Hello NDBiker,
Sorry I've been so slow to respond. I have been involved in communications with newspaper journalists. I've also had another couple of conversations with the defendant and the wife. I've been tied up other ways too.
Thank you for responding. I've been posting about this because I want to hear other opinions and discuss it from different angles. All the more so, because I still had a great deal of ambivalence about how I would enter into this. Some variables are still in play. You are one of very few who has had anything to say. I knew for certain that I needed to be involved in this case, to back up the children. Its not so much to protect them from further harm from their parents. No, its to stand with all those who feel animosity towards their parents so that a path towards justice, instead of submission, can eventually be established. If those of us who feel the animosity don't stand together, who is going to stand with us? We need to protect each other from people who think it not right to feel animosity towards one's parents and towards the Family System as a whole. More often than not this means protecting ourselves from advocates of psychotherapy and religion. But what it really seems to come down to is the Self-Reliance Ethic. It is this ethic which exonerates parents and which parents are playing to. Only by standing together is there a chance that justice can be obtained. Also, if we want to be able to honest with ourselves and others, then we have to protect ourselves from harm which be directed at us from those who are threatened by what we say. People are threatened because what we say defeats their own denial systems. As such, reactions can be hostile and persecutory.
You wrote:
"You know full well that the, fifty year, possible sentence is just a fluff number in the beginning of a case. "
Yes, what you are saying could be true, but maybe not. I feel that there is a very good chance that the jury will convict on all counts. When the jurors deliberate they will not know the potential sentences. Then after the verdict, its just whatever the judge wants to do with him.
I am the public advocate for another man who is serving a life plus sentence over a conflict with a girlfriend and her father. No one died. No one was permanently injured. My friend probably did only the very minimum necessary to save his life. He may be completely innocent. But what he got was a life sentence, plus a whole bunch of years. There were serious problems with the Judge and with his Defense Attorney. Our system can be extremely unfair.
With this religious fundamentalist case, I feel that the more the defendant talks, the more he will incriminate himself because people will be offended by his logic. The more his lawyer tries to advance allegations against the eldest daughter, the more the jury will be angered. They will take it out on the defendant. So conviction on all counts is a definite possibility. Its all the more so now, as I have gotten involved and I am exerting influence.
Our DA's Office has learned that they do not need evidence to convict people. They do it by the creation of a story, a psychotic narrative. The Prosecution will present this, if necessary even trashing their own witnesses. "Don't listen to the witnesses. I have experience with these sorts of cases. Listen to me." They get away with it.
I am not a fan of our criminal justice system. Our country locks up more people and for much longer times than the European countries do. We lock up a higher percentage of our people than does any industrialized nation. We try to use prisons to solve very complex social problems, and it does not work at all. If anything, it makes for a harsher world and increases the crime rate. We have a higher crime rate than do the nations which have less harsh criminal justice systems.
In entering into this, I have to consider that the 50 year sentence is like Russian Roulette. The defendant could get it, or something close to it. If I contribute to it, then I am also responsible for the outcome. This type of responsibility is what comes when one abandons Live and Let Live, or 12-step powerlessness, and instead decides to take action.
In my wanting the defendant to be imprisoned, I am not primarily motivated by a concern that he could hurt more children. First of all, I don't see him as someone who would prey on children outside of the family. Even though the massages started when his eldest daughter was only 8yo, I am not seeing him as a pedophile. He would not go after any other children, because he has no claim on them. With his daughters he feels that he has an ownership right. When he started to rebel against the lifestyle choices he had made, commonly known as a mid-life crisis, he expressed this by acting psychotic and getting put on medication. He found that he no longer liked the wife, because of the dynamics of their enmeshed relationship and because all it amounted to was keeping up appearances. Something like this probably applied to his career choices too. But rather than admit this to himself, he accepted the logic of a psychiatric diagnosis. He then made the eldest daughter into his petting partner, while pretending it was something else. Then when she reaches the age of 16 and starts having sex with a boyfriend, he freaks out. He loads the two of them into his car and drives them to the police station. This daughter gets out of their home, but then he starts grabbing at the younger two and watching them dress and undress. He is not a pedophile, his is a father. This is most evident in the logic he is using to try and defend himself. And this is all the more reason why he must be convicted.
As far as the defendant inflicting more emotional pain, I know he is going to do this, convicted or not. He is still going to try and proclaim his innocence and try to fight this. The high powered sex offender defender he has hired is advancing a reactionary political agenda. So the defendant will continue to attack the credibility of the 3 girls, and the legitimacy of any and all such cases.
For me, where I would stand would have been easier to decide if the children had killed their father, even killed their mother too.
Paul Mones defends parricide cases. We have around 300 per year in the US. Defending them is not easy.
http://www.amazon.com/When-Child-Kills-P...n+a+child+kills Anyway, I've put it out there for everyone. Based on how I have described it, do you think he should be imprisoned? For how long? Do you think the children should recover a financial settlement? How much and how should it be divided? I am not aware that any of them are thinking financial settlement at this time.
So why do I want him to be imprisoned if not to protect other children or to stop the infliction of more emotional pain? Its to make an example of him in order to attack the authority and justification which the Family System invokes when using children for instrumental purposes. The high powered sex offender defender advances the line that the eldest daughter hates her father, and that this is the reason for this entirely unfair prosecution. In the face of such a claim, I have to stand with this eldest daughter, so that such an argument cannot be used, so that her animosity towards her parents can be vindicated. Those of us who feel animosity towards our parents face hostility and denigration from every corner. So then the only way to advance is to band together and start scoring some visible victories.
This case is a better place to take such a stand than many family molestation cases. Our justice system strikes harder on poor people, hard living people, and people with criminal records. Many molestations result in parental separation, or the molestation doesn't even begin until there is parental separation.. This case fits none of these parameters. The parents are married, well-off, financially solvent, white collar, and have spotless records. They are heavily involved in their fundamentalist church. The man has written of his intent to someday become a minister. The husband and wife are standing together. I just found a social networking profile for the wife. It is drenched with the same self serving pity and melodrama that the defendant puts out. Their defense is entirely based on calling the three girls liars, and then faulting our criminal justice system for not seeing this. They are not saying that the acts alleged never happened at all, they just dispute the interpretation. So this is a perfect case to use for an example, and for me to be able to claim as a "scalp". I have to stand with the daughters, with all of the children. This is the only way forwards for those of us who reject the Self-Reliance / Parental Exoneration Ethic and instead demand redress.
I have heard all sorts of horror stories about foster care, foster families, step families, and adoptive families. I believe everything I hear and I am very sorry that people have suffered such. I am also pleased to say that in the US the high water mark in lawsuits is $30Meg, against a county Child Protective Services for sexual abuse in foster care. That kind of a judgement does change things.
But what will really solve the problem is the outing of The Family, that is the biological well-off married parents and liberal pedagogy family, the Good Family. These problems which occur in the other forms do so because people are blinded by the Good Family, and because people accept the Self-Reliance Ethic which underlies it. They see these other forms as poor substitutes, ones where problems are to be tolerated. Well, if people start to understand better how The Family works, and what kinds of safeguards are needed to protect children from being used, then the same issues with these other forms will also be addressed.
As far as the girls getting therapy with money from a financial settlement, I am opposed to therapy and to the entire therapeutic paradigm. I would not recommend it to anyone. When I write to all of the children I am going to elaborate on this and try to discourage them from having any contact with therapists.
No, money would not undo what has happened. I understand this.
These girls are already to doing very well on their own. They were not looking for redress from the legal system. They did not intentionally start this case. They did not "drop a dime" on their parents. It started because the youngest one, in the eighth grade, was talking to a youth councilor. They have not taken deliberate acts to keep it going. It goes because the criminal justice system is how the State legitimates itself.
You know that once this case started the eldest daughter got the younger two removed from the home, and then got herself and her new husband appointed as their legal guardians. No, I am not too worried about these girls. They have demonstrated that they are quite able to act on their own behalf. I am though worried about the boy who ended up taking a psychiatric diagnosis, was placed on medication, and was expelled from the home, for his own good. Him I am very concerned about because he has not acted in his own interest, but rather accepts the logic applied to him.
To focus on this aspect I've been promoting the classic text on the issue:
http://www.amazon.com/Sanity-Madness-Fam...+and+the+familyIt shows how none of these so called conditions would exist outside of the context of the family. It makes for fascinating reading and I strongly recommend it. At this point it may even be available somewhere online.
I also note that in Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari do not pay direct homage to too many people. They in fact seem to oppose Laing and his thesis. But in fact, you could not understand what they are saying without first understanding Laing. They are completely indebted to him, as is Foucault.
Overall what concerns do I have about these children long term? Its the same as I would have with most people, that the Family System has been effective. Its not dysfunctional at all, as they are very much like their parents. They define themselves by Self-Reliance. They may not be able to see how their parents' lives worked and they may end up repeating the pattern. They may not be receptive when I try to encourage them to file a lawsuit. This is their liability. So what they need is deprogramming. They need to be deprogrammed from the doctrine of the Good Family, from Born Again Christianity, and from Motivationalism ( from their father and from their church ). I will explain this when I write to them, but unfortunately I have little to suggest to them. Therapy is the last thing I would suggest, and I will explain this. I will commend them for what they have already done and encourage them to stay in the fight. If we want deprogramming, if we want different ways to live, if we want to stop the instrumentalization of children, then we have to make these things happen. So activism on on behalf of ourselves and others in the same situations has to be the way. I am already being challenged intensely just by having moved off the fence and making communications which influence this.
You wrote:
"Determining a dollar amount that is supposed to have equal value to the amount of torture endured isn’t possible."
I would never try to determine such an amount. These children have been USED, sexual molestation is only one of the more extreme facets of this. I want to establish the principle that if someone uses a child, then they must pay. I want to clean these parents out, leave them with nothing. Whatever they have, I want to make sure that the children get it. The children should not have been removed from the home. It should be theirs just as much as it was the parents'. The perpetrators are the ones who should have been removed and that home and everything else should now belong to the children. You might think of this as a variation on divorce and on the definition of Community Property.
You wrote:
"If you used animosity as your foundation for a case in proving that children were created entirely for utilitarian purposes, it would be impossible to prove. Animosity can come from too many different sources. It would be too easy for the defense to show an outside source and leave a jury without certainty."
Well certainly here the Defense is trying to use a claim of animosity as the cornerstone of its case. My first interest is in sinking this as a defense and turning it around. Certainly their church would try to find other explanations for animosity. This already seems to be in play. My own argument about utilitarian purposes is moral not legal. That is, it applies in all cases, not just this one. So really all that is necessary is to claim animosity, not to prove it or legitimate it. Again this could be seen as a variation on the divorce law and the concept of irreconcilability.
Long term I don't see civil suits as the remedy, too cumbersome. Holding parents accountable and bringing the Family System into check will be best served by more streamlined processes than lawsuits, but we are not there yet. One simple reform which I support would be to let the US follow Europe and prohibit disinheritance. Later I would see something like the Family Court or the Probate Court as the remedy. Simply go in and claim "irreconcilable differences" and proceed to a settlement.
Remember, I'm not advocating a penalty for sex or conception. That is not the issue here. Rather its for using a child. I mean like how some people would obtain a puppy or a kitten, and then abandon it after the summer. Or think of the way many men have used mistresses and then paid them hush money when they were done.
I want children to have social and financial rights and I want there to be institutions which safeguard these. These are to be independent of the family, Children should not be used by the family. But neither should they be used by the State or our society in order to keep their parents in harness. Children must be provided for, no matter what. Leaving them to their parents alone is high risk. They must have other adult connections, other places to go besides the familial domicile. Otherwise we will always be picking up the pieces at the end. So no, I'm not advocating a penalty for sex or conception or for trying to tell people not to have children. I don't see that it can work that way. My primary intent is to see to it that children are not seen as and used as house pets, and then told that they have zero redress.
You wrote:
"'If you decline to ever strike back, then the abusers win.' What a load of crap! Everything you have typed so far has been about manipulating people into your view of things. A lot more could be achieved with a lot less!"
Well, what penalty do you think the defendant should get? Do you think the children are entitled to financial compensation beyond that?
As far as being able to strike back, I don't mean just as it pertains to this case. I mean ever. If I can never strike back what could that mean? It must mean that I have been so shaped by the Family System, so influenced by its high level of functionality and effectiveness, that I am unable to act against it. In that case it would have to mean that my abusers have won. They have made me submit.
The Family System would then have been as effective on me as are the sharp stones and hot coals which primitive societies use for scarification and genital mutilation. Never being able to strike back would mean that I accept this and I am incapable of opposing it, because I have been broken, because I accept its logic.
Since this is not what I want, I have to find places to act. I am acting here, and I hope that by making a good showing here, I will be able to find more situations in which to act. What I most hope for is to find comrades. To a certain extent now I do have a high profile journalist in my camp.
I am being straight about what I am doing and why. The people who are doing unfair manipulations are the parents who use children plus doctrine from pedagogy manuals, psychotherapy, and religion to give themselves social identity.
Thank you for reading my posts and for giving a thoughtful reply and for sharing your views,
Becoming Other
http://theexploitedunited.onlinewebshop.net/31:45 - 35:40
http://youtu.be/FZYs8OGeCAA?t=31m45sWhen Love Comes to Town
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2mIzIBoPtU
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