Should pedaphiles Be tagged

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Originally Posted by confus-ed

I can't believe this has swung around to be blaming this on irresponsible parents !!!

Kids should be able to walk about un-molested & thats all there is to it.

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Yes, I agree. I used also and that wasn't too long ago. I did live in a different community also. I lucked out and lived with my grandparents for a few years. The neighborhood was 80% plus old people that all paid attention to what the kids where doing. As a child, I found it very annoying that they would "spy" on me but as an adult and father, I find it remarkable that a neighborhood would pull together like that.

I ponder it from time to time and all that I can come up with is that we still have tribal customs. The tribe in this case, watches the young of the tribe to protect them from harm.

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Originally Posted by El_Squid

Fortunately for us, we live in an older residential area full of nosey retirees and all 5 of our kids are boys. They traveled in pairs, at the least, if going anywhere. I have dealt with the horrible effects of child molesters, having worked for nearly 20 years at a State Mental Health facility for children and adolescents, and have zero tolerance for people who will violate a child in any way.

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I have very little tolerance also. My tolerance for molesters can be measured from the chamber to the tip of my gun. Yeah, so I live in Texas......we are just very effective in dealing with criminals.

I missed this thread earlier.


“9mm lobotomy.”

I applaud the notion of zero tolerance, but violence here is a confession of failure. The issue of child abuse is complex. Putting the muzzle or your Glock behind the ear of a paedophile and pulling the trigger is a simple(minded?) solution which does not get to the roots of the problem. At best, the vigilante-lynching of a paedophile provides the killer with a momentary and illusory sense of power against an evil which they cannot comprehend and which they helplessly fear, and at worst, lynching reduces the vigilante to the level of the pathetic life they destroy. Most victims of child abuse suffer not at the hands of the bogeyman stranger but rather at the hands of people who are known to them and into whose care they are entrusted. Often the abuse is ignored. The vigilante killings of a few bogeymen here and there will do little or nothing to protect children at large.

It is something I almost never talk about, but I am a victim of child abuse, not sexual abuse but physical and psychological abuse. My abuser was an elementary school teacher, someone well-known to my family, a family “friend.” I am a survivor, but I suffer still. I struggle with depression and low self-esteem. I have a limited sense of self; it is as if part of my soul is dead. I often feel lost, paralyzed, directionless. By force of will, I have accomplished much in my life, overcoming the school-applied labels “underachiever” and “lazy,” overcoming failure after after failure, overcoming heroin addiction (on my own), etc., etc., but I am largely robbed of any sense of enjoyment of my accomplishments. I seem to have an impaired ability to experience pleasure. I have difficulties maintaining friendships. I have difficulties in maintaining relationships with women – intimacy is difficult when there is no sense of anything to be intimate with – nonetheless, I have been married now for eighteen years and have two children, but it has been a long and difficult road. And the difficulties are not over. I suffer still. My abuser is still alive, old but alive. Could I kill my abuser? Probably not. If I had the opportunity to save my abuser’s life, would I do it. Probably. I am angry. I am damaged. But killing is not going to change anything. It is certainly not going to heal me.

There is a cycle. Most victims of child abuse are survivors, who are not child abusers, but most child abusers are victims of child abuse. Perhaps the solution to the problem (if there is ”a” solution) lies in the breaking of the cycle. Unfortunately, this breaking is a much more difficult task than putting your Glock’s muzzle behind the ear of a symptom of the problem. So what can you do? I don’t know for sure. But I do have some thoughts: Zero tolerance – don’t look away – speak up – stand up. Work to end poverty. Work to end our culture’s mindless glorification of violence. Do not tolerate the abuse of other human beings – do not turn a blind eye to it.

An excerpt for an interesting but controversial article:

(Whole article here -- www.gladwell.com/pdf/damaged.pdf -- right click, save as)

__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________

from The New Yorker
February 24, 1997
CRIME AND SCIENCE
Damaged: Why do some people turn into violent criminals? New evidence suggests that it may all be in the brain
by Malcolm Gladwell

__________________________________________________ _____________________

Abuse also disrupts the brain's stress-response system, with profound results. When something traumatic happens-a car accident, a fight, a piece of shocking news-the brain responds by releasing several waves of hormones, the last of which is cortisol. The problem is that cortisol can be toxic. If someone is exposed to too much stress over too long a time, one theory is that all that cortisol begins to eat away at the organ of the brain known as the hippocampus, which serves as the brain's archivist: the hippocampus organizes and shapes memories and puts them in context, placing them in space and time and tying together visual memory with sound and smell. J. Douglas Bremner, a psychiatrist at Yale, has measured the damage that cortisol apparently does to the hippocampus by taking M.R.I. scans of the brains of adults who suffered severe sexual or physical abuse as children and comparing them with the brains of healthy adults. An M.R.I. scan is a picture of a crosssection of the brain-as if someone's head had been cut into thin slices like a tomato, and then each slice had been photographed-and in the horizontal section taken by Bremner the normal hippocampus is visible as two identical golfball-size organs, one on the left and one on the right, and each roughly even with the ear. In child-abuse survivors, Bremner found, the golf ball on the left is on average twelve per cent smaller than that of a healthy adult, and the theory is that it was shrunk by cortisol. Lewis says that she has examined murderers with dozens of scars on their backs, and that they have no idea how the scars got there. They can't remember their abuse, and if you look at Bremner's scans that memory loss begins to make sense: the archivist in their brain has been crippled.

Abuse also seems to affect the relationship between the left hemisphere of the brain, which plays a large role in logic and language, and the right hemisphere, which is thought to play a large role in creativity and depression. Martin Teicher, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard and McLean Hospital, recently gave EEGs to a hundred and fifteen children who had been admitted to a psychiatric facility, some of whom had a documented history of abuse. Not only did the rate of abnormal EEGs among the abused turn out to be twice that of the non-abused but all those abnormal brain scans turned out to be a result of problems on the left side of the brain. Something in the brain's stress response, Teicher theorized, was interfering with the balanced development of the brain's hemispheres. Then Teicher did M.R.I.s of the brains of a subset of the abused children, looking at what is known as the corpus callosum. This is the fibre tract-the information superhighway-that connects the right and the left hemispheres. Sure enough, he found that parts of the corpus callosum of the abused kids were smaller than they were in the nonabused children. Teicher speculated that these abnormalities were a result of something wrong with the sheathing-the fatty substance, known as myelin, that coats the nerve cells of the corpus callosum. In a healthy person, the myelin helps the neuronal signals move quickly and efficiently. In the abused kids, the myelin seemed to have been eaten away, perhaps by the same excess cortisol that is thought to attack the hippocampus.

Taken together, these changes in brain hardware are more than simple handicaps. They are, in both subtle and fundamental ways, corrosive of self. Richard McNally, a professor of psychology at Harvard, has done memory studies with victims of serious trauma, and he has discovered that people with post-traumatic-stress disorder, or P.T.S.D., show marked impairment in recalling specific autobiographical memories. A healthy trauma survivor, asked to name an instance when he exhibited kindness, says, "Last Friday, I helped a neighbor plow out his driveway." But a trauma survivor with P.T.S.D. can only say something like "I was kind to people when I was in high school." This is what seems to happen when your hippocampus shrinks: you can't find your memories. "The ability to solve problems in the here and now depends on one's ability to access specific autobiographical memories in which one has encountered similar problems in the past," McNally says. "It depends on knowing what worked and what didn't." With that ability impaired, abuse survivors cannot find coherence in their lives. Their sense of identity breaks down.

It is a very short walk from this kind of psychological picture to a diagnosis often associated with child abuse; namely, dissociative identity disorder, or D.I.D. Victims of child abuse are thought sometimes to dissociate, as a way of coping with their pain, of distancing themselves from their environment, of getting away from the danger they faced. It's the kind of disconnection that would make sense if a victim's memories were floating around without context and identification, his left and right hemispheres separated and unequal, and his sense of self fragmented and elusive. It's also a short walk from here to understanding how someone with such neurological problems could become dangerous. Teicher argues that in some of his EEG and M.R.I. analyses of the imbalance between the left and the right hemispheres he is describing the neurological basis for the polarization so often observed in psychiatrically disturbed patients-the mood swings, the sharply contrasting temperaments. Instead of having two integrated hemispheres, these patients have brains that are, in some sense, divided down the middle. "What you get is a kind of erratic-ness," says Frank Putnam, who heads the Unit on Developmental Traumatology at the National Institute of Mental Health, in Maryland. "These kinds of people can be very different in one situation compared with another. There is the sense that they don't have a larger moral compass."

Wow, house, a personal account like that is powerful, and I admire both your achivement in spite of circumstances, and your willingness to share it with us.

I agree the "shoot 'em" response is an understandable but simplistic response to a complex problem. The research you quote is interesting, and probably has a bearing on early stage results of experimental rehabilitiation programs in New Zealand, which suggested recidivism rates may be as low as 15% among recovery-motivated offenders who willingly follow effective programs, but effectively 100% re-offence for recalcitrant offenders who refuse rehabilitation.

Thankfully, my direct experience of this is limited to one contact, an approach by a church youth leader which I was able to avoid, but I am aware that even this has probably influenced my own low opinion of religious institutions. Yet as a Christian, I'm very moved by the capacity of a victim to have compassion for their abuser (Jesus: "be kind and do good to those who treat you badly...").

The great difficulty is to be able to identify and distinguish between those who genuinely want to stop offending and are worth helping, and those who will always be an active danger to children regardless.

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Originally Posted by houseisland

It is something I almost never talk about, but I am a victim of child abuse, not sexual abuse but physical and psychological abuse.

I have accomplished much in my life, overcoming the school-applied labels “underachiever” and “lazy,” overcoming failure after after failure, overcoming heroin addiction (on my own), etc., etc., but I am largely robbed of any sense of enjoyment of my accomplishments.


I seem to have an impaired ability to experience pleasure. I have difficulties maintaining friendships. I have difficulties in maintaining relationships with women – intimacy is difficult when there is no sense of anything to be intimate with – nonetheless,,,, I suffer still.


There is a cycle. Most victims of child abuse are survivors, who are not child abusers, but most child abusers are victims of child abuse. Perhaps the solution to the problem (if there is ”a” solution) lies in the breaking of the cycle. Unfortunately, this breaking is a much more difficult task than putting your Glock’s muzzle behind the ear of a symptom of the problem. So what can you do? I don’t know for sure. But I do have some thoughts: Zero tolerance – don’t look away – speak up – stand up. Work to end poverty. Work to end our culture’s mindless glorification of violence.
How about the glorification of SEX????

Do not tolerate the abuse of other human beings – do not turn a blind eye to it.

An excerpt for an interesting but controversial article:

(Whole article here -- www.gladwell.com/pdf/damaged.pdf -- right click, save as)

__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________

from The New Yorker
February 24, 1997
CRIME AND SCIENCE
Damaged: Why do some people turn into violent criminals? New evidence suggests that it may all be in the brain
by Malcolm Gladwell

__________________________________________________ _____________________

Abuse also disrupts the brain's stress-response system, with profound results. When something traumatic happens-a car accident, a fight, a piece of shocking news- (WAR)the brain responds by releasing several waves of hormones, the last of which is cortisol. The problem is that cortisol can be toxic. If someone is exposed to too much stress over too long a time, one theory is that all that cortisol begins to eat away at the organ of the brain known as the hippocampus, which serves as the brain's archivist

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As a Vietnam era Veteran (I was never in country) I have seen and met and talked with many PTSD survivors. And, as the article relates, it is quite sad to see no less experience first hand. As far as sexually abused children, I can not relate to that on any level quite like what is talked about here, but DAMN!!! I can imagine, being the dad to a couple of girls!!
On the issue of psychlogical and physical abuse, I can certainly relate, as one of the sons of an abusive pair of parents and one nasty arse drunk one. Does it have repercussions? You're damn right! My brother died just recently: a drug addict till the end, with no moral compass. Me? I did survive, and as you, overcame on my own some serious addictions to prescription drugs...not heroin.
I for one, appreciate your honesty house, and your laying it out on the line. Is there any answer? I think not. At least not "tagging"!!! What would be next? The "Scarlet Letter"??? Based upon societies latest whim? How about labeling and tagging lying politicians? Drug dealers? Car thieves? Where would it end????

Listen House: hang in there bro, I'm rooting for you...
...and THANKS for that enlightenment. :thumbs:

One of my uncles is a thrice convicted pedophile currently free somewhere in the state of California. The last time he tried to contact us, he was informed that it was his death to attempt to see us. I do have a personal stake in this arguement.

I do have a fair understanding of the causes of pedophile behavior from research on the subject and discussions with a psychology professor. In many, if not most cases, the prime cause devolves to something that isn't the pedophiles "fault." They were abused as a child or the genes just came up wrong. Few if any just decide that today is the day to go abuse a child. The problem is that you can keep playing the blame game indefinitely. Sure, lock them up for the good of society. Just pray that no one down the line decides to clear out the mental institutions, dumping these people back into the population.

As cold, as callous as it sounds, death is the only sure answer. I know that I would choose death rather than suffer a condition that would lead me to that sort of behavior. This is like a plague that won't burn itself out. We can quarantine it, we can kill it, or we can cure it. We lack the will to do the first and we lack the science to do the last.

My heart and prayers are with all survivors of child abuse. My wife is a survivor of sexual abuse by her father and physical/psychological abuse from her family and ex-husbands. It is a terrible thing to deal with and watch your loved one go through, day in and day out; the terrible nightmares, the ever present fear, the inability to function "normally". She has found the inner strength to cope with it and has come to forgive and understand what happened to her, which is not easy when the rest of her family denies it ever happened.

I had a hard time learning to deal with her father (and the rest of her family), which we do regularly, without getting the urge to destroy him (them) completely. We have reached a state of coexistence, which I participate in for Linda's benefit alone, punctuated by occassional open warfare when they cross the line, for I will not allow them to hurt her any more, in any way. It seems like they want to keep making her and her boys the scapegoats/victims of their nasty little minds. The funny thing is that they are all highly respected members of our church community, especially since my brother-in-law is a beloved Deacon.

They can thank God and Jesus I have returned to the church and have learned much from my wife, or they would all be worm food by now. God bless you House, we will pray for you.

(Edited for typos)

You have to play the hand that is dealt you. It's as good as it gets. Work with it.

I do not think paedophiles should in anyway be absolved of their crimes. To deny them the responsibility for their actions is to deny them the whatever vestiges of humanity remain in their damaged psyches. They should be accountable. Society should not mollycoddle them.

Vigilante killings are not acceptable, however. They are arbitrary. They follow no rules of evidence. They are dangerous.

State sanctioned executions are also questionable. One problem is that there are wrongful convictions. The police have been known in their frustation and anger to fudge evidence and to proceed on hunches and predjudices where they cannot find ironclad proof, all with the best of intentions -- they are only human. And state-appointed legal aid is often "the best" that "minimum legal wages" can buy -- not that great, minimum interest, minimum defence. My grandfather was a life-long career police officer, and he was staunchly opposed to the death penalty for a number of reasons, not the least of which was his Christian faith. On a practical level, however, he was opposed simply because jury convictions were much harder to obtain when the death penalty was on the table. He also did not believe that the death penalty was any meaningful deterant to the sort of people who kill or who do sex crimes. The only real argument in favour of the death penalty is economic -- cheaper to kill than to lock up forever -- lower taxes -- but then couldn't we extend this to America's large population of three-time-losers, and what about the disproportionately large population of blacks in American prisons or the aboriginal/first nations people in Canandian prisions? What about disenters and political "criminals?" It all starts to look like a "final solution," one that I don't like.

I doubt that paedophiles, serial rapists, serial killers and the like can be cured or rehabilitated. I suspect that they are broken and that repair is not possible. I had an acquaintance who worked in the justice system with paedofiles and sex offenders -- God, what a miserable, depressing job! He had serious doubts. He felt that there are some intelligent and self-motivated individuals who can manage life-long self-control outside of prision merely for practical reasons -- they don't want to stay in jail forever -- but that they are not "cured" and that they have little or no compassion for their former victims and no real remose for their crimes. Whatever brain structures are involved in empathy, compassion, and morality seem to be nonfunctional (dead or damaged) in paedophiles, serial rapists, serial killers and the like.

The answer? Not vigilante killing, anyway.

I think I confused my point, House. I feel a lot of rage against child molestors/abusers, etc. I am not going to go out and blast my in-laws, but I would like to. All in all, I cannot stand/abide the strong abusing the weak, but I have learned much from my wife, especially forgiveness and understanding. :)

Mr. Squid,

The "vigilante" reply was not in response to anything you said. It goes back to the "9 mm Lobotomy."

Anger is understandable here. I am angry, too.

Really its a case of punishment shoud match the crime.
There is no rehabilitation for children scared for life. Least none that I have seen.
I have a niece who was abused ata young age. Yes they tend to somewhat grow out of it
BUT
The damage is never repairable so as to return them back to the life they would have had without the trauma.
So saying he has served his sentence and has paid his debt is ludicrous. There is no payback for a child thats traumatized period.
Beyond that maybe just maybe if enuff of a message was sent to those that do get convicted others might see that its a looseing game and thereby not start.
Now likely it is that only a small portion would heed that warning but isnt even 1 childs saved from that worth it?
So I am with some of the others
FRY EM ALL

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Originally Posted by Ferrit

Really its a case of punishment shoud match the crime.

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http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/hamcode.html 196? 197? 200?

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Originally Posted by Ferrit

There is no rehabilitation for children scared for life. Least none that I have seen.
I have a niece who was abused ata young age. Yes they tend to somewhat grow out of it
BUT
The damage is never repairable so as to return them back to the life they would have had without the trauma.

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Agreed. The "healing" that does occur is more of a learning to live with the damage.

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Originally Posted by Ferrit

So saying he has served his sentence and has paid his debt is ludicrous. There is no payback for a child thats traumatized period.

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Agreed. Offenders in Canada are released against the best judgement of those who have worked with them in the prison system. Judges are too reluctant to apply Canada's "Dangerous Offender" designation which allows for indeterminate incarceration -- a designation that can mean life inprisonment as in imprisonment until death.

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Originally Posted by Ferrit

Beyond that maybe just maybe if enuff of a message was sent to those that do get convicted others might see that its a looseing game and thereby not start.

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I don't think deterants are effective for the people who commit these sorts of crimes. They lack the judgement.

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Originally Posted by Ferrit

Now likely it is that only a small portion would heed that warning but isnt even 1 childs saved from that worth it?
So I am with some of the others
FRY EM ALL

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What about people like David Milgard? Should we have fried him?

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Originally Posted by houseisland

What about people like David Milgard? Should we have fried him?

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Well, that's the problem with "...." They think there is an "easy" solution...sort of like the Nazi's thought theirs was a "Final Solution". :rolleyes:
WELL:
WHAT about the INNOCENT accused???? Does ANYone ever think of them? Yeah, they MAY be few and far between, BUT!!! One is one too many!!!:sad:
Oh yeah, it would so convenient if there were a perfect solution. Sorry though, this is NOT Xanadu.

I fail to see how living in a community mostly full of old people is some kind of protection from your kids' getting molested. As the running logic, born out in reality, is going, pedophiles can't be rehabilited, ergo they evenually go from being younger molesters to being older molesters, as in old people. Still, they remain as pedophiles and are every bit as dangerous, if not more, as they have that much more experience at molesting kids (check out the pic of Mr. Baldy, he's old now). I think that the answer is to just remove them from society permanently. This goes for rapists and other sexual predators as well. Unfortunately, there will always be those who do these things.

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Originally Posted by houseisland

Mr. Squid,

The "vigilante" reply was not in response to anything you said. It goes back to the "9 mm Lobotomy."

Anger is understandable here. I am angry, too.

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Who said that comment had anything to do with vigilantism? Impartial trial followed by a merciful execution.