Who Enables Sexual Predators?
Who led the many teenage girls into Larry Nasser's closed-door office where he examined and treated them, unchaperoned, by inserting his ungloved finger into their vagina?
Predator-enablers cannot be viewed as accessories to Nasser's many hundred crimes. But they were abettors. How many coaches and athletes saw Jerry Sandusky flitting around prepubescent boys, many of whom he sodomized in the showers of Penn State Athletic buildings. Abettors also.What about the parents of the two prepubescent boys who were allowed to spend days and nights and weeks alone with Michael Jackson while he played penis and butt? Abettors also.
What happens in the minds of all these people, probably unaware of the grossly illicit behavior occurring, if not on their watch, but under their nose. How did they not know, not attend to signs, not sum the two-and-two they should have counted?
The answer falls partly on the persuasive, seemingly guileless charm of the predator whose m.o. operates on a psychopath's platform: able to present his will under an umbrella of kindness, generosity, solicitude, caring, respectability, conscientiousness, virtuousness — all deliberately forged to conceal and deny.But the evidence does leak.A blinder falls across the eyes of abettors because the institutions they serve, along with the very secretive predator, operate under a mission that not only precludes sexual abuse; the mission also is established to prevent abuse of any kind. Institution-based predators do not operate in open alleys or from unmarked vans. They seclude themselves in institutions that blind the people who assist and co-operate with them in effecting the institution's mission. Predators can abuse almost in plain sight because no one is able to peer around the mission statement.
"Predators see the empathy of others as a weakness "
And more than that: the maintenance of self-regard as a member of an institution requires an automatic trust in colleagues. Even as evidence comes to light, as the predator begins to be exposed, that blind regard does not readily yield. Doubts, questions, excuses mount and create a shield that may protect the predator for months, years or forever. The collegial bind that holds members of an institution together is itself a force shielding predators, and those who begin to suspect them, from full disclosure and exposure.
Anyone's self-regard becomes, at the institutional level, a regard, a safeguard for the reputation of the institution. Having a sexual predator in its midst is not only a gross embarrassment, it also shreds the mission statement and reveals huge fault lines in the operation of the institution. So protection from scandal becomes the institution's situational goal, its survival mission.Predators know to rely on that institutional need to advance, protect, and polish its reputation. They know how to hide in plain sight, because they are joined with all their blind-sighted colleagues in living and surviving under that reputation.All this boils down to the parts of the brain that constitute the necessary function of trust. We are naturally armed to distrust strangers, to distrust even more the strangers who appear dangerous. But we are also naturally driven to trust people we know and people we choose to associate with and to work alongside. That trust is allied with a capacity for empathy. Predators, who signed out of empathic relations with their victims or who lack empathy as a cerebral condition, are none-the-less aware of this function in others. Predators see the empathy of others as a weakness and as a conduit into a relationship that allows the predator to manipulate and control the trust of others in order to foster their own agenda. Predators are essentially empathy scammers.
Thus trust becomes a tool in the predator's methodology, a means to his end that hides his intention, his behavior, his true character. Predators use that tool with everyone in their life. Like all humans, they crave social bonds and they know what constitutes socially acceptable bonds. They marry and procreate and play golf and attend their children's games and graduations. They build a place for themselves to operate on their own agenda because they know that trust is their secret weapon. Trust will serve them as a sacred cover, a mephistophelean covenant. It is an open secret, an emperor without any clothes.So...we must learn to peek behind our veil of trust. Consider its perils. Trust is a necessary bonding factor in all societies, but the risks remain. Institutions, formed of hierarchical structure, can make its members feel isolated and professionally insecure so that collegial bonding can work to allay those feelings, so much so that trust may be given to professional comrades perhaps too readily, with some safeguards dismissed. Predators, if effective in acting on their victims, focus on trust as a well-oiled manipulative tool.
So... we must, along with the back pats and extra favors, the smiles and well wishes and salt-of-the-earthiness, consider ingesting a little drop of the elixir of paranoia.
