I dedicate a page, not just posts,

to the miraculous escape of Jaycee Dugard a.k.a. “Allyssa” and her two daughters Starlet and Angel from the cruel false imprisonment, repeated rapes, being used for sex as well as administrative support in a personal business, and God knows what else in a suburban Antioch, California, back yard.  The key word there is “use.”  This champion of a spirit, Jaycee, was used in every sense of the word.  Hear tell her children came out well, which blows a lot of philosophies out of the water as to which parent makes the crucial difference.  Unless you call Phillip Garrido something approaching a father just because it was his sperm and she and their (yes, THEIR) daughters didn’t starve to death in the back yard.

For future blog visitors, after this event has died down (or non-locals):

In 1991, while an 11-year-old Dugard was walking to her school bus stop in South Lake Tahoe, wearing a pink windbreaker and white T-shirt imprinted with a kitten, a gray car made a U-turn, and a dark-haired woman snatched her screaming into the vehicle.

Dugard’s mother and stepfather had moved to the mountain town several months earlier to escape the crime of Garden Grove in Orange County.

For the next 18 years, law enforcement officials say, Dugard lived in a compound of tents and sheds hidden in the backyard of Phillip Garrido and his wife Nancy Garrido, near Antioch. Dugard also bore two daughters, now 11 and 15, fathered by Garrido. (The rest, you can Google.)

 

ALSO OF NOTE:

 

Wife of Phillip Garrido largely a mystery

Police allege Nancy Garrido was a full partner in the kidnapping and rape of Jaycee Lee Dugard, while acquaintances describe her as being under her husband’s control.  

{{Just a comment.  Police — or at least some in law enforcement — had been told more than once that people were living in the back yard, a few years before the victims got free.  While I’m not in a particularly merciful mood these days, as to women who enable abuse, kidnapping, or anything else, it should be noted, the righteous indignation might be a little overwrought coming from certain quarters, and MIGHT be proportional to relief that the public’s attention is not going in a different direction.  An on-line news source in Pleasanton, CA (which I either have blogged, or will get out of “draft” status soon) says there was a brothel, drugs, etc., going on there too, which I doubt would’ve escaped police notice entirely, but somehow it seems DID, while a prosecutor in the same county was himself put on paid administrative leave for allegedly raping a (female) colleague,and THAT whole prosecution — same time frame as the recent escape of Jaycee — is clouded with political accusations and intrigue on both sides.  So, just let’s keep that in mind here…  I also assert, and relate, that my two daughters were stolen in violation of a standing custody order FROM a law enforcement place, and over my protests that I didn’t know the true residence of the father, or of the woman in question.  So go figure!  Nevertheless, no excuse for Mrs. Nancy, either, in my mind..}}

 

…Police insist Nancy Garrido, 54, was a full partner in her 58-year-old husband’s alleged crimes, and she faces almost identical charges in the kidnapping and rape of Jaycee Lee Dugard.
In fact, for more than a month in 1993, authorities say, Nancy Garrido was apparently the sole jailer of the then-13-year-old Dugard while her husband was in prison for a parole violation.  {{I heard it was longer..}}

The woman who allegedly grabbed Dugard as she walked the few blocks to her school bus stop 18 years ago told her lawyer that she loved Dugard and her daughters as “family.“

Well, well, well.  

Love “is” as love “does,” and perhaps our legislators will come up with a definition of it that may hold sway in court some day.  Meanwhile, the validity of self-reported emotions are in the ears of the hearer.  To a stalker, the obsession is “love.”  To a batterer, his assaults are motivated out of love, and of course to train the wife or partner to obey.  To any codependent relationship, it may be self-reported as “love.”  However, “friends don’t let friends drive drunk.”  And spouses of convicted kidnapper/rapers who haven’t stopped kidnapping and raping are not “loving” anyone, let alone society.  They may think they are, which might add to the performance, but the actions tell another story.

She appeared to do much of the work at their home near Antioch and sometimes helped her husband in his printing business, though she stayed in the background.

Garrido, a nurse’s assistant, (in her PROFESSIONAL live!!  Shudder!!)  is believed to have helped Dugard deliver the two babies that police say Phillip Garrido fathered.

Ages 11 & 15 themselves when finally rescued.

Again, thank you to the women officers on the University of California Campus who NOTICED something was amiss and ACTED on it, following through.  Also, I can only imagine how many people were praying, still, to see Jaycee Dugard and know what happened to her since she was kidnapped at age 11 at a rural bus stop, and finally apparently WALKED IN (under a different name) to a different parole office, after the initial alert.  

Now all the people who noticed, but didn’t act.  Or noticed, reported, but then didn’t press for the proper authority to follow through properly.  Or weren’t able to, because those proper authorities weren’t so proper as them supposedly are.. . . those people’s “aha!” moments (or their lack of them, in a few cases) will become public property, through the press.

Newspaper coverage of this extent, and for this long, is going to affect both people who have experienced this in their own families.

The distant public will identify to varying degrees to it.   Some, it may trigger PTSD, and pre-occupy them.  Others, the emotions will waft over or through them, and then back to business of life.  What really concerns me is that future stalkers, kidnappers and rapers may get smarter, as Garrido’s second kidnappee (not including his first wife) says the federal and state prisons helped him become.

I feel a moral obligation to report, and note that communal emotion of any sort is not necessarily going to help the next victim.  While we (?) are on this topic, let me point out that similar activity is business as usual in the family court venue. Similar in quality, similarly criminal (but not so likely to be handled as such) and similarly ignored when cries for help, investigation, or enforcement come.  

However, acknowledgement of it is appropriate as part of the healing process.

I fear that it may also make future kidnappers wiser, smarter, and that they may “batten down the hatches.”  I don’t know that it’s going to make people in denial less in denial, prosecutors follow through, or release policies less lenient.  

I am going to add my (fifty-)two bits from the perspective — and again, it’s a common one — of a “left-behind parent.”  I still have to deal with the people that enabled this travesty to happen, on a regular basis, and to deal with the turning upside down of one’s understanding of reality, extended social reality, and therefore judge on a case by case basis, whose word is reliable, and who’s got the ulterior motives.  

I sense that the public and the press are comfortable with making hay from this story, because it wasn’t a direct relative of Jaycee who did the kidnapping.  Unfortunately, it is indeed possible for relatives to become this directly detached and this depraved.  Would it have been reported differently, or less in such a case?  Or would that be a “family matter” and a “domestic dispute”?

In my account, the enablers weren’t strangers, but extended family members over-reacting to the fact they were caught with their pants down in the matter of my first having reported domestic violence, which at least two of them didn’t notice (and many others).  I have learned more about the depravity of human nature (and what I would deduce, from this vantage point, the honesty of the Bible in reporting this truth — as a point of reference at a minimum, and for me, a personal character indicator along with the other obvious ones (hitting, stealing, lying, breaking laws, etc.) – after doing “the right thing” according to society, and attempting to get on with life.  It’s handy infformation to know; we can’t all live in these social bubbles.

The most consistent factor I’ve noticed is historical revisionism, and retaliation/shunning for not signing on to it.  An insistence on reframing reality of all involved.  

There are indeed lessons from these various news stories surfacing day by day.  Here are two I noticed today, and probably that’s all can handle for today, either:

(1)  Jaycee Dugard and daughters need appreciation, privacy for recovery

By Suzanne Bohan 
Contra Costa Times

Posted: 09/05/2009 02:24:15 PM PDT

The road to recovery for kidnap victim Jaycee Dugard depends on fostering the innate capacity for healing, along with society fully supporting her, says a German psychologist who treats severe trauma in crime victims.

 

“Most of all, trauma victims need appreciation,” said Dr. Christian Ludke, known for his work on the psychological effects of kidnappings, hostage-takings and bank robberies.

 

Appreciation for those surviving life-threatening crimes means acknowledging that they were victims who weren’t responsible for their trauma.

 

“They need quietness and distance from their painful experience,” Ludke said, “so they can start their self-healing process, which is a natural, inborn ability of every human.“

 

They need time, safety, ideally at least one attuned relationship and the ability to put it in some perspective.

 

Recovering from severe trauma relies less on immediate talk therapy and medical interventions, he said, than on re-establishing stability in key relationships and thinking ahead to a positive future.

 

“All studies (of recovery from post-traumatic stress disorder) show that talking is not very healing,” Ludke said. “If you talk about your relationship to the perpetrator and what happened, it means the experience stays alive in your brain.”

 

The “false” gong just went off in my head.  Ludke says “you” but has Dr. Ludke been in this type of trauma?  If so, is he (?) speaking from his own experience only?  We seem to have a confusion of pronouns in this statement” it stays alive in your brain.”  One moment it’s a “they” the next it’s a “you.”  

While we’d like to think that a therapist, or even those doing Cat-scans may indeed be inside our brains, the fact is, they aren’t.  If anyone comes pretty close to being in side a victim of trauma’s brain, it’s likely to be the perpetrator of the trauma, if it was intentional.  IN fact, one of the characteristics is what I’d call “presumptive mind-reading.”  

Whose purpose, and whose benefit is it to kill the experience in someone’s brain?  And whose interest is best served by setting a prescription and time frame on it?  

COMMENTARY:

Any “ALL” studies show that” in almost any field is suspect, and this one is simply false.  MOST abusers, to keep it up, need to employ a degree of “crazy-making” to condition their victims, otherwise it’d have to be all force & threat only.  Validation counts!  

Has Ludke come through traumatic experiences or near-death ones himself (herself?).  Apparently not!  

In fact, at some time (and at the victim’s pace) talking about it is essential, to get the experience OUTSIDE, and hopefully in an attuned, safe relationship of some sort.  Some women may wish to talk.  Others may simply not.  I would just point out that all advice should be taken with a grain of salt, and it doesn’t make sense either to FORCE a victim to talk (adult or child) repeatedly, or to tell them to shut up.  I found writing very healing, and not just writing, but sending it to a person I knew would not betray me for talking.  The Pulitzer-prize-winning author Richard Rhodes (also a survivor of childhood abuse) in ‘How To Write” says he needed to get it out.  

Incidentally, it was the stepmother that did the abuse.  His mother had committed suicide.

Another book that helped, at least “spoke” to my experience of domestic violence, and family denial of the same (and this was BEFORE the child-stealing event of some years ago) was “Transforming Abuse:  Nonviolent Resistance and Recovery”  “. The reviewer says:  

 

“Among the tasks identified are the need for education and self-defence, the battered women’s movement, and the need to break the silence, tell stories, and create safety zones.”  

“In the last section, “Our Future,” Schmidt argues that the value of community lies in the value of each individual finding his/her place in the community, enabling each to contribute and receive. Schmidt points out that our repulsion toward violence may prevent us from being responsive to both victim and offender. She says that excluding, disbelieving, persecuting, and misunderstanding continue the hate that violent behavior requires. The last chapter of this section, entitled “Grace,” uses traditional religious language such as transformation, ceremony, celebration, gratitude, sacrament, forgiveness, love, joy, and wholeness.”

 

Even though some  of the terminology didn’t match m y personal beliefs, the language of this book correctly named the sentiments and emotional needs of that time as to how failure to hear others’ stories is quarantining them to a separate silence.  Moral?  DOn’t believe everything you read in a newspaper.  It just may not be true.

 

He described a study in the August edition of the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry that compared how victims of serious crimes in China and Germany fared in the months after the trauma.  The researchers found that although the German study’s participants talked far more openly about the trauma, they reported higher levels of post-traumatic stress months after the event.

 

The German participants, half of whom lived alone, also reported feeling less acknowledgment as victims, the study reported, while the Chinese victims typically had a wide network of understanding people. Only 22 percent of the Chinese participants lived alone.

 

“The most important thing they have is family and friends,” said Ludke, speaking of the Chinese victims. “They have a lot of social networks around them.”

 

Many mental health professionals are also entering unfamiliar territory when treating those such as Dugard who have undergone complex traumas.

 

Most work on treating trauma victims focuses on simpler cases, said the psychiatrist who helped coin the term post-traumatic stress disorder.

(Again, that’s a summary statement.  I didn’t see cites.  It may be true).

“There’s a big difference between simple post-traumatic stress disorders and complex syndromes,” said Dr. Mardi Horowitz of UC San Francisco, whose team in the 1970s developed the diagnosis for the disorder. But with less research on the latter, “mental health professionals “… will tend to use simple treatments for a complex disorder, which is a misalignment.”

 

This short book by Patricia Romano tells the story of a woman who had severe reactions from being repeatedly abused (sexually) since childhood by her brothers growing up.  It talks about her attempts to kill herself, resorting to drugs, other responses she had, and how this one therapist, with time and patience was able to help her.  It talks about complex post-traumatic stress in understandable terms, and in case you guess, yes it helped me at a time when I was receiving a lot of external orders to get over it (and how to do so) alongside the denial.  I ignored them (which wasn’t appreciated it) or tried to, and went about my own recovery in a different manner.  I recommend this book for those helping someone else, or for those having a hard time with ongoing repeat assaults on their personal integrity after some initial shocks, for example, when criminal behavior was involved.  Author appears to be Bahai and talks about the brain’s fluidity.

BACK to the Contra Costa Times’ expert’s article re:  Jaycee Dugard and her daughters:

Ultimately, discussing the traumatic experience can be part of recovery, but only if the victim wishes to and controls the level of self-disclosure, after having time for reflection, Ludke said.

It’s also critical for trauma victims to develop relationships with emotionally stable people and to begin achieving new short-term goals before disclosure and trauma reconstruction begins, both Horowitz and Ludke said.

“When everything happens the way she imagines it,” Ludke said, “she becomes stable and then you can start, a little bit, to reconstruct the trauma.”

Emotional stability in those close to them allows trauma survivors to share their stories with people “who don’t start crying when they hear the worst experiences that they had,” he said. “They give them hope that they will find their way back to the normal life.“

Just a headsup, I’m going to compare this situation, stranger-kidnapping, false imprisonment, nightmare years, and now safe back with the family, public acknowledgement (when the Dugards get out, they may or may not read all the press, I don’t know), and the public’s expressed wish for these young ladies to heal, with what happens in two DIFFERENT scenarios:

1.  When the kidnapper is or the abuse has come from a family member, with family endorsement or enablement of the same.  THEN where does a person go for healing or recovery — new social connections, new friends, new life, separation, right?

AND/or

2.  When some or all of the above is true, and a case gets stuck in the family law venue, where there IS no safety, there is continual retors as to the truth or falsehood of WHAT HAPPENED, and where the stakes are high for the winner in the “new” version of what happened.  AND when kids are involved.

Am I being selfish in saying this?  Maybe, maybe not.  I’m hoping that a lot of people didn’t suffer in vain, that something might be learned in the situation.  But I’m saying, WHAT IF it were, not that extent (years, outrages, drama), but still, some of the same crimes, AND it became out of the frying pan into the fire?  Because when custody is contested after abuse, that’s exactly the situation.

Reading on as to this article on PTSD and recovery from kidnapping:

The father of Elizabeth Smart, who at age 14 was kidnapped and held hostage by a street preacher for nine months in Salt Lake City in 2002 and 2003, {{NOT THAT LONG AGO!!}} said last week that focusing on activities that spark the girl’s passion helped them move on. Smart, now 21, is studying for a music degree at Brigham Young University.

Our case:

Post-Separation:  I intentionally and specifically kept arts and music (etc.) and healthy social involvements HIGH for both self and children during the domestic violence and AFTER evicting the father who had been assaulting me in front of them for many years.  While the restraining order was on, this continued until forcibly stopped.  The manner in which it was stopped was abusive, and peremptory, and based on unsupported allegations — from a family member that had witnessed much of the abuse!  So I had to heal, work, rebuild, and re-set boundaries, which were not respected, and so forth.  This was where the “real” fight appeared to begin for the lives and control of our daughters.  It’s not over yet.

When the restraining was lifted (as I tried to renew it, expecting to maintain some healthy momentum and STABILITY, particularly economic and social/personal/professional– and it was lifted by initiating divorce proceedings — the door was opened to stop ALL of the above, repeatedly, and disrupting our household stability.  In addition, the child support became volatiles, the frequent exchanges (court-ordered, and in appropriate, I later learned, in cases with such violence, as it leads to more conflict, need to debate, negotiations, etc.), and not only their lives but mine also became unstable.  I was lucky, having at least a few years (and some moves) to repair, clear out, rebuild, and distance us somewhat from the scene of all that trauma.  I chose another county intentionally because there was no place in the original one that didn’t have memories of the abuse associated.  We got a fresh start without losing contact with the other parent.

I was driven out of the field of music (rebuilt post-restraining order) n the ensuing years, and am now having to look, again, elsewhere, for healing, not to mention a livelihood, and a total restructuring of social support system — again, and again, and again.  

That’s the “inheritance” of this family law system.  Many women (see this blog, and others) don’t make it even a few years down the road.  Some cases I heard went straight from restraining order to divorce action to custody evaluators to custody switch with no contact to one parent, usually the mother in these cases.

This is a recipe for complex post traumatic stress, never-ending.  And I do not believe it’s accidental in design.

Public policy in these matters is “insane” unless constant turmoil (“Crisis in the Courts”) is what the doctor prescribed.  

It becomes a matter of vocabulary:

While many know the term “dissociation” and “compartmentalization” when they think of a Nancy Garrido (professional nurse by day, false imprisoner, and enabler of rape and all kinds of horrors in private life), and countless others who also do this, what about Communal “Dissociation” in the inability to realize that these high-profile cases resemble other ones?  

Again, this is not just about “our case” (but that’s one I can speak with some authority on; it’s not ‘hearsay’), but across the country, this is causing long-term trauma, and that “long-term” can mean, until a child reaches majority, or possibly beyond.  See “courageouskids.net.”

When the public dissects the aftermath of high-profile kidnappings, and thinks, whatever thoughts, and wishes these children and their relatives well, remember the ones that thought they got out, but didn’t.  Who is going to help them heal and recover, if there’s communal denial of the past?  There are EFFFECTS from the past, if the causes of these effects are buried under denial and sanitization of some pretty nasty behaviors, then the only place to attribute cause will upon be the places the effects sometimes show up — the victims themselves, the targets of domestic violence, child-kidnapping, child abuse, and the inability of one (not necessarily both!) partners to separate amicably, and outside of the nightmarish alternate reality of the family law venue.

Certified Family Law Specialists in California do not need to know much, at all, about domestic violence, and I don’t even see (at last count) that child abuse was even mentioned.  Even if they are taught well, who is to say this teaching will become practice?  Who is checking the certifying organizations?  Certainly not the litigating parents, unless such parents are involved in the professions attached ot the courts?

There are many lessons to be learned from this case, and others like it.  Most of them may not surface through the press.  

Reading on as to this article on PTSD and recovery from kidnapping:

I don’t have the “means” down, but I know that this should be priority.  PERIOD!

Point Two:  Knowing potential danger zones:

The general public (is this a personality type? a character?  A fiction?) — should know by now that there are men that seek out women to validate themselves socially (or to just dominate for fun and profit) women from religious groups.  Obviously, because many major religions value female submission, so this angle can be and is played.   I attended domestic violence support groups.  I was hardly the only “woman of faith” there!!  I can’t breach confidentiality, but good Lord!  Marriage per se is not a character indicator.  Maybe one time it was.  Now, it ain’t.  Phillip Garrido got married in prison, giving him more credibility, and got out to do it again.

Know that the presence of a female (or absence of a male) companion is not a character indicator!

In light of these recent events, and that they’re not the only such events, I believe that the “healthy marriage movement” at federal expense should be filed where Colleen “K“ spent 23 hours a day starting about 1977, and that’s in a box where the sun don’t shine: 

When she was not sexually servicing him, she “lived” in a coffin-like box beneath his bed in sunny, sunny California. His wife knew all about it.

No, I am not talking about the ordeal of Jaycee Lee Dugard, who was kidnapped in 1991 when she was 11-years-old and who has just been rescued after an eighteen year captivity in the northern California home of Phillip and Nancy Garrido.

I am talking about 20-year-old Oregonian, Colleen Stan, who in 1977 was kidnapped by Cameron and Janice Hooker, buried alive in a coffin-like box and enslaved for seven years in southern California. The Hookers were a well-liked couple who had two children. Cameron was a 24-year-old bespectacled mill-worker at a lumber company. Janice was the kind of wife and mother who sewed, crocheted, entertained friends and who eventually worked at a nearby convenience store.

 

FIRST, let’s see all government officials practicing what they preach.  When we have five presidents in a row, most governors, and an entire Congress NOT caught cheating on their wives — OR on the public they represent , at all, then they can vote funds to teach the rest of us:

• whether to keep it zipped or not (abstinence education), 
• how to keep it together (Marriage education) 
• what manhood is about (promoting responsible fatherhood), 
• how to do our divorces or separations (access/visitation funding for noncustodial parents), 
• how to protect ourselves and our children from child abuse, child-stealing, or a lifetime of learning to “perform” for officials who then write reports that change lives, based on a half hour or three hours at a time (SUPERVISED visitation, something that might have kept my daughters in this household, but I was not offered that, even after they were stolen on an UNsupervised exchange — go figure!), and generating a whole new profession around the premise that children need to see fathers — ANY fathers — no matter prompted the need for supervision, and not to mention:
• About our own government and economic systems, which are some of the worst-taught topics around, probably in part because reading and writing aren’t exactly in stellar form these days either, across America.

Also, I also recommend we delay teaching about the separation of church and state, and instead teach them how to write intelligent letters to faith-based organizations on what they’re teaching in some of the above programs, and how these do or do NOT correspond with existing laws stipulating that when comparing divorce to how to intimidate, isolate, degrade, talk down to and control one’s intimate partner (ideally, in this world view, wife), divorce, though it can turn deadly IS legal, and the latter pattern of behavior, especially when it’s habitual AND a pattern, is both immoral and illegal, and can also turn deadly.

And while we’re at it, I also don’t approve of teaching the nation’s children to trust whichever adult in front of a classroom, or a nation’s classrooms, for that matter, just because of the office.  We need to instead focus on self-respect, self-determination, self-sufficiency and, clearly, self-defense.  

Oh yes, and also generating another powerful tool for possible mis-use, i.e,. you want to see your kids, you pay!  No paying, no seeing!  But no, the U.S. Government is NOT trafficking in children, in fact it is opposed to the very concept.  Nevertheless, let’s see a contested custody case get out of the family law system before one child turns 18…

Point 3:  Stop being so gullible!:

1.  Not all fathers are nice guys.  Or mothers.  Or married people.

2.  Not all religious people are child-molesters or wife-beaters.  But plenty of them, obviously, are, so get over it!

3.  There’s an abundance of non-religious people in the same categories, so get over that, also!

4.  WHY is our President so “into” Head Start?  Professions with lots of little kids attract people that just “love” little kids.  Some are moral, some are perverts.  Some are just in it heading towards the Ph.D. in Child Development and a lifetime of publishing on how kids learn, or how to get them ready for school (which ostensibly gets them ready for life).

5.  Professions in which those in the profession have a LOT of authority over others lives, sometimes life-or death, or Now you see’em, now you don’t (regarding one’s offspring) attract people who like to have authority over others’ lives — some to help, and some to control.

Well, I do have trouble with the sarcasm sometimes. . . . . 

Point 4:  In addition to the Lessons from Antioch, let’s learn these 5 truths, believe “this means you!  this means me, too!” and teach them to our girls, not just our boys, in all out institutions.  Count them off on the fingers, and start young.  Get it verbatim first (like the alphabet) and explain meaning as time goes on, adding depth as they grow:

Here’s a mini-course in self-respect.  

 

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident:

1)that all men are created equal

(2)that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,

(3) that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness

(4)That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

(5) That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

 

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. . . . . –Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government.

The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

Now try the same thing when it comes to individual social connections, i.e., marriages.  I’m not saying the institution of marriage, and I’m absolutely not saying the government of the United States.  What I AM saying is that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander (actually, vice versa) and that already, this has been resigned to dusty past while the public fight is over tranformative, worshipful nebulous terms like “fatherhood” “parental alienation” “trauma” “abuse” “partnering” “parenting” and in general, a struggle for pre-eminence in the language markeplace.  Garrido was so screwed up, he couldn’t get no satisfaction without dominating a woman.  He found another woman to help him do this, and several women to do it to.  As the U.S. had a very hard time acknowledging that “all men are created equal” actually meant ALL men, it had a harder time, and waited later, to even give lip service to the concept that “men” meant (in context) mankind, humanity, and this requires women.  Sorry dudes, you need us to propagate and replicate.  You do NOT need to so dominate us in order to do this, and should get over yourselves in this matter, because more of us read now, and we have read the Declaration of Independence, too.  

One more time, with the more personal  flavor, and I’m female and going to do it from this point of view.  I don’t see a problem with women killing men, or men helping women kidnap young boys and keeping them in boxes under the earth, or in tents in the back yard for personal pleasure and progeny + administrative business support, so humor me, OK?  We can go visit Jeff Leving, Glenn Sacks, or Stephen Baskerville later for the other version, or whitehouse.gov for the version of “family” that deletes the term “mother,” etc.  Right now, this is my personalization of the declaration of independence:

When, in the course of A MARRIAGE 

 , it becomes necessary for one SPOUSE to dissolve the MARITAL bond which has connected HER with the other, and to assume among the citizens of (this) state and the U.S. of A., the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God (and this state and the USA) entitles her, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that she should declare the causes which impel her to the separation.

I hold these truths to be self-evident:

1)that all men & women are created equal 

(2)that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,

(3) that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness

(4)That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, AND MARRIAGES between  SPOUSES,** deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed AND their marital relationship from the ongoing consent of the married.

(5) That whenever any form of government OR MARRIAGE becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people (as to government) OR EITHER SPOUSE (as to marriage) to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government (marital status, whether celibate, or remarried, etc.), laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

(AND SO ON AND SO FORTH.  LOOK AT THIS NEXT SECTION< THINK ABOUT HOW A PROTECTIVE ORDER DECLARATION MIGHT GO:)

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments ((Marriages)  long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. . . . . —

 

 

(This would be the supporting declaration, etc.)

Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies {{this person}}; and such is now the necessity which constrains {{him/her}} to alter their former systems of government.

 

The history of the present {{King of Great Britain}} is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

 

This is a moderate course between forcing marriage on all of us as a social policy, and making the unmarried, the celibate, the successfully married, and the divorced employed, PAY for federal grants to figure out how to do remedial education for adults, when it’s already doing (and failing to good degree) in educating so many youngsters, whose time are at institutional disposal for the bulk of their waking hours the bulk of their tender growing  years!!  

Even Jesus said Moses allowed divorce for the hardness of heart.  Perhaps if the hardness of heart (when it comes to violence towards a spouse) were taken a little more seriously, some marriages might stick together better.  One thing I DO know, that governments derive from the CONSENT of the governed, and that when laws become irrelevant to women, they are irrelevant to men as well, and something needs a radical change.  

This organization grades public and even some college graduates on basic civic literacy.

Over-authoritarianism is contagious.  Women get conditioned to it, as do children (less so unless forced to, but we do force them to in many institutions) and men get overentitled as to it.  

I made a serious mistake in placing a higher value on the marital state than on my personal boundaries.  The most proper reaction from the very beginning would have been stronger than a reaction, it would have been a DRAMATIC protest from the very s tart, with some serious consequences attached to the initial violations that very, very quickly became abuse.  It might have been better to drop the marriage shortly after it started (though we came from a religious background) than to value my civil rights less than the relationship.  However many women are not socialized to do this, and I wasn’t.  It was a beast I hadn’t run across before, and I believe because some men don’t pull out that behavior before they have you committed.  Public humiliation versus giving it a chance?  

This is not the post, or the page on this post to bring it up, but the educational system is a contributor to the gradual stripdown of sense of personal boundaries among young men, and women.  I don’t know how Jaycee’s original kidnapping, once the Garridos were on the loose, could’ve been averted, and I thank God she had the guts and stamina to survive, and got out, as I (again) thank God for those Berkeley campus policeWOMEN who noticed something was up.

If we as a “general public” can stick the text of the “charters of freedom” back in our brains (I’m talking memorizing them) and then be as well-informed on these principles as we are on the details of the outrage of the decade (and this is definitely among them, in scope, duration, and horror, although it’s NOT the worst, because all of them are alive….) we might all be better off.

As to recovery, the experts need to listen to those who have experienced it, and stop trying to fix marriages, judge relationships, and insert personal dogma into public policy.  This won’t happen overnight, but it needs to happen.

As to character analyses?  

Keep it simple:  “ye shall know them by their fruits“

One of the reasons we don’t know each other so well any more is because of the structure and institutions of daily life.  Too many boxes, too many delegated responsibilities, and too co-dependent a lifestyle altogether. Interdependent?  I call it co-dependent.  More on that another time.   

As to family histories — yeech, some are good, some aren’t.  When they aren’t, heaven help the children. . . . .