Is There a Space for Rapists?

I spent my first semester after high school, when most of my peers had gone off to college, in a halfway house.

I was 18, fresh out of rehab and now living in downtown Baltimore with men 30 and up. One day while painting an alley strewn with dead rats and empty crack vials, my new roommate Gary asked if I’d ever heard the Neil Young song “Old Man.”

I knew it well.

Gary said the song reminded him of his father, who had shared with him years ago (the intention not made clear) that he’d raped a woman. Replaying the song’s opening line in my head (“Old man look at my life/I’m a lot like you were”) I knew what Gary was wishing to tell me, but couldn’t.

I’ve never heard the song the same way since.

Those who have raped

In my private practice I have treated victims of rape and, yes, those who have raped. It should be apparent to anyone not sociopathic that the suffering of rape victims is immense, often immeasurable. It can take countless hours of working through before trust, let alone healing, can occur.

I take this work very seriously and I believe (or at least hope) the patients I’ve worked with have felt that. Collaborating to rebuild their lives after trauma has been one of the most difficult and consequential parts of my own life.

But over the years I’ve noticed something. Much like the soldier who has killed, those who have raped live with their horrific actions. These are carried alone, with no place to go, no person to turn to, and they get replayed as their own trauma. 

What should be done with that?

A full understanding?

Before proceeding I need to be clear: I am not suggesting that rapists experience anything akin to the trauma of their victims. I know this only too well from my work with both populations. But I am saying that in the consulting room, away from the justified ire of society, something else is revealed.

An act that apparently grew out of unchecked aggression, rage, misogyny and sociopathy is terrifying to look at. But this is required for change to occur.

The offender is left holding the reality of his act, the deep yet unbounded pain it has caused another. Guilt, shame and self-loathing enter into the psyche with phenomenal force and the patient is left holding the understanding that he, and he alone, is now responsible for this suffering.^[1]Scientists such as Robert Saplosky are challenging this notion. I take issue with his stance that people possess virtually no free will. As a philosophical exercise it may have merit; as a moral or … Continue reading

Something else often happens, however, as the patient further examines his life. He begins to see what was perpetrated against him from a young age, most often by loved ones. While the causes of sexual violence are complex, some research suggests a link between adverse childhood experiences and rape perpetration.

An effective treatment allows the patient to see the harm his act has caused others, and also the harmful acts done to him and left unprocessed that helped create the monster he finds himself to be.

Unfortunately this capacity for insight into one’s own aggressive and even annihilative impulses terrifies people, including most therapists.

Making space for all parts

Therapy is not about absolution; it’s about understanding.

It is vital for the therapist to make space for all parts, including the unwanted and despised parts, that a patient presents.^[2]Most therapists have their limits. I once had a supervisor who had served in the Israeli army during the Six-Day War and whose loved ones had perished in the Holocaust. One of his patients, still an … Continue reading It can be tempting to wish to talk a patient out of his discomfort, to reassure him that he and the things he did are not so bad.

But reassurance, as has been said, is not reassuring. It carries with it a subtext of judgment, the notion that what’s been said is, in the ears of the listener, too much to bear and therefore in need of alteration.

But this is potentially inaccurate and unloving. Inaccurate because the patient may view matters differently. Unloving because attempting to explain or write off a part of a patient is to suggest a kind of intolerance for and rejection of that patient.^[3]This is of course not therapeutic. It’s also an essential subtext of something like cognitive behavioral therapy, which many of the patients who come to me have fled. That therapy essentially … Continue reading

Clinically this means that a great deal of patience and openness must be exercised in the treatment, so that the patient may express all of himself and arrive at his own conclusions about what he has done and who he is.

In a world built on judgment that craves retribution this is a tall task. But this is the task of a truly rehabilitative treatment.

This is profoundly painful work, but it also leads to one of the miracles of therapy. An inherent moral sense reemerges.

The patient, having learned to reconnect to his own emotions, can now sit in his own skin. And only then can he begin to feel, often for the first time, what it’s like to inhabit the skin of others.