BOY IN THE HOSPITAL (FICTION)

The hospital had stopped the tradition of hiring a professionally trained and ordained chaplain a decade earlier.  It was about when the idea of everyone being Christian (except for a few Jews) just kind of faded out.  Patients began to be from the Middle East or India or the South Sea Islands or from tribes in the high lands of South America.  Some of them were untouched by Christian missionaries.  Also, the nuns were getting out of the hospital business.  The religious dimension of hospitals faded.

So now the hospital had discovered that though the chaplains had been very useful in keeping things calmed down, not having a chaplain meant that they could sidestep moral issues without being monitored internally.  So the practice became to pull in from the local community whatever religious person seemed appropriate.  That meant no Christian Science practitioners, but few patients belonged to that group and those who did were not anxious to have their leaders know about it.  The administrators could call a list of helpful clergy who never asked for money.  The ones who wanted money were never called and they appreciated the omission.

As the town grew and became more assorted — and deteriorated in some parts — the patients became less and less mainstream.  Victims of abuse and extreme poverty began to show up.  Not that all victims of abuse were impoverished.  For instance, there were often boys who were badly hurt by prosperous fathers who were alcoholic or half-deranged or just frustrated by their failure.  Men who knew it was safer to beat a son than a wife.  When these boys showed up, it was often in the hands of police.  And the boys were often freaked.

Some secular groups would help, for instance the Metropolitan Community Church, whose members were gay, would try to support males beaten because they were gay.  Feminists would supply a companion for women who had been raped and who had to endure the equally invasive rape kit procedures needed and the identity-challenging interviews.

This little boy I’m thinking of was brought to the hospital by an older boy who found him in the street.  (“What were you boys doing in the street so late at night?”)  When the older boy disappeared, the hurt boy became a problem, screaming until he was given a shot.  He had head injuries, a green-stick break in one arm, bruises everywhere, and scrapes on shoulders, elbows, knees and feet from being dragged on cement.  A tooth was missing and the inside of his mouth torn.

Someone called the man who came to help such boys.  It may have been one of the orderlies, or one of the cops, or the doctor who was known to be sympathetic.  The man came, was greeted by everyone because he had to be called so often, and sat down quietly by the boy’s bed.  White-haired, he had glasses with some kind of attachment.  He wore a white t-shirt, jeans, and sturdy shoes, because he limped a little.  If it was cold, he wore a gray hoodie like the kids.  No tattoos, no piercings, no jewelry except a wedding band.

When the boy woke up, before he could begin screaming again, the man talked to him softly, not asking him questions but just starting a discussion of what it means to be attacked, to have your internal organs torn and scrambled, to have your private openings — including mouth — ripped and contaminated.  The man knew because he remembered, not because he read it in a book.  The boy’s eyes began to focus.  Some of the terrible defensive knotting began to relax.

The staff also began to relax a little.  They had been afraid, partly because of the pictures in their heads, partly because they were so enraged that such a thing would happen, partly because the way they dealt with a job where they saw a lot of misery was by just not letting themselves feel anything at all, not even happiness.  None of them had had formal training about such abuse.

They had to do things that hurt the boy.  It felt to him like a repeat of the rape, and he was not wrong.  Society will rape children “for their own good”.  The man stayed with this boy even when the cops came.  He seemed calm, but the staff had seen him go ballistic when he saw injustice.  When they heard the boy begin to weep, they peeked in, and saw that the man was holding the boy’s hand, the one without the IV needle.

When the boy slept at intervals, the man used his smart phone to text a lot.  The town knew, though some pretended that they didn’t know, that he had a tribe that occupied a house that was meant to be safe and therefore had no address.  It had a low fence because of their dogs, not to keep the boys in because they didn’t want to leave.  If the mood around town was hostile, the fence could be electrified.  They thought he might be texting something mysteriously underground, something political, but in fact he was making sure someone did the laundry.

Probably the person in town who knew the tribe best was the librarian because some of them read a lot.  They carried cameras with them everywhere and sometimes the librarian thought of having a show of their photos, but she knew how to access them online and knew that if some of her patrons saw them, they would panic and punish.  Anyway, the man thought it was a good idea not to attract attention.

Online the tribe became a nation, interacting with boys across most continents and a lot of islands.  They talked about abuse, about falling in love, about drugs, and deep existential issues like why are we alive?  All the time they talked, they were growing up, until one day they were men and they left.  Wherever they went, they carried their attitudes with them.  Sometimes they wondered whether they should be more belligerent, but the time wasn’t right yet.

In the hospital the man sat quietly with the boy.  He never tried to figure out what number each boy was — there were simply too many of them.  But he never forgot the ones who died.  He was not alone in a virtual sense.  

In reality he sometimes wished the hospital vending machines sold better food.

OPPOSITIONAL DEFIANCE SYNDROME AND SPLIT BRAIN RESEARCH

Herb doesn't exist.  He is an invented clinical case:

Herb was a guy who was frustrating to his friends because he would flip back and forth — be all in favor, then opposed.  One day he would say that singing was the most transcendent force on the planet and that if it weren’t for singing, he wouldn’t want to live, that singing saved him.  Then he would announce that he hated singing!  That he would never sing again.  Not to pressure him to sing.

Whaaaa?

We knew that in childhood and adolescence his father had beaten him mercilessly and with no concern for the consequences.  It appeared that one of the consequences was periods of dissociation, a brain connectome pattern that takes a person in extreme and inescapable  agony (mental or emotional as much as physical) right out of reality into another consciousness.  Some said it was like the ghostly Sand Hills that Blackfeet described as the ground of death — gray, vast, repetitious.  We finally got Herb to admit that maybe that was related, but he always insisted his experience was real and somehow meaningful, maybe about safety and maybe about sacred, where the shaman went in a trance.

Dissociation, we read, is related to split personalities and paranoid schizophrenia, other variations of brain organization.  But Herb got mad when we suggested split personalities.  He said there was only one of him.   And it wasn’t paranoia if they’re really after you.

Then one of us who is a big TED talks fan, watched this episode about brain damage research, prompted by syndromes affecting football players who ram their heads together.  The major insight is that the REAL damage happens deep in the brain, not where there is an obvious crack in the skull at the surface. 

A related insight is that a blow to the side of the head (aside from damaging vital small structures like the hippocampus over each ear, also does damage at the bottom of the fissure between the two brain halves, which are connected by the corpus callosum.  People have been fascinated by the fact that separating the two brain hemispheres by cutting the corpus callosum can create two identities with different styles, one knowing names and what things do and the other one more imaginative, inventing stories.  

The most fascinating experiments are when one side of the head and eye are simply separated by a partition between.  If one half is shown a picture, it identifies it, but the other might not be able to name it but imply by spinning a little story that it DID know.

fMRI type research has shown that repeated blows as in football or boxing can result in the corpus callosum being very much thinned and the ventricles around it, which are spaces, enlarging a lot.  That is, the neurons around the base of this fissure crossed by the corpus callosum have disappeared and the connection itself is much thinner.  This means that the connection between the two halves is reduced, and bad things are happening to the contiguous tissues.

Two of my family members had concussions to the front of their heads, to their foreheads.  Both of them were changed to the point of changing their personalities, but mostly in a unified and subtle way.  That is, the prefrontal cortex contains things like judgement and decision-making.  A steering wheel sort of deficit.  But the deep tissue damage of side-to-side blows takes away awareness, consciousness-type functions.

http://www.ted.com/talks/david_camarillo_why_helmets_don_t_prevent_concussions_and_what_might?utm_source=newsletter_daily&utm_campaign=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_content=button__2016-09-08

http://www.kavlifoundation.org/science-spotlights/neuroscience-of-decision-making#.V9RUS2UldUQ

What we wondered was whether Herb — who notably has a taste for high society, elegance and the principles of cosmic physics, but other times can crave degradation, danger, and transgression — might have loose wiring that throws him from one hemisphere to the other — and therefore one personality or skill set —and another.

It would be easy to attribute this to psych stuff — after all, one side of his genetic family was brilliant and brainy while the other side survived mostly by sheer tenacity and stamina.  If his thinking framework were more like one side than the other at the particular time, that would make a difference in what he did and how he justified it.

Best of all, if the two sides of brain or psyche could be reconciled and — operating together — the results would be spectacular.  He was not a guy who would accept ordinary therapy — some nice lady gently and insidiously using Freudian principles — so what would work?  Could we put a magnetic headset on him that would make him optimistic enough to burst into song?  They say those waves can create spiritual visions.

One among us recommended high-end S and M, that would reach the areas that his father had evidently split and fused with abuse.  Others said those rituals were too extreme and the humanities of all sorts — art, music, dance, story — could do the job without risking physical damage.  

We went Wiki-diving and learned a lot of neat new words: splenum, genu, eutherian, rostrum, truncus, tapetum.  There was the inevitable sex part:  . . . "advanced analytical techniques of computational neuroanatomy developed in the 1990s showed that sex differences were clear but confined to certain parts of the corpus callosum, and that they correlated with cognitive performance in certain tests. One recent study using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) found that the midsagittal corpus callosum cross-sectional area is, after controlling brain size, on average, proportionately larger in females."  That was irrelevant since Herb was definitely male.

There are a lot of things with names — syndromes, symptoms, dysfunctions — that relate to the corpus callosum.  It can fail to form in gestation, be badly formed, or be only partially there, or be cut, all without fatal results — just loose wiring sorts of probs.  Maybe progressive.  One football wife said that first they lose the car keys, then they lose the car, then they can’t remember where they’re going while they’re still sitting in the driveway.  That can get dangerous.  Seizures are the most common problem: electrical storms when the orderly pulsing of thought gets snarled.  

It’s only a notion that ODD might be related to ACC — erratic behavior caused by failure to properly manage consciousness because of forceful damage — but it seems logical.  And if the slamming of heads by adults — more likely to the side of the head than the front, though Mark Harmon on NCIS smacks the backs of heads (bad screenwriters!)— then the corpus callosum could easily be torn or bruised.  If this is a family or cultural practise, then it could be passed from one generation to another in an imitation of inheritance.  

Herb refused to talk about his family. but listening carefully and doing a little genealogy we heard about alcoholism, obsessions, paranoia, and schitzy thinking.  Also, high achievers and advanced degrees, but no artists.  What if a corpus callosum were exceptionally large/thick — would the result be high intelligence?  Maybe, undamaged, it could be an advantage, but hard to handle.

One afternoon, clustered in the generous corner booth of our fav waffle house, we realized that our Herb project had made us ourselves into a “corpus callosum,” a tough bunch!  About that time, Herb walked in and he had a project for us.  It was kids.  And he never changed his mind.

MIDDLE CLASS CHILD ABUSE

Most representations of child abuse (and to some extent domestic violence) tend to be portrayed in terms of drug-fueled degenerates or else debauchery among privileged high status power players.  There’s little discussion about ordinary respectable-seeming hard-working middle-class people and what makes them either use physical punishment inappropriately or sexually abuse children, their own or those of others, without ever admitting to themselves or others that they are doing something wrong.  

(I want to make a side-remark that a large part of the criminal under-class has all the earmarks of the respectable middle class: hierarchies, careful management, enforcement of standards, prosperity -- they’re just antisocial standards that support criminal activity by a kind of in-group.  Not all of it is as dramatic as a TV show, and in fact, flying beneath the radar is one of their values.  The crimes may be entirely on paper, but -- in terms of the larger culture -- as destructive as shooting people.  Within the smaller self-contained group, this is simply what "our" people do.  No guilt.)

Much of what supports and even encourages child abuse is old-fashioned ideas about discipline.  I remember complaining to the parent of an unmanageable boy.  The father sighed and said,  “All right, I’ll beat him again, but I don’t think it will do any good.”  It didn’t.  And I had never suggested such a thing.  But clearly the father thought he was obligated to do his part and had no argument against it.  This was a white family, nothing remarkable about them.

Prison punishment, 1912

High School punishment, 1950's  (a reenactment at the time)

Contemporary sharia law

Calvinist religion put much emphasis on punishment, ultimately God putting individuals into eternal burning hell.  In those days power was raw and torture was considered effective.  Diluted versions of those assumptions hang on in our own ordinary government and -- secretly -- in full intensity.  The ancient grisly practices persist in all their intensity in individuals and the Middle East.  I will point out that in Africa the present tin god authorities were taught by the overseers of Empire, right down to amputation of hands and feet.  (Look up Leopold II of Belgium).   In unsophisticated parts of the world, some people confuse intense religious devotion with a kind of merging with God, which means trouble for the “children of God.”  People still say "Spare the rod and spoil the child" and really mean it.

"Board of Education"

In my own family my humanist father was a spanker -- I’ve explained that this was related to pre-frontal cortex trauma that let anger get out of control -- but my mother used a switch on my bare legs hard enough to make stripes.  My cousins on both sides deny any such thing and I never witnessed any of them “getting a licking,” but I don’t think my parents ever punished us in front of family or neighbors.  My parent generation was moving “up” from the farms, as were the majority of people as the cities of today formed.  They were used to managing animals by using a switch or whip.  Children can seem pretty much like little animals.  I can’t remember anyone in the decades after WWII getting upset about corporal punishment.  Schools all had wooden paddles.

In rural and small town settings, a “front” of respectability is key to success to the point that one of the most destructive byproducts of any sort of deviation from the accepted code (alcohol, gambling, promiscuity) is the enforcement of secrecy, esp. on the children.  Given serious problems, family members will be separated from outsiders.  Even in country days, even with the reluctance of small community institutions (school, cops, government, church) to get involved, kids could let information escape that would punish the adults.   My country cousins were not allowed to tell how much acreage or how many cows they had.   Business is a poker game.

The counter-advantage of those places was that relatives could be a buffer who intervened for children in a quiet way, an advantage lost in the anonymity and mobility of the city.  No one would even necessarily know how many family members there were, so a missing kid might go unnoticed.  The more force is used to keep secrets, the more secrets there are to be kept.  The more hard work is needed for survival, let alone upward mobility, the more stress there is.

In places where men do hard life-threatening work, alcohol is often the buffer that makes their life bearable.  Strangely, littering with the empty cans is more frowned on than when, how much, and where they were emptied.  Drinking can be seen as an entitlement of management, a tool for deal-making by administrators and legislators, a bonding mechanism among CEO’s.  Alcohol is entwined with athletics as a source of identity and being “number one.”  Both beer drinkers and wine drinkers indulge in beverage snobbery.  Every movie shows big shots sipping whiskey from cut crystal glasses or lovers holding champagne flutes.  Putting an age threshold on drinking has made it a potent symbol of adulthood.

Now to add the element of sex.  It is generally agreed that much sexual abuse is not about the act of coitus, but in the imposing of authority, the assumption of privilege, a defense against the perp’s own weakness, frustration. and self-hatred.  Sex is the core because it is violation of intimacy, the most protected of our inner selves, replacing it with ownership, stealing our souls from us.  Of course, the perp gets nothing.  Not even an illusion.  Which is why he returns.  Alcohol is a way to undermine resistance if you don't have access to date-rape drugs.

Sex has been a highly tabooed aspect of life, controlled by the notion of marriage which muddles entitlement with ownership while pretending it's about love.  Few taboos still remain unexploited by the media.  Men with an uncertain sense of their own life will be drawn to transgression, even within their own family.  In fact, the incest taboo may add an extra kick rather than a restraint, the smugly risky feeling that they can get away with it.  A little child who can’t yet talk won’t tell.  What damage can it do?  No marks on the body.  Deep marks on the formation of the child from inside.  And economic motivation for everyone to look the other way because it is dad who pays the bills.

Violence even to the point of death and sexual misuse are biologically deep in humans (those apes), and no culture yet has succeeded in controlling the forces entirely, though we try in many different ways.  Probably the real maximum of protection is equal economic safety, which is not possible on a planet swept by drought, hail, hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, catastrophic fire, and so on.  We have not solved the problem of territory- or identity-based wars. 

So what are we to do?  If we are trying to develop a “better” civilization, then clearly secrecy and neglect are not the answer.  They only perpetuate what we’re trying to get rid of.  As we grow more able to understand and address the individual human brain, more possibilities for healing and protecting develop in our groups.  Institutions are changing in response to what science tells us about the cosmos, the planet, the other life here including microbes.  Less force, more strategy, better patterns for the creation and care of children.

The persistence of species is based on the conservation of behaviors and ideas that help humans survive as both individuals and groups.  We can make pretty good guesses about what will be “conserved” but we may be wrong.  It may be that those who are willing to get drunk, rape children, set cities aflame, kill, cheat and steal, will be the ones who survive.   That’s sometimes the way it’s been so far.  Roll the dice.  Before we run out of air and the oceans become vinegar. Otherwise, why survive?

THE VORTEX OF ABUSE

Every year in the United States there are infants and toddlers killed by dogs.  Sometimes these are unexpected tragedies.  But after taking a few reports of such incidents, a pattern emerges.  It is not surprising since households that "innocently" mishandle pets and children bring them into a kind of shared vortex.

The pattern is this.  An adult or near-adult likes to tussle with the family dog, often getting them to play tug o'war and toss around a stuffed animal, maybe one that is used by babies in the family so that it has the baby’s smell on it.  The dog gets praised, gets excited, and maybe gets carried away, shaking the toy into bits.  In the future, the dog fails to see that the baby is not a stuffed toy and someday treats it the same way, maybe when the child is thought to be safe in a playpen or sleeping -- with adults in the house but not the room.

But there is another version of the same game.  An adult, often at bedtime when children (let's say little boys) are in underwear or pajamas, begins to play with the child physically -- tussling, hugging, maybe tickling, rolling around on the floor.  Often the child is excited, loving the attention as well as the stimulation -- esp. if the adult is not familiar, like a visiting relative or a boyfriend.  Usually it’s males who like to play this way, maybe because it doesn’t seem like “sissy” behavior, but sometimes the male also becomes excited.

When the child is finally put into the bedroom to sleep, an adult with no boundaries may come to the bed to act out his sexual fantasies as he (usually he) would have done with an adult female or male partner.  He knows the child cannot prevent the act and figures the child can be intimidated into secrecy or that he is enough desired/needed by the mother that his actions will be ignored, denied, or blamed on the child.  Maybe he's the only adult home.  Some women who do not welcome sex don’t object when it’s deflected somewhere else and think of their sons as an extension that can't get pregnant or otherwise be a rival.  Or maybe everyone is too drunk or high to care.  A. B. Guthrie Jr. had a “thing” about how men with frigid wives don’t displace the sex, but rather the frustration -- by whipping their sons.

The next step can be that the child becomes upset, the adult tries to suppress the upset with punishment, partly to exorcise his own guilt and shame, and the punishment spirals out of control so that it is the child who is thrown, smashed, beaten to death.  More often the child manages to shut down enough to be left alone but carries life-long damage.  Call it PTSD if you care to, but it not quite the same thing as a nineteen-year-old boy being in the midst of combat.

Abuse of a child leads to his or her dissociation, which is almost like petit mal epilepsy, a brain storm that can shatter identity.  Nothing dramatic like whole personalities with names  -- no “Three Faces of X” and so on, but “states of mind” that are more protective under the circumstances.  The remarks one gets while in such a state are things like “you’re not yourself,” or “you’re two people.”  The person can seem to be sleepwalking.  Preoccupied.  Daydreaming.  Or as one counselor said to me,  “You suddenly act as though I’m speaking Chinese.”  (I had withdrawn to process a new idea.  She taught me to say,  "Wait a minute.  I'm still thinking.)

One can tell how parents treat their children by watching how they treat their dogs, how they choose their dogs.  Men often involve dogs in their efforts to settle their sons, or maybe the sons reach out for dogs in order to have another being to share the dynamic of domination.  One man came into the shelter to adopt a dog and chose a rather aggressive German shepherd though we counseled against it.  In fact, now the rules have changed so that such a dog couldn’t be adopted even if were only to be a junk yard guard dog.  This dog was for a delinquent and mentally challenged son.  

The next day the man called in a rage to report that the dog had bitten his son, when “all the boy did” was to kick the dog.  The law requires that an officer must quarantine the dog in case of rabies.  The man reported that THIS dog would not be quarantined and it would not bite anyone ever again either.  He had gone out with an axe and chopped it up.  So now my task was to go get the pieces, or at least the head, so we could test it for rabies.  The only person home was a little girl who showed me where they had “buried” the dog, except that it had only been thrown into the brush and a wheelbarrow of dirt dumped over it.  The dog’s ear was sticking out, so it was easy to know where to pull.

This was less grisly than another officer’s case: a man had freaked on drugs and chopped up his whole family including the Pekinese.  Its head was under the sofa.  The more difficult problem was that the toddler had the same color hair as the Peke so the AC officer and the cop had to sort them out.  Evidently the dog had been in close proximity to the child, maybe held or maybe trying to guard him.

The case that made my reputation was at a high school, a kid siccing his golden retriever on other kids.  One had already been bitten.  I, former school mar'm, marched onto the scene, took the collar of the dog, and was not about to let go, even when a big boy held me from behind while the dog owner choked me.  They were strong boys. The matter was resolved when the dog's collar broke, but my throat hurt for a few days.

Weeks later I was nearby and saw the dog without the boy.  I heaved the dog into the truck, locked it, and was on my way when the kid showed up and threw himself on the windshield, pounding as hard as he could.  I kept driving -- slowly --  and he slid off, thankfully not going under the wheels.  I had pressed charges when the boy choked me, but the ticket had not been served because no one would open the door.  The boy and his father came to get the dog but couldn’t take it without accepting the ticket and paying fees.  Luckily the boy really wanted that dog.

Once in juvie court, the judge had the boy’s files in front of her, two piles each five inches thick.  Nothing happened to him.  The father attended but not the mother -- I’m not sure there was a mother.  No one would look at me -- I was a “dog catcher” who took a “boy’s dog!”  Love, violence, authority, aggression, gender (a female officer), sentimentality.  How does one sort it all out?

When I first moved back to Valier, I went to one of the many community events.  Two women next to me were talking about a male relative who had become drunk at a recent family picnic.  There had been a bonfire and the man got the notion of jumping over it.  He managed this successfully, and then scooped up his small son and began to jump over the fire with the kid in his arms.  Even with the extra weight, he didn’t fall in the fire.  The two women were admiring this feat.  

Unable to resist (that school mar'm thing), I turned to them and said,  “What you are talking about is child endangerment.  Maybe a felony.”  I didn’t ask their names because I had no intention of making a formal complaint -- it wouldn’t have gone anywhere anyhow.  I just figured maybe I’d raise their consciousness.  They froze, staring, hastily cleared out, and never looked at me again.  Their consciousness had a wall around it, air-tight, danger-proof.  If this boy was being subjected to other dangers in his bed at night, they knew nothing about it.  It was more than a policy -- it was a reflex.

We don’t solve underlying dynamics.  We just wall out everything from suspicions about the neighbors to international conflicts.  The graffiti on the wall says, "Stigma," "Mind your own business," and "These are MY children and dog."

FAMILIES THAT ABUSE

If we could only stop thinking of families in terms of agrarian practices in Europe and America and instead think of them in new ways. What ought they to be?  What arrangements would prevent the abusive and neglectful child raising that re-produces adults with unmanageable cravings for sex, drugs and money that in turn cause them to abuse and neglect others.  What can we imagine?   Think big, think future. 

Some of us are searching our own families for clues and are disconcerted to uncover what we were never told before about unwanted babies, strange afflictions, people who disappeared, convicts, embezzlers, rejected races, alcoholics, and -- there’s no end to it.  Much of it about stigmatized issues.  In the past the idea has been to evict the offenders or lock them into the attic, pretend they never existed, and deny anything happened at all.  Enforce this with punishment for those who blab or go prying.  The de-cloaking of sex has finally allowed us to talk about the unspeakable in constructive ways.  Maybe we can treat social dysfunction calmly as the trouble-making disease it is and show that making it secret only makes it impervious to change so it festers in the dark.  

Recently a survey of SE Asian men asked whether they had ever raped women.  Almost one in four men surveyed said they committed rape at least once. Researchers interviewed more than 10,000 men at nine sites in Bangladesh, China, Cambodia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Papua New Guinea. The article was published in  The Lancet Global Health journal.

This quote is from the Bloomberg version:

One in 10 men said they had raped a woman who wasn’t their partner, the researchers found. When partners were included, the figure rose to 24 percent. Just under half of the perpetrators said they had raped more than one woman. The rates of violation differed between the sites: 11 percent of men questioned in Bangladesh said they had committed rape, compared to 60 percent in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea.

The most common reason men gave for the violence was sexual entitlement, followed by entertainment and the wish to punish the woman. Rates for men raping men ranged from 1.5 percent of those surveyed in Indonesia to 7.7 percent in Papua New Guinea.  No reasons given.

I suspect that the rates of rape and violence around here are comparable, though if you sorted out the populations a little bit they would range from the low figure to the high one.  Certainly there appears to be high rate of abuse of women on the reservation, whether or not either victim or perp is tribal.  But abuse is not uncommon in Valier or anyplace in Montana, even in high-income high-status neighborhoods.  Sometimes it’s not recognized as abuse or even as sexual.  They say “dysfunctional families.”  Privately dealt with.

The head of the Montana Highway Patrol just abruptly retired after making offensive comments related to sex about women and race.  Two University of Montana Bozeman fraternities have just been suspended because women were raped on their premises.

Consequences vary extremely.  A recent scandal concerns a judge in Billings who sentenced a rapist to thirty days in jail.  The particulars are that the girl was 14, the rape was statutory, the rapist was her teacher (in his late forties), she thought she was having a romance, the rapist had been in trouble for similar issues earlier, had been sentenced to a sex offender therapy group which he had left, and the judge said that in his opinion the girl was in as much control of the situation as the older man was.  (The older man was not presented as being in love.)  The community rose up in dissent, the judge is on his way out, and the Montana legal system is looking for a way to jigger the law in order to overturn the verdict and impose a much longer sentence.

At about the same time in Great Falls a fifteen year old boy baited an eleven year old girl into an alley and raped her.  His sentence was sixty years, with thirty suspended.  The despairing boy hurled himself off a courthouse rotunda balcony and is now recovering from the damage, which includes brain trauma from cracking his skull on the terrazzo floor.  Everyone has confused sympathies, which is why the law is not based on sympathy -- technically. 

In May a 26-year-old Great Falls man was found guilty of raping a 4-year-old girl, his biological daughter.  I haven’t been able to find his sentence online.  Perhaps it was appealed.  All of these have in common the power dynamic that feminists say is at the heart of rape: not just the violence, not just some irrepressible erotic urge, but the need to have power over a lesser person, to assert some kind of entitlement, and to impose a punishment, a humiliation and a stigma.  The common remark about uppity females is "she needs to be laid."  A toddler?

These are extreme and shocking examples, but local.  In Missoula it’s big-time athletes and in Great Falls it’s often live-in boyfriends stuck taking care of inconsolable babies they try to shut up with violence, breaking bones and occasionally killing them.  No sex involved except that the guy is there because of sexual services to the mother who is earning a low-level income.  This is NOT a family.  

What I know from animal control work is that if women are abused, then children and animals are also being abused. As my social psych prof used to say in the late Fifties, the boss yells at dad at work, he goes home and yells at his wife, she yells at the kid and the kid kicks the dog.  It was a relatively accepted attitude of hierarchical entitlement mostly awarded to the male, keeping the family in line with violence, which is excused as the marker of a powerful man so long as he’s a good provider.   He feeds 'em so he's entitled to beat 'em. The woman is supposed to just suck it up.   A man’s home is his castle and his family are his chattel.  This entitlement to use smaller, weaker beings (who may or may not be female or even human) has become twisted and inflated, partly in pushback to women’s empowerment and partly to the related attempt to legally end all discrimination.   A steady stream of reinforcement for the pushback comes from the media.  (The guys in Indonesia said they raped for "entertainment.")

Works of art, consciousness-raising projects, religious codes, and simple decency seem unable to counter the dynamics of domination-by-penetration with instead long-term sustaining care for children and intimates.  In fact, competitive sexual penetration is part of the violence of war: “shooting-off” equated to gun-fire.  Since men are defined by their ability to defend their “owned” female, children and animals, hurting the living "possessions" of a man is a way of humiliating their owner -- demonstrating his weakness.  Viagra is a kind of armament increment, a gunpowder.  

There are so many neglected, un-socialized, damaged children that foster homes and group homes are overwhelmed and infested with opportunists looking for victims.  Even if there were a good way to sweep up these kids and move them to happy circumstances where they had food, shelter, meds, and so on, they could not settle down to conventional families for a long time, if ever.  They are used to being self-determined, enjoying a certain level of excitement, and a circle of tightly bonded -- if exotic -- friends.  They would rather be free than safe.  So what do we do with them?  Maybe we should ask THEM.

What makes families dysfunctional?  Rigid and out-moded beliefs about what a family is, economics that stress families beyond coping, war, famine, natural disasters, and cultural confusion like that rampant in America today.  Blaming is part of the problem, not the solution.  We’re in no position to be fussy about gender or skin color and anyway those are not proper criteria for happy families anywhere.   So what ARE the criteria for arrangements that will nurture kids who will grow up able to nurture their own kids?  

"A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE": 2 film reviews

There are no children in the 2003 movie about priests called A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE,  nor are there any Native Americans since it is about the Irish church, but it IS about the abuse of power -- which is always relevant.  Actually, this would be a good vehicle for discussion to separate several problematic aspects of the priesthood.

The main focus is to argue against celibacy as a requirement for priesthood.  (Some religious people try to slide the subject over to “chastity,” which is slightly different.)  The bases are loaded in this story:  those defending celibacy are old white men who plainly have not married God, which is what they purport without realizing what mental pictures someone might form about two powerful old white men in an intimate relationship (God/Jesus as man/boy anyone?).  Rather they married the Church for the power and status -- altogether a nice life -- and loyalty only to the status quo: not rocking the boat.  The lesser authorities think they are enforcing immutable rules from God but the major authority thinks the rules don’t really apply to him.  He does what’s strategic.

The kind of sexuality that must be denied in order to constitute celibacy is left open.  That is, the question of whether celibacy must be the same as virginity, never ever having had any sex at all, is not addressed, except that it seems to be assumed by the community.  It is clear from the plot that the only thing wrong with a “chaste” homosexual relationship (that is, faithful and nurturing) is that the church rules it wrong.  The idea card about Jesus kissing John the Favorite is not played, but the church instituting the celibacy rule in the Eleventh Century is framed in terms of property, authority and greed for wealth that families might claim.  NOT something Jesus prescribed.  Fair enough.

No repellent gay characters exist except for the revelations about high authorities -- these days so usual in terms of secular high authorities that they’ve lost plot punch.  Sex is framed in terms of two straight youngsters, both attractive, and an initiation so innocently seductive (a hayloft with loose hay -- not many of those now) that one imdb.com reviewer was horrified.  The friends and family of the youngsters are in favor of this and one suggests,  “Why not get out of there and go start your own parish?  You’d have a crowd in the church in no time.”  It worked for Luther.

All same-sex lovers here are male, though there is a lesbian female who despises men and yet is sympathetic to same-sex relationships.  There is just a hint at the problem of age -- an old helpless priest is the instrument of discrimination and cannot get his moral feet under him without losing his home.  One of the most important factors is the rage and helplessness of the protagonist's father, his vulnerability to the church influence on banks and government.  In the end the mask is ripped off the Archbishop so that we see that under the Church is the skull of the Mafia, quite willing to use violence.

This is not child abuse, but it is the template for child abuse, both in the home and in the church.  The same known elements of over-investment in appearance, domination, status plus a hidden vulnerability where the shriveled soul lives, craving some kind of comfort and warmth and instead passing on the suffering.  Hugh Bonneville, before he became responsible for “Downton Abbey” and the family of three girls, is here the voice of the True Christian. (Yes, I know I’m mixing reality and fiction.)  The good guys in this movie wear colored clerical shirts with reverse collars.  They do NOT let them hang open unbuttoned the way Jack Lennon did.

There is a second movie by the same name, which is on YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asvl6kO1Vo8   This movie IS about child abuse: a BBC documentary about a case in Nebraska in 1990.  It is a rough cut because of being cancelled mysteriously before the editing was finished.   The beginning is a Boys Town case that accuses the Catholic-sponsored beloved institution of corruption and sexual abuse of boys.  This gradually moves over to being an indictment of a small group of Nebraska big shots playing games in Washington DC and using Nebraska boys for sex and drugs.  I suspect this is one source of the constant suspicion of victim testimony, because devastating discrediting accusations were made against these kids (now adults) when they were ready to testify.  The worst tactics were deaths.  Next after that was “blaming the victim” as inherently worthless and predatory trash.  None ever recovered money settlements.  Some left in the night.

For me, a key takeaway came from one of the investigators on the side of the “righteous.”  He remarked,  “This wasn’t just about some old men preying on little boys, it was about really important stuff and major figures in Washington, D.C.”  Seems to me that’s backwards.  The priority ought to be the little boys -- not the important big shots.  But I have no trouble at all understanding what they mean about corrupt state figures playing footsie with Washington, D.C.  That was twenty years ago.  These days the prairie state big shots fly to China and Russia.  The sex, drugs, and kids have probably not changed much.  I come from Portland, OR, where our much admired and progressive mayor was caught “shagging” the teenaged babysitter.  It was hard to believe the newspaper.

This week I’ve watched the first season of a new Swedish crime series called “Annika Bentzon, Crime Reporter.”  It’s fast, gorgeous, and engaging -- even with subtitles.  It appears that the idea of journalists as moralists is an idea that has not worn out, even though some of the major whistleblowers who release incriminating papers have not been treated well in Sweden.  In the BBC “A Conspiracy of Silence,” another source of reform comes from people of color, like the visiting alumni, a black man, who comes to give a lecture.  He explicitly says in the lecture -- which is disrupted almost as soon as it is begun -- that the more farflung and supposedly “young” branches of the Roman Catholic church are far more advanced and sophisticated that the old Brit fossilized center of power, let alone Rome.  So that makes four sources of renewal: media, internal people of conscience, achieving people of color, and the world-wide church.

I’ve also been watching TED clips all day -- those short presentations about cutting edge ideas.  One of them, a man of color, says that we are being asked to assimilate as many bits of information in a day than people in medieval times had to absorb and sort in a year.  This rings true.  It is also one of the reasons I’m living in a small town -- not that I can evade the avalanche, but that I can reduce most of the daily stuff to near-automatic so I can think about major issues.  The Internet makes research easy.

Nevertheless, there is a certain amount of paranoia that sets in.  I’m not so worried about the FBI as I am that some bedraggled eight-year-old, beaten and bloody, will knock on my door late one night.  Maybe he will tell me he is sexually abused.  Luckily, we have a good sheriff who will confront abusers.  I don’t have illusions about such a boy only needing a wash-up and a new set of clothes.  After the hospital, which hopefully won’t discover anything that will mean a lifetime of troubles, there will need to be more than just a foster home that’s sympathetic.  I’m not much impressed by foster homes.  And I know how twisting and distorting any abuse is to a child.

But I think it’s important to try to understand what dynamics in our society make old white men with power think that their reward is permission to torture children.  Why Boys Town in the first place -- created after WWI because of the many abandoned and suffering boys -- and why Jonestown?  I think the questions are linked, if not overlapping.  Good intentions gone not just bad but mad.

SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN

People who don’t know Indians or reservations are having trouble believing the things I’ve been blogging recently.  I refer them to this video report so they can actually see the people they have a hard time believing.  Maybe body language will be more persuasive. In this story the Bishop actually acts like a Christian.  You need to see that, too.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/the-silence/

Mark Trahant is an American Indian journalist of considerable stature and accomplishment.  We were on the same “bulletin board” back in the Nineties, so his name always catches my eye.  I admire his work and am eager to see his book on "austerity."  (His glasses are just like mine!)

http://www.marktrahant.org/marktrahant.org/Mark_Trahant.html

So far I haven’t located a thoughtful piece about what a kid ought to do if he or she has been sexually abused, whether or not the kid is on a reservation or even whether or not the abuse is by a priest.  Two phases of this:  an immediate response and then the aftermath.  Neither do many adults know what to do if a child tells them they’ve been molested.  If a parent doesn’t respond or responds by punishing the child, then what?  Normally one goes to a priest or a cop for help, but what if they don’t help?  If you’re a kid, you can’t very well go to a lawyer for help. Kids end up resorting to other kids for help, which can at least get them emotional contact, but what do you do if you’re a kid and another kid confides in you that they’ve been molested?  

I’m impressed that in Mark’s Frontline story, the woman who is more-or-less the protagonist of the story has not only left and recovered (she appears to be both prosperous and educated) but has gone back to her roots to do something about it.  One is first a witness, then a testifier.  I also spot another role, which is the person who stands with the testifier to support testifying, physically and emotionally.

There is a role for the website that simply accumulates evidence.

http://www.rickross.com/groups/clergy.html   The list of cases on this website is stunning.  Most of them are from the media.  Since newspapers like big money amounts, there are a lot of accounts of settlements.  For those who think the people molested as children are simply milking the system for money, consider that the church could just as well “disown” convicted priests, set them out on the street, and telephone the police to come get them.  Of course, that would lead to even more questions.  But maybe they need to be asked.

The following document includes excellent and explicit information about reporting child abuse, detecting child abuse, and the actual law.  It's specifically for Montana where there are enough Indian reservations to sway elections.

http://www.dphhs.mt.gov/publications/mtschoolguidelines.pdf

If you’re not in Montana or even in the United States, it will take a bit of research to find the equivalent and there might not be one.  I must warn you that when I’ve turned in cases of sexual abuse of children, I’ve had to kiss the job goodbye, but in those days I didn’t have tenure and there was no hotline.   

MONTANA’S STATEWIDE TOLL-FREE CHILD ABUSE HOTLINE at 1-866- 820-KIDS (1-866-820-5437). This Hotline is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

If you’re a kid reading this or if you’re an adult who is wondering what’s going on in some kid’s life, I encourage you to keep a journal.  Date it, note the time, keep it as fact-focused as possible.  Over time it might very well form a pattern that can be reported, and even prove to be valuable evidence in court.  Be careful where and how you keep it -- maybe online in a “cloud” of some kind.  I use blogs, which can be set not to allow access by anyone but yourself.  Be careful where you record your password. 

If you are being bullied or cornered, I recommend a “screamer” that’s about the size of a chapstick, easy to carry in a pocket or attach to a keychain.    It’s VERY loud and will often make a dog run away, which is how I started using them when I was an animal control officer.  No one has to monitor as with a GPS or "smart" phone.  Screamer false alarms don’t cause as much trouble as bear spray or MACE.  As some friends have pointed out, MACE won’t phase an attacker full of meth.  Even a canister stored in a locker can go off accidentally and clear a school.  At the level where a taser or gun might be necessary, the police need to be involved. 

If the Catholic church wants to recover its credibility, it will, as Father Fitzgerald advised, carefully identify those who are molesting children, immediately laicize them (this is asking a lot), and set them outside the gates for secular authorities to process according to the law.  Then they should follow the example of the Bishop in Alaska who went to the victims and asked their forgiveness, anointing and blessing each one.  No doubt the church is afraid that if all the pockets are turned out, they will no longer attract either parishioners or priests.  This is probably true.  But then those looking for a safe place with a true message can come back.

Evidently a deadline has passed -- the big ads from the lawyers soliciting clients seem to be gone.  I’ve said about everything I have to say.  Probably unless there is another local incident I’ll be quiet on the subject, except that as I turn up movies that seem relevant to the public understanding of priesthood, I’ll review them.  I’m also looking for books about Indians plus professional religious people.  Why has no one made a movie from one of the Louise Erdrich books?  Law & Order SVU has had an American Indian cop (Adam Beach) but never a religious molester.  Too hot, I expect.  Was it an echo that the Adam Beach character was overwhelmed with anger and left the SVU unit or did the actor just get a better offer so the scriptwriters needed an excuse to drop him?  Where is a script about Native American officers on a reservation trying to cope with sexual abuse of children?  Maybe a priest should write it.  I hope it won’t be a lawyer.