Five Philadelphia cops were fired for allegedly assaulting or threatening women. They’ve all been reinstated.
Two arbitrators appointed by the Fraternal Order of Police overruled the five terminations of Philly cops. A citizens oversight group said the outcomes are “concerning.”
The stupid, it burns like an Arizona sunny day.
Isn’t he the guy whose entire family took out ads that said, “please don’t vote for this asshole?”
I would love to have a book of interviews with trans people about their experiences with things like medicine, job hunting, promotions, safety before and after transitioning. It’s such a fascinating perspective.
Or she’s just a bi curious pedo with a fetish for watching/enabling.
Fucking gross ass creature that one.
I remember briefly wondering the same thing about Linda Tripp. Ultimately, the myth that women are less likely to harm others needs to die in a fire. The only positive thing in detailing how predators and opportunists manipulated their targets is they provide warning signs for those trying to avoid becoming victims in the future.
Yep. Honestly it is annoying that this trope exists at all, because it just enables misogynists to cherry pick the occasions where women get caught doing something bad and then use that to diminish the impact of abuse on women. The way I see it we need to stop feeling sorry for women like this and hold them as accountable as we would like to see men held accountable especially when they harm other women. She gets no sympathy from me. I’ve heard some obnoxious speculation about how maybe she was abused when she was young. Not a justification. That only makes her a piece of shit with a sad backstory. If every person with a sad backstory was a child trafficker though we wouldn’t have any children left.
Monsters find each other. They were (and in her case, are) monsters.
The way I’ve heard it:
Every adult who abuses others was abused as a child, but only a small percentage of those who were abused as children grow up to be abusers themselves.
Basically, most people think: I don’t want to treat anyone the way I was treated, because I know how bad it was. When someone doesn’t respond that way, that’s on them.
That’s a generally good rule of thumb, though I’ll say it’s not 100% that every abuser was abused. A relatively small percentage (about 7% of my offender patients, but that’s a small, skewed sample and not peer reviewed data) had no childhood trauma to speak of and still went on to abuse someone. A larger percentage weren’t sexually abused but did have significant non-sexual trauma.
As you noted, it is definitely true that the vast majority of survivors do not go on to commit offenses. That myth that abuse inevitably leads to more abuse is deeply hurtful to trauma survivors and one of the things that contributes to people sometimes choosing to not seek support. And I’m sure it’s not surprising to find that among offenders, very few received support promptly after their own victimization. Being left to fend for themselves is one of the common factors that seems to have a role in keeping the cycle rolling.
All of that being said, I like to offer a disclaimer in these conversations that nobody owes empathy to abusers, even if the abusers were abused themselves. It is never an excuse, their actions outweigh feeling sad for their pain for most people, and that is perfectly fine. Maxwell and Epstein may have suffered horribly in their lives…I don’t know either’s history so I can’t say. But they surrendered the right for us to prioritize their pain in the story of their lives. We can leave that to any professional treatment providers who may work with them!
I will reserve my sympathy for their victims. If they ever come to the light and seek to rectify their past sins, so be it. That is not on me, and certainly not on the victims. (And this is the line (with a few modifications) that I use when interacting with abused kids in my professional life.)
Explanation ≠ excuse
I have a cross stitch on my wall that expresses exactly that sentiment. I still have to remind my patients of that verbally quite often though.
I would suggest a small disclaimer: as far as anyone knows at that point. I’ve had multiple examples in my own circle where everyone swears up and down that no abuse occurred, but things start to fall into place after 60 or 70 or 80 years and it turns out, oh yeah, there was abuse, just everyone blocked it out.
As you say: might not be sexual abuse specifically, but physical and psychological abuse takes its toll.
Could there be someone who was born a psychopath despite having the best childhood ever? Sure, but I’d have to believe that’s a rare occurrence.
I just recommended The Klansman’s Son: My Journey from White Nationalism to Antiracism: A Memoir by R. Derek Black (name at the time) yesterday to someone, which I think is an excellent example of someone facing their past and making amends for their actions. Was he abused? Sure. Did he continue the abuse? Yup. Did he come to realize, and do everything in his power to make up for what he’d done? Also yup.