Shame in secrecy

Abusers expect victims will not be believed.

by Jody Dallaire, Dieppe Advisory Committee on Equal Opportunity between Women and Men

Male on male sexual abuse has been in the news lately, with Graham James' sentence, the moving Cap Pelé acknowledgment of sexual abuse done to many men there when they were children, and the compensation paid to childhood victims of clergy in the Diocese of Bathurst. Notably, some of the men who had been abused came out publicly, giving their names and rejecting the shame that is supposed to be associated with sexual abuse victims.

The communities involved (and the media) have been wonderfully supportive of the victims, who spoke out as grown men. This respectful approach helps more than those men and their families. The change in attitudes and reactions helps all victims of sexual assault when they ask for help.

Bravo! And may more women one day feel safe to do the same thing! Most sexual abuse victims are in fact female, even most sexual abuse victims of priests or clerics. Few report it though. Girls and women still get a different reaction when they speak out. In these enlightened times, few boys and men who speak out about sexual abuse are suspected of making up their story or of having encouraged the sexual contact — as still happens with girls and women.

The first problem with sexual abuse is that so much goes unreported and unpunished. The abusers count on that.

In France last month, a women's group invited women to tweet the reasons that they did not report their sexual abuse. Within hours, thousands had sent in replies. "Because when I tried a year later, they didn't believe me." "Because I wasn't supposed to be at the party and my parents would be mad." "Because it was my husband." "Because people know you've been raped, they think you cannot be normal again." "Because I was afraid of him."

One person wrote "Amina, if she was alive, would have said "Because I did not want to marry my rapist," referring to the 16 year old girl who committed suicide last month in Algeria because she had been forced by her family and local authorities to marry her rapist. She had not reported it. She was found in the woods after the assault.

There are several countries that have or had until the last decade, such traditions and laws — not just Muslim ones either. In many, the criminal prosecution for rape ends in the event of marriage, because marriage "resolves" the rape. Few rapes are reported in these countries.

The group Pas de justice, pas de paix (No justice, no peace), who started the campaign in France, also laid a complaint in the name of the 70,000 women and girls they estimated do not report their sexual abuse every year in that country.

A similar #ididnotreport is still attracting a lot of contributions from women after a group in England launched it even earlier. Someone recently tweeted, "I wrote an #ididnotreport tweet and then I deleted it. Says it all, really."

Even more chilling is the website launched by a New York teen aged photographer of women holding cards showing the words of their rapists, at the time of the assault or later. "You can go home now." "I thought you wouldn't remember any of that." "They won't believe you."

Peter Hermann, husband to Mariska Hargitay, the actress in Law and Order: Special Victims Unit who launched a foundation to help people healing from abuse, says, "Our vision is that is that someday someone will be able to sit down at a table and say 'I'm a survivor of sexual abuse', and not have the needle skip off the record and have the person sitting across from them not know what to say. Because [having been sexually assaulted is] not what defines them, it's simply something that happened to them and it's not their fault and they don't need to carry the shame…

"The shame belongs to the perpetrator."

eMail: jody.dallaire@rogers.com 

© Copyright 2012 Jody Dallaire, All rights Reserved. Written For: StraightGoods.ca