Nothing's Black & White

What do we know about why crimes are committed?

Today my little brother, who has been in prison for 10 years, gets his freedom. 

Personally I think he paid too much for his crimes, but that's a policy conversation for another day. 

Because of my bias, I wanted to get another perspective - from a robbery victim's point of view. 

A childhood friend, coincidentally, was the victim of a crime (similar to my brother's offenses) when we were in high school nearly 20 years ago. 

I decided to interview my friend - a father & educator - via email, since I have never asked him about the details of the robbery. Somewhat surprisingly, it turned into a conversation about healing & race.

Names have been changed & edited for time. 


Tampa Do-Gooder: What it was like to be robbed?  

Friend: The surreal thing about being robbed was how calm I was during the robbery. I took a grim pride in that later. Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself - I should set the scene, first. 

My brother, myself and a friend went to Wawa for snacks. Unfortunately, we finished shopping at different times and I came out to the car before they did. 

Little did I know that we were being watched the entire time. Maybe if we had all left the store at the same time and taken off together, none of this would have happened. 

Anyway, one of the robbers knocked on my window and asked something inaudible. I rolled down the window and he jammed something inside, pointed at my crotch. In horror, they stuck around while my brother and his friend eventually made their way back to the car. 

All in all, they probably didn't get more than $20 from the three of us.

After they had taken our stuff, they hung around for a while and I remember the guy with his arm in the car hesitated for a while, maybe wondering if he should actually pull the trigger or not. 

Community

Do you know what it takes to recover from childhood sexual trauma? I don’t, because I’m not there yet. 

Last month, just shy of two years into my weekly therapy sessions, I asked my counselor how much longer it would take until I got better. When she informed me that healing is a lifelong process, my heart split open. I felt like I’d been handed a life sentence.

Of all the causes I’m willing to take a stand for, and there are a lot, I don’t want this to be one of them. I want to be out there saving dolphins from discarded fishing nets or teaching overweight kids how to eat healthfully.

Child sexual abuse is too ugly, or as media folk say, the polar opposite of a sexy issue. It’s horrid, and I didn’t ask for it. But it’s one of the heavier cards I’ve been dealt.

How children are treated and what they learn early on forms their thinking and sets their standards for life. For example, take learning a second language. It’s more than a skill or additional avenue for communicating. Studies show that “bilingualism exerts systematic effects on cognitive performance” in children and even protects “bilingual older adults against the decline of those processes in older age.” The brain develops differently in the heads of bilingual children.

I've seen this for myself. By the time I was 10, I had spent at least half my life in Germany. I wasn’t taught a lot of German in my American schools, but the German vocabulary I have now remains from those elementary days, not the four subsequent years of high school German class, of which I retained nada (or nichts, but now I’m just showing off).

I can count as quickly in Deutsch as I can in English. Meanwhile, I’ve been studying French for the past few years and still can’t count past 30. German, or at least German numbers and colors, are tattooed inside my brain forever.

And so are feelings of insecurity, guilt and abandonment. If I can’t remove from my being the bit of German I learned over 25 years ago, how will I ever recover from not being protected as a child? It stares at me in the mirror like my ears, nose and teeth. I see it in every child and adult I meet, wondering if he or she endured this too.

I lost something before I was old enough to know I ever had it – a whole self. On days when terrible things headline the news, I’m not sure I’ll ever have it back.

I write about this because I hadn’t told anyone about what had happened to me when I was little. It took me decades to find my voice. Some kids are braver than I was then, and they speak up. Or the crimes are discovered as they’re occurring.

Either way it’s the responsibility of adults to prevent it, or if not, take charge and hold the offenders accountable. The Penn State mess is inexcusable, unforgivable. It turns the character & community building of sports into a farce.

Some days I forget there's anything to be thankful for. But little things, like this column by Eric Wilbur of the Boston Globe, remind me there's a lot of people on my team. I'm thankful for that.

Community Stepping Stones

Tampa artist Sigrid Tidmore visited the students of

Community Stepping Stones Wednesday to give the first of a special two-part lesson in watercolors and how the oil spill is affecting the environment.

Sigrid opened by asking the class how the oil spill made them feel. Hands went up and answers were blurted out.

"Sad!"

"Mad!"

"Depressed!" (This comment may have been from one of the several USF fine art interns).

Sigrid then asked: "What are you going to do about this? When you grow up?"

Again the answers flew, this time just from the kids.

"Make a law!"

"Don't litter!"

"Get a better car!"

In this first session the students learned

techniques of painting with watercolors and traced starfish.

23rd Annual Children’s Mental Health Research & Policy Conference

I've always wondered how research leaves universities and is enacted in the real world. This week I got a little insight into that process when I interviewed Dr. Mario Hernandez for the WMNF Evening News.

Dr. Hernandez is chair of the Department of Child and Family Studies at USF and one of the organizers of next week's 23rd Annual Children’s Mental Health Research and Policy Conference in downtown Tampa. Among the things he spoke to me about was the importance of community resources for children, as opposed to sending the "bad" ones off to residential facilities to live out their youths outside of their communities and away from their families. Here's one guy who thinks all kids should be seen and heard.