The Plan
We can name three layers of maltreatment that we can address, when we deliberately set up the space for collaborative response. The first layer is boredom and deprivation. One face of this is called neglect. Poverty is also included in this.
Concentric communities can provide meals in common. Otherwise sharing goods and space supports sane distribution and good nutrition for health. Think about this as something people do with their extended family and friends. Peer assembly and free speech – this is high sounding language for fun and games. Access to free information is providing for learning. Community organizations can be like magnet schools during the day, specializing in certain interests to further lifelong learning, and enhance social options.
When a community organization operates for social enjoyment, it naturally creates an alternative to staying at home and going without, or staying at home and having a hard time. When permissions are built in to access these options easily, the organization is part of a solid environmental immunity against the first and second layers of domestic maltreatment.
The second layer of maltreatment is overt battering and strife: violent or stressed events that people agree happen in their household. The meanings may be different for each participant, but the basic fact of the event is not in dispute. When individuals have freedom of movement within a setup of intelligent agreements, reasonable boundaries and well-used space, these hard times can be diffused and replaced with useful routines. Of course, counseling attention is another part of better results.
The third layer of maltreatment events are covert assaults, and the mechanisms of unconsciousness that keep them covered. People in these situations can sometimes go for long periods in apparent harmony, because nobody is challenging the structure of life as they know it. We identify a conflict only when the anomaly occurs: somebody starts telling something other than the “official story.” A child makes a report. If anybody believes it, the family goes nuts.
These kinds of conflicts, like compounded incest, tear a family apart. We can call these cases deviancy situations, simply because the stories of the participants deviate so much from one another. Members of the family emphatically don’t agree on what is happening in the home. That there is a problem, however is not usually in dispute. Deviancy situations are highly charged with felt stress.
For the purpose of this basic naming of layers of maltreatment, it is not necessary to name this or that side as the truthful or the deviant side. Just recognize the situation of widely divergent stories about what is or isn’t true. The more the members of the family disagree about what is real, the more everyone can agree that there are widely differing stories. For the purposes of the “applied human rights” model of family health and recovery I am talking about in these pages, this defines deviancy. Sexual abuse generally fits as a subset of this group.
I write these pages to share my thoughts about the particulars of covert assault systems and recovery from the same. With the title I promised Response Ability to End Sexual Abuse. Yet I have come to believe it is not possible to solve covert assault in a vacuum: we have to solve all kinds of domestic strife problems to take care of the special problem of sexual abuse. The whole picture is needed to see how it all fits.
The ability to collaborate and solve covert assaults rests upon proven and practiced results in solving the second layer, overt assaults and strife. The ability to solve overt assaults rests upon solid results in replacing first layer boredom and deprivation with community routines of basic needs being met.
We can guess that families that are steeped in covert assault likely won’t join any organization that creates boundaries that inconvenience the offender. Yet I suggest that human rights communities still offer the solution for dependents in families like these, because news travels fast in our society, and those who otherwise would be victims will figure out they have an entirely new option: they can effectively run away from home.
Let’s project that third layer cases of conflict will be resolved by the same basic options of peer assembly, liberty, free religion and privacy that solve overt assaults, but the stories about the movements and their meanings will vary. Free speech allows this.
The stories do matter when they become spring boards for action. Some will use their stories to justify, when they violate boundaries, this is the nature of sexual assault. Whatever paperwork laws, restraining orders or bullshit agreements people say they have made, push will come to shove, somewhere in the whole recovery from societally ordained sexual abuse.
Boundaries are more than words on paper. Courageous men will have to stand as a line of defense when the anti-constitutionalists make their move to attempt to abduct unwilling victims, this time without the police at their side.
Our advantage will then be in that proving incest or sexual abuse becomes beside the point. There is no need for any child witness to be torn up in court.
The option to incarcerate becomes useful where somebody shows up on the ground of a community organization in which one does not have membership nor permission to enter; trespassing becomes the only criminal violation to bother to prove.
Think about church as something other than a defender of faith. Consider again sanctuary as defender of persons. A network of collaborative community organizations can become vehicles to uplift our whole society, establishing the context for curing child abuse and family violence.
The real common ground is that we apply human rights. We can celebrate diversity in theology, no need to struggle over this. You can choose what resonates with your own experience; we allow for many ways to experience the divine. Or put it this way, celebrate every way to experience the best of what is available to human experience.
When a church, temple, mosque or neighborhood playgroup can allow each member to experience their own direct and unique contact within to their own core of Spirit, that community delivers freedom of religion. Embrace this as fundamental. This is our first Amendment right, and our foundational need.
Granting freedom of religion even down to little children is the grand avenue of recovery, when religion is understood as community formation to support healthy consciousness and interpersonal immune system response. Once concentric community is alive, it forms sanctuary for those who need to run away from home.
Think about the whole thing. The time will come when we move in the Supreme Court for full recognition of Constitutional Rights for all children. The outcome rests on proving the value, indeed the validity of the community organization that oversees their delivery.
Look ahead with me to imagine the scenario where we find ourselves testing in life - and in court - what is the meaning of true church, balanced against the meaning of our Constitution, and upon which rests no less than . . . everything.
Concentric communities can provide meals in common. Otherwise sharing goods and space supports sane distribution and good nutrition for health. Think about this as something people do with their extended family and friends. Peer assembly and free speech – this is high sounding language for fun and games. Access to free information is providing for learning. Community organizations can be like magnet schools during the day, specializing in certain interests to further lifelong learning, and enhance social options.
When a community organization operates for social enjoyment, it naturally creates an alternative to staying at home and going without, or staying at home and having a hard time. When permissions are built in to access these options easily, the organization is part of a solid environmental immunity against the first and second layers of domestic maltreatment.
The second layer of maltreatment is overt battering and strife: violent or stressed events that people agree happen in their household. The meanings may be different for each participant, but the basic fact of the event is not in dispute. When individuals have freedom of movement within a setup of intelligent agreements, reasonable boundaries and well-used space, these hard times can be diffused and replaced with useful routines. Of course, counseling attention is another part of better results.
The third layer of maltreatment events are covert assaults, and the mechanisms of unconsciousness that keep them covered. People in these situations can sometimes go for long periods in apparent harmony, because nobody is challenging the structure of life as they know it. We identify a conflict only when the anomaly occurs: somebody starts telling something other than the “official story.” A child makes a report. If anybody believes it, the family goes nuts.
These kinds of conflicts, like compounded incest, tear a family apart. We can call these cases deviancy situations, simply because the stories of the participants deviate so much from one another. Members of the family emphatically don’t agree on what is happening in the home. That there is a problem, however is not usually in dispute. Deviancy situations are highly charged with felt stress.
For the purpose of this basic naming of layers of maltreatment, it is not necessary to name this or that side as the truthful or the deviant side. Just recognize the situation of widely divergent stories about what is or isn’t true. The more the members of the family disagree about what is real, the more everyone can agree that there are widely differing stories. For the purposes of the “applied human rights” model of family health and recovery I am talking about in these pages, this defines deviancy. Sexual abuse generally fits as a subset of this group.
I write these pages to share my thoughts about the particulars of covert assault systems and recovery from the same. With the title I promised Response Ability to End Sexual Abuse. Yet I have come to believe it is not possible to solve covert assault in a vacuum: we have to solve all kinds of domestic strife problems to take care of the special problem of sexual abuse. The whole picture is needed to see how it all fits.
The ability to collaborate and solve covert assaults rests upon proven and practiced results in solving the second layer, overt assaults and strife. The ability to solve overt assaults rests upon solid results in replacing first layer boredom and deprivation with community routines of basic needs being met.
We can guess that families that are steeped in covert assault likely won’t join any organization that creates boundaries that inconvenience the offender. Yet I suggest that human rights communities still offer the solution for dependents in families like these, because news travels fast in our society, and those who otherwise would be victims will figure out they have an entirely new option: they can effectively run away from home.
Let’s project that third layer cases of conflict will be resolved by the same basic options of peer assembly, liberty, free religion and privacy that solve overt assaults, but the stories about the movements and their meanings will vary. Free speech allows this.
The stories do matter when they become spring boards for action. Some will use their stories to justify, when they violate boundaries, this is the nature of sexual assault. Whatever paperwork laws, restraining orders or bullshit agreements people say they have made, push will come to shove, somewhere in the whole recovery from societally ordained sexual abuse.
Boundaries are more than words on paper. Courageous men will have to stand as a line of defense when the anti-constitutionalists make their move to attempt to abduct unwilling victims, this time without the police at their side.
Our advantage will then be in that proving incest or sexual abuse becomes beside the point. There is no need for any child witness to be torn up in court.
The option to incarcerate becomes useful where somebody shows up on the ground of a community organization in which one does not have membership nor permission to enter; trespassing becomes the only criminal violation to bother to prove.
Think about church as something other than a defender of faith. Consider again sanctuary as defender of persons. A network of collaborative community organizations can become vehicles to uplift our whole society, establishing the context for curing child abuse and family violence.
The real common ground is that we apply human rights. We can celebrate diversity in theology, no need to struggle over this. You can choose what resonates with your own experience; we allow for many ways to experience the divine. Or put it this way, celebrate every way to experience the best of what is available to human experience.
When a church, temple, mosque or neighborhood playgroup can allow each member to experience their own direct and unique contact within to their own core of Spirit, that community delivers freedom of religion. Embrace this as fundamental. This is our first Amendment right, and our foundational need.
Granting freedom of religion even down to little children is the grand avenue of recovery, when religion is understood as community formation to support healthy consciousness and interpersonal immune system response. Once concentric community is alive, it forms sanctuary for those who need to run away from home.
Think about the whole thing. The time will come when we move in the Supreme Court for full recognition of Constitutional Rights for all children. The outcome rests on proving the value, indeed the validity of the community organization that oversees their delivery.
Look ahead with me to imagine the scenario where we find ourselves testing in life - and in court - what is the meaning of true church, balanced against the meaning of our Constitution, and upon which rests no less than . . . everything.
