The Upside of Outrage

I've decided to give my $.02 worth re: the abuse scandal.

It's just, you know, that old "dialectic of trauma," as they say.

I once saw a high-school kid who got in trouble for sexually assaulting a girl. There are security cameras at his school, so the administrators could see the whole thing: him pinning her down with his hand up her shirt. His punishment? He had to write a letter of apology and swear before a judge that he wouldn't commit any crimes for at least 90 days.

His furious school counselor compared his case to another student who was caught with marijuana. That kid was suspended for five days and required to do hours of community service. What is wrong with this picture?

Judith Herman in Trauma and Recovery calls it the "dialectic of trauma": the coexistence and interplay of opposites. Something may be too terrible to remember, and too terrible to forget. When the truth is told, it meets overwhelming pressure to return to silence.

Within the individual, PTSD sympoms occur in this way. A person alternates between numbing and overwhelm, amnesia and intrusive images, avoidance and remembering. In a family, this can play out among family members. Some individuals may deny and some support. They may acknowledge what happened but deflect blame. Whole countries often function like this. They might recognize heinous acts, but fail to bring perpetrators to justice. Authorities may apologize, but fail to listen and care for survivors. When it comes to sexual crimes (among many others), the pressure to minimize, ignore, shift responsibility, make excuses, scrutinize the victim, or identify with the perpetrator is enormous.

See: Freud changing his position on hysteria. At first, he concluded hysteria resulted from sexual abuse. Then, after extreme pressure from his contemporaries, he changed his position. He decided it resulted from girls fantasizing about sex with their fathers. Then over a century went by, until the waves of feminism fought to bring the truth about sexual crimes to light.

I'm encouraged to see the world responding with so much outrage. If anything, victims are being heard, and the world is becoming more educated on sexual abuse. Punishing these priests is crucial, of course. But in many cases, the criminal justice system can do damage of its own--it's not enough. Consciousness raising is just as essential, and that's what's happening now. Sexually abused men and boys, a particularly silenced and stigmatized group, are receiving support all over the world.

Seeking Justice For Campus Rapes: An NPR News Investigation March 1st, 2010

I heard this special on NPR recently about how sexual assault cases are handled on college campuses. Many colleges and universities have their own tribunals, made up of students and staff, which handle decisions about disciplinary action at their schools. Often, sexual assault reports are handled by these tribunals. In a review of hundreds of cases throughout the U.S., very few students who committed sexual assaults were expelled.


The report speculated that the education system might view many situations as "teaching moments." One victim interviewed said a member of her school's tribunal encouraged her to have compassion for her rapist, who had struggled with alcohol abuse--maybe this situation would push him finally to turn his life around. As a result, the girl eventually dropped out of school because she couldn't bear to be on the same campus as the man who raped her.

Maybe the clergy clings to the hope that sex criminals can be forgiven and recuperated. It's a staggeringly deluded position. Show me a sex criminal with a recuperable moral compass and I'll show you a thousand men in and out of jail and recovery programs. But it's a position that many people--well, many men--desperately cling to. Men defending men is nothing new. Now we see just how many men who call themselves moral authorities, who claim to devote their lives to God, are no different.

The scandal is profoundly tragic, and the Church's response nauseating. That response seems to me not surprising, as sad as that is. But if there's an upside, it's this: the fruit of outrage is action and understanding and change.