This is a continuation of the part one post below. Please read that first so you know where I'm coming from. This was meant to all be a rant/discussion about the legal system and court cases, but this one gets a bit more personal. Ok a lot more personal. I'm questioning if I should even put it out there, but I feel it's an issue that needs to be discussed somewhere. Might as well be here.
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On a somewhat related topic…the next issue that gets to me…
How much of a person’s bad decisions can be excused by past abuse? I don’t have a good answer for this one. On the one hand, when someone hurts someone else, especially in these severe/extreme cases, I believe that nothing should excuse it. An abusive past might be the reason for it, but their sentence shouldn’t be any less because of it. Millions of people are abused as children and would never dream of doing something like that as an adult. On the other hand, kids who grow up with abuse often struggle to learn anything different. It’s called the cycle of abuse for a reason.
There’s many cases out there of kids who have been abused being placed in foster homes where they end up acting out their abuse on their siblings. (I’m sure this happens in biological families as well, I personally just haven’t heard about it as much). This acting out can be physical or sexual, but of course it is the sexual abuse that gets the most notice. When a young child sexually abuses another, it is in my experience generally looked at as sad and unfortunate for both children. The perpetrator is looked at as a tragic victim of circumstance. After all, where could an innocent child have learned such a terrible behavior?
Now repeat that scenario again, but this time the perpetrator is a teenager. Now it gets trickier. S/he no longer looks like an adorable innocent child. S/he is now an attacker, an abuser. Maybe. Maybe not. Should that child/teenager be sent to jail? Or sent to treatment? Are they still a victim? Does it matter? What is the right way to handle a child like this? After all, they are legally still a child. And the fact that they must have learned the behavior somewhere still holds true. Somewhere along the line, something happened to them to cause them to hurt another.
Then you have the adults in trials like Casey Anthony’s. Again I don’t know the story there, but I know there has been a lot of discussion about blaming a past of abuse for inappropriate actions. I believe that adult abusers of children should be punished. I would love nothing more than to see my abusers be severely punished for what they did to me. (It’s one of the few situations where I find an eye for an eye to be fitting!) It doesn’t matter to me that they were more than likely abused as children. They were the ones meant to raise me, love me, and protect me. I was an innocent child. They should be punished.
But I can’t draw a line of where I think blaming the past is appropriate. In a sense, it’s always appropriate. Growing up in abuse makes people do sick things, whether it’s hurting others, hurting themselves, turning to drugs and alcohol, unhealthy relationships, etc. And it may just be that a bad past is to blame for those decisions. What becomes not appropriate is claiming that punishment should be lessened or non-existent due to past experience. It’s also NEVER appropriate to stop trying to heal from the past. It is never ok to sit back and say “not my fault, I was abused.”
The grey area comes in the form of those people who are working to heal but slip. If an alcoholic relapses we generally give them the benefit of the doubt. We’re willing to work with them to find their way back to sobriety. But if that hurt child, now an adult, reacts to a situation in anger and physically hurts someone…is that not a similar type of slip? Yes one involves hurting other people while the other does not, but in many ways they are fundamentally the same.
The thing is, I have a different perspective than most on all of this. I hope to some day have the courage to tell my story, but for now suffice it to say that I was a bully. Starting in elementary school, I was the child that everyone feared. I grew more physical as I grew older. I wasn’t looking to hurt anyone, but I came from a house where pain and abuse were the norm. I knew that the best protection for my scared little self was to be feared. If they feared me, they wouldn’t try to hurt me.
I also believed that I was standing up for myself, and for those around me, when I got in fights. Sometimes maybe I was. But when I got older and my anger increased, I’d fight someone just for looking at me funny. In time I targeted others and did things I’m not yet ready to speak of. I was in my teens.
I by no means excuse myself for what I did. I blame my past in the sense that it was that pain that left me with no other knowledge of how to deal with my peers. It was the abuse that was done to me that left me afraid of everyone and believing that I needed to acquire power in order to survive. And I’m not speaking in hyperbole here…in my head it was truly a matter of life and death.
I hold a great deal of guilt for the ppl I hurt. It’s a guilt that eats away at me, and leaves me feeling like less than human. However I also know that there is much good inside of me. I no longer hurt others. It has been many years since I have. These days, I feel guilty if I squash a bug. Heck these days I apparently feel sad if a weed dies (see last post :P). I have worked with kids and I know I have helped them. Today I work to protect others in a healthy way…especially kids.
I remember specific decision points in my life. These were points where I was literally deciding between becoming healthier or becoming like my parents. It may sound strange to those who have not been there, but it was never an easy choice to make. It wasn’t that I wanted to hurt anyone. Instead it was a matter of fighting against those deep down urges and desires to cause pain to others. And the worst part of it was, there was nowhere to get help. If I tried to voice the thoughts in my head I was told to keep them to myself. Or I was punished for them. Or I was told that if I didn’t stop thinking that way I’d be locked up.
It is my belief that society lacks any sort of realistic system for helping rehabilitate abusers and possible future abusers. I hear often that abusers are a different breed; that there is no helping them and they will never change. And as much as I may want to feel that way about the people who hurt me, I know in my heart that it’s just not true. I see myself in my abusers, and in others I read about. We reached the same decision point. They took one fork, I took the other. But we’re not all that different, really.
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