Scrutable

Very upset; a kid I knew and taught has just been convicted of rape against a 13 and 16 year old. He attended the Special educational school where I taught and to put it frankly we failed him in that we failed to instill in him a sense of right and wrong in such matters.

Or did we fail him, would he have offended anyway no matter what? At what age and IQ can you attribute agency and responsibility in such matters?

I feel crap.

f.ck. That's awful for all concerned

Ugh. So sorry for how you and all concerned must be feeling. Having spent most of my professional life dealing either with computers or the relatively minor stress caused to their generally adequately-remunerated users by their occasional failure to what was expected, I am always in awe of people who do real jobs that affect the lives of vulnerable people.

My view on this is that things like agency and responsibility are (a) socially constructed and (b) measured on a continuous scale. Sometimes the way we organise our society requires cutoff points, but those should be kept to the minimum. This kid was probably always very likely to offend, and your interventions may have reduced that offending --- just not to zero. Some things are not fixable; the best we can do is to move them along a positive trajectory, either in scale or time. (I would never say that to the victims or their parents, of course.)

Happy to talk more about this by DM if you want (I have a small amount of relevant professional training, although I am not a certified counsellor).

There are people whose profession it is to decide whether or not someone poses a risk to the public, and they get it wrong sometimes, and there is no way to definitively predict how someone will behave. I'm sure that if you knew something like this would happen you would have done your utmost to stop it, but you didn't know.

And from the kid's perspective, moral and legal culpability aren't identical, however much the law tries. Of course that doesn't matter much to the victims but you aren't at fault here, life is just messy and unpredictable. Easy for me to say I know, it must be gut-wrenchingly difficult not to ask 'what if', I don't really know how I'd process something like this if it was me but standing here from the outside, I can't see how you are responsible for this. I hope the victims are getting the right kind of support, and enough of it.

sTeamTraen wrote: ↑

Thu Nov 19, 2020 4:03 pm

Ugh. So sorry.

Thanks, that helps. I'm OK, just sad.
I had no idea what to say to his friends on FB who are either stunned or understandably judgemental. At the moment I have said nowt and probably intend to leave it that way. I am a long way from it now, 4 years and 180 miles, so it is none of my responsibility any more.

It's not the first time that ex pupils of mine have fallen foul of the law, but probably the most tragically and with the greatest impact on others.

I'm so sorry to hear that, Don. I can't begin to imagine how you must feel, but I guess I would feel a greater sense of responsibility for the actions of a SEN student than a less vulnerable one (knowing nothing about this particular man's circumstances).

As steamy says, legal and moral culpability are somewhat different axes and it's impossible to know what, if anything, you could have done to steer him on a different path.

My thoughts are with you.

Cheers. I'm a little surprised how much it has upset me.