My dear, sweet, thoughtful husband recently wrote a blog entry regarding our State Legislature’s latest action against sexual predators. Among the provisions is the use of castration. Rocky thought maybe this wasn’t the best solution to the problem of sexual predation, and compared it to the draconian “solutions” of Nazi Germany.
One guy got pretty heated up about it, and accused Rocky of insulting Jews and of not fully understanding what an encounter with a sexual predator can do to a person. He said that if someone close to Rocky were the victim of a sexual predator, he would feel differently about the subject.
Needless to say… he was way off base on both accusations. But I don’t blame him a bit. I mean…this is not a subject people really want to think about or deal with in any depth.
It’s icky. It’s disturbing, and it’s complicated – and frankly, these people piss us off and it’s really just easier and more comfortable to think of them as not being human, and not being worth the time and energy it takes to figure out what to do with them. It’s more fun to think of ways to humiliate and torture them than to think of ways to solve the problem.
Guilty as charged. Oh yeah, I cheered when Hartigan ripped the child molester’s gonads off in Sin City. Let’s face it, the higher angels of our nature tend to take a vacation on this subject. We want these animals…these monsters…to get a dose of their own medicine. We want to see them humiliated, violated and mutilated the way they did to their victims.
It’s not really a feeling I can let go of, as much as I would like to. It’s human, it’s understandable…but it’s not a solution.
First of all, there’s the fact that sexual predation isn’t about sex. It’s about predation. People don’t rape other people because they are horny. People rape other people because they have a sick need to be in control of another person. They want to hurt someone, and they want that hurt to last a long, long time. They want power, and specifically, they want the power to take over someone else’s mind and pollute their spirit.
There are plenty of people who have the same goal, but do it without a sexual component. They are just as sick, just as wrong, and can be capable of doing just as much damage without ever touching the person they are hurting.
Castrate a sexual predator, and all you have is a sexually impotent predator. One who has been humiliated, violated and mutilated…probably numerous times before the state got hold of him, and now again by the state. You have not rendered him harmless. All you have done is reinforced his world view; which is that the world is a place where you are either a victim or a perpetrator, and it’s better to be a perpetrator. You’ve just confirmed that the whole world is no better than he is, just more powerful because it is united against him. You’ve just given him confirmation that there is no reason to change, and no other way to be. You’ve added to his sense of powerlessness, rage, victimization and drive to find someone to take it out on.
The guy who objected to Rocky’s entry declared that it has been proven that sexual predators cannot be fixed. They cannot be cured. I’m inclined to agree, although I don’t think it has been “proven”. It’s just something I feel very, very deeply. Not rational. My rational mind is powerless before my feelings on this issue.
I have a good friend who is a psychologist, and far from being a fuzzy-wuzzy tree-hugging type liberal. She is not prepared to accept that conclusion.
I don’t know what the solution is, but castration is not it. In order to change a predator, you have to alter their mind. Altering their body does nothing.
And it is dangerous and irresponsible to mistake it for a solution because it will actually make each individual it is applied to worse. It is a dangerous indulgence of our mob-mind style attraction to thoughtless, inhuman, and retributive penalties against classes of people our culture decides are “subhuman”. And it will be applied in lieu of actually looking for a real solution.