We must stop the blame game and face evil among us to protect the vulnerable
AT FIRST, many of us will feel repulsed and recoil every time we read news about the horror inflicted on vulnerable children in Ireland.
After that, our brains click into gear and we will want to follow any information we can about another shockingly tragic story.
This is all pretty normal – the brain is a problemsolving organ and it is human nature to try to solve the problem of evil in our midst. Soon many of us will begin the blame game.
We do this in a bid to convince ourselves that if we put the necessary safeguards in place then we can assure ourselves that it will never happen again.
But really, when trying to understand profound wickedness, we probably shouldn’t try to pin the blame on the social services or the State or any number of actors.
In truth, the only people who are to blame are the adults directly involved in any paedophile ring.
The psychologist Carl Jung described how every one of us has a dark side and how our unconscious ‘shadow’ consists mainly of primitive emotions such as sexual lust, greed, selfishness, rage and striving for power.
The more we can acknowledge the depths of our shadow side, the more we can reduce its ability to shape our behaviour. Thus people involved in a paedophile ring are generally operating at an instinctive level and driven by their dark side.
The less connected we are, the more likely we will be shaped and influenced by our darker motivations.
There might be some very weak personalities involved in a gang and some of these adults might have been almost entirely under the influence of one or two powerful personalities, and yet the weaker personalities are no less evil for all that.
Being weak and powerless doesn’t excuse a person from evil; nor does the fact some adults involved might themselves have suffered sex abuse. Nothing really excuses this evil.
Evil is a perennial problem and it is more helpful to acknowledge it and stand strong in the face of it than to pretend that it doesn’t exist and kid ourselves that with the right systems in place and the right supports available that we will all live happily ever after.
We’ve been down this road before. When we exposed a corrupt culture in parts of the Catholic Church in Ireland, we hoped we had lanced the boil of paedophilia here. Then we realised we hadn’t and so we turned our attention to adults in positions of authority and we put the proper safeguards in place.
It’s only right and proper that we did this – indeed we can undoubtedly learn from each story about how to better recognise when child abuse might be taking place.
Some of the signs to watch out for are inappropriate behaviour, clinginess, irrational aggression, anxiety and physical complaints in the genital area. It is estimated about 90pc of child sexual abuse occurs either within the family or from someone known to the family.
But it remains likely that paedophilia will continue to be a problem in society.
Rather than playing the blame game, you could do better than that and instead acknowledge sadness and tragedy may always exist.
It is more helpful to spend your time making sure you are a force for good and not evil. What do you hate and fear more than anything else? Because whatever you hate and fear is probably deeply connected to your shadow side and if you can become aware of your darker motivations, then you will be less driven by your dark side.
Far better to acknowledge there is evil amidst us and then do our bit to make the world a better place.
We won’t all live happily ever after. Life is just too complicated and difficult for that.
But we will at least be part of the solution instead of being part of the problem.