Many readers think that I posted yesterday about the ultra-Orthodox child abuse exposed by the New York Times because I want to embarrass Jews. While it is true that I will use embarrassment (and rage and scorn and anything else in the armamentarium) against Jews who support the oppression of Palestinians (and partly for selfish reasons, to save my religious group from a cult), this was not my motivation yesterday. In fact, I meant to celebrate the progress of social attitudes. So let me clarify.
The Catholic child abuse scandal took me by surprise. When I was covering the Bush-Gore election in December 2000, I ran into a lonely middle-aged guy picketing a Catholic church in Washington who said he came out there every weekend to protest what was done to him. And from his shirt pocket he got out a photograph of himself as a smiling boy and said, This was me before my soul was crushed… I came home telling my wife I wanted to write about it. In one of her rare errors, she advised me not to, it was too offbeat.
Fast forward. Last Christmas I was at my wife’s cousin’s house in Philadelphia standing outside at a small bonfire with several of her cousins. We were all talking about the Bill Conlin story, which had just broken in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Conlin is a great sportswriter in Philly; I knew him when I worked at the Daily News with him many years ago. And because of the Penn State Sandusky-Paterno story, which had broken earlier that fall, three women and a man had come forward to say that in the ’70s when they were children, Conlin had touched their genitals.
[Conlin’s niece Kelly] Blanchet, now a prosecutor in Atlantic City, and the others said they were speaking out now because the alleged sexual assaults and cover-up at Pennsylvania State University brought back painful memories and reminded them of the secrecy that shrouded their own assaults.
Conlin retired when the story broke, and standing at the fire, I said I found this moving in many ways. I had thought the sexual abuse issue was special to the Catholic church– to the celibacy and hierarchy and authoritarianism of the church. No: it had bedeviled other institutions, including the militaristic sports establishment…
Well, then my wife and her cousins piped up and began talking about sexual abuse in schools they had gone to. In essence, they stated that at every school they had attended a teacher was well known as an abuser. And this had gone on everywhere in the 70s– and from time immemorial. I found their stories shocking.
It struck me that night that because of the Catholic church scandal and its sequels, our society is experiencing an awakening. We are uncovering important new terrain of man’s inhumanity to man. The truth is that sexual abuse has gone on everywhere, in countless institutions where children and power intersect. The discovery of these horrors is now widespread and imperative, and it will make society better. That is why I jumped on the Ultra Orthodox story yesterday.
(H/t ScottRoth76.)
i remember exactly where i was when i first heard of pedophilia, or first realized it was part of the society i lived in. standing in my kitchen which was a construction zone at the time, one of the two carpenters didn’t show up in the morning. the other carpenter explained it was because a story broke that day on the cover of the local pacific sun..about a man who had been raping his 8 year old stepson for years…and that was him..the quiet seemingly gentle man, over 6 ft tall, the talented finish carpenter.
i was stunned. that was around 79 or 80. nobody ever talked about pedophilia before that, not that i can recall. then i found out a friend of mine had been raped by her father for years, a deacon in the church. it’s really weird thinking about how common it is.
There are so many distinctions. Rape is a very serious crime. What of the gay prep school teacher who liked to try to tickle boys when they had lights out at 10:30? We used to make fun of him, kind of gently. It didn’t seem that serious. He was a good English teacher, actually.
I think it’s important to mention that there have been numerous lives ruined and years, even decades, spent in prison on false child sexual abuse accusations that were part of a nationwide hysteria in the 1980’s and 90’s. Most of these nightmares involved day care centers, from the Bronx to Maplewood, NJ to Edenton, NC to the McMartin case in California. Real child sex abuse is truly horrifying, of course, but a cadre of “experts” in the field managed to coax out of toddlers (who initially denied any abuse) the most fantastic allegations of mass abuse. Many of those unjustly convicted were eventually vindicated by the courts, but only after a prolonged period of misery. This is a very sensitive subject, and the revulsion we all feel over this crime causes even well-intentioned people to abandon common sense and healthy skepticism. A journalist named Debbie Nathan did some great work in this area.
there isn’t a more oppressive, exploitative relationship than this, annie. aside from the personal revulsion i feel, the relationships and the inherent shame are part of what perpetuates authority in these circumstances. i can’t even begin to understand the relationship between someone in a position of esteem who has molested a child and that child’s parents, or others in the community who know of or suspect of the abuse. the absolute power that the abuser holds over the parents and enablers, as well as the child obviously, unless someone is willing to expose the abuse. this is the ultimate assertion of the ‘i own your ass’ ethic. who/what else has such control over your child? just god, who can tell you that you have to have the will to kill your own child to prove loyalty. in this case you just have to be willing to assent to the metaphorical murder of your child, or someone else’s child, i.e. assent to the loss of their innocence. it really is like a ritual sacrifice, some members of the community willing to overlook the abuse, particularly if the abuser is in a position of authority and if the victim is somehow ‘defective’ in the first place, the developmentally retarded, fatherless, etc. being prime targets.
Phil Weiss wrote:
“The truth is that sexual abuse has gone on everywhere, in countless institutions where children and power intersect.”
Yes, and in light of how exclusively it was made to seem a Catholic Church problem now ask whether or not the smell of anti-Catholic bigotry wasn’t and still isn’t prominently on display amongst our cultural elites.
Hey man, it’s about the *only* bigotry left that’s not just acceptable, but will get you laughs and applause galore.