Born Evil?

[paradise lost]

Bathsheba, i do understand, i know you seek to understand, but it seems to me that the question "WHY did YOU do THAT?" is better than "WHY did THIS happen?". I feel that responsibility is diminished when understanding is sought. It doesn't HAVE to be this way, but it can be and sadly, in the current climate of therapy-for-all i think it is. That is society's problem though, not yours.

Take sexual abuse. We all know sexual abuse damages lives. Abuse changes people. However, what is the USE of knowing a killer was abused? We KNOW abuse is wrong (an evil itself). We have laws to protect against it, counsellors to help deal with it, drugs to suspend the effects of it while victims scrabble to put themselves back together. It still happens sadly. But it is not an excuse for killing. Every abused child does not grow up and kill. MOST abused children do not grow up and kill.

In some ways i think that's about expectation too. Around 70% of women suffer some sort of abuse or sexual crime in their lifetimes. DId you know that? 70%. That ranges from being flashed once to full-scale, long-term abuse or rape. But we do not talk about it, and when women are abused they feel alone and lost and like it must have been something to do with them because it doesn't happen to everyone else. Our expectation is that something like that will never happen because we do not hear when it happens, and in the vast majority of cases it goes unreported. I know many, MANY women who have been raped, date-raped, molested, flashed, and they didn't report it, they just went on with life. Because they were drunk, drugged, out where they shouldn't have been, you name it. I was flashed once and it never crossed my mind to report it - it barely even registered. So in most cases we pretend this is not happening, and then we are emotionally devastated when it happens to us. Perhaps if people knew how common it was and, crucially, that recovery is possible, they would be less damaged by it in the first place.

As for rapists and murderers and their fate... Could it be that without them the fates of their victims could not be fulfilled? Sometimes suffering is required to teach us things we could not otherwise know. If Judas Iscariot had not betrayed Christ for money, humanity could not have been saved by his crucifixion.

Bx