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Originally Posted by RandyWayne
So who is to forgive them? The victims or people not involved in the crime at all? In most cases it is the "people not involved in the crime at all" who think they are capable of forgiving the perps on behalf of the victims.
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In the case of childhood sexual abuse it is most often a family member or close family friend that is responsible for the abuse. While burning the person alive may sound like a good idea on the surface, because of the anger that a crime against an innocent causes, it is not really a workable solution.
These child victims can have a huge amount of guilt when the abuser is even found out, arrested, punished. In reality, something like the death of the abuser is not usually going to be satisfaction to the abused, it is more likely to be more pain, grief and guilt.
I grew up in the foster care system. There were a lot of us with abuse backgrounds and there was even abuse in the system. Over the years I have seen people change, lives and relationships healed and restored. None of that is possible after death. It is a well established fact that most abusers are the product of abuse so are we saying we would kill for them now but kill them later if they follow what appears to be a natural progression for may who are abused and become abusers themselves? It makes no sense. Instead we need to focus our limited time, energy and money helping the abused to deal with what has happened to them and avoid continuing the cycle.
If there is not hope for true rehabilitation of an abuser then those who are a danger to others should be permanently separated from polite society. I have some rather radical ideas about how to accomplish that separation in less expensive ways but I won't get into them here. I will say that medical science has a lot to offer in the way of helping with rehabilitation. Chemical and physical castration as well as certain types of brain surgeries can alter behavior and render one who was dangerous no longer dangerous but we consider that cruel. I think it's a man thing that we believe that losing testicles is a fate worse than death when really these people could probably be safely returned to society.
Most murder victims families admit that they found no closure or peace at the killer being executed. It seemed like they would but then didn't. I can only assume from this that God was right when He said to forgive our enemies. Forgiveness makes us stronger and grows us into who God wants us to be. That is not fluff, it's real stuff.
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