Jan Whitaker Let's not dismiss this out of hand. I think this is about people who were abused as children themselves and then went on to behave the same. Why should they not be compensated?
Steve Thomas For the same reason murderers who were mistreated as children (which amounts to all of them) forfeit any right they had to any sympathy for it.
Pick your favorite mass murderer and I don't care if it's Stalin or Hitler or Richard Speck. Do you realize what crap those people went through as kids? Do you think they should have been given monetary "redress" for it *after* they killed all those people?
If society wants to acknowledge that child mistreatment is everybody's business, that's great. Because whether people realize it or not, it absolutely is. But the buck has to stop somewhere.
Predatory adults have no excuse. It's a known fact that most abused children *don't* turn on the rest of us later on. To reward those who do it doesn't just diminish the ones who successfully fought against and surmounted the piles of crap they were handed, it comes *extremely* close to saying that nobody's responsible for their behavior because of determinism.
My strongly held opinion is that that attitude actually makes sense when applied to children, but somewhere around age 18 or 21, I think it's crucial that the opposite concept of free will be recognized.
Protection is a legitimate role of government. Paying people who have themselves preyed on children serves no protective function.
It arguably does the opposite.
Sylvie Imelda Shene I'm with you Steve Thomas! I could not agree more with you! I have compassion for the children they once were, but I have no compassion for the adults they have become! As adults, we can use our privilege of being adults to go on a journey to find the help and support we need. As a child, I always said to myself: the pain stops in me and I will never be like them. It has been a long journey for me, it took me over 40 years to find the help and the support I needed, but I broke the circle of repetition compulsion and this is my proudest achievement in life. My experience was the same as Alice Miller: "It has taken me all my life to allow myself to be what I am and to listen to what my inner self is telling me, more and more directly, without waiting for permission from others or currying approval from people symbolizing my parents."
Steve Thomas The Ghost of Christmas Present quoting Scrooge's words back to him once he had changed his attitude regarding charity.
An Alice Miller line that for some reason made an impact on me was "We put these people in prison because we don't know what else to do with them."
Punishment is actually not just beside the point, it's pointless. I also think that Australian Robin Grille is right in his assessment that the carrot is as poisonous as the stick, that reward is the just same manipulative authoritarianism showing its sweet side.
Predatory pedophiles belong in jail because we're entitled to protect ourselves and don't know what else to do with them. "Treatment", from what I understand, has so far been close to 100% ineffective. You can argue how long or short sentences ought to be, but money is or at least probably should be useless to people behind bars.
If somehow Australian experts have inadvertently stumbled onto some kind of crazy magic bullet that eventually shows itself to lower recidivism rates, I'll applaud it. Excuse me if I remain skeptical until then.
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