Caution: Emotional Subject Enclosed.

Case #1
Patient was abused as a child by his father. He was beaten, he was insulted, and he was made to watch while his mother was abused and beaten. By his early teens, the father was incarcerated for his actions, and the child was put into foster care, but many problems were left undealt with. As an adult, the patient showed signs of an anger disorder, but never sought help. Now, the patient has been convicted of abusing his girlfriend, and stalking her. He was sent to prison after assaulting one of the ex's male friends.

Case #2
A woman comes forward to report she's been stalked by her exboyfriend. She left him when he became too controlling in the relationship. However, at this point, he began showing up at her new apartment, calling her repeatedly, and contacting her friends, claiming he wanted to talk it out. It all culminated when she was out with a male friend. The ex showed up and assaulted the friend, assuming it was a new boyfriend.

In these two hypothetical situations, I've created one man, one girlfriend, and one male friend. It's the same situation, yet our opinion is so vastly different. In case one, we would say it's a mentally unstable man who suffered great trauma in his childhood that has greatly skewed his view of society. We would say he himself is a victim, and that his shattered childhood would need to be dealt with so that he can see the world in an unjaded way.

However, after sitting through a two hour lecture this morning from the Violence Prevention Center on my college campus, I was told "your average rapist is not mentally ill." I challenged this fact in class, saying that someone who feels no emotional connection for their victim - who is usually someone they know - cannot be totally mentally stable. My answer was that, they just have different belief systems.

So, we're told that this man isn't disturbed, his mind is working perfectly, and that it is this idea of "evil" that drives him to do this. We throw him in jail where he can sit in a tiny little closet for a few years, stewing over what happened, trying to figure out why the woman he loves would do this to him, so that when he comes back out, he's even more motivated to let this happen again.

This is just something I can't get out of my head. We look at repeat offenders, and we just throw them back into a jail cell, and wonder why they don't get better? We teach these classes that tell us people are evil, and that the victim is the only human involved. That's essentially what I've been told anyway. How do we ever expect anyone to recover or to change their actions, when we tell them they're just evil, and that they don't deserve to be helped?

Of course the behaviours going to continue if we tell them they're far passed helping. I honestly felt a little sick after I left that lecture. Not that I don't think sexual offenders should be punished, but if they receive the help they obviously need, they will still have to live with what they've done, remembering that state of mind they were in, for the rest of their life.

I would say that in itself is quite the punishment.