Deconstructing Monster Narratives

[Ziran]

5 hours ago, trenton said:

They often operate under the just world fallacy. Good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people, also known as karma. Therefore if they can get away with raping someone, then that person deserved to have something bad happen to them and because they got away with it, that is the proof that their behavior is acceptable.

Have you come across any research regarding the manner in which the fixation takes root?  Specifically, please correct me, criminal minds follow "signs" which trigger them?

[moonawakening444]

1 hour ago, trenton said:

I finished reading a book called "Without Conscience" by Robert D. Hare. I think it gives some pretty good explanations as to how psychopaths function, how they think, and the limits of our current system for handling people with such conditions. Treatment attempts are known to often backfire by teaching psychopaths how to fake progress and learn to manipulate even more effectively. It seems to truly be difficult to get a determined psychopathic offender to just behave themselves without trying to screw people over. To this day our justice system doesn't really have a good answer for such offenders. Preventative and proactive measures in early childhood seem to be the best bet, but with our current system focused on reactive measures, it would be difficult to make such a leap. It might require restructuring the incentive structure of our justice system which seems to focus on mass incarceration rather than crime prevention.

yeah, it´s a complex topic, very nuanced... 

for sure making sure our children feel safe and loved from the very start is so important, and still it doesn´t guarantee anything, life is unpredictable

and also i believe society is in need of restructuring not only in the justice system, but all systems, right? 

i can see that we will slowly progress individually, and therefore collectively by becoming more conscious of our own shadows... 

slowly but surely we will reach a point where there will be no such individuals in our society. 

until then, the biggest lesson, at least for me... has been becoming aware of their humanness and actually be able to hold Love for them, just as i do for myself when i feel i acted in way that goes against my Spiritual essence.... 

peace and Love, brother!

[trenton]

1 hour ago, Ziran said:

Have you come across any research regarding the manner in which the fixation takes root?  Specifically, please correct me, criminal minds follow "signs" which trigger them?

@Ziran in the case of grievance rapists, they usually target someone in an intimate relationship, partially due to the entitlement worldview. This worldview was actually prevalent throughout history due to women being considered property of men and expected to submit. In fact, marital rape wasn't fully criminalized in America until 1993 due to the assumption that the relationship automatically confers consent. Sometimes rapists operate under these relational assumptions such that they believe they are justified in using force against an intimate partner to get sex and to them it isn't even rape. The same is still the case in less developed country where women are seen as property and expected to submit.

The entitlement worldview is part of the problem, and it can worsen if they expect infidelity. In that case the grievance might be so bad that they could rape and murder and intimate partner.

However, they might sometimes attack strangers. These strangers or random women that they barely know just might happen to remind them of a past woman they felt betrayed by. Therefore, raping this woman symbolically destroys the type of person he now hates.

They seem to be triggered by loss of control and power, which is well known in domestic violence cases, making it dangerous when a woman tries to leave. The disturbing implications is that the one documented rape at the time of the murder, is only the tip of the iceberg of a long brutal history. This rapist likely sexually abused this woman many times before she tried to leave him, and this is implied in relationship studies of abuse cases, but not always clearly and starkly stated.

The rapist often says "that bitch deserved it." Defense attorneys often look horrible when they try to defend these people, but our system does require due process for such people and some kind of attempt at a defense even when the behavior seems indefensible.

[trenton]

For anybody interested, I have a long document, about 12 pages single-spaced. It is about organized crime, focusing mainly on stage red. This was my first draft, and there might be some mistakes in it. I have given a copy to a couple of people I know in preparation for review, but they haven't gotten back to me yet. I will give you the sections related to my father and circumstantial evidence as it is most relevant for understanding the "monster." If you are interested in the full document, let me know, but I made it by myself without help. Here are some snippets from the document. One thing I didn't mention was grooming behaviors. I didn't understand this very well, but grooming is being criminalized and it explains much of what my father did to me to prepare me for exploitation similar to other child predators.

My Father

Christopher Paul Hamann was my father. He had an extensive criminal record involving drug distribution and child support evasion. He had children by multiple women including highschool girls like my mother, though due to a five year age gap being allowed, it was not considered statutory rape when maybe it should be. My father proceeded to abandon his children he had with at least two women that I know of as he fled the State to avoid paying child support. My mother had extensive legal battles, only to discover that child support enforcement was often ineffective at compensating mothers like her. Child support enforcement might take his license away, only for him to drive without a license. Similarly, men who don’t pay child support might end up in jail while the victims remain without compensation in an unstable home. For the most part, my father remained out of jail despite owing approximately 300,000 dollars in child support. He would argue that he was doing his best to help the kids, and this sympathetic sounding argument covered his criminal lifestyle.

Some of the mechanisms for child support enforcement include taxing a paycheck from a job or taxing property. However, my father had methods for evading both of these. He would jump from job to job, so that he could not be taxed due to inconsistent income. He would also pay his landlord in cash which he received through illegal means as part of a money laundering scheme, thus avoiding the property tax. This money was often stolen from family members such as when he broke into mom’s house, or the money would be received from other gang activities which seemed to mainly be drug deals to my knowledge. Sometimes my father would boast about his exploits, mentioning money made from drug deals, glorifying gang violence and death threats, and prostitution deals. Although I initially assumed the prostitutes were adult women selling themselves, I would later discover that prostitutes could be victims who are sold by other men, and the victims could also be children including me.

My father was often impulsive and manipulative. He would suddenly run out of the house in the middle of the night, taking money, and going to meet his gang. He would also treat me as if I were special, giving me lots of positive praise while threatening to disown me if I reported his crimes. This was combined with incoherent religious messaging in which he would condemn a teenager for masturbation while soliciting minors for prostitution. He claimed to believe in karma, arguing that people gave him money for his drugs because he made good drugs and did the right thing by not mixing poison in the heroin he was selling them. This gives a psychological profile of someone who is deeply irrational from an intellectual standpoint because in reality the underlying logic is power and whatever serves him. His ideology is therefore inconsistent, similar to a Nazi ideology which is logically incoherent, but has a fundamental message of power and dominance. The details are changed as needed to suit them. 

My father also appears to have been operating under the “just world fallacy.” From his point of view, so long as he could get away with these things, it was as though God was on his side. He believed that good things happened to good people and bad things happened to bad people. In the mind of organized criminals, this is disturbing because it mirrors patterns in how a psychopath thinks. If a person is stupid enough to fall for their tricks, then to the psychopath, that person deserved to be hurt and they deserve to benefit from hurting them. This is what happens when the just world fallacy is filtered through a psychology rooted in power and control.

I was often isolated from the rest of my family while my father would be mixing apparent love with threats. This created a dynamic in which my sisters learned to associate me with a perpetrator and therefore started turning against me. I was the easier target which therefore made me a more compelling scapegoat compared to our father involved in a violent gang. I felt as if I were alone trying to navigate not just my father, but also another unstable abusive situation with Mom and my stepfather involving drugs and domestic violence. Teens from unstable homes are often the most vulnerable to sex trafficking due to the isolation from other family members. In the case of my father, he also wanted me to give him information about Mom and Mike which he later went on to use in court with success. It was suspicious how he got this information, but the court didn’t question it and instead investigated Mom for drugs.

My father had ties to police corruption through his father Gerald Hamann. Gerald was a former gang member who later became a police informant. He reported some gangs, but didn’t turn his son into the police despite knowing of his crimes. My father claimed he had extensive involvement in crime with Gerald, but I don’t know which parts are true and which parts are fabricated. The part that concerns me is that these stories are plausible given the context of both of their criminal histories, access to weapons, violent histories, and connections to the police in a way that would prevent accountability.

In his free time, he would look like a normal man. He would play videogames, read books, and listen to music. One thing I noticed is that he listened to a lot of dirty rap music that glorified criminal behavior. This music on its own does not necessarily have a connection to real criminal activity. However, a finer psychological point is that the music a person listens to often speaks to their identity on some level. This becomes more blatant when the music is used in the context of actual ongoing criminal behavior. It becomes a sign that he actually resonates with the things being said in the dirty rap music that glorifies violence. This makes me wonder if it might be possible to reduce criminal behavior by allowing for edgy raps that have stronger moral messages while still being badass. An example might be criminals who reformed. If stage red values respect and admiration, then sometimes the military or aiding police becomes a gateway to reform. Other times it leads to corruption in the form of a revolving door between police officers during the day and gang members during the night.

My father showed some signs of wanting to be different. He feared that his kids would not respect him if they thought of him too negatively. He needed to keep secrets from the family while claiming to want to break the cycle of criminal behavior. Sometimes having a child inspires criminals to change, but in my father’s case it didn’t. Instead he put the burden on me to fix what I didn’t break while involving me in things I didn’t want to be involved in despite claiming to keep family separate from criminal activities.

He would talk about breaking the cycle of crime while actively perpetuating it, claiming to be a product of his environment. The stories he told of his childhood involved racially motivated gangs in both directions. He became associated with criminals early on and was described as an asshole by his sister. He put a cat in the microwave while his mother minimized the behavior and became defensive. Although child sexual abuse is common in youth gang members, it is unclear if my father was “initiated” through such abuse. If he were, then that would explain escalating aggression, but the aggression may have been present regardless of such abuse. He came from a father that was also a gang member and later became a police informant. My father learned to glorify violence and power, including his father’s violence such as death threats and beatings. He had learned that his behavior was only bad if he got caught.

The Incident

Although my father usually did drug deals with his gang, there was an incident that added another dimension to his criminal behavior that I found disturbing. Back when I was in highschool, my father took me to his gang in the middle of the night. He had previously mentioned prostitution deals, but I didn’t think this included children until I was sexually exploited.

Once he brought me to his gang, he left me in the car as he walked off and disappeared from my sight. He had been talking in code frequently to disguise his intentions, including numbers and colors. I waited alone until Dad returned from his deal with someone code named Fat Ass. I never saw this man or any of his supposed five other gang members including a woman. They seem to have set up this situation well to ensure that I would have as little information as possible. This made my report ineffective by the time I tried to tell the police what I witnessed.

When Dad came back, he said that Fat Ass would give me 600 dollars if I spent the night with him. He for some reason seemed happy about this, as if on some level he felt a twisted sense of pride or being special for having his son offered to a gang. At first I was confused about what exactly he wanted me to do when spending the night with this man. Because children with autism are more trusting and prone to literal interpretations, I thought he meant that he wanted me to literally sleep with Fat Ass rather than figuratively, meaning have sex with him. The reason I hesitated is because 600 dollars sounded like a lot of money for minimal effort. Therefore, I started to grow suspicious until I remembered that Fat Ass was the man who had supposedly hired prostitutes in other deals. I discovered that these deals also involved children when I was the subject of this deal.

Ultimately, I didn’t take the money. I was torn between seeing my father as someone I needed to trust to protect me while reconciling it with the reality of his criminal lifestyle. I fell silent and became heavy after being exposed to trafficking deals. I began to fear that my father and his gang may have done deals like these before with other minors. This turned into survivor’s guilt in which my silence felt like enabling. These feelings seem to be driving me to document what I know about organized crime in the hopes of protecting other victims, bringing perpetrators to justice, and preventing these crimes where possible. Therefore, I would like to describe how circumstantial evidence might be applied to cases like mine along with how it might help to catch perpetrators. It will be important to highlight the limits of evidence, as organized criminals often have deep knowledge of the legal system and know how to manipulate evidence to sometimes frame their victims.

Circumstantial Evidence in My Case

The sexual exploitation of a minor is often extremely difficult to prove. In my case, I was set up by organized criminals who used coded language, hid their identities, spoke behind closed doors by word of mouth without texts, and exploited the trust of a child toward his father while being linked to police corruption that enabled the behavior. Because of factors like these, the majority of organized criminals for the most part evade significant charges. Therefore, the justice system has been relying more and more on circumstantial evidence which is more difficult to hide even for organized criminals while still implicating them through indirect proof rather than hard evidence that is easier to hide such as a gun or a body. In my case, the proof at first seems nearly impossible, but upon closer inspection it is possible to build at minimum probable cause, even if not beyond a reasonable doubt without a further complex investigation. Using what I know about my father, I can reason backwards to see what the signs were that would implicate him.

First of all, my father had an extensive criminal record, including drug distribution offenses that would implicate gang activity. His crimes included fleeing the State to avoid paying child support, after which he structured his lifestyle around avoiding these taxes. He was later caught with a pipe in his car by law enforcement, possibly because a gang member left it there or he was using it himself. There was a broad continuation of the same criminal lifestyle even after he supposedly passed all of his drug tests after being caught the first time.

Secondly, organized criminals often have a money laundering scheme. This makes sense because the money they are getting is through illegal means, and then often used for seemingly legitimate purposes. In my case, my father owed about 300,000 dollars in child support, owned property, and had multiple jobs. Normally someone would pay a tax on their property for child support, but in the case of my father he didn’t due to paying the landlord in cash. This combined with inconsistent income tied from jumping from job to job, would implicate a money laundering scheme with which to avoid paying child support because the paycheck is also supposed to be taxed for child support. There are likely many other reasons for money laundering schemes that organized criminals could use. In cases like these, a person with a criminal record that implicates gang activity such as drugs, weapons, or sexual offenses combined with a pattern of tax evasion, would implicate that there is a continued criminal lifestyle.

Thirdly, in my case my father was less careful with the text messages he sent me. He was confident that I would not report him, which he seems to have been right about. Some of the messages on my old phone included things like Dad saying he would gank my stepfather. This would actually be treated as hard evidence in a court of law, had I had the courage as a child to turn my father into the police for his gang activities. In other cases there likely are damning text messages that are never recovered due to children being too afraid to become a legal enemy of a parent. My father likely had the contacts of other gang members on his old phone, which would establish an ongoing relationship and criminal lifestyle.

Proving sexual exploitation specifically would be the hardest to prove, even if my father were implicated in drug and gang related offenses. Once again, I did not realize what I was witnessing or grasp the significance until later on. In this case, I was the child closest to my father, spending the most time with him on his property. Given his ongoing criminal lifestyle, I would have been exposed to gang activities.

The closest thing I can think of that might implicate sexual abuse would be my father’s broader criminal lifestyle and character. If my father is the kind of person who shows very little care for his children such as by evading child support while having children by multiple women, then this person would be very careless, reckless, or dangerous. This kind of character, given an ongoing criminal lifestyle, would be the kind of person to endanger his own child by exposing him to gang activities. In my case the specific endangerment was being solicited by a gang for child prostitution which my father facilitated by bringing me to them. However, in order to prove that the specific mechanism of endangerment was sexual exploitation, that would likely require finding out who these other prostitutes were that the gang was hiring. I don’t see how I could prove sexual exploitation specifically while being an isolated witness against an organized gang without corroborating this kind of testimony. Even if I can’t prove sexual exploitation specifically, there should be sufficient evidence to prove child endangerment in the form of criminal socialization and foreseeable risks such as violence from a criminal gang. Lesser charges might still be possible even if sexual exploitation specifically cannot be proven, and depending on the severity, the lesser charges might be sufficient to ensure a just outcome regardless of absent proof of child trafficking.

Relevant factors would include contributing to the delinquency of the minor or using a child to manipulate court outcomes. In my case my father not only said he would disown me if I reported his crimes, but he also wanted me to gather dirt on Mom that he could use against her in court. This put me in a loyalty conflict in which I was forced to choose between two bad parents. I sided with Dad because Mom and Mike were using drugs and destroying the house, causing me to fear for the safety of my siblings. Once Dad got this information, it then changed the legal outcome of the court. Mom was treated with increased scrutiny while being made to take drug tests due to knowledge my father could not have had without me. This therefore helped him to avoid consequences. If a person gets this kind of information that they shouldn’t have, then it might implicate some form of spying. In this case I was used as a pawn due to coercion behind the scenes that the court could not see was happening. I was being forced to make adult legal calculations without guidance as both parents were unsafe. Courts should probably be more skeptical of people giving this information they shouldn’t have other than through hearsay. If a child gave him this information along with this broader criminal lifestyle, then this would implicate something very serious in that I was being coerced into aiding in a felony. I would like to help law enforcement and advocacy groups, but sometimes people like me get charged instead of the people doing the coercion as the truth seems to be too complex for courts to handle easily and routinely.

In my case, I showed repeated signs of distress and suicidal ideation that was often ignored in schools when I mentioned these things in creative writing. I would write stories involving me committing suicide or I would mention gangs and domestic violence. It was not until I publicly confessed to homicidal thoughts that the community reacted, leading to Mike’s eviction and my mother coming off of the drugs. Maybe children who write about suicide in creative writing should be taken more seriously in schools as it could lead to discovering serious abuse.

My father was the son of a former gang member who became a police informant. This would create a strong incentive to cover up crimes while seeming legitimate. Maybe gang members who become police informants should be treated with more scrutiny if they have family members involved in crimes that implicate gang activities. 

There might be other factors, but I don’t know what else would implicate my father in these crimes. My hope is that these circumstances can be used to better detect gang activities in other cases, such as men with criminal records related to gang activities who owe hundreds of thousands in child support while being implicated in a money laundering scheme. Maybe these circumstances should be seen as more suspect and potentially leading to the discovery of drug, weapon, or sex trafficking, thereby protecting present and future victims.