Sexual Abuse Author Offers New Insight on Clerical Scandal Damages to Children and Communities

Charlottesville, VA---Silences. Secrets. The misuse of a father's power. Decisions by adults not to speak about painful things. Misunderstandings about forgiveness, forgetting, and the capacity of children to confront harmful adult behavior. These are among the most crucial elements in recent, widespread press reports about clerical sexual abuse.

Because I Love You, psychotherapist and psychiatric nurse Joyce Allan's new book, offers important keys for coming to terms with, as well as beginning to resolve, the traumas caused by priest-pedophile scandals in the Catholic Church. Subtitled The Silent Shadow of Child Sexual Abuse, the book examines in great detail a five-generation story of incest and pedophilia within the author's extended family. The book was launched in March during the Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville.

Core damages created by child sexual abuse
Whether the pedophilia happened across many decades as it did in Joyce Allan's extended individual family, or across the same time frame within the "spiritual family" of a church, many similar damages emerge:

• · The most immediate and painful consequence is the personal wounding to each one of the children who has been abused by a priest, or any loved and trusted adult/authority figure. The abuse involves not only their relationship with a trusted adult. It also attacks each child's inner sense of self in ways that distort their spiritual and emotional development out of childhood and into adolescence.
• Also, reports the author, "There is a similarity between the allegiance to the pedophile of silence-keepers within my extended family and those in the Catholic Church. Both of these 'knower groups' recognized the abuse was or had been occurring. Yet both chose to support the perpetrator, so he would not lose respect, authority, his professional work life, and other privileges of his adult male role."
• A severe disruption of relationship occurs between those keeping the secret and those not knowing the secret. Whether this happens inside an individual family or a church's congregation, when the latter group finally learns of the secret, the impact of the knowledge causes a fatal breaking of their trust not only with the pedophile himself, but also with those in a hierarchy who protected him.
  

"I am reading headlines reporting payments of between 100 million and a billion dollars to victims of pedophile priest abuses over the last decade," notes Joyce Allan.

"Yet I'm not sure the word repair, or reparation, even feels like the correct term. Research varies, but it seems certain that between 100,000 and 500,000 children are sexually abused each year. These are very large numbers. When we have been denying for so long that child sexual abuse even exists this extensively, it is difficult to know how to repair it. Culturally we have very little experience with what to do.

"A therapist's viewpoint on reparations
While recent news stories have described huge financial reparations to survivors of priestly pedophilia, Because I Love You offers an entirely different perspective. Allan, a psychiatric nurse with over 37 years experience working with adult as well as youthful survivors of child sexual abuse, says that its not financial payment, but rather making amends for damages to children's lives, that needs to receive a primary focus of our attention.

"In our culture, money can become a symbolic form of justice," reports Allan.

"Although the Catholic Church may now be offering millions in 'pain and suffering' monetary reparations, the pain of this sort of child abuse can never be compensated in dollars. In addition, while churches may have the resources to settle financial claims for justice, most individual families where sexual abuse has occurred, including mine, can never do this."

Sexual abuse in childhood has devastating social, emotional and financial effects upon survivors on into their adult lives. This includes loss of income from work, medical expenses for illnesses related to the abuse, the emotional costs of marital sexual problems and divorce, as well as the costs of sometimes extensive psychotherapy.

Some costs are even more serious. There are reports of Catholic families losing adult-survivor children to suicide as the current wave of allegations have occurred, points out psychotherapist Allan. "Other families have watched their adult child, post-abuse, becoming an abuse perpetrator themselves. These kinds of consequences happened in my own family incest history. No amount of payment can fix this kind of suffering."

"The situations in the Catholic Church today are exactly like issues outlined in Because I Love You, where I interviewed over 150 people about my own father and his pedophile history," says the author. "One of my father's abuse victims later became a perpetrator. To see him today, I have to visit this cousin in prison. And my father, just like former Boston priest John Geoghan, abused many dozens of children. In Because I Love You I include 15 interviews with some of these victims, in order to show dramatically the broad scope of damage caused by pedophila."

"In families, neighborhoods and communities, as well as within the church, we are looking foremost at issues of betrayal of trust," continues Allan. "We also find issues of power and its misuse, not only by the pedophiles themselves, but also by those who choose loyalty to the pedophile over concern for their victims. Within churches, I'm speaking of those officials who elected to protect priests or ministers, through silence-keeping, minimizing, or by transferring the perpetrator to another locale. In their choice not to prevent further damage to children, these leaders ended up damaging the larger institution of the church, in its supposed role as a safe and secure spiritual family. Consider the impact of these abuse revelations on the thousands of decent, devout parish priests. I wonder how they are responding as their parishioners come to them for counseling."

Community healing after sexual abuse
"We traditionally have focused on therapy for survivors of abuse, says Allan. But really, the entire family and community are also being torn apart. These larger social bodies must also find ways to address this tragedy, to face it together.

The picture of this kind of healing, Allan suggests, is more one of re-weaving a fabric that has been torn. This may involve reconstructing the parts of the story that can be. For example, she says, people who haven't spoken to each other, or who feel wounded by each other's past actions, can try again to connect. In some cases it may involve replacing or patching parts that seem irreparably torn or damaged.

"Emotionally, this is the work of expressing and hearing feelings, or learning to tolerate our own grief and rage, of exploring issues of guilt and forgiveness," reports the author. "Ultimately it's the integration of our abuse history and secrets into the larger whole of who we are. In the process, we come to learn that we - survivors, families, communities, even perpetrators -are much more than our abuse and secrets."

Forgiveness and truth
Some Catholics, she notes, have simply said about the present scandals that it's better to forgive and forget. "But I don't believe you can forget something if you don't really know what has happened," insists the therapist. "Many of those who say this are minimizing, even before they know the scope of the problem, especially if they have not heard - from the victims - about how the priest-abuse has affected their lives.

"To suggest we offer forgiveness before we even to grasp the problem, is to really say: 'I don't want to know what happened. It's just too painful or frightening.' Yet the abuse is a problem affecting everyone in the family, everyone in the Church family. We should never wish to forget the truth.

Financial payment is not the primary model required to achieve healing says Allan. "What would be better is to let all the parties concerned by the abuse become willing to hear the whole truth. Society has found several other very useful structures toward this end. One of these is making amends. This is a process that comes of the Twelve Step model, which also has to do with mending, listening and reweaving."

"Other approaches are those of restorative justice, or truth and reconciliation, which we have seen serve healing functions in larger social or national conflicts. All three ways offer the opportunity to acknowledge the truth, for perpetrators to accept full responsibility for their behavior, for victims to be removed from cycles of shame and blame, and for some agreed-upon actions to occur that will symbolically meet the needs of all who are involved. Here I mean the victims, the perpetrators, and the family or community of caring that surrounds them."

The specifics of family and community healing
Most often it is difficult or impossible to obtain an acknowledgement of guilt and sorrow on the part of the perpetrator. In the case of the Catholic Church, those admissions of wrongdoing that have occurred are coming many decades too late. And in many families, including Allan's, the perpetrator may be deceased. The author points to valuable ways her family learned for moving beyond their psychic and emotional wounding:

1) "We engaged in counseling processes with each member of the immediate family. So we all had the opportunity to be heard, in a safe place, about secrets we had been keeping from one another.

2) We've participated annually in community vigils for child sexual abuse survivors.

3) We review family photos and albums, talking about the stories and things each person did know, and about other family members and what they knew.

4) We developed our own family ritual. Each of us wrote a message to the deceased perpetrator, which we read to one another, and then we burned these in a fire.

5) We write, phone and visit regularly with our incarcerated pedophile cousin, and encourage his treatment progress.

6) Several family members are active in community action projects. Among these are our local Sexual Assault Resource Agency, a high school peer education program called Voices for Interpersonal Violence Alternatives, Court Appointed Special Advocates for Children, teen pregnancy prevention programs, and work with incarcerated women, many of whom were abused."

Ultimately, says Allan, each person, each family, each community, including church communities and congregations, must find its own healing "by speaking with each other about what is needed, and committing to the higher universal spiritual beliefs of courage, love and compassion."