Tag Archives: #violence

Blameless and Forever Free Ministries and Chaplain Tammy believe by the time a crime is committed and a victim is harmed, the root causes of the crime may have occurred long ago. D.A. Kevin Barton

By The Time A Crime Is Committed And A Victim Is Harmed, The Root Causes Of The Crime May Have Occurred Long Ago! -D.A. Kevin Barton

By The Time A Crime Is Committed And A Victim Is Harmed, The Root Causes Of The Crime May Have Occurred Long Ago!

-D.A. Kevin Barton

We can’t solve the problem of violence against girls and women without also addressing violence against boys and men.

And our prisons are filled with wounded souls that need healing. This requires connection, community, compassion and safe places for healing to begin.

Ready or not, 95% of our incarcerated residents will be released as our neighbor!

Sexual Assault Against Boys Is A Crisis


It’s far more common than we think. Below are a couple of great articles shedding light as to why we don’t talk about it. It’s far more pervasive than we think.

Discussions regarding sexual violence against boys and men need not be uncomfortable and awkward, but it will require honest, open and transparent communications that require listening and engagement.

I share, taking 15 minutes of time invested in this reading will save souls, maybe even the lives of our own future children, their children and/or our grandchildren.

Sexual violence against boys is far more common than we think. And since Sundays seem to be the perfect day Blameless lays out and exposes hard issues, we’ll continue because our sons, grandsons and future generations, heck ALL BOYS and MEN for that matter, are invaluable members of the Body of Christ and when they’re being attacked, we need to have the courage to stand in the gap with them.

Jesus wants our eyes open through the lens of love and Sabbath days are perfect days to chew on tough matters. If we want to raise boys differently, we must start believing that they are equally capable of feeling pain AND doing violence.

Just reading these couple articles will help empower awareness and shed light to toxic stress, trauma, the reality of our dark culture, and open up a dialogue exposing behaviors of generational household dysfunction that would even think that hazing and bullying are acceptable behaviors, much less without also addressing violence against men and boys.

This is why Blameless and Forever Free Ministries is now adding the incarcerated families to our curriculum to work through some household dysfunctional issues with the residents at Folsom State Prison because there’s an intergenerational link tied to the revolving door of our lives that needs addressing and exposure to sever the strongholds.

After all, there is no shame in our game; Jesus is His Name! And in order to receive healing, we must name it and that requires intention.

The article below is from the Washington Post and it sheds so much light as to why we don’t want to talk about matters concerning boys and men in being sexually violated and how and why we need to engage in these tough questions and conversations.

👉 https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2021/02/22/why-we-dont-talk-about-sexual-violence-against-boys-why-we-should/?arc404=true

I only hope and pray you’ll take the time to look through the lens of trauma and compassion when looking at others that are different from us.

Until next time…

Blameless and Forever Free Ministries and Chaplain Tammy believe that love softens traumatic memories. Memories of being loved that we can access or create help us tolerate suffering. It all comes down to love.

Violence Behind Bars Is Inescapable & Traumatizing…

Blameless and Forever Free Ministries operates under the fact that prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings.

Violence Behind Bars Is Inescapable & Traumatizing…

Blameless and Forever Free Ministries understands that as we sojourn with our Beautiful Jesus back inside our state prison facilities; with society’s obsession with punishment, our job is to also help society understand that cages and violent justice only perpetuates violence and IT WILL NOT break the cycle of evil and/or deliver any healing.

If today’s offender will be tomorrow’s neighbor, prison may be necessary for a time, but it is not a solution to evil and crime.

God has showered us with heaven’s rain seeing goodness overcome evil through forgiveness as relationships between victims, offenders, families and staff have become reconciled and restored.

But…

If justice is accomplished by solely locking a person up in prison as punishment, how can we expect that this will somehow accomplish a betterment of a person who has done evil or even make our communities safer?

Incarcerated beloveds rarely return back to society as a morally better person. They usually re-enter society more broken and damaged than before incarceration.

Regardless of the conditions of the confinement or adaptation of incarceration to institutionalized life, our prisons DO NOT make “bad” men and women “good.” Prisons do not overcome or erase the evil that lurks within the human heart. That takes the power of healing, transformation and redemption.

With our state prisons being in lockdown this year due to COVID-19 leading to isolation, suffering in silence, Blameless understands the importance of shifting the narrative by bringing awareness to what our incarcerated go through. This includes the violence they’re subjected to at times, how and why prisons are factories of racism, the mundane nature of it all, along with sharing that there’s not an easy six-to-eight-week course program that one can take that will deliver healing results.

It’s going to take extra grace and commitment establishing relationships, finding the need behind the need, what triggers their behaviors for accountability purposes, and start pulling down layer by layer of the traumas associated with their lives and crimes.

Our incarcerated lives matter and they have value. They are more than worth the time and commitment needed for healing and restoration.

Blameless and Forever Free Ministries understands what these eyes see now matter. Adverse childhood experiences and traumas surround incarcerated lives.
https://www.blamelessandforeverfreeministries.org/single-post/violence-behind-bars-is-inescapable-traumatizing

Every life matters…

This article and new report by Prison Policy is too important not to start off with taking bits and pieces for a good week to talk about. This is prison life.

We have had increased suicides. We have had significant rioting and killings. Suffering in silence increases mental illness and rage. They have suffered sickness and death due to COVID. The anxiety is real and it’s powerful. It’s dark and it will slay you if you’re not careful.

The plague of violence behind bars is often overlooked and ignored. And when it does receive public attention, a discussion of the effects on those forced to witness this violence is almost always absent.

Most people in prison want to return home to their families without incident, and without adding time to their sentences by participating in further violence. But during their incarceration, many people become unwilling witnesses to horrific and traumatizing violence, as brought to light in a February publication by Professors Meghan Novisky and Robert Peralta.

Participants reported witnessing frequent, brutal acts of violence, including stabbings, attacks with scalding substances, multi-person assaults, and murder. They also described the lingering effects of witnessing these traumatic events, including hypervigilance, anxiety, depression, and avoidance.

We can never lose sight of the fact that “these traumatic events affect health and social function in ways that are not so different from the aftereffects faced by survivors of direct violence and war.”

Blameless and Forever Free Ministries believes that human suffering could connect all of us if only we had the courage to share in it .

We pray after reading this study from Prison Policy, you understand a glimpse of what our incarcerated beloveds are subjected to. This way maybe you’ll become a recipient of such incredible and amazing grace yourself that you respond to offenders beyond a “tit for tat” and “eye for eye” justice. Click here…

Until next time…