A recent political cartoon in a Costa Rican newspaper shows a young boy in the priest’s cubicle in the confessional; the priest, draped in an American flag, kneels in the place usually reserved for penitents.
That simple image cuts to the crux of the tragedy behind the cacophony of news stories about the Catholic Church’s sexual assault scandal. But its lessons have implications that extend far beyond the Catholic Church. We should all be asking our children’s forgiveness for not protecting them.
Unfortunately, what has happened to victims of priests is a tragedy that plays out all over America, and the world, every day. Every day people pervert the wonderful, powerful gift of sex into violence to exploit and gravely hurt others, and every day others, even well-meaning others, look the other way.
Sixty-one percent of rape victims were sexually assaulted before age 18, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. One in three girls in the United States and one in six boys will be sexually assaulted by age 18, according to some experts.
In 1997, 1.8 million of the 22.3 million adolescents in the nation were victims of serious sexual assault and abuse, according to an estimate by the U.S. Department of Justice.
The abusers cross all classes, cultures, religions and professions. Most perpetrators do not fit any stereotype. In fact, 85 percent of all sexual assault or abuse victims know their abuser. This kind of abuse crosses the line between domestic violence and sexual assault. The abuse takes place in the home, in school, at work or in religious sanctuaries.
The abusers are relatives, bosses, coaches, teachers and friends. We often love and respect them. So do the victims. For the victims, however, fear often dominates what can be a complex brew of emotions toward their offenders.
And many of us–the offenders’ friends, relatives, co-workers–comply, sometimes instinctively and sometimes more deliberately, with their need for us not to know. There is so much incentive not to know, never mind the convincing accusations by victims.
We are related to the abusers politically, economically and genetically, and can be deeply affected by their downfall. Confronting them can threaten our positions and harm our economic status and emotional stability.
They count on our divided loyalties. They depend on our love and trust as well as our fear. They often will defend themselves fiercely and point to bogus cases of sexual abuse, which, though they certainly exist, are only 4 percent of charges. Or they may blame the victim with real or contrived accusations. With so much at stake, many of them use every tool to intimidate their victims and cover their actions.
As the headlines about the Catholic Church continue to shock and sadden us, we all need to see what we desperately don’t want to see. We need to learn more about how to prevent this betrayal. We need to learn more about how to treat the perpetrator, because even in the rare instances when they go to jail, they are eventually released. We must find ways to talk with children about the potential for what we pray will never happen and, if it does, make them feel safe to share secrets that their perpetrators insist they keep.
We must pay attention to the adults in our children’s lives, to their activities, to those fleeting feelings that something is not right. The need to protect our children must always outweigh our desire to protect the perpetrators we may love or fear.
We need to understand how much and how long survivors will suffer–how devastating it can be to go through life associating intimacy and pleasure with danger and shame. We need to stop denying the pervasiveness of the problem and make certain that our communities have enough support services for survivors of rape, incest, sexual assault and abuse. And we need to find out how those support services–medical, psychological, legal and financial–can make all the difference for survival.
In short, we must echo the critics who demand no less than zero tolerance from the Catholic Church. For the sake of our children and our future, we need to insist that sexual abuse no longer be a secret.
