crimes against children and our rage

Written by Cathoel Jorss, published 11 years ago

A sex offender or child killer gets convicted. Somebody posts about it on Facebook. Their thread fills up with eager commentary, almost lip-smacking: Got the bastard! May he rot! Hope he gets raped inside, hope he gets torn. There’s a self-righteous tone of “He deserves his victim’s fate, only worse.” This vindictiveness and the sense of moral entitlement sicken me. “He” had “that” done to him, as a child, almost certainly, or has been damaged in some way. Where is the difference between him taking it out on another child and us punitively taking it out on him? What is the difference between what he put that woman through and what we are now so virtuously decreeing he should suffer? It feels Old Testament, feels primitive. I discuss this queasy feeling with my local German, who instantly gets it. He says: in Germany on Facebook there are many Nazi pages, real Nazis, always hiding behind this same rubric of “death penalty to child molesters.” It’s under the flag of “save our children,” he says. I’m uneasily reminded of anti-abortion extremists who believe that “baby murdering” doctors are so evil they can righteously be shot in cold blood. Nobody deserves rape. Nobody, not even a rapist. They deserve a heavier sentence than a smuggler. They deserve to be stopped and prevented and given at least the opportunity for rehabilitation. Some are unrepentant and can’t heal, true sociopaths who need locking away, for the safety of the community. But who are we as a people to gang up and declare that we are pure and they must suffer. 90% of our most commonly available porn according to an article I posted this week involves violence against “the talent” – usually women. Foulness and entitlement and a spoilt, rotten, egotistical, moralising snatching of what suits us best, no matter what, pervade our culture and are draining the teeming seas, lopping whole forests and beheading mountains, rupturing the very liveability of the Earth. You can’t fight fire with fire or fear with fear. The fantasy that all the evil can be projected cleanly onto one monstrous, identifiable stranger who is then locked away is a dangerous and to me deeply repugnant fallacy.