An Audio Journal From an Adult Survivor -Reflections on Religion, Culture and the Epstein Files
(00:00): Welcome once again everyone to my audio journal. This is Dawn Boiani Sandberg from childsurvivors.com and a lot of us right now who consider themselves adult survivors of child abuse from harm from their family of origin are having I suspect, a lot of re-triggering and a lot of soul searching questions right now with the exposure of the Epstein files. I think what we're reading and what we're seeing right now, it's so incredibly painful and horrific. And the fact that the Department of Justice is not investigating any of these reports a lot of us are in a deep way thinking, wow, how ubiquitous is this? And some scholars have said that this child sexual abuse and physical abuse and neglect, it's much more all pervasive than we had ever known. I think the statistics are now like one in five children have had something happen and not just an anomaly like a parent hit them or something, but real profound soul crushing abuse, sexual abuse, neglect, or physical abuse.
(01:18): And then what happens in these family dynamics that can go on for generations. It can be a grandfather and then a father and then the son and then the son either gets healed or becomes a perpetrator. So it can go on and on. So what I've been doing since I came from this type of family of origin is I spent my entire life seeking very powerful methods of healing so I could break that karmic pattern and not impart that to my child. And I think I've done a pretty good job. My daughter does not have the trauma and was not abused as I was. I was not sexually abused. It was physical, but it was also neglect. And then what's even worse is psychological abuse. I was told things like we wish we'd never had you. It's things that are so incredibly soul crushing for a child that it takes every ounce of strength and personal internal spirit and will to live to survive something like that.
(02:19): And for the grace of whatever, I feel like I've found that within me and I did stop the generational trauma and I wanted to offer some reflections about what I see and what I've experienced. So of course, coming from this type of family, you're sort of a little bit broken and codependent and it's very, very easy to choose relationships, work environments or religions or organizations that recreate that same unhealthy pattern of what you knew as familiar. So of course I joined a pretty dysfunctional Buddhist group that was a High Demand Group. They expected your life to be owned and for you to be subservient to charismatic personality. And I gave my life over to this organization and Buddhism is supposed to be kind of progressive and esoteric, but once you get behind the scenes with some of these organizations, they can be cult-like and do bad things behind the scenes like a lot of these cults were seeing in unethical organizations and then you're sworn to secrecy and then you're kind of complicit in this whole dark ring of abuse and exploitation.
(03:31): So I got caught up in that with a particular Buddhist organization. And just this year there was a report where 13 adult children came forth and said they had been sexually assaulted by those in entrusted relationships within our Buddhist group. And that's been really hard. And that report actually just sort of went under the table. No one seemed to care about it. It's kind of shocking. I was just reading a report about child trafficking in Nepal in India where children are sort of bought from vulnerable poor families and they're used to populate the monasteries there. So it's not always that these monasteries and Buddhist monasteries worldwide that the children are offered freely. And the Nepali reporter said, "I'm trying to bring this to the surface. No one seems to care." She actually wrote an article saying, "No one cares about child trafficking." It is amazing how these reports in the Epstein files, no one's investigating and not even the International Criminal Court.
(04:41): It's like whatever. I'm so surprised at the lack of follow through when reports of child abuse, sexual and physical and child trafficking occur. It's like humans sort of go numb. I don't know, but I'm trying to explore why it is that we are not enraged and why we don't take personal responsibility for protecting children. What is in us that kind of just goes into this dissociated state? I'm going to come to the answer for that, but I don't know it right now. But I wanted to offer a few personal experiences in this audio journal of what I have found about these issues and also some possible solutions.
So I feel as though it's a family systems issue where you have a person like a parent who is a sexual assaulter and then they will assault their children and then the child can either get healed, go in and seek support, or oftentimes they'll become a perpetrator in their adulthood.
(05:50): So it just continues on. So if you do have this trauma in your past, first of all, it's really embarrassing. It's extremely personal and really a dark shadow thing. It's really hard to be honest enough to go in to get therapy for it. It gets driven underground where people either try to molest children or they look at child porn and then they can get in trouble for that. The whole thing is sort of driven underground and we can't talk about it.
If the person ever wants to go and get therapy, you can't because if they are perpetrators, they're going to be with mandatory reporters and they're going to go to jail. So the whole thing is sort of criminalized and driven underground. And I found an organization in Germany called it's actually called Don't Become a Perpetrator. I can't exactly pronounce it in German. It's like and it's called kein-taeter-werden.
(07:10): And their organization is kind of an experimental therapeutic milieu, which offers help for people who are sexually attracted to children. And they offer that they will keep everything 100% confidential even if you've been a perpetrator, which is kind of outrageous because in the United States that would not happen. You go right to jail as soon as you said that you were hurting a child. But here they're waiving that protocol so that people can actually get help because they're considering it more of a therapeutic issue rather than criminal. And the point is that if you drive it underground and you can't get (mostly men,) if you can't get the men to get healed and they can't go in for therapy, then you're actually endangering children by keeping them at large. But if they can try to get help and we can have transparency around this dark issue, then there's a possibility that people can get help.
(08:14): So I think this organization is kind of cool. And it says that their tagline is
"No Perpetrators is aimed at people with a sexual interest in children. We offer confidentiality, a protracted framework and an acceptance based concept. We work with our clients to find ways that are legally compliant."
So they're not trying to do conversion therapy and sort of talk men out of this hardcore attraction to children, but they are able to talk about it in a transparent way and then find healthy ways of having it be more like fantasy rather than converting them and sort of shaming them because if they're hardwired because of often... And they said something like 87% of people who are perpetrators of child sex crimes or pedophiles had been sexually abused themselves. And that's only from the population that they've been able to assess because sometimes people are not forthright about what happened to them.
(09:22): Another thing is that people sometimes bury memories. It's even hard. Sometimes there's a dissociative disorder involved with this. People have no memories of what happened. So it's only of the ones that are able to talk about it and have memories intact. 87% of these adult perpetrators had been sexually assaulted. So to me, that just feels so sad.
Do we want to round up these men who had been their adult children themselves and throw them all in jail? Or could we find another way? Is it a criminal issue or is it a therapeutic issue? And if we were to be transparent and provide proper support and have this dark undercurrent of human society come into the light, then I think we can have healthy ways of protecting children and helping men to stop this generational pattern. So that's where I thought it was really interesting, this organization.
(10:20): I'll send a link to them. And I also wanted to say that with the Epstein files, we keep on throwing the word pedophile around as the sort of jargon of the stamp of the one instance of being sexually attracted to younger children. But pedophile is something that's very specific. And I just wanted to get really clear about the terms. Pedophile is someone who's sexually attracted to a prepubescent child. So that is under the age of 10 children that have not gone through any type of sexual development, small little children. So those are pedophiles. And then there's something called a hebophile. And that's for someone who is attracted to kind of beginning pubescent children from like 11 to 14.
(11:27): And then there's a... It's actually hard to pronounce. It's called ephebophile. And that's someone who's sexually attracted to teenagers that are very young from the ages of 15 to 19. And in that case, a lot of men will fall into that. They love kind of young, beautiful, like in our Buddhist scriptures they say, "Oh, 16 year old is the optimal lover." So I mean throughout human society, men have always valued women who are very young or just starting to flower. That's not necessarily some sadistic creepy criminal thing. It's just appreciating girls as they are starting to bloom. That's just a beautiful thing. It's not necessarily horrible. And the age of consent in the United States ranges what, between 16 and 18. So that's not necessarily even criminal to have just an affinity for younger women.
(12:43): Although what I'm finding is men who are older, not just within three years of that age group, but 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and of you're still having sexual attraction to teenage girls. A lot of that has to do with some fundamental insecurity in the man. It's a ploy for power. They're not able to be developed enough emotionally to sustain and consummate relationships with adult women. They feel out of control. So when you're with someone that young, oftentimes it's about power and control, manipulation than it is. And also protecting yourself emotionally like an older woman can hurt you. Whereas these young ones, as long as you stay in control, you can manipulate the situation to not get hurt. So there's a whole entire body of pathology that I think they delve into in this organization that you can really explore. And I want to support their work because it sounds revolutionary. And I just don't like the American model of punishment jail for sex crimes when oftentimes, as we know the statistics, we have 87% of them, if not more, are adult survivors themselves.
(13:46): So it just makes me sad. And I just don't want... I want to really find a way for these patterns to stop and to heal this within our society. So number one, you need to talk about it. Transparency, transparency, take what is driven underground all of these dark things from the human psyche, the heart, the conduct, and shed huge amount of megawatt light on it. So that's the first steps of bringing things to light, normalizing. If it's one out of five families, then I think we really need to see this as more of a cultural tenant and a cultural shadow and something that really needs to be addressed not necessarily in a criminal way because I don't think that that stops the issue. So to me, it feels like a therapeutic issue. It's a therapy issue rather than a criminal issue. \
(14:53): And I wanted to tell you that I had a friend in our Buddhist community that's kind of a well-known... There was a lot of public discussion and he became pretty famous in our Buddhist community. And I knew him for a really long time. I knew him from my 20s when I lived in Vermont at a Buddhist retreat center. And he was accused of child sexual assault in an entrusted relationship with someone that he was living with who was a teenager, very young. And he got a 23 year prison sentence. And I went to advocate for him with the district attorney. And I said, "Please don't consider this a criminal issue because our particular district attorney in Boulder does a lot with restorative justice." And I said, "I think this person had been really forthright the entire time about his crime, his propensities. He went into the sex offender like eight month or nine month rehab program and they still threw him in jail 23 years later.
(15:54): So I just felt like the whole thing was sort of vindictive. And I was advocating for him, not enabling, but saying that I felt like he needed to get help in a therapeutic way, in a supportive way. And then as I befriended him and went further into his case, he disclosed to me something that he had never disclosed to very many people, that he grew up Catholic and he had a memory. And you can kind of know where this is going. He said when he was about six years old, and this memory is kind of foggy because it's hard to remember exactly what happened, but that he would go into confession. His Catholic family would have him go into confession with the priest in the booth. And he said that the priest would have him come into the place where he's giving the confession and he was sexually assaulted.
(16:45): And that happened a few times when he was really young. And his mom has a memory of this where she would try to bring him to church on Sundays and he would start having like a total temper tantrum and a meltdown. And I actually confirmed this with the mom directly. She said, yeah, he started to not want to go to church for some really weird reason. So this was like really early on in this man's sexual development that he was sexually assaulted by a priest at the age of six and onward. So when he grew up, he has very dormant this hardened propensity, this compulsion to be with younger people and break the law and be a perpetrator. But it's coming from him not being protected when he was young. So forgive me if I have sympathy for perpetrators, but being a child abuse survivor myself, I know what type of monumental task that is to overcome those dark patterns that were imparted to you at a very early age and not become a perpetrator yourself.
(17:54): And I consider perpetrator to be child abuse, which is sexual or physical or neglect or emotional abuse. So there's four different ways that we can perpetrate. And so why I advocated for him was I thought that his sentence was punitive and vindictive and not going to really protect society or our children. But if we were to look at it therapeutically with some compassion, with some, wow, we failed you buddy. We didn't protect you when we should have. We should have gotten you out of that home, out of that environment and into safety and then gotten you the help that you need. So it's more of like a systems issue. And that's what I feel about our Buddhist community and then about sexual assault in the same sex monasteries worldwide. I dated an ex - monk from one of the monasteries and he told me that sexual and physical abuse and threats of hell are ubiquitous and that boys are sexually assaulted and physically assaulted in these Buddhist monasteries worldwide every day.
(19:11): And this is a really, really dark problem that we're not allowed to talk about within a Buddhist tradition because when you have a spiritual tradition, it's supposed to be a source of refuge and solace, sacredness and spirituality and you can't really reconcile like, wow, the whole thing is occurring on the backs of these young boys with all this Epstein light dark assaults. So if we don't talk about it, then it continues. So I would want to have people really become aware of how vast the problem is. If in family systems, it's like one in five. And in the monastic system, it's pretty much everyone from what I understand and all the reports that have come out. And it's amazing to me how little we have in terms of justice and accountability worldwide. It's not just our DOJ not investigating the Epstein violence, but there's a reporter [in] in Nepal that she had found out that a lot of children in the Buddhist monasteries in India and Nepal are trafficked.
(20:20): They're actually bought from families in the villages and that this is a really serious ethics issue and then they're not safe there. They're sexually and physically abused and threatened with hell if they leave. They're using religious doctrine to silence and perpetuate the abuse for a really long time. And she writes these articles and she's like, "I can't believe that no one seems to care." And it's funny because the work that I've done over the years with trying to bring this issue just to our Buddhist organization and my friends, even my own friends, they just go silent. They just go into this dissociated state of like, I don't really understand what it is. I'm trying to figure out why people don't care or they just go silent or they just freeze. I don't know if they're getting re-triggered. They don't believe it. They can't bring it to the consciousness, but it's almost like a stop gap where you actually just dare to venture into the topic of child sexual and physical abuse.
(21:27): And then something in the human psyche just stops. It's like flat, gone, dissociated silence. There's like this bar within us that we cannot have this conversation. And I find it really interesting that there's not people being enraged and wanting to protect children. I don't know, but I'm going to explore a little further as to why people don't come forth and they don't protect children when this is very clearly and repeatedly exposed. I think that, I mean, in religion and cults, of course, it's because you don't want the religion or the cult to be defamed or the reputation to be besmirched or to alter the sacredness or integrity of people. I mean, I get that. But it's more than that. It's like people just can't handle it. Maybe it's because it re-triggers something all deep within us or there's a social unspoken construct of we don't go there.
(22:33): I don't know. But I would invite people to maybe look at this organizational, send the link, help for people who are sexually attracted to children out of Germany and talk about how vast and awful this problem is. And I've said before, once I found out about it and off these Me Too movement and I realized that within our Buddhist tradition, we have child abuse. I was on retreat once and I was crying reduced to the fetal position, hemorrhaging about how sad I was that I supported tradition, that people don't seem to care about how we hurt kids and we kind of have this edifice of sacredness and ethics and it's occurring on the backs of children being harmed. And I couldn't believe it. I just felt like I had this intense sunk cost fallacy and I thought my whole life was just a sham. Everything that I believed and had faith in was a paper tiger and it was soul crushing.
(23:43): But I said in my last recording that I'm not going to leave the tradition because leaving to me feels like abandoning kids. I can't leave with this ocean of children being abused. I would feel like I'm abandoning them. And so we've got to help. I think we can have compassion for everyone. It's not a criminal issue because if it's a criminal issue it's like what Pam Bondi said, if I release all of the Epstein files, the entire system goes down because it's like everyone. I mean, if it's so ubiquitous and it's like one in five and it is this giant cabal of child abuse and trafficking and horrible things that have been occurring in a silent way underneath human society, then I think we have to bring it to the light. We have to talk about it. We have to venture into the places that scare us to the darkest shadow of the human psyche, things that have happened in our past, things that we're all keeping secret and just bring it to light.
(24:51): Hey, this is our shadow. This is not, as I said, it can't be a criminal issue because then we're going to have to imprison, what is it, 20% of our population. I mean, we can't do that. So if there's so many crimes like this, just like war crimes, you almost have to have a truth and reconciliation. Be like, okay, we know this has happened in one out of five families throughout all the monasteries worldwide these same sex monasteries throughout all of these elites. Now we just need to have some type of ethics in transparency and bravery to heal this within us. And so I hope that that process starts. I feel like it's beginning. I feel like there's enough voices of sanity, compassion, wisdom to begin to shed light on this and to begin to heal it. And I think it's important that it not become only a criminal issue, that it be more of a therapeutic issue because we can't just arrest everyone.
(26:03): I mean, I guess we're building detention camps, but we don't have enough prisons to put the entire population of people who've been guilty of these crimes into prison. And then by having this mandatory reporting and punitive punishments for these types of sexual abuse and physical abuse crimes of children, people will never come forth and then it gets driven underground and it stays underground. So I think mostly something par with a Truth and Reconciliation Commission worldwide is in order. And I pray that that happen. And personally, I don't know how to reconcile this. All that I ever know is that the teachings of clarity, compassion, forgiveness, and the belief that the human goodness is stronger than our generational patterns and generational patterns can be cut and we can heal together, but it will take very powerful conversations with ethics committees and willingness to heal this therapeutically.
(27:24): So it's a huge task and the problem is ubiquitous and way more vast than we ever knew. And I hope that these children become safe and the survivors become healed and the perpetrators cut the patterns. So I believe that there is help for people who are sexually attracted to children and help for the survivors. And with transparency, we can cut these patterns within us.
Image: https://www.magnific.com/photos
Sources:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9663395/
“No perpetrator” is aimed at people with a sexual interest in children. We offer confidentiality, a protected framework and an acceptance-based concept. With our clients, we work out ways to a legally compliant and satisfied life. https://kein-taeter-werden.de/
