Sexual abuse and its outcome

Art and life: a response to the movie Spotlight

For many survivors, the Oscar-winning movie Spotlight will prove harrowing viewing, and hopefully a sense of what has been achieved so far to address so many wrongs. Some argue correctly that the furore over child sexual abuse is primarily fuelled by the fact that many the victims are male, but the work of the Royal Commission into Institutional Response to ChildSexual Abuse is ensuing that the investigation of these issues would be as broad as possible and would be focused primarily on institutions, not individuals.

SOURCE: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/pursuedbytruth/2015/11/sr-helena-burns-reviews-spotlight.html

As art mirroring life, Spotlight showed that separating those in power from the impacts of abuse is often not so easy.  The drama of the movie, and the saga of uncovering the extend of child abuse in Boston at the time, both hinge on the extent to which Boston’s Cardinal Law was aware and had been aware for a long time of what was going on, and the insistence of the editor of the crusading Boston Globe that unless the institution was impacted then nothing would change. The truth of this insight has been born out here in Australia in the responses of a number of dioceses, and in the responses of a number of religious orders.

What the Royal Commission and the VictorianParliamentary Inquiry into the Handling of Child Abuse by Religious and OtherOrganisations have demonstrated repeatedly is that time and again authorities knew what was going on, totally failed to understand the gravity and the impact of the behaviour they tacitly condoned, and by so doing spread the effects of the perpetrators into the lives of many people who need not have had their lives destroyed. We will never know the true extent of this abuse in Australia, and it would take much more than a mere Royal Commission to explore how that abuse also spread, like a deadly virus, to the Pacific Island, to India and to Africa, as authorities in Australia sought to rid themselves of these troublesome priests.

That the authorities had no idea of the impact of the abuse is troubling in itself, but not surprising. The Boston diocese ex-priest portrayed in Spotlight, as if invoking an iron-clad moral panacea, insisted that ‘I must stress I got no pleasure from it myself’. His delusional sense of himself, his behaviour and its impact was distressing, but not surprising. As a celibate with a limited adult sense of the intimacy and importance of married life, many of those priests in the current Australian media spotlight show a similarly remarkable lack of empathy for their victims, and a chilling but instructive lack of awareness of the impact of the abusers.

As was highlighted in the movie, this impact was, for many, at the deepest level. Abuse is always appalling, especially when it involves a breach of hallowed trust and a profound imbalance of power. But when that trust breaches notions of self enshrouded in deeply-held spiritual beliefs, then the extent of the destruction of a core self can only lead to the challenging of the deepest resources of individuals. As the movie highlighted, and the interim reports from the Royal Commission confirm only too well, such self destruction ranges across all the forms of self-abuse, with substance abuse utterly common, and suicide an option far too many were finally to take.

Hopefully the Royal Commission will lay bare the mechanics of such monstrous failure, by the institutions and those that lead them. Hopefully, too, it will help those who have survived, and their friends and families, appreciate the extent of the damage they suffered, and how that has impacted on their lives. Most of all, it will hopefully help those who have lost a family member, a partner, or a friend to understand why those who could no longer live with their pain chose to end their lives. That so many suffered is bad enough. That so many have chosen to end their lives as the result of this widespread abuse demonstrates, if  nothing else does, the gravity of the impact of this long-running scourge.