Silence Was the Wrong Message

In the wake of the child sex abuse scandal that felled legendary head coach Joe Paterno and University president Graham Spanier and forced the school to place rape eyewitness and assistant coach Mike McQueary on administrative leave, the Penn State Nittany Lions tried to return to football as usual. Before Penn State’s game against Nebraska yesterday, the two teams met to observe a moment of silence and prayers for abuse victims. The paltry sum of $22,000 was raised at the game, to be donated to a charity for sex abuse victims. One need not be a cynic to see the school’s clumsy PR efforts all over the day’s events.

But a moment of silence is exactly what sex abuse victims don’t need.

Silence is the friend of the abuser and the enemy of the abused. Victims who remain silent, remain captive to the terror of their abuse into adulthood. For children who are afraid to disrespect elder relatives by “telling” on them; children who fear getting a pastor or priest into trouble by revealing a secret they promised to keep; children who have been coerced into silence by abusers who threatened to hurt the child or his or her family if s/he tells –freedom to speak the unspeakable often comes after decades of silent suffering.

In her book, “No Secrets, No Lies,” Robin D. Stone talks about “how sexual abuse, and the silence that surrounds it, affects our physical and mental well-being, how it shapes our lives and influences the choices we make.”(1) Ending the silence is critical for survivors, not just the Penn State molestation survivors, but all survivors of sexual abuse.

While there has been much focus on the criminally and/or morally reprehensible behavior of Spanier, Paterno, McQueary and others at Penn State who knew what Jerry Sandusky was doing to boys but failed to do anything to protect the young victims, it is also sad that many of these young men were afraid to speak out. Perhaps Penn State and Nebraska should have observed a moment of shouting, yelling and screaming, the sounds most abuse victims don’t make while they are being attacked. One wonders if McQueary would have intervened if the child he allegedly saw being raped in the shower had been brave enough to yell or scream out for help when he heard McQueary’s footsteps approaching.

This is not victim-blaming. The powerlessness of that young child, being anally raped by a man who was more powerful than him in every imaginable way, is palpable. And I understand the boy’s silence all too well. I was sexually assaulted in college, and I didn’t yell out for help, or tell anyone about the assault for years after the fact.

But I was an adult woman who was assaulted by a fellow student. My situation was quite different from that of a child sex abuse victim.

Laws, though imperfect and unevenly enforced, exist to protect young sex abuse victims. Adults are required by law to report their suspicions of abuse to the authorities. We need to teach our children to use their voices: to scream when they are being assaulted; to tell adults they trust about what has happened to them; and to speak out against their assailants in court so that justice can be served.

Still, the responsibility to protect children rests with us. When a child is uncomfortable around an adult, we must pay attention and not accuse the child of being “rude.” When a child tells us that an adult has touched him or her in an inappropriate way, we must listen. We must not tell the child they are mistaken, or ask the child why they are lying on Uncle Joe or Aunt Sue like that, or say it happened because the girl is too “fast,” or because the boy is “a bit funny anyway.”

We can’t value our family, friends, pastors, churches or schools – and for damn sure, not a college football program – over the lives and souls of children.

(1) Robin D. Stone, No Secrets, No Lies: How Black Families Can Heal From Sexual Abuse, Broadway Books, 2004, p. 7.

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