There Are No "Toxic" People, Only Traumatised Children
Most of us suffer from trauma bias on some level
Okay, okay I just made up this term “trauma bias”.
But aren’t all words made up at some point?
Like all of the other make-believe terms we take so seriously, maybe it can come to mean something.
Anyway, I call it trauma bias because it discriminates between the different ways people play out their traumas
We have great sympathy for someone who is depressed and commits suicide, but not for someone who beats their partner or kills other people.
Many people might scowl at the idea of feeling sympathy for a wife-beater or a murderer. In fact, you are probably scowling at me right now.
We believe that through sympathy we might catch the same killing disease, so we avoid it at all costs.
What is the difference between punishment and revenge?
Some people may argue that punishment is a moral lesson that deters crime.
It isn’t.
Of the prisoners released during 2017–18 in Victoria, 54.8% returned to corrective services in the two years to 2019–20. (Sentencing Council)
Yep, you read that correctly. 54.8% of Victorian prisoners end up back on the inside. And that statistic doesn’t include the people that re-offend and don’t get caught.
So, if there is no deterrent in punishment, what is left besides the satisfaction of revenge?
As a society, we suffer from the hangover of relative Christian morality.
We still have some childish idea that there are good and bad people in this world which is crazy given our knowledge about human psychology.
There are no good and bad people, only good and bad states of mind.
It’s not that people are just natural-born criminals.
Studies confirm that adverse childhood experiences in the first 18 years of life increase the risk of psychosis and criminal behaviour. The more adverse childhood experiences one has, the greater the risk of depression, anxiety, suicidality and other mental disorders. (Gina Wong)
It is our trauma bias that is getting in the way of creating a safer community. We discriminate between how people play out their trauma
It’s hard for us to see that they are the same thing playing out differently. How we deal with prisoners could be very different if we understood their actions to be manifestations of trauma.
Rather than having some middle-aged Catholic white guy in a robe judge people based on his own personal idea of morality, can’t we learn to view violent criminals as patients and try to rehabilitate them instead?
You might be wondering why we should bother rehabilitating violent criminals. Well, Here is some IMPORTANT information for you:
One day a Prisoner is going to be released back into society.
When they do get released, would you rather that prisoner has:
a) Spent ten years in comfortable conditions being rehabilitated?
b) Spent ten years in cramped, torturous conditions surrounded by other dangerous criminals?
Hmm, I just can’t CHOOSE. How long do I have????
Let’s say you did choose answer a). What is to be done about it?
Could we be intelligent enough to create safer conditions for their release by:
- Treating prisoners like patients.
- Offering superior counselling.
- Showing them the love they never received as a child.
- Teaching them that society doesn’t hate them.
- Teaching them life skills.
- Giving them a comfortable bed, free phone calls and excellent food.
Are these really such radical ideas?
I mean, the prisoner is getting released anyway, so knowing (as we do) that crime is a manifestation of trauma, why would we give an already traumatised person another decade of trauma before releasing them back into society?
Do we genuinely think that this has any positive outcome on any level whatsoever?
Suppose we could just let go of the make-believe tension in our brains that tells us certain humans don’t deserve such things, could we build a system of rehabilitation that transforms humans into good people again?
The only other obstacle here is the Prison Industrial Complex. But I won’t talk about that here since I’ve written about it before.
While corporate influence is involved, and politicians are for sale, we will never transition from punishment to rehabilitation since it is not good for business.
But, if somehow, by some miracle, we end up living in a system that actually wants our streets to be safer, we need to reconsider what further trauma we are causing to our already traumatised prisoners in the years before their release.
There are no toxic people, there are only traumatised children and the continued manifestation of that trauma if left untreated. The question is, are we going to start treating that trauma or keep enacting revenge and living with the consequences of that?
If you want more info on this I came across a couple of hopeful websites called worthrises.org. and prisonpolicies.org. I am sure there are plenty more sites like this.
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