Sexual Coercion vs. Other Forms of Behavior Coercion and Control
“My name is Joey. I have learning disabilities, a boat load of them apparently. Plus, I HATE sitting still. Every year my teachers put me on behavior plans. If I’m too active a star is ripped off my behavior chart. If more than 5 stars get ripped off per week I’m not allowed out for recess the whole next week. It’s torture. I can’t stand it! I want to jump out of my body and leave school every minute. When I grow up I will never again let people control my behaviors like this.”
Joey developed a binary perspective of the world. He could see all the girls and boys like him were depersonalized, stuck on behavior plans, and their bodies were controlled by authorities.
Joey saw two kinds of humans, those with the power to control the behaviors of others and those who had no choice but to be controlled by the powerful. Thus, Joey believed there were two options in life, be controlled or be controlling.
Joey decided he would be one of the controllers. To earn enough money to be a controller instead of being controlled, Joey buys and sells girls for the illegal sex trade.
Joey learned in school exactly how to make people behave how he wants them to behave because it was constantly done to him.
This makes sense because psychological theories are manuals for how to exploit and coerce toddlers, infants, and adults to comply with societal and ‘psychological’ behavior norms.
This is why the DSM requires votes over scientific verification and why it requires constant updating.
Psychiatrists ‘update’ the DSM so therapists, educators, and parents can know which behaviors need to be coercively and punitively changed and which behaviors are acceptable in accordance with ever changing societal norms and expectations.
Homosexual behaviors were once considered “psychologically disordered” and authorities were instructed to extinguish all homosexual behaviors. At this point in time homosexual behaviors are considered to be just fine.
Psychologists and psychiatrists reserve the right to tell us which of our human behaviors are fine and which are abnormal, disordered, or unacceptable. We humans have been gaslighted for so long by religion and psychology to believe we have no say in how to interpret our own personal behaviors that we acquiesce to this state of affairs despite one in five of us succumbing to a mental illness each year. (Correlation?)
For example, wanting to move constantly instead of sit still in a desk for 6 hours is still considered “psychologically disordered” and will garner an ADHD diagnosis in a New York minute.
The psychological theories upon which the DSM is based are impervious to new research because they were never based on verifiable scientific research in the first place. Careful observations over time have never caused a single psychological theory to be discarded or changed because psychological theories are not based on careful observation; they are opinion based and thus only swayed by changing societal expectations.
This means psychology is still a philosophy, the branch of study it started as, not a science. It also means educators should be deeply questioning psychological theories. If you don’t believe me, hear what Allen Frances just had to say.
Allen Frances is a famous psychiatrist and headed the task force who voted on the updates in the fourth Diagnostic and Statistic Manual, the DSM-IV. This February of 2018 @psychopharmacopeia tweeted to Frances. “Perhaps we need a way to decouple school services from Psychiatric diagnosis ie find some other way of assessment to determine the children who qualify for these services.”
Frances tweeted back: “Big mistake to use DSM to determine who gets special school services: 1)Promotes psych overdiagnosis/excess meds/harmful stigma 2)Neglects specific educatonal needs 3)Misallocates scarce resources 4)Educational decisions should be by educators using educational tools.”
What???? Not even psychiatrists believe in psychological theories apparently.
There are a spectacular number of things wrong with this exchange, but I tweeted back to Frances in response to his point #4) that educators can’t just make stuff up out of thin air like psychologists can. Educators are taught to base our practices and methods on psychological theories. We are accountable to those theories.
We educators are specifically accountable to psychological theories of personality, behavior, emotion, and child development. This is NOT easy as there are dozens of theories for each variable, theories that contradict each other all over the place. This is why teachers mostly resort to behaviorism. It is the only psychological theory one can cohesively understand, practically apply, and produce evidence with which to be accountable.
However, behaviorism relies upon exploiting the fight or flight response. Teachers must promise an uncomfortable consequence for children when they behave inappropriately or fail to behave appropriately.
To the human brain, an uncomfortable consequence it cannot figure out how to understand or manage is threatening. The brain has one single way to deal with unmanageable threats, regardless of their severity, and that is to signal for fight or flight.
Thus we have classrooms full of children with internal environments that would serve them equally well on the front lines of a civil war. We scratch our heads at the epidemic of anxiety related disorders when it should be obvious psychologists and educators rely on theories that terrorize the nervous systems of our children.
When educators use behavior as the window into coercing compliance in the classroom, we teach children how to do the same. We also normalize the practice of subjugating less powerful humans to do one’s bidding.
Sexual behaviors are no different to a human’s brain than other behaviors. The brain has the exact same protective and defensive relationship to all the behaviors it is capable of calling upon. The brain will cue for fight of flight when ANY of its behavior are coerced, controlled, or exploited 100% of the time.
Unfortunately, the brain’s protective relationship to all its behaviors is not written into any of the plethora of psychological theories. So instead of using cognition as our only window into teaching children, educators are bound by psychological theories to rely on behavioral compliance in order to teach. Thus, we keep most children in fight or flight all day long.
Thousands of methods are accessible to educators for how to individualize instruction to match ALL kinds of learners, but learners can only fail two or three times before their behaviors are targeted for exploitation and coercion.
If educators had adapted Joey’s school work to accommodate his movement needs, how to respect and accommodate differences of others would have been modeled to Joey instead of how to exploit power imbalance to coerce behavioral compliance.
Would Joey have chosen a different profession had his behaviors not been exploited throughout his developmental years?
There is no 100% full proof method for molding any human child into the kind of adults psychologists ask us to ‘produce.’ But if Joey had witnessed equal treatment of all kinds of thinkers, he would have learned about equality based cooperation instead of authority based coercion.
When authority is NOT synonymous with the right to define and control the behaviors of those with less power, we will begin to model a very different way to be in the world to our children.
When nobody’s behaviors are placed under the jurisdiction of someone more powerful, sexual assault and exploitation will not be just another run of the mill way for someone with more power to control the behaviors of someone with less.
We can only legitimize sexual exploitation as a violation of a human rights when we legitimize the exploitation and coercion of all behaviors as a violation of human rights.
We need a theory of human development that is humane. And we need to retire psychological theories that are nothing more than vehicles through which authorities are given the power and the right to practice behavioral coercion.
