The process is good!  As I look through the abuse communities here in www.DailyStrength.org I wonder if any of the offenders that caused these people to be in this community have been arrested yet?  I hope so.  I am in emotional pain by what I see and read.  I see a lot of broken people who are desperately trying to get put back together.  Please keep trying, keep talking, keep searching, and keep reaching out.    As I see it one of the steps in the process is the legal system of our culture.  It is good to have the offender arrested and for them to go through that process as well.  It is good for the victimizing to cease.  It is good for the victim, society and the offender.  It is good to know that the boogieman isn’t going to do it again.  It is good for the rest of us to have it stop.  It is good for the offenders’ own sanity to have it stop.  Don’t view the legal process as a bad or terrible thing.  The bad and terrible thing was the original victimization.  The legal process is a good thing.  Yes the process is painful, embarrassing, and even shameful.  Burning yourself on a hot stove is also.  Your body employs a similar system.  First you pull away to stop the act that caused the pain and damage.  The pain then becomes a teacher so that you won’t do it again.  The pain also triggers mechanisms in the body to prevent infection, fight infection and repair the damage and restore the members that are affected.  The stove can be a good and useful thing.  You learn to not fear it but respect and use it appropriately.  The legal system should be doing the same things.  Begin to see it as something good.  It is good to separate the offender and the victim to stop the pain and the damage.  It is good to trigger systems of prevention and defense.  It is good to repair the damage and restore the members affected.  After all you don’t throw away the stove or the burned finger do you?  Quit throwing away the victims and the offenders as well.  Restore the hurt ones and restore the offender to productive and useful function.  Begin to look at offender notification websites as something good.  (NOTE: Eventually all crimes and offenses will be listed in these sites or they will cease to exist because of vigilantism) Begin to not look at those people as “the bad guys” but as the ones we know most likely will not do it again.  These people are being seen and observed, no longer having secret lives.  The real bad guys, the scariest and most dangerous are the ones not caught yet who are still causing victims and harm in secrecy.  See the following: Washington State Institute for Public Policy:  Series: Sex Offender Sentencing in Washington Statehttp://www.wsipp.wa.gov/topic.asp?cat=10&subcat=55&dteSlct=0   And a report from Vermont titled:Key Findings and Trends2006 March. Elizabeth Drake, Robert Barnoski. #06-03-1201, Page 12http://www.vnews.com/sexcrimes/   Quit looking at the caught ones in anger.  Understand that anger comes from fear and fear comes from pain or perceived pain.  Begin to focus that emotional effort on the victims, the forgotten ones.  This is where prevention begins.  Prevention is not in arrest or incarceration though it will stop the current victimization.  Prevention is helping victims to learn how to no longer be a victim and to become restored to who they were meant to be.  Help them to restore their sense of self and self-value.  All offenders used to be victims with victim mentalities and victim behaviors.  Left unchecked some victims develop into being offenders with twisted victim mentalities and twisted victim behaviors.  Listen to the victims, hear their story, believe and validate them no matter how far fetched their story sounds at the time.  Stop the current trend in our culture that teaches victims to “Be good, don’t tell.”  We do that by not listening to them, by not believing them, by not validating their perceptions of what happened to them.  We are also a culture of victim blaming.  Just the other day I cut myself on a sharp piece of metal on a city bus.  I mentioned to the driver that there was a harmful piece of sharp metal and he told me that it was my responsibility to watch out for things like when I get on a bus!  We do that to all victims.  How did a 5-year-old little boy cause an adult to abuse him?  Is it the child’s responsibility to avoid being victimized?  Quit hiding in shame, laziness, and self-gratification and quit blaming the victims; listen to them.  Become a noble human being by feeling what they feel and hearing what they say.  Don’t react, don’t recoil or cringe, just be the one they can tell.  Help them begin their own process.  By listening to victims, by hearing them, by believing them you will begin to help them to cultivate their own sense of self worth and value.  When they find someone who will listen they will begin to feel like they are worth listening to.  Look at the victims you know.  They have extremely low self-esteem and self worth.  They have victim mentality and victim behaviors.  Listen to them and make a difference in their life.  Grow up and cultivate the guts and fortitude to be able to hear what they have to say.  It’s not pretty but they must be heard and believed.  Who cares how much the story is twisted or fabricated, right now that doesn’t matter; just listen.  In time their story will become more truthful if they begin to feel that trust and compassion.  Learn empathy, allow yourself to feel what they are saying.  Get your own support if you need it.  Be willing to be a “secondary victim” by allowing yourself to be exposed to what you will hear.  Don’t take on their hurt and anger, just listen.  Be careful to not become angry and want to lash out yourself or you will become another offender.  Be the strong one who saves society by listening to and feeling what others feel.  It is a lack of empathy that comes from personal disconnect in victims that leads them to offending, i.e. they no longer have a conscious or an appropriate sense of self.  Cultivate empathy in everyone around you.  You may save a victim from becoming an offender if you do.  Understand that when a victim “acts out” most of them are trying to re-intact what happened to them so that they can undo or fix what is broken.  The problem is that the one, inside them, who is trying to fix it, is still a child inside while the adult person doing it is weak and submissive to adult passions and cravings that only cause more victimization instead of getting it fixed.  They no longer have the appropriate cognitive skills to put it together right.  This isn’t making excuses for them, just understanding how it happens.  Know that both offenders and victims practice secrecy and lies.  They both live in dual lives.  One life is the public life, the life they present for every one to see, the second is a secret life hidden in fear and shame that they both don’t want anyone to see.  Secrecy is an indication of a broken trust.  When you find secrecy look for the broken trust.  The lies can be in the form of denial.  The denial is again to avoid the guilt, shame and pain of what is going on.  Both offenders and victims practice grooming.  This is the practice of getting others used to how they act so that others will not notice what they are really doing.  The offender grooms to be able to offend and not get caught.  They groom themselves to keep themselves convinced to continue offending when everything inside them screams to stop offending.  Offending then takes on a life of its own and becomes a sense of being alive for the offender.  To continue offending is to be and feel like living.  They groom their victim to seduce their victim to not resist.  They groom others (who are also victims) to enable them to offend.  Most offenders hate being around other offenders and often point the finger at other offenders to keep from having attention placed upon them.  The victim grooms to protect the shameful secret so no one will find out and blame them.  Victims groom themselves convincing themselves that they are the reason that it is happening.  Victims groom themselves to allow and enable offenders to victimize them or others as well.  Being victimized then takes on a life of its own.  Some victims actually seek out the victimization so that they can feel alive.  Being offended then feels like being alive and creates a false sense of life and normalcy.  Victims groom other victims by blaming them further convincing the victim that it is their own fault. Victims beget victims and gather victims around them in a pseudo community so that no one will point the finger at them to blame them.  Learn to see and observe what is going on.  When you see someone who is having defeating and destructive social issues you are seeing a victim.  Victims are not only victimized by the abuse of others but by victimizing them selves as well.   When you see self-defeating and self-sabotaging behaviors you are seeing a victim.  Observe, learn and observe again.  Support the legal system in your area by becoming active.  Learn the truth, (check out websites like http://www.sohopeful.org/ and the others listed above.)  Quit listening to the fear mongering and hype of the media and politicians who twist the truth to get re-elected and generate their own cash flow at your expense.  They don’t care about you and your safety they only want to keep themselves on your payroll.  They use fear to sell you laws that are expensive and ineffective so that they can look like they are tough on crime.  Watch out for the schoolyard snitch that is pointing the finger at someone else so that they can keep doing what they are doing at your expense.  Begin to become active against laws that don’t help and take taxpayer funds from the laws and programs that do.  So far no notification and registration law has prevented any crime!  Get your lawmakers into the understanding of paying more attention to the victims not the offenders.  Spending all of the money on offenders is unwise.  Spend more of the money on victims so that prevention can be set in place to keep them from becoming the next offender.  The law shouldn’t be about anger and retribution but rather about stopping the offending and preventing it for a safer future.  Develop victim programs that help them to put their thinking and behaviors back together.  Look into cognitive modification as it is practiced in Offender Treatment programs and apply the same wisdom to victims.  They teach empathy in these programs, thus causing the offenders to become reconnected with themselves and those around them.  Yes, it is good for helping known offenders learn why they offended, how they offended and how not to offend in the future, but how much more wise will it be to apply that to victims before they act out and offend?  Look into how this organization in England reintegrates offenders into churches:http://www.sanctuaryuk.com/ Check the entire website out.  Look into the recommend books and other links.  They have an appropriate approach.  Most school systems (including colleges) now have victim awareness programs.  Get into one yourself.  Take the class; encourage others and your own children to take the class.  This will be a real eye opener and life changer for the good.  You can find it on the Internet but interacting in a class or group will provide the best input for yourself.  Make the investment of yourself and your time.  It will re-energize the empathy you already have.  If you are victimizing and offending someone right now, turn yourself in, it is the best thing you can do for yourself, your victim(s) and society.  Think about it you are offending and victimizing yourself as well.  If you have to get someone you trust to go with you, what ever you need, just do it.  It is a good thing to do, by doing it you will save yourself, your family and friends.  Going to jail is not being thrown away, it is a chance to get to find yourself and put your own life back together.  It is a good process.  DO IT NOW!  If you are a victim and are being victimized TALK, start talking, talk to yourself, encourage yourself to tell others, and talk to anyone who will hear, the rest of us WILL listen.  You are worth it.  For the rest of us, let us not just stop the victimization but also prevent it by helping victims get restored, this is a good and honorable thing for our future and us. “I don’t think our loved ones make our lives, but loving them does.” Sarah McClure in True Women.