Yesterday I went to a training session ran by the Catholic Church. I have applied to work as a substitute in one of the local Catholic schools here in Cincinnati, and the Church requires that everyone attend this child protection course before they can work around children in any capacity. They have gotten really serious about protecting children with all the problems that they have had over the years, so they screen everyone and make them keep their knowledge current.

While I never officially studied abuse in any academic sense, I have worked hard to become an ally to those who are less fortunate and less privileged than myself, and I am active in several communities that have less than stellar track records with how they treat other human beings. I identify as both a gamer and a nerd, and the culture in both of those communities can be super toxic. So I’ve heard some pretty terrible stories and had to deal with friends who went through some horrible stuff. Sometimes stuff that’s so terrible that it sounds made up. Stuff that you have a hard time believing that a human being could do that to another human being. But when you see the scars, physical and emotional, staring you in the face, you know it’s real.

In this training session yesterday, they showed us some videos where they had former sex offenders explaining the things that they did. Real predators breaking down the tactics and strategies that they used to get close to and abuse real victims. They did this not to shock us, although it was shocking to many people in that session, but so that we would understand how their minds worked and are able to better protect the children in our care. During one of the breaks, I heard some of the other participants talking, saying that they weren’t sure if they could believe it. I butted in to tell them flat out that I had heard everything that the predators had said before and worse from victims face to face. That I hoped that they were taking notes because this was deadly serious.

One of the hidden dangers of poverty and homelessness is victimization. Homeless people are easy targets. Homeless women (and men) are often dirty and smelly for a very good reason: if people find them repulsive, they are much less likely to be raped. But they still are. Homeless people are beaten up, robbed, spit on, and verbally abused every day. Poverty causes frustration and anger, which can spill out into physical altercation. And when it happens to children, it’s that much worse. They look to adults to build patterns for future behaviors, and when those adults are physically, emotionally, or sexually abusive, it often makes the children become abusers themselves.

I’ve had people ask me why I care. Why I spend so much time helping people and caring about the problems of others. There are many reasons, but one of them is that I spent so much of my own life in pain that it made me kind. I don’t want others to have to spend their lives suffering too. I don’t intend to have kids of my own, but if I can use my experiences to help other kids avoid going through the kind of pain I went through, then that gives my life meaning. That’s why I go to these upsetting training sessions. So that others don’t have to suffer consequences.