The title of this post was initially prompted by another platform called MEDIUM. They issued a call for submissions on one or more of these 4 topics. I thought it an occasion for me to try to summarize where I was at this stage of things in my life. But The deadline on MEDIUM passed, but the article remained. I’m posting it now. This will be longer than usual, but it explains many things. It meanders a bit, but so does life.
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I reentered France in August of 2018, after living in the US for nearly 50 years. After a year of unemployment, I started teaching English in a private French high school in September of 2019. Pole Emploi (the French unemployment office) had suggested this to me, and I happily worked there for 13 months.
But last October, in the middle of the COVID pandemic, I had to resign from my teaching position. This is the letter I wrote to my French students. I needed to explain why I was leaving so suddenly after teaching English for over a year. I wrote it in English. It would be my last English assignment to them, trusting the better students to translate for the others.
Dear students,
It is with a heavy heart that I find myself unable to continue to teach at this time. It was just a matter of time before COVID would sooner or later reach my doorstep. As some of you know, I have been taking care of a handicapped friend whose health is very fragile, having Parkinson's' disease whose lungs were also damaged by more than 40 years of smoking. The demand on my time now is such that I can no longer devote the required time to be an effective teacher of English. My friend will survive but the resulting damage obliges me to spend more time helping him recuperate and he can't do it alone.
I do want to say that despite the various difficulties, the various ups and downs over the last year that I have been at Tersac, I can honestly say that I have the fondest regards and the best wishes for all of you. I hope that you all – both the new students and the returning students - have learned at least a little bit from our time together, however brief it might have been.
My last lesson:
It was a rather fortuitous chance that the last lesson Friday with Seconde happened to deal with the epic story of Gilgamesh, that most ancient of mythic heroes who, despite its very ancient roots, still speaks to us today because its themes appear again and again across our lives. He is neither wholly good nor wholly evil, a bit like normal human beings. Gilgamesh is called to adventure and rises to the occasion. And so it is that we, even in modern times, can hear the call to adventure if we listen closely. Those adventures are not quite so manifest and dangerous as they once were in the days of Gilgamesh, and have in modern times more to do with internal struggles than with external ones. All those exciting battles with monsters and demons that face Gilgamesh are all representations of inner battles. The real battlefield is not “out there” but all within your mind and your heart.
When you're tempted to give up, just ask yourself: what would your favorite hero (or heroine) do? What would Gilgamesh do? What would Ulysses do, or Hercules?
These are all just embodiments of various sides of the human spirit. They are meant to encourage us along the way, to help us become the best version of ourselves that we can be. None of our heroes are perfect, as none of us are as well. But we are encouraged to be – at least from time to time – the best that we can be.
That, ultimately, is the function of myths and heroes – not just to entertain but to inspire. I hope the best for all of you – your life's adventure has just begun!
Such was my explanation; except that it was a lie. My friend is handicapped. His health is very fragile, and I am taking care of him, but he didn’t have COVID. It was a cover story. This second letter is what I wrote to my colleagues explaining the real reason why I had to leave so suddenly.
Dear Colleagues,
As you are all adults, I think I owe you all a better and more truthful explanation rather than the proposed explanation for my rather sudden disappearance from school.
Though there is some truth to what I have said in the teacher's lounge about my past, I am really in France because I was deported back by US immigration. Why? Because I had spent 5 years in prison - from 2013 to 2018. It is no surprise that American prisons are not very pleasant and would have preferred not to talk about it. But the why of it is the most difficult to admit, but here it is: I was convicted - and indeed guilty - of having downloaded child pornography, what the French call "pedopornography". There is no excuse. I knew it to be wrong, but I talked myself into doing it anyway. My life had spiraled into various drug addictions, including amphetamines, and addiction to (so-called normal) pornography, and then worse. I paid the price and went to prison for nearly 5 years.
Being deported back to France, I thought I might be able to restart my life. Here was my second chance. But all I know is how to teach - philosophy preferably - but I can adapt to other things, like teaching English to French students. It took me a year to finally land on my feet and on this job, teaching at Tersac. At first, I hesitated but finally took the plunge. The school had indeed been recommended to me by unemployment services who were fully aware of my special circumstances.
Despite the difficulties, all in all, I have come to love this job. I have come to love the students and the teachers. I need not tell you that the profession of teaching is a kind of calling. It can be very fulfilling as all of you know. I have had my shares of ups and downs, but on balance, there is nothing else I would rather do.
My past is my past, and I have paid dearly for my mistake. I arrived in France - in Paris to be exact - two years ago (August of 2018) with nothing but the clothes on my back and my passport in hand. I won't bore you with the details of how I came to be in Marmande.
I thought I could restart my life with some semblance of peace and tranquility. You normally don't have to pay twice for your mistakes. You pay the price, you do your time, and you move on. But we now live in the modern age of the internet. Google is like the all-seeing eye of Sauron. It knows all; never forgives and never forgets.
And so it is that my complicated past has come back to haunt me a second time and remaining here at the school, at Tersac, has suddenly become an impossible proposition. Someone (an acquaintance outside the school but known to me whom I shall name JL) who seeks to do me harm recently discovered that I worked at Tersac. He called M Heitz and revealed my identity and threatens to do more, but I do not know what.
As you know, the school is already fragile enough as it is. I can only assume that the newspapers would love nothing more than a juicy scandal, or at least the appearance of one. I hasten to add that both my police criminal record N° 1 and N° 3 ("casier judiciaire") are both completely clean. The school director felt obliged to go to the police to make inquiries since this particular acquaintance also took it upon himself to call them. I have been told that, from the point of view of the police, there is nothing to report. I have done my time and I should have the right to begin again without prejudice towards myself.
All I can say on my behalf is that I have proved my worth and my character through my actions. I feel I should be judged, not by what I have done many years ago under very different circumstances, but by what I do now, and what I am at present. Who I am is who I present myself to be daily - in the here and now - for all to see and judge.
But the question poses itself: what should I tell the students? The current story is that I have withdrawn myself to take care of my handicapped friend who is allegedly ill from COVID (which is not true. He is handicapped but he is not ill). But why not tell them the truth? Can the students handle this difficult truth? Can they be so naive that they should just be left in the dark? Are they not mature enough to have some say-so in this matter?
What should I do? Should I just go quietly and not imperil the school, already in a difficult situation? I have no ready-made answers. I can only guess at some possible outcomes but cannot sort out the probable from the improbable. There are presumably possibilities I have not even considered. What is my moral duty vis-a-vis the school? The students? And even myself?
For none of these questions do I have a satisfactory response. This is why I write. Please, help me think things through.
I apologize for this difficult position that I am putting you all in. I am aware that some will think that I should never have come here in the first place - that I should never have put the school - however inadvertently - in this terrible position. I should have known that the risk of exposure was always present.
But perhaps there is a solution that I have not thought of. Is my continued presence untenable? I just do not know.
You may well think me excessively naïve for having written it in the first place. But In the end, they never got the letter. I first sent it to the school principal just to be sure, but he counseled me against it. He understandably just wanted this to go away. He wanted me to stick to the first story, and to do so even with my former colleagues. So I did. I went away quietly and filed for unemployment.
The vengeful man who happened to know me, called the school director directed him to this picture, easily found on the internet.
He must have been horrified. A bit like this guy.
France has a "right to be forgotten" law that applies to ex-felons. I have no legal restrictions on me whatsoever. There is no public access to police records in France, and technically he should not have been able to find this. But everybody seems to have a VPN now, and you can surf the internet and hide your true IP address. How convenient.
This is me now in 2021:
Clearly, something had gone terribly wrong. But what? It's a long complicated story, but at the heart of it was failure. I had failed to complete my Ph.D. thesis in 2010 when I finally gave up in despair. From 2001 to 2010 I had lost 3 teaching jobs, even an online gig with Phoenix University. Amphetamines, alcohol, GHB, despair. My drug-addled brain could not keep up. I cracked. I gave up. And then came the porn.
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Was I mentally ill? Was my moral responsibility diminished? Was I losing my autonomy? My agency? Was there a better alternative than complete and total ruinous loss through incarceration and deportation? I still ask myself all these questions today.
And yet things could have gone worse for me. I had been locked in an addiction-relapse cycle, familiar to drug addicts, but not just drug addicts. In moments of some clarity, as if I had woken up, I recognized what I was doing. I erased everything. Deleted the Peer-to-Peer program that I used to download this stuff. And I seemed to be more or less “cured”. Or so I thought. But the underlying issues were not resolved, and I was on my own, with no professional counseling available. My psychiatrist saw me once a month for 15 minutes, just long enough to renew my medication. I could not speak of it to him, and he just kept prescribing me Adderall for my underlying ADHD. That made things worse to the extent that it further dysregulated my Dopamine system. I started abusing Adderall and even started writing my own prescriptions until I got caught by the pharmacy. They just basically said "stop it", but never called the authorities. So I did, and so I just continued the regular dosage.
But the underlying addiction to pornography was still there. The underlying issues just festered. I was leading an utterly meaningless life. And I started downloading again, more or less indiscriminately. Files by the hundreds. Impossible to know what you get until you open the file. That's how many get caught. Some of those files have been through the FBI system and have a Trojan horse that can get in the system and track your ISP, or your IP, or whatever. The internet-savvy know how to avoid this. I am not particularly internet savvy. I got caught and went to prison.
So much can be a matter of just luck.
Had I been arrested 3 days earlier than I was, I would have had many over a hundred videos of all sorts, and could potentially have been facing 20 years. A fellow inmate, in jail on similar charges, but in larger quantity, got exactly that. Or had had I been arrested 3 days later, given that I was yet in another personal relapse-recovery cycle, I might have managed to erase everything. There would have been just circumstantial evidence, and the charges might have been much less. Probation might have been a real possibility. Another fellow inmate, in jail on similar charges but with fewer videos and also a better lawyer, got probation. I only had a public defender; there was no hope. That I was a resident alien (for 50 years!), with a green card, and not a full-fledged citizen, made it almost inevitable that I would be deported. And I was. The very first thing I discovered upon my arrival to France is that I speak much better English than French!
The scope of the problem of underage pornography is enormous but linked, I believe, to the larger problem of pornography generally, and the consequences of porn addiction, a world-wide phenomenon. Last year, on his Making Sense podcast, philosopher Sam Harris interviewed Gabriel Dance on this epidemic of child pornography.
In this episode, the podcaster, Sam Harris speaks with Gabriel Dance about the global epidemic of child sexual abuse. They discuss how misleading the concept of “child pornography” is, the failure of governments and tech companies to grapple with the problem, the tradeoff between online privacy and protecting children, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, photo DNA, the roles played by specific tech companies, the ethics of encryption, “sextortion,” the culture of pedophiles, and other topics.
But the system is beginning to respond.
Earlier this year, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof reported that Pornhub was monetizing videos featuring “child rapes, revenge pornography, spycam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags.” In his piece, Kristof cited instances of videos on the website featuring girls aged between 9 and 15 being sexually assaulted. Pornhub responded to the allegations by barring unverified users from uploading or downloading content from the site and promising to expand its moderation efforts. Despite the changes, Mastercard and Visa announced that they would stop processing payments for the site. Visa went a step further banning all transitions with sites owned by Pornhub’s parent company Mindgeek including Redtube, Youporn, XTube, and Brazzers. A group of bipartisan senators led by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) also introduced a bill last week that would allow victims of crimes like revenge porn, sex trafficking and sexual assault the ability to sue sites like Pornhub for hosting illegal content depicting them.
VICE Motherboard article on Pornhub
This was last December. The issue about what tech companies can do has been in news once again because of new initiatives coming from Apple iPhones.
New York Times - Apple and privacy
Apple’s iPhones Will Include New Tools to Flag Child Sexual Abuse The changes, for later this year, raised concerns that the company is installing surveillance technology that governments could exploit.
You would think this would be welcome news. Why all the fuss? It's worth considering the following description of this new technology:
Later this year, iPhones will begin using complex technology to spot images of child sexual abuse, commonly known as child pornography, that users upload to Apple’s iCloud storage service, the company said. Apple also said it would soon let parents turn on a feature that can flag when their children send or receive any nude photos in a text message.
Just what is "child sexual abuse"? What is "child pornography"? And how is this linked to children sending and/or receiving nude photos? Nude photos of who? What are young teens doing today that they were not doing (or not able to do) 15 or 20 years ago? This is very complicated, and should be the subject of another post, but things can go wrong very quickly. Let me explain.
I had a cellie for about 2 weeks back in 2015 who had finally finished the MOSOP program. He had been in prison for about 4 years. But he seemed different from many others. Sometimes you believe people, and sometimes you don’t. He had been a horse instructor, in his late 30s, and indeed owned his equestrian school. Among his students was a teen girl of about 14 or 15. For whatever reason she had a crush on him. He said that he gently rebuffed her and wanted nothing to do with her. But, having his number, he says that she sent unsolicited nude pictures of herself. I don’t recall the exact details, but it was somehow found out, and he was charged with possessing child porn and enticing a minor. He tried to fight the charge, but eventually he settled for a plea deal. He had little choice. It’s just far too risky to go to trial and risk losing. This is a well known prosecutorial tactic. Charge the suspect with as much as possible, and force a plea deal to reduced charges. If you go to trial and lose, give him maximum penalty, which could have been 10 or 15 years. He opted for the plea deal. There was enough credibility to his story and in his manner of telling it that I believed him.
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But let’s move on. What does science say about people like me? Do I have the brain of a monster?
Images of child sex abuse have reached a crisis point on the internet, spreading at unprecedented rates in part because tech platforms and law enforcement agencies have failed to keep pace with the problem. But less is understood about the issue underlying it all: What drives people to sexually abuse children?
Science in recent years has begun to provide some answers. One thing most pedophiles have in common: They discover, usually as teenagers, that their sexual preferences have not matured like everyone else’s. Most get stuck on the same-age boys or girls who first attracted them at the start of puberty, though some retain interest in far younger children.
“People don’t choose what arouses them — they discover it,” said Dr. Fred Berlin, director of the Johns Hopkins Sex and Gender Clinic. “No one grows up wanting to be a pedophile.”
Two points to make: conflating the viewers of those images with the actual abusers themselves is unfortunate, and it’s a distinction that the NYT should have made between the two. Another point to make is that, especially in the last 10 or 15 years, an enormous amount of underage pornography is posted by the underage teens and preteens themselves doing what teens and preteen do.
In any case, I filtered the viewing of all of that through the lenses of my own childhood experiences. Even as a child I knew I liked boys, but also young men, far more than I liked girls. Even as a ten-year-old boy I desperately longed to be held by a man. I knew that I was gay but just didn't know the word for it. But more than anything else, I was utterly starved for male love and affection which my stepfather simply never gave me. He never abused me in any way. He essentially just ignored me. My own emotional life was utterly dominated by a despotic and tyrannical mother who seemed essentially to despise me (and the frequent subject of my posts!) But she owned me completely and utterly and my stepfather never ever dared to step inside the arena that was my childhood, with me in one corner and her in the other. I was never able to tag out. And I always lost. Apparently, they don't call that child abuse, but maybe that definition should be broadened. It was just one long unending emotional battle that ended when I ran away at 16 and went my own way. But the emotional damage was done.
So - what about that brain of a pedophile? What it’s there anyway?
Consider this abstract from recent research on the brain of pedophiles. Read it carefully, because, if the research is correct, it's the reverse of what you might be initially tempted to think.
Ok … so that’s not what they found … that’s actually a hydrothermal deep-sea vent worm.
Feel free to just lightly skim this Abstract …
Decoding Pedophilia: Increased Anterior Insula Response to Infant Animal Pictures
Previous research found increased brain responses of men with sexual interest in children (i.e., pedophiles) not only to pictures of naked children but also to pictures of child faces. This opens the possibly that pedophilia is linked (in addition to or instead of an aberrant sexual system) to an over-active nurturing system. To test this hypothesis we exposed pedophiles and healthy controls to pictures of infant and adult animals during functional magnetic resonance imaging of the brain. By using pictures of infant animals (instead of human infants), we aimed to elicit nurturing processing without triggering sexual processing. We hypothesized that elevated brain responses to nurturing stimuli will be found - in addition to other brain areas - in the anterior insula of pedophiles because this area was repeatedly found to be activated when adults see pictures of babies. Behavioral ratings confirmed that pictures of infant or adult animals were not perceived as sexually arousing neither by the pedophilic participants nor by the heathy controls. Statistical analysis was applied to the whole brain as well as to the anterior insula as region of interest. Only in pedophiles did infants relative to adult animals increase brain activity in the anterior insula, supplementary motor cortex, and dorsolateral prefrontal areas. Currently, pedophilia is considered the consequence of disturbed sexual or executive brain processing, but details are far from known. The present findings raise the question whether there is also an over-responsive nurturing system in pedophilia.
What the hell was that all about!?
Read that again: an overreactive nurturing system in pedophiles? What does this even mean? Is this an excuse? Is this an explanation? Whatever it is, it fits with an aspect of my personality. I am easily overwhelmed by pictures of baby animals of nearly all kinds. I avoid at all cost any all such pictures because the very prospect of any kind of animal abuse will send me in a tailspin. As much good as they do, as necessary as they are, I could never work in an animal rescue shelter. It would be emotionally unbearable for me. I salute those who have the fortitude of doing this kind of work. This is paradoxical, but it's part of who I am and that brain research speaks to me. More can be said, but that’s enough for now. I am meandering after all.
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This is Latifa Bennari … The person who rescued me.
“Victim of a pedophile and President of Blue Angel”.
Here she was appearing on a popular French television show. She was a victim of sexual child abuse when about 11 or 12 years old in Algeria, where she grew up. As is often the case, it was a family member. She is now president of Ange Bleu - a private organization. Part of her goal is to make a clear legal and moral distinction between pedophiles and pedocriminals. For many years now she has organized a weekly meeting encouraging a discussion between former victims of childhood sexual abuse and pedophiles (some of whom have prior convictions of possession of underage porn and others not).
The host of the show is Cyril Announa, a popular and sometimes controversial TV show host. The subject matter?
“Are you for or against obligatory chemical castration for sexual predators?”
(Needless to say, she does not favor the idea.)
If anyone rescued me from an extremely uncertain future in France, she did in 2018. On this TV show in early 2019, She brought along this man, her friend and guest.
He also had a story to tell. He is my age. He was from an impoverished family and at the age of 7 or 8, he found himself placed in a catholic boarding school where, to his horror, he was systematically abused over the next several years by those who should have been his guardians. This was an early, traumatic and formative experience for him. Over the years, this abusive childhood gnawed at him. He could never form proper companionship as he grew older, and found himself powerfully attracted to younger boys, even as he was in his 20s and 30s. Not knowing what to do, and fearing the worst, he voluntarily decided to undergo “chemical castration”, via Androcure. This is technically not chemical castration, but testosterone blockers which help diminish his sexual interest and urges. He continued this treatment for more than 25 years, with the ensuing emasculating side effects on his body.
This is the very man who Latifa Bennari called to find a shelter for me. This is the man who welcomed me in his home back in August 2018, when I arrived in France, homeless and penniless. I still live with him to this day.
When I was deported back to France, I was escorted by two immigration officers who simply handed me off to the French police who had been alerted about my arrival. I had the clothes on my back and my release papers in hand. I had done my time and I was a free man, so to speak. I was free to go. But where was I to go?
Luckily I had taken steps when still in prison.
I had contacted the French consulate in Chicago to try to get my bearings and see what my options were. I had been advised to call 115 upon my arrival in France. This is a bit like 911 in the US, but strictly for homeless people. They try to find a place to shelter you for a week or two until you can get something more stable. But this is subject to available space and subject to how urgent your case is. Understandably, women with children are prioritized. It also depends on the season. More space is available in the winter than in the summer. And this was August of 2018. That's also the month when half of France goes on vacation. There's even fewer personnel available with 115.
But at least 6 months before my release, I had written many letters to the French embassy trying to explain the particulars of my situation, who I was, what had happened to me, and how I hoped to restart my life if given a second chance. I explained how it had come to this, but that I still had something to offer. He never replied. Ever. Complete and total silence. I was kept in the dark to the very last minute. Even as I was handed off to the French police, walking to the police station in the airport, I did not know what was going on.
But months before my release, a good soul at the French consulate had read my many letters, and his silence was just a formality. He had made many phone calls, finding no takers. Eventually, he landed on Latifa Bennari. Once she understood my case, she took charge. She explained to the authorities who she was, namely the president of Ange Bleu, an association in Paris working on behalf of pedophiles who has long advocated a more therapeutic approach and less a criminal one.
And so they handed me off to her. She had some contacts to provide me with a temporary shelter so as to give me some time to begin the lengthy process of reinserting myself in the French social system. I had remained a French citizen all this time, and here I was, unexpectedly back in France after 50 years.
Bureaucracies tend to be invisible until you have to interact with them in order to get the proper paperwork. It probably took me about 4 to 5 months to finally get my ID card, my Carte Vitale (National health card), my Social Security and properly registering with all the necessary agencies, including the unemployment office.
I have frequently convinced myself that I got exactly what I deserved. I'm now forever labeled as a "sex offender" and my police record will live on the internet well past after I am dead and gone. It’s even been thrown back at my face by email as grim reminder! I’ve tried having it removed, but that’s impossible. Victims of child sexual abuse likewise say, while they themselves committed no crimes, their pictures live on forever to circulate on the "dark web".
Ten years ago, their father did the unthinkable: He posted explicit photos and videos on the internet of them, just 7 and 11 at the time. Many captured violent assaults in their Midwestern home, including him and another man drugging and raping the 7-year-old.
The men are now in prison, but in a cruel consequence of the digital era, their crimes are finding new audiences. The two sisters are among the first generation of child sexual abuse victims whose anguish has been preserved on the internet, seemingly forever.
But consider this cruel paradox: were it not for the internet, his crime would never have been discovered, and the two sisters never identified.
What exactly is being done for those victims of sexual abuse whose abuse goes unrecorded and presumably unknown?
In what way was arresting me and deporting me in any way helpful in addressing whatever the underlying problem really is?
I was never a part of any "pedophile network"; never "groomed" a child; never touched a child; never filmed anything. But I was curious. I was already addicted to porn, and a major category of any porn site is commonly labeled "barely legal". It was not long before I could no longer distinguish between "barely legal" pornography and underage pornography and eventually worse. Under the right circumstances, pornography can be like a "gateway" drug to other things. Once you feel utterly disconnected from everything and everyone, anything and everything feels permitted. Without others around you to help you stay afloat, you will sink like a rock to the lowest possible depths. And I did.
As an average liberal, I had a standard liberal view about pornography and thought it to be an industry like any other and activity that posed no great moral and political challenges that could not be resolved rationally. I thought it should be regulated to protect sex workers, but it never occurred to me that there was a psychological component to consumption of pornography that could be quite concerning and that it could be the thin end of a wedge. This is a discussion society ought to be having.
…
In any case, I had my release papers in hand, and the clothes on my back. That was it. And that's how I arrived in France, 3 years ago, at the age of 61, trying to refashion a life for myself. It is not easy, for I am viewed differently. I often feel as if I am radioactive or potentially toxic. My situation is not helped by the fact that with just a few clicks on Google, one can find my police record which is publicly accessible.
But I remain more or less undaunted and, as I like to say, robustly cheerful!