How often have you heard recently that some sexually predatory and disgraced politician or cleric is OK now, the slate’s been wiped clean and it’s all good with jeebus because it was all about the booze, or the drugs, or the sex addiction and blah blah they’ve gone into rehab blah?
Rehab is a massive business worldwide; the teen rehabilitation clinic industry alone is worth $1.2 billion annually. Making money from human misery can even buy you an ambassadorxhip to Europe.
12-step programs, being peer-led and largely self-directed, really should be better than these medically industrialised warehouses of emotional trouble, shouldn’t they?
But a recent rape case questions whether anyone involved in 12 step programmes like AA ever give any thought to the damaged people that some of their admittedly criminal peers may have left in their wake. Are 12-step programmes a good alternative to medical rehab or are they ultimately an expression of pure selfishness in emphasising the addicts’ recovery above all other considerations including the law?
Tucked into Deborah Orr’s column in this morning’s Independent was this short item:
An astonishing rape case in the US features a man who got in touch with a woman he’d raped may years before and confessed to her by letter in order to “make amends” in step nine of his 12-step Alcoholics Anonymous programme. The woman in question, a Mrs Seccuro, was unimpressed by the gesture, because her own recollection was of a violent gang rape, while her assailant’s was of something deeply unpleasant but rather less elaborate.
I hadn’t picked up on this in my meandering around the internets so I went googling, and it’s a well reported but ugly story: