Child Molesters Are Good Teachers

My wife and I adopted our daughter Cindy when she was nine, nearly 30 years ago now.  We’d known Cindy and her immediate biological family since she was three, which means we witnessed the consequences of her birth mother’s inability to nurture and protect her children.  This inability included bad taste in men.  Your imagination will unlikely lead you far from the grim reality of our daughter’s early life. 

I say we “witnessed the consequences” but of course that’s merely a figure of speech.  The most significant consequences for Cindy are all but unknowable to anyone who hasn’t experienced what she calls “the equivalent of having your heart removed, yet you keep living.” 

Today, Cindy is herself a mother.  Her children are not unscarred by the reverberations of a trauma that commonly rolls through generations—and yet these three kids are also playful and kind.  I love being in their presence.  Should they grow into adulthood with dreams and the resilience to pursue them, among the causes of such a healthy outcome will be the extent to which Cindy moves beyond the identity of victim, and thus brings forward, more and more, the beauty and passion of her own dreams.  It’s a job that demands her attention every single minute, and probably will until the day she dies, if not beyond.  So it is for all of us, I’m sure, continually growing our awareness of how we keep ourselves small by believing that our well-being is determined by forces beyond our control.  Still, there are times I consider Cindy’s journey and I’m amazed she’s even alive.  Her grit inspires me.  As I’m writing this paragraph my friend Tom Rizzo called from his home in Los Angeles.  He’s a masterful musician and composer.  We’ve collaborated over the years, but mostly we enjoy getting on the phone and laughing as we share our lives with one another.  Anyway, the name Tony Asher came up, whom I’d never heard of.  He’s a friend of Tom.  Turns out Tony wrote the lyrics for one of my favorite Beach Boys songs, “God Only Knows,” which happens to be the closing music of one of my favorite movies, “Love Actually,” so favorite I’ve teared-up at that point in the film each of the several times I’ve watched it as image after image encompassing the scope of humanity shows people greeting their loved ones while the Beach Boys repeat again and again the refrain, “God only knows what I’d do without you.”  It’s how I feel about my daughter—privileged to be her dad.

Without embracing reincarnation—the principle of reaping what we sow over multiple lifetimes until we reach enlightenment—I can’t make sense of life at all.  Existence seems capricious and mean-spirited otherwise.  That the Creator is less loving than a parent for their child seems ludicrous; where does a parent’s love originate in the first place?  All of which is why I’m partial to the Eastern view that, life after life, we basically draw to us those circumstances that will best serve our spiritual evolution.  In the book Living With the Himalayan Masters, Swami Rama reflects on his early life with his guru.  In one passage he writes: “I was sixteen years of age then, and had tremendous energy.  I was very active and would constantly annoy him.  But he often said, ‘This is my karma and not your fault, my boy.  I am reaping the fruit of my own deeds.’”  However else I feel about child molesters, I can’t help but have a certain empathy for anyone who creates for themselves the unrelenting condemnation and isolation that comes with being rejected by every quarter of society.

If I told you that I kneecapped the man who sexually abused our daughter, would you nod your head in understanding?  Not agreement, necessarily, but understanding.  I bet yes, even if you’re Gandhi.  Maybe especially if you’re Gandhi.

From my local newspaper, a recent story I doubt will surprise you.  A man accused of molesting a young girl killed himself. 

In prison, repository of society’s outcasts, the sexual predators of children are the outcasts of the outcasts.  None among the various prison sub-cultures, which create pockets of shared identity and thus a certain security in belonging, welcomes these ultimate aliens.  And when these ostracized ones are released from incarceration, little changes.  Their “debt to society” may never be paid while alive, or dead for that matter.  Commonly, communities would, if they could, brand an X on the convicted pedophile’s forehead and force him to wear a large neon “P” on his back for the rest of his life.  And if it isn’t happening already, it’s no stretch to foresee a data base that, for the rest of eternity, will keep track of all those who share the molester’s genetic signature.  So fierce is our collective fear. 

Meanwhile, to me, everything is a gift, serving our journey to enlightenment.  Few of us go nose-to-nose with a snapping turtle indefinitely.  Pain is how the universe helps us to wise-up and make healthier choices, including the choice not to consider ourselves victims of anything.  Since that can be a daunting practice under any circumstance (as we who have felt victimized by a flat tire or a mosquito bite can attest), imagine the courage, the passion to love, and the commitment to self-forgiveness that is necessary for anyone to consider their glass half-full when everywhere they turn they hear, “You are a piece of shit.”  To learn to love ourselves in the face of self-imposed guilt and the world’s revulsion is no small accomplishment.  Just as is learning to give up hatred and grow to forgive the person whose inability to perceive us, and themselves, as human led to the rape of our innocence.  

While those convicted (or even suspected) of being a sexual predator experience a quality of banishment that is seldom surpassed in our culture, it is for that very reason that they are also among the human family’s most powerful teachers. 

Do we know a greater teacher than the person who triggers our outrage, our self-righteousness, our propensity to rip another to shreds?  It takes little intestinal fortitude to live in Mister Rogers’ neighborhood or go bowling with the Dalai Lama.  But how about giving an inch of kindness to the person we usually respond to as if he or she were a rabid dog?  It takes a warrior of the heart to love those who harm us…or might.

One of life’s more humbling lessons, I find, is that the only way to move beyond whatever prompts our hatred is to love it.  No wonder it takes a zillion incarnations to find God.  And if we can’t love it in this moment, maybe we can at least love ourselves for hating it.  We create peace of heart, and thus peace in the world, by continually moving fearward, toward whatever we resist, whatever we prefer to despise, blame, judge and otherwise reject. 

Doesn’t this make child molesters good teachers?  But hey, they are far from unique in that regard.  When you consider the countless reasons we humans find one another unacceptable (race, nationality, religion and bad breath among them), there are probably a few people whose blood sizzles whenever they think of us.  Maybe more than a few.  Isn’t it useful to remember, then, that we’re good teachers, too?

Comments

[Neil Hendricks]

Mr. Roberts,

I read your article, Child Molesters Are Good Teachers, with some interest.

I completed a 5 year probation sentence for a 4th degree CSC conviction in November of 2007. I committed the crime in June of 2000. Since about April of 2009, I have been working as a volunteer for Project Unity for Life (PUFL), a faith-based inreach and outreach organization. At present, PUFL is working with inmates in 5 jails and 1 prison in NW Michigan.

In 2001 my wife and I started a handyman business (I was teaching at a K-8 Charter school until July 2000) because, as you noted, aware employers seldom hire sex offenders, especially child molesters. We went bankrupt in 2008 and out of business in 2009.

Last December, I returned to college, on line, to work on a Ph. D. in Organizational Psychology, Consulting. What I found out as a handyman, people are happy to hire service providers, and, once they have opportunity to get to know the person for who they are today, are quite open to acceptance of past history. As a matter of fact, all but a handful of all the people who know about the nature of my crime have shunned me, and only 3 have condemned me.

What I had to do was to no longer condemn myself, to accept responsibility to be a safe person to be in the community, and to live my life in the best way I know how. So, I work, almost every day, with other men who are convicted felon sex offenders, some of whom were child molesters.

In the last 3 years I have completed 4 trainings through Shadow Work Seminars, Inc. in Boulder, CO. with the mission and intent to work with men, most of whom are sex offenders and/or sex/relationship addicts. I, too, believe we are good teachers. And I believe that until we (each person/all persons) deal with those things that they keep in shadow (hidden, repressed, denied), they are in bondage to them and are acting out in anti-social ways, too.

So, my want is as people look at me and want to condemn me for my acting out, that they look too, at what it is in them that would cause them to condemn another human being as opposed to condemning their behavior.

Thank you for this forum.

[Steve Roberts]

I am grateful for your story, Neil. Thank you. I hope you'll stay in touch. I welcome hearing of what you are learning. Steve