16 February 2024
I am pleased that they do this. They need to know all they can about this in order to be more attuned and vigilant overseers, watching over the flock of their families and as well, helping to guard the church and other social situations. Men are made to watch out for wolves, and sex abusers are wolves.
This is a course of greater social relevance and importance currently than perhaps at any time previously. Our culture has become inured to reports of widespread sex abuse. We have assumed patterned responses to this social damage, but without relevant education regarding the severity and nature of it. So from a learning perspective, we have been fossilizing our errors in understanding this social phenomenon.
When we discount the depth of the damage, we have become, without realizing it, a force that can present greater psychological hurdles and difficulties for a victim in the event of the disclosure of abuse in our church, our school, or any social group where we are members. If a child begins intimations suggesting the need for a disclosure of abuse, we can too easily respond in a way that greatly minimizes the severity, mostly because of our ignorance.
Therefore, we need to not merely take this course, watching all the videos and doing all the reading. Rather, we need to view the videos again and again, maybe reviewing at six-months intervals, to get the material ingrained within our minds. We have to socially re-engineer ourselves in order to be ready to respond to the most subtle overtures towards an eventual disclosure from an abused child or youth... lest we "drop the ball," and cause harm before we even realize what was happening, that a child sought our trust and quickly decided that we were not safe to engage on that topic.
In his introductory video for this course, our seminary leader said that the biggest reason cases of sexual abuse have become so much more numerous over the past few decades is because our U.S. culture has given greater and greater legal freedom to the production, distribution, and consumption of pornography. I believe he has a strong point. If it has not become socially acceptable to consume pornography, I know that some believers will claim that it is virtually ubiquitous and almost irresistible. Just last night at a multi-cultural dinner with a large church in this area, I sat with a 55-year-old man, a strong believer, who said to me and my sons, "every man struggles with pornography."
My wife notes that earlier generations had "dirty magazines," but did not have fingertip cellphone access to photos and videos of people in compromising situations, engaged in ungodly physical relations. This, she adds, is highly addictive to the brain. She studies the effects of addition on the brain with Neil Postman's books. There, we learn that the brain scan of a person addicted to anything, even social media (which many assume to be relatively benign as an addiction), appear indistinguishable from the brain scans of a heavy drug user, with portions of the brain shut down.
One speaker in our course says that the brains of a person sexually abused as a child have whole areas shut down, just like you see in stroke victims. This is profoundly disturbing when you think that these people, made in God's image, are just starting out in life. They didn't get a chance to form a healthy experience of their emotions before their brains were damaged. They do not know how to interpret their environments, and feel unsafe in situations which have any link to remind them of situations and circumstances where they were abused.
And it is a subject commonly misunderstood, even by social leaders in positions where it is of great importance that they have a solid understanding of the relevant research.
