From the Hand of God to You: Everything You Thought You Knew But Did Not by Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti

What happens to this buried, unexpressed grief? In many cases it turns to anger, and ultimately to rage. Some of the angriest kids that are encountered in clinical practice are children whose grief was buried long ago in the inner recesses of their psyche. When the losses are compounded and buried so deep that the child can no longer acknowledge the sorrow, the result can be dehumanization of the losses. At this point the child can evolve into what is considered the ultimate menace or threat to society because the child not only loses his or her capacity to feel anything for his or her own losses, but can no longer feel for the pain of others. The child then becomes capable of committing a violent assault or even a homicide without any feeling of remorse whatsoever. - David Crenshaw, Ph.D., ABPP

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I found this verbal assault before me, in black and white type, this morning on a website that seeks to publish books to help the mentally ill. I’ll wait while you read that quote again, then focus on the use of my word “help”. I am now setting out to both prove and disprove the author of the statement’s point and note, I hold the publisher of this trite, middle-class sentiment as responsible as the author.

This sort of “understanding” of the poor – of the abused shows a basic lack of knowledge and experience as well as an awful tendency to stereotype leading ultimately, a real and tangible prejudice that sets up so many who have been dealt the rough hand, to deal with an even rougher hand as they grow older. What Crenshaw’s statements, like the one above, prove, if anything, is that a boy like Crenshaw, for whatever booksmarts he may have, will never be able to understand what it means to grow up abused, to grow up poor. Or maybe he did; maybe he is poor boy made good, and if he is, then tant pis for all of us and shame on him for so lacking in insight. Worse than all, to grow up a child of sexual abuse, and note, I will not use the word “victim” here for the word gives too much power to the abuser – meaning that we are forever “victims” of the abuser, even as we grow older. It is a system that holds up Ph.D.s like Crenshaw as experts that is most worrisome. Not only are children fucked, but they are fucked again by a society that sees them only one way. So little changes for this child. In both cases, there is a role to be played into which the child is forced over which we lay our neat little template just to keep things straight.

I don’t buy it. I don’t buy any of Crenshaw’s arguments. What happened to choice? What happened to will? Should it be then that I, who grew up in the projects of Northeast London, whose family hails from the poorest town in Scotland, who has some family history of abuse, then by this (and I use the word lightly here) "logic", I ought be pulling out my Luger about now and wondering where Crenshaw is… which I am… wondering where Crenshaw is, that is because I’d really like to sit him down and have a real philosophical and real-world discussion that sets out to first, define our terms, because it seems to me that Crenshaw has clearly drawn a line between "us" and "them".

When we talk “remorse” what exactly are we talking about? Crenshaw has told us that essentially all abused children, and all abused poor children certainly, will grow up “capable” of committing violent assault or homicide (both his words) and with no feeling of “remorse” (which leads us to the definition of the term “sociopath”), hence, let’s take sexually abused children as a subgroup. Crenshaw can only state, if he sticks by his sad guns, that all sexually abused children grow up with no capacity to feel remorse (hence, all sexually abused children grow up to be sociopaths). This is dodgy logic, poor reasoning at best. At its worst, this is deliberate propaganda.

Not all abused children grow up to become felons and sociopaths, an obvious fact. Obvious to everyone but apparently not to Crenshaw. Perhaps his fellow friends or writers he rubs elbows with do not advertise their history on their sleeve – How are we to know who in the world was abused and who was not? Should we, must we, wear our history on our sleeve - a thick black arm-band that defines who we are for the rest of our lives. Is this then a new Nazi Germany in which we must wear a star to denote who we are? This, then, is your identity for the rest of your life; that’s what this means. If you were raped as a child, you will forever “be” that raped child. You will be cornered, hurt, unapproachable, irrational, and that grief… How do you cope with that grief? According to Crenshaw, you do nothing with that grief but take it out on other people. A wounded child is the dangerous child. Hell, let's not examine the parent or adult who abused that child in the first place, or the root of that pathology. Let's skip square one and go straight into the "blaming the victim." It would be un-American to do it any other way.

Of course, we all know that people who were abused ever make it “out” and certainly don’t make their way to the ivy league. And heaven forfend you should discover, Dr. Crenshaw, that you are neighbors with one of “those” people. Yet somehow, remarkably Dr. Crenshaw, “those” people often do survive and to their great credit, they recover from such abuse and go on to become any number of things (including doctors!) in our society. Not all live the neat little life you so carefully script out for us. While we are labelling, why do we not also file away the abused child as the mentally ill one and not the offending relative, parent or otherwise, who raped the child (who to my mind, anyway, is truly the sick one and the one in need of help) - a thought; maybe you could author a paper about the pathology of those adults who we know commit the crime instead of theorizing about the clear and blank future of children who as of yet have committed no sin other than to simply "be".

Perhaps there is a greater chance of abuse in those who were abused. Some evidence points to this, but then, I also heard on the news the other night that some apples cause breast cancer. Really. Then I read that some apples do not. So there are those that do, those that do not, and then, I suppose, those apples that do nothing. It's all symbolic logic.

Our history, however, is not a reliable predictor of future behavior. One only need look at some real criminal masterminds like Jeffrey Dahmer who ate his victims and who came from a perfectly “normal” family in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Dahmer’s day job was so perfectly neutral, even positive: he worked at a chocolate factory. Very Willy Wonka. Of course, this nice, even background did nothing to prevent Dahmer from molesting young boys and then storing them away to cook later, and putting the rest of their bodies in large vats in his living room so that the flesh would decompose and he could dispose of the rest of the corpse without suspicion.

Of course, nobody suspected Dahmer. He didn’t have the right “profile”. It must be some “other” kid – perhaps a kid from the projects? What about a black kid from the projects? And what about some kid who was himself sexually abused: by Crenshaw’s logic, this would be the most befitting profile. Or am I being unfair? Let's put it this way: Dahmer had none of the "indicators" that Crenshaw would point to. Neither did Ted Bundy from what I know. In fact, a lot of serial killers are outright "normal" "nice" guys only they happen to be sociopaths from well-balanced, upper middle-class families. The point: sociopathy is not selective when it comes to class. All incomes seem affected by this. The ruling class is equally likely to commit crime (it may be of a different tone in some cases, but my own anecdotal evidence has proven that the upper-classes are as equally violent as the lower-classes, only there, charges are not pressed and it's kept more hushed. Small wonder the figures are smaller. Lawyers cost more, judges are paid off, pride is a higher factor  - you do the rest of the math here. It's just not that hard.)

It would be wrong to draw a conclusion based merely on class, but hey, who said anything about accuracy here. Our job, if we are as irresponsible as Crenshaw (and those who back him), is to blurt out some half-baked theory and further penalize and stigmatize those who already feel like society’s outcasts and those who feel, without cause, that they are somehow “different” precisely because of a history of sexual abuse (and the social abuse that follows, isolating these people further the same way Crenshaw has here), so let's ostracize them further. Can everybody line up and thank Dr. Crenshaw for further victimizing those people? Some plaque in his honor, etc. Let’s erect a shrine to this paean of ignorance. Scary that Crenshaw could well be a court doctor, nay, “expert”. This makes me want to run screaming down the hallway, “Ixnay! Ixnay! Ixnay!” and handing out ear plugs to anyone within earshot, in case god help us, they should listen to him. Imagine having a hearing in which Crenshaw is an "expert" witness (I use both terms very loosely). The word I cannot emphasize enough is this: scary.

If there is one thing that we do know, we do know that children of sexual abuse almost invariably blame themselves, and rarely their attacker or violator. It is usually, and sadly, on their own heads that they squarely place the blame. This type of self-blame can take years of psychotherapy to help work through and certainly, this requires an extraordinary amount of determination and even empathy (because you do to some extent need to understand the child who “was” to get beyond self-blame).

The empathy required to overcome childhood sexual abuse is then, clearly the opposite of what Crenshaw has in mind when he talks about the homicide without thought or feeling. Crenshaw’s sociopath may sometimes be born of a background of abuse, but just as easily, he is born of privledge and all things found in, yes, my god, Greenwich, Connecticut and even Rye, New York, where I know, I know, it seems only “good things” can come from. In those places, children are never abused, and if they are, they may as well not be because it is swept so quickly under the rug that it is almost as if it never happened at all. Almost.

But let’s assume for argument's sake that the incidence is far lower in those communities (which is the case), then we are saying that all of the crime inflicted on exactly those communities is perpetuated by “those” people. Ah, that would be those people from the projects; those people who were yesterday’s daddy’s little toy and are today’s, or Crenshaw’s anyway, little scapegoat. Either way, it sucks being you, right? If you were daddy’s little play thing and worked your way through it, bravo (Yes, Dr. Crenshaw, people not only survive, they sometimes flourish, even blossom…). It no doubt takes enormous amounts of will and effort to overcome great obstacles in life, but it’s arguable that this is more meritorious than a child who has had no obstacles to overcome and has, instead, had an easy path.

Of course, both are to be held up as good examples: we want to do well in society, regardless of background. What is sad is that it is among the relatively educated and those who supposedly “work” to “help” and “understand” the mentally ill (read: the poor, the fucked, etc etc), that we have too many people like Dr. Crenshaw and not enough people writing articles like this in response and more, letting the publisher of this sort of misinformation (read: propaganda that helps lubricate the wheels of a machine that is poorly functioning and that keeps “people like that” in their place).

Does Crenshaw’s article piss me off? You bet… Absolutely. I find it deplorable. I find it deplorable because I know what it means to be poor and I know what it means to live on that fringe. I also know, or would wager, that Dr. Crenshaw considers himself a “friend” to people “like [me]” and that he is the perfect example of the ineffectual democrat, standing neither here nor there, and the stance he takes, which he truly believes will help is to further victimize and “define”.

Thank you, Dr. Crenshaw, for telling me who I am. Before I read that avalanche of bullshit, I had no clue as to exactly what sort of sociopath I was or could be, nor the amount of violence I am capable of, and all without remorse. Well thank god for you, for that… Pray for small mercies, right?

How very sad.

Thanks for listening,

Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti