Learning to act right (42)… building stereotypes from nothing

Torrey Orton

July 21, 2014

 Once more again with feeling…

Repetition is the heart of learning almost anything. Noticing that one is repeating certain experiences is the heart of capturing unconscious learning in motion. Until captured by awareness the unconscious process unfolds with certainty and produces actions assumed to be right automatically…which is what a habit does.

Repeated experiences are based on sufficient uniformity of actions, circumstances and purposes to survive generalising over time. That is, an effective habitual response requires a consistent experience base. The test of an effective habit is it works for me, and maybe others.

 Once more, the Fertility Control Clinic

So, back to the frontline at the Fertility Control Clinic. My colleague T., the regular security guard, with more than a year’s experience 6 days a week at the Clinic, has acquired an unscratchable itch about certain classes of arriving patients. The itch is their perceived resistance to him executing his security role to his standards of adequacy (which independent observers class as high).

The routine is supposed to go like this: for each arrival at the Clinic (an action sequence of about 3-5 minutes duration depending on how far down the street they come into view, repeated at unpredictable intervals about 15-18 times a morning over a 90 minute period) he walks towards them to escort them past the Catholic anti-abortionists and then up the pathway into the Clinic*. At the Clinic front door he unlocks the door and admits them to reception, turns around and leaves, closing the door (and so relocking it again). Patients usually come in pairs – a patient and her partner, family member, friend, etc. – which makes a small crowd at the door.

 Unintended injuries
 

Here’s where the stereotyping begins to be built, and then reinforced and embedded. A proportion of arrivals do not notice T. is getting out keys while walking towards the door and saying, “I’ll open the door”. They may miss his call because their English is weak, because they are apprehensive about being there in the first place, because his English is accented, because they do not know his role though he’s clearly marked as Security, and so on….with the overall consequence that he is unable to effectively, from his viewpoint, play his role correctly – to care for patients until they are safely inside!! This is seriously angering. The people he’s supposed to protect unwittingly make it difficult for him to do so to his standards of service!! A classic unintended injury.

The backwash of this injury to his professional self-regard has hardened into stereotypes, the effect of which is to raise his blood pressure well beyond appropriate levels, while not affecting his presence  and conduct to all patients. When he sees suspect patients (from his developed stereotype viewpoint) on the street horizon he’s already expecting trouble for him which he cannot, so far, prevent because the situational variables reduce everyone’s capacity to respond ‘rationally’. There are few patients, or protestors, arriving at the Clinic who are not in a heightened state of some kind.

 

There is very little room for altering the context to allow new perspectives and awareness to arise. There is no relationship with the patients other than offering a kindly reception, including obstructing their harassers (an emotion priming activity). There is no room (?) for engaging the patients about their potentially, from T’s viewpoint, injurious behaviour towards him because the relationship is too fraught with implicit intent and brevity of exposure. So, the injury is incorrigible, unmitigatable…the very stuff of hardened emotional arteries set in permanent ineffective defence for T. Micro-traumas recurring persistently. Perhaps this kind of pattern is why few Clinic security staff last very long at full exposure.

 

I have raised my perception outlined above w/ T. in various less complete forms over recent months, prompted by his slowly increasing expressions of exasperation with his least favourite types.  This is the beginning of creating a space for reflection and change, I expect.

 

*the over full richness of this sentence somewhat captures the emotion and content density of the experience it describes.

Learning to act right (38)… The line at the Fertility Control Clinic

Torrey Orton
March 1, 2014

Reaching points of no return. This is one of them.

 

Tariq has always had a fine feel for the line and a finely tuned capacity for drawing it. It comes upon him in a flash he often doesn’t quite notice himself. We close to him see it arrive before it is in his conscious awareness carried in a change of expression and posture which takes all feeling from his face and settles a calm readiness in his body. I know it is a human look of cold anger because I can mimic it to others not present and see the fear flash on their faces. It comes when certain lifelong value lines are crossed – for Tariq, ones to do with religion, family, identity and others.

 

He has to defend himself both from going over his own line (breaking his own rules) and allowing others to come across it to him (allowing others to break his rules). This, as it sounds, poses perilous problems of balance, since a perception of another’s approach or of his own need to enforce the line can provide a mutually supported but unintended energy to breech it, one way or the other, or both ways at once.

 

This conflict is clear at the Clinic for all of us present who are engaged in defending our respective sides of the line of protest. As the pressure to defend the line increases the likelihood of a transgression increases, too. Tariq bears this pressure more than the Friends* because he’s always there as security guard.

 

For example, the other day one of us was running interference for patients being subjected to the usual “offer of help” from two of the HOGPI’s** most intrusive providers, T and W. These women uniformly disregard the known council rules for street proselytising in Melbourne City Council domains: you may offer a pamphlet, a talk, a hello but you must stop when the other signals (verbally and/or gesturally) their refusal of interest. T and W’s refusal to stop offering their help is the key point of enragement for us. We are powerless to stop them. We can only intervene physically by stepping between patients and T and W once patients signal no interest in their offer. This is the point, at times, where our frustrated, powerless anger flairs verbally like this: “They said no, T.” loud enough to be heard 20 meters away, and definitely by patients 2 meters away.

 

We have spontaneously erupting feelings of offence at patient treatment. These lines are drawn in a deep and broad rush of blood to our extremities, but mostly expressed in our voices - “They said no, T.” Trouble is, this can scare the patients more than it inhibits T and W. Others of the HOGPI persuasion wilt in the face of “they said no”, signalling their retreat by withdrawing to their designated side of the line on the footpath and not participating in direct patient harassment.

 

On occasions, as this one, the Friends energy aggravates patient fear/anger and attracts expressions of those feelings in threatening forms, which we’re inclined to treat as rejection of our offer!! And so, unknowingly, it is. Arriving patients have enough to concern them without reading breastplates advertising our label (Friends of the FCC). Even calm passers-by have trouble with that. Fortunately these events occur in 30 seconds, each being a new beginning as the patients arrive. There are few repeat participants in the street drama, except us and the HOGPIs.  The vocal and physical intervention moments are so hard to describe my effort leaves too much to the imagination, but it is just to feed imagination that I’m writing!! Its difficulty reflects the difficulty of our efforts on the line at the Clinic.

 

* Friends of the Fertility Control Clinic – volunteers seeking to reduce harassment of arriving patients.

** Helpers of God’s Precious Infants

Learning to act right (28)… Cracking nuts - talking to single-issue fanatics

Torrey Orton

Nov. 23, 2013

 “There is a right way of living” he said on the phone from Rome, “and it is our task to try to find it and follow it.”

Cardinal George Pell quoted in TheAGE’s GoodWeekend, June 16, 2012; pg. 10

It should be clear that Pell’s assertion is not remotely true. The Catholic Church’s history can be read as a repeated confrontation with the fact that there are many ways to be human and, so, to live. Pell’s untruth supplies the intellectual and organisational energy for the absolutisms of the Helpers of God’s Little Children’s (HoGPI) personal confidence in their abusing other’s life choices under the pretence of offering “help” they know they cannot materially or socially provide. Of course, similar simplicities underpin the fanatical ends of Islam, Judaism, Buddhism and evangelical protestant Christianity.

The Protestants a few centuries ago arose out of various revulsions at the socio-spiritual voracity of the Church, only then to spawn their own rigidities (sects like the Exclusive Brethren and the cyclical upshots of evangelisms) with which they have struggled ever since. They rest in the near background of our present focus on the Catholic Church at the Fertility Control Clinic. Much about to be said here will apply to them, as to the rabid branches of Judaism (ultra-orthodox) and Islam (Wahhabi / Salafi) and Buddhism. All three monotheisms are fired by periodic ecstatic revisitings of the original texts in search of uncorrupted meanings, pure meanings, the ‘real’ meanings – always a backwards look which fuels backwards steps. The catalysts for the cleansing fires are perceptions of moral decline, often the fruits of socio-economic and scientific / technological growth.

Within these struggles lies the critical one over the question of rendering unto Caesar – that is, the acknowledgment that the religious is neither the only nor the dominant domain of human being and that pretending to be the only domain necessarily leads to astounding corruptions of the religious, and perversions of everything else. The separation of church and state took a lot of killing to achieve, first arriving at a clear closure through Roger Williams in what became Rhode Island in 1636 and that only by self-exile from the rigours of the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony.

A shareable assumption, perhaps

Let’s continue with a potentially shareable assumption: the world as we knew it in the 1950’s has fallen apart across a broad spectrum of life domains and has been doing so for a long time before that. The pace of decomposition of basic relationships seems to be increasing, marked by data on reduction of friendships over time and increases of sole occupancy dwellings, especially by women. Marriages are a very un-investable 50/50 commitment these days. The evidence on life satisfaction as a function of increased wealth should be a caution to the hyper-accumulating One Percent club, but it won’t be.  And so on… It’s not hard to think we are in a period of catastrophic decline, surrounded by Decline of Rome type perversion and indulgence.

Some would say the fall started when the Church lost the fight to keep the sun circling the earth 500 years ago; others would say since the discovery of relatively safe sex media starting with reliable condoms and running on into the pills (before and after, in turn), and abortion as a backup for inevitable mistakes/failures of these media; others, again, would say since the acquisition of wealth has become the dominant objective of all leading world economies, and its principal measure, money, the major denominator of virtue (virtue having become just another tradeable commodity); and, others would say since human control of life was put within arm’s reach through the advances of sciences, amongst which the biological is the most prominent.

The Enlightenment scientific project (now a program daily reiterated by announcements of the latest “evidence-based” discoveries) promises to save us from the conditions of being human: from being fallen in the Judaeo-Christian sense, from being frail in the biological sense, from being limited in the ontological sense, and so on. That project is a canonical claim with as much purchase on reality as the biblical but masquerading as possible, not necessary – no faith required, just wondering interest.

Cracking nuts, really?!?

Yes, it is my professional judgment that the HoGPIs are nuts, cracked, crazed and must be addressed as such since an assumption of sanity (e.g. that they not provoke patients in any way!) justifies behaviour which repulses patients, and enrages us, by its inhumanity (to put it moderately). HoGPIs think somewhat the same of the patients (and Friends, too, of course) because we are working against what they see as the natural order of things. The main evidence for the latter thought is that they always present themselves as conflicted by their unrequited love of patients and unrecognised hate for patient’s choices. Their public face and materials (the hoardings worn by men and women to meet the council requirements for no promotional materials on the pathways) are more provocative of patient anger / sadness than they are solicitous of patient concern / interest. Why else keep secret video records of who comes to the FCC without knowing what they are coming for.

HoGPIs may not be cracked throughout their lives, but in Fertility Clinic matters they behave convincingly as if they are nuts. So, how can we talk to them? There are many difficulties having a real conversation in the setting of HoGPIs’ protest. One of us remains admirably committed to the possibility of “real conversation”. I’m a few steps behind him, currently mostly acting as if there is no possible conversation with them these days.

Challenges: major issues which I’d like to turn into development opportunities.

First, ask them their names. Most refuse, saying “I don’t have to tell you.” The refusal can be engaged as an avoidance of personal responsibility for the roles they are playing in “helping”. By staying nameless they do not have to face taking personal responsibility for their beliefs or their expressions of belief to patients. This is a sub-adult behaviour, of course, typical of those with an uncertain grasp of their belief systems. By remaining nameless they can treat us as “murderers” with no humanity. Ask which church they belong to of the two ex-Premier of NSW Christina Keneally a few months ago discussing the challenges of talking to her children about church paedophilia and distinguishing between the “Institutional church” (the putative guilty ones) and some of the church (the real one???).

Help pressed on patients who decline it is harassment.

1)     HoGPIs making the offer of “help” to patients is a legal process, until it becomes harassment. Harassment starts in Melbourne Council ordinances at the moment a potential offer of information or discussion is refused by a member of the public. This refusal may be explicit – ‘no thanks’, etc.- or implicit – a refusing non-verbal of normal sorts like turning away, shaking the head, etc. Nothing may be offered by hand or mouth after that point.

It is also unlawful to pursue patients, or anyone else, from down the street to their notional destination at the Clinic. Daily HoGPIs pursue three ‘innocent’ parties: local inhabitants, local workers and patients with other than termination concerns, often from 50 metres up or down the street from the Clinic gates.

Conflicting rights: the right to offer and the right to refuse; the latter is not acknowledged or accepted in practice by HoGPIs except when Council authorities are present and even then…

“Murder is happening behind these walls”

2) Responding to single issue perspectives packaged as the most important thing right now – e.g. “murder is happening behind these walls” which we (Friends of the FCC) are facilitating in their view, and therefore we are murderers’ too.

Responding to the “murder” charge is necessary because this perception fires HoGPI righteousness!! It is not the legal view of life beginning in Victoria. It is not the scientific view of life beginning in the educated world. It is not the view of all Christians, Jews or Moslems anywhere.

A second response is to deny it is a stand-alone issue…rather, it is part of the whole package of the Church’s birthlivingdeath doctrine, which at any time in history variably validates and supports differing standards for birthing, living and dying; varying principles of decision…specifically the regressive Papal package of no abortion, no contraception, no gay sex or rights, no euthanasia which is the currently received message of the Church on all such matters and undiscussably so, or as Pell would say, “universally”…. though there’s a slight lightening of the atmospherics of the doctrine under the new Pope Francis – less judging but no less condemning.

They are failing miserably…

3) They are failing miserably in their efforts to even get a hearing from patients – 70% will not even accept a handout and most of those who do are Chinese or Indians for whom rejecting a public offer is impolite. Most of those which are accepted are not read, and in some cases couldn’t be because some patients are not native speakers of English.

No real numbers exist on “help” HoGPIs have provided to any patients and they acknowledge they couldn’t provide any large amount of help if they were successful engaging patients. So, they are constantly frustrated. One HoGPI said “It’s about love, not money” when confronted with the impossibility of their “helping” any significant number.

The historical shortcomings of prohibitions

4) Ask them if they know the pre-abortion and pre-contraception history of coat hanger abortion parlours and farming out of children to agencies - Catholic or otherwise – which themselves harboured systemic child abuse practices????

What did the recent Bert Wainer (http://www.abc.net.au/tv/dangerousremedy/video/ ) story tell us?? That no abortion, like no alcohol (have a look at the criminalities spawned by Prohibition in the US 90 years ago for an example of unintended and unimagined consequences of universal virtue imposed for others’ good) and no drugs (the criminalities across the world spawned by the War on Drugs) are practically unsustainable regimes, slowly collapsing under their own weight now and at previous attempts to impose virtue by force… Another case in point: the notorious failure of abstinence-only sex-education in the US!!!

Can you stop people from messing up relationships, committing rape, fumbling pre- and post-marital sexual encounters, having contraception breakdowns (20% condom failure rate?)?? The figures on relationship instability are consistent for 50+ years – around 40-50% formally fail (end in divorce). These figures are insignificantly different for major religious groupings in industrial cultures, except for the cult-like fundamentalist fringe groups across the monotheisms.

Ask HoGPIs what drove people to seek abortions under pre-legalisation conditions, even at great danger to themselves?? This set of forces is most instructive because it tells us something about what will push people into action with high risk potential – a way of predicting likely rates of abortion seeking in spite of a ban.

They are wrong about stress and trauma

5) HoGPIs have incorrect psychology about patient stress, historical traumas, the meaning of tears, leading to embedding untested attributions of patient present states like they are feeling guilt, regret, etc.!!!

 

The last weakness is the most important of all. Attributions cannot be reliably tested under threat like that patients experience out front of the Clinic. The social context there elicits the personal guilt/shame about sexual matters which abounds in our culture. Guilt/shame are known to affect reporting of abuses massively and are recognised widely as a distorting feature of the domain…one which is aggravated by religious upbringings for many people.

The HoGPIs’ abortion regret argument: there is no rigorous support for abortion being especially conducive to “mental health” problems. And, of course, regret and guilt are normally occurring feelings in life situations of many kinds. They are not intrinsically pathological or forecasts of depression.

Tears often have more than one emotional foundation: minimum possible feelings expressed in the simple act of crying are sadness, fear and anger together. Shame/guilt comes second. Stress is cumulative. Acute stress is common throughout life but not dangerous to well-being unless converted into chronic reoccurrences, as in family violence, etc.

If you claim to lead virtue you have to be squeaky virtuous

6) Recognising that different life matters have different moral valences – e.g. those who propose to rule (others) on “the right way to live” are making moral claims much greater than those in everyday life roles and institutions; the closest to the church would be legal and financial ones, w/ medical in the second row; those making great claims about anything and wanting to insist on being followed have to be purer than the rest of us; we can do impurity OK already.

Can you prevent a proportion of the population from being systemically excluded from normal society in ways leading to sub-minimal upbringings over multiple generations? E.g. – the repeatedly poor over generations. And there is “soul murder” – the destruction of quality of life by parents and other responsible adults.

The Church has a noble and long commitment to alleviating poverty, etc…why don’t you put energy into that since those conditions produce the most negative results for children...and doing so is part of your notional spiritual vocations!!

Can you guarantee no child will be assaulted by any religious from any given date forward??

Could you provide for anything like 10% of patients presenting for abortions if they chose your offer??

Sexual abuse and silence

7) Do you know that X % of sexual abuses, and many other intra-familial or communal ones, are never reported formally? Do you know why?

Where does your taking choice away from people stop??  At the church’s “double jeopardy” principle for handling end of life pain mitigation: that medicating to reduce suffering may consciously be used where the process will also produce eventual death (the de facto ‘put ‘em out of their misery’ treatment that has long been allowed in medicine)?

Sexism and power

 

8) Who are you the Church to decide for women and men? Sexism is explicit in the Church’s role structure and ideology.

Liberal democracies judge that everyone has a right to their claims, but not to ones which endanger the dominance of liberal democratic values – i.e. freedom of thought and its assistant, speech. At the gates of the FCC these two values clash quietly for the four groups of participants: patients and families, Friends of the FCC, security guards and HoGPIs. And so, we have the central challenge for Friends and HoGPIs – the challenge of enforcement of regulations which establish and manage the borders of free speech and offence. No one in enforcement wants to be involved with this highly irregular terrain. The last place the police and Council officers want to hear from is the FCC footpath.

Start at home…

9) Why don’t they go after their co-religionists who do not practice the Church’s doctrine on life/ death matters?? Actually the Church has sent an envoy recently to “evangelise” the wayward masses who self-identify as members but are non-practicing…Do they fear the disapproval of their co-religionists? Wouldn’t it make a greater impression if they were known to be putting the resurrection of Catholic morality first in their efforts?? Shouldn’t it be easier to do…or maybe that’s why it’s not a promising venture for the martyr oriented fundamentalists of the FCC front yard.

Matters of faith / belief

10) But in the end, this is a matter of faith, which cannot be adjudicated by facts and we see the issue of life beginning (and ending!) differently, and you have a right to your faith but no right to attempt compelling our faith / belief…though I’m happy to entertain discussion about the rightness of the faiths – e.g. some faith issues have been clearly ruled matters of fact, like varieties of sexualities!!!...just as the role of women as equals in everyday life has been similarly clarified as fact and accepted as such even in the Church except for where further work needs to be done to close the gaps in historical practices  - eg male only priesthood, bishoprics, etc.

A note on faith: there have been three iterations of the Word, of revelation, each of which founds a religion – Judaism, Christianity and Islam - all of which are in the name of the same god. This leads to a wonder at what the god was doing each time, since the revelations overlap in content…did the god realise it had forgotten certain points and needed to have another go? This would make the god a developing or maturing being, not a finished and perfect one.. and therefore having no universal, immutable claims…a fact which is replicated in  the  Church’s Papal infallibility having been repeatedly shown to be fallible, or need adjusting for changing times, etc., by the Church itself, to say nothing of Galileo and company.

 

 

 

Learning to act right (31)… When is a counter-attack ethical

Learning to act right (31)… When is a counter-attack ethical
Torrey Orton
Jan. 9, 2012

I look forward to the views of St James Ethics Centre on the ethics of our proposed action described below. At least, some generic guidelines for our thinking so far would be useful. I will be approaching Ethi-Call, the Centre's telephone ethics consulting service for an opinion of the following strategy when they re-open in a week. This article is still in draft at this posting.

I write on behalf of a loose assemblage called Friends of the Fertility Control Clinic (FCC), numbering around 6-8 volunteers who appear solo or in pairs at least 4 of the 6 mornings a week the clinic is open. We support patients arriving between 7:30 and 9AM who are being challenged by Helpers of God's Precious Infants (HoGPIs). The HoGPIs' view is that they are offering help to pregnant women who are, in their own views, being harassed by the HoGPIs.


Proof of the patient perception lies in two facts: almost no patients ever take up the help offer (as reported by the HoGPIs themselves) and, two, once the patients pass by the first offer they are subjected to various degrees of continuing verbal harassment (as defined technically by the Melbourne City Council by-laws, which is also harassment by our standards and, we believe, the standards of most of society). The HoGPIs have on passive display materials which can only be called provocative for patients and partners. Their view is that they make no contribution to patient distress because patients are already distressed – a simple, but self-serving ignorance of the psychology of stress (it is cumulative!).


We have been supporting patients for 18 months now. The HoGPIs in some cases have been protesting for 20 years at this site, or another. We are on a first name basis with the principal actors of the HoGPIs, though none will take responsibility for leadership on the site. The regular HoGPI participants number about 10, with daily numbers varying from 4 to12. The most persistently aggressive of their number are women. Patients do not know they are usually being covertly filmed by one HoGPI and their daily numbers recorded manually, all assumed to be seeking abortions. The HoGPIs do not know which patients are coming for abortions and which for other fertility control help.


Apart from our presence, which patients spontaneously thank us for, we support by actively pointing out when HoGPIs have stepped over the technical harassment line, usually saying to the offending HoGPI, "they said 'no'". Sometimes some of us step between patients and protestors after that line has been crossed and accompany them to the clinic entrance. The pattern of events under discussion occur on a public footpath bounded on one side by the property line of the clinic and overseen by a security guard each day (one of whom was shot to death 10 years ago by a protest-associated gunman; no one in the clinic has forgotten that this is a possible end game of their professional commitment).


Our commitment to patient support is based mainly on the need to reduce patient stress. I am professionally committed to this as a psychologist and psychotherapist. Others of the Friends have their own reasons, but reducing patient stress is always the starting place for our actions. Therefore, any actions we undertake to inhibit, moderate, or deflect HoGPI impacts are judged from a patient stress reduction perspective.


Our actions are largely seen by HoGPIs to be an inhibition of their freedom of expression. They seek legal redress for our perceived indiscretions, e.g. being supposedly "provocative" by pointing out the connection between their anti-abortion line and the Church's clear anti-contraception and anti-gay positions, plus its present difficulties with systemic paedophilia. We are prompted to remind them about the latter difficulty when a regularly appearing priest adds his contribution to the patient experience as he surveys the clinic entrance from 6 feet away: "protect your child." They call the police when offended. This results in no reportable offenses being found.


We have made efforts to assist the HoGPIs to increase the effectiveness of their first offer to patients so that there would be greater uptake potential and less added stress for patients. These efforts have been documented, discussed and refused consistently. Two of their number attempt to discourage the more flagrant misbehaviours of their colleagues.


The HoGPIs are absolutely certain about when life starts and finishes. From that position they judge others' positions as right or wrong. The source, and authority, of their position is the Catholic Church's published positions on said issues, available for all to see on their website. From their point of view, no one has the right to any other position. Hence they label as "murderers", including by implication patients, those differing with them at the FCC. They do not extend to non-believers the democratic consideration we extend to them as our starting point in opposing them – that they have a right to say what they want. We do not oppose their offering help, but we are "going to hell" for opposing their excesses.


Liberal democracies judge that everyone has a right to their claims, but not to ones which endanger the dominance of liberal democratic values – i.e. freedom of thought and its assistant, speech. At the gates of the FCC these two values clash quietly for the four groups of participants: patients and families, Friends of the FCC, security guards and HoGPIs. And so, we have the central challenge for Friends and HoGPIs – the challenge of enforcement of regulations which establish and manage the borders of free speech and offence. No one in enforcement wants to be involved with this highly irregular terrain. The last place the police and council officers want to hear from is the FCC footpath.



We know that the HoGPIs will vigorously defend their perception that they are not harassing the patients, just trying to help them…to the point of claiming, as one did recently when she was haranguing a couple who had turned away from the offer of help, that she was just "speaking to herself" in mouthing the standard accusative mantras at users of the clinic's services.


Now it's time for a new step. Remember the context, in brief, is this: 6 days a week the already emotionally charged patients of the fertility control clinic are confronted by anti-abortion protestors whose behaviour clearly offends them to the point of tears in many cases and outbursts of rage in a few. These patients are entirely within their legal and moral rights to use the services of the clinic.


This will be a more confronting step, at least from our viewpoint. Confronting for us is the fact that we have to become much more systematically attentive to HoGPI misbehaviour in order to push the Melbourne City Council / police authorities to enforce their own rules of public behaviour – notably the rules against public harassment.


So we are committing to a persistent data gathering campaign by live video to clearly document HoGPI transgressions against the law of harassment, and three other recurrent invasions of patient privacy. These three are:

(1) 'gang tackling' approaching patients in pairs or trios with the effect of partially blocking their normal progress along the footpath;

(2) chasing patients from many meters down the footpath, sometimes as far as 100 meters from the clinic so that their approach to the clinic is punctuated by the continuing presence of protestor(s); and,

(3) corralling patients in their cars on arrival so they cannot easily get out.

Harassment data is the most difficult to collect because it requires close video with audio which is highly likely to be more confronting for patients than HoGPIs.


This project, once agreed by all stakeholders on the FCC side, will be clearly advertised to the HoGPIs, as have been all our other initiatives. That is, we are trying to work with democratic values of openness and transparency in a context where they are not shared by the 'opposition' in the name of their right to free expression.


Torrey Orton
AHPRA Reg. No. PSY0001120138
11 Wertheim St
Richmond, Vic., 3121
Australia
Mob. +61 (0) 419 362 349
Skype - torreyo

Learning to act right (30)… I did do something, really!!

Learning to act right (30)… I did do something, really!!
Torrey Orton
Sept. 4, 2012

The nuts are cracking…

Two weeks ago I wrote: "I did see something, really."


Four days ago the following happened on the same stage: The police were called again for an act of mine deemed assaultive by another of the regular Saturday HoGPIs*. I was reported to have badmouthed one of the priests on duty at the clinic by calling him a paedophile. The policeman (one of another bunch of two) said I did not have to comment on the allegation and I was not being cautioned. So I said nothing.


At the time of my notional assault not one of the non-religious HoGPIs had objected to what I was saying, nor said they did not want my commentary on their work, and nor did the supposedly offended priest. That is, they did not establish the condition for a harassment allegation. Nor had they two weeks previously. The priest in question, one of the trench-coat-masked pair who show up regularly, refused to pursue the matter when the investigating officer asked him what had happened. Perhaps he was surprised it had anything to do with him because the complaint had been made on his behalf it seemed.


For the record, what I had said was that the priests present were accountable organisationally for the church's paedophilia problem and maybe they should be doing something about that since they couldn't guarantee the safety of the children being born now. I've been saying this in roughly this form for months now. And, I say it to the assembled HoGPI multitude of the day, not just the priest(s). They gather under the umbrella of the church's dogma so they can live with its results as a whole.


All the evidence is that they do not like that connection to the whole of the Church's sexuality struggles. One priest (the other of the trench- coated pair) has actively dissociated himself from the struggle by claiming accusations of paedophilia are a matter for the police. Victims should contact the police, he said on another day to the security guard who was pursuing a line of thought like mine above. The same priest subsequently saluted my contributions to their work one morning with "Sieg Heil", a perspective on me I'd not imagined before. Guess it goes with "devil", "Satan" and "murderer" that are typically cast on me by HoGPIs.


The parishioner protestors (the larger part of the HoGPIs) are often even more incensed than the priest to be compromised in their absolute virtue by its undeniable roots in the priestly corruptions (don't forget gay priests and married priests for two other reality assaults on the Papal Bull).


One side effect, I noticed afterwards, has been a reduction in my normal response to authority figures – a feeling of generic guilt which produces a tendency to offer information that's not been asked for and generally to behave collusively. This day I felt less shaky. The slight bit I did feel dissipated in a half hour or so. I take this to be a result of my professional development program in conflict management – our counter protest. It followed a session in which I had made various remarks on the HoGPIs activities (which were not subject to police complaint, but were of similar character to the paedophile accountability ones above) in a coherent way, with low anger and little disturbed thinking on my part (usually the main product of high anger).


Perhaps I'm getting closer to cracking the nuts by being less cracked myself?




*HoGPIs – Helpers of God's Precious Infants - Google for details



 

Preface to a counter protest – Defence of the FCC

Preface to a counter protest – Defence of the FCC
Torrey Orton
Oct. 19, 2011


The purpose of this paper is to establish the context for design of an intervention to change the outcomes for participants in the processes which occur here. It arises from our – Charles Brass and my - participant-observer experience at the FCC since early July this year.

The Fertility Control Clinic's front gate is a frontline of the struggle over life and death rights in Melbourne. There a group of Catholic protestors meet six days a week at 7:30am to protest patients' moral rights to a legal service authorised by elected representatives of the people of Victoria three years ago. Their protest expresses their unflagging commitment to expunging this parliamentary offence against the revealed word of gods.


Our goal is to improve the FCC patient experience by reducing the negative effects of the protestors' manner and methods. To do so we have to take into account all the players, direct and indirect, in the theatre of the public patient experience. Anything we do which increases patient stress is not a viable strategy. By chance, so far, the net effect of our presence has been an unintended positive for patients. Our presence appears to constrain protestors' harassing behaviour. We did not set out to do that at the start. We do now.

There is a set of regular players in this drama – the protestors, the security guards and large numbers of local residents and locally officed workers who pass through the frontline the five work days the FCC is open. The sixth is quieter.

The theatre of protest – a gauntlet to run

The typical 'facts' are simple. This is what you might see repeated perhaps twenty times a day:

The set: a two way black top with one lane access in the middle; one verge marked with a white line the other corralled by a 6 foot stone wall; midway is a recessed gateway with Fertility Control Clinic advised in large letters.

Onto this set six days a week between 7:30 and 10am a pregnant woman, with partner or family member(s) accompanying, walks along the footpath on Wellington Parade, East Melbourne, to the gated entrance of the Fertility Control Clinic. If she is coming for an abortion, she may be filled with conflicting feelings amongst which anxiety, shame and guilt may predominate. She may also have been told to expect watchers in wait for her – the 'pro-life' protestors whose aim is the reversal of the recently (2008) legalised practice of abortion in Victoria, and so they will explicitly and openly disapprove of her walk.

As she approaches, the protestors first appear standing on the curb side of the footpath. A couple, both men, have display boards dangling from their shoulders like spruikers for a year 8 sex-education class… 3D plastic portrayals of early stages in foetal growth and screen prints of ultrasound scans. A security guard, whom she perhaps has not even noticed, signals to her that she does not have to talk to the protestors.

Next, the patient encounters an 'offer' of help, often from a female protestor, to see her experience in the light of the only Catholic option – birth. She accepts it by stopping to talk or refuses by walking on by, sometimes with a verbal clarification on the way. Some protestors push their offer beyond the patient's refusal, to the point of attempting a verbal assault unless physically blocked. The patient's last message from the uninvited outside world may be "Don't kill your little baby…" as she's entering the inner world of the Clinic. Its door is always locked. Only a guard can admit her.

The 'set' – an emotional portrait

I have been a watcher, too, standing with the security guard for the Clinic, watching the watchers and at times explicitly protesting their protest by physically blocking their access to arriving patients who made it clear they did not want to hear from the protestors. The mood of this setting is just below the physical violence threshold. The guards and protestors have faced each other across the footpath for months (and years in some cases). Each day is a stream of boredom¹ with sharp irruptions of rough water as a patient comes into view and a dance of offer and protection as in the theatre above is stepped out. The boredom produces a slow build of inexpressible energy which even the protestors occasionally fall victim to in moments of baiting the guards. For protestors and guards this is an experience of waiting with fear and anticipation. Fear roused by possible conflict runs from slight discomfort to irritability thru frustration on into anger and occasional rage. It is expressed in a running background struggle between protestors and security for judicial ascendancy: who can prove who is harassing who? Who can catch who fudging local short term parking rules?

Anticipation adds an edge of fight to the fear's possible flight - a situation poised for action; players waiting to take up their roles; the boredom of no patients being present holds them in suspension. This edgy experience fills about 2 of the 2 ½ hours each morning. The ½ hour of action is approximately 20 X 1 minute flurries, each event having its own specific, unique dramatic energy as the dance of entry plays out.The protestors and the guards both see the other as more powerful than themselves, and so threatening. The guards have physical and legal power on their side, though they have very limited right to use the physical – much less so than in other security contexts like night spots. The protestors have persistence, baiting and the niggling stretching of the notional behavioural limits of public protest on theirs. Both spend time trying to catch the other out in derelictions of roles. Hence the role of cameras in the daily drama, especially at moments of patient arrivals.

Patients walk into this set already tuned to potential assault from without by the assault from within of their own feelings. Refusing a protestor's offer is culturally more difficult for some than others, as it is psychologically more difficult for some than others. The simplest evidence for the acceptance which is not an acceptance is the number of protestor handouts given by patients to the guard as he accompanies them to the locked front door for which only he has the key. The guard's slow ritual shredding of the handouts in the protestors' faces completes the loop of patient refusal.Behind the scenes…

All of the regular players – protestors, guards, local residents and locally officed workers - are aware that this clinic is the symbolic centre of resistance to the Catholic, and other (religious) fundamentalist, "pro-life" protestors. It is not a political playground. A guard died here 10 years ago at the hands of a madman², armed in part with the beliefs offered by the protestors to arriving patients. The protestor's case against the FCC sits, in part, on a thorough misunderstanding of what professional counselling's role is in clinics like the FCC. As has been explained to me first hand, that role is first to help generally with patient understanding of their fertility issues and second to help sort through the personal implications of a pregnancy, checking that all implications and options have been taken into account, including proceeding to normal birth.

It is professionally unethical to promote a particular patient conclusion as much as to hide a medically understood, socially viable and legal option. Those charged with the welfare of patients do neither³, if they can. There is no complaint book suggesting the FCC's counsellors have compromised their role. Fulfilment of that role does not include any assumption of what the right resolution is for any patient, other than that patients' unintentional ignorance of factors and options may produce sub-optimal resolutions.

Reality photo shoots??

Think of yourself being paraded by fate before an avowedly prejudiced audience which seems likely to judge you as falling short in some painful regard – an audience which will record your shame and give it a life by reciting it as end of day stories to their families and friends. And, they'll have a photo record of it, too!! Welcome to celebrity health in the name of the lord.There is always a hidden camera in the dress of one protestor capturing the daily comings and goings. This occurs in other protested sites in Australia and the US. That the cameras are hidden means they are ashamed of their actions because there is no legal reason to hide them. They know it is an unwarranted intrusion. Private photographs of anyone are just that until they are made public at which point pay-for-use and defamation concerns arise immediately. They know this, too. We've discussed this explicitly with the protestors.

The bigger picture

We guess that for protestors the patients are both individuals making their personal way through life challenges and symbols of mistaken pathways at the same time – that is, representations of big ideas, not people. I know that some protestors label patients, and us⁴, as evil. In their symbolic form for protestors, patients are bigger than their own reality and so open to any influence process, and righteously so in the minds of protestors. They, the protestors, would not present any assaultive materials if they wanted to maximise low-emotion responses from patients. High emotion responses express automatic defensive reactions, likely to elicit an automatic rejection of the protestors' offer – the reaction of someone feeling punished by unreachable others.

 Because they are confused about their aims – helping the patients vs. helping the church achieve its mission of repealing the law – they assault as often as they solicit. One could say that any offer by a "protestor" under such circumstances is always a potential assault.

Larger struggles of this sort surround us in increasing numbers and depths. They take tangible shape in the human scale of face-to-face settings like the Clinic entrance on Wellington Street. That's just fine. However, this protest is executed through invasions of patient privacy in the open space between their transport to the Clinic and its front gate. They feel harassed, and 14 once-a-week participant observations by both of us support this claim. These are palpable harassments of visual, verbal and physical sorts. Research makes this observation more than a passing or stereotyped perception of ours⁵.

Onto this stage patients appear solo or in couples, in widely ranging states of disarray from the wholly contained to open crying. The core cast of protestors (in bunches of five or more) and guards (always only one at a time) can see them coming 100 meters away. The guards almost never mistake a patient for an in-transit local. The protestors, though more experienced than the guards (some being on deck at this site for 18 years) often propose their offers mistakenly. And if rebuffed by an actual patient, they are too likely to persist with a plea like "please save your little baby…" and follow them to the gate (unless blocked by the guard) repeating the plea over and over. At the same time, in the background, a visual assault is on offer. We know from the guards and patient reports that protestor actions are more invasive in our absence.

Disapproval and disenabling are the weapons of moral intimidation. The disapproval is obvious. The disenabling, more veiled. The agent of disablement is shame, with a backdrop of guilt. Shame is the public face of guilt and the passage from transport to clinic aggravates its power. Patients arrive in a context in which they are at best amateurs and are confronted by a working practice, an established order of things whose role players are thoroughly at ease with their purposes and moves, though not with each other!

Vulnerability and intimidation – the harassment equation

This makes the very presence of the protestors – physical, visual, and verbal – potentially invasive. It is especially so for those patients most affected by the experience of unwanted pregnancy. They are the most vulnerable and the least able to defend their vulnerability. In my most recent conversation with the most articulate and sympathetic of the protestors, there was no recognition of the immense power imbalance that patient vulnerability gives to the protestors, perhaps because they are so often unheard themselves.

They are aware that harassment is a matter of perception, but not that some perceptions of harassment have ethical priority over others. Clearly in counselling, patients' perceptions of their own vulnerability always comes first at the beginning of any work. This is also the medical rule. How else can we find out what they think/feel is wrong?I know the protestors are open to moral intimidation because I have quietly threatened to threaten them morally twice and the reaction was faster than the twitch of an eye offended by a wandering mote. So, they should appreciate their effects on patients, but the powerful seldom do appreciate their effects except as benefits to themselves. When I aim an openly held camera at them they shy away, while training a hidden one on me. Shame is a wondrous thing.

We are in the early stages of negotiating an agreement between all the players. Whatever form an agreed result might take, it will have to respond to the factors above. Keep posted.

1-boredom is a high energy state expressing one's frustration with a context with no accessible action opportunities, no way to focus an interest into anything.

2- see Dr. Susie Allanson's Murder on his mind (2006); Wilkinson.

3-declaration of interest: I am an AHPRA registered psychotherapist with a broad caseload of biopsychosocial disorders in which degrees of danger to patient viability are common; they are in danger from others or themselves.

4- "Fear the lord…" - In one of my more effective patient shielding efforts recently I earned the attention of a candle wielding, female, septuagenarian protestor's ire : "Fear the lord" she said drawing a roar out of her 4'10' body. I asked her later what she meant and she said (roughly) "…because it's written in black and white, thou shalt not kill and what you are doing is evil and the lord will come and take you away, snip, snip, just like that (with a snip of her fingers as if pinching off a wayward stem)."

5- see Hilary Taylor's Parliamentary Intern Report "Accessing Abortion – Improving the safety of access to abortion services in Victoria", June 2011.