I've been intrigued for a long time by the famous Thomas Wolfe line "You can never go home again." Home is that elusive place-in-time (or, in physics, point-in-space/time) that once was, but can never be the same again. It's not just a physical location. Sure, you can go to the place that was once your home; in fact, you may live in the exact same house or at least the same city in which you were born. But 'home', as in that place-in-time where you thought of yourself as 'being at home' was once, but can never be again, the same place. It has changed, just like you have changed. The 'you' who goes there is not the 'you' who once thought of that place, in that time, as home. It can become a complex analysis, breaking each component of the sentence and the concept down into constituent parts.
I was reminded of the sentence this morning when I was talking with an old friend from Albuquerque, where I lived for 29 years of my adult life. I was born into and lived my childhood in a military family, so I have never been 'from' a specific place (we lived in 7 U.S. states and possessions and two foreign countries). There is no 'this is my home' sense, for me, in the same way that people who grow up in a town, from birth until they leave their parent's house. I now live in St. Louis, Missouri and I meet a lot of people who were born here, have lived here their whole life, and fully intend to die here. This is their 'home', and though they have changed, and St. Louis has changed, they have that 'sense of home' in a stronger and more 'stable' way than I can ever manifest. Nevertheless, when I reached 17 years of age, I moved to New Mexico to go to college (because my mother was from there and my parents had residency in the state, hence schooling was less expensive). After a year in Socorro at the School of Mines, I moved to and lived in Albuquerque until 1998, when I moved to St. Louis. So, in the sense of 'a singular place where I spent the majority of my life', Albuquerque is my primary home, with St. Louis my second home.
This Christmas, I sent a gift of a book on the history of the Missouri Botanical Gardens to a number of different friends whom I'd met over the years (most of them in New Mexico). I sent it sort of 'out of the blue' -- no one expected a present from me, and indeed I had never before sent them a Christmas gift. But I did it this year as an 'incentive' for them to remember me and to give serious thought to come and visit me in my second home city; in fact, I stated such, quite directly, in my letter to them. As those friends have called to thank me for the gift, we have had a chance to 'catch up' on the events that have transpired in our mutual lives. And, lo and behold (I say that as a small bit of surprise, given how each of us gets involved in our lives wherever-we-are) 'life happens' to your friends [and the rest of the world] when you're living your own life. My friend in Albuquerque was telling me about how his wife of 30 years has developed ALS and is slowly physically deteriorating from the condition. That put me in a bit of a melancholy mood, and made me sad that I hadn't been there to live through all the years with them as the close friends they had been when I lived in Albuquerque. But, of course, none of us can be in more than one place at a time. We can only live our lives wherever-we-are, and be aware of, somewhat tangentially, the lives of others at a distance.
That got me to thinking about the journeys that immigrants have taken throughout history. I remember reading about how, when Europeans left the 'Old World' for the 'New' (America), they knew they were unlikely to ever see their families again. And how this was true for early settlers of the American West, when they left their families back East. Or what refugees experience when they leave war-torn countries to immigrate to a new country to raise their families in relative peace. There is always the probability they will never again see the families or friends who constituted their 'home'. They are, indeed, moving elsewhere to establish a new 'home', for themselves and their families, to establish a different 'place-in-time' where they can once again create a 'sense of home'.
Nowadays, with computers and the Internet, the ability to keep track of family and old friends is more resilient. You don't even have to wait until someone replies to a letter; you can call them on the phone or write them an email, and 'instantaneously' reconnect. But, of course, it's not quite the same thing as 'being there', nor of having lived in the same town and had the experience of interacting on a regular basis. It's surely better than what immigrants have had for most of human history, no doubt about it. It's a much quicker connection and you can ever write to people at 3 in the morning, when you can't sleep and know that, via email, you can send them a note which they will read at their leisure. And that casual ability to keep connections alive, even while living your busy life elsewhere, is truly a wonderful gift of technology.
There is another level, though, of 'never going home again' for people who are recovering from trauma. The journey of recovery takes one (hopefully, if there is forward movement) far afield from the 'home' where one's trauma occurred. And, indeed, the point of being in recovery is to move quite far away from the original home. In the case of recovery, the hope is that one won't be able to come home again, at least in the sense of the home where the trauma took place. That's a 'home' you want to leave far behind. But, at the same time, like any immigrant, you want to establish a new 'sense of home' in a place where you can find relative peace. And that 'place-in-time' may also be a 'place inside your soul' where one can experience safety in a way that was never possible in the original 'home'.
There were, indeed, many aspects of my life in my military family that I never want to 'go home again' to, just as there were with my life in Albuquerque (or even life here in St. Louis). I'm nostalgic for the good times, the warm loving experiences with my friends, and the intermittent happy times with my family-of-origin, but surely I'd like to move beyond, and never return to, the negative events, the years of deep depression, and the long years of painful struggle involved with recovering from the sexual, physical and emotional trauma.
So, though none of us can 'ever really go home again', on some levels we wouldn't want to, and on other levels we wish we could. It's complex. That 'place-in-time' isn't what it 'used to be'. We're different, it's different, life has moved on, we've gotten older. But if we can create a safe and resilient 'place in our souls' that is, for us, 'home', then we can carry our 'sense of home' around with us wherever we are, forever.
Monday, December 27, 2010
Monday, December 20, 2010
Fear Of Intimacy Is Doubly Difficult for Sexual Abuse Survivors
Everyone I know, everyone I read about, talks about having a 'fear of intimacy'. It's hardly an unusual phenomenon. Getting emotionally close to another human being is difficult, in the best of circumstances. Each person brings to a relationship their own 'emotional baggage' -- familial upbringing, cultural assumptions and expectations, personal hopes and longings, media images of 'what a good relationship looks like', body-type preferences, sexual and financial desires, experiences with past relationships, good or bad, and a whole host of other life challenges. To say that it's difficult, 'in the best of all possible worlds', to find a compatible partner is to put it mildly. Even people with relatively positive life experiences have a struggle finding someone with whom they want to spend time, someone with whom they share 'chemistry', and finding someone to spend a lifetime with -- well, the chances of that happening are statistically quite rare.
But for survivors of sexual (and physical, emotional, or religious) trauma, the fear of intimacy is doubly difficult. They are not simply butting up against run-of-the-mill fears, of 'losing oneself' in an intimate relationship, but of being able to trust another human being not to abuse them in the same [or a similar] way they were abused as children. As children, they were molested and/or raped by 'caregivers' who 'said' they loved them, even as the 'caregivers' violated every shred of the child's trust. After a childhood of being told that love was being 'disciplined' by being beaten senseless ["I wouldn't beat you if I didn't love you"], or that love was submitting to the sexual predation of mentally diseased adults, or that love was being the object of another's violent outbursts or unreasonable religious demands, one's 'sense' of 'love' has been rather corrupted. And it becomes necessary as an adult, through positive mental health intervention, to re-learn what love can be whole-cloth, from the ground up.
And that lack of trust tends to be projected upon an individual who most looks like the child's abuser. If you were a boy child and your father molested you, you tend to distrust most men and be fearful of male supervisors; or if your mother molested you, you tend to distrust women generally and be fearful of female authority figures. The same is true for girls (distrust of men if your father molested you, fear of other women if your mother did the sexual abuse). If both your parents engaged in the sexual abuse or if the parent who abused you took pleasure in gender cross-dressing when they engaged in the sexual molestation, your struggle to trust much of anyone, of either gender, is greatly compromised. It might take a lifetime of searching, going through one relationship after another -- via serial promiscuity or serial monogamy -- before finding someone who is compatible. Even then, with the best of mental health intervention (assuming the survivor has access to such assistance, which especially for boys is rare), finding a compatible partner with whom one has 'positive chemistry' and whom one can trust, is rare. Not impossible, but rare.
The sexual abuse survivor fears, with good reason, that they might 'go to their grave' never finding a partner who cares about them personally. One of the 'trauma messages' that is learned by many survivors is that their only value is in being sexual, primarily being 'sexually available' for the pleasure of someone else, or for being able to 'sexually service' their abuser. [For some sexual trauma survivors, not being in a sexual relationship, as an adult, for an extended period of time sets the stage for suicidal thoughts -- precisely because they believe their only value in the world is in 'servicing the sexual needs of others'. Not having that opportunity for a long time essentially means, by way of this dysfunctional logic, that they no longer have 'human value' in this world.] That the other person could, possibly, be concerned with the survivor's sexual pleasure or emotional care is so far from consideration as to be viewed as 'fantasyland' -- maybe desired, but utterly and completely unexpected.
Many survivors, at least until they learn better mating techniques [and the underlying emotional dynamics], tend to be attracted to people who are 'similar' to their abusers (even if they say to themselves that they are looking for someone quite different from their abuser), simply because that 'kind of person' is familiar to them. It's not that people want to be abused again (for most victims, the last thing they consciously want is a reenactment of their trauma), rather that they tend to be attracted to people who have characteristics that reenforce their underlying trauma dynamics. As a therapist noted to me one time: "If a survivor is in a room with 100 people and 99 of them have relatively healthy behaviors, but there is one person in the room who exhibits the underlying inappropriate behaviors that a survivor is 'familiar with', that is the person with whom the survivor will try to connect."
This pattern will continue for years until and unless the survivor has the opportunity and resources to obtain constructive mental health intervention and a provider who can lay out the underlying dynamics. Only by showing the survivor how he is reenacting the trauma and point out a more effective approach to finding a healthy relationship will anything begin to change. As was pointed out to me in the course of my own recovery "the best way to find a suitable partner is to be the kind of person you are seeking." It was only by engaging in a lifetime of really difficult mental health recovery that I finally gained sufficient mental health to be able to 'attract' a relatively healthy intimate partner/friend into my life. And, indeed, I have found someone with whom I now have a long-term relationship, but it took 38 years of 'dating'. [This is not to fail to acknowledge some delightful short-term relationships -- and some resultant long-term friendships -- with women in the interim, but to note that this is the first time anyone has been willing to 'invest' in a mutual long-term emotionally caring and sexually pleasurable interaction with this survivor.]
For so very long, it was as though there was an infinitely strong plexiglas wall between myself and other people. I could 'see' other people engaging in what appeared to be emotionally and sexually caring relationships, but my access to those kinds of interactions was impossible. It was as though that was available to other people, but surely not to me. When I would discuss such a possibility with female partners, their behavioral reaction (if not their actual words) was "That's a really funny joke; do you have any more humor like that?" It was extraordinarily painful to be rejected for a long-term invested relationship time-after-time, even when I felt deeply loving toward the women. Finally, a couple of years ago, I met someone who, due to their own trauma recovery and positive relational intervention, was seeking someone like me.
It has taken a 'a lifetime' [I'm now 59] to find someone with whom I'm compatible, but I know now, personally, that it is possible. And I extend that 'acknowledgement of possibility' to other survivors of profound sexual trauma. I'm not talking about perfection (what would that even look or be like?) nor am I saying there are any guarantees of it's longevity; I'm talking about hard relationship work that has the chance to lead to a positive relationship outcome. At least now I have an 'envelope' in which to generate such a mutually caring - and trusting - relationship. I'm finally on the other side of that plexiglas wall.
But for survivors of sexual (and physical, emotional, or religious) trauma, the fear of intimacy is doubly difficult. They are not simply butting up against run-of-the-mill fears, of 'losing oneself' in an intimate relationship, but of being able to trust another human being not to abuse them in the same [or a similar] way they were abused as children. As children, they were molested and/or raped by 'caregivers' who 'said' they loved them, even as the 'caregivers' violated every shred of the child's trust. After a childhood of being told that love was being 'disciplined' by being beaten senseless ["I wouldn't beat you if I didn't love you"], or that love was submitting to the sexual predation of mentally diseased adults, or that love was being the object of another's violent outbursts or unreasonable religious demands, one's 'sense' of 'love' has been rather corrupted. And it becomes necessary as an adult, through positive mental health intervention, to re-learn what love can be whole-cloth, from the ground up.
And that lack of trust tends to be projected upon an individual who most looks like the child's abuser. If you were a boy child and your father molested you, you tend to distrust most men and be fearful of male supervisors; or if your mother molested you, you tend to distrust women generally and be fearful of female authority figures. The same is true for girls (distrust of men if your father molested you, fear of other women if your mother did the sexual abuse). If both your parents engaged in the sexual abuse or if the parent who abused you took pleasure in gender cross-dressing when they engaged in the sexual molestation, your struggle to trust much of anyone, of either gender, is greatly compromised. It might take a lifetime of searching, going through one relationship after another -- via serial promiscuity or serial monogamy -- before finding someone who is compatible. Even then, with the best of mental health intervention (assuming the survivor has access to such assistance, which especially for boys is rare), finding a compatible partner with whom one has 'positive chemistry' and whom one can trust, is rare. Not impossible, but rare.
The sexual abuse survivor fears, with good reason, that they might 'go to their grave' never finding a partner who cares about them personally. One of the 'trauma messages' that is learned by many survivors is that their only value is in being sexual, primarily being 'sexually available' for the pleasure of someone else, or for being able to 'sexually service' their abuser. [For some sexual trauma survivors, not being in a sexual relationship, as an adult, for an extended period of time sets the stage for suicidal thoughts -- precisely because they believe their only value in the world is in 'servicing the sexual needs of others'. Not having that opportunity for a long time essentially means, by way of this dysfunctional logic, that they no longer have 'human value' in this world.] That the other person could, possibly, be concerned with the survivor's sexual pleasure or emotional care is so far from consideration as to be viewed as 'fantasyland' -- maybe desired, but utterly and completely unexpected.
Many survivors, at least until they learn better mating techniques [and the underlying emotional dynamics], tend to be attracted to people who are 'similar' to their abusers (even if they say to themselves that they are looking for someone quite different from their abuser), simply because that 'kind of person' is familiar to them. It's not that people want to be abused again (for most victims, the last thing they consciously want is a reenactment of their trauma), rather that they tend to be attracted to people who have characteristics that reenforce their underlying trauma dynamics. As a therapist noted to me one time: "If a survivor is in a room with 100 people and 99 of them have relatively healthy behaviors, but there is one person in the room who exhibits the underlying inappropriate behaviors that a survivor is 'familiar with', that is the person with whom the survivor will try to connect."
This pattern will continue for years until and unless the survivor has the opportunity and resources to obtain constructive mental health intervention and a provider who can lay out the underlying dynamics. Only by showing the survivor how he is reenacting the trauma and point out a more effective approach to finding a healthy relationship will anything begin to change. As was pointed out to me in the course of my own recovery "the best way to find a suitable partner is to be the kind of person you are seeking." It was only by engaging in a lifetime of really difficult mental health recovery that I finally gained sufficient mental health to be able to 'attract' a relatively healthy intimate partner/friend into my life. And, indeed, I have found someone with whom I now have a long-term relationship, but it took 38 years of 'dating'. [This is not to fail to acknowledge some delightful short-term relationships -- and some resultant long-term friendships -- with women in the interim, but to note that this is the first time anyone has been willing to 'invest' in a mutual long-term emotionally caring and sexually pleasurable interaction with this survivor.]
For so very long, it was as though there was an infinitely strong plexiglas wall between myself and other people. I could 'see' other people engaging in what appeared to be emotionally and sexually caring relationships, but my access to those kinds of interactions was impossible. It was as though that was available to other people, but surely not to me. When I would discuss such a possibility with female partners, their behavioral reaction (if not their actual words) was "That's a really funny joke; do you have any more humor like that?" It was extraordinarily painful to be rejected for a long-term invested relationship time-after-time, even when I felt deeply loving toward the women. Finally, a couple of years ago, I met someone who, due to their own trauma recovery and positive relational intervention, was seeking someone like me.
It has taken a 'a lifetime' [I'm now 59] to find someone with whom I'm compatible, but I know now, personally, that it is possible. And I extend that 'acknowledgement of possibility' to other survivors of profound sexual trauma. I'm not talking about perfection (what would that even look or be like?) nor am I saying there are any guarantees of it's longevity; I'm talking about hard relationship work that has the chance to lead to a positive relationship outcome. At least now I have an 'envelope' in which to generate such a mutually caring - and trusting - relationship. I'm finally on the other side of that plexiglas wall.
Monday, December 13, 2010
Physical Manifestations That Result From Sexual Trauma
To say that an individual is 'sensitized' by their sexual abuse trauma is to put it mildly. The very nature of a trauma event pushes ones nerves to the breaking point, forcing the person who is being molested to both shut down emotionally and want to flee the event as quickly as possible -- though flight is often not possible, especially if the assailant is bigger and/or stronger or is using a weapon to force, via coercion, submission from their victim. That 'fight or flight' desire is almost always present, and depending on the level and frequency of the abuse, it can eventually become an inculcated defense in the abused individual's life. Even when abuse is not actually occurring, the abused individual is constantly 'on guard' in defense against a possible set-up, attack, or abandonment. And they tend to 'read abuse into' situations which might objectively be nonthreatening to a non-abused person, simply because they expect abuse to occur without the slightest provocation.
The adrenal glands, which produce the chemicals that allow the body to be ready for flight, are continually taxed and depleted. And there is plenty of, at least anecdotal, evidence that this depletion leads the individual to become hypersensitive to the world around them. I give my own situation as an example of this syndrome. Between profound physical abuse, incest, the resultant attempt to 'stuff' the emotional pain with substance abuse, and various disease maladies over the years, my own body has become more and more hypersensitive (not less) as I have aged. Medications which I had been able to tolerate when I was younger (and at an earlier stage in my mental health recovery -- indeed, when I was more 'shut down' emotionally) have now become intolerable as I have gained a greater 'sense' of my somatic body, as I have 'spent more time', consciously, in my body. [One definite result of profound trauma is that abused people spend a good deal of their waking hours being mentally and emotionally 'outside of their own skin', because it was -- and continues to be -- not safe to consciously inhabit the body that was so severely abused.]
Medical practitioners always assume that since I'm a tall man [6'8"] who weighs over 200 pounds that I can easily tolerate fairly strong levels of medication; in fact, quite the opposite is true. I often can only tolerate children's doses (and even then, I can 'feel' the medication cursing through my body in a way that most people find rather curious, since they don't feel much of anything on a normal adult dose). Several of my therapists have speculated over the years that this is, at least in part, due to the over-depletion of the adrenal glands. It is very difficult for me to completely relax in any given situation because I'm continually 'on guard' for a possible attack. Which is, of course, as an adult somewhat paradoxical, since now I'm tall enough and big enough to probably fend off most non-weapon related physical attacks -- but it is difficult for me to 'know' that that's an objective reality.
A number of years ago, when I was first setting up the Mariposa Men's Wellness Institute, I speculated that 'most men' walked around in a constant 'defense mode', continually 'on guard' for physical [or, in business, emotional] attack from, especially, other men. My therapist at the time noted that he didn't see that kind of defense exhibited by most men at all, and that I might want to consider that that was my personal experience which I was then generalizing to all males. That came as a real 'ah ha' moment for me; I simply assumed that my experience was the experience that was common to most other men (especially given the 'one-up-man-ship that many men exhibit toward one another). Indeed, it may be the experience of some other males, and is very probably the experience of other males who, like myself, had been profoundly abused as children (or who had experienced torture, war-related trauma, or physical attack as an adult), but it was not, as my therapist pointed out, the 'common experience' of most males in their daily lives.
Even now, after many years of recovery work, I find myself having to consciously overcome panicky 'fight or flight' feelings in two particular situations: when I walk past another man who is sitting on a park bench and when a crowed room becomes very quiet for more than a minute. In the first situation, I have a powerful fear that I will be attacked and raped by the man on the bench when my back is turned away. In the second situation, I have an overt sensation that it's a 'quiet before the storm' moment, that any moment I will be physically assaulted. Now, I have clear memories about the second of the two situations: in my family-of-origin, the 'discipline' [i.e. physical violence] was often meted out after a period of silence. It was far 'safer' when there was a lot of noise, when other people in the family [especially my father] were otherwise occupied. But the first situation is more defuse in my memory. I'm well aware of what the fear is, and I have to consciously regulate my breathing to feel any sense of safety (and continue walking -- after about 50 feet of distance, the fear subsides considerably). But the event that causes the fear is rather unclear to me (though I assume it is related to an actual event in my childhood). But in both situations, I have to make a hyperconscious effort to overcome my 'fight or flight' fears, and know in my heart that I can, as an adult, take care of myself.
Abuse survivors often face a lifetime of these fears and phobias, and require continual therapeutic [and/or personal] intervention to feel any sense of safety in situations that non-abused persons would not particularly notice. It requires a focus on desensitizing oneself to these kinds of triggers, differentiating between real and imagined threats.
Monday, December 6, 2010
Filling the Bottomless Pit of 'Not Enough'
For many years, I've studied and have been involved in various 12-step groups around the issue of addiction. Back in the mid-1980's, I served on the New Mexico Governor's Task Force on Alcoholism [after it was no longer an issue in my own life]. As a younger adult, I had my own issues with substance abuse addiction, as I tried -- albeit quite ineffectively -- to 'kill the emotional pain' resulting from the sexual and physical abuse I experienced as a child. I was in profound anguish about that terror and doing everything I could think of to try to forget and move on. It took many years of hard slogging psychotherapy before I realized that it was only by diving into the middle and going through the pain in a sober state of mind that I could ever hope to come out of it.
This is a common problem faced by people who have serious PTSD [Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder] issues. As a first sort of pre-mental health education step, they just want to stuff the outrageous pain that is in their souls resulting from all the terror that was visited upon them (from physical, sexual and emotional abuse and/or warfare). But the addiction to those mind-altering substances simply doesn't help, at all. Their intent is spot-on, but the effectiveness of that methodology is simply nonexistent. If anything, their lives tend to spiral out-of-control [even the minimal 'control' that they can exercise in this rather random existence] and worsen as they need more and more 'doses' of alcohol and illicit substances to suppress their inner emotional turmoil. In many cases, they have to finally 'hit the wall' or 'bottom out' before they can have the willingness to take more appropriate and effective steps out of their angst. It takes that willingness, some basic knowledge about more healthy alternative paths, and often intervention by outside agencies [mental health, social service, or judicial] to move to 'the next step' of their recovery. Many volumes have been written about how to move forward and what steps are necessary to gain self-empowering mental health; it's not my intent to cover that here. My focus this week is to talk about a few of the precursor feelings that cause the addictions to surface in the first place.
The major one that I'm only too aware of (that I continue to suffer from, in spades, even after many years of a clear and forward-moving path of recovery) is the very primal sense of not being enough, what I call 'not-enough-ness'. Children often gain this sense when their 'caregivers' either fail to instill the sense in their children that they are 'enough' just the way they are, or have unduly high expectations of their children (expectation levels that no one could possibly meet), or actively terrorize their children with profound physical, sexual, emotional and/or religious abuse. The children grow up with the clear sense that no matter what they achieve in the world, it is never enough to gain their parents' unconditional love. In many situations, the parents think of themselves as 'not being enough' and therefore pass this self-deprecation on to their children [in a whole host of ways]. Or, due to their own negative feelings and/or the abuse they experienced as children, they fail to have any clear idea how to express honest love toward their children, even if they have the sincere desire to do so.
Though I've managed to move beyond the more physically and emotionally destructive addictions, like many people who have those experiences as children I'm still very much ruled by not-enough-ness addictions. Nowadays, that expresses itself in avid 'collecting', surrounding myself with academic degrees, stuff in my house [art, books, music, etc.], industrial quantities of ushering at music, dance and theater venues, and service on community boards. While one could say that these addictions are less destructive to my 'being', and indeed do, in many ways, serve a positive purpose for other people in the community (due to the high levels of volunteerism), the 'reason' I do much of it is that primal fear that failure to engage in all of this will expose me to my feelings of 'not being enough'. Hence, even though much of it may indeed serve a positive social outcome, the motivation [often, though hardly always] is less commendable. And rather abusive of the care of my inner child's better needs.
I'm reminded of the advice I gave a woman, years ago, with whom I had an intimate relationship. No matter how much love I laid upon her, she simply couldn't 'feel' the love and was always yearning for more. I noted to her that life is 'like a Pilsner glass', wide at the top and narrow at the bottom. You can pour gallons upon gallons of love in from the top -- from outside of the Self -- and the glass would never fill up [like a bottomless sink hole], but if you squeezed one drop in from the bottom -- from your inner Self, from your love of yourself -- the glass would fill up immediately. If we can't feel love for ourselves, it is difficult to feel love from others. She never quite 'got it'; I finally gave up the relationship when I realized that 'the sky was the limit' on her need for love, or in other words, there was no limit. When I came to that realization, I moved on, to protect my own rather weak emotional heart.
The other image I often perceived in my relationships with many of the women I met was that it was like they were laying on the ground with their mouths wide open, waiting to be 'fed' with emotion that they couldn't supply, not to themselves or to me. I had my own host of PTSD issues; looking back upon such situations, I realize that I likely was attracted to women who were themselves sexual abuse survivors, simply because that 'viewpoint' was familiar to me (surely not healthy, but what I was used to). It has only been in recent years, as my mental health has increased and my recovery become stable and resonant, that I have begun to attract women into my life who, while they may or may not have had their own trauma issues [as Lord Byron noted, none of us leave this world without some pain in our lives], at least were actively working on their own recovery and therefore had 'emotional space and energy available' to offer honest love instead of simply demanding its unilateral receipt.
This is not to say that it doesn't 'take two to tango'; indeed, all intimate relationships, with one's Self [one's inner voices] and with others, takes active involvement and responsibility by all parties. I am noting that I [along with other PTSD survivors of profound abuse] had -- and have -- my own angst around not-enough-ness and that that 'lacking' has and does influence my ability to manifest and maintain loving friendships. All survivors of profound abuse struggle with those issues.
This is a common problem faced by people who have serious PTSD [Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder] issues. As a first sort of pre-mental health education step, they just want to stuff the outrageous pain that is in their souls resulting from all the terror that was visited upon them (from physical, sexual and emotional abuse and/or warfare). But the addiction to those mind-altering substances simply doesn't help, at all. Their intent is spot-on, but the effectiveness of that methodology is simply nonexistent. If anything, their lives tend to spiral out-of-control [even the minimal 'control' that they can exercise in this rather random existence] and worsen as they need more and more 'doses' of alcohol and illicit substances to suppress their inner emotional turmoil. In many cases, they have to finally 'hit the wall' or 'bottom out' before they can have the willingness to take more appropriate and effective steps out of their angst. It takes that willingness, some basic knowledge about more healthy alternative paths, and often intervention by outside agencies [mental health, social service, or judicial] to move to 'the next step' of their recovery. Many volumes have been written about how to move forward and what steps are necessary to gain self-empowering mental health; it's not my intent to cover that here. My focus this week is to talk about a few of the precursor feelings that cause the addictions to surface in the first place.
The major one that I'm only too aware of (that I continue to suffer from, in spades, even after many years of a clear and forward-moving path of recovery) is the very primal sense of not being enough, what I call 'not-enough-ness'. Children often gain this sense when their 'caregivers' either fail to instill the sense in their children that they are 'enough' just the way they are, or have unduly high expectations of their children (expectation levels that no one could possibly meet), or actively terrorize their children with profound physical, sexual, emotional and/or religious abuse. The children grow up with the clear sense that no matter what they achieve in the world, it is never enough to gain their parents' unconditional love. In many situations, the parents think of themselves as 'not being enough' and therefore pass this self-deprecation on to their children [in a whole host of ways]. Or, due to their own negative feelings and/or the abuse they experienced as children, they fail to have any clear idea how to express honest love toward their children, even if they have the sincere desire to do so.
Though I've managed to move beyond the more physically and emotionally destructive addictions, like many people who have those experiences as children I'm still very much ruled by not-enough-ness addictions. Nowadays, that expresses itself in avid 'collecting', surrounding myself with academic degrees, stuff in my house [art, books, music, etc.], industrial quantities of ushering at music, dance and theater venues, and service on community boards. While one could say that these addictions are less destructive to my 'being', and indeed do, in many ways, serve a positive purpose for other people in the community (due to the high levels of volunteerism), the 'reason' I do much of it is that primal fear that failure to engage in all of this will expose me to my feelings of 'not being enough'. Hence, even though much of it may indeed serve a positive social outcome, the motivation [often, though hardly always] is less commendable. And rather abusive of the care of my inner child's better needs.
I'm reminded of the advice I gave a woman, years ago, with whom I had an intimate relationship. No matter how much love I laid upon her, she simply couldn't 'feel' the love and was always yearning for more. I noted to her that life is 'like a Pilsner glass', wide at the top and narrow at the bottom. You can pour gallons upon gallons of love in from the top -- from outside of the Self -- and the glass would never fill up [like a bottomless sink hole], but if you squeezed one drop in from the bottom -- from your inner Self, from your love of yourself -- the glass would fill up immediately. If we can't feel love for ourselves, it is difficult to feel love from others. She never quite 'got it'; I finally gave up the relationship when I realized that 'the sky was the limit' on her need for love, or in other words, there was no limit. When I came to that realization, I moved on, to protect my own rather weak emotional heart.
The other image I often perceived in my relationships with many of the women I met was that it was like they were laying on the ground with their mouths wide open, waiting to be 'fed' with emotion that they couldn't supply, not to themselves or to me. I had my own host of PTSD issues; looking back upon such situations, I realize that I likely was attracted to women who were themselves sexual abuse survivors, simply because that 'viewpoint' was familiar to me (surely not healthy, but what I was used to). It has only been in recent years, as my mental health has increased and my recovery become stable and resonant, that I have begun to attract women into my life who, while they may or may not have had their own trauma issues [as Lord Byron noted, none of us leave this world without some pain in our lives], at least were actively working on their own recovery and therefore had 'emotional space and energy available' to offer honest love instead of simply demanding its unilateral receipt.
This is not to say that it doesn't 'take two to tango'; indeed, all intimate relationships, with one's Self [one's inner voices] and with others, takes active involvement and responsibility by all parties. I am noting that I [along with other PTSD survivors of profound abuse] had -- and have -- my own angst around not-enough-ness and that that 'lacking' has and does influence my ability to manifest and maintain loving friendships. All survivors of profound abuse struggle with those issues.
Monday, November 29, 2010
Perception of Male Sexual Child Abuse Survivors About Their Molestation (Part 2)
During the two recent Friday broadcasts of Oprah's "200 Men Come Forward About Sexual Molestation", the men made a number of comments about their sexual abuse that I felt were particularly noteworthy, in terms of my personal experience of sexual child abuse.
As such, in this second of two blogs, I have continued to quote those statements and then expand upon them, with further examples and discussion.
"Fear of being around children, given the abuse that was perpetrated upon me during my childhood." When I was a younger man, I was often confronted by women with the statement that I was simply irresponsible and immature for not wanting to have children and a family. Yet, from early in my adulthood, I had been quite queasy about even being around children, much less participating in the production and raising of children of my own. My own childhood was so thoroughly traumatized, due to the overt levels of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, that I wanted to forget and 'run away' from those memories as quickly as possible. Of course, it was rather impossible (short of amnesia) to actually forget about the abuse, and for reasons of achieving mental health, I came to realize that 'forgetting' was not the same as 'forgiving', primarily forgiving myself. (I particularly liked Oprah's quote, during the show, about forgiving: Giving up hope that the past could have been any different -- and using this moment, this time to move forward with your life.) But moving beyond an intensely negative memory about my childhood -- about childhood as a dependent, unprotected stage of life -- was very difficult, even after many years of psychotherapy. And that, apparently, is the experience of other men who were physically and sexually traumatized as children [as evidenced by the above comment].
From my own negative experience (which I will assume may be true for some other abuse survivors) I both was concerned that I might abuse any children that I helped produce [perpetrating abuse upon other children as had been done to me] and I was hyperaware of how incredibly dependent children are on the good graces of adults. And the combination of those two factors [combined, further, with relative poverty most of my adult life and hence some question whether I could afford to have children] generated a 'fear of being around children', a fear which is still as true now as it was when I was younger.
Even though I have more than 25 years of mental health therapy behind me now -- and am considerably more healed from the PTSD of my childhood -- I continue to be uncomfortable around children, and have never had, at any time in my life, a strong desire to have children of my own. The 'paternal instinct' simply isn't there. I have two brothers, both of whom have children, but for me the memories of my profoundly negative experiences in childhood have produced and maintained that lifelong discomfort.
"Men 'don't know' because they are so ashamed. We're supposed to be 'in control', we're supposed to be strong." "I had the feeling that, as a boy, I had allowed it to happen, I was complicit [in my abuse]." The messages that our society gives to boys -- and later adult men -- about 'being in control' tend to overtly color their ability to come to terms with the limits of being human, especially the limits of being a dependent human child. The larger reality is that 'stuff happens' in life that is simply beyond anyone's control, and that 'control' is rather an elusive and transient quality that few individuals, if anyone, really have the continuous ability to manifest. Yet, there is this cultural message directed at men, however forlorn it may be to actually accomplish.
One of the primary illusions that adult males have about themselves -- and that the larger society has about males -- is that, all along, they should have been 'strong' and 'able to take care of' themselves. But the reality that they often forget is that when one was a child, they were highly dependent upon the 'caregiving' of adults who they hoped (and believed, until and unless other evidence made it clear this was not the case) would have our 'best interests' at heart. And the larger reality for males who were traumatized as children is that they often are not 'strong' or 'in control' as adults either.
Oh, they may be good a maintaining an outward 'appearance' of those qualities, but if one is a product of profound physical and sexual trauma as a child [depending on a number of factors, including the amount and kinds of abuse, ability to escape the abuse at least temporarily, and the veracity and effectiveness of intervention by other, more mentally healthy adults], they often have multiple addictions -- alcohol, drug [legal and illicit], sexual, self-abuse, etc. -- or significant intimate and/or employment problems. The PTSD affects their life in often quite obtuse ways, and in ways that are difficult to have any 'realistic control' over, unless and until the men engage in competent mental health recovery programs. Working through the internalized emotional pain and anger is necessary if one is ever to have a chance to 'come out on the other side' of such a traumatized life.
Indeed, there is real hope for recovery, but it often takes long-term therapy and hard work on self-development. Men [and women] who have been severely traumatized as children must often re-learn what 'love' is whole-cloth, from the ground up. They must -- hopefully with the assistance of competent mental health providers, mentally healthy friends, and trustworthy intimate relationships -- come to grips with the dynamics of their abuse and with new, more healthy 'tools' at their disposal, move down the pathway to recovery. They may even reach a state of inner strength, but it is unlikely they will ever again have an illusion about being able to be 'in control' of all of their life -- no matter how often the society around them continues to perpetuate such an illusion about males. Hopefully, they will come to see how they could not have been 'in control' as children -- and yet be able to forgive themselves for that failing.
-------------------
Author's note: When one is writing a blog, it is often questionable whether anyone is reading the information. If any of my readers wishes to provide feedback or at least acknowledgement about reading and hopefully enjoying the information provided and learning new concepts, I would appreciate such constructive observations and comments!
As such, in this second of two blogs, I have continued to quote those statements and then expand upon them, with further examples and discussion.
"Fear of being around children, given the abuse that was perpetrated upon me during my childhood." When I was a younger man, I was often confronted by women with the statement that I was simply irresponsible and immature for not wanting to have children and a family. Yet, from early in my adulthood, I had been quite queasy about even being around children, much less participating in the production and raising of children of my own. My own childhood was so thoroughly traumatized, due to the overt levels of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, that I wanted to forget and 'run away' from those memories as quickly as possible. Of course, it was rather impossible (short of amnesia) to actually forget about the abuse, and for reasons of achieving mental health, I came to realize that 'forgetting' was not the same as 'forgiving', primarily forgiving myself. (I particularly liked Oprah's quote, during the show, about forgiving: Giving up hope that the past could have been any different -- and using this moment, this time to move forward with your life.) But moving beyond an intensely negative memory about my childhood -- about childhood as a dependent, unprotected stage of life -- was very difficult, even after many years of psychotherapy. And that, apparently, is the experience of other men who were physically and sexually traumatized as children [as evidenced by the above comment].
From my own negative experience (which I will assume may be true for some other abuse survivors) I both was concerned that I might abuse any children that I helped produce [perpetrating abuse upon other children as had been done to me] and I was hyperaware of how incredibly dependent children are on the good graces of adults. And the combination of those two factors [combined, further, with relative poverty most of my adult life and hence some question whether I could afford to have children] generated a 'fear of being around children', a fear which is still as true now as it was when I was younger.
Even though I have more than 25 years of mental health therapy behind me now -- and am considerably more healed from the PTSD of my childhood -- I continue to be uncomfortable around children, and have never had, at any time in my life, a strong desire to have children of my own. The 'paternal instinct' simply isn't there. I have two brothers, both of whom have children, but for me the memories of my profoundly negative experiences in childhood have produced and maintained that lifelong discomfort.
"Men 'don't know' because they are so ashamed. We're supposed to be 'in control', we're supposed to be strong." "I had the feeling that, as a boy, I had allowed it to happen, I was complicit [in my abuse]." The messages that our society gives to boys -- and later adult men -- about 'being in control' tend to overtly color their ability to come to terms with the limits of being human, especially the limits of being a dependent human child. The larger reality is that 'stuff happens' in life that is simply beyond anyone's control, and that 'control' is rather an elusive and transient quality that few individuals, if anyone, really have the continuous ability to manifest. Yet, there is this cultural message directed at men, however forlorn it may be to actually accomplish.
One of the primary illusions that adult males have about themselves -- and that the larger society has about males -- is that, all along, they should have been 'strong' and 'able to take care of' themselves. But the reality that they often forget is that when one was a child, they were highly dependent upon the 'caregiving' of adults who they hoped (and believed, until and unless other evidence made it clear this was not the case) would have our 'best interests' at heart. And the larger reality for males who were traumatized as children is that they often are not 'strong' or 'in control' as adults either.
Oh, they may be good a maintaining an outward 'appearance' of those qualities, but if one is a product of profound physical and sexual trauma as a child [depending on a number of factors, including the amount and kinds of abuse, ability to escape the abuse at least temporarily, and the veracity and effectiveness of intervention by other, more mentally healthy adults], they often have multiple addictions -- alcohol, drug [legal and illicit], sexual, self-abuse, etc. -- or significant intimate and/or employment problems. The PTSD affects their life in often quite obtuse ways, and in ways that are difficult to have any 'realistic control' over, unless and until the men engage in competent mental health recovery programs. Working through the internalized emotional pain and anger is necessary if one is ever to have a chance to 'come out on the other side' of such a traumatized life.
Indeed, there is real hope for recovery, but it often takes long-term therapy and hard work on self-development. Men [and women] who have been severely traumatized as children must often re-learn what 'love' is whole-cloth, from the ground up. They must -- hopefully with the assistance of competent mental health providers, mentally healthy friends, and trustworthy intimate relationships -- come to grips with the dynamics of their abuse and with new, more healthy 'tools' at their disposal, move down the pathway to recovery. They may even reach a state of inner strength, but it is unlikely they will ever again have an illusion about being able to be 'in control' of all of their life -- no matter how often the society around them continues to perpetuate such an illusion about males. Hopefully, they will come to see how they could not have been 'in control' as children -- and yet be able to forgive themselves for that failing.
-------------------
Author's note: When one is writing a blog, it is often questionable whether anyone is reading the information. If any of my readers wishes to provide feedback or at least acknowledgement about reading and hopefully enjoying the information provided and learning new concepts, I would appreciate such constructive observations and comments!
Monday, November 22, 2010
Perceptions of Male Sexual Child Abuse Survivors About Their Molestation (Part 1)
During the previous two Friday broadcasts of Oprah's "200 Men Come Forward About Sexual Molestation", the men made a number of comments about their sexual abuse that I felt were particularly noteworthy, in terms of my personal experience of sexual child abuse. As such, I will quote the statements and then expand upon them, with further examples and discussion.
"Worse than the abuse was not being believed by those we tell about the abuse." In part, I addressed this last week, when I asked "to whom can these men safely tell their story?" This is an incredibly important issue. My own experience was that, when I finally started to come to grips with my childhood incest (at around 40 years of age, which is the age Mike Lew in Victims No Longer says is the age at which many men come to realize their abuse), my mother refused to believe what I told her -- but then she was in denial about a lot of the childhood violence. One of my brothers believed me, because he had started to have memories of his own incest at the hands of our father. This is, apparently, the experience shared by a lot of males (and females) who were sexually abused by family members. Often, the abuse is a 'family secret', one which members may or may not know about, but to the extent that they do know, they often want to keep it 'quiet' and 'out of the public view'. Additionally, they may do little to intervene when it is occurring, in part out of a fear that intervention will only hurt themselves (by subjecting them to similar molestation or violence directed at them by the perpetrator), or a feeling that their efforts will bear little fruit in the family structure.
I talked with a fellow many years ago in whose family he was the subject of incredible physical violence from his father (he was an only child). His father, in fits of rage, would beat him bloody with a wire coat hanger, from the age of 9 until around 16, when he finally could take no more of it -- and was big enough to fight back. One day, when he was 16, he had the 'presence of mind' to hold his father's arms, and stop him from beating him. As his father was turning beet-red and straining to break the grip and continue the torture, his mother screamed at him to stop holding his father's arms 'because he might have a heart attack'. In other words, his mother had never done anything to stop the abuse in the past, and now that he had enough strength to stop the abuse, she was far more worried about the safety of her economic partner than about the safety and care of her child.
That was an intense point of clarity for this fellow, who realized that he had to get out of that house as quickly as possible, out into the world that had to be more safe than it was in his own home. This is the experience of boys who either are beaten and/or sexually molested in their own home by one or both of the parents: that, as unsafe as the 'outside world' may be, it has to be safer than what they are experiencing within the supposed safety of their own home. Not that it is, but the terror within the home is so over-the-top that anything else 'just has to be' better, or so they hope.
"You become 'the problem'; the shame says you 'asked for it'." This is a common dilemma faced by children. Since adults are supposed to be 'caregivers' and 'protectors', children naturally assume that if they are sexualized by adults, they must have unconsciously encouraged the behavior. And, of course, many perpetrators actively encourage this way of thinking, so that they can delude themselves into believing that the burden of the behavior will not fall on their shoulders.
The story told by the two brothers who were sexually abused by the parish priest -- who, as the abuse continued, forced the boys to have sex with each other and then invited his fellow priests to engage in gang-rape of the children -- exposed this lie in the 'full light of the day'. When they told their parents about it, at least at first no one believed them because, after all, the priest was a respected member of the community. They and the other men interviewed noted that the internalized shame 'told them' that they had 'asked for the abuse' -- when, of course, those of us who sit outside of the circumstance know full well that no child asks to be abused, not sexually, not physically, not emotionally. But shame is an insidious emotional culprit and it makes victims believe things which, though wholly untrue, make 'sense' within the terror they are experiencing. It is difficult for children to come to the realization that they weren't the cause of the abuse, but rather that the abuse was done to them by others. It serves the abusive interests of their perpetrators to encourage the children to believe that 'they are the problem', not the adult.
"When I was in the shower, I wanted to peel off my skin, given how horribly uncomfortable I was within my own skin." From my own abuse, I know this one well. I've spent a lifetime trying to feel any sense of comfort 'within my own skin'. The sexual abuse poisons an individual's comfort with their own body, and destroys a desire to continue 'in the bodily form that invited the abuse'. Boy children sometimes fantasize that if they only had been girls, they would not have been abused, but this is only the 'magical answer' to their bewilderment; girls sometimes have the alternate fantasy, that if they had only been boys, they would not have been molested. But, as we now know, many many children, of both sexes, are sexually abused on a regular basis by biological relatives, step-parents and step-siblings, sexual partners of single parents, babysitters, and complete strangers, and whatever is their sex-of-origin does not inhibit the desire of the perpetrators to abuse them.
It is the children's vulnerability that makes them 'desirable' in the eyes of the perpetrators. Many perpetrators are clumsy, inept, or socially immature and lack the skills needed to manifest sexual relations with other adults; hence, their 'sexual desires' are dysfunctionally directed toward children (often, as in the case of biological parents, their own children). For the children, the experience is sufficiently terrifying and shame-filled that they often end up wanting to be anyone, or anything, or anywhere else than who or where they are. And as they grow up, they are uncomfortable with their own bodies and quite uncomfortable when engaging in sexuality with other people, given their own intensely negative feelings about 'sex' or 'love-making' (especially given that many perpetrators say they 'love' the children and are 'making love to them').
Additionally, a child who has been sexually abused begins to question their own sexuality. Boys often feel like they 'must really be girls', because why else would their perpetrators have wanted to have intercourse [sodomy] with them? Whether they had homosexual or transsexual desires as children becomes rather problematic; being sexually abused doesn't make a child gay or a transsexual individual, because it is not sex -- it is abuse!
As Mike Lew notes in Victims No Longer (p. 41): Since men "are not supposed to be victims," abuse (and particularly sexual abuse) becomes a process of demasculinization (or emasculation). If men aren't supposed to be victims (the equation reads), then victims aren't men. The victimized male wonders and worries about what the abuse has turned him into. Believing that he is no longer an adequate man, he may see himself as a child, a woman, gay, or less than human -- an irreparably damaged freak.
As a result, the child is quite unclear whether later sexual desires toward members of their own sex-of-birth are 'natural' or 'abuse-driven' desires, especially when the abuse has occurred in infancy. On top of it all, if their sexual molestation and/or rape first occurred before the age of 2, the memories of the abuse are 'locked away' in a dissociative part of the memory that has no words attached to it, since children don't begin using full sentences until after that age.
"Worse than the abuse was not being believed by those we tell about the abuse." In part, I addressed this last week, when I asked "to whom can these men safely tell their story?" This is an incredibly important issue. My own experience was that, when I finally started to come to grips with my childhood incest (at around 40 years of age, which is the age Mike Lew in Victims No Longer says is the age at which many men come to realize their abuse), my mother refused to believe what I told her -- but then she was in denial about a lot of the childhood violence. One of my brothers believed me, because he had started to have memories of his own incest at the hands of our father. This is, apparently, the experience shared by a lot of males (and females) who were sexually abused by family members. Often, the abuse is a 'family secret', one which members may or may not know about, but to the extent that they do know, they often want to keep it 'quiet' and 'out of the public view'. Additionally, they may do little to intervene when it is occurring, in part out of a fear that intervention will only hurt themselves (by subjecting them to similar molestation or violence directed at them by the perpetrator), or a feeling that their efforts will bear little fruit in the family structure.
I talked with a fellow many years ago in whose family he was the subject of incredible physical violence from his father (he was an only child). His father, in fits of rage, would beat him bloody with a wire coat hanger, from the age of 9 until around 16, when he finally could take no more of it -- and was big enough to fight back. One day, when he was 16, he had the 'presence of mind' to hold his father's arms, and stop him from beating him. As his father was turning beet-red and straining to break the grip and continue the torture, his mother screamed at him to stop holding his father's arms 'because he might have a heart attack'. In other words, his mother had never done anything to stop the abuse in the past, and now that he had enough strength to stop the abuse, she was far more worried about the safety of her economic partner than about the safety and care of her child.
That was an intense point of clarity for this fellow, who realized that he had to get out of that house as quickly as possible, out into the world that had to be more safe than it was in his own home. This is the experience of boys who either are beaten and/or sexually molested in their own home by one or both of the parents: that, as unsafe as the 'outside world' may be, it has to be safer than what they are experiencing within the supposed safety of their own home. Not that it is, but the terror within the home is so over-the-top that anything else 'just has to be' better, or so they hope.
"You become 'the problem'; the shame says you 'asked for it'." This is a common dilemma faced by children. Since adults are supposed to be 'caregivers' and 'protectors', children naturally assume that if they are sexualized by adults, they must have unconsciously encouraged the behavior. And, of course, many perpetrators actively encourage this way of thinking, so that they can delude themselves into believing that the burden of the behavior will not fall on their shoulders.
The story told by the two brothers who were sexually abused by the parish priest -- who, as the abuse continued, forced the boys to have sex with each other and then invited his fellow priests to engage in gang-rape of the children -- exposed this lie in the 'full light of the day'. When they told their parents about it, at least at first no one believed them because, after all, the priest was a respected member of the community. They and the other men interviewed noted that the internalized shame 'told them' that they had 'asked for the abuse' -- when, of course, those of us who sit outside of the circumstance know full well that no child asks to be abused, not sexually, not physically, not emotionally. But shame is an insidious emotional culprit and it makes victims believe things which, though wholly untrue, make 'sense' within the terror they are experiencing. It is difficult for children to come to the realization that they weren't the cause of the abuse, but rather that the abuse was done to them by others. It serves the abusive interests of their perpetrators to encourage the children to believe that 'they are the problem', not the adult.
"When I was in the shower, I wanted to peel off my skin, given how horribly uncomfortable I was within my own skin." From my own abuse, I know this one well. I've spent a lifetime trying to feel any sense of comfort 'within my own skin'. The sexual abuse poisons an individual's comfort with their own body, and destroys a desire to continue 'in the bodily form that invited the abuse'. Boy children sometimes fantasize that if they only had been girls, they would not have been abused, but this is only the 'magical answer' to their bewilderment; girls sometimes have the alternate fantasy, that if they had only been boys, they would not have been molested. But, as we now know, many many children, of both sexes, are sexually abused on a regular basis by biological relatives, step-parents and step-siblings, sexual partners of single parents, babysitters, and complete strangers, and whatever is their sex-of-origin does not inhibit the desire of the perpetrators to abuse them.
It is the children's vulnerability that makes them 'desirable' in the eyes of the perpetrators. Many perpetrators are clumsy, inept, or socially immature and lack the skills needed to manifest sexual relations with other adults; hence, their 'sexual desires' are dysfunctionally directed toward children (often, as in the case of biological parents, their own children). For the children, the experience is sufficiently terrifying and shame-filled that they often end up wanting to be anyone, or anything, or anywhere else than who or where they are. And as they grow up, they are uncomfortable with their own bodies and quite uncomfortable when engaging in sexuality with other people, given their own intensely negative feelings about 'sex' or 'love-making' (especially given that many perpetrators say they 'love' the children and are 'making love to them').
Additionally, a child who has been sexually abused begins to question their own sexuality. Boys often feel like they 'must really be girls', because why else would their perpetrators have wanted to have intercourse [sodomy] with them? Whether they had homosexual or transsexual desires as children becomes rather problematic; being sexually abused doesn't make a child gay or a transsexual individual, because it is not sex -- it is abuse!
As Mike Lew notes in Victims No Longer (p. 41): Since men "are not supposed to be victims," abuse (and particularly sexual abuse) becomes a process of demasculinization (or emasculation). If men aren't supposed to be victims (the equation reads), then victims aren't men. The victimized male wonders and worries about what the abuse has turned him into. Believing that he is no longer an adequate man, he may see himself as a child, a woman, gay, or less than human -- an irreparably damaged freak.
As a result, the child is quite unclear whether later sexual desires toward members of their own sex-of-birth are 'natural' or 'abuse-driven' desires, especially when the abuse has occurred in infancy. On top of it all, if their sexual molestation and/or rape first occurred before the age of 2, the memories of the abuse are 'locked away' in a dissociative part of the memory that has no words attached to it, since children don't begin using full sentences until after that age.
Monday, November 15, 2010
If Oprah Convinces Men To "Come Forward About Sexual Molestation", To Whom Do They Tell Their Story?
Last Friday, the second installment of Oprah's show focused upon '200 Men Come Forward About Sexual Molestation' was broadcast. The program was advertised as being an opportunity for the "spouses and partners of the male survivors, who have been listening backstage, to come forward and tell their side of the story." Unfortunately, it didn't quite work out that way. While the program was, indeed, another powerful evocation for informing the nation about the prevalence and extent of the sexual child abuse of males, there was very little focus upon the spouses and partners of these men telling their side of the story. In fact, only two women spoke on the program (though those two women told painful stories). Frankly, I was a bit disheartened by that, since both I and my intimate partner (who is a wonderful supporter of my work on this subject and who was hoping to see how other women and men faced issues similar to hers) were looking forward to 'hearing the other side' of the intimate relationship issues.
Now that Oprah has encouraged male survivors across America to 'come forward' and 'tell their stories of sexual child abuse', the overriding question is: to whom can these men safely tell their stories? As I've noted before, most people, whether they be heterosexual female or gay male partners (or the families of origin) of these men, are generally not equipped to deal with the information that would be presented. There are, though, a number of great books available to help in that process. For anyone needing resources, I would suggest starting with Allies in Healing: When the Person You Love Was Sexually Abused as a Child by Laura Davis and If The Man You Love Was Abused: A Couple's Guide to Healing by Marie H. and Marlene M. Browne. (There are a host of other resources listed in the bibliography of the Mariposa Men's Wellness Institute website.)
Whether your partner is willing to read these excellent guides is, though, a problematic issue. It both depends on the couple's level of mutual respect and intimacy, and your partner's willingness to hear the kind of deep male pain that most people aren't used to hearing from men and which, given the narrow cultural construct of 'manhood', leads many women to question their male partner's masculinity in spite of any amount of their otherwise active encouragement to display his more 'sensitive' side. [For a further exploration of this contradiction, see The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by bell hooks]. Additionally, as I have pointed out in many of my blogs -- and will continue to do so until substantive change occurs -- there are very few social service or nonprofit agencies which have mental health services or personnel trained to cope with the special kinds of issues faced by male sexual abuse survivors (such as the cultural prohibition that 'males aren't supposed to be victims', etc.).
Nonetheless, the willingness of Oprah to present these programs on a major network channel is truly to be commended. Hopefully, funders will take notice. The kind of information that she conveyed, especially the statistics that approximately 1 out of 6 boys are sexually abused as children and that 90% of perpetrators are known by their victims, is the very kind of data that I have been trying to disseminate, since 2003, via the Mariposa Men's Wellness Institute website (www.mmwi-stl.org). Therapists throughout the nation should be heartened by these broadcasts and the associated links to Male Survivor, 1 in 6, Men Thriving, and other resources promoted on the program and on Oprah's website. My concern is not that there aren't some great websites to which male survivors and their partners can turn for assistance; rather it is that online information is only a start. One-on-one mental health therapy is the next quite important step that needs to be taken, and there is a profound dearth of those programs. Maybe [hopefully] this program will encourage other broadcasters to address this subject and funding for such mental health services will eventually be in the offing. However, until then, male survivors who have the courage to come to grips with their childhood sexual abuse will be, in many cases, left 'high and dry' when they seek out competent and affordable mental health services.
In any case, the programs did provide survivors and the general public with a view of 'the world around them' of which most citizens are profoundly unaware. Least we forget, the knowledge about the sexual child abuse of females is only a quite recent phenomenon; until the mid-1970's, many mental health studies had continued to perpetuate the myth that females were 'only sexually abused as children at the rate of one in a million'. So, even though there is a greater cultural allowance to seeing women as victims (which, though, doesn't in may respects help women, because such a viewpoint also continues to encourage the cultural view that very few women are -- or can be -- potential successes), this perspective, as it relates to females being sexually abused as children, is only of quite recent vintage.
Hence, it should hardly be surprising that the culture is largely unaware of the sexual child abuse of males, given the greater and more pervasive reluctance of the culture to view males, even male children, as potential victims, nor that it has taken so long for such a program, like what Oprah broadcast in the last couple of weeks, to appear on network television. This is profound emotional and psychic pain and its existence challenges many deeply held assumptions in our culture. That it will continue to be a while before sufficient social service and/or mental health agencies 'take notice' of this change in the mental health landscape should not surprise anyone. It's one thing to be aware that some boys were sexually molested by some Catholic priests (or ministers or politicians); it's quite another to come to grips with the reality that such trauma is not an isolated dysfunctional 'acting out' behavior exhibited by a small percentage of the population, but a much more widespread problem.
Again, Oprah is to be commended on the hard hitting and no-holds-barred issues raised by the men who were interviewed, and by Tyler Perry and Dr. Howard Fradkin of Male Survivor. Next week, and in the weeks to come, I will continue addressing, more directly, some of the comments made by the male survivors on the Oprah broadcasts.
Now that Oprah has encouraged male survivors across America to 'come forward' and 'tell their stories of sexual child abuse', the overriding question is: to whom can these men safely tell their stories? As I've noted before, most people, whether they be heterosexual female or gay male partners (or the families of origin) of these men, are generally not equipped to deal with the information that would be presented. There are, though, a number of great books available to help in that process. For anyone needing resources, I would suggest starting with Allies in Healing: When the Person You Love Was Sexually Abused as a Child by Laura Davis and If The Man You Love Was Abused: A Couple's Guide to Healing by Marie H. and Marlene M. Browne. (There are a host of other resources listed in the bibliography of the Mariposa Men's Wellness Institute website.)
Whether your partner is willing to read these excellent guides is, though, a problematic issue. It both depends on the couple's level of mutual respect and intimacy, and your partner's willingness to hear the kind of deep male pain that most people aren't used to hearing from men and which, given the narrow cultural construct of 'manhood', leads many women to question their male partner's masculinity in spite of any amount of their otherwise active encouragement to display his more 'sensitive' side. [For a further exploration of this contradiction, see The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by bell hooks]. Additionally, as I have pointed out in many of my blogs -- and will continue to do so until substantive change occurs -- there are very few social service or nonprofit agencies which have mental health services or personnel trained to cope with the special kinds of issues faced by male sexual abuse survivors (such as the cultural prohibition that 'males aren't supposed to be victims', etc.).
Nonetheless, the willingness of Oprah to present these programs on a major network channel is truly to be commended. Hopefully, funders will take notice. The kind of information that she conveyed, especially the statistics that approximately 1 out of 6 boys are sexually abused as children and that 90% of perpetrators are known by their victims, is the very kind of data that I have been trying to disseminate, since 2003, via the Mariposa Men's Wellness Institute website (www.mmwi-stl.org). Therapists throughout the nation should be heartened by these broadcasts and the associated links to Male Survivor, 1 in 6, Men Thriving, and other resources promoted on the program and on Oprah's website. My concern is not that there aren't some great websites to which male survivors and their partners can turn for assistance; rather it is that online information is only a start. One-on-one mental health therapy is the next quite important step that needs to be taken, and there is a profound dearth of those programs. Maybe [hopefully] this program will encourage other broadcasters to address this subject and funding for such mental health services will eventually be in the offing. However, until then, male survivors who have the courage to come to grips with their childhood sexual abuse will be, in many cases, left 'high and dry' when they seek out competent and affordable mental health services.
In any case, the programs did provide survivors and the general public with a view of 'the world around them' of which most citizens are profoundly unaware. Least we forget, the knowledge about the sexual child abuse of females is only a quite recent phenomenon; until the mid-1970's, many mental health studies had continued to perpetuate the myth that females were 'only sexually abused as children at the rate of one in a million'. So, even though there is a greater cultural allowance to seeing women as victims (which, though, doesn't in may respects help women, because such a viewpoint also continues to encourage the cultural view that very few women are -- or can be -- potential successes), this perspective, as it relates to females being sexually abused as children, is only of quite recent vintage.
Hence, it should hardly be surprising that the culture is largely unaware of the sexual child abuse of males, given the greater and more pervasive reluctance of the culture to view males, even male children, as potential victims, nor that it has taken so long for such a program, like what Oprah broadcast in the last couple of weeks, to appear on network television. This is profound emotional and psychic pain and its existence challenges many deeply held assumptions in our culture. That it will continue to be a while before sufficient social service and/or mental health agencies 'take notice' of this change in the mental health landscape should not surprise anyone. It's one thing to be aware that some boys were sexually molested by some Catholic priests (or ministers or politicians); it's quite another to come to grips with the reality that such trauma is not an isolated dysfunctional 'acting out' behavior exhibited by a small percentage of the population, but a much more widespread problem.
Again, Oprah is to be commended on the hard hitting and no-holds-barred issues raised by the men who were interviewed, and by Tyler Perry and Dr. Howard Fradkin of Male Survivor. Next week, and in the weeks to come, I will continue addressing, more directly, some of the comments made by the male survivors on the Oprah broadcasts.
Monday, November 8, 2010
Adult Men Speaking Up About Sexual Abuse On 'Oprah'
It was both disturbing and refreshing to see the November 5 Oprah broadcast "200 Adult Men Who Were Molested Come Forward". Disturbing, of course, because of the horrendous abuse they recounted and how their families often either refused to believe them or chose to remain in denial about the abuse perpetrated upon their children. Refreshing, because of their courage and candor in being willing to speak openly about a subject that has, for too long, been ignored in America by the media, the public, and all too often, men themselves. It isn't easy for adult men to come forward and talk openly about being molested as children. Men, as I've noted in several of my blogs, aren't supposed to be victims. Never mind that the molestation often occurred when they were children and defenseless -- in our culture, men aren't allowed to admit that they were victimized. To "be a man" in our culture, you have to stuff your anguished feelings and 'tough up', face the world as an independent person who can take care of himself.
Except, of course, when you were sexually abused as a child and it impacted your ability to adequately cope with maturation. Under those circumstances, becoming someone who can, in any healthy way, grow into a person who has any idea, at all, how to take care of yourself, how to defend yourself adequately from further abuse, isn't really much of a relevant issue. So, you turn to alcohol and/or drugs to deaden the horrific shame that consumes your soul, you fail in one interpersonal relationship after another because you don't want to face your abuse (it's painful and even more painful to work through the shame to the other side where mental health lies), or you have no idea what 'intimacy' actually involves because being sexually abused was equated by your perpetrator with 'being cared for' (when in fact the abuser only cared about their own sick pleasure -- to them, you were only an object upon which to act out their perverse fantasies).
Life, under those circumstances, just doesn't feel worth living as you grow into 'manhood', as the stages of life past 12 years of age are so harshly termed. I say harshly, because no one seems to be concerned about allowing you to be human, only whether you fit into an extremely limited 'manhood box' that your society has constructed for you. This 'box' inherently crushes your ability to exhibit the full range of an emotional life, one that involves angst, joy, tears, laughter, inner turmoil, loving touch -- and, yes, anger as well. Not only rage, which is one emotion men are allowed, but all those other possibilities, the ones that constitute the 'infinity of shades of gray'.
But you rarely meet other people who can tolerate hearing about the pain and shame and terror that you experienced as a child, especially not female partners and just as rarely male partners and even more rarely your male friends. Stuff it, that's the message you hear from others, whether they say it openly or just let you know by refusing to listen. Your female partners might be willing to let you know about their angst, their emotional pain, but don't make the mistake of discussing your own. After all, you're supposed to "be a man" and men are supposed to not be emotional and definitely not talk about how their souls were crushed as children by 'caregivers' who had 'care' as the least of the emotions for which they took responsibility.
It's not that you never cross paths with such persons, rather that it is rare. We're all socialized by the same culture, whether male or female, and all too often people are looking for a 'specific kind of partner', and not especially individuals who are authentic about the anguish they experienced as children.
As the Oprah program pointed out, among other things, 90% of child molesters target children they know. We're not talking about guys in trench coats molesting random children in the park, though indeed that occurs and far too often; we're talking about biological fathers (and mothers, which is too often overlooked), stepfathers and stepmothers, brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles, grandparents. Those closest to us, the ones we should be able to trust, the people who we have no choice but to trust, because we are, as children, so highly dependent on adults, especially adults who claim to love us. Those are the people who molest young boys (and girls) most often, that molest the 1 out of 6 boys in America who are sexually abused as children. The monster isn't 'out there, lurking in the shadows', like Nosferatu, but 'in here', in our own homes, twisting the truth to serve their own twisted sexual desires. Or they are priests or teachers, who have authority over us, and whose supervisors (or bishops or school administrators) look the other way, even when they hear about the abuse and deny that it is happening.
Children can't be believed, they make up stories, they have great imaginations; this simply isn't true [or so the society wants to believe]. Mothers believe, in their hearts, that their husbands can't be raping their children, because 'men don't do that' and because the women don't want to lose their economic support. So they side with their sexual partners and say their children are lying, not even allowing for investigation or curiosity. Or fathers deny that their wives are molesting their children, because they don't want to risk emotional abandonment, or because they were molested as children themselves and haven't faced their own shame squarely or gotten intervention for it. Or either or both parents have no earthly idea how to obtain intervention for their children, even if they did believe them.
And children are 'taught' by the molester that they will only be allowed to survive if they keep the abusive 'loving' secret, that it's 'just between the two of us', or inculcate the belief in the children that "you caused me to do this to you", which far too many children willingly believe, because how could they know otherwise? This is their 'caregiver', this is an adult who, like all adults, is supposed to have their best interests at heart -- though we, the observers of this process, sitting outside the molestation mechanism, know only too well is not the case. Adults and only adults are responsible for their actions, not the children who are the object of their abuse.
We, as a culture, have slowly begun to be aware of the sexual abuse of children by the clergy, especially a portion of the population of Catholic priests. But hopefully Oprah's programs, which were inspired by her friendship with Tyler Perry and motivated by his willingness to talk about his own childhood molestation, will move the 'conversation' to the next level. As I've pointed out, in my blogs, and on my website since 2003, when I founded the Mariposa Men's Wellness Institute, our culture is well aware (at least since the late 1970's) that females are victims of sexual abuse at the rate of 1 out of every 4 or 5 girls, but has only just started to admit that males suffer sexual abuse at more or less an equivalent rate. And for men, the issue becomes if I do come forward with the truth about my abuse, are there any services available to help me through this pain? That's the larger question: motivating males to come forward is a powerful first step, but if society doesn't fund programs that assist adult men with intervention -- and, just like with female survivors, intervention that is long-term -- then inspiring them to come forward will only lead to further frustration.
Except, of course, when you were sexually abused as a child and it impacted your ability to adequately cope with maturation. Under those circumstances, becoming someone who can, in any healthy way, grow into a person who has any idea, at all, how to take care of yourself, how to defend yourself adequately from further abuse, isn't really much of a relevant issue. So, you turn to alcohol and/or drugs to deaden the horrific shame that consumes your soul, you fail in one interpersonal relationship after another because you don't want to face your abuse (it's painful and even more painful to work through the shame to the other side where mental health lies), or you have no idea what 'intimacy' actually involves because being sexually abused was equated by your perpetrator with 'being cared for' (when in fact the abuser only cared about their own sick pleasure -- to them, you were only an object upon which to act out their perverse fantasies).
Life, under those circumstances, just doesn't feel worth living as you grow into 'manhood', as the stages of life past 12 years of age are so harshly termed. I say harshly, because no one seems to be concerned about allowing you to be human, only whether you fit into an extremely limited 'manhood box' that your society has constructed for you. This 'box' inherently crushes your ability to exhibit the full range of an emotional life, one that involves angst, joy, tears, laughter, inner turmoil, loving touch -- and, yes, anger as well. Not only rage, which is one emotion men are allowed, but all those other possibilities, the ones that constitute the 'infinity of shades of gray'.
But you rarely meet other people who can tolerate hearing about the pain and shame and terror that you experienced as a child, especially not female partners and just as rarely male partners and even more rarely your male friends. Stuff it, that's the message you hear from others, whether they say it openly or just let you know by refusing to listen. Your female partners might be willing to let you know about their angst, their emotional pain, but don't make the mistake of discussing your own. After all, you're supposed to "be a man" and men are supposed to not be emotional and definitely not talk about how their souls were crushed as children by 'caregivers' who had 'care' as the least of the emotions for which they took responsibility.
It's not that you never cross paths with such persons, rather that it is rare. We're all socialized by the same culture, whether male or female, and all too often people are looking for a 'specific kind of partner', and not especially individuals who are authentic about the anguish they experienced as children.
As the Oprah program pointed out, among other things, 90% of child molesters target children they know. We're not talking about guys in trench coats molesting random children in the park, though indeed that occurs and far too often; we're talking about biological fathers (and mothers, which is too often overlooked), stepfathers and stepmothers, brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles, grandparents. Those closest to us, the ones we should be able to trust, the people who we have no choice but to trust, because we are, as children, so highly dependent on adults, especially adults who claim to love us. Those are the people who molest young boys (and girls) most often, that molest the 1 out of 6 boys in America who are sexually abused as children. The monster isn't 'out there, lurking in the shadows', like Nosferatu, but 'in here', in our own homes, twisting the truth to serve their own twisted sexual desires. Or they are priests or teachers, who have authority over us, and whose supervisors (or bishops or school administrators) look the other way, even when they hear about the abuse and deny that it is happening.
Children can't be believed, they make up stories, they have great imaginations; this simply isn't true [or so the society wants to believe]. Mothers believe, in their hearts, that their husbands can't be raping their children, because 'men don't do that' and because the women don't want to lose their economic support. So they side with their sexual partners and say their children are lying, not even allowing for investigation or curiosity. Or fathers deny that their wives are molesting their children, because they don't want to risk emotional abandonment, or because they were molested as children themselves and haven't faced their own shame squarely or gotten intervention for it. Or either or both parents have no earthly idea how to obtain intervention for their children, even if they did believe them.
And children are 'taught' by the molester that they will only be allowed to survive if they keep the abusive 'loving' secret, that it's 'just between the two of us', or inculcate the belief in the children that "you caused me to do this to you", which far too many children willingly believe, because how could they know otherwise? This is their 'caregiver', this is an adult who, like all adults, is supposed to have their best interests at heart -- though we, the observers of this process, sitting outside the molestation mechanism, know only too well is not the case. Adults and only adults are responsible for their actions, not the children who are the object of their abuse.
We, as a culture, have slowly begun to be aware of the sexual abuse of children by the clergy, especially a portion of the population of Catholic priests. But hopefully Oprah's programs, which were inspired by her friendship with Tyler Perry and motivated by his willingness to talk about his own childhood molestation, will move the 'conversation' to the next level. As I've pointed out, in my blogs, and on my website since 2003, when I founded the Mariposa Men's Wellness Institute, our culture is well aware (at least since the late 1970's) that females are victims of sexual abuse at the rate of 1 out of every 4 or 5 girls, but has only just started to admit that males suffer sexual abuse at more or less an equivalent rate. And for men, the issue becomes if I do come forward with the truth about my abuse, are there any services available to help me through this pain? That's the larger question: motivating males to come forward is a powerful first step, but if society doesn't fund programs that assist adult men with intervention -- and, just like with female survivors, intervention that is long-term -- then inspiring them to come forward will only lead to further frustration.
Monday, November 1, 2010
Men's Roles As Fathers: Equality in Divorce and Custody of Children
In the past decade, ever since President Clinton's 'welfare reform' of the mid-1990's, there has been a re-emphasis, in economically-deprived families and/or those on welfare or in Head Start programs, on fathers playing a greater role in the lives of their children. The government chose this policy, in part, to display it's realization of the value of fathers after four decades of pushing fathers out of the home [families received fewer or no welfare benefits if the father was around the home], but more importantly because it wanted to save money. This 'cost cutting' was one of the primary motivations of the 'reform', which forced welfare families to get off welfare by taking low-paying jobs, often which didn't sufficiently cover their expenses, especially after the cost of childcare was factored in (though, in some high-profile examples, families were able to completely move beyond the minimum wage/welfare cycle altogether). The problem was that after many years of discounting the value of fathers -- of, in fact, acting as though the government itself was sort of a 'big daddy' that could, via welfare payments, replace fathers [ignoring, in the process, the emotional value of fathers in families] -- the government turned around and acted in a rather haughty manner and demanded that fathers take a more active role in the lives of their children without constructing a social service delivery system that supported that change.
As an example of this, several years ago I was involved with the Father and Family Committee of the St. Louis [Missouri] Consortium on African American Male Survival. We were working with a lot of fathers who had been incarcerated due to failure to pay child support. The policy of throwing fathers who were delinquent in their child support payments into prison, as the members noted, was somewhat contradictory: the state wanted fathers to make the child support payments that had been ordered by the court system, but incarcerating fathers for failing to do so was rather counterproductive. They surely could not earn money in prison, at least not enough to send any sort of sufficient payments to their families, and once having been incarcerated, their economic value on the labor market was reduced, since they now had a prison record.
The Consortium felt that motivating the fathers to take a more active role, after divorce, in the life of their children, helping them with job training and employment programs, and then garnishing a portion of their wages -- while still leaving them enough to support themselves economically -- was a more viable [and more cost-effective] solution for the government to engage in. Such a policy would allow the fathers to maintain personal pride and a potentially positive role in the life of their children, other than simply being the providers of child support payments to the mothers. Critical to this policy, though, was to not so harshly garish the wages of the fathers -- many of whom were only able to secure minimum wage employment -- that the fathers would be left with insufficient means to provide for their own minimal needs and, as a result, be motivated to avoid the economic support of their children, the very problem the government was trying to resolve.
A further problem for fathers, generally, whether poor or otherwise, was that when the school system would sponsor 'parent meetings' to support the educational progress of the child -- or for a meeting concerning disciplinary or truancy problems the child was having -- the invitation would be sent solely to the mother of the child, not the father [in non-custodial families]. The very idea that the concept of 'parent' only applied to mothers was rather short-sighted. The school system, in direct contradiction to its own stated mission of promoting family cohesiveness as a better predictor of the child's educational advancement, was in fact promoting a 'social construct' that assumed the only parent of value was the mother. While it was often the case that the fathers had, for various reasons, dropped out of the family system, the school system's invitation mechanism reinforced the very lack of mutual parental involvement that they publicly disavowed. Additionally, fathers who cared a lot about their children, but who had been forced, via various emotional and legal means, out of the family structure, were further discarded by 'the system' that supposedly cared about the father's involvement with the children. Members of the Father and Family Committee actively intervened on behalf of the fathers, when they could, by showing the school system how ignoring the fathers in such 'parent meetings' was thoroughly counterproductive to the emotional support of the children and discounting of any potential ongoing involvement by the fathers.
The contradiction that the educational system faced was often rooted in the way in which the court system handled custody of children in divorce cases. Often, custody was awarded to the mothers -- on the assumption that they were more 'stable' and could provide the children with a 'nurturing home' that the fathers could not or would not provide -- regardless of the mother's emotional or economic capacity to care for the children. The result, in far too many cases, was that the children were, de facto, raised in single-parent households. This legal solution was not particularly helpful to either the mother or the father of the children. The mother was left with an egregious economic and emotional burden, trying to raise the children unilaterally, often dependent on unstable child support payments, welfare assistance and/or income from minimum wage jobs to support themselves and their children. The fathers were either 'left off the hook', in terms of emotional support of the children, or, in situations were the fathers wanted to have an ongoing involvement with their children, often excluded from family activities due to emotional conflicts between the parents.
The tendency of the courts to award sole custody of the children to the mother, with the father's sole responsibility -- or 'right' -- being to provide child support and alimony payments [but not being allowed an emotional relationship with his children] has been increasingly challenged by father's rights groups, with mixed results. In some cases, the courts have been willing to accept the fathers as legitimate caregivers of the children, more so than the mothers, and grant them primary custody, or has been motivated to view both parents as equally caring toward the children and been willing to grant mutual shared custody [with its own struggles in the emotional lives of the children]. In either solution, the rights of the fathers and their value in the family structure has been 'legitimized' by the court system, after decades of viewing fathers as having less value in the life of children than that of mothers. While it may or may not be true that being raised by a single parent [mother or father] can result in an emotionally stable child, there is at least some anecdotal evidence that both sons and daughters who are raised in homes where the father is not present have greater problems with delinquency and/or teen pregnancy. Having positive role modeling from both their mothers and fathers appears to provide children with a more solid emotional foundation in their growth and maturation.
As an example of this, several years ago I was involved with the Father and Family Committee of the St. Louis [Missouri] Consortium on African American Male Survival. We were working with a lot of fathers who had been incarcerated due to failure to pay child support. The policy of throwing fathers who were delinquent in their child support payments into prison, as the members noted, was somewhat contradictory: the state wanted fathers to make the child support payments that had been ordered by the court system, but incarcerating fathers for failing to do so was rather counterproductive. They surely could not earn money in prison, at least not enough to send any sort of sufficient payments to their families, and once having been incarcerated, their economic value on the labor market was reduced, since they now had a prison record.
The Consortium felt that motivating the fathers to take a more active role, after divorce, in the life of their children, helping them with job training and employment programs, and then garnishing a portion of their wages -- while still leaving them enough to support themselves economically -- was a more viable [and more cost-effective] solution for the government to engage in. Such a policy would allow the fathers to maintain personal pride and a potentially positive role in the life of their children, other than simply being the providers of child support payments to the mothers. Critical to this policy, though, was to not so harshly garish the wages of the fathers -- many of whom were only able to secure minimum wage employment -- that the fathers would be left with insufficient means to provide for their own minimal needs and, as a result, be motivated to avoid the economic support of their children, the very problem the government was trying to resolve.
A further problem for fathers, generally, whether poor or otherwise, was that when the school system would sponsor 'parent meetings' to support the educational progress of the child -- or for a meeting concerning disciplinary or truancy problems the child was having -- the invitation would be sent solely to the mother of the child, not the father [in non-custodial families]. The very idea that the concept of 'parent' only applied to mothers was rather short-sighted. The school system, in direct contradiction to its own stated mission of promoting family cohesiveness as a better predictor of the child's educational advancement, was in fact promoting a 'social construct' that assumed the only parent of value was the mother. While it was often the case that the fathers had, for various reasons, dropped out of the family system, the school system's invitation mechanism reinforced the very lack of mutual parental involvement that they publicly disavowed. Additionally, fathers who cared a lot about their children, but who had been forced, via various emotional and legal means, out of the family structure, were further discarded by 'the system' that supposedly cared about the father's involvement with the children. Members of the Father and Family Committee actively intervened on behalf of the fathers, when they could, by showing the school system how ignoring the fathers in such 'parent meetings' was thoroughly counterproductive to the emotional support of the children and discounting of any potential ongoing involvement by the fathers.
The contradiction that the educational system faced was often rooted in the way in which the court system handled custody of children in divorce cases. Often, custody was awarded to the mothers -- on the assumption that they were more 'stable' and could provide the children with a 'nurturing home' that the fathers could not or would not provide -- regardless of the mother's emotional or economic capacity to care for the children. The result, in far too many cases, was that the children were, de facto, raised in single-parent households. This legal solution was not particularly helpful to either the mother or the father of the children. The mother was left with an egregious economic and emotional burden, trying to raise the children unilaterally, often dependent on unstable child support payments, welfare assistance and/or income from minimum wage jobs to support themselves and their children. The fathers were either 'left off the hook', in terms of emotional support of the children, or, in situations were the fathers wanted to have an ongoing involvement with their children, often excluded from family activities due to emotional conflicts between the parents.
The tendency of the courts to award sole custody of the children to the mother, with the father's sole responsibility -- or 'right' -- being to provide child support and alimony payments [but not being allowed an emotional relationship with his children] has been increasingly challenged by father's rights groups, with mixed results. In some cases, the courts have been willing to accept the fathers as legitimate caregivers of the children, more so than the mothers, and grant them primary custody, or has been motivated to view both parents as equally caring toward the children and been willing to grant mutual shared custody [with its own struggles in the emotional lives of the children]. In either solution, the rights of the fathers and their value in the family structure has been 'legitimized' by the court system, after decades of viewing fathers as having less value in the life of children than that of mothers. While it may or may not be true that being raised by a single parent [mother or father] can result in an emotionally stable child, there is at least some anecdotal evidence that both sons and daughters who are raised in homes where the father is not present have greater problems with delinquency and/or teen pregnancy. Having positive role modeling from both their mothers and fathers appears to provide children with a more solid emotional foundation in their growth and maturation.
Monday, October 25, 2010
Gender Equality: If It's Not A Two-Way Street, It's Not Equal (Part 2)
Note: This week's blog is the second part of what I had originally intended to be a two-part blog. But the more I write about the subject, I realize that even two parts are insufficient to address the issue. I have a lot to say about it, having studied gender relations, both personally and professionally, for 30 years, and having read a vast amount of books and articles on both women's and men's issues. Hence, while this is Part 2 of the Gender Equality blog, there will be many more 'parts' than the originally planned two parts. And I will probably intersperse the "Equality blogs" with other issues. So.... bear with me on this.
Readers may feel that I haven't as yet addressed what they consider to be 'equality issues' and while that may be true [even if I cover every issue I can think of], it is partly an issue of there being so much to say about gender equality and equity [or the lack thereof] -- from a men's wellness standpoint -- and a certain limit of what I can say each week [to keep the blogs within a rational length for enjoyment of reading).
Please read last week's blog for the first part, including some definitions of terms used.
Basic Issue of Socialization that makes 'Equality' Difficult
In American society, when females say they want equal relationships with men, there are some basic socialization patterns that tend to get in the way of the achievement of that equality. Females are socialized to seek male partners who are taller and stronger than themselves, earn more money and have greater economic assets, have more education, are willing to be more dominant in decision-making, are willing to physically defend them (and the children they mutually produce, if they have a family), and, to a fair degree, are willing to be proficient sexual lovers, more so than is expected of women. All of which creates a situation whereby desiring an 'equal' relationship is somewhat pre-weighted in an unequal direction. The very partner-seeking socialization (and the opposite is often true of males -- seeking partners who are shorter, earn less, etc.) predisposes an inherently non-equitable relationship. Of course, for females, in part this is due to a hope -- however forlorn in a worsening economy -- that women will be able to either stay home and care for children while being economically supported by a man who has a 'good salary' [an increasingly rare economic circumstance], or at least have a partner who earns more than they do, so that they can have the flexibility to spend more of their non-employment time caring for children.
Some of this is, thankfully, changing: in some segments of the society, women now have better pay than their partners (in about 25% of heterosexual marriages); more women than men are students in college and more women graduate from 4-year colleges than men; and at least some males are assuming a larger role in child-rearing, thereby, in part, balancing the rationale for the traditional female desire for an unequal economic arrangement. But for the majority of the population, these 'traditional socialization patterns' continue to hold true. And as a result, achieving economic and emotional parity in heterosexual dating and marriage relationships is problematic, at best.
In gay relationships, these patterns of course do not hold true. Women seeking female partners are not directly affected by male/female socialization patterns, though (and I am, quite admittedly, no authority on this subject) given that they are socialized in the same society as everyone else, they may replicate some of the patterns with their partners, though obviously within same sex variations. The same would hold true for gay males: being raised in a society with those socialization patterns and that combined with males generally tending to make greater salaries than women in equivalent jobs, their mating patterns would have to be affected by this inequitable partner-seeking pattern, though hopefully not to the same degree as heterosexual couples. While noting this, I need to continue my reading and research to find out how such socialization affects gay male and lesbian female couples -- and feedback, pertaining to this specific issue, from the gay and transgender readership of this blog, would be welcome (as it always is from anyone).
Equality in Heterosexual Dating Relationships
In point of fact, in heterosexual dating, women [even many self-identified feminist females] continue to expect men to pay for dates, or at least pick up the bill the greater portion of the time -- partly as a means of 'ascertaining whether this partner will be willing, down-the-road [assuming marriage becomes an option] to support a greater portion of the economic burden'. That this is inequitable is patently obvious, and I have explored this issue in much greater detail on the pages of the Mariposa Men's Wellness Institute website; there is no need to replicate that here. (For this much greater detail and extensive analysis, look under "Men's Emotional Wellness" on the left-sidebar of the MMWI website -- www.mmwi-stl.org -- for the articles are Equality of the Sexes, Equitable Dating and Equitable Sex.)
Economic Equality in Heterosexual Marriages
I read a statistic some years ago, in relation to the issue of pay equity, that noted, with a fair amount of distress, that women earn about 60% of the income that their husbands earn -- which struck me as sort of an odd statistic. Indeed, there is a basic inequity, between women and men, in salaries for equivalent jobs, and I recognize and am greatly bothered by this pay inequity (that women still earn about 77 cents for every dollar that men are paid). But females, on top of this [and partly because of this] are socialized to seek partners who make larger salaries than themselves; hence, of course their husbands would, a priori, make more income than the women. As Warren Farrell pointed out in Why Men Are The Way They Are, even the small percentage of professional class women who earn $100,000 a year and more tend to seek partners who earn even more than they do. In that economic class, there is hardly the question of 'having enough' -- depending, that is, on one's economic desires -- yet still women seek male partners with greater incomes.
As Barbara Ehrenreich pointed out years ago in The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment, many men are getting tired of being treated as meal tickets and financial objects and want partners who earn salaries equivalent to them; but as she also stresses, this will only be possible with pay equity in salaries. Both as a feminist man and a man who understands the inequity of salaries, I believe it would be wonderful if women had access to equitable salaries. Many women are either single, single heads of households, or in lesbian relationships, and they are not tied into the whole "seeking a man who makes more money" pattern, either by choice or lack of finding what they consider a suitable partner. Plus, when pay equity is achieved (if it is ever achieved), more men will be able to have the option that most women have always had -- of 'marrying up' economically. (In an economy where men generally have greater salaries, as has been true for most of human history, women have 'married up' economically, whereas men have 'married down'.)
Equality in Education
As noted above, females, statistically, now earn more 4-year university degrees than males. While there have been a slew of articles hyping this as a major crisis in male equality, I personally agree with some of the feminist writers I have read who point out that it will still be quite a number of years before women in the workplace have college degree parity with males, due simply to the fact that, until recent years, men earned far more degrees than women. Of course, the additional problem, currently, is that many people, female or male, are finding that earning a college degree not only doesn't guarantee them employment (not that it ever did, but much more so now in this long-term recession), but that, as a result of the economic downturn, achieving college education parity in the workplace is going to take much longer than was previously anticipated.
And then, of course, we get back to pay equity. Even with those greater numbers of college degrees earned, and even with some reasonable chance at employment, many women still earn less than males in equivalent jobs. Sexism is alive and well in the marketplace.
Equality in Professional Employment
'Breaking the glass ceiling' in management circles continues to be a major issue for females. While some high profile women in management prove that it is possible to break that ceiling, for many females such a possibility remains elusive, at best.
On the other hand, employers have tended, in spite of extensive 'sensitivity and diversity training' in larger companies, to hire people who 'look and sound like themselves'. And this continues to be true even as females gain management positions. I have experienced this in social service and nonprofit employment -- which have been, historically, female-dominated professions. In many of the jobs I have applied for, if females constitute the management and hiring authorities, they tend, like males who were managers in the past, to favor the hiring of 'females just like themselves'. Many employment openings at which I, as an applicant, had much more extensive education and experience than female applicants, have nonetheless gone to females when the hiring personnel were also female. Of course it may have been, in part, due to age discrimination, pertaining to persons over 50 years of age (while officially outlawed, it is alive and well in the marketplace). The female applicants hired, even for management positions, were often one-third to one-half my age. And while, as an antiracism trainer, I am quite apprehensive about seeing this as a form of 'reverse discrimination' [which I feel is often misapplied and overused in situations where affirmative action still needs to be given greater credibility], I am aware of the potentiality of such situations being a form of inequality in hiring.
Yet, overall, in most employment sectors, I do strongly agree that women have less opportunities than men in hiring. And I am very much aware that employment inequality continues to be prevalent in the professional employment marketplace, mainly adversely affecting females.
Readers may feel that I haven't as yet addressed what they consider to be 'equality issues' and while that may be true [even if I cover every issue I can think of], it is partly an issue of there being so much to say about gender equality and equity [or the lack thereof] -- from a men's wellness standpoint -- and a certain limit of what I can say each week [to keep the blogs within a rational length for enjoyment of reading).
Please read last week's blog for the first part, including some definitions of terms used.
Basic Issue of Socialization that makes 'Equality' Difficult
In American society, when females say they want equal relationships with men, there are some basic socialization patterns that tend to get in the way of the achievement of that equality. Females are socialized to seek male partners who are taller and stronger than themselves, earn more money and have greater economic assets, have more education, are willing to be more dominant in decision-making, are willing to physically defend them (and the children they mutually produce, if they have a family), and, to a fair degree, are willing to be proficient sexual lovers, more so than is expected of women. All of which creates a situation whereby desiring an 'equal' relationship is somewhat pre-weighted in an unequal direction. The very partner-seeking socialization (and the opposite is often true of males -- seeking partners who are shorter, earn less, etc.) predisposes an inherently non-equitable relationship. Of course, for females, in part this is due to a hope -- however forlorn in a worsening economy -- that women will be able to either stay home and care for children while being economically supported by a man who has a 'good salary' [an increasingly rare economic circumstance], or at least have a partner who earns more than they do, so that they can have the flexibility to spend more of their non-employment time caring for children.
Some of this is, thankfully, changing: in some segments of the society, women now have better pay than their partners (in about 25% of heterosexual marriages); more women than men are students in college and more women graduate from 4-year colleges than men; and at least some males are assuming a larger role in child-rearing, thereby, in part, balancing the rationale for the traditional female desire for an unequal economic arrangement. But for the majority of the population, these 'traditional socialization patterns' continue to hold true. And as a result, achieving economic and emotional parity in heterosexual dating and marriage relationships is problematic, at best.
In gay relationships, these patterns of course do not hold true. Women seeking female partners are not directly affected by male/female socialization patterns, though (and I am, quite admittedly, no authority on this subject) given that they are socialized in the same society as everyone else, they may replicate some of the patterns with their partners, though obviously within same sex variations. The same would hold true for gay males: being raised in a society with those socialization patterns and that combined with males generally tending to make greater salaries than women in equivalent jobs, their mating patterns would have to be affected by this inequitable partner-seeking pattern, though hopefully not to the same degree as heterosexual couples. While noting this, I need to continue my reading and research to find out how such socialization affects gay male and lesbian female couples -- and feedback, pertaining to this specific issue, from the gay and transgender readership of this blog, would be welcome (as it always is from anyone).
Equality in Heterosexual Dating Relationships
In point of fact, in heterosexual dating, women [even many self-identified feminist females] continue to expect men to pay for dates, or at least pick up the bill the greater portion of the time -- partly as a means of 'ascertaining whether this partner will be willing, down-the-road [assuming marriage becomes an option] to support a greater portion of the economic burden'. That this is inequitable is patently obvious, and I have explored this issue in much greater detail on the pages of the Mariposa Men's Wellness Institute website; there is no need to replicate that here. (For this much greater detail and extensive analysis, look under "Men's Emotional Wellness" on the left-sidebar of the MMWI website -- www.mmwi-stl.org -- for the articles are Equality of the Sexes, Equitable Dating and Equitable Sex.)
Economic Equality in Heterosexual Marriages
I read a statistic some years ago, in relation to the issue of pay equity, that noted, with a fair amount of distress, that women earn about 60% of the income that their husbands earn -- which struck me as sort of an odd statistic. Indeed, there is a basic inequity, between women and men, in salaries for equivalent jobs, and I recognize and am greatly bothered by this pay inequity (that women still earn about 77 cents for every dollar that men are paid). But females, on top of this [and partly because of this] are socialized to seek partners who make larger salaries than themselves; hence, of course their husbands would, a priori, make more income than the women. As Warren Farrell pointed out in Why Men Are The Way They Are, even the small percentage of professional class women who earn $100,000 a year and more tend to seek partners who earn even more than they do. In that economic class, there is hardly the question of 'having enough' -- depending, that is, on one's economic desires -- yet still women seek male partners with greater incomes.
As Barbara Ehrenreich pointed out years ago in The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment, many men are getting tired of being treated as meal tickets and financial objects and want partners who earn salaries equivalent to them; but as she also stresses, this will only be possible with pay equity in salaries. Both as a feminist man and a man who understands the inequity of salaries, I believe it would be wonderful if women had access to equitable salaries. Many women are either single, single heads of households, or in lesbian relationships, and they are not tied into the whole "seeking a man who makes more money" pattern, either by choice or lack of finding what they consider a suitable partner. Plus, when pay equity is achieved (if it is ever achieved), more men will be able to have the option that most women have always had -- of 'marrying up' economically. (In an economy where men generally have greater salaries, as has been true for most of human history, women have 'married up' economically, whereas men have 'married down'.)
Equality in Education
As noted above, females, statistically, now earn more 4-year university degrees than males. While there have been a slew of articles hyping this as a major crisis in male equality, I personally agree with some of the feminist writers I have read who point out that it will still be quite a number of years before women in the workplace have college degree parity with males, due simply to the fact that, until recent years, men earned far more degrees than women. Of course, the additional problem, currently, is that many people, female or male, are finding that earning a college degree not only doesn't guarantee them employment (not that it ever did, but much more so now in this long-term recession), but that, as a result of the economic downturn, achieving college education parity in the workplace is going to take much longer than was previously anticipated.
And then, of course, we get back to pay equity. Even with those greater numbers of college degrees earned, and even with some reasonable chance at employment, many women still earn less than males in equivalent jobs. Sexism is alive and well in the marketplace.
Equality in Professional Employment
'Breaking the glass ceiling' in management circles continues to be a major issue for females. While some high profile women in management prove that it is possible to break that ceiling, for many females such a possibility remains elusive, at best.
On the other hand, employers have tended, in spite of extensive 'sensitivity and diversity training' in larger companies, to hire people who 'look and sound like themselves'. And this continues to be true even as females gain management positions. I have experienced this in social service and nonprofit employment -- which have been, historically, female-dominated professions. In many of the jobs I have applied for, if females constitute the management and hiring authorities, they tend, like males who were managers in the past, to favor the hiring of 'females just like themselves'. Many employment openings at which I, as an applicant, had much more extensive education and experience than female applicants, have nonetheless gone to females when the hiring personnel were also female. Of course it may have been, in part, due to age discrimination, pertaining to persons over 50 years of age (while officially outlawed, it is alive and well in the marketplace). The female applicants hired, even for management positions, were often one-third to one-half my age. And while, as an antiracism trainer, I am quite apprehensive about seeing this as a form of 'reverse discrimination' [which I feel is often misapplied and overused in situations where affirmative action still needs to be given greater credibility], I am aware of the potentiality of such situations being a form of inequality in hiring.
Yet, overall, in most employment sectors, I do strongly agree that women have less opportunities than men in hiring. And I am very much aware that employment inequality continues to be prevalent in the professional employment marketplace, mainly adversely affecting females.
Monday, October 18, 2010
Gender Equality: If It's Not A Two-Way Street, It's Not Equal (Part 1)
(Note: This is the first part of a two-part discussion.)
Gender equality is an issue that I, as a man who is motivated by men's emotional wellness, am very interested in, and there have been a wealth of articles and discussion, in both the feminist press and public media, about it in recent years. One of the problems with the nature of the discussion, though, is that far too often the terms of the dialogue have been solely about how females can gain equality with males, while ignoring how males can achieve parity with females. Readers may sit back from that statement and say "Well, yes, I can understand the first part, but what are you referring to in the second -- in what ways do men need to achieve parity with women? Aren't men in the dominant position in most, if not all, sectors of the society?"
And my answer is: yes, there are many ways in which women are treated as 'one-down' in the culture (as a feminist man, I'm only too aware of that), but there are also areas where men have fewer rights than women (which many self-defined feminist women ignore). In this week's blog, I want to look at the various areas of the society where in some cases men have the advantages, in others where women have the advantages. My objective is to display the ways in which those gender advantages are unequal and suggest approaches to gender equivalency that achieve actual equality (or equity, which I will discuss further) by noting that unless equality is a two-way street, it simply isn't equality.
Rights and Responsibilities
When discussing gender equality, it is important to define some terms. The Oxford American Dictionary defines equality as "the state of being equal, esp. in status, rights and opportunities." It defines equity as "the quality of being fair and impartial." In some areas of gender equivalency, equality is the more important feature, in others equity. Equality is focused on being 'the same as', whereas equity is about 'fairness' and 'functionality', even if the resultant effect of the fairness is unequal in a strict sense. For instance, in employment pay, we often refer to 'pay equity' in salaries, because since many job titles are not actually equal, what is focused upon is "given a difference in the kinds of jobs that men and women have, what would be a fair and impartial pay equivalence that a non-sexist observer would assign to those jobs."
Wrapped up in that discussion is also the issue of rights and responsibilities. If one gender has more rights than the other, then gender equality cannot be achieved; but, also, one must look at who has the greater responsibilities in a given situation. And there must be a determination about whether there is some balance between the rights acquired and the responsibilities being shouldered.
My personal concern, from a men's wellness perspective, is that much of feminist discourse in recent decades has been focused on how women can achieve more rights [equal or equivalent to that of men] without a concurrent acceptance of the responsibilities that men often shoulder along with those rights. (I will balance this discussion by also addressing areas where women have greater responsibilities than men, along with fewer rights. This is a complex issue and not one that can be dealt with in a short one week blog -- hence, the two-part nature of the discussion.)
Hence, equality is, from my perspective, about sharing rights and responsibilities. And, to emphasize my original point again, it is not simply an issue of women being equal to men, but also of men being equal to women.
Let me note at the outset that I see many areas of the society where the conditions I describe are changing, and changing in ways I find positive, but where they are currently unequal and imbalanced.
Equality in Healthcare
The first sector that I want to tackle is healthcare, as regards both physical and mental health. In this arena, there is a clear inequality, for both women and men.
Generally, more healthcare funding is spent on the physical healthcare needs of men than on those of women. As many feminist writers have pointed out, men are often chosen as the 'standard' by which treatments and medications are tested. Dosage amounts and levels, reactions to medications, and treatment plans are focused on males, with the results being assumed to being applicable to females. These writers have clearly shown how those results are often not applicable to the needs of women. Further, healthcare issues specific to females -- such as pregnancy, vaginal health and breast cancer -- tend to get less funding than physical healthcare funding for issues specific to males. While this is often quite true, it is also true that some physical issues specific to males, such as prostate problems, are often ignored in the healthcare funding cycles.
On the other hand, as I have pointed out in many of my blogs, when it comes to healthcare funding for mental health, the needs of men are assigned considerably less value than those of women. Mental health funding for females is significantly greater than that spent on males and, as a result, there are, by a wide margin, many more social service and mental health agencies focused on the emotional issues of women than of men. As I've noted, there are vastly more programs focused on female survivors of childhood sexual abuse than on male survivors, even though the actual number of sexual abuse survivors is very close in numbers (16% of male children vs. 20% of females).
Further, the societal 'concern' and awareness about sexual abuse is far greater and more widespread in relation to the issues faced by female survivors than issues faced by male survivors. In part, this is due to a cultural artifact that assumes that while we can talk about female victimization, the equivalence is not true of males. Males aren't 'supposed to be victims', and it is assumed that when males become chronological adults (over 21 years of age), they have the ability to 'face their issues without assistance', unlike females. Yet, clearly and unequivocally, given the greater preponderance of issues faced by males concerning suicide, alcoholism, drug abuse, acting out emotional pain in a violent manner, etc., this is simply not accurate. Additionally, while there are programs available for adult female rape victims (again, an insufficient number of programs and those that exist are insufficiently funded), many rape programs either ignore male rape victims or have few resources devoted to their issues.
When the issue of domestic violence is considered, the number of services for female victims, while still insufficient in comparison to the number of women who need them, are vastly greater than those available to males. In fact, there are very few, if any, shelters devoted to male victims, even though males and females, in heterosexual relationships, share 50% each of the number of perpetrators of domestic violence [for more on this, see The Whole Truth About Domestic Violence, by Philip W. Cook, in Everything You Know Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Secrets and Lies], and the shelter system ignores males who are victims of gay male-on-male domestic violence.
Next week, I will continue this discussion (in Part 2), focusing on employment, salaries, hiring, education, divorce outcomes/legal custody of children, alimony, childcare, and other areas where gender equivalency is unequal.
Gender equality is an issue that I, as a man who is motivated by men's emotional wellness, am very interested in, and there have been a wealth of articles and discussion, in both the feminist press and public media, about it in recent years. One of the problems with the nature of the discussion, though, is that far too often the terms of the dialogue have been solely about how females can gain equality with males, while ignoring how males can achieve parity with females. Readers may sit back from that statement and say "Well, yes, I can understand the first part, but what are you referring to in the second -- in what ways do men need to achieve parity with women? Aren't men in the dominant position in most, if not all, sectors of the society?"
And my answer is: yes, there are many ways in which women are treated as 'one-down' in the culture (as a feminist man, I'm only too aware of that), but there are also areas where men have fewer rights than women (which many self-defined feminist women ignore). In this week's blog, I want to look at the various areas of the society where in some cases men have the advantages, in others where women have the advantages. My objective is to display the ways in which those gender advantages are unequal and suggest approaches to gender equivalency that achieve actual equality (or equity, which I will discuss further) by noting that unless equality is a two-way street, it simply isn't equality.
Rights and Responsibilities
When discussing gender equality, it is important to define some terms. The Oxford American Dictionary defines equality as "the state of being equal, esp. in status, rights and opportunities." It defines equity as "the quality of being fair and impartial." In some areas of gender equivalency, equality is the more important feature, in others equity. Equality is focused on being 'the same as', whereas equity is about 'fairness' and 'functionality', even if the resultant effect of the fairness is unequal in a strict sense. For instance, in employment pay, we often refer to 'pay equity' in salaries, because since many job titles are not actually equal, what is focused upon is "given a difference in the kinds of jobs that men and women have, what would be a fair and impartial pay equivalence that a non-sexist observer would assign to those jobs."
Wrapped up in that discussion is also the issue of rights and responsibilities. If one gender has more rights than the other, then gender equality cannot be achieved; but, also, one must look at who has the greater responsibilities in a given situation. And there must be a determination about whether there is some balance between the rights acquired and the responsibilities being shouldered.
My personal concern, from a men's wellness perspective, is that much of feminist discourse in recent decades has been focused on how women can achieve more rights [equal or equivalent to that of men] without a concurrent acceptance of the responsibilities that men often shoulder along with those rights. (I will balance this discussion by also addressing areas where women have greater responsibilities than men, along with fewer rights. This is a complex issue and not one that can be dealt with in a short one week blog -- hence, the two-part nature of the discussion.)
Hence, equality is, from my perspective, about sharing rights and responsibilities. And, to emphasize my original point again, it is not simply an issue of women being equal to men, but also of men being equal to women.
Let me note at the outset that I see many areas of the society where the conditions I describe are changing, and changing in ways I find positive, but where they are currently unequal and imbalanced.
Equality in Healthcare
The first sector that I want to tackle is healthcare, as regards both physical and mental health. In this arena, there is a clear inequality, for both women and men.
Generally, more healthcare funding is spent on the physical healthcare needs of men than on those of women. As many feminist writers have pointed out, men are often chosen as the 'standard' by which treatments and medications are tested. Dosage amounts and levels, reactions to medications, and treatment plans are focused on males, with the results being assumed to being applicable to females. These writers have clearly shown how those results are often not applicable to the needs of women. Further, healthcare issues specific to females -- such as pregnancy, vaginal health and breast cancer -- tend to get less funding than physical healthcare funding for issues specific to males. While this is often quite true, it is also true that some physical issues specific to males, such as prostate problems, are often ignored in the healthcare funding cycles.
On the other hand, as I have pointed out in many of my blogs, when it comes to healthcare funding for mental health, the needs of men are assigned considerably less value than those of women. Mental health funding for females is significantly greater than that spent on males and, as a result, there are, by a wide margin, many more social service and mental health agencies focused on the emotional issues of women than of men. As I've noted, there are vastly more programs focused on female survivors of childhood sexual abuse than on male survivors, even though the actual number of sexual abuse survivors is very close in numbers (16% of male children vs. 20% of females).
Further, the societal 'concern' and awareness about sexual abuse is far greater and more widespread in relation to the issues faced by female survivors than issues faced by male survivors. In part, this is due to a cultural artifact that assumes that while we can talk about female victimization, the equivalence is not true of males. Males aren't 'supposed to be victims', and it is assumed that when males become chronological adults (over 21 years of age), they have the ability to 'face their issues without assistance', unlike females. Yet, clearly and unequivocally, given the greater preponderance of issues faced by males concerning suicide, alcoholism, drug abuse, acting out emotional pain in a violent manner, etc., this is simply not accurate. Additionally, while there are programs available for adult female rape victims (again, an insufficient number of programs and those that exist are insufficiently funded), many rape programs either ignore male rape victims or have few resources devoted to their issues.
When the issue of domestic violence is considered, the number of services for female victims, while still insufficient in comparison to the number of women who need them, are vastly greater than those available to males. In fact, there are very few, if any, shelters devoted to male victims, even though males and females, in heterosexual relationships, share 50% each of the number of perpetrators of domestic violence [for more on this, see The Whole Truth About Domestic Violence, by Philip W. Cook, in Everything You Know Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Secrets and Lies], and the shelter system ignores males who are victims of gay male-on-male domestic violence.
Next week, I will continue this discussion (in Part 2), focusing on employment, salaries, hiring, education, divorce outcomes/legal custody of children, alimony, childcare, and other areas where gender equivalency is unequal.
Monday, October 11, 2010
Diversity Allows The Greatest Number of People 'A Place At The Table'
Last week, one of the members of the Human Rights Campaign LinkedIn group posted a video on which Cynthia Nixon [of Sex in the City fame] was expounding on the issue of marriage equity for gay couples. She was noting that gay people were not asking for special privileges concerning their right to marriage -- they were simply asking for a 'place at the table'. She stressed that their participation wasn't an attempt to change the rules of marriage, anymore than the 1960's Freedom Riders, who engaged in sit-ins at lunch counters in the South, were trying to change the rules for eating out. They simply wanted to have a 'place at the table' that others had had all along.
That strikes me as one of the essential elements for having diversity in a society: that all the members of the society want a 'place at the table', to engage in the feast of life, to participate freely and equally in the fruits of the culture, of which they are also a part and which they add to. Gays and lesbians, transgender and transsexual people, all ethnic and racial groups, members of various economic classes, disabled persons, etc. all want the opportunity to take an active role in their own economic, political, and social advancement and a chance to live an enjoyable and economically adequate life. And the question is: Why should they not have that chance? Why should anyone be barred from having such an opportunity?
This past week, I attended a speech by CNN's Fareed Zakaria [who is also a columnist at Newsweek and The Washington Post]. In addition to a wide range of incisive observations (the fellow is a brilliant social and political commentator), he was talking about the objections to the proposed Islamic Center in New York City near the 'Ground Zero' of the 9/11 tragedy. What he emphasized was that, while many people felt negatively about the location of the Islamic Center, that 'majority opinion' was not and should not be the deciding factor in where the Center is located. He was giving the audience a historical perspective: that 70% or more of the population had, at one time, opposed miscegenation, Catholic churches in Boston, and suffrage for women -- but their opposition 'didn't make it right'. Sometimes the larger perspective of ethics had to have a place in our national consciousness and sometimes we need to allow that our Founding Fathers had some real intelligence in writing the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
And sometimes we, as a majority (in a democracy that honors majority opinions, but also guards minority rights) need to step back from our prejudices and realize that it isn't 'just us' who have a right to the fruits of the culture, but that true 'justice' involves honoring and promoting diversity, where everyone can have equal access to a 'place at the table'.
Critical to that diversity, though, are two additional elements: tolerance and respect. It does an individual or organization little good to be willing to engage in diversity without concurrently having the emotional and cultural openness to feel and display tolerance toward people who are different, sometimes profoundly different, from themselves.
Due to the neighborhoods they chose to live in and can afford to purchase a home in, many people in our society tend to live in monocultural communities. They don't avail themselves of the opportunity to interact, on a regular basis, with people who are racially, ethnically, sexually, or in terms of life choices, different. What often results is a kind of intolerant 'in-group thinking' -- an 'us versus them' mentality. Indeed, all of us tend to spend our time with people who are 'similar to us' and often the result is that we gain the illusion that 'the whole world has values and perspectives just like mine', when it is rather that the people whom we've chosen to spend time or collaborate with are those persons whom we have chosen precisely because they are 'just like us'.
Which is why it is important to avail oneself, as often as possible, either in work, school, or social environments, with diverse populations of people, if for no other reason than to remind oneself that there are a multitude of different kinds of people in this world, who have similar hopes and dreams as ourselves, but who choose [or alternately, have no choice] to live out their lives in quite different patterns. Being open to spending time with or working with people who are quite different from ourselves so that we can allow new worldviews to enter our consciousness is critical to the process of diversity.
However, being tolerant of other kinds of people is itself only the first step. It is also necessary to be respectful of and toward those persons. My brother advised me years ago that it wasn't as important to be liked as to be respected. We don't have to be in agreement with the implementation of other people's lifestyles or cultures -- and often, indeed, we aren't -- but it is critical to respect the value that that perspective has for the other person, and to be willing to view it as equally valid as ones own life and perspective.
There is a third important element, though, that plays into the implementation of diversity: the issue of allowing other people to participate, to have a 'place at the table'. One needs to create, with a conscious approach, systems that allow other people, who are different from the 'previously ordained in-group' [who often have been exercising cultural and sexual entitlements that have negatively affected other groups], to actively participate in the feast of life. It is not enough to simply say that one is willing to engage in diversity or that one is tolerant of other kinds of people or even is respectful of others, if there aren't systems in place that allow people quite different from ourselves to actively sit at the same economic, cultural, and sexual advantage table that we've been sitting at all along. It is also necessary, through education and training, to help others, who have not previously had this experience, to learn how to make use of the new opportunities that a multi-cultural environment thereby affords.
Lack of diversity, which many individuals and organizations have engaged in in the past [or continue to engage in presently] has limited the ability of the society to have access to the wealth of new perspectives that can, in turn, add to the wealth of the nation and our culture. Diversity isn't simply a good policy, nor is it simply the right thing to do (though both of those are true); it is also a means by which individuals, organizations, and the general society can grow, develop and foster empowering approaches to life that allow for the maximum number of people to take part in and enjoy the bounty of the world.
That strikes me as one of the essential elements for having diversity in a society: that all the members of the society want a 'place at the table', to engage in the feast of life, to participate freely and equally in the fruits of the culture, of which they are also a part and which they add to. Gays and lesbians, transgender and transsexual people, all ethnic and racial groups, members of various economic classes, disabled persons, etc. all want the opportunity to take an active role in their own economic, political, and social advancement and a chance to live an enjoyable and economically adequate life. And the question is: Why should they not have that chance? Why should anyone be barred from having such an opportunity?
This past week, I attended a speech by CNN's Fareed Zakaria [who is also a columnist at Newsweek and The Washington Post]. In addition to a wide range of incisive observations (the fellow is a brilliant social and political commentator), he was talking about the objections to the proposed Islamic Center in New York City near the 'Ground Zero' of the 9/11 tragedy. What he emphasized was that, while many people felt negatively about the location of the Islamic Center, that 'majority opinion' was not and should not be the deciding factor in where the Center is located. He was giving the audience a historical perspective: that 70% or more of the population had, at one time, opposed miscegenation, Catholic churches in Boston, and suffrage for women -- but their opposition 'didn't make it right'. Sometimes the larger perspective of ethics had to have a place in our national consciousness and sometimes we need to allow that our Founding Fathers had some real intelligence in writing the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
And sometimes we, as a majority (in a democracy that honors majority opinions, but also guards minority rights) need to step back from our prejudices and realize that it isn't 'just us' who have a right to the fruits of the culture, but that true 'justice' involves honoring and promoting diversity, where everyone can have equal access to a 'place at the table'.
Critical to that diversity, though, are two additional elements: tolerance and respect. It does an individual or organization little good to be willing to engage in diversity without concurrently having the emotional and cultural openness to feel and display tolerance toward people who are different, sometimes profoundly different, from themselves.
Due to the neighborhoods they chose to live in and can afford to purchase a home in, many people in our society tend to live in monocultural communities. They don't avail themselves of the opportunity to interact, on a regular basis, with people who are racially, ethnically, sexually, or in terms of life choices, different. What often results is a kind of intolerant 'in-group thinking' -- an 'us versus them' mentality. Indeed, all of us tend to spend our time with people who are 'similar to us' and often the result is that we gain the illusion that 'the whole world has values and perspectives just like mine', when it is rather that the people whom we've chosen to spend time or collaborate with are those persons whom we have chosen precisely because they are 'just like us'.
Which is why it is important to avail oneself, as often as possible, either in work, school, or social environments, with diverse populations of people, if for no other reason than to remind oneself that there are a multitude of different kinds of people in this world, who have similar hopes and dreams as ourselves, but who choose [or alternately, have no choice] to live out their lives in quite different patterns. Being open to spending time with or working with people who are quite different from ourselves so that we can allow new worldviews to enter our consciousness is critical to the process of diversity.
However, being tolerant of other kinds of people is itself only the first step. It is also necessary to be respectful of and toward those persons. My brother advised me years ago that it wasn't as important to be liked as to be respected. We don't have to be in agreement with the implementation of other people's lifestyles or cultures -- and often, indeed, we aren't -- but it is critical to respect the value that that perspective has for the other person, and to be willing to view it as equally valid as ones own life and perspective.
There is a third important element, though, that plays into the implementation of diversity: the issue of allowing other people to participate, to have a 'place at the table'. One needs to create, with a conscious approach, systems that allow other people, who are different from the 'previously ordained in-group' [who often have been exercising cultural and sexual entitlements that have negatively affected other groups], to actively participate in the feast of life. It is not enough to simply say that one is willing to engage in diversity or that one is tolerant of other kinds of people or even is respectful of others, if there aren't systems in place that allow people quite different from ourselves to actively sit at the same economic, cultural, and sexual advantage table that we've been sitting at all along. It is also necessary, through education and training, to help others, who have not previously had this experience, to learn how to make use of the new opportunities that a multi-cultural environment thereby affords.
Lack of diversity, which many individuals and organizations have engaged in in the past [or continue to engage in presently] has limited the ability of the society to have access to the wealth of new perspectives that can, in turn, add to the wealth of the nation and our culture. Diversity isn't simply a good policy, nor is it simply the right thing to do (though both of those are true); it is also a means by which individuals, organizations, and the general society can grow, develop and foster empowering approaches to life that allow for the maximum number of people to take part in and enjoy the bounty of the world.
Monday, October 4, 2010
A Lonely, But Truly Necessary, Journey Toward Men's Emotional Wellness
A couple of weeks ago, I was involved in a landscaping project at my Unitarian Universalist church. While we were working together, I got into a conversation with a female congregant about 'what we did for a career'. For my part, I noted that I had been working on a nonprofit devoted to men's emotional wellness for the past 7 years, but that it was, frustratingly, an unfunded organization. She replied "why don't you work on women's and children's issues; there's funding for those issues."
Which, of course, struck me as a rather odd suggestion. I mean, I know she meant well enough and I consider myself to be a devoted 'equality feminist' who supports those issues. But, given that the focus of my nonprofit is on men -- and I personally have been involved in the men's movement since the early 1980's -- why would I want to completely change my focus to working on the issues of women and children?
Indeed, she was quite correct that the present funding, to the extent that funding is available (less so in this long-term recession), is for issues relating to women and children. To the extent that there is any funding for issues related to males, there are some Department of Justice grants for working with male sexual abuse perpetrators. The trouble is that the primary model for working with that male population is to shame the men into changing their behavior, which is a profoundly counter-productive methodology. After all, very often the very reason for criminal sexual molestation is that the males were, themselves, swimming in a sea of shame in their childhoods [from their own incest experiences]. Shaming them into changing their behavior simply reinforces the primary problem.
What gets left out of the 'mix', in either of these funding streams, are the 95% of males who don't 'act out' criminal sexual behavior. Men in whose lives there are often problems that are in need of intervention, but for whom no services are available, such as the 1 out of 7 boys who are sexually abused as children, or about 20 - 25 million males in the United States [and several hundred million more worldwide].
Back in the mid-1990's, I was the Success by Six Coordinator at the New Mexico Advocates for Children and Families in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In trying to ascertain the best way to expend a limited resource base, I talked with the United Way about the need for some GIS mapping to determine the necessary community-wide needs and which of those were being served by too many agencies and which were not being served by any community organization. It was clear -- due to the grant-driven nature of many government and nonprofit agencies -- that some needs were overemphasized and others were completely neglected. I'm not sure whether United Way ever implemented my suggestion, but what I can say, unequivocally, is that at that time and ever since, it doesn't require GIS mapping to determine that there is little funding, anywhere, from any government, foundation, or corporate funding source, for men's emotional health issues.
Which, of course, is quite paradoxical. As I noted several weeks ago, even though we live in a patriarchal society, there are very few funding dollars for mental health intervention programs for men. My own theory is that this is true because the men in control of the funding refuse to admit that men have problems -- which is glaringly incorrect, but denial is hardly a rare phenomenon.
This gets me back to my original point about the need for my own nonprofit. Most founders of nonprofit social service organizations are motivated by either their own painful experiences or those of people they love, and their belief in the need to provide services for that issue. Personally, I have focused Mariposa Men's Wellness Institute on men's emotional wellness with an emphasis on adult male sexual abuse survivors both because I'm a survivor of incest and profound physical abuse, and because it's clear to me that that population is profoundly neglected by the social service delivery system.
When I was setting it up in the early part of this decade, there were many people 'cheering me on'. Some 'brothers' were willing to brainstorm ideas, contribute starter funds, and point me in good programatic directions, and I continue to have a very supportive Board to assist me. But beyond that, as one of my professors at the University of Missouri-St. Louis Nonprofit Management and Leadership Program noted, "it's your passion and energy that are going to be needed to promote the issue," and it is those qualities that are going to be needed, in a long-term sustained way, to ever generate funding for the nonprofit. I knew from the very beginning that this would be a fairly lonely journey, that while there are other practitioners in the men's wellness field, those of us who are working on these issues are rare.
Which is why 'reaching out', via LinkedIn and other social media sites, has been so very helpful. Just knowing that there are other people in the country (and internationally) who are working on these issues -- and connecting with them professionally -- has reinvigorated my sometimes flagging energy.
My fellow congregant's suggestion got me to thinking about what it's like when one is working on a 'cutting-edge social frontier' issue. I'm sure, quite sure really, that when feminists, in the 1960's, first approached foundations and government agencies for funding for women's issues, they were told to work on something else, because there wasn't funding available for that. What it took was slowly educating other females, and then their male colleagues, and finally the 'public at-large' about the need for a change in social ideas about women. And, indeed, as we all know from the history of the last 40 years, while it took some time for funding for issues focused on women and children to 'take hold', it finally happened -- maybe not sufficient funding to tackle all the needed issues, but far greater than when it was first broached in the 60's.
And that is what is needed for men's emotional wellness. Slowly educating other males, then our female colleagues, and challenging and finally changing cultural assumptions, perceptions, and expectations about problems that men face in their lives. I truly believe that those attitudes can -- and, with consistent effort, will -- change eventually, and that we can, over time, motivate foundations, corporations, and government agencies to generate grant funding.
If I didn't have that deeply held belief, I couldn't continue this work. It's too lonely and the funding is presently far too little to continue it without the fervent belief that it will eventually come to fruition. There are simply too many males who need the intervention services to have any desire to ignore that reality or turn away from the necessary work in this field.
Which, of course, struck me as a rather odd suggestion. I mean, I know she meant well enough and I consider myself to be a devoted 'equality feminist' who supports those issues. But, given that the focus of my nonprofit is on men -- and I personally have been involved in the men's movement since the early 1980's -- why would I want to completely change my focus to working on the issues of women and children?
Indeed, she was quite correct that the present funding, to the extent that funding is available (less so in this long-term recession), is for issues relating to women and children. To the extent that there is any funding for issues related to males, there are some Department of Justice grants for working with male sexual abuse perpetrators. The trouble is that the primary model for working with that male population is to shame the men into changing their behavior, which is a profoundly counter-productive methodology. After all, very often the very reason for criminal sexual molestation is that the males were, themselves, swimming in a sea of shame in their childhoods [from their own incest experiences]. Shaming them into changing their behavior simply reinforces the primary problem.
What gets left out of the 'mix', in either of these funding streams, are the 95% of males who don't 'act out' criminal sexual behavior. Men in whose lives there are often problems that are in need of intervention, but for whom no services are available, such as the 1 out of 7 boys who are sexually abused as children, or about 20 - 25 million males in the United States [and several hundred million more worldwide].
Back in the mid-1990's, I was the Success by Six Coordinator at the New Mexico Advocates for Children and Families in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In trying to ascertain the best way to expend a limited resource base, I talked with the United Way about the need for some GIS mapping to determine the necessary community-wide needs and which of those were being served by too many agencies and which were not being served by any community organization. It was clear -- due to the grant-driven nature of many government and nonprofit agencies -- that some needs were overemphasized and others were completely neglected. I'm not sure whether United Way ever implemented my suggestion, but what I can say, unequivocally, is that at that time and ever since, it doesn't require GIS mapping to determine that there is little funding, anywhere, from any government, foundation, or corporate funding source, for men's emotional health issues.
Which, of course, is quite paradoxical. As I noted several weeks ago, even though we live in a patriarchal society, there are very few funding dollars for mental health intervention programs for men. My own theory is that this is true because the men in control of the funding refuse to admit that men have problems -- which is glaringly incorrect, but denial is hardly a rare phenomenon.
This gets me back to my original point about the need for my own nonprofit. Most founders of nonprofit social service organizations are motivated by either their own painful experiences or those of people they love, and their belief in the need to provide services for that issue. Personally, I have focused Mariposa Men's Wellness Institute on men's emotional wellness with an emphasis on adult male sexual abuse survivors both because I'm a survivor of incest and profound physical abuse, and because it's clear to me that that population is profoundly neglected by the social service delivery system.
When I was setting it up in the early part of this decade, there were many people 'cheering me on'. Some 'brothers' were willing to brainstorm ideas, contribute starter funds, and point me in good programatic directions, and I continue to have a very supportive Board to assist me. But beyond that, as one of my professors at the University of Missouri-St. Louis Nonprofit Management and Leadership Program noted, "it's your passion and energy that are going to be needed to promote the issue," and it is those qualities that are going to be needed, in a long-term sustained way, to ever generate funding for the nonprofit. I knew from the very beginning that this would be a fairly lonely journey, that while there are other practitioners in the men's wellness field, those of us who are working on these issues are rare.
Which is why 'reaching out', via LinkedIn and other social media sites, has been so very helpful. Just knowing that there are other people in the country (and internationally) who are working on these issues -- and connecting with them professionally -- has reinvigorated my sometimes flagging energy.
My fellow congregant's suggestion got me to thinking about what it's like when one is working on a 'cutting-edge social frontier' issue. I'm sure, quite sure really, that when feminists, in the 1960's, first approached foundations and government agencies for funding for women's issues, they were told to work on something else, because there wasn't funding available for that. What it took was slowly educating other females, and then their male colleagues, and finally the 'public at-large' about the need for a change in social ideas about women. And, indeed, as we all know from the history of the last 40 years, while it took some time for funding for issues focused on women and children to 'take hold', it finally happened -- maybe not sufficient funding to tackle all the needed issues, but far greater than when it was first broached in the 60's.
And that is what is needed for men's emotional wellness. Slowly educating other males, then our female colleagues, and challenging and finally changing cultural assumptions, perceptions, and expectations about problems that men face in their lives. I truly believe that those attitudes can -- and, with consistent effort, will -- change eventually, and that we can, over time, motivate foundations, corporations, and government agencies to generate grant funding.
If I didn't have that deeply held belief, I couldn't continue this work. It's too lonely and the funding is presently far too little to continue it without the fervent belief that it will eventually come to fruition. There are simply too many males who need the intervention services to have any desire to ignore that reality or turn away from the necessary work in this field.
Monday, September 27, 2010
Cultural Expectations Predicate Perception of Social Reality
I was reading an article recently in the Smithsonian Magazine which pointed out that much of scientific research is predicated on a pre-existing assumption that researchers make -- and want to prove. The scientists often gather evidence that proves their assumption, and ignore evidence that proves the contrary or even proves something else entirely, not related to the focus of the research. As a result, many 'breakthrough' scientific discoveries are ignored for many years, because the outcomes don't match those that the researchers are looking for. In other words "you see what you want to see and ignore anything to the contrary."
All of us have grown up in societies which have cultural expectations that are 'bred' into us. We believe certain 'truths' because our parents say they're true, our friends agree, we read books that buttress our assumptions, and the society around sometimes is in agreement as well. Then, having spent an enormous amount of emotional capital on believing something is 'true', we either ignore evidence that contradicts our belief system, or, even more importantly, fail to ask questions in such a way that will elicit perspectives that might move our perception of reality in a completely different direction.
This is the focus of this week's blog, and a subject I will return to often. In particular, this week I want to talk about our cultural assumptions, and the expectations they lead to, around sexual abuse perpetration and victimization.
Many people in our American culture, including mental health and social service providers, are indoctrinated with two societal 'beliefs': that a certain cohort of men, when they have experienced trauma in their own childhood, will later sexually 'act out' abusive behaviors toward women and children, but that women, generally, given the same set of similar traumatic experiences, are not likely to do so. As a society, we tend to believe men capable of this because they're bigger, generally stronger, and 'lack empathy' (due to not being able to express their emotions), but that women, since they are 'good mothers', 'nurturing people', and 'always have the interests of children and families foremost in their minds', are incapable of this kind of behavior.
The first cultural expectation I want to address is that, in sexual relations between adult males and females, if anyone is going to 'act out' in an abusive manner, it is simply assumed, a priori, to be the males.
Traditionally, in surveys on heterosexual relationships, questionnaires about perpetration are given to males and questionnaires about victimization are given to females. And, given our cultural 'blinders', based upon pre-existing cultural assumptions about male and female behavior, sure enough the 'evidence' 'proves' that the cultural expectation is accurate: males are the perpetrators and females are the victims. However, a number of years ago, a thoughtful group of psychologists asked "What if the outcomes are predicated primarily upon our pre-existing assumptions? And if we ask the questions using quite a different methodology, would we obtain different results?" So this group (as outlined in the study Sexually Aggressive Women by Peter Anderson and Cindy Struckman-Johnson) gave perpetrator questionnaires to females and victimization questionnaires to males. And, lo and behold, it turned out that, in some adult heterosexual relationships, females were the perpetrators of sexual abuse and males the victims, to a statistically significant degree. Given that our society, in the past 30 years, has allowed women a greater degree of 'sexual freedom' and greater economic security in professional employment, it should not be surprising that some women have chosen to 'act out' sexually in the same abusive predatory manner that they have observed men engaging in. Or, maybe, this was occurring long before the era of 'sexual freedom', but nobody ever thought to ask the questions in this manner.
The second cultural expectation I want to address is the assumption that, as a result of women's greater socialized capacity for childcare and the social allowance for being 'more in touch' with their inner emotional life -- partly, as the assumption goes, as a result of having a 'natural maternal instinct' -- such socialization predisposes them to not act out in a sexually abusive manner toward children. However, in contrast to this expectation, as Michelle Elliot points out in Female Sexual Abuse of Children, more in-depth and extensive research has shown that as much as 30% of the sexual abuse of children is perpetrated by females [and this figure may itself be too low, given that children often feel that reporting such behavior will be unsupported by adults or the legal and mental health system].
Now, this is not to 'blame women' nor allow the burden of male perpetration to be less noticeable; far from it. The sexual abuse of children by either sex is a horrible and intensely traumatic event. But, as a result of our pre-existing cultural assumptions and expectations, this statistical percentage often makes people aghast with incredulity. "No, it's only men who sexually abuse children!" Not so.
What is so amazing about that incredulity is that, given the greater number of females who were, themselves, sexually abused as children, objectively it should not really surprise anyone that some females, without sufficient and competent intervention, would 'act out' their sexual trauma on others around them. After all, it is well documented that at least 1 out of 5 girls and 1 out of 7 boys are sexually abused as children. Further, given that women continue to be the primary caregivers of children, it is not surprising that some of those females will perpetrate sexual abuse on defenseless children, much as was done to them when they were children. [It should be noted that 85-90% of female and male victims of sexual child abuse do not become perpetrators; we are focusing here on those that do.]
I stressed last week that the cultural denial of male victimization was serving males poorly; I would note that the denial, by our society, of female perpetration, is also serving females poorly. Most of the social service agencies focus on females as victims, thereby ignoring male victims, and focus on males as perpetrators, thereby ignoring female perpetrators. Hence, funding cycles of health foundations and social service delivery systems concentrate on what they perceive to be true based upon their cultural expectations, and thereby fail to address services to those clientele that don't fit within the boundaries of that belief system. By doing so, they, much like the society in which they exist, deny the full spectrum of perpetration and victimization.
All of us have grown up in societies which have cultural expectations that are 'bred' into us. We believe certain 'truths' because our parents say they're true, our friends agree, we read books that buttress our assumptions, and the society around sometimes is in agreement as well. Then, having spent an enormous amount of emotional capital on believing something is 'true', we either ignore evidence that contradicts our belief system, or, even more importantly, fail to ask questions in such a way that will elicit perspectives that might move our perception of reality in a completely different direction.
This is the focus of this week's blog, and a subject I will return to often. In particular, this week I want to talk about our cultural assumptions, and the expectations they lead to, around sexual abuse perpetration and victimization.
Many people in our American culture, including mental health and social service providers, are indoctrinated with two societal 'beliefs': that a certain cohort of men, when they have experienced trauma in their own childhood, will later sexually 'act out' abusive behaviors toward women and children, but that women, generally, given the same set of similar traumatic experiences, are not likely to do so. As a society, we tend to believe men capable of this because they're bigger, generally stronger, and 'lack empathy' (due to not being able to express their emotions), but that women, since they are 'good mothers', 'nurturing people', and 'always have the interests of children and families foremost in their minds', are incapable of this kind of behavior.
The first cultural expectation I want to address is that, in sexual relations between adult males and females, if anyone is going to 'act out' in an abusive manner, it is simply assumed, a priori, to be the males.
Traditionally, in surveys on heterosexual relationships, questionnaires about perpetration are given to males and questionnaires about victimization are given to females. And, given our cultural 'blinders', based upon pre-existing cultural assumptions about male and female behavior, sure enough the 'evidence' 'proves' that the cultural expectation is accurate: males are the perpetrators and females are the victims. However, a number of years ago, a thoughtful group of psychologists asked "What if the outcomes are predicated primarily upon our pre-existing assumptions? And if we ask the questions using quite a different methodology, would we obtain different results?" So this group (as outlined in the study Sexually Aggressive Women by Peter Anderson and Cindy Struckman-Johnson) gave perpetrator questionnaires to females and victimization questionnaires to males. And, lo and behold, it turned out that, in some adult heterosexual relationships, females were the perpetrators of sexual abuse and males the victims, to a statistically significant degree. Given that our society, in the past 30 years, has allowed women a greater degree of 'sexual freedom' and greater economic security in professional employment, it should not be surprising that some women have chosen to 'act out' sexually in the same abusive predatory manner that they have observed men engaging in. Or, maybe, this was occurring long before the era of 'sexual freedom', but nobody ever thought to ask the questions in this manner.
The second cultural expectation I want to address is the assumption that, as a result of women's greater socialized capacity for childcare and the social allowance for being 'more in touch' with their inner emotional life -- partly, as the assumption goes, as a result of having a 'natural maternal instinct' -- such socialization predisposes them to not act out in a sexually abusive manner toward children. However, in contrast to this expectation, as Michelle Elliot points out in Female Sexual Abuse of Children, more in-depth and extensive research has shown that as much as 30% of the sexual abuse of children is perpetrated by females [and this figure may itself be too low, given that children often feel that reporting such behavior will be unsupported by adults or the legal and mental health system].
Now, this is not to 'blame women' nor allow the burden of male perpetration to be less noticeable; far from it. The sexual abuse of children by either sex is a horrible and intensely traumatic event. But, as a result of our pre-existing cultural assumptions and expectations, this statistical percentage often makes people aghast with incredulity. "No, it's only men who sexually abuse children!" Not so.
What is so amazing about that incredulity is that, given the greater number of females who were, themselves, sexually abused as children, objectively it should not really surprise anyone that some females, without sufficient and competent intervention, would 'act out' their sexual trauma on others around them. After all, it is well documented that at least 1 out of 5 girls and 1 out of 7 boys are sexually abused as children. Further, given that women continue to be the primary caregivers of children, it is not surprising that some of those females will perpetrate sexual abuse on defenseless children, much as was done to them when they were children. [It should be noted that 85-90% of female and male victims of sexual child abuse do not become perpetrators; we are focusing here on those that do.]
I stressed last week that the cultural denial of male victimization was serving males poorly; I would note that the denial, by our society, of female perpetration, is also serving females poorly. Most of the social service agencies focus on females as victims, thereby ignoring male victims, and focus on males as perpetrators, thereby ignoring female perpetrators. Hence, funding cycles of health foundations and social service delivery systems concentrate on what they perceive to be true based upon their cultural expectations, and thereby fail to address services to those clientele that don't fit within the boundaries of that belief system. By doing so, they, much like the society in which they exist, deny the full spectrum of perpetration and victimization.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)