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  #21  
Unread 02-04-2021, 02:00 PM
Mark McDonnell Mark McDonnell is offline
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Ah thanks Jayne. I didn't want people to think I was fuming about the lack of interest in my thread haha. I mainly brought it up because Aaron and I both used the word "kerfuffle".

What a weird little Sphere gremlin! (the angry red guy, not Aaron)

Last edited by Mark McDonnell; 02-04-2021 at 03:29 PM.
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  #22  
Unread 02-04-2021, 03:38 PM
James Brancheau James Brancheau is offline
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A vile, vile word, kerfuffle. I'm surprised you turned out as well as you did, Mark. I wouldn't have survived kerfuffle, and by god, I don't know many who could.
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  #23  
Unread 02-04-2021, 03:39 PM
Julie Steiner Julie Steiner is offline
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I saw that little gremlin and thought, "Oh, no, it's finally happened--I've gotten on Mark's last nerve...."

Seriously, though, I didn't mean to imply that Jenny Lindsey's perceived misdeeds were anything other than perceived, and I regret if I gave that impression. I was just trying to illustrate how easy it can be for people to get swept up in the excitement and self-righteousness of a virtual lynch mob.

Changing topics:

Accusations of child sexual abuse are particularly notorious for making "decent" people's ugliest punitive fantasies socially acceptable. The farfetched QAnon conspiracy theories I've seen remind me a lot of the bogus Dale Akiki accusations about Satanic rituals in a San Diego religious preschool in the 1990s. And many of the most vehement critics of Poetry's decision to publish this man's work seem to imply that almost any other crime would have been perfectly okay with them.

Last edited by Julie Steiner; 02-04-2021 at 03:58 PM.
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  #24  
Unread 02-04-2021, 04:38 PM
James Brancheau James Brancheau is offline
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And just like that, Julie, you make my kerfuffle moment seem unimportant.
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  #25  
Unread 02-04-2021, 06:13 PM
John Riley John Riley is online now
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As someone who was a long-term victim of child sexual abuse I’ve cringed over the years at the mobs that have created McMartin Pre-School-type hysterias. Maybe that’s why my molester wasn’t caught until he was eighty and authorities said the number of his victims was in the hundreds. I was poor, powerless, living with my single-mother in a housing project. There is no way I would have been believed. Then as an adult it became something people cared about, so naturally there were dishonest hysterias that again minimized my experience. I think there are aspects of human experience most people can’t take a long look at so they flip into denial or fantasy. But those of us who have gone through it have no choice. Delusion, illusion, or fantasy aren’t available to us. We’re left staring.
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  #26  
Unread 02-04-2021, 07:13 PM
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Catherine Chandler Catherine Chandler is offline
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We use the word kerfuffle quite frequently here in Canada.
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  #27  
Unread 02-05-2021, 01:49 AM
Julie Steiner Julie Steiner is offline
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Thanks for your perspective, John. Yes, whether these lies are allowed to stand or are discredited, their effect is still to minimize what you and others really experienced.

I don't think naïveté alone can explain the eagerness to believe exaggerations about child sexual abuse, and the reluctance to believe true stories. The math suggests that factors other than ignorance and inexperience may be at work.

Your abuser, like many of his fellow abusers, had lots and lots of victims. This means that there must be lots and lots of adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse out there. The number of family members of abusers, who are sometimes anxious to deflect suspicion from the household's primary breadwinner, is also significant.

I strongly suspect that people from these varying points of view sometimes actively participate in the minimization and denial of stories like yours. Their personal coping mechanisms might include avoidance when someone's factual account gets uncomfortably close to their own closely-held traumas; or someone else's account may be just different enough from their own memory of abuse that they may sincerely think that it rings false. Victims might also experience vicarious vindication by joining in the condemnation of someone universally believed (rightly or wrongly) to be a pedophile. For family members of pedophiles, joining in the condemnation of an exaggerated caricature of an abuser helps telegraph to others that their response to such news is normal, and that they find such behavior abhorrent, and that therefore their own family is above suspicion. And on a less public level, the secret that their own grandpa went to prison for touching little boys and girls inappropriately might seem like less of a big deal, compared to claims that some other guy was sacrificing babies and making other kids drink the blood.

And obviously the perpetrators themselves have a vested interest in minimizing their own crimes by encouraging society to grade such things on an exaggerated curve.

Digression: From time to time at Eratosphere, I've workshopped poems that try to address my own firsthand experience in this area, but these usually don't go over well. When I've tried to "tell it slant," no one could figure out what the heck I was talking about. When I've tried to spell it out, people have found the result too unpoetically on-the-nose and unambiguous. And then there's the small matter of no one wanting to be a meanie and tell me why my poem about a harrowing, real-life experience wasn't all that great a poem. We've all critiqued (and sometimes, alas, workshopped) poems that the author was too close to emotionally to respond well to criticism, so we try to avoid those situations. But maybe it would be worthwhile to give it a go again.

Last edited by Julie Steiner; 02-05-2021 at 10:10 AM.
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  #28  
Unread 02-05-2021, 04:04 AM
Mark McDonnell Mark McDonnell is offline
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Quote:
Seriously, though, I didn't mean to imply that Jenny Lindsey's perceived misdeeds were anything other than perceived, and I regret if I gave that impression.
Oh I know, Julie. No worries. Ignore the gremlin.
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  #29  
Unread 02-05-2021, 05:55 AM
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Andrew Mandelbaum Andrew Mandelbaum is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Martin Elster View Post
There are experts who feel that after a certain age, most (if not all) felons should be released (after rehabilitation) from prison, because they are no longer young and wild, but slothful middle-aged people who just want to sit on the couch and watch TV and are no longer at all interested in committing the kind of crime they committed as a young person.
Setting aside what prison is as opposed to what it could be, this bit about retiring from crime is not true about abusers especially sexual predators. It would be a dangerous bet. Isolation/exile is a better option maybe than cages but not in this system. Just going home to the same access in these cases is not a good plan. This is in reference to violent predators and child abusers not some of the statuatory cases that carry misleading labels, many of which are ridiculous.
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  #30  
Unread 02-05-2021, 10:07 AM
Julie Steiner Julie Steiner is offline
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Wouldn't a system in which murderers can hope for release, but sex offenders cannot, create a huge incentive to murder potential witnesses?

Last edited by Julie Steiner; 02-05-2021 at 10:14 AM.
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