I think I understand WHY Yeshua of Nazareth told his people to ‘visit the sick and those in prison’. It’s about making sure that those who are utterly powerless don’t get forgotten. If everyone who is like ‘Andrea’ gets a regular parade of inquisitive, persistent, honest, intelligent and compassionate visitors, it will be harder for abusers to get away with abuse.

The general principle is about having checks and balances; ‘interruption’; external reference points. NOTHING can be safely left to be a law unto itself. No-one should ever be left all alone. No institution -mental hospital, boarding school, monastery or convent, military college, orphanage, prison, nursing home – should be completely closed to scrutiny. Nothing, whatever the good intentions with which it was originally set up, should be immune to the ‘surprise inspection’.

Because wherever there are powerless people you will find not only the genuinely compassionate, those with the Healer vocation, you will also find Abusers – many of them disguised as angels of light, many of them extraordinarily clever at lying and covering up their evil deeds.

It’s easy to dismiss the visitors as ‘do-gooders’; to laugh at naive prison visitors who get conned by clever crooks; to query the motives of whistleblowers and rockers-of-the-boat. But: there’s a place for the holy stickybeak who won’t be fobbed off and won’t shut up. What else were the Biblical prophets? They told us that YHWH pokes his nose into all the darkest corners and exposes what is done in secret. He interferes with evil.

There’s an Aussie ‘community developer’ called Dave Andrews who wrote a book called ‘Building a Better World’ – in it one of the ‘case studies’ is that of a brave whistleblower (I forget whether he was a patient or an employee) who became aware of gross abuses being perpetrated inside a Queensland mental hospital. He made noise; he refused to be silenced, and eventually brought about a major inquiry and – I think – criminal convictions. (Sorry I can’t give more details – I have the book but I just spent an hour looking for it in my library and it seems to have gotten mislaid). Dave talks about the incredible courage it takes to do that.

Likewise: we had a surgeon, in a large regional hospital in Australia, who was essentially killing patients by either incompetence or malice or both, and getting away with it; he was eventually exposed, and stopped, only by a combination of patients’ families refusing to be fobbed off, and a courageous nurse who observed things that disturbed her, refused to be silenced despite the hospital ‘covering’ for the doctor, and ultimately took the whole thing to her local Member of Parliament…who, blessings on him for doing his job, listened to her, believed her, and then ALSO himself, in parliament, refused to shut up about the case – result, BIG shake-up of health dept hiring procedures and practices, and Aussie govt chasing after the doctor (who shot through to another country) to bring him to trial on, I think, manslaughter charges.

One of the female patients that I was assigned to was a woman of about 24. I’ve long since forgotten what was wrong with her, but I think it was some sort of motor nueron thing, although there might have been some kind of catatonia involved as well (I’m not medically trained, so please allow for any diagnostic mistakes I may be making here; also, remember that it’s been 17 years). I remember that she was the longest surviving person ever to suffer from this illness, and that her parents — who were quite wealthy — spared no expense to ensure that the agency was always provided with the very latest information on this and other illnesses, as well as nearly anything else it needed (like money, always a chronic problem with these non-profit facilities). I also remember that she was beautiful, in a very classical way that would have been imortalized by a Bottecelli 200 years ago. Because I worked the overnight shift, it was part of my job to awaken, bathe and dress the residents in my charge, in order to have them ready for breakfast and whatever activities their Individual Health Care Plans called for that day. This young woman, while ambulatory, was unable to do anything for herself (including speak), so my task was to guide her to the shower room, remove her clothing, physically wash and dry her, comb her hair, dress her in her day clothes, etc. Now, remember, SHE COULD NOT DO ANYTHING FOR HERSELF. She even had to be hand fed. About all she could do was walk, if you led her. The only movement I ever saw this woman make occured each morning when I removed her clothes; with what appeared to be a summoning up of all her strength, she would bring her arms up to her chest, in a sort-of defensive posture, and begin to shake. NOT shiver with the cold; the house was not cold. Shake, and with a look of abject fear in her eyes. Five mornings a week I bathed that woman, and five mornings a week I got the same response: arms to chest, shaking, fear.

I knew a lot less then than I do today about abuse and abusive people (a scant year before, while teaching at a high school in Nevada, a STUDENT had to take me aside to remind me that another student — who habitually showed up black and blue and with broken bones due to “falling off my skateboard,” “dumping my motor bike,” or “got angry and slammed my fist into a wall” — couldn’t possably be having that many accidents), but when a woman who doesn’t otherwise make a movement brings her arms up to her chest when you undress her and the guy who works the nightshift on my days off refers to her as “my girlfriend,” even a rather dimwitted person like the guy I used to be can start to put two and two together. Unfortunately, my supervisor, or “housemother” (yes, she was a woman) either couldn’t or chose not to. According to her, the young woman shook because she was naked and it was cold (it was NOT cold; the house temperature was always kept at 75, specifically for the comfort of the residents, and God knows even they probably weren’t very comfortable during the summer!), her ability to bring her arms to chest at that moment (and at no other time)…well, that was a little puzzling, but it was probably a reflex of some sort and, remember, there’s a lot we don’t know about this illness. Oh, and that look of fear? It’s just your imagination, Lou; you watch too much TV.”

I continued to work there for nearly a year, and I continued to draw attention to the young woman’s behavior. Meanwhile, I did the only other thing I could think fo to do under the circumstances: I talked gently to the woman whenever I worked with her, telling her she didn’t need to worry when she was in my care, that I wouldn’t hurt her and that no one else would as long as I was around. When the “housemother” wrote me up for insubordination, because I continued to complain, I went over her head and paid a visit to the CEO. A week later, I was fired for being “a disruptive influence on the residents.” They even got a restraining order to prevent me from coming within 500 feet of the resident’s home.

I called the office that investigates crimes against vulnerable adults (Oregon has a Vulnerable Adults Act; every state should). They told me to write them a letter. I wrote the letter and received an acknowledgement. I don’t know what happened after that but, since I never heard about it again — no newspaper or TV exposes — my letter was probably dismissed as the ravings of a disgruntled ex-employee. I wish now that I had thought to write the woman’s parents.

Personally, I think that both the perpetrator (and I’m pretty sure I know who he was), the “housemother” and the administration of this agency were equally culpable, and deserved the same degree of punishment.

Recently, though, I had the opportunity to make up (as much as I ever can REALLY make up) for my past failings, while serving on a jury. The case was a civil trial that grew out of a criminal case involving one Carl Munch, who had reached the end of his fourth stint in prison during the past 20 years. He was sent up the first time for raping each of his four children; he pled guilty to this, but claimed he was drunk at the time. Upon his release, he began attending AA meetings, where he picked up a woman with a young daughter, and subsequently pled guilty-but-drunk to fondling the girl and her 12-year old friend. After serving his sentence, he was picked up for drunk driving (he apparently went to AA meetings only to pick up vulnerable women, preferably with kids) and served a sentence, pleading guilty once more, but calling the incident “a slip.” Finally, he attended an AA New Year’s Eve party, where he attempted to rape an 18-year old girl who weighed about 70 pounds soaking wet and looked like – you guessed it – a 12-year old. This time, he fled the state and lived as a fugitive in Florida (with – yep – another woman with a pre-teen child) for three years before being found, brought back, tried and sent to prison. Mr. Munch, as even his attorney pointed out, is a nasty little man. However, he HAD served every day of his sentences pertaining to the above crimes.

What we were there to decide was whether, in accordance with the newly passed Article 10 of the state law pertaining to sex offenders, Mr. Munch has (a) a congenital abnormality that pre-disposes him to commit sex crimes and/or (b) requires further treatment before he can be released, such treatment to be determined by the judge, if the jury finds in the affirmative. Since this was the first case to be tried under this law in the county (maybe in the state!), everything proceeded at a crawl. The vior dire took two days, a good thing, too! Some people are SO stupid, you wonder how they can even remember to breathe without a prompt, much less sit on a jury and decide a person’s fate! Or maybe they were faking it, trying to get off the jury and back to their boring jobs, which probably pay more than the $40 per day the state provides for sitting in the box. The two days of vior dire were followed by a day of testimony from two independent psychiatrists, one of whom was originally hired by Munch’s team, then dismissed from the case once they read his report. He was subsequently asked to testify for the Attorney General’s office and, as soon as he began talking, you could understand why the other team didn’t want him; he spoke carefully, in a manner that was completely comprehensible to a lay person, and completely damning to the person he’d originally been hired to provide testimony for. He had interviewed Munch for four hours the week before the trial, and found that he blamed everyone but himself for his “mistakes,” had no sympathy whatsoever for his victims and felt, using the defendant’s words, like “I got fucked!” by the system. The second psychiatrist gave his opinion based on Munch’s record; Munch wouldn’t allow himself to be interviewed by the guy after what had happened with the first shrink.

Munch’s attorney was a pregnant woman who looked like she might deliver at any moment. I guessed that she was court appointed (I learned later I was right), since the expression on her face said this was the last client she had hoped to be defending. Her cross-examination of the two psychiatrists was limited to questions about their level of expertise in sex crimes. She managed to get the second guy to admit that he practices psychiatry mainly within the sphere of sports medicine, but the same question directed at the first shrink backfired; turned out he has examined more than 500 pedophiles. She rested her case without calling a single witness (who was she going to call: Munch?) and probably broke a record for speed talking during her summation, so anxious did she seem to have it over with. Under different circumstances, I might have said, “Wait a minute; this guy didn’t get a fair trial. His lawyer obviously wasn’t working to get him acquitted.” But, in this case, the woman clearly had nothing to work with. When a guy who is fighting to get out of spending the rest of his life in a mental institution tells the psychiatrist interviewing him for the purpose of telling a jury whether he is fit to be released into society that “Yeah, I grabbed the girl’s tits; so what?” and “I got fucked at my trial,” he’s pretty much shoved both feet in his mouth and there’s not much that a lawyer can do for him. We actually had the verdict decided within five minutes of retiring; we held off notifying the judge for about 20 minutes out of politeness, and to make sure the county didn’t try to screw us out of having lunch. Anyone reading this who doesn’t think the guy had a congenital abnormality predisposing him to commit sex crimes and requiring further treatment, raise your hand. I thought so.

Afterwards, both the judge and the attorney general’s representative visited the jury room to thank us for the verdict, and to explain that they intend to use Article 10 on only the most dangerous sex offenders (what they call “Level 3”) and not on, for example, some 19-year old who got popped for having sex with his 16-year old girlfriend. I don’t really believe that; I think a couple of these cases will have to go all the way to the Supreme Court before that part of the law is straightened out. But, since a whopping majority of people in psychiatry and psychology seem to agree that there is no cure for pedophilia, and that these guys will do nothing but re-offend, why not change the law entirely, and give them life without parole?