There is some sort of scarring-for-life going on here, but I can't figure out who's doing what to whom.
"You gotta know when to hold 'em
Know when to fold them
You gotta know when to walk away
And know when to run..."
me, I think. she skipped merrily away, happy in the knowledge that her mommy had found the pink fan after all! my stomach hurt for the rest of the day.
It would never, ever have occurred to me mid-conversation that the little girl might be describing something skeezy.
Partly because: are there really abusive people who start prepping their victims two years ahead of time? I'd assume not.
I would have been curious, though. I'd have guessed something like a trip or a cell phone that Mommy doesn't approve of little girls getting until they're older.
6: With no actual first or second-hand knowledge, just media, I actually think that's supposed to be the sort of thing that does happen sometimes for in-family abuse.
really? you wouldn't have instantly thought that? yes, pedophiles start grooming their victims well in advance, it's their thing. when the surprise comes she's already invested in the narrative of it being an awesome secret, and feels like she agreed to it by being so excited all along.
also, you think, who's such an asshole he would fuck with a 6-year-old and not a four-year-old? well, pedophiles often think what their doing is right and that the child can consent in some way or even be flirtatious. such a person might have some arbitrary age barrier that seems idiotic to us because it's under 10 but makes sense to them.
how many assholes are out their molesting their little girl? fuck tons, is how many. nothing really bad ever happened to me till I was 11, and that was just one time and nothing recurred till I got to be 15. I feel like I can deal with that, but 6 would have just fucked me up forever. more than now, I mean. well, getting molested by your step-dad makes you unduly hyper-vigilant, maybe.
And man, must that have been terrifying for you. It probably wouldn't have occurred to me either, but as you report the conversation it was a reasonable thing to think.
god that's so weird, I thought everyone would have that same reaction.
also, re-reading 11 out-loud in print, as it were, makes it clear that's a crazy fucking thing to say and it isn't "all right" for some reason because I was 11. I just need to tell myself things like that to help me be less crazy.
and you would have known all this already if you rtfa so don't everybody shut up now, I am curious about your reactions. you don't have to say, "hey al, I'm sorry that horrible thing happened to you." I'm sure you're all thinking that which is quite sufficient.
Anything secret, it's so hard to get a sense of probabilities by personal experience. I've got no direct experience of molestation, so I reflexively think of it as vanishingly unlikely, which I know is wrong. If it happened to you, and you know that no one outside the family knew about it, you probably have the sense that it's really common and everyone's keeping similar secrets. Either possible set of experiences is going to give you the wrong set of odds.
Kind of fucked up: I thought of you, alameida, and your step-father, when I noticed that the can of Le Sueur peas actually says "Very Young, Very Small" on it.
I have to say I've talked to a bunch of other people to whom things like this happened. wikipedia cites studies saying 15% or so of women and 8% of men were sexually abused as children, with family members and extended family (babysitters etc.) doing the yeoman's work of molesting. that actually makes it reasonably likely the kid your talking with might face a real problem. this doesn't mean they were all horribly raped or something, it's every sort of sexual abuse. the older brother being the abuser is common and underreported. it's kind of tough for the family; kick him out on the street? or start drinking a lot more maker's mark and never talk about it again? I think we all see the more appealing option here.
16: oh fuck no it doesn't! god, fuck that.
See, from the lead up I thought the parents were just going to tell her *about* sex. Like, maybe she had walked in on them and said "what are you doing," and, thinking fast they said "We're playing a game, umm, we'll tell you about it later"
"When?"
"When, I dunno when you're six, now go watch TV."
It would have never occurred to me to worry that they were talking about a practical experience.
god that's so weird, I thought everyone would have that same reaction.
I sure did. I was dreading the end of that story. Nothing ever happened to me that way but it did to family members and of course my job isn't helping to not assume the worst.
ok, fine, I'm crazy.
luckily it's never affected my choice of boyfriend or whatever. psych! husband x is a wonderful, stable, sexy person who just doesn't have any serious psychological problems, aside from neurosis about completing papers for submission. so I made a great choice there. but this was the result of determinedly fighting an inclination towards irrational, scary men who might kill you, or convince you to do drugs with them all the time, or whatever. (yes, shearer, I am aware that it was my own choice to go and use drugs and it can't be blamed on any exes, not even the one who would plead to shoot my up while we made out because it was so sexy and then almost kill me like 4 times.)
I probably would have thought about the distressing possibilities shortly after the conversation ended, but not during. Unless the little girl seemed really creepy somehow.
But my experience of these things is the exact opposite of yours, having never heard of anyone I know being molested, but having the personal experience of being accosted by a madwoman at my sister's HS graduation, who insisted that I go through my camera and delete all the crowd pictures I'd been taking that happened to have children in them, thus preventing me from getting a picture of my sister actually graduating.
Next time just hold the camera instead of taping it to your shoe.
It's hard for me to know what would have occurred to me during the conversation, versus what I thought reading your description (which is obviously influenced by what you thought). But certainly I was expecting this story to have a worse ending when I went past the cut. I do know close family friends who were abused by "family" (well one "mother's boyfriend" and one "father of a different mother's boyfriend").
In the latter case there was a successful prosecution (well, plea bargain, but still real jail time and he ended up dying around release time so the length didn't end up mattering) of someone who'd abused before, but where they couldn't get a good witness. So at least that's good.
It's an interesting thing that you can have a family like the one from HG's janitor story, but within it there's still wild variation in how good they are at life. The kid who could talk to the police at 4 or 5 years old has just way more shit together than any of the other kids in that family. Didn't stop her from getting knocked up at 16 like everyone else, but she's still with the baby daddy and they both eventually got HS diplomas (though the latter wouldn't have happened without my mother's heavy involvement).
see, now that's the kind of idiotic thing people do when they turn their fear and anger on imaginary stranger pedophiles. go yell at your creepy uncle, bitch. you know he's off somehow and you don't always feel OK around him, and maybe you don't let your kids be around him, but what about your nieces and nephews? are you protecting them? turn the lens on your fucking boyfriend and your family and close friends, lady. nobody's that paranoid about stranger pedophiles unless they're covering up some shit at home. it's like how republican anti-gay crusaders are all gay. did I mention your asshole boyfriend, by the way, lady? yeah. that.
night all!
That reminds me of something I was going to say about HG's grandmother's daughter.
Women who are objectively un-datable end up with awful awful boyfriends. But when the alternative is being single forever, that's a tough situation.
I instantly thought the same thing Al did. Daddy teaching her a secret game mommy and daddy play? Just sounds ominous.
Second 30. And relevant to any discussion of odds.
how many assholes are out their molesting their little girl? fuck tons, is how many.
This is obvious. I'm not contesting this.
yes, pedophiles start grooming their victims well in advance, it's their thing. when the surprise comes she's already invested in the narrative of it being an awesome secret, and feels like she agreed to it by being so excited all along.
And I believe the grooming is common. I just wouldn't have thought anyone who would molest a 6 year old would have the patience/plan to start grooming their victim for two years.
Women who are objectively un-datable
Is that an ISO standard? It seems kind of, uh, dickish.
something I was going to say about HG's grandmother's daughter.
I'm guessing this isn't my mom?
Oh, right, HG's friend Grandma, and her daughter.
People date assholes for all kinds of reasons, and it goes both ways, gender-wise. It's not like ugly fat dudes (if you're going to put it in terms of looks, which I'm guessing you are) date all the horrible bitches so they won't be alone. Looks doesn't balance out with personality on the other end like they're equal liabilities.
So, OT, last night I had an internet date with a local dude who I suspected would not be any kind of love match but maybe a possible friend. At least, he's one of the few people here who didn't start a message to me with "I don't like anything you like!" (That's a big come-on here?) We meet up and he's definitely represented himself as way way cuter and more charming than he is--always a bad sign. But he's acting like I'm a disappointment or something. Every time I try to say something engaging or funny or whatever, he looks hard at something over his other shoulder a few times and then says "Huh. Funny."
But we end up going to another bar, where we run into some people I know and talk to some strangers, who seem cool, and then suddenly the dude's ex-girlfriend shows up. Turns out he'd been trying to get her to meet us out somewhere all night--hence all the shoulder-looking. She's awesome and is with her punk sister, and every time this guy talks she's sort of just firm and polite. It becomes obvious that he's still horribly in love with her and invited her on our date... to show me what he's used to? To... use me to make her jealous?
Anyhow, he ended up drifting off from the group and I brought her home and had sex with her. It was pretty cool.
Right, goes the other way too, but there aren't as many abusive women out there as men. So the consequences aren't as dire.
Not being attractive is only part of the point. Someone who's below average attractiveness-wise could have lots of other positive attributes to compensate. Furthermore, people have very different tastes. But if you don't have anything going for you in other areas (trouble holding down a job, lots of small kids, crazy mother who lives in your house, too many pets who shit all over your apartment, undependable because you might be in jail for parking tickets, etc.) that's a problem. It's a problem that being attractive might get you out of, but it's not the unattractiveness that's the root of the undatability.
37.4 is internet winning lemonade from lemons.
20 was my reaction, and experience (not my job, but a guy I office share with).
The other amazing moment from last night was sitting in this really shitty (very hetero) dive bar and there are these two old queens just making out like crazy. One sees me staring and drunkenly walks over to talk to me. He sort of looks like David Bowie, a bit made-up, dreamy far-off eyes, 50sish, and he comes up and takes my hand between his and says, "I know you. You really see people, don't you? You are an incredible woman and my partner and I want you in our life." I'm like uh OK sure! We're going to take a trip out to see the river and go fishing and stuff. Or they're going to cut out my liver and leave me in a dumpster somewhere.
I love the story in 37. Awesome!
37 is awesome.
to show me what he's used to? To... use me to make her jealous?
The latter.
Why, a boat trip sounds delightful!
She had never had sex with a lady before! And I think she had a nice time, so I feel good about that.
37 is amazing.
Do you think the guy has heard what happened (that is, did the other people in the group know what was going on)? If he hasn't, there's the possibility that he'll unknowingly try to bring you up to her to make her jealous, which has just amazing comic possibilities.
47: I don't think he knows, because he was texting me this morning as if we had a good time together last night, which we really didn't. I mean, he acted like he was miserable and bored until the girl showed up and then kept trying to touch her hair. I put a fuckload of effort into keeping the conversation going all night. There's a real lack of awareness of other people and their motivations there.
Man, he's going to feel like such a loser when he finds out.
If this were a movie he'd try to make her jealous by pretending that he slept with you that night, not realizing how transparent a lie it would be.
21
... yes, shearer ...
You appear to have a thrill seeking personality and I doubt it has anything much to do with something that happened when you were 11.
As for molestation in general the entire subject seems to be infused with the sort of hysteria that you all make fun of when it is about say airplane hijacking. (I was seated next to an Arab on an airplane once and I was sure he was acting suspicious and about to hijack the plane but it turned out he was just unpacking his lunch but I was still nervous for hours. (Not a true story)).
Certainly there's a lot of irrationality around stranger child abduction and stranger child molestation. But extended family sexual abuse is several orders of magnitude more common than terrorism.
There may be a considerable lack of awareness of his own self & motivations. 37 is still a great story. I await the follow-up in which you date the punk sister.
I've been feeling through the OP - I probably wouldn't have been frightened as fast, but I think it would have occurred to me later. Given that one doesn't know the truth, is there an approach to the mother that is most likely to cause an accurate response?
And even if I mostly don't say it, alameida, 11 was too young, 16 would have been too young. I'm sorry it happened at all.
Nonetheless, I think 23 is exactly the kind of thing 52 is talking about, and, for those of us who lived through the satanic ritual abuse scare, JBS is clearly on the mark.
The difference is that the chance a kid will be molested is orders of magnitude higher than that anyone will be injured by terrorists. Hysteria about strangers is wildly overblown, but with family/friends/teachers/so forth is not likely in the 'more likely than not' sense, but it's not very unusual.
Child abuse is more like muggings than like terrorism. People have some irrationality surrounding it, and in particular often have incorrect estimates of what is and isn't a big threat. Nonetheless, getting mugged is a real threat that people need to worry about (unlike terrorism in the US), and sometimes it's rational to worry about muggings.
23/52/55: Issues of anecdata collection at work here. The number of women I've known who have been molested/raped (which is to say, have told me they'd been molested/raped) is well beyond what I'd have guessed had they not told me, and is truly depressing and angering.
Also 52 (and hence my 57) is an egregious violation of the analogy ban.
I don't doubt 58. I think some folks are overreading 52.2; not exactly unfair, to the extent we all have impressions of each other by now. The stranger thing isn't just overblown, it was a full on beating-up-Sikhs-after-9/11 style panic a couple decades ago. People went to jail based on fantasy. For years. People who brought kids to the doctor after they crashed learning to ride a bike got visits from social workers.
I don't see 52.2 as casting doubt on the existence or actual prevalence of domestic abuse.
In hindsight, wasn't the Satanic panic an inadvertent blind for actual abuse? People kind of realized child abuse was possible, so horrible it had to be full-on devilish baby-eating, which gets the focus off the ability of seemingly OK people to carry a streak of the vile.
I dropped a clause there, inadvertently enacting the scrambled thoughts in question.
When I was a teenager I would have thought the OP was a funny or innocuous story. After 20+ years of adult life, I was on edge with dread for the entire post.
Semi-related, this week I had to make a call about an actual potential Bad Guy. Ended up going through unofficial channels to refer him a trusted fed. Am not 100% sure I did the right thing but am entirely certain that my radar was not off in detecting him as trouble. There's a lot to be said for life experience.
29 and 39, if I am understanding them, are extraordinarily dickish. I hope I have misunderstood.
If I had been party to al's conversation with that girl, I would sure have thought bad things were afoot. Not crazy.
Hrm, let me try to restate the point. I used to think she must be a bad person to keep dating people who abuse her kids or leave her kids alone with their child abuser father. But at some point, I realized I should be more sympathetic, it's a sad tragic thing to be a person where people who are interested in you are going to be bringing something really fucked up to the relationship, rather than moral character flaw. If I were un-datable, would I really be able to see through and think "this person is dating me to take advantage of access to my kids"? Probably not.
Here's where I'd like clarification:
1) Are you saying only "undateable" people get caught in abusive situations?
2) What do you mean by "undateable"?
I think the pattern Unfoggertarian is latching on to is really just the fact that predators target people with low self esteem. Someone with low self esteem is likely to view themselves as undatable or have some problem that is likely to make an outsider like Unfoggertarian judge them as undatable. But really the trait that is drawing trouble here is crappy self-image. You don't need to hypothesize that someone is "objectively undatable" to explain what is going on.
I'm not convinced the "pattern" holds.
Yeah, I know I say this every single time the Low Self-Esteem Theory of Abusive Relationships comes up, but I personally think it hides a lot of abuse by making you look for the lonely, depressive, self-hating women as the obvious targets of abusers. Other ways you get involved with an abusive person? You are so confident about your interpersonal competence that you think you can handle someone who's obviously pretty red-flaggy. Or you yourself are a happy-in-your-own-skin oddball and don't see oddball-weirdo behavior in others as a sign of something dangerous. Or you just like being a caretaker, a nurturer, to someone who gives you a lot of different kinds of goals for your nurturing. (Can you love me even now? How about now?) Or it turns you on to struggle. Or or or.
I don't think the opposite of the Low Self-Esteem Theory is blaming victims. I think we just need to be aware that even nice-looking, together-seeming people you know, who you trust are of course doing fine in their relationships, might be hiding some painful domestic secrets. Absolutely no one believes when I tell them how bad my abusive relationship got because I'm not ugly, self-loathing, pathetic, depressed, or whatever all the elements of their Battered Woman stereotype was. Even now I've tried to explain what I went through to my mother, and she just says, "It couldn't have been that bad. You're such a confident and intelligent person you just wouldn't have let that happen to you." Uh, thanks?
Rapists and molesters, sure, totally target women and kids with low self-esteem. You know who else they target? Extremely confident and competent people. It makes them feel like they got you, they're better than you now. When I almost got violently date-raped a few years ago, the guy, who was also a grad student studying similar things, but younger and not quite as far along in his work, kept saying, over and over, "You think you're better than me? You think I'm not good-looking enough? You think you're smarter than me, huh? You think I'm no good in bed probably, huh?"
To be clear, I didn't say that all, or even most, women in abusive relationships have poor self esteem. I said that predators target people with low self esteem. There probably are plenty of other ways people end up in abusive relationships, but having low self esteem is one that predators use, because they know they can rely on it.
Also, we know that predators target people with low self esteem, because they sometimes admit to in frankly. It is a big part of the "pick up artist" crap, and it is something that child molesters advise each other about when they are trading tips for grooming their victims.
I also was on the same page with al. I would hope that I'd be willing to risk embarassing myself rather than freezing and worry/regreting forever after, but I don't know. I tend to describe myself (when it comes up) as someone who survived an abuse situation (not directed at me, but right there with me; also not family), so my antenae are a bit up. I wouldn't say it's a majority of people I know who've been through one kind of sexual violence or another, but it's a substancial minority.
'tarian's error seems to me to be in believing in the category of "objectively undateable." There's no such thing. Alongside AWB point, I think it's also worth noting that abusers work hard to create people with low self-esteem, people who will come to believe that no one will believe or love or help them anymore, rather than just starting out that way.
On the less depressing front, yay for excruciatingly awkward dates that bizarrely produce happy hook-ups!
objectively undateable
Everyone is date-able. You have to work really hard even to not be multiply date-able. Some people have enough social disfunction to approach unreleation-able, though, to mangle a term.
It's not hard to see how some of the latter may fall eventually into relationships with other similarly difficult people, but it's hardly a model for the majority of abusive relationships.
Several people I have known to be in abusive relationships had enough self-esteem that they had difficulty seeing themselves in the role of a victim; it was easier for them personally to hide the abuse than to expose it, at least for a time.
When I try to think of "objectively undateable" people I think of the sorts who go on "Freaky Eaters" or something, but pretty much everyone on that show seems to have a nice-looking, emotionally supportive spouse. I keep thinking of boyfriends who wanted to end it with me, or men who have rejected me, on the basis of something like having once made a particularly inappropriate joke or whatever. I have not been eating 25 potatoes a day since I was 4.
Also, I was with alameida the whole way in that story, such a revelation from a 6 year old would shake me too.
Heh. While I've been going through my period of temporary rich people's unemployment, I've been taking little Lucretia to school. We started to stop off at a cafe on the way for a coffee and a hot chocolate, and she was absolutely beside herself with joy at the idea that Mummy didn't know about this. We had about three days of her doing these absurdly cute theatrical winks at me and saying "yes, we must set off right now ... So That We Are Nice And Early For School, Not For Any Other Reason" in the morning. Then indeed, I realised that I didn't want her telling all her friends at school that her and Daddy had a special secret that they didn't tell Mummy about. And so the secret of the morning coffee was no more.
Urban Dictionary let me down on prominent "hot chocolate" definitions.
also I unban myself, infinite no backsies.
shearer: I want to say I'm sorry you spent part of your flight in mortal fear while the arab guy unpacked his lunch, and I can even imagine myself nervous right after 9/11 in some iterations of such a story (not well because flying overseas all the time has desensitized me; they have MUSLIM PRAYER ROOMS in the airport itself here!), but on the gripping hand, it's totally fucking hilarious.
more seriously, you don't think getting molested as a young person often has life-long bad effects on people's psychological make-up? or if not life-long, then salient and difficult to overcome until later in life? I will agree it's also possible for bad things to happen to people and have them grow up to nevertheless be well-adjusted adults, either by chance, or because of some inner strength, or a later loving family member, or whatever. getting molested doesn't doom you to a life of being a miserable junkie or anything, but if you do end up a miserable junkie, is it likely to have been related to those times you got sexually assaulted by your step-dad as a young person? I submit: probably so.
I was not a thrill-seeking chid; I was timid and anxious and concerned about keeping my siblings safe somehow. I tried to take care of them. I was a bossy older sister making them come off the top part of the jungle gym because it was too dangerous.
OK I just realized my face is getting hot now and Im actually upset so I'm stopping. stupid feelings. if only I could turn them off somehow. hey...!
I personally think it hides a lot of abuse by making you look for the lonely, depressive, self-hating women as the obvious targets of abusers. Other ways you get involved with an abusive person? You are so confident about your interpersonal competence that you think you can handle someone who's obviously pretty red-flaggy. Or you yourself are a happy-in-your-own-skin oddball and don't see oddball-weirdo behavior in others as a sign of something dangerous. Or you just like being a caretaker, a nurturer, to someone who gives you a lot of different kinds of goals for your nurturing. (Can you love me even now? How about now?) Or it turns you on to struggle. Or or or.
It's almost as if you've never realized the truth of "Ladder Theory".
stupid feelings. if only I could turn them off somehow.
There is a not-small community of people who are very, very glad that you not only have feelings, but express them eloquently and use them to advocate for others, alameida.
Probably obvious, but I wanted to say it. Inane Shearer hypothetical notwithstanding.
thanks witt. I appreciate that a lot. I really was getting upset. shearer passes the turing test but is emotionally retarded. but what really explains his behavior is that he is a dick. I mean, I said you don't have to baby me around the whole thread but re-reading 16 and 52 together caused my vision to white out with rage briefly.
it turns out that drugs and alcohol are a great way to turn off feelings, but not a great long-term solution. word to the wise, kids!
in other vicarious thrill seeking news, my friend's new warlord has a present for him: an afghan heroin dealer (big-time to the tune to 500Ks at a go which is maybe meduim-time? I confess I have no idea) who wants to talk to the d/ea. what's the de/a doing over here? I'm glad you asked: they have a big international arm, the better to catch, you know, corrupt indonesian generals and such...er. they are even stocked with fast boats and everything. perhaps even fancy cars though that I've never seen, so maybe crockett and tubbs would have to stay on the boat. fucking hilarious, or would be if the war of (some classes of) people who use (some) drugs weren't so socially destructive.
I got a chance to ask him a real question: you're going to let this guy narc out his competitors and a few underlings who have been getting threatening/out of line lately, and thus consolidate his control over a bigger area and...then what? what's the endgame? what's the fucking point?
his answers: then nothing, there is no endgame, and this will make his friends in the US government owe him a favor and boost his status in his private company. now you know the inside scoop!
Huh. I am the odd man out here. My mind simply would not have gone there. I mean it's triply hypothetical or so since I happily give off a "talk to someone else, kid" vibe so I wouldn't have been in the conversation. But if I had been accidentally radiating humanity, and had gotten into that conversation, my first thought would have been "that sounds tedious; kids play boring games and you have to let them win."
Also, Freud's abandonment of the seduction hypothesis is germane here maybe.
81
shearer: I want to say I'm sorry you spent part of your flight in mortal fear ...
What part of "(Not a true story)" didn't you understand? Actually I haven't been on a plane since 1986 since just being up in the air is enough to induce mortal fear in me.
more seriously, you don't think getting molested as a young person often has life-long bad effects on people's psychological make-up? ...
I think the effects are often exaggerated. Although there is a chicken and egg problem in that by expecting bad results society will to some extent induce them. Things like bad auto accidents seem objectively more traumatic than lots of molestation incidents but don't seem to get blamed as much for later problems. (Of course this depends on the nature and extent of the abuse.) And I think there is a lot of hysteria around the subject so you have people jumping to objectively unlikely conclusions (like dsquared feared) based on a false view of the actual probabilities involved.
"Also, Freud's abandonment of the seduction hypothesis is germane here maybe."
howso? not intended in an unfriendly spirit. or rather, "yes, mr. smearcase! no, mr smearcase! how fascinating, do go on, mr. smearcase!"
reflecting I remember the asean goverments don't like various brands of us agent running around with guns and stuff, so maybe they give the boats to their drug-fighting agency counterparts and then quasi-comandeer them when it comes down to it. I have only seen d/ea agents driving decidedly non-maserati-like cars in narnia. but they do got money. walking-around paying-informant money.
Oh I guess not germane to the original post so much as the mid-thread discussion of the prevalence of abuse and the satanic ritual abuse scare and such. The abandonment of the seduction theory, in my understanding (filtered largely through Janet Malcolm) tells us not that child abuse never happens but that we do well to be careful in evaluating the veracity of such memories on account of the complexity of infantile sexuality. Or something.
And then on the other hand if you're Jeffrey Masson or plenty of other people, you see it as a cowardly denial that invalidates Freud maybe entirely.
||
This interviewee's style of written communication reminds me of a certain troll. Could it be?
|>
I missed the imaginary caveat. I don't deny americans are pruriently obsessed with child molestation and deeply invested in it's being uniquely harming, when this is not invariably the case. but if you think being in a scary auto accident as young person has traumatizing effects roughly equal to those of being repeatly sexually abused by a person in a position of authority and trust over you, I would think your reaction would be rather to agitate for the long-term effects of car accidents to be taken seriously, than to downplay the former.
I was in a car accident at six: standing, unsecured, between the two front seats of my grandmother's car, I got slammed into the metal trim on the dashboard, which broke my nose badly and sent me into shock (partly from seeing my vision red-rimmed and understanding my lashes were all full full of blood.) the main effect was that I have always remembered, and even treasured, the brief sensation of actual flight after the car had stopped and I was still in glorious, self-propelled motion. would you like to show us on the doll where the car touched you, james?
Also it's sort of fun to see my nom de blogge in context. After many years of use, it's become just me and I forget how it amused me enough to start going by it.
COWARDLY DENIAL. but I would say that.
91
... the main effect was that I have always remembered, and even treasured, the brief sensation of actual flight after the car had stopped and I was still in glorious, self-propelled motion. ...
But you weren't thrill seeking as a child?
37: And here I was coming home all excited to tell you guys about how I recycled my "Hell's Kitchen? More like Purgatory's Bistro" joke this evening sitting around the fire with old theater friends and it KILLED. Oh well.
Also, one of my favorite SF writers compared me to Artie Fufkin from This Is Spinal Tap, just because I was a little bit nervous about how things would go with bringing him to town to talk to the @ists. He meant it in a mean way, but he said it nicely.
Also, the dog of one of my close friends, a dog that is universally beloved, and has helped my friend through many personal crises, has lymphoma and has 2 weeks to live. Very sad.
James, among the many things you are doing here, you are conflating two issues. When people panic about homicide and convict lots of innocent people of the crime, it makes homicide no less damaging to the victim.
Or are you now going to explain to me that family members of murder victims are probably exaggerating their sense of loss?
It's always amusing watching Shearer attempt psychoanalysis. It really reminds me of something.
in all fairness, my description in 91 is potentially indicative of reckless, thrill-seeking behavior. nor is it merely retrospective; I expressed the sentiments at the time. but who doesn't like flying?
in actual seriousness, it's mildly annoying that dsquared would have to consider such problems when consuming a innocent cup of hot chocolate, but on the whole you do want caregivers to be alert to signs of abuse, rather than blithely oblivious, given that loads of children are out there suffering right now.
I bet you also jumped off the swing at least once before age 11, al. Thus proving Shearer right about everything. Everything.
OMG you're right; I even wondered if the swing could go all the way around! and I did gymnastics! shearer FTW!1!!!
natilo: sorry to hear about the dog, that's always horrible.
awb: YOU FUCKING RULE! 37 is the best story EVAR.
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So. I've had a painful week at work. One of my very psychotic clients is at a state mental hospital. Her inpatient social worker is new to the hospital and never struck me as terribly competent, particularly since she won't admit to any gaps in her knowledge. She didn't, for example, like it when I asked her about my client's med changes. I think that I may have unintentionally expressed my lack of respect when I asked her to clarify a question in a way that probably made her feel ignorant.
I had this incredibly touching moment with my client who was quite lucid for a bit where she said that she did not want me to think that I had not helped her just because she had wound up where she was and some other stuff about how important I was to her.
I e-mailed my supervisor to let her know that I was concerned that I had alienated the SW. She said she was glad that I had e-mailed because she had gotten a voicemail from the SW and wanted to check in with me before responding. Turns out that the SW had initially contacted the group home manager and asked that I not be allowed back because I was harming my client's treatment. I'm not in trouble with my supervisor or anything but it was awful. Especially since the SW never tried to raise any of her concerns with me before that day other than in the hall that day in front of a bunch of patients as I was heading out and needed to leave.
The idea that she would want me to stop visiting without even saying goodbye strikes me as enormously shitty. I don't know what she knows, and she doesn't know what I know which is why we should be working together.
All of that rational stuff notwithstanding, I've been torn up over this for the past few days.
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sorry bostoniangirl, that sounds awful. I really admire your sticking with a job that must be so emotionally draining. I absolutely agree you shouldn't stop seeing this person without saying goodbye. maybe there is a way to repair your relationship with the sw? you could sort of apologize even though you weren't in the wrong, just as a way of moving the relationship forward, engaging her directly rather than taking the back way of communicating via others?
something that happened when you were 11.
this has been eating me up inside all day. "something that happened." fucking "something." I could tell everyone all the details, and I imagine it might move even shearer to actual sympathy because it was so goddamn horrible. the only reason my mother wasn't there was that she was at the hospital giving birth to my sister and that's why I had to be the woman of the house, but there's no reason I should have to do all that to be treated with a modicum of fucking dignity. I didn't think I could get got like that by shearer of all fucking people but I really am going to cry now. and because I didn't know that about the peas, that's just killing me also. I thought I would be OK with this discussion but I'm clearly not.
I don't know what to tell my husband about why I'm upset, he'll think it was stupid to even talk about it in front of other people. it's not like I don't know someone might be an asshole in an unfogged comments thread after all. it's famously not a group-hug place. whatever, I stone-faced myself out of crying now, I have amazing powers of not crying. fuck it.
If I can, let me contribute a virtual portion of a group hug, al. I admire greatly your willingness to share your tragedies and struggles here -- it is important stuff. Yeah, there are assholes like Shearer who will trivialize what you went through. But you know he's wrong. You know what happened really is a rather big deal and how you've managed to recover is a really big deal and how you help others with all variety of recovery is a very big deal.
HUG!
104: That was my plan, but I do have to coordinate with my boss first and am not supposed to go back until my boss can reach the supervisor.
I wish y'all wouldn't link to TVTropes because I always lose half a day. I have things to do!
Ala, that still happens to me sometimes here too. Even when it comes from someone who thinks about human relations like the interactions of paper dolls, it still riles one up because that's how people want to talk about abuse.
Last night I went to see a play about sexual abuse of children (w00 fun night out!) sponsored by a group that advocates for more effective means of reintroducing sex offenders into society. They were really clear, as was the play, that no one here is advocating for raping children. In fact, treating sex offenders like they might have a constitutional right to life might be the only way they don't end up isolated and driven to offend again. The message was so completely clear. But of course during the hour-long discussion afterward, there are about five ladies in the audience shrieking in angry tones, "Is this group advocating molestation for children? Are we forgetting that these people are sick monsters?"
Like, of course not. I piped up and said, "Do you want us to kill them? Like if we lynch them and hang them from trees, nothing bad will ever happen to your children?" It all got very intense.
Part of what the group, that is sponsored by various churches, was trying to say is that former sex offenders have no community at all, and no one wants to provide them community, because they're horrible people who have done horrible things, so maybe churches should find ways to reach out to them. It's a hard thing to talk about.
And I'm visiting my parents this weekend too which isalways kind of painful.
Sorry to hog your thread,al.
alameida: To the OP, I had the same sinking feeling as you described the conversation, but I was hopeful because of the post title and stuff that it would not be too awful. And I respect you a great deal for being able to work through so many awful things. Thank you for all your contributions.
Shearer: For chrissakes, you don't have to be such a jackass all the time. Jeez.
Anyway, my main suggestion to the conversation, thinking as I was about this conversation, is not only does there need to be a space for sex offenders to talk honestly about their struggles and seek a support network, but there also needs to be an environment in which we actually listen to victims.
I said just about everyone I know has had some kind of non-consensual sexual assault in their life, ranging from violent incest rape as a child to unwanted groping, and I don't at all want to equate those things, but to say that whenever someone brings up what happened to them, the response is "Well, if you didn't send your abuser to prison it must not have been that bad" or "It's so great that you just got over it and are perfectly fine now la la!" or people get mad at you that you didn't react the way they want you to do. And that's why we don't talk about it. People don't want to hear about it unless (a) it completely ruined your life and you're a shell of a human being who doesn't get out of bed ever, and (b) your abuser went to prison and died there. Otherwise, it's too scary. So they tell you you're fine.
thanks di, that really means a lot. there's no reason to let one person get me down like that. I know the vast majority of unfogged commenters are normal sympathetic people. I just feel like he managed to shiv me in this one slender, undefended weak spot.
the main thing I have now is that when I have a sponsee who has to tell me some terrible shit in her step 5 (honest story of her life) I can say, "that happened to me too. it's ok and it wasn't your fault. you don't have to put anything down in the 'what was my part' section, and you don't have to ever say sorry to that fucker." I know that if I could manage to forgive him I would be a happier person. I'm working on it. my step-father was an alcoholic, and he was violently abused by his dad, just terribly beaten and humiliated. he had a miserable life, and destroyed every relationship he had with every person except his sister. every opportunity for happiness he threw away with casual cruelty and violent destruction. he wasn't the master of himself.
I feel like I could even maybe forgive him for me, but for my brother and sister never ever never never, not until the end of time will I forgive him for doing that shit to them. he made my baby brother eat out of the dog bowl on the floor while the rest of us were having dinner at the table, because he made a mistake in his table manners, when he was 5! this tow-headed angel! and I sat up at the table and ate, I didn't run away or throw my plate at the wall or get down under the table with him. I was just afraid. I was so scared, I didn't stand up for him. I comforted him later but what is the use of that, really. something, I guess. intellectually I know I wasn't supposed to be a superhero there but inside I still feel like I failed them, I didn't keep them safe. they are broken people now. glued back kind of, but fundamentally broken. that is the worst of all, way worse than "something happening to you when you were 11."
my step-father killed himself and died alone in a shitty apartment that smelled like piss and bourbon. I didn't feel satisfied when it happened, though, I thought I would. but that's my sister's real dad and she loved him in her way. I don't want to check out like that. I just have to stay sober. my stupid bank machine had an inspirational saying from MLK about not letting bitterness overcome me while I waited for the whirring sounds of the money being dispensed. OK then. fuck bitterness.
and thanks for the support, normal humans. bostoniangirl, don't worry about it--unfogged threads are made for highjacking!
yeah, former child molesters, what to do with them--I honestly don't think my step-father was a danger to anyone that way for a long time, it's just a crime of opportunity by a fucked-up person. it does mean you don't want to give them opportunities but I don't think they should be locked up forever, or shunned by society for all time.
it's not as though they're worse than murderers, after all. and the re-offending rate is actually lower than for many other types of crimes. they are human beings and also deserve to be treated with dignity.
going to sleep, good night all. sorry to bum out the blog.
118: Yeah, one of the factoids offered by the group that I was unaware of is that 3/4 of the re-arrests for sex offenders are for parole violations, not for further abuse. But it gets represented as the incurability of molesters.
Actually I haven't been on a plane since 1986 since just being up in the air is enough to induce mortal fear in me
Says the rational-expectations, you-read-the-EULA-you-deserve-to-die libertarian. This is hilarious.
Fuck. You're statistically safer in a commercial aircraft than you are in front of your PC commenting on unfogged! Or not far off it. Certainly more so than in a car.
alameida, I would have been about 15 seconds late to draw the same conclusion as you in the OP, and found the end of the story a delightful relief.
119: I don't think you've bummed out the blog. Honestly, though I'm not sure I can explain it and maybe I'll spend some time trying to reflect on it, but I feel kind of encouraged by what you have to say. Maybe it's the idea that if you can manage to find the strength to one day at a time keep moving forward and healing and being healed and sharing and making yourself vulnerable, well then who the hell am I to curl up and give up in the face of comparatively trivial challenges? I'm sorry James shivved you in that tender spot. Maybe you know something now that you didn't know before about that specific piece of you he hurt?
123 seconded. This is going to sound sort of like AWB's "And you made it through and you're absolutely fine now!", which I can see would be maddening, but knowing that even hurt as badly as you were and still are, that you can manage to work through it and lead a good? fulfilled? often happy? life despite the damage that was done to you is very helpful for me to know.
Actually I haven't been on a plane since 1986 since just being up in the air is enough to induce mortal fear in me
Says the guy who equates therapy with astrology. Has that mild mental problem improved over time?
Shearer, you really owe alameida an apology for 87.2 and related comments. Your brain is not properly engaged here: you have children yourself, do you not?
126 -- He might just be waiting for a retrograde Neptune to cross his ascendant. Then it will be safe for him to fly again.
Shearer is being an asshole, but he's obviously not actually afraid of flying. What he was saying was the he, unique among all people, is rational at all times. While everyone else, makes fun of republican irrationalities, but holds on to their liberal irrationalities (like worrying about child abuse). I don't think either of his comments was actually unclear about this, though sarcasm is notoriously difficult to catch in text.
Actually, I think the fear of flying thing was straightforward. And of course that Shearer was being as ass.
A lot of Americans are irrationally afraid of terrorism, which means it wasn't a big deal for people to jump out the windows of the World Trade Center on 9/11.
Shearer has a really high IQ.
The fear of flying thing can just be visceral and somewhat organic for some people, I believe. Like 'fear' -- which is really extreme discomfort -- of heights, or a tendency to seasickness. I was on a flight a while back in which a man in a nearby seat was visibly shaky, trembling, throughout. He put on a cheerful face and was otherwise normal (please, everybody, try to ignore my obvious shakiness here as I attempt to eat my meal), and I felt rather badly for him.
In all honesty, this is a very strange thread. I thought the sentiment in 99: it's mildly annoying that dsquared would have to consider such problems when consuming a innocent cup of hot chocolate, but on the whole you do want caregivers to be alert to signs of abuse, rather than blithely oblivious, given that loads of children are out there suffering right now
would be the takeaway. And it takes guts to speak up when something potentially troublesome crosses one's path, but the stakes are pretty high. High enough that it's not really okay to walk away.
We have self-defense programs available (not widely enough) to women, to learn how best to address a potential attacker; perhaps we should have training or rehearsal for how alameida, in this case, might have addressed the mother of the little girl in the OP, had the little girl not clarified that this was about poker. We've talked before here about sociocultural barriers to talking to a parent about her or his child. When you see a parent yanking a child violently around by the arm in a grocery store, and the child is clearly on the road to being traumatized.
Well, thanks to alameida for reminding us all of how seriously we should take this. A great deal of this was entirely swept under the rug in previous generations, to a stunning degree.
I have a friend who is irrationally afraid of planes, and the thing that really confuses me is that he doesn't think "I have an irrational fear that makes me afraid of flying, so I can't do it even though flying is safe" he actually genuinely claims that flying is objectively dangerous.
You're confused because he doesn't recognize his irrational fear as irrational?
Exactly. And I think lots of people have irrational fears that they recognize as irrational. (E.g. I have a friend who can't even stand to hear bees mentioned. She has no trouble recognizing that as irrational.)
Or, after I was mugged I stopped going down that particular block at night. I perfectly well knew that the other block was no different in any way and no safer, but it made me feel better for reasons that I knew to be entirely irrational. But it still made me feel better to avoid that block.
135: I have plenty of irrational fears that I recognise as irrational. I am afraid of jumping out of aeroplanes even though I have a perfectly good parachute on. I am afraid of spiders even though there's no way any British spider could ever harm me. I am sure most people have similar fears - but fear, a lot of the time, is not rational.
I know that many people have irrational fears that they know to be irrational.
What I find surprising is that anyone should be surprised that a person might have an irrational fear and not know it to be irrational.
137: By the definition of rationality in economics, that's not irrational. You have an aversion to a certain street, so you get disutility from using it. There's a perfectly good substitute, so you don't use it.
There must be a coherent definition of "rationality" where something like that is irrational, but I'm not sure what it would be.
What I find surprising is that anyone should be surprised that a person might have an irrational fear and not know it to be irrational.
This is basically about two thirds of politics. Start with the irrational fears and hopes and come up with a way of rationalising them.
This would seem to be the thread for this anecdote: Today I was talking with the daughter of a friend of mine who is 11. Her parents split a couple of years ago, and she has to live part time with her father and his girlfriend out in the suburbs. We were having a pretty normal conversation (given that she is very precocious) and she told me that her father mocks her in front of the girlfriend, apparently (to her) to bolster the gf's spirits, and somehow deflect anger or bitterness away from the gf's own kid, who has some kind of serious behavioral disorder. And she was really freaked out that if she talked about it, her dad would lose custody, and that she would ruin her relationship with him.
So, of course, I told her that this was not her fault, and that she should not hold this too close to herself, and that she did not deserve this treatment. And I asked her permission to talk to her mom about it, and now I have emailed her mom, my friend, to let her know.
And here is where I pretty much butt out of the story, I guess, but it left me feeling pretty drained (I cried too) and like I didn't want to have to hold onto that secret either. So there you have it.
"the 11 year old daughter of a friend of mine" that is, pedants.
142: that seems more like a hint that economics is stupid than that it's not obviously irrational to fear that block. clearly he's no more likely to be mugged there again as any adjacent street (assuming they are all the same with respect to visibility and so forth). so it's irrational to avoid that block. do children get disutility from stepping on a crack in the sidewalk, such that it is not irrational to do so in fear of breaking one's beloved mother's back?
Why is it necessarily irrational to privilege information (about relative safety, in this instance) that you have received due to direct experience over second-order information about relative distribution of crime? I'm not sure there's a learning algorithm that's been devised that wouldn't reduce the probability of taking an action in the face of new evidence that said action produces deleterious consequences.
good job, WHT! also, ajay; your conjunction of examples confuses me. british spiders are harmless and it's irrational to be afraid of them; jumping out of planes is inherently dangerous, parachute or no, so it's perfectly sensible to be afraid of that.
144: Probably not a big shock that I think you did the right thing, and am grateful that you did. Shit's tough on kids, especially when they feel like they're toen between conflicting loyalties and insecure about what it takes to hang on to mom or dad's love. Hope it all works out for the kid.
144: Yeah, muggers might have habits.
OK, I guess my problem here is that I've only ever been mugged on my own street and so haven't had the opportunity to change my habits. but the cracks on the sidewalks?
also, thinking about last night, I have come up with a sure-fire cure for my shearer problem: I'll shun him from all commenting spaces within 200 feet of a decent argument and he'll be reduced to commenting from under a bridge.
151.1: children's prefrontal cortexes (which are heavily implicated in rational decision-making under uncertainty) are not yet developed/not fully developed. A better example would be superstitious habits (lucky socks, or whatever) in adults, but even so building heuristics based on correlations (on the one hand) and reliance on social cues (on the other hand) in the absence of better information are not necessarily irrational strategies.
151: also, thinking about last night, I have come up with a sure-fire cure for my shearer problem: I'll shun him from all commenting spaces within 200 feet of a decent argument and he'll be reduced to commenting from under a bridge.
You know, if you had less of a thrill-seeking personality, this solution would've occurred to you earlier.
In the interests of less wholly dispiriting news about the world, we were out at a family wedding, and little Napoleon Adolf can dance! He's nine, so he's still at that lovely unselfconscious age, but a fat great-uncle from Wigan showed him how to spin and how to do that sort of drop-splits thing, and he was away, giving it the full Northern Soul treatment all night! All the aunties were just ooey over him. Meanwhile, little Ulrike was working it with the Chinese half of the wedding, proving (I think) Jamie Bloodandtreasure's theory that whatever animal the year is named after in Chinese astrology, it is *always* the Year Of the Fat Western Baby.
Hmm. I, too, have fat great-uncles from Wigan.
I'm just saying that if I took up mugging, at first I would have some ambitious plan for randomizing my crimes to keep the police off balance, but pretty quickly I would just settle in some comfortable, dark alley out of laziness.
156: I suspect that most muggers do not come into things with a plan for how they're going to go about it. I think most muggers are like "damn, I could use some money. I will take some from that person who is right there and doesn't look obviously like they'll shoot me to death!" and/or "well, I should go ahead and mug that person so my friends don't make fun of me."
Al, I haven't been around much this weekend but I hope you know how much I value your honesty about such things, not only because it helps me feel better talking about and dealing with my much more minor shit but because I've decided it's my goal in life to raise kids who've dealt with awfulness along those lines and I really, really need to have reassurance as a parent that I'm not being ridiculous there. You help a lot. So far, Shearer never has.
I can't say for sure about how rationally muggers go about things, but certain other ... activities ... certainly take account of things like just where the streetlights are, where there are more or less frequent cop cars going by, where any passersby are more and less likely to become involved (or walk on), and so on.
It sounds like you've done some serious thinking about this, parsimon.
150, 156, 157: The stereotype in Berkeley was that muggings were gang initiations for gangs in Richmond. I don't know if that's true in my case, but it's plausible (young kid, didn't seem to know what he was doing). At any rate, I think it's highly unlikely that he'd try the same block again.
148: Indeed, parachuting is more dangerous than most activities. One of my friends had an exciting incident in paratrooper training where another person came through his parachute and they had to land together with only one parachute at a much higher speed. Things can go wrong, that's why there's a backup chute.
151.1: I guess the extra half a block was convenient, as the block around the corner is actually avoidable.
The driveway / parking spaces behind the bookshop, which is off an alley, sports a variety of used condoms of a newfound morning, at least during certain times of the year. Those of us who've noticed them have analyzed the situation closely.
I have a short clip of the Geebies. I think it's funny, but it's terribly not anonymous, so I'll destroy the link in a day or two. Plus burying it in a comment thread.
I was going to put it in Neb's thread, but it bears some superficial resemblance to this thread topic.
164: luckily, it's private, so nobody can actually look at it.
whoops, forgot I was in the middle of changing that.
Forgot to hit "save". Now it should be available.
I laughed so loudly that Snark came rushing across the house to see if I had hurt myself.
What a coincidence. I'm not wearing a diaper either.
Yes, but what was the trick that the people on the other side of the video did?
They were so clever they typed messages into a website for us after watching the video.
164: but it bears some superficial resemblance to this thread topic.
And fortunately HP's too young to give a superficial description of it to a stranger.
Thoughts upon reading 175:
"Oh, the grandparents must have typed in youtube comments!"
"Of course I didn't look at them; NEVER look at youtube comments!"
"Yes, but the chance that these youtube comments are horrible racist trolling are very, very slim."
"That's true! Off to look at the... hey, they aren't any comments here!"
"I wonder if... oh. You are dumb, Sifu."
"I am, aren't I?"
129
... but he's obviously not actually afraid of flying. What he was saying was the he, unique among all people, is rational at all times. ...
My fear of flying (and heights in general) is real. Although mortal fear might be an exaggeration (I could fly if I had to), I find flying unpleasant and avoid it when I can. And I certainly am not rational at all times nor do I claim to be.
154 is great! and I wanted to say thanks to thorn and lizardbreath and di and others who expressed support. I do have kind of a feeling of success, like, in your face, people who tried to destroy my character!!
I'm still trying to draft the opening line of "please do not be personally offended as I know this is a low-probability fear, but..." It would be useful to have on tap for freaking -out occasions.
137
Or, after I was mugged I stopped going down that particular block at night. I perfectly well knew that the other block was no different in any way and no safer, but it made me feel better for reasons that I knew to be entirely irrational. But it still made me feel better to avoid that block.
I don't think this is irrational at all. The fact you were mugged on block A and not on block B is in fact evidence that block A is more dangerous. Perhaps the mugger lives on block A.
If there's one thing muggers hate, it's commuting.
23.2: who insisted that I go through my camera and delete all the crowd pictures I'd been taking that happened to have children in them, thus preventing me from getting a picture of my sister actually graduating.
Here's my somewhat related, but self-imagined, "incident" from yesterday. I grabbed the "good" digital camera as I was heading out the door to possibly get some (mediocre, but my mediocre) shots while at Mt. St. Helens. We all use it from time to time, and after a couple of shots I discovered that the heretofore seemingly limitless storage was full. As I was flipping through looking for pictures to delete* I came across a bunch my one kid had taken of a group of friends messing around in a sprinkler in someone's yard. All tame, but still teenagers in bathing suits ... on this old guy's camera.
*What actually had filled it all the way up was, numbnuts that I am, I had inadvertently set the thing to take videos--I didn't even know it could. So my first few shots were actually short videos. Fortunately, it turns out you can get an AT&T signal in the video center parking lot way up on the ridge closest to the mountain. The better to get in touch with competent advisers.
I'm quite sure that mugger didn't live on that block. (Both because I lived there for 5 years and would have seen him again if he lived a block away, and for stereotyping reasons.)
When I was looking into which neighborhoods in New York to live in, I did some looking at crime maps. As far as I can tell they typical mugging on Manhattan is: mugger walks across a bridge from the Bronx, mugs someone, goes back home to the Bronx. Central Harlem, being far from any bridges to the Bronx, is actually quite safe (by US city standards and by places I've lived standards, if not by Manhattan standards).
If I were mugged in New York on some block, that I think would be real evidence that block was more dangerous. There's just way more individual block-to-block variation here than there is in south berkeley. Which makes sense when each block has as many people as a neighborhood in another city.
my block sucked because all the buildings after mine were boarded up and the other side was a con-Ed substation, big and empty. it was generally quite safe because the puerto rican guys who controlled the trade on the "corners" didn't want cops and trouble around. a random black dude just tripped out and cold-cocked me, right on the ground. the drug dealers came to my rescue as they regarded it as an inappropriate incursion on their territory.
Before I go to bed I wanted to say thanks for posting that video, Heebie. It cheered me up this evening.
The video has inspired me to start a line of greeting cards with the theme "It couldn't have happened to a nicer relatives that we love dearly."
Not long after I arrived here, I happened to be walking around in a neighborhood just on the border between the main city and one of the neighboring ones (not exactly a suburb) and came across a corner on which someone had written in large letters in chalk: "NO HOOKERS." It was on a small commercial strip on a busy road in a mostly residential area that during the day did not look remarkably anything but bland.
Yeah, muggers might have habits.
FECK! NUNS! REVERSE!
192: Did someone wriite "NO SLICERS" on the opposite corner?
in actual seriousness, it's mildly annoying that dsquared would have to consider such problems when consuming a innocent cup of hot chocolate, but on the whole you do want caregivers to be alert to signs of abuse, rather than blithely oblivious, given that loads of children are out there suffering right now.
Of course, there is a difference between being alert and being too quick to accuse.
It is not uncommon for female clients to raise the issue of possible abuse in custody cases involving daughters. They will allude to possible sexual abuse as a reason they should get custody. Often saying, "my [mom/friend] says I should be concerned too."
When I probe them a little ("what has happened that has caused you concern?"), almost invariably they have absolutely NOTHING. And they dont have any concerns about leaving the child alone with the other parent. But, just want to raise the possible issue so that they can get custody.
Geez, people. This is serious stuff. If you are truly concerned, do something about it. If not, do not freaking use it lightly.
Alamedia: I love your posts.
I live in fear of the issue raised by dsquared.
Accusations are easy to make that totally change your life. I've previously mentioned a friend who was accused of assaulting his autistic daughter. He was in the paper, tv, and radio as the guy who abused his autistic daughter. Even after he was found not guilty, his business sucks. Nobody wants to hire him, even though he is an AMAZING dad.
She is incredibly lucky to have him, yet, because someone who wasnt familiar with them misperceived what happened, their lives were screwed up.
So, yes, we want people to look out for abuse, but think about the consequences of your kid going to live in foster care for 6 months. That isnt going to screw with them??
195, 196: Irresponsible accusations are certainly a terrible thing. But honest doubt has got to be a ghastly problem. Take the OP -- say the kid had left it ambiguous: "Daddy says it's a special game that we're going to have a lot of fun playing together because we're best friends, and Mommy doesn't play it with him anymore." And say it really was innocent, really about poker, and really a dsquared-style secret from Mommy. Alameida would have been irresponsible not to tell the mother, and then what would she have thought, or been supposed to do? Getting it wrong in either direction is a horrifying prospect.
I agreed with alameida that she should tell the mother. Absolutely.
But, this is a minefield of an area. An accusation of sexual abuse is not a zero-sum game. There are severe consequences to everyone. The child being separated from the parent "as a precaution" has severe consequences for that child.
Not horribly long ago, a client was outraged bc her 8 year old daughter watched a movie in the client's ex's bed at night! Shock and horror!
So I asked, "does she watch tv with you in your bed?"
"yes, but that is DIFFERENT!!" Insert righteous indignation.
I can't argue with that. Even an 'honest doubt' standard is slippery -- some of your clients probably have genuine doubts that aren't what I'd call honest, because they talked themselves into worrying because the worry was convenient.
199:
Exactly. They typically have no problem with the kids spending the night with dad. They just want the schedule that they want.
"So you are ok with them spending the night with a potential sexual abuser??"
I share the fear D^2 expressed, doubly so since I am a single man living alone, no kids - pretty much the picture perfect stranger onto whom to project hysterical fears.
As far as the false accusation thing goes - I have a friend who seems to be getting set up for exactly that. His stone cold bitch ex videotapes him and the kids every time he picks them up and drops them off. Given her pattern of past behavior, all the times the kids are in a good mood will be erased, and the times they are cranky will be spliced into a video showing that the kids are always sad when dad picks them up or drops them off. He can do nothing about this except wait and see if his worst fears are realized.
Or build his own record. He can buy a video camera, and take lots of adorable video of him interacting happily with his kids. Not that he should have to worry about it, but if that's what he's afraid of, there are tactics.
And make sure that he and the kids spend lots of time around other people aka witnesses.
Right, spending time around other families and their parents. Who can hold the video camera, and testify to his sterling parentitude.
He should bring someone with him when picking up the kids who can then testify that she's left some pickups that she recorded off the final tape.
202 was my first thought, I think he does have some video records of him and the kids having a blast, but the nastiness of the whole thing still turns my stomach. He's traveled halfway around the world to be with his kids and has basically no support network and nearly no money. She's clearly working towards an accusation that he's hurting the kids, and has already lied about him abusing her physically. It's grotesque - she hit him multiple times during the breakup and now she's claiming it was the other way around. She's forced him to come to a foreign country and deal with all this on his own while she has the support of her family (who are fully on board with trying to strip him of all rights by fair means or foul).
some of your clients probably have genuine doubts that aren't what I'd call honest, because they talked themselves into worrying because the worry was convenient.
Or because once someone seeds a worry like that, it's really, really hard to get it out of your head. I know the first time UNG took Rory out of the country (during the divorce? or maybe it just came up during?), everyone, but everyone, insisted on asking "Aren't you worried that he won't bring her back?" And then, next thing you know, I was worried. Spent a lot of time with my therapist assuring me that this really wasn't likely to happen. But damn, I do still get awfully anxious when they leave the U.S.
I know the thread is dead, but:
1. Wow, group-hug for Alameda. Ugh.
2. AWB's story in 37 was great.
We still have morning coffee by the way. And Mummy did, in fact, know about it, because it was simply too hilarious not to tell her (it was her idea that we could stop off on the way, she just didn't realise that Lucretia would find this so amazingly decadent). All that has happened is that we had a great big "shall we tell mummy the secret" conversation, with much giggling and "It was Daddy's idea, honestly!". I made sure Grandma was there too, just to make sure there was no confusion in future.
209:
There isnt much better than those special bonding activities.
My daughter and I used to stop and get bagels on our way to school.
Oh man, heebie, I have had the longest and most overwhelming day, and I can't tell you how great and hilarious it was to watch a ridiculous video of such lovely people.
(And HP and HP2 weren't bad either.)
Seriously, thank you so much for posting.
Apropos of Stranger Danger, http://t.co/tHTR7z62
god, when I hear of some of the shenanigans bitches pull to get custody, Jesus Christ, lady, don't you love your child at all? give two shits about their happiness? my mom was very afraid my dad would off us and himself on our first solo visit post-divorce (he had tried to kill her with an axe, and his reaction to her leaving was to methodically shoot out every pane of glass in the house, including the tuning bit of the stereo). and he threw me down the stairs in my walker, that was maybe a bit dodgy. but see, it all turned out fine!
I don't think they had the same attitudes about custody in the south in the late 70s/early 80s. nowadays him having gone after her with an axe that one time would probably be a deal-breaker.
will: I'm sorry about your friend, that's horrible. the only person concerned about me being abused was someone also abusing me, to wit my idiot photography teacher. FML.
god, when I hear of some of the shenanigans bitches pull to get custody, Jesus Christ, lady, don't you love your child at all? give two shits about their happiness?
(insert Law and Order type disclaimer about any resemblance to actual people being a total coincidence and shit)
Tips from the pros. Your mother is only a "witness" if she actually saw today's altercation which supposedly went down in broad daylight in the driveway. That she once heard him call you a bitch is not the same thing. Oh, and I don't care how many times you demand it, him calling you bitch isn't an arrestable offense. If you'd shut your face for two seconds and quit talking over me you would have heard me tell you that like four times. If you're a chubby girl in three inch heels and you claim your athletically built ex tried to punch you I'm going to wonder how exactly you managed to avoid that. Be prepared. Don't dodge the question and then try and demonstrate the punch in a comically unbelievable manner. When I point out a lack of evidence and witnesses don't demand I interview your six year old. Go fuck yourself for even thinking I will be a party to messing up a kid in that fashion.
213: and he threw me down the stairs in my walker, that was maybe a bit dodgy.
A touch, perhaps. A yellow card offense at the very least.
Speaking of abuse, incidentally:
||
I finally saw the first episode of Game of Thrones today.
On the upside: it's always great watching Sean Bean work, and a huge huge huge Peter Dinklage fan and Tyrion Lannister is clearly his best performance since his work in In Bruges.
But Jesus fuck, the Dothraki-Daenerys storyline is if anything more horrific and embarrassing than any of the protests about it led me to believe. The "Dothraki" are a ludicrously lurid pastiche of virtually every stereotype of savages and barbarians from the Amazon to the Vikings and from Darkest Africa to the Mongols. And the treatment of Daenerys is so obviously meant as titillation-via-rape that it made me physically ill. I contemplated shelling out for HBO to see this rest of this... but no. Not happening.
|>
teddy: you don't want the child psychologist to have maybe a little chat with the 6 year old? or are there people who are so obviously bulshitting you that you're totally confident all is well on that front? I can believe there would be, and that you'd just basically want to tell the woman to fuck off.
I'm confident it's not warranted here. In my totally hypothetical and made up story this lady has the kid only on weekends and Dad pretty much has full custody. Possibly due to things like this lady having prior arrests for domestic violence which led the family of a different ex of hers to get protective orders which the lady in question then racked up some further arrests for violating those orders. Oh, and after getting the kid to dad he asked for a medical device the kid takes with him which is really pretty important. I relay this request to mom, who promptly (still in a snit because I didn't arrest her ex) jumps into her car where the device is and drives away.
yeah, fuck that. if a kid has never been abused, it seems like someone even raising the possibility would be a really unpleasant experience that you shouldn't put someone through merely because, if I may be uncharitable for a moment, bitches be tripping.
and hello, drive off with the inhaler much (or whatever)? previous dv convictions/restraining orders makes me say hells no.
I'm not sure I ever would have said anything to the cops at any stage. when I was little I distrusted them as adversaries since my family was dealing drugs, more hanging out with some big-time dealers than ever selling that much ourselves, but still. later...still an adversarial attitude. I don't know; my stepdad said it would take social services a long while to ever do anything, way less time than it would take for him to, say, kill us. he only ever mentioned this once, it's not like he was always threatening us or anything. but it's not really the kind of thing you need to hear twice. and take my baby sister away to foster care, what, that's the good ending? I think I would have told the nice officers everything was just jim-dandy, thanks for asking!
the one thing I did consider was planting hard drugs in his car and then narcing him out anonymously. too scared to go through with it, I guess.
213: My cousins' Mom got custody of her kids, and except for one stint where my cousin was in boarding school, they lived wherever USAID sent them. So,they'd see their Dad for 3-4 weeks during the summer and were scared much of the time. I think that my uncle (who recently married a total scam artist) might have pulled a gun on her once. My eldest cousin continued to go once he turned 18 to be there for his sisters.
drive off with the inhaler much (or whatever)?
Or maybe something that rhymes with shminsulin shmump.
I dont speak with the children either.
When they describe some horrible thing happening to their child, I always ask what the child's counsellor or doctor thinks.
"Oh, so it wasnt serious enough to treat?" Ok, so I am not always that snide about it. But, I do ask whether such a serious injury (mental or physical) should be treated by a lawyer or by a doctor or mental health professional.
will -- Opportunities to grow your business!
I would feel pretty confident in getting no contact with believable evidence of an assault with an axe.
I see Teddy's situation all the time:
"This 250 pound man punched you in the face? With his fist? And this picture showing a little redness is your proof?"
Aw, Witt, you're very welcome! I'm so glad you got a kick out of it.
there was a witness to the thing, my dad chopped the phone out of the wall while my mom was on it with her parents talking about leaving him, and then my godfather restrained him from hacking her up, apparently. south carolina represent!
and 223: fuck that, why does she even have visitation rights?