Knowing but not doing anything about it is the latest banner of guilt capturing public interest. “Pope Benedict XVI failed to act over complaints during the 1990s about a priest in the US who is thought to have abused some 200 deaf boys, victims say.” The public cries out “how could you have ignored this problem?”. The sad truth is it happens every day – it just doesn’t make it to the front page of CNN. It is a systematic failure to act.
So where is the problem here? Taking a quote from Star Trek – “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one”. Just as that logic was shown to be flawed in the TV show, the same is true here on planet Earth. It’s easy to rationalize that serving a larger population sometimes means not dealing with “smaller problems” . Especially when it’s a topic that no one wants to talk about in the first place. Much like the problem of sexual abuse itself, the actions of the people dealing with it, often exist out of a lack of education. So do we blame people for their ignorance, or educate them? There’s an enlighted answer, but the reality is that blame solicits the most emotional response and plays better for the media. Blame can be done in an instant – education takes time.
System Failures
As a parent dealing with your child’s sexual abuse, you will probably find yourself dealing with several agencies or individuals who failed to act. There were a couple that really annoyed me. First was the public safety licensing person that pencil whipped an inspection I requested because she was tired of me calling about the status. The other was the school superintendent that told us we couldn’t discuss the subject with our child’s teachers unless we got a subpoena – and the offender wasn’t even associated with the school.
There’s a saying that given the choice between maliciousness and incompetence – assume incompetence. Failure to act often falls into the later area. Conspiracies play better for the media, but most times it comes down to people not having the wisdom that the generation that will follow them is likely to have. Concepts like slavery and racial purity have all been popular themes in some culture in the not too distant past. By people’s decisions to act they have largely disappeared. My hope is that an awareness of sexual abuse will cause more people to act. It may dramatically reduce it in our lifetime. For now, there continues to be those that we rely on that fail to act. And for the majority that simply made decisions that seemed right for the time, my hope is that the media attention will serve as an education for better decisions in the future.
Let us know if we can help you dealing with your family’s sexual abuse situation. For ideas to get started please check out our book on what to do during the early days after disclosure.
