Salon
28th February 1997
Every wednesday i find a seat in a windowless basement room, in a circle of 25 people. The chairs are hard and cold, the level of discomfort far more than physical. There are eight teenage boys and two therapists, all the rest of us are parents. These boys, including my son, are sex offenders.
Some months ago, a school counsellor called and said he needed to speak to me at once. When he arrived I was braced for the worst. What he told me was more unexpected than death-my 14-year-old son had confessed to molesting our other son, who is several years younger. In the parlance of sexual abuse, he had "disclosed," begun the slow unravelling of detail and self-castigation. That moment began my own continuing nausea, like a backward somersault I cannot control. I swing between rage at my son and fury at the damage done by what are called good intentions.
The next day, the police came to his school and arrested him. I arrived as they drove him away, a shrivelled boy sitting behind two armed men. And all that has happened since has been a duller and dirtier knife digging a deeper, nastier wound.
He was jailed for three weeks. I came to visit him that first evening, chill with shock, thinking I was done crying for a while. I brought him the book he was reading. I pressed door buzzers and intercoms, waited behind locked doors, spoke through thick glass windows to distracted guards. The book was denied, without explanation, and the tears came again. When I calmed down, I was given 20 minutes to speak to him.
He came out dressed in ill-fitting work clothes, pale and embarrassed, and we huddled in a crowded room of other parents and other boys, some of them loud and strutting, others silent and withdrawn. I visited every day I was allowed and each time I left he had to go through a strip search. He told me about the other boys, the drive-by shootings, the rapes and the robberies about which they bragged. He told me about recreational drugs I had never heard of. He described R-rated movies he had seen in detention, violent films I had refused to let him see because he was too young. He complained about the food and the boredom, worried about his schoolwork, talked of everything but what had happened.
No one asked about the younger boy, the victim. No one suggested a doctor's exam or a counsellor's interview. No one interviewed my husband and me, no one visited our home. So I arranged for a lawyer for us, and I took my other son to the doctor-who found no evidence of abuse-and to a counsellor. My older son stayed in jail. First one, then two custodial hearings were scheduled and cancelled without explanation. I got lost in the labyrinth of voice mail, lost messages, authority changing hands. I grew skittish and paranoid. I did not know what to do or whom to ask. I was afraid to tell my friends. We sat in the courthouse hallway before the third scheduled hearing in stark terror. I had asked the receptionist in the lobby what to expect. She looked at a schedule, at my son's name and the word "sodomy," and said, "he'll probably be locked up for a few years." The juvenile advocate came out of his office and told me that this hearing, too, had been cancelled. I started to cry. "I don't know what to do," I whispered. "Tell me what to do."
The details of what my sons did are not unlike what I did out of curiosity with my own brother many years ago. Between them there was kissing, there was touching, there was oral contact ("sodomy"). There was a lot of looking. There was no penetration, no force. My youngest son confessed in tears that he had enjoyed it, and was sorry he had got his brother into so much trouble. I still do not know how I feel about what happened. The boys are too many years apart for it to be simple childhood sex play. I am not sure it was abuse, I am certainly not sure it was a crime. I wish it had never happened, but I am not convinced that it is anywhere near as terrible as people think.
I could not voice these doubts to the Wednesday afternoon group, to the judge, to anyone, without threatening my entire family. Although I secretly believe the cure has been much worse than the disease, I am careful not to say so out loud. I know that half the people who work in the "childhood sex abuse field," would then be convinced I was either a victim, a molester or both.
Each boy in our therapy group must "disclose," again and again, to all of us. Certain stories are almost unbearable to hear; they are thick with coercion and deception and denial. These boys, with their pimples and baby fat, are all different, and some are capable of hard things. I know why the boy who raped is here, I know why the boy who penetrated a baby is here. I am not sure why the boy who touched his sister's genitals once, one afternoon, is here-but I see them all tarred with the same brush.
For months I have woken at night and felt myself sink into a swamp of guilt and shame, wondering how we could have not known, how it could have happened here, in the house, while we suspected nothing. My husband is almost paralysed with remorse, convinced somehow his tame and well hidden collection of naked lady pictures is at fault. We seem unable even to consider making love anymore. Neither of us knows how to talk to our children now.
After my son spent three weeks in detention, we had a trial on the issue of custody, attended by social workers, a psychiatrist and a bevy of lawyers arguing on our behalf. With their help, he was allowed home. Three months later, we had a trial on the criminal charges, the felony charges that can never be expunged from his record, that will haunt him for ever. Lawyers had warned us about the district attorney. "He's a maniac on sex charges," one told us.
We were never introduced to him. He knew nothing of our backgrounds, educations, professions, our philosophy of parenting, religious beliefs or lifestyle. None of this was deemed relevant. At the trial he was vehement and personal. He spoke to the judge about our "conflicts of loyalty," that our efforts to regain custody of the one child made it clear we could not care for the other. "That," the DA said, pointing at me, "is a parent who blames the victim."
Our son was sentenced to "time served," a closely supervised probation until he reaches the age of 18 and two years of therapy. He was given dire warnings of what would happen if he made any mistakes at all. The DA vowed to appeal, a vow he has kept, and we still wait our last turn in court.
Everything has changed. Our family looks the same. Only a few people know what has happened. But we are bruised and lost, and this town I have loved living in feels corrupt to me now. The victim has at last been noticed, and is also in therapy-not a group or therapist of our choice, but one chosen by the court. He believes now that his pleasure in being touched was itself bad, that because that touch was forbidden, he himself is bad, that the upsets of the last year are somehow his fault. It does not matter how many times we or anyone tell him different. Now I am afraid to caress him, afraid to go to the bathroom at night because he might wake up and see me in a state of half-dress, afraid to tuck him in and kiss him when he is asleep, lest he have a dreamy memory of being touched in bed.
I am not afraid of our older son. He has also been examined and prodded and interviewed and tested at great length and expense. He shows no signs of a compulsion, no signs of anything except a deep-seated shame and remorse, and the desire to suppress his own blossoming sexual nature. I am supposed to fear him. I am also supposed to give him all my anger. It is his fault, and I must not forgive. It does not matter that he is a child, that he is not fully formed. I do not believe that it is his fault that the system is so cruel, the therapy so shallow, the philosophy so unintelligent.
He tells the same story over and over again, to one stranger after another. In one private session, he is walked through his story in excruciating detail: When did he take his pants off? What did his brother's face look like? What does he think his brother was thinking? And then the young, attractive, female therapist makes him tell her his sexual fantasies, how often he masturbates, whether he ejaculates, what he thinks about when he touches himself. He stares at the floor and whispers his answers
I write to a friend with several children: "If this ever happens in your family, don't tell anyone, don't tell a teacher or a nurse or a counsellor. Don't let them into your house. You can handle it alone, as we could have-but we can't handle this."
What I wish I could do is somehow find a way to tell these boys they have a future. Sometimes I wonder if they do, if they will be allowed redemption, or if they will just go through life in the stocks of social rejection, our new lepers. We plan to move, change neighbourhoods, schools, our lives. And if one more professional says to me, as I tremble on my cold, hard chair on Wednesday afternoon, "I know what you're feeling," I will holler with all my strength: You don't know. You don't. You don't.
