Doublethink: The Institutionalization of Sexual Harassment

I have received training as a Sexual Assault Victim Counselor and Advocate in accordance with the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services and in compliance with Evidence Code 1035.2 of the State of California.  During one training session the assistant DA told us of a case in which a young man was brought to trial for sexual assault upon a minor female.  There was an incredible amount of evidence presented in the trial by the assistant DA, and other evidence that was not admitted by the judge in the case.

In spite of the evidence, the jury unanimously voted the young man not guilty.  After the trial, the jury waited in the hallway, and gave ‘high fives’ to the individual who opportunistically took advantage of a minor female who must not only bear the indelible wound of the sexual assault, but who must also carry the reality of the insult to her person dealt out by the system that was suppose to protect her rights.

In an article entitled “Ending Men’s Violence Against Women” Ted Bunch said, ” The U.S. Department of Justice reports that men will rape 1 out of 6 women and commit more that 300,000 acts of rape and sexual assault every year.  It is estimated that 84% of rape and sexual assault goes unreported.  In addition, more than 80% of those women and girls will be under the age of 25.  It is a fact that more than 3 out of 4 rapists will know the women they rape.  Men are responsible for a multi-billion  dollar industry that supports and promotes the commercial sexual exploitation, enslavement, and trafficking of women.  The overwhelming majority of the men that do enter the criminal justice system do not experience prosecution and the small percentages that are prosecuted receive little or no penalty.”

This blog in entitled Doublethink because it is a term that adequately depicts our current situation.  Doublethink is a term that I learned from a book called ‘Soul Murder’ by Leonard Shengold, M.D., in which he discusses the nightmarish nature of child abuse with clinical insight and prophetic power.  Doublethink means the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time, and affirm both without conscious tension.

Our culture has mastered this psychic split as manifested in laws that decry the sexual exploitation and abuse of persons, and yet under free speech support the rights of those who publish materials that portray horrific images of persons being hurled into the abyss of moral ruin for the ‘pleasure’ of others.

There is little if any realization that such malevolent intrigue and preposterous behavior may go on indefinitely.  Our universe, such as we know of it is organic.  It is not merely composed of physic-chemical forces.  It has an intrinsic ethos that is self-correcting.  The belief in  a moral continuum that allows for unrestrained moral license protected by the arcane reasoning of legal fiction will some day collapse under the weight of its own frightful  misdeeds.

In the editor’s introduction to ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ these words are found speaking of the cardinal in the book: ” He suffers from the very deception the he has to practice.”   So it is with those who fantastically believe that they may reduce others to mere objects and not walk away grandly lacking what they have stolen from others-’Soul Murder’ is a mutual affair.

For more information about Dr. Rich and his teaching ministry, please follow his blog and visit his website.