wayne LaPierre’s fiery delivery of nonsensical rhetoric.
c) a well-aimed garbage truck.

14. This assessment involves a fourteenth question because…
a) paranoid conspiracy theorists would probably view an assessment with thirteen questions as being somehow satanic or otherwise involving the occult.
b) because it was probably crafted by liberal pussies who want to make sure it doesn’t reference anything patriotic or pro-America like the original thirteen colonies.
c) test subjects engaging in speculation about the number of questions on an assessment is a sure-fire way to identify people who have an unnatural obsession with the arbitrary connections they make, which seem irrational to anyone not sharing in their delusions.

Scoring is as Follows:
For every “a” answer, score one point.
For every “b” answer, score two points.
For every “c” answer…what the hell, two points seems reasonable.

Once the score is added up, engage the following procedures:

For anyone scoring a 14 or above:
• Prior to any gun purchase, a license for gun ownership must be obtained, which will include training in, and demonstrated proficiency in, use of the weapon, safe storage of the weapon, and proper maintenance of the weapon.
• Prior to licensing, the person desiring to purchase a firearm must pass a comprehensive background check.
• Prior to licensing, the person desiring to purchase a firearm must undergo a three-month waiting period.
• Prior to licensing, the person desiring to purchase a firearm must pass a rudimentary course in statistics/risk assessment so that they understand that they are much more likely to experience the death of a family member by gunshot wound due to having a gun in the home, than by not having a gun in the home, and that cars really are not more dangerous than guns unless a lot more people deliberately start using cars to kill people.
• Purchases of assault weapons, assault rifles, automatic weapons, and semi-automatic weapons will be disallowed.
• Any guns owned must be registered in a national database accessible by local government/police agencies for the basic purpose of making sure any law enforcement officers responding to a situation at a particular residence will have some idea of the level of danger they are facing there.
• At time of acquisition of any gun, owners must purchase firearm insurance at whatever going rates insurance companies deem reasonable for covering expenses related to use of firearms, including, but not limited to, costs for destruction of property, medical care, mental health care, and loss of life stemming from use of firearms.

In an ongoing effort to ensure the public safety, the “mental health system” reserves the right to impose further restrictions/sanctions on the ownership of guns.  Currently under consideration: a proposal by one Dr. Rock to increase the cost of bullets to $5,000 apiece.

The “mental health system” would like to thank the NRA and the American people for their trust and support in the design and implementation of the GVPPMHAP-I and its attendant requirements.

God Bless Anita Bryant

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Friday, May 16, I had my first experience with a mental health/chemical dependency conference hosted by a drag artist. The incomparable Aleksa Manila presided over the “Saying it Out Loud” conference, complete with multiple costume changes and delightfully tasteless jokes between various announcements, awards, introductions, and seminars. This was the thirteenth annual gathering of this conference, which was created with the goal “to continue to co-create learning, growth and understanding of the best practices and relevant clinical services needed to support members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning communities.”

Dr. Ronni Sanlo served as the keynote speaker, as well as screening a new documentary, “Letter to Anita,” about her almost-wasn’t involvement in LGBTQ activism. Now I’m going to get into a few spoilers here, but I don’t think the basics of Sanlo’s story are the heart of the documentary, as much as is the personal perspective she brings to them. So, when I say her activism “almost-wasn’t,” I mean that Sanlo, like a number of lesbian women of her generation, went about her life as a heterosexual woman, married (to a man) with whom she had two children, not really aware that there were other options.

Unfortunately, just as Sanlo was realizing that there were other options, that the attraction she felt to women wasn’t something that made her completely alone in the universe, Anita Bryant was ginning up Florida’s legislature to pass laws denying parental rights to gay parents. Sanlo’s divorce went through.  Her children, for all practical purposes, were taken away from her.

Liberty turns her back as Anita Bryant looks to the sky, expecting Jesus to fly down and smite the gays.

Liberty turns her back as Anita Bryant looks to the sky, expecting Jesus to fly down and smite the gays.

Hearing the story now, it seems unfathomable to me. In part, my disbelief comes because at the time Sanlo was being viewed as an unfit parent simply for acknowledging who she was, I was living a few doors away from a blended family—two lesbian mothers with three teenage children among them. Granted, at the time, I was in grade school and not really aware that the two parents in that household were ‘romantically linked.’ I was under the impression, for whatever reason, that the families were living together for other reasons—economic? ecological? I remember that, in the fifth or sixth grade, when our class was given an assignment to write an editorial letter about an issue of concern, I mentioned the family as I explained why we shouldn’t be mowing down forests and fields to build new houses when there were other options, including multi-family homes, that would allow greater preservation of nature. Clearly, I had missed the more important political/social issue facing the family.

At any rate, the nature of my neighbors’ relationship was eventually pointed out to me by gossiping peers, with the implication that I was stupid for not having realized it, along with the weird sexual goings-on that were certainly a part of that relationship. Not to say that I was super-forward-thinking at the time, but I knew the two women as my neighbors who had been pleasant to me whenever I encountered them. So whatever sexual things may have been going on between the two women were of about as much interest to me as those of the parents of anyone I knew. That is to say, I really didn’t devote much time at all to thinking about sexual things between various peoples’ parents, and may, as I tilted toward pubrerty and all manner of prurient thoughts, have actively avoided thinking about them.

As far as I was concerned back then, anyone who was cool and/or innocuous toward me warranted much less concern, anger, or fear than the bevy of teenage male piltdowners who seemed to have little more to do than roam the suburban streets trying to prove their masculinity by tormenting children much younger and smaller than them—a model of “manhood” I unfortunately subscribed to briefly when I hit a similar stage in life.

I can only imagine that the lives of the couple from the blended family had some parallels to Sanlo’s—at least in terms of them apparently having partnered with men to build families in order to live out the deliciously limiting American Dream. It’s not too big of a stretch to believe my neighbors, like Sanlo, had seen few other options for relationships but hetero marriage and procreation. It was my understanding that both of my neighbors were divorced, although, like same-sex partnerships, such things were not discussed a great deal at the time, despite divorce quickly becoming commonplace—something that would reach almost all of my friends who hadn’t, like me, experienced the death of a parent. And if the exes of my neighbors were still coming around to visit their teenage children, I wasn’t aware of it. Then again, I wasn’t aware of much that went on in the lives of those teens, since there was far too great of an age gap between us—that impossibly vast chasm between elementary school and high school—for us to concern ourselves with each other.

Speaking of parallels and gaps, “Letter to Anita” touches on another critical piece of Sanlo’s life that fits in with the development of my own understanding of individual rights, freedoms, and what it actually means to be something “other” than heterosexual: Anita Bryant’s crusade against, well, all people who don’t fit her very narrow definition of appropriate relationships (never you mind Bryant’s own divorce).

As I’ve noted before on my blog, I was raised religiously, in the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod. My father was a pastor in said church. My father died when I was rather young. I spent a great many years struggling with religious ideals and how they fit into the world. And despite my current agnostic tendencies, I still hold onto an idea of religion as an expanding element in peoples’ lives, a force that should open people up to larger experiences, a force that should create love and acceptance, as opposed to a limitation on peoples’ lives that causes anger, hatred, judgment, and closed-mindedness. I spent a lot of time struggling over moral issues, their relation to legal and spiritual concerns, and how we all get along as a people who are supposed to be dedicated to personal freedom, personal responsibility, community ties, love, and all the rest of that stuff.

But Anita Bryant, with her perfectly coiffed hair and starchily-pressed orange and brown polyester outfits, was telling me, in her own, orange-juice-endorsing way, to fear, hate and distrust people I knew, people who had shown me kindness, people I knew to be funny, smart, and no threat to me at all. She put out albums (which, as a teen, my younger brother delighted in purchasing from the local Goodwill for the purposes of mocking and destroying) filled with patriotic and religious songs, promoting the goodness of the USA and Jesus. Yet, everything she said, every objective she pursued, was in contrast to freedom, goodness, and the anti-judgmental stance that Jesus and America were supposed to represent.

Yes, Anita Bryant, in contrast to all she stood for, or wanted to stand for, had helped turn this white, hetero, suburban boy, and his white, hetero, suburban friends, into supporters of gay America…into people who would forever see the gay menace she was so sure was destroying us all, as nothing more than the paranoid delusion of close-minded, controlling, angry people who were completely incapable of seeing the irony of their anti-freedom, anti-love stance as they waved their flags and thumped their Bibles.  Anita Bryant, as Sanlo notes, managed to galvanize opposition to gay rights opposition–even out into the hetero world and parts of the Christian community she was so sure she could count on to share her views.

So God bless Anita Bryant. God bless Ronni Sanlo. And God bless us everyone.

The Danger of Desensitization: Child Pornography Users and Other Empathy-Sapping Traps

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In Grad School, I did my practicum work with an agency that specialized in the assessment and treatment of sex offenders, an agency I went on to work for as a contractor.  As part of the practicum process, along with the work students did at agencies, we also had class meetings that were structured more-or-less like a consult group, where a small number of students could discuss cases under the supervision of an instructor.  At one of these meetings, while discussing an occurrence that had thrown me off balance in the previous week, I said something along the lines of, “I was looking through the client’s file and thinking, ‘oh, child porn offender, no big deal’…”

As I continued on, I noticed several in my cohort registering mildly horrified looks on their faces.  It was as if I’d just casually told everyone present that I barbecued live kittens because I was fascinated by how the dome of my Weber impacted the tonal quality of the pained mewls of the kitties as they were burned alive.

Thankfully, the instructor did what she could to rescue me by noting that in certain areas of practice people become desensitized to the peculiarities of those fields.

Such distancing and desensitization was exactly what I was trying to highlight.  I had, in a fairly short period of time, gotten to a stage where a person who was arrested for possessing child pornography seemed much less insidious to me than somebody who—as we refer to it in the biz—had “hands-on” victims.  This was not my attempt to minimize the seriousness of child pornography, but my admission that I had begun compartmentalizing things in a way that was making it easier for me to cope—but in a way that potentially compromised my effectiveness in dealing with clients.

The point I had been moving toward when the barbecued kittens got in the way is that the charging papers for this particular client contained descriptions of the child pornography that had been recovered from the client’s computer.  For me, reading through those descriptions was a kind of reboot to the disturbing reality of just what “child pornography” or “depictions of minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct” entailed.  I will spare you good readers the details, but we aren’t talking about photos of little kids splashing around in the tub.  I will also say that, because the files had already been cataloged by the FBI in previous cases, the descriptions were pretty minimal, but distressing nonetheless.

As a (greatly simplified) note of explanation, the FBI tracks child pornography cases, and labels the “sets” of photos and/or videos that are uncovered in those cases—often with some readily distinguishable feature of the sets—so they can be easily identified each time somebody is found in possession of such files.  The bulk of child pornography that is exchanged involves files that have been floating around for some time.  In each case, efforts are made to track down everyone involved in sharing the files.  However, when new sets (files not previously cataloged) turn up, there is an intensified response to identify and shut down the source, as well as to find the victims and secure help for them.

As another note of explanation, the documentation on clients with hands-on victims routinely contains detailed information from the investigation, often including transcripts of interviews with the victims.  Generally speaking, case information from child pornography charges describe things such as from where the files were recovered (computer hard drive, storage disks, flash drives, etc.), the type of files (images versus video), and the number of items recovered.  Obviously, reading through a child’s account of being groomed and molested carries a much heavier impact than a brief mention of how many image files were found on a client’s memory stick.  Hence, my more startled reaction to reading the descriptions of the child pornography files on this particular occasion.

On some level, making a distinction between child pornography possession cases and hands-on victim cases speaks to a more generalized idea of how people interact online or with media, compared to how people interact with each other face-to-face.  That is, it is much easier to distance oneself from the feelings of people one only knows from images or Internet exchanges than it is to distance oneself from the pain of an actual person one knows.  From the perspective of a treatment provider, accepting such divisions becomes an easy way to compartmentalize, but also speaks to a number of lies—the lie of an offense of lesser seriousness for the offender, and by extension, the lie of lesser pain for those exploited.

A big part of the work done with offenders who have accessed child pornography, but have no hands-on victims, is breaking down their defense mechanisms that allow them to view child pornography as a “victimless” crime—the offender’s sense that they are not victimizing anybody because they didn’t create the porn or do anything directly to harm the children in it.  In some ways, working to establish a sense of empathy can be more challenging with users of child porn than with those who have hands-on victims, simply because it can be easier to get an offender to understand how they have harmed somebody they actually know, than it can be to get an offender to understand how they have harmed somebody in a picture or a video.  This is especially true since an offender is  unlikely to have any idea what has happened to a child in a series of pornographic photos in the time since those photos were taken, and much more likely for a hands-on offender to have some knowledge of the turmoil created in the life of a victim in the time since the offense(s) took place.

Still, child pornography ties sexual gratification to children, reinforces deviant arousal with the power of images, and provides a false sense to users of child pornography that they are not complicit in the harm that it does.  It also potentially creates the illusion for users that they are in control of what they are doing, and are capable of keeping that deviant gratification from making the leap out of their virtual worlds and into their real lives and the lives of potential victims.  And, of course, it’s illegal as @$#*%, and with good reason…great reason…unassailable reason.

The issue of child pornography is one that I have to address with clients on a regular basis.  But it is also one that I am seeing as a more frequent element in the ‘histories’ of the offenders I encounter—particularly for those in their twenties and younger.  On the one hand, I understand the possibility of increased use of child porn as a consequence of Internet access and the ability to find child pornography by chasing down links on a computer, as opposed to having to go through several steps to connect to purveyors via phone, through the mail, or in face-to-face meetings.  But on the other hand, I find the possibility of increased use to be somewhat shocking in the sense that I assume people realize just how much trouble they can get into for possessing it.  Also, it takes some effort to get to it.  It’s not the kind of thing that turns up in sidebar links when you’re shopping for curtains online.  And, given that reporting child pornography that one might encounter is also a matter of clicking a few links or making a phone call or two, one would think that anybody who came across it would report it, just to keep themselves out of trouble.

At any rate, I’ve carried the ‘barbecued kittens’ with me for years as a means of (trying to) remind myself to exercise caution in how I discuss my work, particularly with those who are not in the field, but also as a way of reminding myself that each case, each client, is a serious case, a client who needs some real help.  Compartmentalizing is often a necessary strategy for therapists working with challenging populations.  One cannot be effective if one is carrying around every deep emotional scar of every client, or internalizing each client’s negative behaviors.

But there also has to be that place and time for the compartments to get busted open, particularly while in session or during other client contact, where the reality of what a person has done, how they got to that point, and what they are doing about it now, are not things that can be shut out.  Obviously, that ‘busting open’ should not drown the therapist in overwhelming emotion of any kind, but instead needs to involve the ability of the therapist to connect with the client both as a supporter of positive changes, and as a challenger of negative habits and patterns.  That de-compartmentalization and re-sensitization must not lead to complicity in allowing a client to minimize his/her actions.

In dealing with the struggles that are attached to difficult fields and difficult clients, I am frequently reminded of a quote from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, from a story about the city of Necropolis, a home to specialists in preparing and honoring the dead: “It is our responsibility not to let it harden us.”

Indeed, as therapists working with difficult populations, it is often necessary to compartmentalize and protect ourselves from succumbing to the emotional toll such jobs can take.  But it is also necessary to avoid hardening ourselves against those realities if such hardening keeps us from connection not only to clients, but also to the impacts those clients have had on others.

 

GUN CONTROL OR PEOPLE CONTROL? Part Two: Psych Beds and Psych Meds–Faster Than a Speeding Bullet?

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As we pass the 13.5-month anniversary of the Newtown school shooting, and approach the 15-year anniversary of the Columbine school shooting (or, hell, pick a school shooting and do the chrono-math) we find ourselves struggling with the idea of stigmatizing people with mental illness in order to support easy access to guns and ammo—okay, not so much struggling as having to have a really stupid argument with people who love guns and people who know better than to engage in such a dangerous form of Objektophilie at the expense of fellow citizens, and while demeaning a particular group of citizens.

In an opinion piece that was posted on the Fox News web site just before the one-year anniversary of the Newtown school shooting, “Medical A-Team Member” Dr. Keith Ablow once again lends his severely-compromised credibility to the issue of gun control versus mental-health-system-blaming in order to craft an argument where fewer people would die if only there was increased access to psych beds and other psych services, and just as much, if not more, access to guns.

You can read the piece (all puns intended) here… http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/12/12/on-newtown-anniversary-america-mental-health-system-still-mess/

Dr. Ablow fires out a random assortment of gun- and mental-health-related ideas with the precision and deadly accuracy of a single blast of #9 shot, aimed to take down the elephant in the room—that no meaningful action has been taken to reduce access to unnecessarily powerful weapons and massive amounts of ammunition.  Of course, as with trying to take down an elephant with a single blast of #9 shot, all that Ablow does is irritate the elephant—or exacerbate the problem—by claiming that it is mental illness that is the real problem.

Ablow starts off by listing five mass shooters from recent years, and remarks that we “now know” that they were all severely mentally ill.  Ablow then abruptly shifts to talk about Virginia State Senator Creigh Deeds, whose adult son, Austin (aka Gus), slashed/stabbed the Senator (with a knife) and then committed suicide (with a gun) in November.  (Note: this crime did not involve mass killing).

Prior to the stabbing and suicide, Austin was under an emergency custody order for a psychiatric evaluation, which expired before a psychiatric bed was secured for him.  Multiple hospital officials in Virginia later stated that they had open psychiatric beds at the time Austin was turned away.  It’s unclear exactly how things fell apart in this case, but it wouldn’t be impossible for a six-hour hold to expire while an overwhelmed staff at one facility needed to present the case for, and secure a bed for, hospitalization at another facility.  It is also possible that Austin did not meet grounds for (mental health) detention.

Dr. Ablow states that Austin was “discharged from an emergency room where he complained of severe psychiatric symptoms.”  But there are a number of problems with this statement.  For one, it comes in the context of one of Dr. Ablow’s “We know” statements—and “we” do NOT “know” what Austin may or may not have said or “complained” about.  Also, given that Austin was under an emergency custody order, chances are that he wasn’t voluntarily seeking help.  If Austin was willingly seeking help, and considered competent to do so, then the order wouldn’t have been necessary.

Unfortunately, if a client is not a clear threat to self or others, or in danger of harm due to being incapable of caring for him/herself, the client (generally speaking) cannot be detained.  Senator Deeds stated, after the incident, that while he expected conflict with his son, he did not expect his son to turn violent.  And in Virginia (mental health evaluation and detention procedures differ from state to state) a person cannot be detained if the emergency custody order expires before a psychiatric “bed” is found.  By contrast, in a number of other states, if a person is viewed as detainable for mental health reasons, they can be held (for example, in an emergency room) until a psychiatric bed becomes available or the client is stabilized.

At any rate, Dr. Ablow devotes a one-sentence paragraph to greatly simplifying what happened in the Deeds case, and ensuring that nobody who reads his column would understand anything about how laws related to mental health treatment operate, or what is required of patients and evaluators in detaining a person for mental health reasons.

As a bit of an aside, I routinely speak with people who think that all it takes for the state to send out an ambulance with a couple of guys and a straitjacket to cart away a loved one is three people who will pinky-swear that a relative or close friend needs to be “locked up.”  This is the kind of information that comes from old movies involving a group of people conspiring to get a relative “committed,” so they can usurp the family fortune.  As another bit of an aside, think of how much you agree with the idea that it should be legal for the state to lock a person up based on a consensus among three people that the person is “crazy.”

But Ablow’s interest is not in creating greater understanding, or making any kind of appeal to anybody based on, say, critical thinking skills.  It’s in telling us how guns are not a problem when it comes to people being shot.

Strangely enough, to make his pro-gun argument, Ablow then discusses Adam Lanza, the Newtown, Connecticut mass-shooter, in deeper detail.  Lanza, Ablow explains, was “allowed” to “learn how to shoot a firearm” by his mother, Nancy, who was the first victim of Adam’s shooting spree.  Dr. Ablow apparently hopes that readers don’t remember/can’t do an Internet search to find out that Lanza’s mother had numerous guns and a great deal of ammunition in her home (where Adam also lived), all purchased legally, and, shortly before the killings, had even written a check to Adam so he could go buy his own gun.

Also, as with the Deeds case, Lanza’s mother indicated that she did not fear violence from Adam, despite his statements and behavior to the contrary, and despite the large number of weapons she kept in her home.  Nancy Lanza’s sense of safety in opposition to all signs to the contrary is not unusual.  Most gun-rights advocates seem to suffer from some sort of collective delusion that they cannot be harmed with their own guns, although statistically speaking, gun owners and their family members are much more likely to be shot with those guns (accidentally, self-inflicted, or otherwise) than any bad-guys.

While ignoring Nancy Lanza’s love of guns, Dr. Ablow notes Adam’s obsession with mass murder, his playing of “violent video games (including one about school shootings)” and that Adam lived in the basement of his mother’s home, where he had covered the windows with trash bags and only communicated with his mother via e-mail during the three months before the shootings took place.  Dr. Ablow mentions Lanza’s Asperger’s Disorder diagnosis, and posits that he “may well have merited other diagnoses.”

Well, given that most people with Asperger’s Disorder don’t take up arms against grade-school children, I’d guess Dr. Ablow might be right about that diagnosis piece.  Lanza had also been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, and with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (neither of which tend to lead to mass killing), and had been prescribed medications related to his various diagnoses, but there was little follow-up by Lanza or his mother with regard to the psychiatric care.

This leads to another point regarding how pointless it is to claim that the “mental health system” is to blame for the problem of gun violence.  If the family members of someone like Adam Lanza did little or nothing to get him help, and actively encouraged his access to guns, it seems rather ridiculous to think a psychiatrist would be able to correct that situation with a few days in the hospital and some medications.

Strangely enough…whoops, I mean, “of course,” Dr. Ablow doesn’t mention where Lanza got any of the weapons and ammunition, but instead highlights just how weird (he assumes his readers will believe) it is that Lanza lived in his mother’s basement, and spent time on computers.  Remember, kids, video games kill.  Living in your mother’s basement kills.  Having a massive arsenal of weapons in the home is NOT the problem.

Getting all compassionate, Dr. Ablow goes on to say that “untreated or poorly treated mental illness is” a problem.  He even italicizes it.  Oh, wait, let me back up off of that statement a bit, so that we can see that what he actually says is that (and let this soak in), an “anti-gun agenda misses the point: Firearms aren’t the responsible variable in mass killings: untreated or poorly treated mental illness is.”  (His italics)

Well, I don’t know, Dr. Ablow…I’ve got a weird feeling that there are a lot of people out there with untreated or poorly treated mental illness who don’t commit mass killings, at least in part because they don’t have access to a bunch of guns and ammunition.  (My italics)

After his impassioned, italicized plea that guns don’t kill people, people with mental illness kill people, Dr. Ablow awkwardly segues to a brief mention of the 1927 Bath School disaster as the example of the “worst episode of school violence ever” and notes (italicized and underlined) that it “involved no gun.”  (Yes, his underlining and italicizing).

The Bath School disaster is one of those weird things that pro-gun folk like to cite as a reason why school shootings really aren’t all that bad.   Unfortunately, it kind of undermines their argument if you actually look at it—because the Bath School disaster was committed using dynamite and incendiary pyrotol—substances that are not generally sold in your local Walmart.  Those explosives in particular aren’t actually available much anymore, pyrotol having been banned for sale to farmers in 1928 (the year after the Bath School disaster—committed by a guy who owned a farm), and dynamite having largely gone off the market due to the availability of more stable explosives.

Another fun fact is that explosives tend to be rather heavily regulated by the government.  After that whole episode of Timothy McVeigh blowing up the Oklahoma City Federal Building, a whole lot of regulations got slapped on the seemingly innocuous components of his fertilizer-truck-bomb.  So, if you want to make a connection about the appropriate action to take after somebody uses a certain kind of “tool” to kill a lot of people, bringing up explosives isn’t really helping your case.  After all, we don’t encourage people to go buy more explosives to make sure the good exploders can explode the bad exploders.

Ablow also forgets to make any relevant connection between Andrew Kehoe, the man responsible for the Bath School disaster, and mental illness.  Certainly, given that Kehoe was homicidal and suicidal, he could have been detained by today’s standards if his intentions were at all known.  But from all accounts, he was a rather angry, vindictive individual, like a lot of people who commit gun crimes.  Ablow fails to delve into the possibility that Kehoe was constantly playing Grand Theft Auto XIV, eating Cheeto-and-kale sandwiches (on Dave’s Killer Bread), and drinking Baja-Blast Mountain Dew, while masturbating to animated monster porn.

In another odd turn that undermines his argument, Ablow then chooses to discuss untreated mental illness, saying (in relation to suicide of all things) that, “shooting victims don’t come close to the body count from untreated mental illness in the United States.”  Apparently, Dr. Ablow,  thinks that “shooting victims” who shoot themselves don’t count.  Because suicides make up about two-thirds of all gun-related deaths in the U.S.  And suicide by firearm makes up about half of all suicides.

To give some nice, round numbers, there are over 30,000 firearm deaths per year in the United States, with about 19,000 of those due to suicide.  There are about 38,000 suicides total.  The next-highest category of suicides is suffocation, which accounts for around 9,500 deaths.  But “suffocation” includes a variety of things such as hanging, cutting off one’s air with plastic bags over one’s head, and using one’s car exhaust to deprive an enclosed space (and, hence, oneself) of oxygen.

Along with failing to mention that suicides by gun account for the lion’s share (sorry lions) of suicides, Ablow also neglects to mention that a big piece in risk assessment and suicide prevention involves removing firearms from the homes of suicidal (and homicidal) people.  After all, why would anyone take the guns away from people who are suicidal or homicidal (or who are so paranoid as to think that the government is coming to take their guns away)?  Why would anyone take guns away as part of “fixing” the mental health system?

Dr. Ablow then makes the tragi-comedic statement that he wishes that in the year since the Newtown shootings the Surgeon General would have, “declared war on mental illness.”  I suppose Dr. Ablow means a declaration of war on mental illness—like where a lot of resources are committed to treating mental illness and maybe to getting rid of the stigma associated with mental illness—as opposed to declaring war on those with mental illness.  Because, in effect, blaming mental illness and the failures of the “mental health system” for mass shootings, instead of viewing easy access to the tools for killing (guns and ammo) is a rather shaky position to take.   As a general rule, “untreated mental illness,” which covers a huge range of possibilities, is not the vehicle by which metal projectiles end up penetrating children’s skulls.

Ablow goes on to compliment the Obama administration for providing additional funding for mental health care through the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act. No, really, a guy on Fox news said the Obama administration kinda-sorta did something good.  But he then condemns the Obama administration for undermining mental health care by trying to ensure access to mental health care via “Obamacare.”  He says that insurance companies do nothing but try to block access to mental health care, and because Obamacare tries to bring down costs, it sucks that people are going to have access to mental health care and the insurance companies that want to deny them care.

So, I think Ablow’s point is that Obama tried to do some good, but failed because he didn’t devote enough resources to it.  Increased access to mental healthcare is good, but failure to provide enough money for the highest levels of mental healthcare is bad?  What’s the remedy for that?  Dr. Ablow apparently thinks the remedy is mental health spending in whatever amount is necessary to put all people dealing with mental illness of any kind into the ongoing care of a psychiatrist…because we all know that what helps people diagnosed with a mental illness…any mental illness…is somebody who prescribes them the right medications.  Right?

Let’s do it, then, Dr. Ablow: provide unlimited funding for unfettered access to psychiatrists for all people who are diagnosed with a mental illness.  What does that entail?  Monthly check-ins with a psychiatrist?  Weekly check-ins?  Daily check-ins?  It’s hard to know what Dr. Ablow is talking about, because he states that MDs need to be in charge of the care of any person who needs mental health care.  But unless we increase spending on mental health care by billions, and find a gusher of a grad school, spewing psychiatrists, his ill-defined proposal isn’t going to work.

What Dr. Ablow (very vaguely) proposes is sheer fantasy.  And the reason he proposes fantasy to deal with a real world problem is that if a real world problem has a fantastical answer, then that real world problem never has to be solved.  We can keep saying, “Fix the mental health system,” or, “Make sure the mentally ill can’t get guns” all while we ignore the fact that we have no intention or way to fix the mental health system in the fashion proposed.

Maybe a better solution is to allow mental health professionals to evaluate people who want to buy guns.  If you meet certain diagnostic criteria, you are not allowed to own a gun.  If you own a gun, everybody in your house must undergo annual psychiatric testing.  But, then, wouldn’t the desire to own a gun be an indication of mental illness, since the intent to own a gun to protect oneself from bad guys would indicate an intention to shoot somebody?  Well, nevermind, it would all be rather expensive anyway.

Dr. Albow leans toward closing his piece out by claiming that “We haven’t done anything to meaningfully coordinate police departments and the courts with the gutted community mental health system.”  Aside from the idea that the mental health system has been “gutted,” I think those involved in dealing with the “mental health system” might find Dr. Ablow’s statements false and offensive.  Because, despite massive budget cuts, and childish blame-cops-judges-and-mental-health-providers arguments like Dr. Ablow’s, numerous police agencies, court systems, and mental health agencies have been doing their damnedest to coordinate care, and provide community education into how to navigate the complicated legal knots of the system. They’ve also been doing what they can to get guns out of the hands of people who are potentially suicidal and/or homicidal, despite the best efforts of the NRA to make sure that everyone, regardless of mental health status, has access to guns.

Dr. Ablow actually closes out his piece by claiming that the Newtown school massacre was “entirely preventable”—which I guess it was, but not by anything that would happen in Dr. Ablow’s fantasy world where psych beds and psych meds negate bullets.  He states that the real surprise in the year since the Newtown school massacre is that there wasn’t “another” Newtown massacre.  But I’m guessing that the parents of the children who were the victims of the 27 school-shooting deaths and 35 gunshot injuries committed in schools in the year following Newtown might disagree with the idea that there was not “another” Newtown.   Sure, there wasn’t a single incident where the same number of people were killed and injured. But what kind of world is Ablow living in where he is willing to excuse even one person being shot at a school in a given year, and to blame mass shootings on mental health providers and people with mental illness, while choosing to support the right of gun manufacturers to continue to provide just about anyone with access to firearms and ammunition designed specifically for killing people?

GUN CONTROL OR PEOPLE CONTROL? Part One: The NRA’s Build-a-Bogeyman Workshop

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It doesn’t matter how many shots are fired and how many bodies pile up—particularly in those attention-grabbing mass shootings—the cry goes out, crafted by the NRA, that it is something other than guns and ammunition that needs to be addressed. The most recent and prevalent pro-gun meme is that it’s the mental health system that needs to be fixed, while guns are just great. In fact, guns are so great that everybody should have them all of the time, except for criminals and those people with a severe mental illness. But if any criminals or people with mental illness try to shoot any of us good people, then we can all pull out our guns and shoot them back, and definitely shoot them better, harder, faster, and, just for good measure, deader.

Prior to the pro-gun, blame-the-mental-health-system meme, it was the, “We don’t need new laws, we just need to enforce the existing laws” meme. Of course, since the NRA lobbied to make sure that the existing laws wouldn’t be enforced, and, in fact lobbied to have laws enacted that made it illegal to enforce the earlier existing laws, they had to come up with a different cheer for team shoot-em-up. So, hence: guns good; mental health system bad.

There’s this other, less clearly- and less frequently- articulated position underlying the broken-mental-health-system argument, that people working with the mentally ill are incompetent, first of all, for allowing the system to fall into disarray, and second of all, for not being clairvoyant enough to determine which of the people they encounter who express some form of homicidal ideation are just talking nonsense and which really are stockpiling weapons or have access to weapons their family members stockpiled, so that said mental health professionals can then direct law enforcement to stop the future crimes. Okay, in fairness, there are ways to assess for danger—not that the NRA didn’t lobby to try to prevent anybody in the medical and mental health fields from even asking people anything as simple as whether they have access to guns.

But fortunately, the NRA has finally stepped up and has been instrumental in working to address real-life situations and offer up functional ideas for systemic changes, like, “You guys need to fix the mental health system so that people with mental illness stop shooting people, okay?” Except there’s that whole thing about how people with mental illness who actually commit violent crimes (a very tiny portion of them) are not generally compliant with treatment if they’re even in treatment to begin with. So not only do mental health practitioners have to accurately determine which of their clients might commit violence and make sure those clients are stopped from doing so, but they also have to ferret out all of the potentially violent people with mental illness, even if they have never even met them.

Anyway, what I’m saying is that the argument about fixing the mental health system is a nonsensical argument for a WHOLE lot of reasons…most notably that it’s an argument designed for inaction as far as gun laws go, while setting up a bogeyman that can spring out and yell ‘boo!’ anytime there’s a high-profile shooting. For instance, if somebody commits atrocities, such as shooting up a theater or a school, then we can all say, “Wow, this guy was obviously disturbed. Why wasn’t he getting any help?” Or if said shooter was in treatment, we can say, “How come more wasn’t done to make sure he wouldn’t hurt anybody?” Or if there are no clear indications that a shooter was, for example, psychotic or in treatment, we can always fall back on the idea of undiagnosed mental illness. The broken-mental-health-system argument is also convenient for all those 19,000-ish annual suicides by gun.

The argument to fix the mental health system is also nonsensical because it essentially allows the problem of gun violence to go on forever. That is, no set of laws is ever going to solve the problem of murder 100%, but when the argument is that guns aren’t problematic, but the mental health care system is, then as long as there are shootings, we can keep hemming and hawing, failing to enact simple measures like universal background checks, or tracking of Internet-based weapons and ammunition sales, or making certain classes of weapons flat-out illegal.

In addition, the broken mental health system argument allows gun manufacturers to rack up more gun sales. After all, what are a few dead kids if you can rake in some extra dough by letting 24-hour news networks scare everybody into thinking they need to arm themselves against a bunch of crazy people who are going to shoot their kids? (or invade their homes, or shoot them in a theater, a mall, a church…) Just check out how gun sales spike after high-profile shootings, combined with talking heads appearing on news shows to say stupid things about how the crimes would have been avoided if only everybody on scene had been armed. Check out the secondary spike in sales when the same talking heads suggest that gun laws are going to suddenly become so restrictive that nobody is going to be able to buy a gun anymore.

On top of that, the majority of the people who parrot the broken-mental-health-system meme have no idea how the mental health system actually works, or how it interacts with law enforcement, hospitals, and the court system, or what could actually be done to “fix” it. Nor do most of them care, since it conveniently props up their view of things, without them having to actually learn or understand anything. They’re super-familiar with arguments about why killers are going to kill just as many people whether they have clips with 8, 27, 92, or 412 rounds; why it doesn’t make a difference if a person has access to a pop gun, a hunting rifle, an AK-47, or a BFG-9000; and why any gun control measure at all is useless because criminals are going to get guns anyway, and then only law-abiding citizens will be left unarmed.

Don’t bother trying to point out that all kinds of laws exist that, just as the concept of law implies, are followed by law-abiding citizens, and violated by criminals, and that what makes a person a criminal is that the person violates a law. After all, the no-gun-control stance involves absolutist/absurdist arguments where ANY restrictions on guns and ammunition mean all law-abiding citizens lose ALL access to their guns and ammo, and criminals suddenly have unfettered access to all the weapons they could ever want so that they can create the maximum amount of mayhem. It’s an argument that requires a good dose of the paranoia that persons with mental illness who carry out violent crimes sometimes exhibit.

But the logical extension of the no-gun-control kind of argument is that we could get rid of “gun crimes” and “gun criminals” completely if we could just get rid of all laws related to guns, because then there would be no gun laws to violate. Then we only have to enforce the existing laws against murder. Yup, what’s really broken is the anti-murder system in this country. And if we all had more guns, we could solve that, too.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I would absolutely love it if we, as a nation, were going to get serious about “fixing” the mental health system (makes it sound so simple, doesn’t it—kind of like fixing a leaky faucet or fixing your basset hound). But getting that fix all taken care of isn’t happening anytime soon, since it takes a whole lot of money, a whole lot of changes to the legal system, enough well-trained mental health professionals working in tandem with law enforcement and other community resources, a whole lot more places to keep persons with severe mental illness while they get treatment, and a whole lot of money. Oh, I guess I touched on that money one already.

Of course, a big block to getting the mental health system fixed is that a lot of the same people screaming at everybody about prying beloved guns from cold dead hands and fixing the mental health system are the same ones screaming to slash taxes and remove all government funding from everything everywhere. A lot of them are the same ones who worship former President Ronald Reagan, who loved the idea of shutting down psychiatric facilities in favor of “privatizing” the oversight of people with severe mental illness, who need a lot more than a place to stay and a minimum-wage worker to watch over them.

And even with that “privatization” of things like residential homes and intensive outpatient programs, guess who is paying for mental health care for the people with the most severe mental illnesses. Go on, guess. If you said “the government,” then you’re right. And if it’s a puzzle to you why people with chronic, severe mental illness aren’t getting good jobs with great insurance plans to pay for all the medications, therapy, and hospitalizations they require, well, then I obviously can’t make you understand how we’re ever going to “fix” the mental health system.

So, how do you reconcile de-funding everything in the government, including the mental health system—particularly those long-term inpatient facilities where the people with the most severe mental illnesses stay (or, rather, used to stay)—with the idea that we’re going to fix the mental health system to keep all the most dangerous people with mental illnesses off the street so that we don’t have to have any new gun control laws? Well, the real answer is that you don’t, because it’s a nonsensical argument in the first place.

Now, happily—well maybe not happily, since it took multiple mass shootings and the NRA clamoring to prevent any gun control laws from being enacted while simultaneously screaming about the broken mental health system—mental health funding is kinda-sorta being restored to the very limited levels that existed back when G.W. Bush was president. Unfortunately, those levels are still not anywhere close to the level—comparatively speaking—that such funding was at when dear, old Ronald Reagan became President. So, thanks NRA—you are advocating for restoring all 40,000-ish psychiatric ward long-term “beds” for those with chronic, severe mental illness that went away back when Ronald Reagan was in office, right?

Beyond the complete insincerity behind the NRA’s argument that the mental health system needs to be fixed, the NRA is actively doing a disservice to the people of the United States—a disservice that actually serves the NRA well by scaring up gun sales. By creating a bogeyman out of people with mental illness, the NRA promotes the idea that people who are diagnosed with a mental illness are inherently dangerous, unhinged, and likely to kill us all. Never mind that the mental health system deals with a wide array of concerns, from situational depression to anxiety disorders, PTSD to schizophrenia, and that the majority of those people are never going to commit a violent crime. By squawking that gun violence is a problem of the mental health system, as opposed to a problem with multiple facets, most notably of ensuring easy access to guns, while provoking fear of one’s fellow citizens, the NRA sets the country on yet another course to doing nothing about gun violence, while spreading ignorance about what mental illness is or what it means. The NRA provokes more fear of a big portion of the population, perpetuates a culture where people will avoid seeking help for mental health issues for fear of becoming part of that bogeyman group, and provides an excuse for inaction that will see no end. After all, as long as there are shootings by people who can be labeled as having a mental health issue–bam–the mental health system failed. It’s got nothin’ to do with the guns themselves.

If you want to consider whether the NRA has anybody’s best interest at heart, consider that following the Newtown school shootings, more than 85% of the American people supported instituting ‘universal background checks,’ but the NRA managed to ensure no action would be taken through the power of the almighty dollar. The NRA can threaten to withhold money from political campaigns, or worse, to dump massive amounts of money into campaigns to take out politicians who do anything they don’t like.

The NRA, aka the gun manufacturer’s lobby, knows that an occasional scare is good for business—and having a bogeyman is the best thing possible—especially when that bogeyman is easily stigmatized, poorly understood, and getting the problem of the bogeyman “fixed” could take forever. The whole fix-the-mental-health-system argument put forth by the NRA is nonsensical because it posits that it is easier to “fix” a complex system that attempts to address the needs of people with a broad range of conditions that are not set, uniform, or easily managed than it is to restrict access to the things that people—many who avoid contact with the mental health system prior to committing heinous acts—use to kill people.

AM I REALLY SUPPOSED TO THREATEN TO SHOOT MY DAUGHTER’S BOYFRIEND?

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I suppose the title question of this piece is something of a moot point, or rather, the threat to shoot my daughter’s boyfriend would be an empty one, as I don’t have any guns with which to shoot my daughter’s boyfriend—or anybody else. I do have a potato gun.  Home invaders take note.

That said, this is the first holiday season where my (adult but still teen) daughter has had a “boyfriend” important enough to her that we had to consider their plans when making our family plans.  And, happily, she spent time with his family, and he with ours.  And I’ll say I like the guy.  I feel that my daughter has chosen wisely and connected with someone who compliments her, and vice versa.

After the Christmas round of holiday gatherings had come to an end, and I had returned back to work, I got to thinking about the all-too-frequent jokes and ‘memes’ I see in social media that involve threats to shoot boys who are taking peoples’ daughters out on dates (probably because I’ve seen several in the last few days—the most recent involving one of those Dick Dynasty beardos whose family values apparently include threatening to shoot other peoples’ children just for expressing an interest in dating his daughter).

Dads take note: if you want to shoot the boys who have had impure thoughts about your teenage daughters, you should probably shoot all the heterosexual teen boys who have ever seen your daughters.  Or so the predictable jokes go—relying on the idea that all dads used to be teenage boys themselves and so know how vile teenage boys are.  And is that how we as men think back on ourselves as teenagers?  That we really were so vile that we would have raped any time the chance presented itself?

And isn’t there some way that those “vile” and “impure” thoughts can be channeled into more positive outlets—say, like normalizing sexual thoughts and providing some guidance on how to deal with those, rather than tying sexual thoughts to threats of violence?  Or do we really believe that our sons are perpetually on the verge of rape?  Do we believe our daughters are so clueless that we cannot trust them with their own bodies?  Do we have to threaten violence against teen boys to make sure that our teen girls come home with their “virtue” intact?

And what if our daughters are not interested in maintaining that barrier?  Isn’t it better that our daughters are taught to understand what they’re comfortable with, and how to communicate that, and to seek out partners who respect that?  And while we’re at it, how about teaching our sons the same?  If boys know that it is okay for them to be “uncomfortable” with regard to sex, or to value girls for the same kinds of things they value their male friends for—common interests, for instance—they might feel a lot less pressure to be so gung-ho about looking at our daughters through such a narrow lens—they might be able to see our daughters as people rather than as sexual targets.

And beyond all that, what is it with adult males feeling the need to threaten the boys/young men who have expressed an interest in their daughters?  At it’s most base expression, this is a pissing contest over sexual access to the females of the species.  It is treating our daughters as property or livestock.  It is sending the message to girls not that their fathers want what’s best for them, but that their fathers don’t trust their judgment.  It sends clichéd messages that girls are not interested in sex, and that only men can be trusted with (and are never to be trusted with) protecting women’s lady parts.  On top of that, it, perhaps unintentionally, sends the message that all men are rapists that need to be stopped by other, more powerful men.

All of this takes on an even more twisted element when we look at how rape victims are treated in this culture.  Girls and women who come forward with complaints of sexual assault are viewed first in terms of what they must have done to invite the sexual assault.  Where were you?  What were you wearing?  Were you drunk?  Using drugs?  Why are you making these accusations?  Men and teenage boys are too often excused for rape, especially if they have some status in the community and/or if their victims can be shown to be (or it can be implied that they are) less-than-perfectly-pure in every way.

The whole “get my daughter home on time or I’ll shoot you” (read: you are not to have sex with my daughter or I’ll kill you) idea plays on the idea that boys/men are incapable of controlling themselves sexually when they have time alone with a girl/woman.  It plays on the idea that girls/women are not to be trusted with their own sexuality or sexual decisions.  Worst of all, perhaps, it plays into adolescent revenge fantasies where girls/women are perpetually the victims or prizes in contests between men–that girls’/women’s chastity counts, but girls/women don’t.

Men in our culture (myself included) are not generally taught how to engage their emotions in productive ways, but to channel everything into problem solving, feelings-dodging, and violence.  It is in this context that we tell our daughter’s boyfriends that we’ll shoot them if they “come home late.”  It is also in this context where we connect violence and sex on numerous levels.

If we as men think of teenage boys as little more than rape machines with faulty safety mechanisms, or worse yet, think that we were rape machines as teenagers, then we excuse the worst of male behaviors as nothing more than biology—hormones acting out the only way they can express themselves—violently.  And that’s simply not true.  It is not only as teenagers that people have powerful sexual urges, or multiple forms of confusion and angst over various aspects of sexuality and relationships; and it is never acceptable for those urges to be translated into violence.  It is as teenagers that we should really be learning how to navigate relationships in a positive fashion.  It is as adults that we should guide teenagers—and that means mentoring our daughter’s boyfriends, not threatening to kill them.

I would much rather welcome my daughter’s boyfriend into the family and make him feel comfortable than to threaten him.  But then again, I don’t imagine my daughter coming home with somebody who I would feel threatened by—someone I would feel the need to engage in a pissing contest.  This is not to say that I feel my daughter is immune to sexual assault, or even bad decisions in choosing guys to hang out with.  It is to say that I do what I can to convey my trust in her, but more importantly, to let her know to trust herself as a whole person. 

I WAS A MERCENARY IN THE WAR ON CHRISTMAS

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I fired the missiles at the exhaust port then yanked on the reins of the goats that were pulling my sleigh, steering them up and away from the trench (goats being the sleigh-pullers of choice due to their magic-corn-induced ability to fly in space, not because of their association with certain dark lords).  They flew hard, keeping us just inches ahead of the debris from the explosion of the Christmas Star.  It was a direct hit!  We had destroyed the Christmas Star!

We knew it was just one battle—a minor setback for an enormous holiday—that another star would almost certainly be built.  But, still, we flew back to our secret outpost and had a ridiculously ornate awards ceremony at an ancient, abandoned, pagan temple.  As the Princess slipped a medal around my neck, I swelled with pride.  I thought, “Take that, Christmas!!”

* * *

Many years have passed since that first assault on the Christmas Star.  I won’t detail all that has happened in the time since, only say that I am a changed man.  Now my days of rebellion are behind me.  Still, ever a mercenary at heart, it only makes sense to go where the money is.  And the real money is on the side of Christmas.

Plus, all I have to do on this side of the war is sit around and whine and complain that people are attacking Christmas, despite the fact that it is ever-present from early October until sometime in January.  But as a white, American male, that is my birthright—to complain that traditional values are coming under attack, just because there are people in this county who don’t do the things that I do, and fail to honor my traditions while I berate theirs.

Take that, Christmas, indeed.

Of Sex Offenders, Sentencing, and Suicide

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Dear Judge G. Todd Baugh,

It’s been about a month since the height of the media attention on the less-than-minimal sentence you gave to teacher Stacey Rambold for violating the terms of a plea deal on charges of rape stemming from a sexual relationship he had at his age of 49 with then-14-year-old Cherice Morales.  In some baffling…uh…I guess you’d call it legal reasoning, you expressed that Rambold had suffered enough as a result of being under the “control” of Cherice, who committed suicide just shy of her 17th birthday in 2010.

I don’t want to devote too much time to going over old ground that plenty of other people have covered, like about your use of ridiculous sexist stereotypes, and your blame-the-victim mentality.  What I really want to do, Judge Baugh, is kick a few ideas your way, from a clinical perspective, in the hopes that you might understand Mr. Rambold’s behavior and how and why it led up to his appearance in your courtroom in late August.  Since Rambold just completed his grueling 30-day sentence yesterday, there’s a possibility that he is going to land back in your courtroom on appeal of that sentence.  So let’s just call this a teachable moment.

In handing out a 30-day (of 15-years) sentence, when prosecutors had pushed for ten years (of 20), you argued that Rambold had already been punished enough.  You lamented Mr. Rambold’s loss of his job, loss of his teaching license, loss of his house, and loss of his wife, as well as Mr. Rambold having to suffer the “Scarlet Letter of the Internet” whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean.  Hester Prynne didn’t get in trouble for having sex with one of her teenage students.  And Mr. Rambold, unlike Prynne, did not try to protect his sexual partner.  If protecting Cherice was his goal, Rambold would have accepted his responsibility and taken a plea deal from the beginning, to keep Cherice from the threat of being grilled in a courtroom.  (I could go into a lot more detail with the literary comparison/contrast here, but let’s just leave it at that).

Now, it’s weird that you consider Mr. Rambold’s loss of his wife and his house as punishments he received for having engaged in the rape of a minor.  What happened between Rambold and his wife as a result of his sexual relationship with a student (and whatever other factors were involved) has nothing to do with any punishment handed out by the courts.  There are plenty of sex offenders who have partners or spouses who stick by them, and plenty whose wives/partners leave them, but that’s a discussion for another day.

Likewise, Mr. Rambold’s loss of his house is not a punishment handed out by the court for having violated laws against having sex with underage girls.  I’m guessing Mr. Rambold lost his house either in the divorce from his wife, or as the result of losing income.  But either way, that has nothing to do with the sanctions of the court for committing a sexual offense.

Some of the specific sanctions that came directly as legal consequences of Rambold’s actions, like losing his teaching license, are clearly spelled out in the law, and for reasons I think most people would agree are necessary.  Perhaps you disagree, Judge Baugh.  Perhaps you do not feel that teachers owe it to their students, the families of those students, and the community at large to steer clear of sexual relationships where there is a vast age, power, and maturity gap.  Perhaps you think that teachers should be able to have sex with 14-year-old students, so long as they pick the “mature” ones.

Perhaps, Judge Baugh, you even think Mr. Rambold should have his teaching credentials restored, and that he should be placed back in a high school.  But from the standpoint of his pathology, he already broke down his internal barriers that might have kept him from engaging in sex with minors/students.  And those barriers don’t really ever get put back together in full.  They can be patched up a bit.  People like Rambold can learn to stay well away from situations where they’ll end up having to rely on those damaged barriers to keep them out of trouble.  But Rambold’s barriers almost certainly won’t hold if he is put back in among teens in a position of authority and trust.

And speaking of being in among teens, Judge Baugh, you didn’t think that it was all that important that Rambold was hanging out, unsupervised, with minors.  From what I can tell, you rationalized this away (or let Mr. Rambold’s lawyer rationalize this away) as being a non-issue because the minors in question were relatives of Mr. Rambold.  Now, from a clinical standpoint, that may or may not make a difference to whether he would re-offend against those particular children.  But it’s not considered a good idea to leave someone who offended against minors in a situation where that offender is alone with minors, relatives or not.

Just a little question, Judge Baugh, would you leave your underage relatives in the care of Mr. Rambold?  Here’s a hint from the treatment perspective: the correct answer is “No.”

And, Judge Baugh, you indicated that you weren’t too concerned that Rambold’s repeated rules violations led his treatment provider to kick him out of the program—you know, the treatment program Rambold agreed to attend as a condition for avoiding prison.  I’m guessing you’re not aware that failing to comply with treatment is considered an acute risk factor for re-offense.  Or maybe you are aware of how risk assessments work, since you were sure that Mr. Rambold was doing just fine because he had been rated as “low-risk to re-offend.”

But you know what?  Almost all non-violent (the ones who groom victims into compliance, rather than forcing them into sex) and non-hands-on offenders are considered “low risk to re-offend.”  Contrary to popular belief, sex offenders (again, of the non-violent sort) have a low rate of recidivism once they’ve been caught.  And that recidivism rate drops even lower with treatment.

A funny thing about those ratings, though, is that the ratings are generally predicated on the assumption that the offender’s behavior is actually going to match up with the information used to obtain the risk-level rating.  In other words, the rating is only as good as the information used to obtain the rating (and the quality of the rating tool, and the ability of the rater to use the tool correctly).  For instance, when the evaluator is doing the risk assessment, if it is assumed that the offender is not going to be left unsupervised with minors (which should be a given for anybody in Rambold’s situation), but then Rambold is left unsupervised around minors, then that rating loses more than a smidge of its reliability.

I also noticed, Judge Baugh, that you didn’t seem to think it was such a big deal that Mr. Rambold failed to show up for multiple sessions with his treatment provider.  So, Judge Baugh, when people are scheduled for court dates in your courtroom, is it important to you that they actually show up?  Also, how do you proceed with cases when involved parties aren’t there?  I’m guessing that things don’t turn out in favor of the people who don’t appear for their court dates.  So, that’s kind of the same thing that goes on when a sex offender doesn’t show up for treatment sessions—it doesn’t work out in his favor.  Or at least it’s not supposed to.

It’s also quite difficult for a treatment provider to get a feel for what’s going on with a client who fails to show up for appointments.  It’s considered kind of important when you, as a treatment provider, are supposed to be holding an offender accountable for his behavior, but that behavior includes skipping treatment—you know, because skipping treatment isn’t really considered being accountable.  Believe me, nobody wants that kind of liability.  This is why most states, including your home state of Montana, have laws that allow for offenders to be thrown into jail and/or prison when they violate the terms of their plea deals.

As a treatment provider, do you know what else makes it difficult to keep tabs on an offender?  Lies and lying.  Maybe you weren’t aware, but offenders lying to their treatment providers is considered another one of those things that moves an offender away from a “low risk to re-offend” rating.  And Rambold lied to his treatment provider, or rather, failed to tell his treatment provider that he was in a sexual relationship with a new girlfriend.

Now, generally speaking, having a committed relationship is considered a good thing in terms of risk assessment of sex offenders.  But, having a sexual relationship with someone without telling your treatment provider is, in technical language, a no-no.  This is for a variety of reasons.  For one thing, the treatment provider needs to know certain key things about the new partner, you know, like if she has children around.  Also, it’s considered important that any new partners are aware of the offender’s background so that they don’t do things like let the offender hang around the partner’s underage relatives unsupervised.  There are a lot of other potentially problematic factors here, like whether the partner is of an appropriate age, or if the partner has a history of trouble with the law, drugs, drinking, domestic violence, abuse as either a victim or perpetrator, and so on.

Now, just so you know, I work with sex offenders, and I’m not a really big “throw ’em in prison type”—at least not when it comes to offenders who take their responsibilities seriously and don’t screw around with their treatment.  But you might guess that I’m a bit sensitive about offenders who treat the whole thing like a joke, as if they don’t have to follow the rules.  I would think that as a judge, people who fail to follow the rules would bother you too, even if you don’t take all of this clinical info into consideration.

But I do hope you take the clinical information into consideration, because Rambold didn’t just violate the rules once or twice.  He violated them on numerous occasions.  And the rules he violated were, in treatment terms, kind of a big deal.  If this were basketball, this wouldn’t be traveling.  It would be Rambold driving a car onto the court, parking it under the basket, climbing up on top of the car to stuff the ball through the hoop, then flipping off the referee while Rambold’s coach explains to the referee that it’s okay for him to act that way, and gets the referee to agree.

So, Judge Baugh, a girl was abused, then shamed, then stressed to the point where she thought killing herself was a viable option, then shamed and blamed some more in your courtroom years after her death.  And even if you view Cherice as fully responsible for taking her own life (and, believe me, I could hammer you with a bunch more clinical info on that count), and even if you (completely ludicrously) view Cherice as equally “in control” of the sexual relationship she had with Rambold, Rambold completely failed to take his responsibilities seriously.  He was given the opportunity to dodge a lengthy stay in prison so long as he engaged in treatment in good faith.  He didn’t do that.

So, Judge Baugh, if Rambold ends up back in your courtroom on appeal, I would urge you to take the aforementioned clinical (and other) concerns into consideration when you decide how to amend your earlier judgment.  And whatever happens, I would urge you not to help Rambold or any other sex offenders minimize and justify their actions—they’re already pretty damn good at that on their own.