Abuse

First published in Column 8 on the 22.7.1992

One of the side-benefits of feminism has been the exposing of a once much hidden area.

In just one day I came across the following –

A couple of articles in the newspaper Crosslink discussing sexual abuse by counsellors and ministers.  A radio documentary in which women talk about being sexually abused (in some cases by their fathers), and being freed from the memories that have bound them. A television film about a bigamist who gets his just desserts when his daughter, whom he sexually abused, murders him.

In the Listener, by contrast, a reviewer writes about a positive book, My Father and Me, in which sexual abuse isn’t an issue.

Some years ago we had a Telethon for victims of sexual abuse, and the claim was that this had happened to one in four female children. This figure was afterwards disputed, and the percentage is not thought to be so high. Be that as it may, there’s a dreadful corruption in the hearts of many men in this land.

To hear women speaking about the abuse they suffered as children, which they have subsequently buried away in their memories to such an extent that the episodes are virtually forgotten, ought to distress us greatly. The plight of the victims is horrifying: generations of men – these women are often talking about events that happened up to 40 years ago – have subjected their children or those of other people to this victimisation. We ought to cry out to God for mercy.

The sexual abuse isn’t all: the sense of power these men have over weaker beings is equally horrifying. Power tends to corrupt, Acton said, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The worst of this abuse is that men who being this malpractice seem neither to have pangs of guilt nor any awareness of the corruption in their hearts.

Some use the excuse that the victims might enjoy what happens. As the radio programme stated, the body may react with a certain degree of enjoyment, because the body enjoys touch. It’s made to react that way. But the victim ends up feeling betrayed not only by the person who is abusing (especially if it’s the father), but by the body itself. The very thing that’s suffering the abuse, seems in part to enjoy it.

Of course the repercussions with later normal sexual relations are not hard to envisage.

What causes men to shut their eyes to their wickedness? How do they live with it? do they feel in some warped way justified by their actions? Do they feel they have a ‘right’ (it certainly isn’t a God-given one, as the Book of Leviticus tells us) to have sexual relations with other members of their family besides their wives?

And where will it all end? Sometimes the abuser is brought to justice, forcing the victim to make public those acts of violence they would sooner not see proclaimed abroad.

Justice brings another quandary for the victim: if the abuser is the father, there’s a sense of betraying someone close to you, a person with whom you may have had some good times, the person who helped bring you into this world.

Cleaning out the corruption is never a pleasant process.

After all this ugliness, it was a relief to turn to My Father and Me. In spite of the reviewer wanting to make out a case for these fathers not always being ‘worthy of honour,’ the writers convey the fact that it’s possible to have a good relationship with a father. They show that there have been, and are, and always will be men who take the job seriously and know what it means.

They convey hope. So while much of the male garden is a tangle of weeds, here and there is a patch of roses.

Crosslink was a monthly publication jointly funded by the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand, which ran from March 1987 until April 2001.