1. Describe an occasion in which you were caught engaged in a primary deviant act and thus was labeled a deviant.

Last winter we allowed My son's fiance and their infant son to move in with us. She was having back surgery to repair some discs that were injured in an auto accident. While this does not constitute an act of deviance, a few other details involved, got me into a lot of trouble.

I'll explain. We are certified to do foster care, and in this we are required to notify our certifier whenever we have someone move in with us. However, I couldn't tell them that she was moving in because they are the ones who told us that she had to move out three months prior to this. She was not over the age of 18 and we are only certified to have 8 children under the age of 18 living here. With her and her son here, that made 9. I would have chosen to just put foster care on hold for the time being, but we just couldn't. Our foster daughter had just returned to us after being with her mother for a year. She had been abused. We had agreed to adopt her before she went home to her mother, and we were still in line to adopt her if it didn't work out for her mother to keep her. So we couldn't just send her away. We couldn't say that our grandsons' mother couldn't live here, either. Her mother is a career women and if she lived at home she wouldn't have had my son there to help her with their son, and she wouldn't have had anyone to look after her needs while she recovered from surgery. We were stuck in a very hard spot. We were hoping that nobody would find out. Then I was stupid enough to talk about them living there with our foster daughter's mother. We had become very close over the course of her daughter's life and we shared a lot of confidences. This changed when she found out that she wasn't getting her daughter back. She retaliated and "squealed" on us.
2. What were the effects of this label?
It was very embarrassing. The caseworkers showed up at our house one morning and confronted me about this.

a. How did it affect your self identity?

I always look at myself as a very honest person. Breaking the rules like this had been very hard on me. My stress level was way up. I just couldn't find any way around it, so then when I was caught, it was horrible. First of all I was angry with myself for letting this happen (even though it was unavoidable) I felt like I lost face with the caseworkers that I had worked with so closely for so many years.

b. How did it affect how you were treated by others?

I don't believe it changed how I was treated too much. We have a long-standing record of honor and respect with our workers and they understood the situation that I was in. I just felt like I had broken a trust and I was afraid they would question my honesty in the future.

c. Did this labeling increase, decrease, or have no obvious effect on your deviant behavior?

One effect that this had on me is the agreement with the workers involved, that I would confide in them if I ever felt that I had a situation that I couldn't remedy without breaking rules. They said that they could have made an allowance except for the fact that my son and his girlfriend couldn't legally live together. She was not over 18 and he was.

I

3. Explain how these effects are examples of secondary deviance.

The secondary deviance that I see here is the fact that we were inadvertently deviant when we allowed the daughter-in-law to move in here the first time, then when we found out she couldn't be here, and she left, then we let her move back in. That was secondary deviance.

I could have made this secondary deviance worse yet by lying about it all and saying that they weren't living here and that they were just spending the night. Or I could have retaliated toward the mother of our foster daughter. This crossed my mind many times. But I chose to not let her know that I know she's the one that reported us. Also, it was good to know she was not the friend that she was pretending to be. Since I stayed within the role as a friend to her, I was able to get pertinent information from her concerning her daughter's case, on several occasions. This seemed like a deviant act in itself, like I as a spy or something. Our relationship appeared to be a friendly relationship, however, I knew that she would use any information I told her against me, but she didn't know that I would do the same. She had many things that could be used against her, but I didn't have anything left to get in trouble for. I don't break rules. That time was just an unavoidable exception to my personal code of ethics. So even though I have felt like a rat fink and a Benedict Arnold in this relationship with our foster daughter's mother, I feel justified in my actions. I guess there is deviance in this as well. I've taken some pleasure in seeing this case go from bad to worse for her. I would label that deviance. This whole chapter on deviance is interesting. I could see how deviance in this case is not inherent, it is a property conferred upon this behavior by people who are in direct contact with us. This whole scenario could have ended up with no labeling at all, or it could have ended up being classified under criminal terms. The whole report on this situation was very serious because of my son's and his fiance's ages. My son had to go and be analyzed by a certified Psychologist and he was studied extensively, in order for their relationship to be classified as a healthy one in which they are both on the same maturity level. Now it is not labeled as statutory rape for them anymore. The whole thing is preposterous. Fifty, or even twenty or thirty, years ago it wasn't considered rare for a sixteen-year-old girl to marry a man in his twenties. The way the law is now, they couldn't even consider marriage until she turned 17. If they went to New Mexico they could have been married without parent's consent. She did have her mother's consent and could have gone to Nevada and been married if she took her mother with her. but they can't get married in Oregon until she turns 17. It is all a lot of legal malarkey. It's like those who devise the system don't have anything better to do than sit around and make laws that project their own values into the lives of everyone else in society, and they label those who do not have the same values, as deviant. (Crazy!)

Pamela