honorless freedom

i grew up with predators. amongst them. it sounds like maybe i grew up in the jungle doesn't it? do you hope that is where this story is going? i wish. but then i don't, because if it wasn't for the stories i've been honored to listen to and live, i wouldn't be the woman i am. i wouldn't be able to question things and have helped fight to save some of the ones i've gotten to meet long the way.

as i read the story of josh dugger's sentencing last week and his parents statement saying it is "grievous" i want to laugh and cry and scream at the same time. they are guilty in this too you know.

a friend sent me the link to the press release announcing josh dugger's sentencing after being convicted of downloading child pornography as well as possessing it. technically each count is twenty years in prison. i believe they sentenced him to twelve. my only comfort in that paltry sentence that lets him out to spend time with his seven children (even if supervised) is that the law of honor among prisoners will mean he might be dead before the end of the year.

did you know his family won't allow his beautiful early thirty's wife to get a divorce or marry someone else? her future is to wait for him to get out of jail and hope that her body has shut down enough to not be able to get pregnant again.

unless by some miracle, she can break out of the mental programing she has grown up in and leave on her own to find a a different way of living ... she must wait, and hope he doesn't somehow do to her babies what he did to his sisters.

that is another layer of the heartbreak. you see they were already married, and she'd already had a few little humans with him when that first story came out years ago. she wasn't allowed to choose to leave him. she hadn't been raised with any skills. no college education, no vision of creating and insisting on the life SHE wanted. instead, josh's parents sent him to one of the campuses that are a part of the homeschool program he grew up in, for "repentance counseling". this means he was sent to the northwoods of michigan to live in a cabin in the woods with no cell service and limited wifi and a mid-twenties something "counselor" with zero psychological training other than bible study - to pray with him everyday until he "repented honestly and sincerely". you can imagine how quickly those of us sent there towed the line. if i'm not mistaken, this was the second time he was sent there.

i know this story too well and too personally. i was brought there for different reasons than josh. but i was taken there to be "reformed". i was asking too many questions. too many things didn't make sense. i couldn't understand why it was my fault if a man acted wrongly, without my permission, because he wanted me. why, why was that my fault? i couldn't understand why making a decision for myself was rebellion. my parents drove six hours for a special session with one of the board members of IBLP and i spent eight hours in "counseling" reading bible verses about how my life would be cursed if i didn't obey and honor my parents. i was smart enough to repent quickly. but imagine if i'd truly done something illegal and horrible as josh had, and that was thought to be the way to fix it. because back before the first story ever came out, when the incidents with his sisters first happened, josh's parents sent him to the northwoods for fixing. they thought that would be enough.

they are guilty too. they were wrongly exonerated.

pause for a moment and think about how absurd it is that anyone could think that that form of "fixing" would be effective in healing a soul broken enough to molest his sisters and friends. its absurd to sane humans. but i don't think his parents are sane any longer.

that inability to convict him then, when it came out, let him go free. it let him make four more babies with his wife. it let him spend time with his children unsupervised.

if he had child pornography and lived with seven beautiful children, surrounded also by his siblings families and children, there is so little room statistically for him not to have taken his broken fantasies to reality.

when i was in college i ran a mentorship program for girls 12-15 within the organization josh dugger grew up in. i didn't believe anything i was surrounded with, but i wanted to let these women know they could live differently, they could have a brain, they could see a different future for themselves. along the way, the stories i heard broke my heart. looking back, i don't think i knew how to recognize half of the abuse i saw evidenced in the young women i was there to love and serve and inspire to live a different story.

i'm so so grateful for the justice of josh dugger's sentencing. i'm even MORE grateful to know about the justice exacted in prisons that we free men are too timid to exact. this different justice won't let him hold his wife prisoner too much longer.

i am so grateful that he might not last long.

did you know that there are zero studies that have found that humans with a tendency sexually to children can be rehabilitated? zero. but we let them roam free ... when we know their proclivities.

i don't have a solution. i only have insight into the stories, personal, and otherwise of those broken by this. did you know it takes five to six reports to CPS on the same family or individual before CPS will step in and ask questions?

if reading this inspires you to know thing, let it be to ask questions. ask inappropriate questions. ask nosey questions. find out if someone is okay. if they aren't, you might be the one that tips the scales to them being led to safety.

i love that someone asked questions about the dugger family. someone reported. five people reported him, enough, enough to protect his babies for the next twelve years.

i love that now that that is taken care of, and his children are safe for now ... the honorable prisoners will finish what was started.