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Past show made me think of a legal question.
Topic Started: Sep 13 2008, 04:52 PM (386 Views)
J_W
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In a past show where Rob Schneider was filling in for Stryker a guy in his early teens called the show. He was a victim of molestation and had called into a previous episode of Loveline to discuss it. After getting some advice about counseling the kid called back to update Drew on the therapies progress. Fortunately the kid is/was doing well and the abuser was caught and placed into treatment.

As the conversation progressed Drew discussed the importance of getting victims into counseling ASAP so the victims would not recreate the cycle of abuse. He said that there was a 60% chance of victims becoming abusers themselves in later years.

My question is this: is the government forcing these victims into counseling now and if not should they be?

Should it be the government's job to force this?

Will the therapy still take effect if the victim and/or the family is unwilling to pursue it even if forced by the government?
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Becca
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Ordinary Girl
I think the government should let victims know that they're there to help, but to force them into going, no. I don't think therapy works if you don't want it. You have to be ready to take that step and do something to help yourself.
Edited by Becca, Sep 13 2008, 05:32 PM.
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anobody

J_W
 
Should it be the government's job to force this?


I don't think so. It's good to make treatment available and easy to get, but it's really, really bad to force people to do anything like that.

J_W
 
Will the therapy still take effect if the victim and/or the family is unwilling to pursue it even if forced by the government?


As Becca said, probably not so much.

It's very sticky to get the government into things like psychotherapy - especially when they start forcing people to go to therapy.

Between the slippery slope crowd, religious nutjobs and all of the people who think the gob'ment is already too involved in people's lives, I don't think that something like that would fly (nor really should it, IMO).

Unfortunately, those same forces probably keep us from having a better system for providing any substantial amount of free or low cost counseling for this or other things that people could really use it for.
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Becca
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Ordinary Girl
I know this firshand how the government sucks. I had insurance in high school because of my mom and dad being divorced. After I turned 18, II got put on a spend down, which meant I had to spend at least $500 dollars before I could get it paid for. I'm not sick that much so it was a waste. I pretty much said f--k it. If I did have insurance, I'd get some things taken care of. We do have low income insurance but it's based on how much you make. I sometimes wonder if I would qualify, but on the other hand, I'm worried I make too much to get it. I have looked into insurance options online. There were a few that did get my attention that weren't expensive.
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Laith
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beaten to death with own skull
There's also the fact that a lot of people prefer to ignore scientific and statistical evidence in favor of their own preconceived world views. I imagine a lot of people would be not only opposed to requiring therapy for these people, but would actually disagree with the "60% victims-to-victimizers" rate simply because they'd have the "they should just get over it" mentality that a lot of people have, and would insist that we're somehow babying the victims by trying to help them. They're the kind of people that I imagine would say things like "my pa always told me to grit my teeth and git er done" and such.
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anobody

Sad but true.

Becca
 
I know this firshand how the government sucks....


I've got another anecdote about that.

In Arizona, we have something called <a href="http://www.azahcccs.gov/site/">AZAHCCCS</a> (Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System).

It's a great little thing that provides health care coverage for the poor.

The problem is that, like welfare in most states, it has a hard upper limit for your income in order to be covered under it. That means that, for example, if you're a graduate student and you need to get a relatively expensive surgical procedure from an OB/Gyn, you'd be covered if you didn't make more than, say, $15k per year, but if you actually work as an RA and you make $18k (or, even just one dollar more than the cutoff), you're SOL.

A hard cutoff like that basically punishes people for trying to work harder and basic economic principals dictate that people will end up deciding to earn less so they stay below the cutoff and don't have a huge drop in their effective income / cost of living.

On the other side of that, I volunteered in the ER at a local hospital. AZAHCCCS completely covers emergency care for poor people, and the hospitals even have social workers on staff to sign people up, so there is zero incentive for people to go to a primary care physician and they end up just going to the ER and blowing hundreds or even thousands of dollars of taxpayer's money for things like a sore throat.

It's a spectacularly awesome system really.
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