On the Ethics of Empathy with Abusers
Bullfrog
Shipmate
So, I'm not sure anyone else is following, but an awful lot of geeks (self included, I'll admit) are rather upset because a certain famous author has been accused of some rather impressive feats of sexual impropriety. And this was an author who had cultivated a reputation as a stand-up gentleman for women's rights, even victim's rights; and wrote in a way that conveyed a serious understanding of the issues involved. He should've been a pretty trustworthy guy. And, bluntly, was old enough to have bloody known better than to do...that.
Folks who know this story may know who I refer to. But I don't really want to get into it, just setting up the context. Bear with me...
I read a rather revolting account of his misbehavior on a periodical called Vulture, and...ick. Don't need to read it unless you want to. It combines some psychological sketches derived from his life, also his written work. The article also includes specific accounts of the actions he had allegedly taken against various women, one recent one in particular that went into gruesome detail.
It all seems entirely plausible, to my disgust. Unproven, of course, and I'm sure he'll have some defenders, but plausible. God knows I've known guys like that. God knows we all have. It's a crying shame every time.
Again, let me reiterate that I am not here to say whether or not he did these things, just setting up a case study...
But what had my soul worked into a pretzel was that I found myself struggling to empathize with this almost literal f-ing vampire. I found myself going "Well, let's see, looking at the traumatic backstory, looking at the themes in his work...yeah. I could see someone ending up like that." And at the same time..."Dude! You're older than I am and I'm kinda middle aged! How the heck did you not check yourself?"
I'm afraid to empathize with monsters, especially male monsters. It seems easier, perhaps socially better, to just exile them, if not execute them for the safety of everyone around them. That's not a literal policy suggestion.
And I'll say it again...I don't know of the truth of the allegations, I'm just reflecting on the kind of man these allegations reflect, which I think is a man that exists in many places.
Is there a constructive purpose to empathizing with truly monstrous people? Given the general misery of the world, it seems a waste. Yet...it seems to be a thing I do.
I'm also aware that this thread might get radioactive on multiple levels, I won't complain if a host decides it's too horrible to discuss. It's just burning in me and this seems a good place for burning questions. Pun intended.
(ETA Changed title, DT Temp Hosting)
Folks who know this story may know who I refer to. But I don't really want to get into it, just setting up the context. Bear with me...
I read a rather revolting account of his misbehavior on a periodical called Vulture, and...ick. Don't need to read it unless you want to. It combines some psychological sketches derived from his life, also his written work. The article also includes specific accounts of the actions he had allegedly taken against various women, one recent one in particular that went into gruesome detail.
It all seems entirely plausible, to my disgust. Unproven, of course, and I'm sure he'll have some defenders, but plausible. God knows I've known guys like that. God knows we all have. It's a crying shame every time.
Again, let me reiterate that I am not here to say whether or not he did these things, just setting up a case study...
But what had my soul worked into a pretzel was that I found myself struggling to empathize with this almost literal f-ing vampire. I found myself going "Well, let's see, looking at the traumatic backstory, looking at the themes in his work...yeah. I could see someone ending up like that." And at the same time..."Dude! You're older than I am and I'm kinda middle aged! How the heck did you not check yourself?"
I'm afraid to empathize with monsters, especially male monsters. It seems easier, perhaps socially better, to just exile them, if not execute them for the safety of everyone around them. That's not a literal policy suggestion.
And I'll say it again...I don't know of the truth of the allegations, I'm just reflecting on the kind of man these allegations reflect, which I think is a man that exists in many places.
Is there a constructive purpose to empathizing with truly monstrous people? Given the general misery of the world, it seems a waste. Yet...it seems to be a thing I do.
I'm also aware that this thread might get radioactive on multiple levels, I won't complain if a host decides it's too horrible to discuss. It's just burning in me and this seems a good place for burning questions. Pun intended.
(ETA Changed title, DT Temp Hosting)
Comments
Acceptance is a much more achievable and I would say, on the occasions I work with offenders, perhaps more ethical goal.
But I note you don't have to like someone, or endorse someone's behaviour to try to understand / empathise with someone.
Yeah, "acceptance" is an interesting word. "Unconditional positive regard" sounds rather toxic, but "acceptance" feels more approachable, seems to run against the concept of "exile."
Thanks for the reminder. I think my better side agrees, though I'm struggling these days.
And on top of that, I think when someone becomes a public person, there's a way that their projected persona becomes something larger and more dramatic than their mere person, which is really dangerous. And that's a piece of what happened here. That might be part of what I'm thinking about.
I suspect being wildly famous and surrounded by enablers didn’t help with the whole keeping yourself in check.
I am reminded, amidst all the considerations of impaired consent that surround many of these allegations, of the President Elect, who famously said that he, and other famous people, could just walk up to women and grab them intimately, and that they let you.
There's no consideration in this statement about whether the women might actually want to be grabbed, or gain pleasure from the grabbing - there's just "I want to do this, and she didn't stop me".
It's very uncomfortable admiring and respecting the abilities of someone who may be responsible for deeply wrong actions.
Next time I turned it around, most of the I worked with substance abusers had previously been abused in their childhoods themselves. When I approached the topic from how abuse impacted them as children, the dynamic changed. There was a lot of personal grief expressed, and they seemed more open to discussing how that carried on into their own families.
Part of the discussion then was on how to break the cycle. Number one was work towards recovery.
That said, there is still a lot of abuse not related to substance abuse.
You talk of a well-known author who has been accused of abuse.
Normally, I would say a person is innocent until proven guilty. Of course, this only applies to courts of law. Often times, though, the abused do not want to go to that level because they fear the system is just as abusive. Fortunately, many states have come up with victims abuse programs which will help them through the process.
There recently was a well-known contemporary Christian music writer here in the US that has been found guilty of sexual abuse. His publishing house immediately dropped him and many denominations who had his music in their hymnology recommended not using him again. He has come out and apologized for the harm he has done, but that harm still lasts in the souls of his victims. (Note, this is not the person recently called to HELL in Ship of Fools).
On a congregational level there is the question of what you do if a member of the congregation turns out to be an abuser. Federal and state laws do require reporting of any suspected abuse of children and, in some locales, elders. I have submitted a couple of reports myself. I really want to make sure the victims are protected from any further harm. I also want to see the cycle be broken. But there still is the question of how you minister to the abuser. You certainly cannot give them the opportunity for more abuse, but can you deny the sacraments to them? Where is it possible to welcome them back to the table? I guess it is on a case-by-case situation.
However, I am reminded of a notorious slaver who wrote probably one of the most widely used hymns in Western Christendom. This was after his conversion, yes. If he had written it in today's zeitgeist, would it be accepted or rejected? I would say the later more than the former.
And this isn't the first case of that I've seen, nor is it the nearest to my own life. And I can totally see the causation where a messed up childhood leads to a messed up adulthood. I can feel that. With imagination, I could see myself ending up like that, and that's where the empathy comes in, maybe.
But at the same time, I feel like being an adult means that you're responsible for your behavior. You have to claim your baggage, so to speak, and practice self discipline so that you don't turn into a thing driven more by your traumas than by your sense of self.
I also find that when I want to identify someone as a monster, I remember that God loves and sustains all God's creatures, including the "monster." That doesn't necessarily allow me to move to empathy for the person, but I seem to get a sense of God's sorrow at the pain of our world. I then seem to move to sharing God's sorrow (an empathy with God?) which moves me away from the binary of monster-good person.
Amen.
This. "Hurt people hurt people" may be a reason but it's not an excuse. Not all hurt people pay the hurt forward. Others find ways to ensure they don't.
Empathy may not be quite the word ... Their childhood experiences sound horrific. I feel sorry for them - and anyone else who went through similar. Does that excuse what followed. No it doesn't.
Well, people did say no and try to stop them ... But they didn't count.
But that's not an excuse. And I think for responsibility, that's especially true for an adult, especially a man who carries a great deal of privilege and power.
And this becomes a justice question, I think. What's the point?
Is it to "correct" a broken individual? The machine - malfunctioning - broke those machines, fix this machine so it doesn't do that again.
Is it to provide recompense to the victims? The machine - malfunctioning or not - broke these other machines, we need to fix them; and it's not fair that everyone has to pay for this one machine's fault. Maybe paying the debt will fix this machine too, or scare it into not doing that again.
Is it to isolate the perpetrator so that he's physically incapable of harming another human being? This machine is fundamentally broken, nobody go near it.
Is it to inflict pain on the perpetrator so that the victims feel better, an economic exchange in suffering? These machines are broken by this machine's operation, let's break this machine too.
The word excuse, I think, implies an avoidance of the problem. It's cheap grace, "Oh, it's ok, you're still a good person, carry on like it didn't happen." It's a caricature of the gospel, I think, and one I've heard from people in various ways.
Repentance needs some show of transformation.
Thank you, @Bullfrog, you have articulately raised a lot of the questions that are at stake. Without denying empathy, or emotion, you have moved this onto a ground where we can talk about strategies and what might be appropriate in particular cases.
I take a different perspective. A lot of abusive behavior is the kind of things that humans do much more than virtually any other living creature. Pretending that this isn't so is what's really "dehumanizing" in the most literal sense of the word.
I know someone who likes to go on about people who commit crimes being 'monsters' and I instinctively recoil from it as front page tabloid speak used to demonise people- and with a lot of things playing into who they 'monster' and who, even though they committed a horrible crime, gets humanised and treated more like a victim.
I work on area of history where horrific cruelty happened and have written about the psychology and motives of some actual witch hunters in the early modern period. These were people who did horrific things.
Empathy is a tricky word because it has connotations of quite touchy- feely sympathy - and there are 17th century people I do feel that way about - I've read so much of their own words, they feel like people I know and care about, but the zealous witch-hunters aren't like that. They're the ones who even by contemporary standards were unusually zealous in pursuing witch hunting.
They were often troublesome and troubled people by their own society's standards and their witch- hunts tended to blow up in their faces after initial success. It's not the touchy-feely kind of empathy trying to understand them - it's more kind of seeing why things made sense to them. If you can't explain why the witch hunt made sense to people you cant explain the witch hunt. And it's very important to have some idea why and how that happened.
17th century people weren't monsters - they were ordinary people like us, containing good and bad. Just saying the zealous witch hunters were 'monsters' doesn't help to understand them and to understand them you have to, to some extent, be able to see their world through their eyes - to see why when this person's cows died, he chose the explanation of a massive witchcraft conspiracy while another person might have seen it as punishment for their sins requiring that they should repent and ask God's mercy and not take up looking for witches.
It's a kind of empathy but it's more trying to see how something happened or made sense to someone. I find a lot of people, perhaps understandably, struggle with that when it comes to the witch hunts. They easily and, quite rightly, empathise with the accused witch but they then just want to 'monster' the accusers and don't want to understand why those accusations were made and were credible to people just like us.
And that to me is dangerous- it means we don't learn what is to me a cardinal lesson of the witch hunts that we, if told the right things by credible authorities to dehumanise others and made to feel a sense of threat to ourselves could just as easily accept and carry out similar cruelty.
So there needs to be a willingness to see through the eyes of people who torture and abuse, to see how they think and feel without excusing them. That involves a measure of empathy- if you don't see how it came about, how can you see how to prevent it?
Is it John Newton?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazing_Grace
If I recall, and I'm trying to type this without being unduly critical of the RCC, one big failure of the RCC in such scandals was they invested a lot of effort on the basis that they could "reform" abusers, in this case abusers of children, which is of course another scale of ick. And from my situation, it's very hard to tell how much of this was done in good faith, how much of this was done out of PR or, worse, tacit permission...barf...
And I don't pretend to know which, it was all before I was born. But I assume at least some of them were trying to be kind.
Story I read was the RCC would spend a lot of resources trying to discreetly reform these men who did horrible things in a collar, send them to another parish thinking it was fixed, and...they'd re-offend. And then the story would eventually hit the secular media and - appropriately, I think - it would raise a furious storm of rage against the institutional church. A seminary prof told us about wearing a clergy collar while he was in seminary in the 1970s in Boston and getting all kinds of flak for it, even though he was protestant, merely for the association.
And that's probably why empathy is scary. And that's why it's tempting to use words like "monster." There's a common dynamic that sexual predators are...yep, there you have it. They're predators, akin to fictional vampires. And once someone is publicly exposed as one, it's too scary to allow for the possibility for recidivism. It's why some places talk about applying castration as a punishment for sexual crimes, to make them physically impossible.
John Newton gave up his business. Senator Byrd left the Klan. But sexual criminals get treated like they have some kind of internal irreversible condition that does not allow for common repentance.
I think murderers sometimes get more sympathy, depending on the circumstances they're acting under. And there are often good reasons for that. Poor people need to make money and may feel driven by the need for income to invest in terrible businesses. But sexual assault just seems so much more self indulgent. It's just fucking. No-body has a biological need to fuck. Literally.
As Ani DiFranco put it - "they say that alcoholics are always alcoholics, even when they're dry as my lips for years, even when they're stranded on a small desert island with no place in two thousand miles to buy beer...and I wonder is he different is he different, has he changed...what he's about? Or maybe he's a liar with nothing to lie about."
It should be noted that after his conversion John Newton continued to be a notorious slaver.
Whatever you do, it shouldn't present an overall greater risk to children than, y'know, telling the proper secular authorities.
Likewise, in 1950 if it were publicised that a 14 year old boy had performed a sex act on an adult male (priest or otherwise) there would have been no recognition of coercion - if he wasn’t badly injured - or of grooming or power differences. In that time and place it might genuinely have been in his best interest not to go to court.
But again, we are no longer living in 1950s western societies so it becomes much less defensible over time.
I think this claim needs a little justification. What sort of things, exactly?
I like this. To take a different example, it is pretty common for people to be short-tempered when they are hungry. "I was hungry" is an explanation for why someone was snarly and unpleasant late yesterday afternoon, after they had skipped lunch. It is not an excuse for being foul, and the thing that "someone" needs to learn in this instance is to identify that their hunger is causing them to be short-tempered, and so both have something to eat and actively avoid contention until they have fixed their hunger problem.
But all of this first requires a person to identify that they have done something wrong (or are at risk of doing something wrong), and that seems to be a bit of a challenge. It is common for the accused in cases like this to maintain that all the sexual activity that occurred was consensual, and it appears that in many cases this is a genuine belief rather than legal posturing.
I am reminded of studies I read involving male college students, where all of the men questioned denied ever having raped or sexually assaulted anyone, but when they were asked to describe details of their recent sexual encounters, a significant number described encounters where they obviously and admittedly didn't care about the consent of the woman that they were with.
There seems to be this rape culture disjunction in many men's minds, where they can freely describe acts that they have committed which are clearly rape, or at least rape-adjacent, whilst denying that they have raped or sexually assaulted anyone. I wonder if there is a similar dynamic in play in some of the "me too" style cases, where the men involved genuinely don't think of themselves as doing anything wrong - in which case the question becomes "how do you fix that?" I'd like to think that a greater cultural awareness of consent issues would help, but at some level, this is the question "how do you stop people from lying to themselves", and I don't think I understand how that works.
It is common for the accused in cases like this to maintain that all the sexual activity that occurred was consensual, and it appears that in many cases this is a genuine belief rather than legal posturing.
I was a juror in a case in which the accused claimed (and probably genuinely believed) that everything which occurred was consensual. It's illegal for a juror to discuss details of the case, and I won't.
But the young man concerned is now in prison, serving a 7 year sentence, of which he'll have to serve at least half, and when he comes out he'll be on the Sex Offenders list for the rest of his life.
Not only do I believe that he genuinely thought he was doing nothing illegal, I also think that it couldn't possibly ever have crossed his mind that he'd end up in prison. Because if he had realised that prison was a possibility, it would have been a very effective deterrent.
Certain kinds of toxic gender roles, as Kate Manne has pointed out can lead to some men feeling entitled to take what they want from women - and assuming or not even thinking about consent. Other forms of privilege or pathology can breed attitudes of entitlement too where consent is assumed or downright ignored in highly toxic ways.
In her book 'Down Girl' Manne also describes 'Himpathy' summed up neatly here as
From 'That’s What She Said: Unpacking And Unlearning Himpathy' link here -
https://www.thegazelle.org/issue/185/thats-what-she-said
Which is something to keep an eye out for and to consider in these cases in general.
https://www.jezebel.com/philosopher-kate-manne-on-himpathy-donald-trump-and-r-1822639677
I initially searched on Google and got a very weird top hit - which made me go and look at other search engines. You just can't assume Google will do the job these days.
I'm regarded as very empathic by many friends but I cannot empathise with brutality. Like many, I experienced bullying as a child and was hurt by it. Probably still am. I know that 'hurt people hurt people' and I guess I was fortunate never to be drawn into reciprocal bullying. But I think one of the impacts is that I feel no desire to empathise with abusers. The level of revulsion is too great. I think I am capable of some measure of forgiveness, but the revulsion and mistrust of abusers remains within me.
We now know much more about the compulsive nature of this crime and how difficult it is to change such deep seated behaviours. It has taken society as a whole decades to see this and to put safeguards and appropriate punishments in place. The churches are not alone in covering up or ignoring abuse, and allowing offenders to move on. Here in the UK this was the case in many sports, in choirs and orchestras, in hospitals and children's homes, in schools. Anywhere, in fact that abusers could get unsupervised contact with children.
During #MeToo, they also said that we should believe women. Except, it appears, the ones who signed NDAs relating to their behaviour.
It's not a great defence to be honest. It's the usual round of I don't recognise those accounts / I would never do such a thing / Why are you kink-shaming me?! With a side order of expensive lawyer. They are being treated a lot more kindly than some others who've found themselves in similar situations though.
As a fan, I'm still processing the whole thing. At the moment, it feels like when I found out the beloved soundtrack to my tortured youth was partly authored by a vegetarian fascist from Manchester. (The solo album featuring a song about truly finding themselves at the local racist disco in case you were wondering).
However, there is also space for a critical empathic, where a person is heard but the engagement is there to seek ways of creating remorse, changing behaviour and generally bringing about a more satisfactory situation. As a rule head on confrontation does not do any of that.
In this second type of empathy I would strike it as the sort that Montygomery had for Rommel who if a TV programme I watched as a child, had a picture of Rommel in his quarters and spent a good deal of time imaging what Rommel was thinking and planning, almost in a romantic fixated way. No-one can deny Montgomery's desired outcome but it was not done through making Rommel a monster but trying to capture what made him tick as a man.
Empathy says "I can emotionally relate to what you're going through."
Sympathy means "I support you socially."
These are not necessarily the same, and the confusion can get really dangerous.
And ideas of justice can make this harder, raising questions of punishment, retribution, and/or vengeance. I might respect [redacted]'s humanity, even understand how his life could've made him vulnerable to the kinds of vices he walked into, but even with empathy, what a person needs is accountability and responsibility.
Empathy doesn't mean "it's ok, just be yourself and pretend that never happened," unless by some process everyone involved can agree that's the best outcome. But you can't skip over the process.
name redacted - L
Thanks, that's more accurate. I'm googling around now and I am probably being a little detached in my description of sympathy. Sympathy means "I care about putting you in a better place but it doesn't mean I necessarily feel the same way that you do," or thereabouts?
I will confess that current events has had me feeling rather cynical lately.
I'm intrigued that it could be emotionally destabilising to discover that an inspirational / admired / respected author appears to be other than you'd imagined them to be.
From another perspective, in terms of being able to critically appraise texts, it would seem useful to be able identity with someone's writings without identifying with the author.
For empathy to have an ethics, there would need to be an element of choice about it. So is empathy with authors something you have a choice about, or is it something that just happens, involuntarily?
More generally, I'm wondering what the benefit is, for human beings, of an apparent significant level of emotional identification with another human being you've never met.