Can we talk?

Children Become Adults

I recently saw a Steve Wilkos episode. No, I didn’t choose it intentionally; I was at someone else’s house who likes his righteous indignation. I don’t. I don’t like the way he gets in people’s faces and yells at them. All that bad language and theatrics are for TV ratings.
    He may have seemed likeable on Jerry Springer, which was always a bad show but has dwindled down to a cheap carnival. Jerry Springer is an intelligent man with a lot of potential to help fellow men and society at large but has become a sleaze ball, greedy for the millions a nasty public offers up. His insane audiences are as bad as his troubled guests, willing to expose the most sordid things, real or made-up, for a moment in the spotlight. And they all want to get naked or fight each other or both. Seems barbaric, doesn’t it? On that show Steve was the big burly guy with a smile and a heart; the sane person, the good guy contrasted against the crazies. On his own show, he just yells a lot, acting as judge and jury.
    A frequent topic according to my friend is child abuse, particularly sexual abuse of a minor. That is a sensational topic, good for ratings, and a very real phenomenon. On this particular day, he was in a woman’s face, yelling because she gave a ride home to someone accused of molesting her daughter. He wouldn’t let her sit in the chair because in his thinking she didn’t deserve to be comfortable. I knew immediately when he asked how she could give a ride to such a man and the way she didn’t answer or look at him that it was because she had been an abused child. Eventually she confirmed that. You don't need to be a psychiatrist to figure these things out.
    Because we adults don’t want to deal with it and keep  things hushed up, we don’t give the child the time or the right to be angry and hurt. They need to know it’s okay to report it, to talk about it, that they don’t have to tolerate it any more. You read about it all the time or occasionally meet people who experienced it. It stayed hushed up when they were young, they don’t talk about it as adults, even when their own children become victims.
    I knew a man who told me that he and a friend were raped by a man when they were nine years old. The creep told them that’s what people do. He was an adult. The boys had no reason not to believe him. Had they been forewarned about shady behavior, they might have run away. But they trusted him. He couldn’t remember any details, or didn’t want to. But both boys went home and told their mothers. If he had told him to keep it secret like so many pedophiles do, they might have done so. The man was arrested and they were told it was wrong, but they never talked about it again.  His family pretended it never happened and he never received counseling. He has low self-esteem as an adult.
    I agree with Steve Wilcos that this mother is not ready to be the principal caregiver again. But she needs counseling. She needs to see how her own violation let her look the other way when her child needed her protection. She needs the compassion that she never received as a child. She doesn’t need a loud, angry man in her face adding to her lifelong guilt and shame.