Saturday, February 17, 2018

A Gift for Valentines day: Help in finding a community of Families/ finding others who 'weathered the storm' found community, survived and now reach out to help other women like us realize that they, too, are not alone at the most frightening time of our lives.

We Understand; Not the life keeps going/ keeps posting because women need a place to grow stronger after the poilce "Knock on our door:"  

There has been quite a bit of discussion lately on Not the Life, regarding finding reliable treatment, especially for wives and families. Cure-Sort has been around a long time (as attested to by the somewhat old-fashioned name: Citizens United for the Rehabilitation of Errants.)  They are there to promote professional treatment as a means of addressing the issues of Prevention and recidvism. We need to find treatment providers who can be fair and helpful without twisting everything we say into their own belief system.

Many women find Not the Life because we feel so alone when we are thrown into the justice system. They threaten us with the loss of our children. Many times our husbands are in jail and we have no income, ir don't make enough to cover the bills And then there are Lawyers...

Many of us were sort of coccooned in our lives. We held the same prejudices as everyone else against sex offenders AND their families. We, too thought the mother's must have been (at least partially) to blame because we believed "those mother's" must have known, after all they lived right there...and then we heard the knock on our own door and found out what it's like to be tossed out of the lives we thought we were living into the reality of life on the "other side"  We find out our neighbors now consider us to be one of "Those peoeple" we too once said bad things about.  

Once a sex offender always a sex offender is not true" but how do we know when our loved one has 'changed'? How do we know he even wants to change or who he (or we) will be once we get through "all this' 
One important thing to do is to educate ourselves. CURE-SORT is another  good place to start:  

  Sex Offenders Restored through Treatment (SORT), a non-profit advocacy membership organization incorporated in Michigan and tax exempt under IRC section 501(c)(3), was founded in 1990 by a group of people dedicated to promoting professional treatment as a means for addressing the issues of prevention and recidivism. It is an issue chapter of Citizens United for the Rehabilitation of Errants (National CURE) and is referred to as CURE-SORT

CURE-SORT works to provide information, resources, contacts, and support to individuals, families, defense attorneys, treatment providers, public media, legislators, law enforcement personnel, and other professionals who work with or are interested in issues of sexual abuse and its prevention. Our website is rich with news, information about assessment, treatment, recovery and educational resources and links to related websites and stakeholders. We also publish a quarterly newsletter called CURE-SORT News and back issues are available on the website. 

In this forum we encourage group members to share news, helpful information and links that further our mission. 

If you wish to join this Google Group, there is no cost. Just send an email to info@cure-sort.org with your physical mail address, a short note on your interest and in the subject line put Request to Join.

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Or if you are not ready to "join" but want to find out more about CURE-SORT 
Google https://www.cure-sort.org/advocacy.html  and just poke around, and find out what they may have to offer you or your family.There might even be  a chapter in your state.  In any case maybe you won't feel so alone after all. 

If you do go there and poke around, come back to Not the Life and let us know what you found that was (or wasn't) helpful. We all need to know.

Take care, Janet M