#and that if that was the universal custom rape would mostly disappear

[disgruntledseagull]

I'm not taking a stance on that I am pointing out that the rhetoric is not accurate.

If you exaggerate a situation you weaken your position this is axiomatic.

It really needs to stop across all realms of discourse.

If OP had meant to say that sex offenders don't deserve a chance at rehabilitation regardless of the recidivism rate then she could have just said that and we wouldn't be here at all because I would have read it and thought "Yeah that's a pretty common and consistent radfem position ¯\_(◕_◕)_/¯" and simply not commented on the post.

As it is she made a clearly false claim that has much wider implications about the nature of humanity and I corrected it, mostly because of the wider implications.

As I said, (and regardless of what laws may pass) repentance and redemption are not made up ideas they are real and people exemplify them every day.

i think not wanting people to be in prison for minor drug related offenses and not wanting people to be literally caged inside of tiny rooms/cells or performing literal slave labor for the prison industrial complex but acknowledging that rapists/child molesters/violent offenders need to be put away from society and sometimes cannot even be rehabilitated are two lines of thinking that can coexist and should be discussed at length especially when considering the safety of women and children. also you absolutely can’t rehabilitate a rapist or a pedophile

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 3.1

509 BC – Publius Valerius Publicola celebrates the first triumph of the Roman Republic after his victory over the deposed king Lucius Tarquinius Superbus at the Battle of Silva Arsia. 293 – Emperor Diocletian and Maximian appoint Constantius Chlorus and Galerius as Caesars. This is considered the beginning of the Tetrarchy, known as the Quattuor Principes Mundi ("Four Rulers of the World"). 350 – Vetranio proclaims himself Caesar after being encouraged to do so by Constantina, sister of Constantius II. 834 – Emperor Louis the Pious is restored as sole ruler of the Frankish Empire. 1476 – Forces of the Catholic Monarchs engage the combined Portuguese-Castilian armies of Afonso V and Prince John at the Battle of Toro. 1562 – Sixty-three Huguenots are massacred in Wassy, France, marking the start of the French Wars of Religion. 1628 – Writs issued in February by Charles I of England mandate that every county in England (not just seaport towns) pay ship tax by this date. 1633 – Samuel de Champlain reclaims his role as commander of New France on behalf of Cardinal Richelieu. 1692 – Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne and Tituba are brought before local magistrates in Salem Village, Massachusetts, beginning what would become known as the Salem witch trials. 1781 – The Articles of Confederation goes into effect in the United States. 1790 – The first United States census is authorized. 1796 – The Dutch East India Company is nationalized by the Batavian Republic. 1805 – Justice Samuel Chase is acquitted at the end of his impeachment trial by the U.S. Senate. 1811 – Leaders of the Mamluk dynasty are killed by Egyptian ruler Muhammad Ali. 1815 – Napoleon returns to France from his banishment on Elba. 1836 – A convention of delegates from 57 Texas communities convenes in Washington-on-the-Brazos, Texas, to deliberate independence from Mexico. 1845 – United States President John Tyler signs a bill authorizing the United States to annex the Republic of Texas. 1867 – Nebraska is admitted as the 37th U.S. state. 1870 – Marshal F. S. López dies during the Battle of Cerro Corá thus marking the end of the Paraguayan War. 1872 – Yellowstone National Park is established as the world's first national park. 1893 – Electrical engineer Nikola Tesla gives the first public demonstration of radio in St. Louis, Missouri. 1896 – Battle of Adwa: An Ethiopian army defeats an outnumbered Italian force, ending the First Italo-Ethiopian War. 1896 – Henri Becquerel discovers radioactive decay. 1901 – The Australian Army is formed. 1910 – The deadliest avalanche in United States history buries a Great Northern Railway train in northeastern King County, Washington, killing 96 people. 1914 – China joins the Universal Postal Union. 1917 – The Zimmermann Telegram is reprinted in newspapers across the United States after the U.S. government releases its unencrypted text. 1919 – March 1st Movement begins in Korea under Japanese rule. 1921 – The Australian cricket team captained by Warwick Armstrong becomes the first team to complete a whitewash of The Ashes, something that would not be repeated for 86 years. 1921 – Following mass protests in Petrograd demanding greater freedom in the RSFSR, the Kronstadt rebellion begins, with sailors and citizens taking up arms against the Bolsheviks. 1939 – An Imperial Japanese Army ammunition dump explodes at Hirakata, Osaka, Japan, killing 94. 1941 – World War II: Bulgaria signs the Tripartite Pact, allying itself with the Axis powers. 1942 – World War II: Japanese forces land on Java, the main island of the Dutch East Indies, at Merak and Banten Bay (Banten), Eretan Wetan (Indramayu) and Kragan (Rembang). 1946 – The Bank of England is nationalised. 1947 – The International Monetary Fund begins financial operations. 1950 – Cold War: Klaus Fuchs is convicted of spying for the Soviet Union by disclosing top secret atomic bomb data. 1953 – Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin suffers a stroke and collapses; he dies four days later. 1954 – Nuclear weapons testing: The Castle Bravo, a 15-megaton hydrogen bomb, is detonated on Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, resulting in the worst radioactive contamination ever caused by the United States. 1954 – Armed Puerto Rican nationalists attack the United States Capitol building, injuring five Representatives. 1956 – The International Air Transport Association finalizes a draft of the Radiotelephony spelling alphabet for the International Civil Aviation Organization. 1956 – Formation of the East German Nationale Volksarmee. 1958 – Samuel Alphonsus Stritch is appointed Pro-Prefect of the Propagation of Faith and thus becomes the first U.S. member of the Roman Curia. 1961 – Uganda becomes self-governing and holds its first elections. 1964 – Villarrica Volcano begins a strombolian eruption causing lahars that destroy half of the town of Coñaripe. 1966 – Venera 3 Soviet space probe crashes on Venus becoming the first spacecraft to land on another planet's surface. 1966 – The Ba'ath Party takes power in Syria. 1971 – President of Pakistan Yahya Khan indefinitely postpones the pending national assembly session, precipitating massive civil disobedience in East Pakistan. 1973 – Black September storms the Saudi embassy in Khartoum, Sudan, resulting in the assassination of three Western hostages. 1974 – Watergate scandal: Seven are indicted for their role in the Watergate break-in and charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice. 1981 – Provisional Irish Republican Army member Bobby Sands begins his hunger strike in HM Prison Maze. 1990 – Steve Jackson Games is raided by the United States Secret Service, prompting the later formation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. 1991 – Uprisings against Saddam Hussein begin in Iraq, leading to the death of more than 25,000 people mostly civilian. 1992 – Bosnia and Herzegovina declares its independence from Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. 1998 – Titanic became the first film to gross over $1 billion worldwide. 2002 – U.S. invasion of Afghanistan: Operation Anaconda begins in eastern Afghanistan. 2002 – The Envisat environmental satellite successfully launches aboard an Ariane 5 rocket to reach an orbit of 800 km (500 mi) above the Earth, which was the then-largest payload at 10.5 m long and with a diameter of 4.57 m.[10] 2003 – Management of the United States Customs Service and the United States Secret Service move to the United States Department of Homeland Security. 2003 – The International Criminal Court holds its inaugural session in The Hague. 2005 – In Roper v. Simmons, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that the execution of juveniles found guilty of murder is unconstitutional. 2006 – English-language Wikipedia reaches its one millionth article, Jordanhill railway station. 2006 – A shocking child rape and murder of 2-year-old Nurasyura Binte Mohamed Fauzi, better known as Nonoi, first made headlines for her initially-presumed disappearance, which would later on be exposed as a case of rape and murder. Her stepfather Mohammed Ali bin Johari was found to be responsible for the little girl’s death, and he was sentenced to death a year later. 2007 – Tornadoes break out across the southern United States, killing at least 20 people, including eight at Enterprise High School. 2008 – The Armenian police clash with peaceful opposition rally protesting against allegedly fraudulent presidential elections, as a result ten people are killed. 2014 – Thirty-five people are killed and 143 injured in a mass stabbing at Kunming Railway Station in China.

[churchintheborderlands-blog]

Ministry with Undocumented Unaccompanied Migrant Children

Borders divide and separate people – assigning – usually – a more privileged space on one side and a less privileged space on the other. Throughout human history . . . people have drawn lines in the sand to tell others, “You can come this far, no farther.” Sometimes the lines are drawn by the weak in an attempt to protect themselves, but more often they are defined by the strong in order to guarantee themselves a greater measure of resources and power.

--  Jerry H Gill, Borderlands Theology

In 2016, I served as volunteer Protestant chaplain at the Tucson Southwest Key detention center for undocumented and unaccompanied minors. My ‘pastorate” consisted of a congregation of approximately 300-350 transient children under 18 from the most impoverished, corrupt, and violent countries of Central America. Following is a chapter from my Doctoral thesis, Being church in the Borderlands. (2018, Drew Theological School)

Southwest Key Detention Center for Unaccompanied and Undocumented Minors

In the spring of 2016, I was contacted by the Southwest Key detention facility in Tucson about providing Protestant23 worship services in Spanish for the undocumented, unaccompanied minor children seeking asylum who were flooding the U.S.-Mexico border, some of whom were in protective detention in Tucson. Southwest Key is a private, non-profit organization contracted by the Department of Homeland Security to provide a safe detention setting for children from birth to 17 years old. According to their website, “Southwest Key empowers youth and their families to make positive changes in their lives including at our 27 immigrant children's shelters in Texas, Arizona and California,” with 20,000 unaccompanied minors under the age of 18 in custody in their facilities at any given time.24 Later in 2016, another detention facility that would house 1,000 children was built in the state of Texas to respond to the ever-increasing numbers of unaccompanied children from Central America. The Southwest Key facility in Tucson was designed to house up to 287 children.25 At the end of 2016, the number of children from the Northern Triangle of Central America participating in the Protestant service exceeded capacity.

Every Wednesday I gathered up my clergy stole, MP3 recordings of praise music in Spanish, and copies of lectionary readings and words to the songs and traveled the 30 minutes from my eastside church to Southwest Key’s detention center on the west side of Tucson for unaccompanied, undocumented, immigrant children and youth. On my first visit, I passed the center several times before I realized that that it was a nondescript brown building close to the heart of town. No one would suspect that almost 300 children are housed there, children who have escaped the grinding poverty, violence, environmental devastation, and lack of opportunity to grow and thrive in their home countries in Central America. No one would guess that the former Howard Johnson Inn, later the bustling University of Arizona International Student Housing Complex, is now a Homeland Securities Center for the detention of almost 300 children crossing the U.S.- Mexico border unaccompanied and without proper immigration papers.

Once past the locked front doors, security check-in and guards, a member of my church and I were escorted to the large bright and colorful cafeteria where the children ate their meals and played board games in-between scheduled classes and other activities. Every Wednesday at 3:30 pm the cafeteria became a sanctuary. Tables disappeared and chairs were rearranged in rows of 30. In the early weeks we met in the gym which easily accommodated the original 30 boys but soon girls began to arrive too. As the numbers increased each week, we grew out of the gymnasium and into the largest space available, the cafeteria. The numbers of children and youth doubled and then doubled again until the cafeteria worship space was packed with children.

I was the only bilingual female Protestant minister to fill an expressed need and contractual requirement to lead “Evangelical” worship services. For some reason, most of the children come to the center from a variety of Protestant churches, mostly Pentecostal and others identifying as Evangelical and Christian, which, in Latin America, does not include Catholics. While these children had not experienced a female minister before, I never for a moment felt a lack of respect or engagement from them. The children and youth arrived for the Protestant worship service in small groups, chaperoned by two adult monitors - guards who watched, counted, and reported their movements 24 hours a day. They were shepherded into the long rows of chairs, while the monitors counted and recounted to make sure no one had gone missing. A few, mostly boys, arrived eager to engage, ready for the next adventure, whatever it might be. Most of the children looked deeply weary and lost. Others stared straight ahead and moved robotically. A few hugged a teddy bear or other small stuffed animal. As the children filed into the make-shift worship space, I struggled with the dissonance between worship at my local church. It broke my heart to know that this small and protected space was just a brief reprieve from a life of suffering.

We prayed together in the custom of the indigenous people with whom I had ministered in southern Mexico. Prayers could last for ten minutes or more with all of us praying loudly in our own language, thanking God for all that God had done, and telling God what to do next. The expectation was that God listened and responded to these strong prayers, spoken individually but joined together as one keening voice. Most of the children hid their faces behind their open palms and sobbed their prayers. Were they reliving the dangerous circumstances of their journeys, missing their families, worried about being sent back to their countries of origin, which would mean almost certain death? I never knew. But I got a tiny glimpse when they came forward for a private prayer and blessing with me. Sometimes I couldn’t understand their indigenous dialect, but their bodies, especially their eyes, spoke of great and prolonged suffering.

These were small children that looked years younger than their actual age due to malnutrition and they literally were worn thin by the journey. Despite the desperation of their circumstances, while they were at the shelter, they were treated like children, and played like children. Their unabashed joy at eating a good meal, coming to worship, playing soccer, and going to school was one of my most precious takeaways from my time with them. Another was their enthusiasm and depth of engagement in worship. They responded respectfully to me, their tall “Gringa”26 pastor. Unlike most children of the same age from the U.S., they participated fully and unabashedly without any prompting or fidgeting. They came hungry for a word to sustain them, for song to lift them, and for prayer to open a channel to God’s presence. When I asked for volunteers to read scripture, hands shot up, and those who read did so with pride and care. We sang songs I had found on the internet, religious songs in Spanish, but with an up tempo I knew the children would enjoy. After one time through, they had memorized and internalized the words. You could literally see the Word made Flesh in and through them as they sang full voiced and embodied.

Over time, the numbers of children increased from 300 or more, with a dramatic increase of girls. I was provided with big speakers and a microphone and found myself leading what I would call an “Evangelical-liberation theology worship service” to a packed house. The energy was spirited and we raised the roof with song. But more than the experience of bliss through song and prayer, the content of my reflections were relevant to their lives as migrant/strangers – unwelcome and “illegal.” The children resonated strongly with Jesus as migrant, Mary as unwed teenage mother, oppressed workers, and an unyielding interpretation of “law.” That was something new for them and they sat up and listened.

The girls though, were very shy at first, some only lifted their gaze from the floor after months of services with me. In my trips to the desert with the Tucson Samaritans, a group dedicated to saving migrant lives in the desert, I had come upon “trophy trees” where women and girls’ panties were hung, signaling a threshold only crossed through rape. The girls at the Center told me they knew the probability of sexual assault and rape when they set out on their journey, and that those who could took precautionary measures to avoid pregnancy. Because girls were far outnumbered by men and boys on the journey north, some tried to disguise themselves as boys, to no avail.

Since I was limited to an hour, I tried to make eye contact with every child, especially girls, whose affect was much more downcast. For me, seeing them had to be blessing enough, and over time, I believe it did have a healing effect. We sang the eight to ten songs over and over because I hoped they would have an embodied memory of a time when they were happy and safe in God’s house. The staff, who over time joined in worship with us, told me that they and the children sang the songs all day long and would burst into song over meals. Those “hymns”, which, at an earlier time and context I would have eschewed as praise music, took us deep into the heart of God. The sense of consolation and relief and hope were palpable in the cafeteria-turned-sanctuary. Even the staff began to join in and approached me after worship for a private moment in prayer. The children also appreciated individual blessings at the end of worship, the only time when I could actually place a hand on a child. Protected from inappropriate physical contact, they were also isolated from healing touch. They formed a line out the door and waited patiently as each child came forward to be prayed over and blessed. These kids were starved for blessing.

The children’s names have blurred for me, as sometimes they were either quickly transferred to another detention facility or placed with a family member who would sponsor them for asylum. I never knew what happened to these children, but the imprint their presence left on my soul is strong. Several leaders emerged from within the groups, and I got to know them by their particular eagerness for worship or sadness during prayer. One moment they would be singing full force, to the point where their voices carried to all parts of the building, and the next moment their heads would be bowed, faces hidden behind hands or song sheets as they wept out their prayers. These were children who had not experienced happy and healthy childhoods. Quite the contrary, they came from the violence of poverty and guns, crossed a desert of almost unimaginable peril, to be placed, for at least a while, in a safe place where they would be fed, educated, treated for medical problems, and allowed to worship. For those who came to worship with me, the hour was a time to carry the past into the room and marry it to hope, albeit ever so small, of a better future, of a God who was present with them.

One teenager, whom I will call Berta, was eager from the beginning to engage with me through scripture and song. She volunteered to lead songs that only she and the other children knew. I would sit back and watch them recapture a bit of their past, something to cling to, even as they experienced a liberating theology and female pastor that they had never known before. Berta asked me for my Facebook address, but I wasn’t allowed to share such personal information. She wrote down my name, which I hope she has retained as a remembrance that someone loved her here in this country where she and children like her were not welcomed. One day she disappeared as so many others did. I do not know to what or whom, but I trust that she was a Meriam or Hannah or Hagar or Mary or Anna from the Bible. She left me with the impression that she would find her way home, wherever that ended up being.

A young man, whom I will call Fernando, probably 15 years old - although he looked like he was much younger - always volunteered to read scripture and asked to keep the paper with the reading on it. This, he said, he took to his room to meditate on and memorize. Fernando also led the children in songs from his Guatemalan church. While the children loved the songs I introduced to them, they showed a particular joy in singing their own traditional songs, sometimes in their Mayan languages. Fernando usually had a word to share about the readings. He told me later that he had been a pastor at his home church. Fernando had to be a minor to be here – a minor who was a pastor and had made the two-thousand-mile journey on the top of a train – no longer a child inside but still clearly with remnants of his former identity that anchored him in this new place.

My favorite time with the children, although I too often could not do it because of the number of children and lack of time, was when they came to me for private prayer and blessings. They lined up around the cafeteria-turned-sanctuary and came forward for a laying on of hands and prayer. I had never understood how priests in Chiapas could hear confession in a language they didn’t understand and still be a helpful pastoral presence. But once I had touched and prayed with children who either didn’t speak Spanish or whom I could not understand, I knew that this mattered. A bond was created. They were seen and blessed with respect and tenderness, and asked every week for more of that. The blessing of a total stranger, a female pastor, a Gringa, who cared about them and saw God in them was a very rare experience for these children in transit in one of the worst journeys a child can experience. I can still feel those moments. They were a blessing for me as well.

Most Wednesdays there were too many children and too little time to bless all of them, even if I had a helper or two from church. Still, taking a note from Jesus’ encounter with the hemorrhaging woman, I blessed the children with my eyes when I could not actually touch them. I encouraged RCUCC members who accompanied me to really see each child and be an instrument of God’s love, blessing them through seeing them, rather than touching them. The girls in particular, responded well to being seen, as they had come from a culture of machismo27 in which girls and women were not truly seen as subjects of their own lives. They stood taller, lifted their head and eyes, and held my gaze more with each successive week’s worship.

We learned that these children were sent to the center within 24 hours of apprehension by Border Patrol and remained in custody between a few days and several months while their immigration status was being negotiated. The staff of Southwest Key worked to find family members in the U.S. who could take in these unaccompanied minor children. Most family members in the U.S. who agreed to be sponsors were, themselves, also undocumented, which makes sponsoring a child for asylum very precarious for everyone involved. Even if a child is placed with a family member in the U.S., their stay in the U.S. is not guaranteed. Many would be returned home where their families would face a huge debt for their journey, and the same or worse violent conditions from which they had fled.

Many of these children had left their lives and loved ones behind, having traveled thousands of miles alone from their home countries in Central America, and hanging onto the tops and sides of freight trains called La Bestia (The Beast).28 Illegal travel aboard La Bestia is controlled by gangs notorious for their brutality. The children’s journeys are extremely dangerous, as human smugglers, Mexican and U.S. vigilante groups, ranchers, and local law and immigration enforcement officers prey upon them. If these vulnerable kids don’t find handholds along the sides or tops of trains, they make the trip north packed into buses and vans.29 The drivers are known to stop abruptly to sell and transfer their human “load” to another driver, who sometimes has different designs on their cargo than was originally intended. Many children make the last 60 miles across the perilous Sonoran Desert on foot. An adult family member accompanies a few, but most of the unaccompanied children come alone and join with a group of adults and a coyote, human smuggler. That they make it to the shelter at all is something of a miracle. If they make it, most take weeks to heal their feet from infected blisters.

22 “No matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here,” from the “Extravagant Welcome Brochure” of the United Church of Christ.

23 The Children at Southwest Key were divided into two groups, “Evangélicos” (Evangelicals) and Católicos (Catholics). No distinction was made for any other denomination or religion. As a Protestant pastor, I was considered to be “la Pastora Evangélica.”

24 “Immigrant Children's Shelters,” Southwest Key, accessed September 24, 2016, http://www.swkey.org/programs/shelters/.

25 Perla Trevizo, “Shelter for Unaccompanied Minors "Homey" Tour Reveals,” Arizona Daily Star, December 8, 2015, accessed September 24, 2016, http://tucson.com/news/local/shelter-for-unaccompanied-minors-homey-tour- reveals/article_9ef8c729-05fe-516b-ba54-4e3cc21d8a8a.html.

26 The word Gringo/a derives from the U.S. invasion of Mexico City, in which the Mexicans are said to have chanted “Green – go home!” because the Marines’ uniforms were green. The term is since generally taken to mean a foreigner in Spain and Latin America.

27 Machismo connotes exaggerated masculinity, virility, male chauvinism.

28 For a better understanding of children’s journey aboard la Bestia, see Sonia Nazario, Enrique's Journey : The True Story of a Boy Determined to Reunite with His Mother (New York: Delacorte Press, 2013).

29 Oscar Martinez, The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging the Narcos on the Migrant Trail, ed. Kindle (New York: Verso, 2014).