How American Hero Narratives Keep Us From Solving Social Crises — or Healing

Note: this essay is Part 4 of a 5-part series I wrote over a period of years prior to Election Day 2024. In Part 1, I described my personal experiences being groomed and the factors that continue to allow it to happen. Part 2 went into the role of generational trauma in child and intimate partner abuse. Part 3 described the failures of the "stranger danger" education I grew up with. Here, I consider how our "hero" narratives keep us from solving the problem of (or healing from) child abuse. Finally, Part 5 offers some thoughts on how healing our own traumas could help us protect younger generations.

It is perhaps a tragic irony that even as our attention has shifted from “stranger danger” to the dangers of people children already know and trust, victims of child abuse must rely on strangers for justice.

Further ironic is that most of these professionals have built their careers within structures designed to address stranger danger. As a result, the criminal justice and family court systems reflect society’s failures to address the calls coming from inside the house. As professor Gillian Harkins wrote in her book Virtual Pedophilia:

“[T]he focus on pedophilia is not so much paranoia about sexual harm that directs attention away from apparently more legitimate structural social problems … as a minimization and denial of sexual harm as a structural social problem tethered to broader systems.”

Is the system functioning as intended?

In the aftermath of any given incident, a veritable gauntlet forms to gather and preserve key evidence: police detectives, forensic interviewers, victim advocates, medical staff, and lawyers among others comprising multidisciplinary teams that coordinate an investigation and eventual prosecution.

This coordination, and the considerable training that goes with it, is necessary not just to collect and preserve as much evidence as possible — including memories — but also to do so in a way that removes as much emotion as possible from an otherwise highly charged incident.

This professional approach to child abuse cases is designed to limit the chance of “vigilante justice.” However, the development of such professionals recreates the dynamic of adults who “know better” than victims; whose emphasis on evidence may disproportionately focus on tactics, rather than less concrete psychosocial behaviors like grooming; and who may not be able to see their own blind spots.

The professionals I’ve worked with over time would doubtless characterize this view as unfair. On LinkedIn, their posts try to communicate that clearly something must be working:

• Recaps of testimony delivered on Capitol Hill and in criminal hearings.
• Personal accounts of children removed from abusive homes and other situations.
• Recountings of burnout and vicarious trauma.
• Resharing of inspirational messages from survivors turned advocates.

Not everyone agrees, however, that these efforts or results are consistent or widely distributed enough. Witness the rise of online “predator catcher” vigilante groups across the United States. Something may be working, but everything is not.

Have we overemphasized “rescue”?

As a survivor who fell through the system’s cracks not just once, but multiple times, it’s hard not to observe that much of the discourse focuses on “rescuing” children from predators’ clutches, or “protecting” them from falling into those clutches to begin with.

In fact, it takes time — often years — for cases to wend their way through criminal courts. Although trauma-informed training along with plea bargaining practices can help reduce the chance of revictimization during trial, victims are nonetheless often disappointed by outcomes.

So are the professionals who have dedicated careers and lives to child safety. They know there’s only so much they can do; only so much that can capture and keep their attention at one time. Naturally, as a result, their focus tends to coalesce around the very worst — a bar that seems to sink lower each news cycle, apparently demanding proportionally strong responses.

Responders can begin to think of their efforts as nothing short of heroic, the natural progression of a “sheepdog” mindset that sets law enforcement, in particular, apart from the rest of the population.

This mindset is a kinder form of “us vs. them” mentality, arguably a byproduct of American law enforcement’s origins from slave patrols. Even so, the idea of “sheepdogs” guarding “sheeple” recalls the words of one young officer, when I first joined the Explorers: “The public is basically dumb.”

Her contempt may have been at least part of the reason neither she, nor any other officers, noticed the grooming happening right under their noses. There were other factors, too:

• I was nearly “of age.”
• They had lives and dramas of their own to contend with.
• They needed to be able to trust one of their own.
• The “weak oversight” cited by both the New York Times and the Marshall Project in their stories about abuses in the JROTC and Explorer programs.

At the time I was attending summer encampments, the U.S. Navy’s 1991 Tailhook scandal was still fresh in most active duty personnel’s minds. More female instructors, or at least a medic who would have been able to address “girl problems” like menstrual cramps and harassment, might have at least curbed some of the more egregious boundary oversteps.

Then again, it might not. Another woman, like the cynical officer, could as easily have sided with her male counterparts’ (especially superior officers’) decision-making.

It’s also hard for me to avoid the sense that I was, again, the “weird kid.” Once again, I didn’t fit neatly into any herd — not among the “sheeple,” nor the pack of sheepdogs I was among.

At that point, it’s difficult for me to view “sheepdog” mentality as anything but a way to fight a pervasive sense of powerlessness: the inability to make as much difference as we’d like in the world.

The underpinnings of modern hero narratives

Heroism is as old as the ancient Greeks. In the United States, modern-day heroism equates with superheroes — a subgenre that’s been part of the national discourse for years, since the late 1930s, when Superman and Batman were introduced.

Of course, those years fell between the Great Depression and World War II, another period of time in which Americans felt powerless. Thus it’s perhaps no coincidence that post-9/11, five years after “Mission Accomplished” was declared and two years after Saddam Hussein’s execution, Marvel Studios introduced us to Iron Man: the first of dozens of films that would generate more than $29.8 billion at the global box office, making the MCU the highest-grossing film franchise of all time.

In 2015, ten films into the franchise — back when it was still easy to “catch up” with the MCU —  President Obama signed the HERO Act into law. The act formalized and endorsed the Human Exploitation Rescue Operation (HERO) Child-Rescue Corps Program, described by the program’s website as “a paid federal internship that recruits and trains veterans as computer forensic analysts to combat child exploitation.”

Administered by ICE HSI's Cyber Crimes Center, the HERO program relies specifically on “wounded, ill or injured (VA/DoD Disability rating) veterans and transitioning service members.” A lot of people, veteran and non-veteran alike, have touted the HERO program as a way to give some meaning back to veterans whose disability or transition back to civilian life has left them struggling with their sense of identity.

Around the same time, though, another troubling trend was emerging: people exposed to child sexual abuse material were experiencing profound vicarious trauma.

On the “tame” side of the scale were those who, for example, turned the sound off on their computers so they wouldn’t experience the full horror of what those children were going through. On the other end of the scale were those who experienced mental health crises, including suicide.

These outcomes were reflected in additional Marvel productions that came out around the same time:

• 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy depicted a ragtag bunch of deeply traumatized antiheroes who, somehow, managed to band together and use their coping mechanisms to defeat a tyrant.
• The following year, Jessica Jones hit Netflix, dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from the abusive relationship she survived.
• Jessica introduced her audience to Luke Cage, whose own 2016 series would explore themes around the traumas of racism and sexual abuse.

As validating and even cathartic as these productions were, they did nothing to address the ongoing mental health challenges of everyday “heroes” in the first responder community. Even aside from all the excessive-force complaints, domestic and intimate partner violence rates are higher among law enforcement than among the “sheeple.” There is the substance abuse, and the suicide rate:

“Four suspected suicides in the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office highlight a problem affecting agencies across the country,” read the deck beneath The Marshall Project’s headline: “Four Suicides in L.A. and the Mental Health Problem in Law Enforcement.”

“...the personality traits of people who are typically drawn to law enforcement jobs are a strong factor in the suicide problem in U.S. police departments,” the article went on to say. “There’s a macho culture among many of the nation’s nearly 1 million sworn officers…. Former members of the military, people with thrill-seeking personalities, and competitive, hard-charging temperaments round out the profile…. Some military veterans, especially those who have been in combat, come to law enforcement with trauma…. Other aspects of the typical officer’s personality profile are also consistent with people more likely to bury emotional wounds and view seeking mental health treatment as a sign of weakness.”

The dark side of hero worship

I’m going to go out on a limb and say I’m not the only person thinking this way. The creators of the comic book series and TV show “The Boys” are very plain in their critique of modern-day hero culture.

In that fictional world, super-anti-heroes do terrible things in the name of maintaining their image as well as their ratings. This isn’t so much that they’re under tremendous pressure to deliver on what the public expect will pay money to see, as that they themselves are being exploited — by the very powers that created them.

In real life, the popular television show To Catch a Predator ended after Louis “Bill” Conradt Jr., chief felony assistant district attorney for Rockwall County, Texas, killed himself as police tried to serve him with an arrest warrant alleging he himself had solicited sex with a minor.

Nearly two decades later, “hero” organization Operation Underground Railroad suffered its own scandal when founder and chief executive officer Tim Ballard resigned. Ballard had been under investigation for claims he coerced seven women to act as “wives” on overseas missions.

In the same timeframe, Ashton Kutcher likewise stepped down from the anti-child-sex-abuse nonprofit he had co-founded, the Thorn Foundation, following backlash for his support of convicted rapist Danny Masterson.

In most cases, of course, people who do bad things aren’t bad people. Those who want to rescue children, in particular, can be thought of as true believers adhering to Joseph Campbell’s definition of a hero: “someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself." 

But that can create a massive blind spot in our worldview, which is that a world that increasingly feels out of control inspires people to seek a sense of purpose or perhaps more accurately, a sense of control.

It’s perhaps this goal that’s behind another, less inspirational kind of LinkedIn posts: those that exhort followers and connections to “step up” and “be the change” — by way of engaging in subtle shaming.

These posts invoke the image of “bystander effect,” the ghosts of movie-set extras either rescued from, standing agape at, or dying in villain-triggered catastrophes.

It’s true that any effort at all “invites more people into the conversation, elevates awareness, and, most importantly, eases suffering in the only time any of us truly have, which is now,” as one of the more positive posts put it.

Indeed, the best of these posts encourage people to recognize our own power to break free from illusions.

For example, understanding that it isn’t possible to prosecute all cases, society has found other avenues. People have founded nonprofits and introduced legislation, shamed social-media CEOs and lobbied to change terminology and terms of service, hosted and led and participated in panels and debates, developed tools and training and apps and education.

And yet, by shifting the onus of child protection to peers regardless of their capacity, the authors of the less positive LinkedIn posts don’t stop to question whether all the work they do:

• Only walks around the problem instead of wading into it.
• Constitutes a way for the powerful to put off doing — or perhaps more accurately, funding — more meaningful, effective, less profitable work.

These posts thus end up being a projection of powerlessness. If the powerful aren’t doing enough, then shaming peers might be seen as “doing something.”

Perhaps that’s why the inspiration in these posts have begun to ring more and more hollow.

While, again, the rates of child abuse of all kinds reported to state child protection agencies have dropped substantially, the reasons for these declines may have come at the cost of unintended consequences.

Take, for example, the “increases in the numbers of law enforcement and child protection personnel [and] more aggressive prosecution and incarceration policies.” The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, the largest crime bill in the history of the United States, provided for — among other things — 100,000 new police officers, $9.7 billion in funding for prisons, and a requirement for states to establish sex offender registries by September 1997.

The “crime bill,” however, has been blamed for a host of unintended consequences, from mass incarceration to stigmatization of juveniles and others who ended up on sex offender registries. Specifically with regard to the drop in child abuse, other unintended consequences arose:

• Cases end up being prioritized based on age, effectively leaving teens and preteens to fend for themselves.
• Trained professionals can overreach their purview, resulting in medical misdiagnoses.
• “Non-protective” parents, usually mothers, have been jailed for child abuse-related crimes rather than treated as victims of intimate partner abuse that led to their choices and actions.
• The false equivalence of poverty with child abuse and neglect has led to thousands of children, usually Black or Hispanic, needlessly removed from their families and placed in foster care — where they went on to experience actual abuse and neglect.

Changing the power and control structures requires a different approach

The activities we engage in to stop child abuse are designed by existing structures, to reinforce the same structures. Systems’ view of abuse is often facile, missing the nuance e.g. older husbands / younger wives as a foundation from economic hardship; holdover from generations where it was necessary.

By communicating that “expert” people and organizations “know better” how to “rescue” victims, in other words, the system models the very nature of abuse.

That’s because the idea of a “rescue” implies a single act with a defined outcome. In turn, an outcome implies control. To be a rescuer, a hero, assumes a person who has taken control.

It’s at this point that we’re wise to consider that “rescue” and “abuse” are opposite sides of the same coin. The nature of heroism requires a power differential; the strong save the weak — and rely on the same “othering” that scapegoats offenders and their victims.

At the same time, heroism is a denial of the weakness or helplessness we refuse to abide in ourselves. Still, denying these traits in ourselves only means projecting them onto others. A rescue requires a victim to be rescued, not an equal with enough agency to participate in their own deliverance.

By bending to the passive assumption that children must be protected from threats, in other words, we participate in denying them the active agency they will need to assert their own boundaries both now, and into their own futures.

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