please feed the sharks

The other day, Cole told me about a podcast from This American Life called Slow to React. Maybe you've heard it. The first act is about a man who was plotting to kill the man who raped him as a boy. He had been 7 years old at the time, a second grader, and the man who raped him was the 15 year old son of family friends. He never told anyone, especially not his parents who were best friends with the babysitter's parents. He knew it would devastate them and burden them with guilt: while they were upstairs drinking wine and playing board games, their son was downstairs being threatened with a knife and raped.

Finally, (I think he was in his 30s) he decided that the only way to protect any other potential victims and to satisfy his own need for revenge would be to kill him. Before he could go through with the murder, his mom called. She had found his Garfield the Cat diary he kept as a boy and found his account of the rape. (His mother later called their friends, the guy's parents, and told them what he had done. She told them that she hoped they had good lives, but please never contact them again. No phone calls, no Christmas cards--nothing.) Knowing that the murder could now be traced to him and his family, he called off his plan. Instead he decided to arrange a meeting.

They met on the street and shook hands. What follows is unbelievable: not only does he admit his guilt, but the two have an honest conversation. Did he have any other victims? He only had one victim: he had not assaulted anyone before or since. Why did he do it? He didn't know. He'd asked himself that same question so many times. He thinks that maybe it had something to do with the fact that until his thirties, he didn't think anyone else's feelings mattered but his. No one else's feelings were real. No one really mattered by him. "If there was one think I could go back and change, that would be it. Did you plan it? No, it was just an impulse he followed in the moment. What did his wife say? She was concerned for their son. Was he safe? Yes. Things had changed when he became a father. He learned to love--really.

The issue of pedophilia weighs heavily on my mind periodically. I studied it in school, and wrote one of my final papers for Sociology weighing the costs and benefits of sex offender registries. It gets complicated thinking about the perspectives of both victims and offenders. I know both personally. I know victims who's trust and security have been almost irrevocably jeopardized. I know an offender who for whatever reason, knows no empathy. I know someone from school, a good person, who struggles with sexual attraction to children. He is strong and does not act on them, but feels intense powerful urges. I have struggled to come up with a perspective that honors the needs of both sides: our need to protect ourselves and our children and our need to protect and assist offenders without alienating them.

I woke up in the middle of the night with a thought. It is not a solution, but I think it might be a step. Or not. I'm still working on it. (My most brilliant moments happen in the middle of the night and last until the next morning when I realize that what looked like brilliance is mostly deranged.) In any case I started thinking about the sharks in the Boston Aquarium. The aquarium has this giant ocean tank. It's huge--23 feet deep, 40 feet wide, and hold 200,000 gallons of water. In case you need that in terms of cereal to understand its magnitude, that's enough milk for a bowl of cereal every day for the next 8,767 years. (Or for the next 2,922 years if you are Cole and need 3 bowls of cereal every day.) For people like us who are fascinated to no end by sea creatures, it is just about the coolest thing ever: the tank holds a few giant sea turtles--one whose name is Myrtle (=lame), barracudas, sting rays, moray eels, and hundreds of colorful reef fish. Oh and also tiger sharks. You may be thinking what we were thinking: "what the??" How/why would you keep sharks in such close proximity as so many delicious fish? So the answer is this: the staff keep the sharks very well fed. They don't need to eat their neighbors because divers are forever sticking fish in their mouths with long feeder poles. It is not a perfect system, but mostly it works and the animals can live in peace. The staff at the Boston Aquarium found a way to take the danger from a predator.

What if we could tell someone is potentially dangerous just by looking at them? Unfortunately a lack of empathy or an abusive upbringing or other attributes that tend to make people dangerous is not a physical attribute. So how do we protect ourselves from harm and others from doing harm? I think the best help comes early, before a compromising situation has arisen. It starts with an awareness of the people around us. And become the the kind of person that others, especially those who are struggling with hard things, can talk to. I have a tendency to dig my head into my own life--taking elliot to stuff, doing house stuff, keeping up with my own family, and the day to day. There have been so many times when I have caught up with a friend or family member who has been going through a hard time and I think "Where have I been? Where was I when this person needed someone?" I wonder if more people were vigilant about taking an active role in the lives of others and were willing to take responsibility for others, could we prevent victimization? Would a predator even become a predator if others had stepped forward early enough to negate the threat?