940226.1115 Hal Pepinsky on violence and control
I know the following isn't written in PCT talk, but essentially, the
irony of how PCT-ers tell stories and cast aspersions on critics and
questioners like and yet preach that one can ONLY control one's OWN
perceptions is just one group's manifestation of the universal human
contradiction I describe as trying to separate victims from offenders:
Hal pepinsky@indiana.edu, Feb. 26, 1994
fn=wo2264 at ftp.indiana.edu: /pub/departments/criminal_justice/pepinsky
THE MOST DIFFICULT IMPLICATION OF SRA/CHILD ABUSE DATA TO ACCEPT:
Abuse/violence is caused by victimization
I think the most difficult challenge of dealing with child abuse,
particularly child sexual abuse, even more particularly ritual abuse
carried out in occult rituals, is overcoming our own violence--our own
survival of abuse which as I see it ALWAYS underlies ALL
violence/punitiveness we feel and act out. The problem is most clearly
revealed in our reactions to abuse which has become an intergenerational
family tradition: to validate the survivors in the newest generation, we
feel the need to condemn the unhealed survivors of the preceding
generation.
Consider this explanation of abuse: the only difference between a
survivor whose pain and dysfunction does not include abusing others, and
survivors who continue acting abuse they have been carefully taught, is
that the latter remain more damaged, more severely victimized by, their
victimization than the survivors who reject it.
We find ourselves forced either to deny that abuse occurs or to condemn
abusers, out of abuse which has taught us that failure of condemnation
of violators constitutes acceptance of abuse. Within the framework of
our own backgrounds of abuse and approval, we are taught only three
"legitimate" options for responding to evidence of abuse: identify and
condemn the perpetrators (extrapunitiveness), find evidence insufficient
to validate the abuse (denial/rationalization of inaction), or take it
upon ourselves to fix it (intropunitiveness/codependency/guilt/being a
"bleeding heart" or in US parlance, a "liberal").
All of these responses fall along a continuum which implies personal
irresponsibility for the problem, including intropunitiveness or
codependency, which implies that no one but oneself, notably including
"perpetrators," is strong/wise enough to make things right for impotent
others. The three responses together fall at one end of a continuum of
responding to social problems--together opposed to ASSUMING PERSONAL
RESPONSIBILITY for abuse, which means that abuse can neither be BLAMED
on anyone NOR dismissed as beyond one's power to acknowledge and deal
with as personal circumstances allow. The focus of personal
responsibility is on my role in it and on small, everyday personal ways
I can confront it and try to deal with it, rather than on programmatic
responses that someone ELSE has to start--or which some group of people
has to agree to start with me--before "society" allows me to do anything
myself.
The limits of our responses to violence was brought home to me yesterday
in a discussion section of my big class. There just one student had
gotten launched into a "community project"; she was a mental health
volunteer helping a single, heavily medicated and distracted mother take
care of her children. She acknowledged how scary it had been for her
the first time she had volunteered to spend time with poor folks, given
her sheltered middle-class upbringing. She was also the only woman in
the discussion section. The guys, meanwhile, were sheepishly sort of
acknowledging that they were blowing off the class. When I reported
that prisoners I had known had pretty much all gotten into trouble with
the law trying to escape abuse at home like that suffered by the
children the woman student was spending time with, and observed that
allowing ourselves time for personal involvement with ANYONE was the
primary obstacle to rehabilitation and crime prevention, one student
came back arguing that this, that and the other person or group who
needed to be "held responsible" (in constrast to what to him was the
manifest injustice of his fraternity house having been put on probation
for having discovered brothers drinking there). It struck me that in
his struggle to identify someone else to handle the things people do
which scare or offend him, he represented all the buckpassing of this
world.
We criminologist are locked in the trap by trying to distinguish victims
and offenders, when empirically and practically, the most fundamental
reality I see is that our worst offenders are simply the most damaged of
victims among us. For me, this reality implies penal abolition as the
only path to avoiding blaming victims. From the standpoint of personal
responsibility, confronting our worst offenders with the compassionate
recognition that they stand before us as our most hapless victims is the
greatest challenge facing us criminologists. Punishing or "helping"
offenders to become good people is precisely how incestuous parents, for
example, defend raping their "beloved" children. Are we criminologists
doomed to applying the same logic to those we find in need of
"treatment" or "consequences"? Are we doomed to identifying the real
culprits outside ourselves to blame for our prisons and crime or to
condemning ourselves as oppressors instead? Does justice rest on
refining our powers of personal condemnation? Are we trapped into
thinking that crime control requires finding good guys to take over the
lives of bad people?
I'll grant Phil Jenkins on uncjin-l this: As long as we remain trapped
in the abuse that has taught us we can only live by identifying and
punishing wrongdoers, the only way we can take a problem like satanic
ritual murder seriously is to launch witchhunts to identify and take out
some gang of perpetrators; the only way to avoid witchhunts is to define
the problem as personally inconsequential for ourselves and as falsely
inflated by others. On the whole the more active, dedicated helpers of
satanic ritual abuse survivors have a huge blind spot: They can readily
forgive the survivors who have helped torture, kill, butcher, eat and
play with the sexual organs of "firstborn sons" and other human
sacrifice victims. These survivors they deem innocent. But the
survivors who don't escape, and who grow up living with this reality as
the only life-game in town, become Lucifer/satan incarnate. They are
somehow (by staying trapped in victimization after they turn eighteen
perhaps?) transformed from victim to devil. But aren't they simply more
damaged by unremitting abuse than those who somehow find a means of
escape? Only when we are in the frame of mind to see that whatever
compassion we have for victims logically extends most to the prisoners
we most fear do we open the door to personal responsibility for
community safety. At that point our theory of crime and violence
becomes quite simple: Crime and violence is caused by victimization
unrelieved by compassion. Worse offenders are postulated thereby to be
more seriously abused/damaged victims. Can we criminologists handle
that reality, I wonder?