The Myth of the Monster

The shape reads as danger before anyone notices it’s only glass, lit from behind, holding nothing but light.

Predator is a satisfying word to use, but satisfying is not the same as true. It provides too clean of a categorization quickly. It tells us where the danger lives…. over there, in a category of person we are not, will never be, and could never become. The word does the defining, so we don’t have to sit with the ambiguity of the person.

But most abuse of power doesn’t start with a monster walking into a room. Some of the time it starts with someone who was, until recently, capable of empathy and patience.

An example is a caregiver who spends months managing a child’s stress with real patience. Then one day the child is crying, on the floor, refusing to comply, and a shift takes place within the caregiver…. from helping this child to making this child stop. The goal quietly shifts and compliance becomes the goal. With that narrowed state, forcefulness can start to look like correction rather than what it is.

To be absolutely clear, this is not a defense of what happens next. It is an attempt to look at it clearly, because clarity is the only thing that actually protects anyone.

Predatory dynamics and predatory people are not the same thing, though we talk about them as if they were. A predatory dynamic is a set of conditions…. an imbalance of power, a victim who cannot report, a room with no witnesses, and a role that grants unearned trust. Those conditions can activate something in almost anyone under the wrong pressure, at the wrong hour, and with the wrong history of being unsupervised and unaccountable. A predatory person is something else entirely…. someone who seeks those conditions out, arranges them, returns to them, and derives something from them that isn’t remorse.

The first is unfortunately common. It is, in some form, in every institution that houses vulnerable people and understaffs the rooms they’re kept in. The second is subtler, and far more dangerous, precisely because it wears and uses the cover of the first one’s problems.

This is why a single incident, however disturbing, cannot answer the question everyone wants answered in the moment they hear about it. Was this the first time. The honest answer is usually: we don’t know yet, and the not-knowing is uncomfortable in a way that makes people reach for the monster story early, because the monster story doesn’t require an investigation. It only requires a villain.

What the not-knowing actually requires is a slower and less satisfying reality. It requires looking at the pattern instead of the person…. whether the room was private by design or by accident, whether the child had ever been believed before, whether smaller boundary violations had already been visible to someone who didn’t act on them, whether the explanation offered afterward was an accident’s explanation or a caught person’s explanation. These are not questions about someone’s soul. They are questions about conditions, repetition, and what an institution was willing to see.

None of this is to say the word predator should never be used. Some people do build a life around exploiting the trust a role gives them, and naming that accurately matters, for the same reason a diagnosis can matter…. it tells you what you’re actually dealing with, and what won’t work against it.

But naming it too early, on too little evidence, tends to do something quieter and more costly. It lets everyone else…. the coworkers, the supervisors, the system…. stop looking at themselves. If he was simply a monster, then no one else has to ask what they missed.

The uncomfortable version is that the conditions that make abuse possible are ordinary. What’s rarer is someone choosing, inside those conditions, not to use them.

This is the first essay in a series on power, predation, and the conditions that make abuse of trust possible.

Nando Schlecht is a Licensed Associate Counselor and trauma therapist specializing in complex trauma, dissociation, and nervous system regulation. More writing at nandotherapy.com.