Maybe it's not an excuse at all.

An excuse would be an end point, but perhaps it's a beginning. An opening. A man trying to reflect and understand. Do better. But can anyone hear it that way? How do people respond when a boy says "I'm confused about what happened to me..."? You think people really are listening? (hint: "Penn State")

We here know very well how men's silence and isolation alone is very limited. The responsibility you mention also extends to adults everywhere not just perpetrators. The possibility I'm wondering about is, what if nobody ever listened to little Joshua and believed him? Or helped him? And he didn't deal with it very well since he was only 8 years old (or whatever it was) when he was raped by someone he trusted and loved. And nobody did anything to stop it.

I'm not excusing what he did, nor denying consequences for him, but just saying we are all connected, and have a responsibility to listen to boys and men, help them and we are failing miserably at that in a lot of cases. And it's part of the issue.

i just tried to find a research report from the late 1980s - no luck- and so i cannot recall the good doctor's name who first studied l.a. gangs and those boys' history of sexual abuse. nonetheless, i'll be brief and deliver what memory serves. he presented the findings to us at one of the first male conferences i attended in '89 or '90. overwhelming (i think he said 100%!) those boys in the gang had been molested - and more than half by their mothers' boyfriend(s). gang members also used male-on-male rape as part of establishing order and initiation. so, since i lived in la at the time, every drive by shooting, every new murder, every hold up etc... little me simply said to myself "another survivor acts out." that was my take away. and it was the good doctor's as well.

joshua komisarjevsky. jeffrey dahmer. dean corll. john wayne gacy. richard ramirez. need we list more? we know there will be more -- young boys are being "primed" right this fine saturday somewhere in happy valley, u.s.a.

what will it take for this society to "accept" and come to understand that violent men aren't born that way? oh sure, its convenient to think it and want to believe it...and the men's parents sure will want us to believe it too -- if one likes fairy tales.

i would like to know though if a boy who is prone to becoming our next serial killer, and who is being raped today, can actually be plucked from that offending environment and saved.

i will submit -- maybe its not possible to bring a kid back after his brain crossed some definitive hunger to drink blood.

all preventable. how we do it, that is quite a quandary.