Four Years On: Civil Management of Sex Offenders In New York

This month in 2007, then Attorney General Andrew Cuomo was tasked with breathing working life into New York’s Civil Management statute. With it, New York joined 20 other states in taking one of the most controversial and delicate legal steps possible in a liberal democracy- that of extending incarceration or strict probation for individuals with mental conditions that drive them to commit sex crimes.The cocktail party description of the law is fairly easy to deliver.  Most candidates are men nearing release from prison for a previous sex conviction. The state Office of Mental Health has the onerous job of examining every one of them (thousands of men are released every year from NYS corrections for sex offenses), and they decide if the person qualifies as having a “mental abnormality.” Basically, that’s a mental illness or disorder that  drives one to commit sex offenses. For the few who make that cut, the Attorney General has the job of proving 1) that the person indeed suffers, and 2) that he needs to be either confined in a state hospital or supervised in the community. Ideally, a person remains subject to one or the other until a judge decides that he’s no longer a danger.New York is both massive and diverse, and characterizing it as left-leaning or “defendant friendly” is an oversimplification. Nevertheless it’s not the most conservative of states, and there was and continues to be tremendous philosophical opposition to the law. Some claim it’s no more than additional punishment dressed up like treatment. Detractors point to its high costs, but more basically to what they see as the fundamental unfairness of telling a person who has done his time that, in fact, he’s got more time to do, albeit in a hospital environment rather than a prison. They also question whether a mental abnormality could ever be treated to the satisfaction of a judge with the responsibility of turning an offender back to the community. To them, it looks like a convenient life sentence waiting to happen.These arguments deserve consideration, and I thought them through when I had the chance to serve in the Sex Offender Management Unit from its infancy four years ago this month. Civil management of offenders, when it’s done right, isn’t about right or wrong.  It’s about ill or not ill, and for a lifelong prosecutor that can be a challenging mental transition to make. Good and evil, the bookends of Judeo-Christian thought, may be unsatisfyingly simple to some philosophers, but they’re the compass of most U.S. prosecutors. And they give way to something more complex in the civil management realm. In the case of a person who is driven to rape, what drives him really isn’t his fault. But it’s not society’s either, and civil management is as much a quarantine function as it is anything else.Of course, 1000 fair questions are begged here, from what “driven” really means to the very nature of free will.  Regardless, what concerned me was less the idea of the law than the process under which it would take shape. There are states where civil commitment has failed miserably because it was political red meat in a ‘get tough on crime’ atmosphere, but never supported well enough to be true to its stated goals.There was no telling how it would play out in New York. A few respected colleagues warned me it was a bad career move, that the law was flawed in its inception and nearly impossible to enforce fairly or effectively.  In the end, though, I bet Cuomo’s office would be a good steward and that New York, despite and because of its big government nature, would be a place where the tricky business of civil management would at least be properly supported and also be done as honestly and fairly as humanly possible.I was right.Kevin Gagan, the former Manhattan ADA who took the reins out of the gate and brought me into the unit, remains one of the very best people I’ve ever worked with or for. He’s a hard charger but fair, deeply decent, and very smart. He also had a great nose for talent and assembled a team of litigators across 40,000 square miles that I view today as the single best collection of trial lawyers I’ve known personally or professionally. Our partners, OMH and Parole, worked honorably beside us and put heroic effort into maintaining not just the appearance but the reality of the ideals behind the law.  Our legal adversaries played their part and fought doggedly to protect and ensure due process for their clients, some of the most powerless and despised people imaginable. The nightmare scenarios of massive lock-ups and unending commitments haven’t happened, and for the most part the process works as it’s supposed to.It isn't perfect and it remains a work in progress. But when I consider that I took a chance with how my office and the rest of the state would implement this difficult, controversial social policy, I marvel at how lucky I got. Kevin has since moved on to higher office in state government, but the bureau he formed continues to thrive under solid new management and the leadership of a new AG. My friends and colleagues there continue their mission with as much integrity and competence as anyone could ask for.The idea remains controversial and rightly so. It involves the most daunting legal questions we face: The rightness, let alone reliability, of predicting future crimes; the correct balance- there is none more crucial- between individual liberty and public safety; the inner-workings of the human mind. New York hasn’t perfected a response to any of these. But it had faith in its own institutions and the safety of the public at heart when it took the leap to answer them. It’s done damn well so far. Happy Birthday.

Sexting, Children, and the Law

I was 24 when I first heard the term “Internet,” still years from its daily use. I bought my first iphone this year at 43. In short, I missed out on the wonder, ease and power of electronic communication and information sharing as a kid.  But as well I was spared the dark side of these advancements. I was hardly a ladies’ man as a teenager; quite the opposite. In spite of this, or maybe because of it, I shudder to think what damage I could have done to myself armed with the power to communicate as it exists today.“Sexting,” basically the phenomenon of exchanging texts and photos of a sexual nature, is probably the most dangerous practice a kid can engage in with a phone under normal circumstances.  The cocktail that encourages it is nearly irresistible: The impulsiveness and short-sightedness of adolescence combined with a ridiculous ease of execution. Smartphones, now nearly universal, allow for the transfer of self-taken photographs within seconds.The practice struck a very mean blow to a group of children near Olympia, Washington late last year when an 8th grade girl took a frontal nude photo of herself and texted it to her then boyfriend.  The boyfriend, a few weeks later and after the two had “broken up,” shared it with another girl, this one a former friend of the one who snapped the picture. The girl who got the photo then did something else remarkably cruel, but also remarkably easy in the modern world of electronic communication: She attached a message (in part reading “Ho Alert”) and instantly forwarded the photo to her entire contacts list.The fallout was, not surprisingly, instantaneous and horrific. The photographed girl was ostracized and humiliated.  The school where all three attended erupted.  Parents panicked and demanded action, and action followed.  The two children who distributed the picture (plus a third who assisted) were eventually arrested and charged with felonies in Washington State.  The felony was for distribution of child pornography, given that the girl in the photo was 14.Ultimately, Rick Peters, the deputy DA who handled the case, did something I did several times as a juvenile prosecutor (although I never handled a case like this one- in the final years of the 20th century most cell phones lacked cameras). Peters reduced the charges to misdemeanor telephone harassment and allowed the kids into a program that will eventually see the cases dismissed.Two questions have arisen from the prosecutorial decisions in this case.  The first is whether the law should have been brought to bear at all.  The second is whether, if charges were to be brought, why they weren’t brought against the girl who photographed herself.Answering the second question first, regardless of who else was charged, I believe sparing the girl with the camera was the right move.  She was, as Peters pointed out, severely punished as it was.  In addition to the scarcely imaginable humiliation she’s experienced, she’ll continue to live with the reality of the photograph traveling cyberspace as it does to this day- and not just in theory but in schools near hers. Regardless of the fact that she made a decision, in effect, to manufacture child pornography, I see no imbalance in sparing her charges while bringing them against the distributors. Yes, she’s technically guilty of a crime.  But she’s much more a victim, and therefore the value in charging her is senseless and cruel. Conversely, the kids who made the decision to send the picture, and in particular the one who attached the offensive message and distributed to multiple kids at once, deserve to have been scared straight by the system.Addressing the first question is for some more difficult. It’s undeniably unfair that sexting, when it’s done between adults (however foolish and stupid) is nevertheless legal.  In fact it’s touted as the new and cool way for adults to rediscover their inner “naughty teen.” But when actual, underage teens do it, seeking naturally to prepare for entry into the world of their sex-obsessed adult counterparts, they’re risking arrest and prosecution.Still, in my view, there is a justification for bringing the law to bear on kids for this behavior. Simply put, the consequences of their actions are too great for the law to ignore. Without the technology at her disposal, the “Ho Alert” girl would have had a pea-shooter to aim at her former friend (relatively) rather than an automatic rifle. The same girl 25 years ago could have done little more than physically post an actual photograph in some strategic location for a time. Is her modern iteration more culpable simply because she had more dangerous tools? Possibly, if she fully appreciated those tools and knowingly sought the full advantage of them. This begs the very large question (suitable for another post) of what adolescents should be held responsible for in the first place. Emerging research about the adolescent brain suggests that their level of culpability in seemingly obvious situations needs to be re-calibrated.Is all of this arguable, including every decision ADA Peters and his office made?  Of course. But such is the balancing act a conscientious prosecutor does when confronting facts like these. Life makes law, not the other way around. I think Peters got it right.

The Baby Ad: Myth, Reality, and Danger in Prevention

They call themselves Men's Rights Advocates, or MRA’s.  I’ve aimed a fair amount of criticism their way over the years as paranoid-sounding myth perpetrators, which I believe many of them to be.  So I was surprised when I found myself agreeing with them- marginally- on an anti-rape video produced by a Midwestern rape crisis and DV advocacy center run by a male advocate named Josh Jasper, now the poster-boy enemy for the men's rights movement.  Jasper, a former Marine, ex-cop and now CEO of what appears to be a vibrant, multi-location facility, is a guy I’d probably admire and agree with more often than not.  But I think his video misses the mark, although not exactly for the reasons the MRA pitchfork crowd is seething about.The video depicts an adorable and utterly innocent, smiling male infant as a potential future rapist, and suggests that teaching him different ideas of masculinity is the key to ending sexual violence.  So presumably he can be taught to rape, or taught not to rape.  Jasper himself contends that no one is born to be a rapist or a batterer, but rather that it’s learned behavior.  MRA’s, though, seem to believe that Jasper wants us to think all boys are by default potential rapists who must be taught to behave more gently than the naturally crazed beasts they are.  That, in their view, constitutes misandry (a hatred of men and boys) and is part of a hyper-feminist, emasculating pandemic fueled by government largess and the self-hatred of guys like Jasper (and me).But I think Jasper believes the way many of us did in the early days of studying non-stranger sexual violence.  He sees a boy’s default setting as non-sexually violent, but believes the wrong rearing and education can turn almost any boy into a rapist.  It’s probably a distinction without a difference for the MRA’s, but I think it’s important.  I also think, unfortunately, that Jasper is wrong.As I’ve written in this space before, the best research we have shows that most men, regardless of what they’re taught, naturally won’t commit acts of sexual violence.   A good upbringing certainly promotes respect for women and a view of them that isn’t grossly objectifying (although societal cues are anything but helpful).  But what we’ve learned is that, even of the cads and womanizers out there, most naturally recognize and respect the boundaries of consent or incapacitation.  And a minority of men, some of whom seem quite upstanding otherwise, view sexuality in a way that leads them to rape, and that they do so repeatedly and won’t be deterred regardless of what they’re taught as boys.  They do most of the damage.In a way, this is a kind sentiment for men to hear. We’re not, as previously suspected, all potential felons with testosterone fueled libidos in need of restraint. But the other side of the coin is a very dark one indeed.  Domestic violence, it might be argued, is more of a learned behavior.  But where do rapists come from? What causes a boy to emerge in adolescence as a rapist or a sex offender?  The fact is, as researchers like Anna Salter have disturbingly but compellingly suggested, we just don’t know.  A tempting but inaccurate answer is that men who rape or otherwise offend sexually were themselves perpetrated upon as children.  I believed this for a while as an ADA.  But Salter and others have revealed that claims of abuse (over 90% for convicted sex offenders) is almost completely the result of self-reporting.  Even threatening offenders with polygraphs takes that number way down.  Will a sex offender or convicted rapist claim earlier abuse before a sentencing judge?  Of course, because he knows it’ll usually produce a more favorable sentence, and he'll be seen as less of a monster than an offender who alleges no previous abuse.What's much worse is when this argument is reversed; when it's believed that boys and girls who are offended against need to sufficiently “heal” in order not to become abusers.  This "vampire theory" is both appallingly cruel and completely inaccurate.  The vast majority of survivors grow to become more protective and cognizant of the risks when they have or interact with children, even if the pathology they suffered leads them to make bad choices in other areas of their lives.Both of these ideas- one benign but mostly wrong and one malevolent and completely wrong, nevertheless stem from usually well-intentioned, Judeo-Christian efforts to understand evil acts by people allegedly created in His image.  I’ve argued this for years with religious friends who can’t accept that a loving God creates people within whom malignant, torturous things simply bloom and create monstrous behavior. People just aren’t born with broken souls.Except that they might be.I’m only a lawyer; I have neither the ability nor the inclination to draw ontological conclusions.  As my father was snarkily fond of saying when I asked him as a kid what God was thinking about this or that, “I don’t know, I haven’t talked to Him lately.”I'm still religious, and I still don't know.  But I believe what methodological research and my own anecdotal experience suggests: There is evil in the world and we really don’t know where it comes from.  That doesn’t mean that efforts like Jasper's, though, are in vain.  If you view the ad as the MRA’s do (part of a continuing effort to demonize those of us with penises, even tiny innocent babies) then yes, Jasper is a misandrist.  But I don’t think that’s the case.  And there is great value in teaching boys gentleness, decency and even chivalry as long it’s understood that their female counterparts are not fragile, weak things to be protected and lorded over, but equals to be viewed on par in every way.  This is particularly important given how popular culture and Madison Avenue sell and objectify women and sex, and it can be done without eliminating gender roles and the life-affirming interplay of sexuality.  So were I Josh Jasper, I’d adjust fire (a reference I’ll bet he gets as a former Marine) but I wouldn’t back away from seeking to change how men view women.And I’d damn sure be careful to avoid assumptions that are tempting in their ability to explain the unfathomable, but potentially unfair to survivors of abuse or cynically exploited by abusers themselves.  With that said, I wish Josh the best as he continues his mission.  And I'll gladly share the target with him where the vitriol of the men's rights movement is concerned.  Semper Fi.

Precious

I recently consulted on a case of involuntary manslaughter.  The victim was a 19 month-old boy who had been inappropriately swaddled (by his stepfather) in a crib and placed face down on an adult sized pillow amid a flashlight and several other inappropriate and dangerous items. The child was dead when his mother finally went to check on him at 9:30 the morning after a particularly wild party where she and his father heard him crying in an unusual and distressed manner at some point over the din, but neglected to attend to him.  The official cause of death was mechanical asphyxiation.   The father had wrapped him so tightly in the blanket that he likely exhausted himself attempting to wiggle around, and then choked when he vomited later in the night (he’d been diagnosed with gastroenteritis and was vomiting regularly).Lividity (the bruise-like purple color a body turns on the side where the blood settles) and blanching (areas of paleness amid the purple because of skin pressed against a surface) made the crime scene photos chilling.  A 19 month-old isn’t supposed to look like some sickly, purple and white-striped, limp doll. For most of an afternoon, the prosecutor and my team discussed possibilities for charging either parent, particularly the stepfather who was the hands-on actor.  There were arguments for mercy toward both parties, particularly given the fact that both (especially the mother) were sentenced already to a lifetime of mourning this child and the dreadful judgment that led to his death.  But there was also evidence that the stepfather was both jealous and contemptuous of the child- and he had beaten him and left marks on at least one occasion previously.  Prosecuting him was appropriate.  The mother was a tougher call; she was guilty of horrendous judgment and some sick combination of laziness and stupidity, but didn’t seem to merit a charge.  And without a doubt, she was being punished already.  We also needed her cooperation.It’s a sticky balance sometimes.  Often the hardest part of being a child abuse prosecutor is working with (and withholding judgment of) the “non-offending” parent, that is, the one who didn’t actively harm the child, but who might have contributed to the environment that gave rise to his being harmed or killed.  Usually, although not always, that’s the mother.  She is often a victim herself, usually of the same perpetrator.  Understanding what’s known as the “Cycle of Violence” and other dynamics that play out in domestic violence situations helps to make sense of a person’s seemingly irrational or unwise choices. It’s not easy, for a hundred reasons, to leave a situation with a violent and abusive man.  Many ADA’s I’ve worked with though, particularly ones who are mothers themselves, draw a line at a mother’s failure to protect her own children.  Whether this is good public policy or mindless vengeance, whether it is justice or cruelty, is debatable and almost always case-specific.  The decision shouldn’t be an easy one either way.I was reminded of this dilemma watching Precious, the brilliantly acted but controversial film by Lee Daniels (and based on the novel by Sapphire)  released in 2009.  I found the movie riveting and recognized some of the dynamics experienced within the family Gabourey Sidibe’s character endured.  The pathology depicted in the film, from brutal incest and rape to the almost demonic assault on Precious’ spirit, verbal and physical, from her mother (played with genius by Mo’Nique), is not mythological.  It exists, and in nearly 15 years of doing this work I have seen it more often then I can shake on certain nights.  Some of the criticism of the movie was directed at its pure level of pain, anger, violence and despair.  It was likened to a porn flick in terms of its sheer scope of sickness, and discarded as simply over-the-top.  Perhaps, but the idea that what Precious experienced just couldn’t or wouldn’t happen in real life is naïve and frankly dangerous.   What’s more understandable was the reaction from detractors who found the movie to be a well-crafted but galling racial slur, designed to titillate white audiences with predictable and myth-cementing images of an inner-city black family.   “Black pathology,” to quote one reviewer, “sells.”   It’s a fair assessment, whatever the intentions of the filmmakers.It’s also grossly misleading.  The very same pathology, from the incest and sexual violence to the endless welfare dependence and cycle of poverty, has eaten entire areas of the US where non-white faces are rare or non-existent.   There is, I believe, an arguable connection between grinding poverty and physical abuse or neglect of children- whether in the city, the country, or anywhere in between.  There is no such link that I’ve ever experienced between poverty and sexual abuse, which plays out with equal malevolence in mansions and shacks.  There is absolutely no connection between any racial group and the pathology that destroys families and rips apart the children within them.  I personally believe Sapphire and Daniels were simply trying to tell a painful but powerful story.  But I can understand the revulsion that arises when it is only the African-American experience that is portrayed with such hopelessness.  The white majority, emerging Hispanic majority and every other group does its share of damage just as effectively.It is crucial to remember this when one is a prosecutor considering charging a neglectful or otherwise feckless mother in a case where a man did the most damage.  It’s simply one of the most difficult decisions we make, and if we’re colored by images of a racial, ethnic or socio-economic group as we do so, we’ve lost our sense of justice and we are deeply failed (and dangerous) professionals.  And, as offensive as the behavior of a failed mother can seem to us, we must remember the battle she has waged as well.  The genius of the character Mo’Nique plays in Precious is that, in the end, she earns a shred of compassion despite how miserably she’s reacted to the real demon in the story, the man we see so little of.The baby in the pictures I beheld was white, as were both of his parents, themselves uneducated and lower class.  Having been raised in a town where lower-class whites were the primary source of crime, abuse and bullying, I felt a quick urge to judge them with a lot more rigidity than I might hold for another demographic.   It wasn’t my case, but even as a consultant it was an urge that was best checked quickly. The landscape of a family destroyed by abuse and violence is as foggy, uncertain and unpredictable as any battlefield.  Understanding that as one walks into the midst of it in order to assign blame, issue subpoenas, and swing the hammer of the law is something we aren’t taught in law school.  But it’s a lesson we need to learn quickly.

Barbie and Rape Culture

A friend of mine has a seven year-old daughter.  She is bright, beautiful, cherubic, and kind.  Between the attributes she’s been blessed with and the fine guidance of her parents, she’s in a perfect position to capitalize on the hard-won victories of her female predecessors.  She truly can be whatever she wants to be, and that is a blessing.Kate loves animals- she’s interested in observing them, caring for them and discovering names for them.  What’s interesting, though, is that unlike many kids her age, her attention hasn’t shifted since she was a toddler.  Animals are her passion, and assuming that doesn’t change, a career in veterinary medicine might be the perfect path for her.  Of the things that could encourage her to think seriously about being a vet, I hope this isn't one of them:This is "Pet Vet" Barbie from Mattel's "I Can Be" series, apparently depicting the kinds of professionals little girls can be if they emulate Barbie.  I encountered this gift (the image reflects the exact same doll and packaging) when another friend of mine’s four year-old daughter asked me for help in opening it this Christmas.  Initially I didn't see what the doll was supposed to be dressed as.  Not just at first glance, but frankly after a few seconds, I concluded the doll was in a waitress outfit- and not a particularly conservative one.  How else to explain the perilously short pink skirt and hose with some flowery fringe, a name tag, that sash thing, and the equivalent of  four-inch platform shoes?   Josie handed me the plastic box and I saw the "I Can Be" logo on it someplace.  I remember thinking, "there's nothing wrong with being a waitress; it's an honest job.  I waited tables for years.  But it doesn't seem like the kind of thing they'd ask girls to aspire to for a career.""She's a waitress, right?" I asked out loud, mostly to myself although Josie was right there.  She is both adorable and precocious.  She wrinkled her nose and looked at me like I was an idiot."No," she said, "she a vet doctor and makes animals better."Oh.Barbie, in this box, doesn't look like a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine.  I dated one once in New York, actually a brilliant eye-surgeon for dogs who makes a fantastic living at a respected clinic.  She's very beautiful, but she doesn't wear hot-pink platform shoes and a mini-skirt to work.  She wears comfortable, rubber-soled shoes and loose-fitting scrubs to work, usually covered by a white lab coat depending on what she's doing.  In fact, I've never seen any medical professional dressed the way this doll was.  Are there vets who wear heels at work?  A guy I grew up with is a physician and farmer in rural Wisconsin- my guess is the female vets he encounters don't, but I could be wrong.  A short skirt and four inch heels could be a plus when walking from the truck to the barn to assist in the birth of a calf during a snowstorm.I'm hardly the first person to criticize the Barbie phenomenon, a uniquely American craze that's been in existence for 50 years.  Ever since high school and a disturbing but spot-on poem entitled "Barbie Doll" by Marge Piercy, I have been aware of the unrealistic and cruel standard that Barbie dolls set for the girls who love them.  That's an issue, and a legitimate one.  I suppose an argument could be made that focusing on what girls can grow to be, through a Barbie fantasy, can be healthy and encouraging despite her cartoonish dimensions and features that almost no girls can hope to "achieve."  Fine.  There is a place for pretty dolls, I guess, and if those dolls are also portrayed as smart, learned professionals, it can be a good thing.  But is it necessary to showcase the "I Can Be" Barbie in clothes that, while sexy and fashionable, are completely inappropriate for the practice of the career being described?  To be fair, there are other Barbie outfits for this and similar professional jobs that are much more appropriate.  So why is this one marketed at all?  Veterinarians don't wear this- they just don't.  If anyone pictures a veterinarian this way, he's probably a basement-dwelling weirdo with deeper issues.So what does Barbie have to do with rape or rape culture?  Rape culture is described more eloquently by others, including my friend and colleague Jaclyn Friedman here.  Basically, it's a societal acceptance and even encouragement of sexualized violence based on norms, attitudes and practices within a culture.  Our culture objectifies women sexually in so many ways it's silly to offer a single example.  That is what it is.  I'm not against sex appeal and I'm not about to categorize women generally as helpless victims, unable to control or use their own sexuality to whatever aims they choose.But in the hands of a child, something especially damaging occurs- something devaluing, objectifying and wrong- when the focus of a grown-up doll (otherwise portrayed as an educated, accomplished professional) remains her sexuality.  When the doll portrayed as the vet, pediatrician, engineer, lawyer, etc, is also shoe-horned into the trappings of rank sexuality, then it's really not the degree she holds or the skills she's developed that count.  It's what she has to offer for the physical gratification of men that counts.  That way, she's more of an object- an object with a degree, maybe, but an object nonetheless.  And objects are there to use, not interact with, negotiate with, get to know and value, the way fellow human beings are.  I use a screwdriver; I don't seek to get to know it and pursue an equitable, give-and-take relationship with it for mutual goals.  Teach me from childhood that a woman is a similar tool and at least I'll regard her as something for my amusement.  At worst I'll regard her as something I can push around and enjoy despite what she wants.  Teach girls, in clear and unsubtle ways, that what really matters (no matter what professional goal they achieve) is how they present in some impractical, fetishized version of the dress of that profession, and at least they'll value themselves less than they should.  At worst, they'll come to expect and accept being pushed around, used, and even raped.I know there are millions of women who played with Barbies as little girls and are healthy, happy adults despite her fictional standards.  That's fine.  But if Mattel is interested in maturing and professionalizing Barbie in certain circumstances, they'd do better to mark a clear line between dress-up Barbie and career Barbie.   The more the lines are blurred, the less the woman matters as a person.  That's rape culture.

The Power of Two

In child abuse prosecution, it is all but axiomatic that a two year-old victim simply cannot describe her victimization to any legally usable degree.  In most cases, toddlers that age can’t relate anything reliably.  Facts that can be gleaned are disjointed, conflated with the product of imagination, or just impossible to follow.  Most prosecutors, even if they’ve raised children themselves, won’t attempt to interview a two year-old.  If the child is three, and fairly precocious, maybe.  Two is just too young.But ADA Danielle Pascale is not most prosecutors.The Bronx District Attorneys Office, where I served for almost two years, is one of the most challenging in the country.  The Bronx, despite its generally dismal image, is an interesting, diverse, and in some areas beautiful place to live and work.  Its food, in neighborhood restaurants and corner delis, is fantastic.  It is framed by magnificent waterways and huge, shaded parks.  Its historical value and educational heritage are unmatched almost anywhere. Some Bronx neighborhoods are charming, tree-lined and friendly.  But grinding poverty and social pathology deeply haunt other areas and still produce crime, while less now than in the hellscape of the 70’s and 80’s, in daunting amounts.Danielle is a product of the Bronx and serves in the Child Abuse and Sex unit where she’s been for nearly nine tough years.  Her compassion for, love of, and raw skill with children are unmatched anywhere in my long experience in child protection.  But sometimes, Danielle surprises even me.A few months before I left the office, a particularly horrific case arose that fell to Danielle.  In a Bronx apartment, a toddler I'll call Jane stumbled out of her mother’s bedroom and into the living area she shared with her three older sisters.  Jane’s lip was split, her hair disheveled, and her face bloody.  Blood was later discovered in her underpants, reflecting a brutal injury to her vagina.  The suspect, Jane’s mother’s boyfriend (I'll call him John), had been in the bedroom alone with the child and walked out a few seconds later.  Jane’s sisters reacted quickly and called the police.  Jane was taken to Jacobi Medical Center, an excellent Bronx hospital where child abuse is often investigated and treated.  She was attended to by physicians and taken into protective custody.  As part of a multi-disciplinary effort in the Bronx to get ADA’s involved early in child abuse cases, Danielle responded to Jacobi after Jane had been treated to see what could be done with the case.When Danielle encountered Jane, she was armed with nothing but the contents of her purse and her cell phone.  She played with the girl for a couple of hours, interacting with her, building rapport, and (in the spirit of the team approach to child abuse) watching her and assessing her ability to describe what had been done to her.  Given Jane’s age, this step is one most prosecutors would have skipped, believing it hopeless.  Patient and tender interaction with an abused and traumatized child is its own absolute good, and the time Danielle spent with Jane wouldn’t have been wasted anyway.  But what emerged from that effort was remarkable.  Danielle was impressed with the cognitive level of development the child was showing, and eventually decided to use the video function on her cell phone to see how Jane would respond to seeing herself recorded.  She loved it, and recited her name, her ABC’s, and eventually her knowledge of basic body parts like her nose, mouth and eyes. Then Danielle put the phone away.  Careful to frame the question fairly and not suggest anything to the child one way or the other as she had been trained, Danielle asked Jane if she knew why she was at the hospital.  Jane nodded.“John hurt my cookie with his hand,” she said.  Danielle asked Jane if she knew where on her body her 'cookie' was.  Jane pointed to her genital area.  And who was John?  Mommy’s boyfriend, Jane knew.New York law allows something called unsworn testimony with children who are too young to be properly sworn as witnesses before tribunals like a Grand Jury or a court of law.  Their testimony can still be considered as long as it is corroborated with other admissible evidence.  Danielle’s first challenge once charges were brought against John would be a presentation to one of the Bronx’s sitting grand jury panels.  She knew that the physician and child abuse specialist on her team could testify compellingly to the injuries to Jane’s vagina and face.  There was no question that she had been hideously attacked; the only question was who did it.  The circumstantial evidence was very good to begin with- the suspect had been alone in the room with the child and had walked out almost immediately after her in view of Jane’s sisters.But Danielle got far more than that.  A child less than three years of age, whom she had known for less than an afternoon, told her in no uncertain terms who had harmed her and how.   Danielle would now make sure Jane told the grand jurors who would hear the case against her abuser.  The testimony would be unsworn, but with the other evidence it could be considered if it could be elicited.  Seeing how well Jane had reacted to being video recorded, she arranged for a camera crew the next day to come to Jacobi, and before the camera asked Jane the same simple questions.  The jurors saw this evidence in context with the rest and passed the case on to the next level of prosecution, where it remains pending.My friend accomplished the nearly impossible through patience, deftness, compassion, and an almost ethereal ability to reach and draw from a child far too young to speak on her own.  In so doing, she gave Jane something the child had likely never experienced and probably won’t again for some time to come: Power. Her power to express herself yielded a simple and profound truth that, communicated to players in a system of justice, went far to seal a criminal case against the man who brutalized her.  A two year-old shouldn’t need that kind of power, but in her case it was utterly crucial to ensure justice and protect herself, her family and other potential victims like her.  This empowerment was certainly lost on Jane in the moment.  But God willing, echoes of it will cascade throughout her life and shape the woman she’ll become.   For Danielle, it was all in a day’s work.

Vertigo

“I’m at a place called vertigo.  It’s everything I wish I didn’t know.” –U2It happens when we’ve drunk too much; in this culture we call it bed-spins.  We plant a foot on the floor and sometimes it subsides.  It happens on boats; we call it seasickness and we concentrate on the horizon, a fixed point that anchors us. It happens to pilots and it kills them; my childhood friend Pete flies jets for a living and explains in chilling detail how, in his world, it is a deadly perversion of the normally reliable signals our body’s navigation system sends to our brain.  So we believe we’re flying on a level course when in reality we are aimed at the ground like a bullet.  It is our senses, confused.  Lying.It’s vertigo. When it hits us, for whatever reason, we grab for something that is, or promises to be, steady, solid and unmoving.  Stability is the thing that delivers us from vertigo.  When the sensation is physical, we can sometimes exercise it or keep it at bay.But vertigo is more than physical.  In a broad sense it can be emotional, and it is one of the many demonic gifts that child sex victims receive as they attempt to navigate a world in which everything their natural development taught them to rely on is suddenly a lie.  A signal telling them that up is down.  That danger is comfort.  That anger is insight. That sadness, abuse and loneliness are what they deserve.  And so they grab for things that promise stability.  But in the dark ether of a damaged soul the columns and posts that present themselves are sometimes false and wavering.  Intoxicants, anger, isolation and self-blame are sweetly tempting as solid, steadying things.  But they are poison.So vertigo is masked, but not eliminated.  The course continues to veer with no warning as to what lies ahead. The key to stopping it for real is to find the true horizon to fix upon, a solid floor to stand on so that reality can be reckoned, ghosts banished and the lying whispers silenced.  It is a journey sometimes of years, and it requires insight, grueling work, and unparalleled courage.That courage is at the solid center of an hour-long documentary produced by Kathy Barbini and Simon Weinberg of Big Voice Pictures.  The film is called Boys and Men Healing, and it is a rare and nakedly honest view of the journey three men in particular have taken to address the horrors visited upon them by older offending males. Female child sex abuse, just as damaging and even more common, has been widely studied, resulting in needed insights.  Male child sex abuse, however, remains more shrouded in secrecy as boys tend to under-report more than girls.  Estimates of the prevalence of male child sexual abuse hover conservatively at about 1 in 6 boys, but even that is probably very conservative.  For this reason in particular, Boys and Men Healing is deeply valuable and eagerly welcomed.I spoke with Simon about the video and was struck instantly by his warmth and kindness (he exudes these like a balm even by phone), but also the fierce passion he shares with his wife and partner, Kathy, on this issue.  The three male survivors the documentary focuses on are diverse in their backgrounds but strikingly common in their struggles and their eventual triumph over the abuse they endured.  One of them, David Lisak, is among the foremost and prolific researchers in my business, a man I greatly admire personally and professionally.  To see him sharing his own story of struggle and recovery was profoundly touching.It’s everything I wish I didn’t know.  But I do understand the stability these decent and extraordinary men have searched for over the long years.  They have now, in some measure at least, achieved freedom from the dizzying fog of vertigo.  They have fought with the hearts of lions for the simple relief of being grounded.  They've striven heroically for something most of us happily take for granted- a sweet, unaltered sense of up and down, right and wrong, dark and light.  It shouldn’t be that difficult.  But it is.Given the numbers as they are, it is likely that within minutes of me posting this, another boy will be introduced to sexual exploitation at the hands of, most likely, a trusted older male.  At some point, maybe as the reality of what is happening sets in, or maybe months or years after, he’ll know the imbalance, the instability, the dark, deep wrongness of something spinning within him.  He’ll have 1000 different names for what it is he’s feeling; perhaps as specific as a fear of intimacy, perhaps as broad as quiet hopelessness or itching rage.  Those around him may simply shake their heads and call him a disappointment, a problem, a failure.  If it succeeds in killing him, it won’t be listed on any death certificate, although it will surely underlie the stated cause, be it suicide, alcoholic hepatitis, drug overdose, etc.Or, with mercy, he’ll come to know it for what it is, and then be able to expiate it through grace, effort and perhaps the angelic support of loved ones.For now, it’s vertigo.  Hold on.

Tough Job, Tougher Women

Sue Rotolo’s eyes are the first thing you’ll notice about her; they are almost impossibly blue, and glow lightly beneath red hair.  Her smile is easy and warm, and she has an enviable air of serenity, whether in the presence of an eight year-old rape victim about to be forensically examined or an aggressive attorney attempting to lock her down on cross examination.It’s a good thing.  That Zen-like calmness serves her well.  In the clinic, her job as a Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (with the odd acronym SANE) is to treat patients who are victims of sexual violence.  In the courtroom, she testifies as an expert to what she observed and what it might mean legally.  Ask her which job is more difficult and she’ll likely tell you the courtroom; it’s less predictable and more brutal.  It’s at times a tongue in cheek response, but it’s no less true even if a little bit funny.Rape, after all, doesn’t usually happen between 9 and 5 weekdays.  SANEs are torn from their beds, their loved ones and their lives to provide hands-on care to people suffering some of the worst trauma imaginable.  It happens in every combination of off hours, holidays, weather and traffic.  In the crush and tangle of Northern Virginia where I learned from Sue the business of forensic nursing, a trip to Inova Fairfax Hospital can take hours from two towns over in the wrong circumstances.  The patients are at times tragically young or old (Sue’s youngest was about three months). Some are combative, some intoxicated.  Some giggle.  Some beg for relief from any number of things that haunt them, real and imagined.  Sue, and the nurses who work for her, see them all.And nevertheless, it’s us, the lawyers, who create the ultimate crucible for a woman in Sue’s crew who wants to be a SANE.  It’s the contact sport of criminal litigation- often at its most bitter and belligerent in cases of sexual assault- that drives many hopeful forensic nurses out of the business.  Attorneys often treat them, because they’re “just nurses,” with far less than the respect they merit (most doctors, unless they specialize in forensics, are much less valuable on the stand in a rape case than an experienced SANE).  They’re attacked mercilessly for being everything from sorority-like “little sisters” of the police and prosecution to man-hating zealots or glorified candy-stripers.  Every cruel and gender-based stereotype that can be slung at them from the male dominated world of trial law is done so.  The successful ones realize early on that testifying is yet another skill- completely discrete from anything else one does as a nurse- that must be mastered in order to survive.  Sue has one iron rule- no crying on the witness stand.  I worked directly with her nurses for years and never saw it broken, even when I knew I’d have been reduced to sobs had I been where they were.The ones who do survive the process make healing differences in the lives of their patients few will ever match.  Rape has always been difficult to report, but prior to SANE programs (an adjunct of the woman's and victims movements of a generation ago) it was at times tantamount to a re-victimization.  Victims waited for hours, triaged behind whatever nightmares took precedence in the ER they found their way to.  Many physicians were unable or barely willing to conduct the examinations both for treatment and possible evidence collection, and they wanted no part of the legal process. Victims were judged, ignored or even threatened with arrest depending on how they presented.  It was more than wrong, more than something that worsened experiences and deepened the pain. It also killed cases and drove victims underground.  That allowed attackers to escape justice and rape again; most rapists don’t stop at one.The idea of SANE programs is to specially train nurses to treat and examine patients whose chief complaint is sexual assault, and to evaluate the body as a crime scene, collecting potential evidence for investigation and trial.  As an invaluable plus, the exams are conducted in a safe, private and dignified setting where the person at the center of the case can begin to heal, and regroup.  With the help of victim advocates who provide the emotional support and ties to other services they need, the process, when it’s done right, produces a better, stronger witness for us and a sex assault survivor with a fighting chance at looking at life at least similarly to how she did before.It’s still an evolving process, and I’ve been blessed to work with some of the finest women I’ve ever known in the building and sustaining of the programs and their interaction with the legal system.  From Jen Markowitz in Ohio, Eileen Allen in New Jersey, Tara Henry in Alaska, Pat Speck in Tennessee, Jen Pierce-Weeks in New Hampshire, Jacqui Calliari in Wisconsin, Diana Faugno in California, Elise Turner in Mississippi, Linda Ledray in Minnesota, Karen Carroll in New York and dozens of others, I’ve learned more about the relevant anatomy and reproductive health then I ever thought possible, and we’ve broken bread and self-medicated together in more places than I can remember.But it was Sue, with her bright eyes, warm smile and unflappable mien who taught me with plain speech how to drop my blushes, learn the anatomy, pronounce the terms, protect the truth through her testimony, and do my job.What Sue has done literally thousands of times is probably best exemplified by a story she sometimes relates in training regarding an eight year-old girl who had been sexually abused by a family member.  After being examined by Sue in an invasive but tender and careful manner, the child asked her how bad she looked inside now that she had been made bad by what had happened to her.“Honey,” Sue said, “you are perfect inside.  And you’re perfect outside.”That child may forget the lawyers, the judges, the police officers and the numbing, contentious process that played out above her.  She will never forget the abuse.  But God willing, she also won’t forget the blue-eyed lady with the stethoscope; the one who reminded her of the most important thing of all.

Prisoner Sex Abuse: Still Common, Still Wrong

“I said there is no justice as they led me out the door.  He said this isn’t a court of justice, son.  This is a court of law.”  -Billy Bragg, “Rotting on Remand”Alexandria, Virginia.  1998.  He was a pizza delivery guy, maybe 20 but built emotionally and physically like 16.  His victim was a six year-old Spanish girl who was excited about her pizza, and walked out of her apartment and into the building’s lobby to await it.  When he saw her, barefoot in a light cotton print dress, something disordered and dark in him stirred.  She asked if the pizza was for her family.  He nodded and smiled.  But then he set it down, took her by the hand, and led her down a short set of stairs to the laundry room.  There, against a washing machine, he penetrated her vagina with a finger until she screamed.  He let her go and fled.APD caught him very quickly.  A hulking, athletic, but kind-faced, easy-going sex crimes detective named Mark Purcell questioned him, and obtained a fair confession.  Mark used no unfair or bullying tactics- the suspect was sick and sad, and confessed without much prodding that he had stuck his finger in the little girl.  He just couldn’t help it.  Mark didn’t ask him why.  He had been around enough to know the answer wasn’t usually satisfying anyway.The case fell to me and he pleaded guilty.  His family, religiously Muslim and from overseas, was mortified at his behavior and terrified for his future.  Virginia employs sentencing guidelines, and when penetration occurs (as opposed to ‘just’ fondling or touching), they go up from months to years.  He had no criminal record, but his guidelines came out to around nine years.  Nine years in a correctional system that has attracted the attention of human rights groups over the years is no joke, and sex offenders go in at a high level of security.  That means they become part of a population of extremely violent and hardened people.  And then it’s prey or become prey.  In his case the outcome was obvious.I argued for what the guidelines called for; that was my job.  His attorney argued for less and got less, to the tune of about three years.  The defendant and his family were as quiet as stones as he was led through the rear door of the courtroom and off to a fate that neither me, the judge, nor even his own attorney really knew.  The sentence was lousy by prosecution standards.  Even for a first time offender (as far as we knew), a digital penetration offense against a helpless child barely six years-old was a heinous crime.  I closed my file and left the courtroom.  Another attorney I knew pulled me aside.“Don’t worry, Rog.  He’ll get his downstate.  Believe me, I’ve seen it.  That guy’ll be worth a pack of smokes before the month is out. I wouldn’t wanna be him.  And he deserves it.”I shrugged. I didn’t want to be rude.  The attorney was a decent guy who had young kids of his own.  Most people are a lot less charitable than he was to the fate of sex offenders in prison.But Billy Bragg's judge was right.For those who don’t know, Bragg is a British musician with a leftist bent who wasn’t singing about the fate of sex offenders when he wrote that song in the mid 80’s. But the sentiment is valid, even when twisted to my point.  We don’t practice in courts of justice.  We practice in courts of law.  The law is what separates us from the state of nature we’ve fought so hard to rise above as human beings.  The law isn’t God by a long shot, but it’s a gift He gave to a flawed, passionate, vengeful creation- man- whom He knew would need it in its noble blindness and gloriously bland and balanced predictability. The law is a temple to our better nature and a shelter from our coarser side.  It’s an ideal we’ll never reach, but to abrogate it for the sake of what some deem “poetic justice” is simply immoral, not to mention stupendously shortsighted.  Poetic justice is fine- oddly satisfying, actually- when it’s meted out by the weight of circumstances.  But legal justice is that itching sense of vengeance- not always a bad thing- tempered by due process and a set of rules all must obey, despite grief, despite rage, despite righteous indignation.I’ve surprised many with the stance I’ve taken on this issue over the years, particularly with the brutality I’ve seen defendants dish out to the very least culpable and most defenseless victims imaginable.  But I’ve fought tooth and nail for relatively helpless victims my entire professional life and I’ll do it until I keel over.  I also have no issue with relatively monastic conditions in corrections; I won’t be found fighting for cable and video game consoles for the convicted.  Get them up, get them working, get them wanting very much not to return.  But a clean, safe environment is what we owe those among us we have the audacity to cage after due process- probably the most profound thing we do as a society other than executing capital murderers.  I’ve served efforts under PREA (Prison Rape Elimination Act) for exactly this reason.  But despite the efforts of PREA since its passage in 2003, the stats regarding sexual abuse in custody, as noted in a new report released late last month, are still harrowing.A society can be judged in large part by how it treats its most despised and menacing members.  That’s what the law is for- to protect us all, not just the favored or the powerful.  It’s time we followed it beyond the courtroom and through the doors that slam locked behind those of us who violate it, but are no more subject to it than we who hold the keys.

Irreplaceable

I’ll call her Lucinda.  She was 13, a little undersized for her age, and pretty with small, neat features and olive skin.  Her English, like her Spanish, was flawless; she had grown up speaking both every day of her life.  She was from a part of the South Bronx I knew only by precinct.  I had been through her neighborhood, but generally at high speed and in a police car.  She wore jeans that she’d marked up with a ballpoint pen, “Spanglish” messages to and from friends that defined her life and announced the things she held dear and cared about.  They were things that I was a lifetime and more from understanding.Lucinda’s uncle had been molesting her for about three years.  She had vomited this simple, awful fact to her mother one night when the thought of spending hours alone with him loomed close and her ability to mask the panic at the thought of it faltered.  Thankfully, her mother had done the right thing.  She had called their precinct.  A thorough SVU detective had taken a report, and she had sworn out a complaint.  Through the labyrinth of Bronx due process the complaint had traveled, eventually landing on my desk.It was in this way that Lucinda and I were brought together.  I greeted her mother, a small, tough but kind looking woman, in Spanish as we stood in the waiting area of the Child Abuse and Sex Unit.  She was gracious despite my accent and occasional grammatical errors.  Then I led Lucinda alone back to my office. Her eyes were black, and moved restlessly around the room as I asked her to sit down.  When they met mine, they were oddly blank.   I was used to that.  I maintained eye contact with her, striking a careful balance I had struggled to achieve over the years.  You don’t want to bore with your eyes, especially when you’re my size.  On the other hand, you don’t want to seem unfocused or uncaring.“Lucinda,” I said.  “Thanks for being here.”  The blank eyes shifted to something more inquisitive.  It had never occurred to her that she had any choice in the matter.  They settled back to blank, and she shrugged.  She looked at the floor.  I waited a few seconds.  Sometimes they just start talking.  But Lucinda didn’t.  I thought for a long moment and fished out a line I’d used many times before.“Do you know why you’re here?”The change was instantaneous.  The look in her eyes melted- I know of no other way to describe it- from blank to two holes of pain her face.  It was more than the eyes, actually.  Her entire face seemed to shift and contort.  She was being crushed by fear, guilt, revulsion and pain.  She nodded.“Okay,” I said carefully, and at low volume.  I considered myself as I always do in professional situations with most women and children.  I am tall, white, and heavy.  My voice resonates naturally like a bass drum, a blessing in some courtrooms but a curse in other venues.  Why someone like Lucinda would give me the benefit of any doubt is beyond me, but sometimes childhood is the prosecutor’s best weapon in child abuse cases.  Sometimes they give us the testimony we ask for because they don’t yet have the wherewithal to refuse us.  Sometimes they’re just willing to take leaps with us because (thank God) they haven’t yet been taught by experience not to dare.“Do you think you can tell me about what’s been going on with your uncle?” I asked softly.  She shrugged, and seemed to cave in further.  It was as if I was asking if she’d consider slamming her hand in a car door for my amusement.  “Just wait a few minutes,” I said.  “It’s okay.  I’m going to look at the file. You can look at it too, if you want later.”There was a small, cheap radio on my desk, playing at low volume.  On that day in early 2007, it was playing “Irreplaceable” by Beyonce.  As I fell silent the music floated over between us.  Lucinda glanced at the radio.  Her head bobbed slowly as she recognized the song- the tune is catchy as hell.  In a few seconds, she began to mouth the words.  I let a minute or so pass.“You know when this comes on in the clubs,” I said, again at low volume, “the girls all go like this.”  I lifted my white-shirt covered arm over my head and pointed awkwardly to the left.  She looked at me quizzically for a long moment.  Then she smiled.  And then, later, she told me.

Accuser: Simply The Wrong Word

When the story of former NFL star Lawrence Taylor broke a couple of months ago, I was angry but not surprised to find the victim in the case- a child used in prostitution by a Bronx pimp- referred to as “Taylor’s Accuser.”  Really?  Even when we’re talking about a child, beaten into submission and presented to a huge, rich, middle-aged man like a snack from a serving tray, we’re going to insist that she be labeled an “accuser?”It’s become an endemic part of the sleepless news cycle.  “Accuser” is how the media now commonly refers to the person who has made a complaint of sexual assault, regardless of the circumstances.  It’s replaced the antiquated legal term “prosecutrix,” the feminine term that was used in criminal justice particularly in the realm of rape.  On its face, it’s hard to argue with the designation of “accuser.”  Unlike prosecutrix, it is sex neutral and seems less paternalistic.  And it’s technically correct.  The person who makes a complaint of sexual assault against another is, by definition, accusing that person.  So what’s wrong with it?The issue is the weight, and connotations, of “accuser.”  The word has a storied history in our culture, and it’s not pretty.  Puritanical, early America was stained by episodes of religious hysteria, exacerbated by superstition and fueled by the misery and uncertainty of 17^th century colonial life.  Witch trials predated the Puritans by centuries in Europe, but the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts bored their way deep into the American psyche.  The story, of course, involved accusations of witchcraft on the part of village women, many of whom began to accuse each other in order to divert the suspicion that had been cast onto them, or to gain some other advantage as the hysteria continued.  The motives of the accusing women varied, but all had one thing in common:  Their accusations were largely or completely false.  Made famous first by author Nathaniel Hawthorne (Hawthorne was a descendant of witch trial Judge Hathorne and so ashamed that he added a letter to his last name), the story was picked up in the 1950’s by the playwright Arthur Miller in “The Crucible.”  Miller’s adaptation of the story was driven by the hysteria of the McCarthy era in which accusations of Communism, also usually false, were dispensed recklessly, destroying careers and lives.The accusing women of Salem weren’t just incorrect, either.  According to lore at least, by and large their finger-pointing, high-pitched accusations were fanciful, destructive and cruel.  They tormented the innocent and shamed themselves, playing on the fears of a hapless and vulnerable community.  They were accusers; they were not victims, certainly not in the way they claimed.  It is this legacy that lingers when the word “accuser” is used in the context of a sexual violence case.  At very least, labeling someone an “accuser” conjures doubt in the accusation.  At worst, it subtly but clearly connotes ulterior motives, mental illness, or evil intent.Supporters of the designation claim that using the term “victim” for a person who has made a report of sexual violence is presumptuous and possibly unfair in the case of a mistaken or false accusation.  American criminal justice is based on a presumption of innocence, after all.   Defense attorneys around the country have been successful in recent years in preventing DA’s and witnesses from using the term “victim” in court to describe the prosecution’s main witness prior to a conviction of the defendant.Part of what drives these arguments is the fact that most sex cases (either adult or child) are not “whodunnit” cases.  The question usually isn’t who committed the act; the great majority of the time the perpetrator is known to the victim.  The question is whether the act was committed at all, or if the “accuser” is wrong, malevolent, mentally ill, under pressure to lie, or some combination of all of these.  The problem with this analysis, though, is that it assumes some sort of roughly equal balance between “real” cases and false reports.  False accusations do occur, but the idea that most or even many charges of sexual violence are false is grossly misleading.  Thorough and methodological research puts the rate of false reports for sexual assault no higher than that of other crimes at the highest.  Nevertheless, when it comes to accusations of sexual violence, ancient myths suggest that rape allegations need to be looked at with a more suspect eye than other cases.  This is despite the fact that other crimes, like car theft or insurance fraud, offer much greater incentives to falsely report and are probably reported that way at higher rates.My suggestion for a compromise is the word “complainant.”  It’s a little legalistic, but easily understood and technically every bit as correct as “accuser.”  But without the punishing baggage of history and myth.  Unfortunately, too many of the purveyors of the term “accuser” employ it for exactly that reason.  So-called “Men’s Rights” groups, “false rape” websites and other like-minded sources want there to be a veneer of doubt over the idea that women, children and some men are sexually abused and assaulted in rates that are frankly alarming.  As for the media, I sense the term has gained traction at least in part because it suggests the kind of knockdown, high-stakes dispute that sells papers.  The idea of an “accuser” evokes courtroom theater, pointed fingers, surprise twists and hidden agendas.This is as tragic as it is unfair; the very act of standing up for oneself as a survivor of sexual violence and starting the terribly slow and uncertain wheels of justice is by itself a cathartic and deeply impressive profile in courage.  Those who perpetrate the myths fear this, and so prefer to cast “accusers” as hysterical or worse.  The media seems unimpressed with the sometimes desperate and always difficult act of coming forward, apparently seeing it as too mundane with out some provocative term to hang on the survivor.  They’re wrong.  The evil that underlies the acts is mundane; all evil is at bottom.  But the journey toward survival and the quest for justice is anything but.  It’s sad that it’s still not enough.

Failed Adoptive Parent: Watch Your Language

The invective that’s being hurled at Torry Hansen for returning her adopted son to Russia is sad, but mostly richly deserved.  Cooler heads and kinder people than I am will reasonably resist a rush to judgment, of course.  Caring for a child who has been raised in an institution, in a remarkably different culture, can’t be easy for anyone.  And it could be that the boy, obviously through no fault of his own, has serious behavioral issues that simply overwhelmed this family, particularly the hapless Torry who apparently believes that “disannulled” is a word.  (And yes, I understand that I’m a lawyer and perhaps shouldn’t pick on people who aren’t when it comes to quasi-legal writing.  Regardless, she has an R.N. and access to a dictionary.  If she’s going to officially abandon a child to a bureaucratic office 6000 miles away with a letter, she should at least have someone proofread the damn thing.)Assuming the Hansen’s are being completely truthful (which the Russian government disputes) and the boy was exhibiting homicidal ideation and fire starting, the fact remains that he’s seven.  Without resorting to abusive practices, he’s relatively easy to control physically, and he needs to be monitored- pretty much constantly- anyway.  If the family was that exhausted by him, they had better have sought out every possible means of assistance before returning him like a pet who ended up damaging the carpet and exasperating the owners.Regardless, there is no excuse- none- for putting a child on a 10-hour transatlantic flight and having him scooped up by some guy on the other side, paid $200 to drop him off at a ministry headquarters. I could care less how many “safety references” the Hansen’s claimed they gathered with regard to this courier.  Canadian Press reports that he dropped the child off with his bags and the letter and promptly left.  Everyone involved, most certainly this child, is lucky he didn’t disappear outside of the airport like smoke.  Since a lawyer has now muzzled the family, we probably won’t know until an official inquest why Torry didn’t accompany the child back to Russia upon rejecting him.  My guess is her reasons will involve all sorts of feelings of helplessness and failure that mask the fact that she really just didn’t want to go.  Cost, and the uncertainty of how, exactly, the Russian government might react to her walking away from him surely gave her pause.  Especially cost.  So instead Nancy, the grandmother, accompanied him as far as Dulles.  United Airlines and the hired stranger in one of the developed world’s more dangerous cities had to suffice from there.What prompted me to write, though was less Torry Hansen’s grim and nihilistic response to this boy’s purported difficulties, and more her description of them.  In the letter she wrote to explain her abandonment, she stated that he is “violent and has severe psychopathic issues/behaviors.”  I don’t expect much from this person in terms of competent description anyway, but she is far, far out of bounds in using the term “psychopathic” in any context.  From my work in New York State with civil management/commitment proceedings, I have a fair amount of lay experience with psychopathy.  I have encountered, spoken with, and cross-examined psychopaths.  The diagnostic term describes a terrifying and still only partially understood condition afflicting career criminals, serial killers, and the most repugnant and dangerous people, criminal or not, among us. At this point anyway, it is reserved almost exclusively for adults, with expanding research suggesting that it can be applied to adolescents.  I’ve yet to see it applied to children as young as seven.  I understand she’s attempting to describe behaviors in the letter, but the word “issues” is broader than “behaviors.”  Certainly she’s at least suggesting the child is, in her mind at least, some sort of “budding psychopath,” another term that is tossed about far too much to describe troubled children.   It's obvious she used the word for shock value in an effort to underscore her faultlessness in abandoning him.  The media is pushing these same unfair buttons also, with shocking headlines that focus on the boy's "terrorizing" behavior, as noted in an excellent blog post by Martha Nichols.The Hansen family’s response to this child’s troubles, whatever they truly are, has been destructive, selfish and cruel.  It has further stoked existing tension between the two countries and threatened the entire process that has placed thousands of the over 700,000 children in Russia who are growing up without parents.  Adoption of Russian children by Americans has resulted in some well-publicized horrific failures, but most, according the National Council for Adoption, are  successful.  But this family’s abandonment of one of them confirms the suspicions of many Russians that Americans view adoption from their country with a mentality best described as something between boutique shopping and the fate of an empty coffee cup.

Holy Week and the Nonsense Continues

It continues from the Church and its defenders, desperately trying to alienate further multitudes.  And it continues from anti-Catholics and the anti-religious who want the institution brought to its knees, some justified because of personal betrayal but many out of sheer, gleeful contempt.Ross Douthat, a conservative columnist for the New York Times, blames the crisis, in part, on the sexual revolution of the 60’s and 70’s.  The insinuation is that some of the abuse, particularly long term abuse against post-pubescent boys by priests, is explainable by the (literally) “revolutionary” effects of that era.  Douthat, in a blog post, attempts to shore up his argument by citing the formidable John Jay study that I’ve referred to here previously.  Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, makes the oft-heard but no less despicable argument that homosexuality is to blame, since most of the boys abused were post-pubescent.  Donohue doesn’t even attempt to cite the John Jay study (which belies his central claim) or anything else.  He’s got his scapegoat and an army of the uninformed applauding his analysis.  Finally, many liberal Catholics and anti-Catholics continue to see the roots of the crisis in priestly celibacy, which has clearly “warped” so many of these priests and turned them, through repression and obsession with the forbidden, into predators.Nonsense, all of it.The Church has a problem with predators because predators have found in it a haven, period.  Whether these predators prefer boys or girls, pre-pubescent or adolescent, has nothing to do with society’s temperature on sexual expression or the sexual preference of the predators.  They prey where they can, like any hunter does.  Non sex-offender priests with homosexual urges, throughout the ages, have taken adult lovers within the priesthood or without.  Were they emboldened to do so more during the post Vatican II sexual revolution?  Probably.  Nevertheless, they did not and have not feasted on the emerging, volatile sexuality of adolescents by betraying their trust, destroying their faith, and using as a weapon the very thing the child was brought up to turn to in times of crisis and discomfort.  That’s what a predator does.  And what they have done over the centuries, let alone in the decade and a half of the sexual revolution, should never be dismissed or excused as free-love experimentation between otherwise “well meaning” or “normal” priests and minor children.  Well meaning priests, gay or straight, who struggle and fail with celibacy turn to adult lovers, period.  Priests who manipulate, con, groom and then molest even older adolescents are sex offenders, period.  The Church has more than its fair share not because she is manufacturing them but because she has proven to be the best and largest hunting ground of perhaps any institution known to man.If the current Pope or anyone else involved in the shame and tragedy of this cover-up can be forgiven at all, it’s perhaps because of three things:  The fear and distrust of outside, civil authority because of past persecution, an over-reliance on the power of psychotherapy and treatment to “cure” the problem, and the doctrine of reconciliation through confession that the Church values so highly.Let’s be clear:  None of these things excuses the ocean of evil and resultant misery.  Even the lofty and still appealing idea that a person can enter a confessional and come out clean and ready to do better does not excuse the reckless judgment calls the Church hierarchy made over the years, at the expense of her most vulnerable followers.  But these points, when fairly considered, provide a slightly less cynical view than that peddled by anti-religion enthusiasts like Christopher Hitchens (although he does make some fair points in a recent Slate article).  Still, the Pope is not, as Hitchens claims, a “mediocre Bavarian bureaucrat.”  He is in fact a remarkably intellectually disciplined and erudite man as was his predecessor.  But this makes his missteps and continued ignorance on this subject harder to accept, not easier.  I don’t fault the Church for not understanding sexual predators earlier.  Our understanding of them now is still emerging, and good research is only decades old, if that.   The Church has been victimized by predators also.  But now she is gambling with her future by looking for a scapegoat in homosexuality and refusing to come to terms with the countless victims whose lives these infiltrators have stained forever.This crisis has been the spiritual heartbreak of my lifetime.  Armed with the professional knowledge I’ve been blessed with from working with the finest minds in the business, and being utterly powerless to affect any change from the pew I kneel in, makes it that much worse.  And the nonsense continues.

Let The Little Children Come To Me

"Jesus said, 'Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.'"  Matthew 19:14 (NIV).This lovely, simple sentiment is relevant to me again, after receiving it like a gift from my mother decades ago, because of the actions of my Church yet again.  The archdiocese of Denver is refusing to re-enroll two children in a Catholic elementary school in Boulder because their parents are lesbians.  The official position of the archdiocese is that, while God loves homosexuals and their children as much as He does anyone, the Church apparently cannot allow the children (!) of such persons to receive a Catholic education because marriage can only occur between a man and a woman.  People with a different understanding of marriage and family life, says the archbishop, "have other, excellent options for education and should see in them the better course for their children."  Indeed.  The kids are five and six.I’m not disrespectful of many of the rules and restrictions put in place by the Church as a part of Catholic life.  I understand the importance of the sacraments to the core of the faith, and I don’t fault the Church for guarding them.  But what sacrament is being challenged here?  What bedrock principle is being torn asunder by these little ones who want to go to school?   I wouldn’t ask the school to teach these kids differently.  Apparently their parents are, for now at least, comfortable with Catholic teaching.  The parents must deal with what the school may teach versus what their children will experience at home.  So be it.  I wouldn’t ask the Church to bend her view on marriage and family life to accommodate this family.What I could ask, as others appropriately have, is whether the archbishop has made all the parents at this school reveal their sexual habits to test them against Catholic doctrine.  But I don’t have to go there.  And incidentally, neither will they, because they'd end up with a terrifically small school population if they did ask and then treated the honest responders the same way they've treated this couple and their kids. Honestly- are we to believe that Jesus, for Whose Sacred Heart this school is named, would bar these two from attendance?I’m not a big fan of the popular and usually abbreviated “What Would Jesus Do?”  It’s not that I don’t think WWJD is a nice sentiment.  I just find the expression far too ambitious and outside the realm of understanding to just about any who would ponder it.  Even with the best intentions, I think most people who ask WWJD are really asking for some earthly doctrinal, pastoral, or pop-culture guidance rather than Jesus’ own.  I’m familiar with and respectful of the evangelical view that Jesus’ teachings, intentions, etc, are right there in the printed word.  God help me, but that’s not my view.  I personally believe that Jesus is divine; that’s where my lot is thrown as a Catholic.  But for the time He was flesh and walked among us, I also think He was a remarkably complex and sometimes difficult guy.  He did things that didn’t make sense to His disciples.  He was playing on such a higher level that, as far as I can tell, He had to be the Son of God just to put up with the weaknesses and fallibility of the group of working guys He chose to tour with- not to mention the lot of us who have followed those original 12 over the centuries.  So WWJD, while a much better sentiment than many that could replace it, is not one I find a lot of comfort in.Sometimes, though, it seems pretty clear.“Let the little children come to me.”  So said the Man, on the Judean coast tending to a large crowd, when his well-meaning but befuddled disciples rebuked the kids who rushed to him.  Jesus would have none of it.  In my mind, He opened his arms, laughed kindly, and let himself get overrun like he was walking in the door after a long day to His own kids and an over-excited Yellow Lab.  If I’m right, He let the unimaginable power He possessed flow gently to them in protection and healing.If I’m wrong, He was an incorrectly messianic, but otherwise compelling philosopher and moralist who drew crowds and comforted them, sometimes by embracing their children.  Either way, He didn’t ask about the sexual habits, or anything else, of their parents when He did so.  My guess?  He had bigger things to think about.

Equal Opportunity in Adoption: Necessary, Proper and Desperately Needed

“No person eligible to adopt under this statute may adopt if that person is homosexual.”So states, in oddly plain and blunt legislative language, the law of the State of Florida.   Last month, a Miami-Dade judge declared the law “unconstitutional on its face” and unrelated to the best interests of the child.  She appointed custody of an infant (removed from home almost immediately) to a family member who is a lesbian in a committed relationship.  Florida’s Department of Child and Family Services filed its appeal last week.  The state’s argument and the spirit of the 1977 law boil down to the idea that adoptive parenting by homosexuals is so obviously harmful to children that prohibiting it is “rationally related” to a legitimate state aim.  The idea is that heterosexuals are, by definition, better parents.  This claim, wherever it asserts itself, is more than baseless and bigoted toward homosexuals.  It is tragically shortsighted and remarkably cruel to the roughly 100,000 American children (about 7% of them in Florida) waiting to be adopted out of the foster care system.Several gay friends of mine refer to straight people as “breeders.”  And indeed, breed we do.  Heterosexuals, generally by definition, produce millions of children each year.  And a disturbing percentage of us rip our own children apart like dogs with a chew toy.  In two very different cities where I served as an ADA, I encountered fathers who sexually abused their children over years, beginning before the children were in first grade.  I saw mothers who literally starved their children to death, or pimped them out for drugs, rent or just extra cash.  I saw toddlers pressed against heating grates by one or both parents as if in a waffle iron.  I saw fathers who shook infants to blindness and epilepsy, their ribs snapping like dry twigs in the process.  In one particularly brutal shaken baby case I prosecuted in the Bronx in 2006, the mother sided with the offending father (a drug dealer) and refused to cooperate with me even while her son languished in a NICU on the edge of death.  The people who did these things came from a broad diversity of racial, ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds and circumstances.  In fact, there were only two things common to every one of the most brutal physical and sexual abuse cases I worked on:1.  The children involved, if they survived, needed new homes and new parents.2.  The biological parents, whether perpetrators or accomplices, were all heterosexual.I’m not claiming that homosexual parents, adoptive or biological, can’t or don’t abuse their children.  I’m just saying I’ve never seen it.  Not in nearly 15 years.  The point is not that homosexuals are perfect.  The point is that they’re human, and when they are successful, compassionate, loving and stable adults who want to improve the life of a child without a home, they should be considered as adoptive parents.Opponents of homosexual adoption often try to point to non-religious, “objective factors” to support their arguments.  They never get far.  No reputable scientific evidence supports a single claim that homosexual parents will be less successful or even that they will somehow foster a homosexual lifestyle on the part of their children.  One of the last legislative pushes to prove that homosexuals are naturally disordered and dangerous as parents came from a particularly despicable Virginia legislator in 2004 (to my eternal shame, he represented my hometown of Sterling Park for seven years). The bill he finally got passed in the House of Delegates would have required social workers to investigate whether perspective adoptive parents were homosexual.  The rationale, that homosexuality was related to increased levels of child molestation among other things, was based largely on junk science spewed by a single discredited and religiously biased sociologist.  The bill, and the sociologist, were eventually routed in the Virginia senate, thanks in good measure to courageous Republicans who called this effort out for the rank bigotry that it was.Although Biblical views of homosexuality (and similar non-Judeo-Christian religious tenets) are the primary force behind laws like Florida’s and efforts like Virginia’s, I won’t engage in a wholesale bashing of these religious views.  There’s enough of that going on, and bigotry against religious people is as bad as bigotry toward anyone.  To hold strict religious views is a private and sometimes difficult choice, and I know many decent Christians (among other religious) who struggle to reconcile the doctrines of their faith with their common experience as compassionate people.  I draw the line, though, when positions based solely on religious doctrine become law in a pluralistic society.  And I draw it in red when children- discarded, debased or destroyed by the supposedly “sexually healthy” people who created them, are languishing in a far too often chaotic, uncertain and flawed foster care system.

From Jill, With Love

Shame and fear are enemies of truth.  Ignorance of what's evil and what can be done about it, will stop truth in its tracks.  Powerlessness will bury it in a shallow grave.  These feelings are all common to childhood.  Child sex abuse is often- probably most often- birthed in the shadows of ignorance; the innocent and natural ignorance of small children.  And it's trapped in those shadows by fear and shame.  Usually forever.We hear about so little of it.  We- those of us responsible for interrupting it, for protecting its victims, for apprehending its perpetrators, for plying justice from juries- we don't scratch the surface of what's dished out and how often.  Conservative statistics put the numbers at around one in three girls and one in five boys.  And boys under-report.  Offenders, of course, are sublimely clever and ruthless about keeping children quiet.  They convince their victims, by viciously creative means, that the abuse must remain a secret between just them."It's because you're special," he tells her.  "It's because I see you like a grown-up, and you're the only one who really understands me.""It has to stay a secret," he tells him.  "If you tell, your mother will hate you.  She'll hate me.  And the other boys will just call you queer.  And no one will believe you anyway.  Even if they did believe you, they'll just put me in jail and split the whole family up. Do you want that?"Shockingly sad is the fact that most of these things- the warnings given to children as to what will happen if they do come forward, are often valid.  In fact, reporting sexual abuse does sometimes break up families.  It does sometimes cause the victims to be isolated, resented, ridiculed.  It does sometimes land them in foster care.  And so on.But sadder still is the situation where a child could disclose and would be supported and handled appropriately, but doesn't.  Because she's ashamed.  Because she's afraid.  Because the suffering has become a part of her reality.  Because human beings can get used to almost anything.  And so she grows with the abuse in silence until it stops.  Often, she lurches forward into adulthood dealing with these wounds in whatever panoply of ways inference, circumstance and maturity have given her.  Usually she'll do  remarkably well.  But the thing in the attic never goes away.  And her compromised life, fulfilling though it might be, is often less than would it could have been. It is less than she deserves.Unless, of course, the silence becomes deafening, somewhere in adolescence.  And things don't go so well.Giving children the tools to report and end abuse before lasting harm is done, or at least truncating the harm and exposing an offender before he moves on to the next child, is one of our greatest challenges.  Creating an atmosphere of comfort, trust, and understanding is the best thing we can do as parents.  But it's more than just assuring our children- particularly small children- that we will believe them, support them, and help them if they tell us about someone touching them inappropriately.  It's also giving them the words, age-appropriate words, taught with tact, grace and love, so they can tell us when something happens that we need to know about.  A child's instincts about 'bad touches' develop very early, and despite the claims of some groups that children are dangerous story tellers whose claims of sex abuse are almost always coached or simply spun from thin air, their instincts are usually correct.  Very young (3 to 5 year old) children can be susceptible to continued, high pressure tactics and can create events in their minds that didn't actually happen.  But even they usually resist implanted 'memories.'  Most of the time, if a child is feeling that a touch from an adult is wrong, she is correct and she should tell someone.  The question is how.Jill Starishevsky has an answer.  Jill had the office next door to mine on the 5th floor of the Bronx District Attorney's Office when I arrived there in 2005.  She has prosecuted cases in the Child Abuse and Sex Unit for over 10 years.  There isn't much she hasn't seen with regard to the horrors that can be visited on children, but to know Jill is to know a woman who, if the business is getting to her (as it does in one way or another to all of us) you'd never know it.  She has a quick and lovely smile, an infectious laugh and a loving, open-hearted manner with kids and their families that makes her a welcome sight when they become a part of the system.Her book, My Body Belongs to Me is a simple and ingenious guide, written to and for kids, that teaches them how to recognize and own what's not right.  And then how to tell someone who can make a difference.  The book has been out for a while to great success, and it's well deserved.  Jill took what she's learned as a mother and an ADA, and created a tool that be of very good use in stopping something terrible before it flowers into something much worse.  Better still, her book in its rhythmic simplicity and poetic, childlike language, is not the type of tool that can challenged as something that darkens childrens' lives with adult themes, or puts runaway thoughts into their heads.There is no sure fire, fool-proof way to protect your children from child sex abuse.  There are simply too many variables, too many opportunities, too little control.  And frankly the kind of control a parent would need to completely cordon off a child from his or her world would be smothering and counter-productive anyway.  So we watch, and try to see every angle, and we hope.A friend of mine with a beautiful and lively six year-old boy sends him to an exclusive private school in a major city.  She told me about a young man in his 20's who works at the school, although not as a teacher, and informally mentors some of the children, including her son.  Usually the activities with him are supervised, but not always.  She likes him, and she's spoken with him. Face to face.  Looking carefully in his eyes.  She wants to trust her instincts, and her instincts tell her that he's okay.  And she's not the only mother whose kids spend time with him.  They're all on board and really like him.  Plus, there are usually other adults around.  What did I think?I could only shrug.  Chances are, he's harmless.  And probably a genuinely good guy who loves kids and will enrich their lives a little bit.  But if he is s predator, and a good one, no one-on-one talk is going to reveal a damn thing.  Best to be conservative.  And in addition, it's best if her son has the words, the reinforcement, and the knowledge to speak up if anything happens that shouldn't.  God gave the child the instinct.  Jill has given us the means to make a further difference.

Night Train

Here I'm goingWalkin' with my baby in my arms'Cuz I am in the wrong end of the eight ball blackAnd the devil, see, he's right behind usAnd this worker said she's gonna take my little babyMy little angel backBut they won't getcha,'Cuz I'm right here witchaOn the Night TrainSwing low, Saint CadillacTearin' down the alleyAnd I'm reachin' so high for yaDon't let 'em take me backBroken like valiums and chumps in the rainThat cry and quiverWhen a blue horizon is sleeping in the stationWith a ticket for a trainSurely mine will deliver me thereHere she comes ...I'm safe here with youOn the Night Train Oh mamma, mamma,Concrete is wheeling byDown at the end of a lullabyOn the Night Train.—Rickie Lee Jones. From the eponymous 1979 album. The song is “Night Train.” It is beautiful and haunting.I first heard it when I was probably 16, maybe four years after the album was released. Even then it spoke to me. A desperate woman. A helpless baby she’s responsible for, completely now that ‘dad’ is long gone, assuming he was ever there for anything but the requisite chemical reaction in the first place. And if he stuck around for a while, it was probably just to do more damage.“And this worker says she’s gonna take my baby, my angel.”In many years of this work, I’ve yet to meet the mother or the child who welcomed the intervention of Child Protective Services (or ACS, Administration for Children’s Services, as we called it in NYC). Few jobs are more difficult than that of a CPS worker, pulling a screaming and terrified child from her mother, sometimes in the middle of the night, for reasons the child can’t possibly fathom. Anyone who believes that a hungry, dirty, abused or neglected kid will welcome the strangers who arrive to remove her from the only reality she’s ever known is sorely misled. It really doesn’t matter what the child is dealing with, and how miserable and inappropriate it seems to the well-intentioned interlopers. To the child, the barren cabinets, the rotten smell in the fridge, the rodent droppings and the paint chips in the hallway are just what she knows. And it’s all she's ever known. Given a choice between what’s awful and what’s unknown, most adults- let alone children- will grasp the former.So word gets around, and sometimes, the mothers run. They do whatever they can to stay a step ahead of those who purport to know better, whether it’s the right thing to do or not. Running is open-ended, like an impulsive visit to a casino. It’s a one-way ticket to something better, maybe. Or maybe not. In any event, it’s an uncertain path. On that path, they trust no one. And frankly, I don’t blame them.“But they won't getcha, 'Cuz I'm right here witcha. On the Night Train.”I’ve worked with women who had been victimized by life- and every male in it- up until the thing that put them on the other side of my desk. Sometimes it was the biological father of the child in a sex case; a lot of people are surprised at how often biological fathers sexually abuse their own children. Sometimes it was a boyfriend, or a second husband, or whomever else looked at the time like something stable and basically good. Until, of course, that illusion disintegrated in a principal’s office, or a hospital, or a police station. Until it fell through like wet paper with the details of what he’d done to her daughter or son behind her back. While she was at work. While she was with friends. While she was out clubbing, or at a 12 step meeting, or wherever else the daily routine took her. The details ring in her ears while she clutches her purse and fights back tears. And wonders what the hell she'll do now.So the gears of the system turn, and eventually she arrives in my office.At that point it’s crucial to remember, if I’m going to be effective in any way, shape or form, that to her I’m simply the next man in the line. I’m further trouble, just not the kind that will leave a bruise. The tie I wear glows as malevolently as a nightstick. The desk I sit behind is the perfect barrier between everything that I am and everything that I’m entitled to, and everything that she is, and will never have. It’s that simple.And so I come out from behind the desk, and sometimes I lose the tie. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.“When a blue horizon is sleeping in the station, with a ticket for a train, surely mine will deliver me there. Here she comes. I'm safe here with you. On the Night Train.”The train image might be a little antiquated. The urge to run isn’t.“Concrete is wheeling by. Down at the end of a lullaby.”The end of a lullaby. That's where I work, which is say, live. I've never wanted to be anywhere else.

Common Sense for Catholicism

It’s time for a brief tutorial on the dynamics, in one regard at least, of child and adolescent sex abuse. I’ve wanted to take this up for a while. The Catholic Church- my church- has endured a still unfolding nightmare regarding the abuse of mostly boys by mostly male priests. It’s without a doubt the most heartbreaking thing I’ve ever experienced with regard to my faith. Perhaps the only thing more disturbing has been the reaction to it, both by many Catholics I know as friends and colleagues, and also by critics or downright haters of the Catholic Church, some of whom are even more off-base.Everyone seems to have an idea as to how this scandal blossomed like a cancerous flower in some sun-starved basement, and how to prevent it in the future. Unfortunately, it usually comes down to one of two options, neither of which will accomplish anything. The first is to eliminate gay men from the priesthood. The second is to change the nature of the priesthood so as to somehow reduce “sexual repression” or some such thing that has adult priests seeking out children as sexual partners. The first is complete nonsense. I’m willing to bet the second is mostly vacuous also.I want to start by saying I was raised Catholic, baptized and confirmed, and that I remain a practicing Catholic. There are many things I love, respect and admire about my Church. I believe that having a good priest as a close friend is a wonderful thing, and that having one in your home is a blessing. And I'm happy to say that priests were wonderful forces in my young life; my parents were personal friends with priests from our parish growing up, I was an altar boy for years, and I've never had a bad moment with a priest then or now. But the directions I see the Church tugged between, both by conservative groups within and other critics without, is taking it nowhere with regard to the issue of sexual abuse of children within the holy orders. And I know what I’m talking about.

Homosexuality and the Priesthood

Many Catholics, particularly conservative ones, mistakenly believe “gay priests” are to blame for the sex scandal. They believe that homosexuality simply equals sexual deviance, and therefore lends itself more readily to the abuse of children and underage adolescents.The Church is doing nothing to dispel this view. In late 2005, the year I joined the Bronx DA's Office child abuse unit, the Vatican released the Criteria for Discernment of Vocations for Persons with Homosexual Tendencies. The document draws a distinction between homosexual acts (grave sins) and homosexualtendencies. “Tendencies” are not grave sins, but are “objectively disordered.” And being saddled with these tendencies (which the document seems to acknowledge are not chosen by the affected person) disqualifies the affected from entrance to the holy orders.As it reads:“Such persons, in fact, find themselves in a situation that gravely hinders them from relating correctly to men and women. One must in no way overlook the negative consequences that can derive from the ordination of persons with deep-seated homosexual tendencies.”There is no explanation of why, or specific examples as to how such people, if called to be priests or nuns, would bring about “negative consequences” to the Church or anyone the church touches. But even more mystifying, there’s also a restriction against supporters of “the so-called ‘gay culture.’” This confounds me. How is a supporter of the so-called gay culture even defined? I’m not about to seek entrance to a holy order, but I did give a toast at a gay wedding in San Diego last year. Am I done for?But back to the larger point, how do any of these people, 1) those who have practiced a homosexual lifestyle but are now willing to be celibate, 2) those who have never been sexually active but have tendencies, or 3) the rest of us “supporters” present a danger to the Church in any way, particularly with regard to the sex scandal within the priesthood?The answer that many buy into is the pernicious argument that “homosexuality is disordered, so homosexuals are dangerous.”Some of this is bigotry, plain and simple. These folks don’t like gay people and are happy to scapegoat them for anything remotely plausible. But much of it is also ignorance, which of course serves as bigotry’s father, mentor and biggest promoter.The more a person believes that even homosexual tendencies are a terrible sign of an “objectively disordered” mind, the easier it is to believe that such people pose a threat in various ways.Generally favoring enlightenment over ignorance, I was thus thrilled to hear that The John Jay College of Criminal Justice (a school that was catty-corner to my last apartment in NYC, btw) is shedding much needed light on the subject. The school is apparently set to release a report demonstrating that homosexuality is not a predictor of the proclivity to commit child sexual abuse.Yes, thank you. That makes perfect sense to those of us who aren’t bigoted or ignorant, or both. Still, the anti-homosexual crowd points to the apparent demographics of the perpetrators and victims. Why are the great majority of the child victims of priests male, when all priests are (of course) male? If the abuse is same sex, then how does being homosexual not explain it?First, terms need to be defined and understood: Homosexuality is not the same thing or even related to pedophilia. Pedophiles are not homo or hetero, they're pedophiles. Their sexual attraction, even if they are exclusive, is not considered to be toward 'men' or 'women' but toward prepubescent children. If a male pedophile happens to be exclusive toward male children, he’s not a 'gay pedophile.' He’s a pedophile, exclusive to males.Hebephilia (a sexual attraction to adolescents) is a little different. The more physically developed the target child, the less pathological it is for the man to be attracted to the child (and the more we can say that his attraction fits a sexual orientation, either homo or hetero. Most adult males could fairly be described as having some hebephilic traits, meaning most men will find a hot 16 y.o., well...hot. A normal and law-abiding man knows not to actually put his hands on a minor, but he’s not abnormal if he’s a straight male who finds a teenage girl to be attractive- as long as she has fully developed secondary sex characteristics (breasts, pubic hair, etc).In fact, from an evolutionary standpoint, it makes sense for a straight male to be attracted to an adolescent girl who is in or approaching the most fertile period of her life. What more or less defines a hebephile (a term not in the DSM but recognized as a paraphilia of sorts) is a guy who only wants teenagers, and has no sexual interest in an adult even if she's Beyonce Knowles or Jessica Alba. That guy has a problem. It's okay to be 30 and be aroused by a 16 year-old pop star as long as you know not to touch her. But if she ceases to be attractive to you upon reaching legal adulthood, you've got a deeper issue.So basically, pedophillic priests are simply pedophiles, and they go after little boys mostly because they're easier targets.Hebephillic priests who commit sexual abuse against physically developed adolescent boys, on the other hand, probably do have a basically homosexual orientation.This is where the homophobes claim victory with regard to their thinking. And sure, it begs the question: If there are many more boy victims, and a large percentage of them are adolescents, then can't we say that homosexual priests are responsible, at least for the abuse of the adolescents?The short answer is yes, but not because of anything related to their homosexuality. Having a sexual orientation toward men does not predispose a guy to sexually abuse an adolescent boy any more than having a sexual orientation toward women predisposes a guy to sexually abuse an adolescent girl. An adult male soccer coach going after his 15 year old female players is a criminal and probably a hebephile. But he hasn't crossed the line because he's straight. He's crossed it because he's immoral, irresponsible, anti-social, possibly mentally ill and God knows what else. Instead, folks, the reason we see more boys as victims from male offenders within the priesthood is for the following three reasons, all of them a product of simple common sense:1. Priests (male) have more ready access to boys and much less to girls. This is still true today, but was much more the case in preceding generations.2. Boys are even less likely to report sex abuse than girls, so they make safer targets.3. Pedophiles and hebephiles who infiltrate the priesthood are probably most often attracted to males exclusively. This is because the Church offers a better environment for men to abuse boys than other circumstances outside of the priesthood. But even pedophile priests who are non-exclusive still go after boys much more- they make more sense for the above two reasons.In a nutshell, that’s it. There’s nothing lurking inside the mind of the homosexual that’s bringing about this evil. If the Church believes differently, it’s because she is confusing an objectively disordered sexual orientation (pedophilia) with a non-disordered one (homosexuality). In so doing, the Church is preventing untold numbers of potentially holy men and women more than willing to give up their sexual lives in order to serve. Worse, they’re continuing to attract exactly what they don’t want, which are predators sneaking under the wire of scrutiny because of the diversion the church is on toward homosexuals.

“Sexual Repression” and the Priesthood

I’m a lawyer, not a psychologist, but I don’t buy what many have written about the “sexually repressive nature of the priesthood” causing priests to “turn into” predators, or the “unnatural state of human celibacy” somehow driving them to sexual deviancy with children and adolescents. There’s simply no psychological evidence that child sex abuse springs somehow from the demand of celibacy or anything related to the duties associated with being celibate clergy. Sexual deviancy and anti-social acts stem from many things, but sexual orientation isn’t one of them, and neither is the life and restrictions of a priest or nun.The darker, more complex explanations of twisted rules and antiquated standards birthing hideous desires are tempting, I’m sure. But I’m sorry to disappoint the Church haters and Dan Brown-esqe enthusiasts when I say this is mostly bunk.Again, I’m not a psychologist. Can an argument be made that an obsession with sex, driven by the denial of it to a naturally sexual being, produces negative emotional consequences? Perhaps.Could such consequences include sexual acting out of some sort?Again, perhaps. But sexual acting out either between priests or with lay adults is a much more likely option for an adult-oriented man looking to release repressed sexual desire- particularly when that desire focuses on adults in the first place.Once again, there are three simple reasons why sexually deviant men are not created by the priesthood, but far too often flock to it instead: The priesthood has, tragically, been the target of predators for centuries because for centuries the Church has unwittingly but continuously given them what all child predators need:1. Continued access to trusting and vulnerable victims (this is especially true for child predators because part of their pathology is that once the child passes out of their attraction zone and into adulthood, they are no longer attractive).2. A cover, if they have no sexual interest in adults.3. An institution that will protect them, and move them around when they are suspected of child abuse in a particular location.His Holiness John Paul II once said plainly that the sex abuse scandal was a “great evil.” He was correct about the predators and what they’ve done to countless victims who came to the Church for the opposite of what they received. But the true tragedy is the inadvertent use of the Church for their purposes.That, my friends, is the darkest evil we’ve faced in how this scandal has played out. The abuse was awful. The discovery by predators, individually and over the centuries, of how hospitable this otherwise noble and glorious institution would be to them, was worse. The great majority of priests are decent, honorable and holy men. Like many institutions that value trust, loyalty and honor, and that often involve interaction with vulnerable victims, the priesthood has been targeted by predatory infiltrators for eons.The saddest fact is how easy the Church has unwittingly made it for them.