Last week a virtual firestorm erupted about a post I wrote on sexual abuse. It was suggested by some that rabbis in the Chicago community were guilty of outrageous cover-ups which either enabled sex abuse or perpetuated it. I took strong issue with that and pointed out some very important differences between the cases brought up here and the cases in New York that I referred to. As a result of that discussion, I have been in contact with a Frum mental health care professional here in Chicago who deals with these issues. He has graciously consented to give his perspective on this issue but has asked to remain anonymous due to the sensitive nature of his profession. I consented. What follows are his words:
I read this blog post and all of the comments that were posted afterwards. As a mental health professional who has worked with victims of sexual abuse, I wanted to add my perspective.
The rabbis in our community are not the same rabbis as they were fifteen, ten, or even five years ago. Long ago it was unfathomable that people could commit sexual offenses against children in our community. Not that it didn't happen, but the denial was thick and people didn’t' understand anything about the mental illness of pedophilia.
Our Rabbis have learned more and grown a tremendous amount and battled against their own inner denial much more so then any other group. A lot of the time they are accused of covering up or protecting someone, when in fact they are doing the exact opposite. But no Rabbi is going to smear people's name and talk about the confidential things he is doing to protect a family, just to clear his own name. Mistakes do get made yes, but more often then not; help is being given in a discrete way.
On the assertion that the Orthodox community is more fallible to this because of the very nature of Orthodoxy, again I most certainly disagree. Across the Jewish community, from Reform, to Conservative, to Reconstructionist there is fear and denial around sexual abuse. In every community around the world there is denial, fear, and covering up of sexual abuse. No one can fathom or wants to fathom, that it can happen in their own backyard. Do the Orthodox have their own individual issues in dealing with the issue? Certainly, but so does every other community.
Our Rabbis have done more then you or even I can know to help people become informed, and we need to strengthen them through that process and not bash them in order for them to get more work done.
I know that is scary for us to think that there is sexual abuse in our community. It makes everyone uncomfortable and we all deal with it in different ways. Two very popular ways to deal with it are denial and anger.
Denial is very strong and permeates many layers of a person's being. Denial causes a person to freeze, emotionally and psychologically. Denial causes people to act in ways that they deep down know is wrong, but they cannot by any means make themselves react differently. People in denial should not be shouted at or persecuted or banned, this makes the defensiveness worse and serves no one. What we need is to slowly start conversations, be as open as possible, and slowly but surely people's denial will crack.
The second way is anger. Someone needs to be blamed. There needs to be someone who is held responsible, but that is not realistic or responsible - though understandable. But while you're yelling and shouting that this one should be fired, and this one should be cut off, realize that what’s going on is your own emotional response to the horror of child sexual abuse.
Those two different reactions, anger and denial, and I'll throw in another one, panic, are what make a community conducive to sexual abuse. When we stigmatize Rabbis, offenders, principals, and others, we are making a community where people are afraid to speak up and tell the truth.
To have conversations where no one is hated or threatened and where people feel that abuse can be talked about in a healthy way, that is a community that is on its way to making itself safer. By turning denial, anger, and panic into a proactive and calm "ok, so what can we do now", it is going to make offenders work harder in getting away with the symptoms of their illness.
The one note I would like to end with is that I want you all to close your eyes and imagine your own children, parents, sisters, brothers, etc. Now imagine that somehow you find out that they have molested a child. Anyone can be a child molester. There is no personality profile for a pedophile, and is usually shocking how normal they are when it's found out. Would your level of ‘kill the molester’ and hang the person who protected them" be as strong?
I encourage you all to view this issue as not so black and white. I also encourage you all to do some real reading and investigating on how you can proactively make our community safer, instead of beating down on the Rabbis who are trying to do just that. We need to take real and big steps to ensure our community's safety. By using our heads instead of our witch hunting skills we can make that happen.
