Sexual Abuse Is a Crime, Not an Affair Bennison's Presentment Raises Questions about Characterization, by Westley Byrne, Episcopal Life, November 6, 2007

'Sexual Abuse Is a Crime, Not an Affair'
Bennison's Presentment Raises Questions about Characterization

By Westley Byrne
Episcopal Life
November 6, 2007

http://www.episcopal-life.org/80050_91662_ENG_HTM.htm

As a former resident of Philadelphia, I've followed the happenings of the Diocese of Pennsylvania for a long time. My first reaction to the news about Bishop Charles Bennison (Pennsylvania bishop inhibited from ordained ministry, Oct. 31, 2007) and his brother John was a mixture of anger and sadness.

As I read further, though, another reaction set in. This second response wasn't so much to the news itself but to the way that news was described.

Seminarian John Bennison's criminal acts toward a child under his lay pastoral care are variously characterized as initiating a "sexual relationship," having a "relationship," and engaging in "sexual relations." As an ordained Episcopal deacon and then priest, John is said to have continued a "sexual relationship with the 14-year-old."

Charles, then a priest and John's supervisor during much of this time, knew that "his brother was conducting a sexual affair with an underage member of [his] church's youth group." It's said that Charles even came upon John Bennison and the 14 year-old-girl "while they were engaged in sexual relations."

Charles is charged with doing nothing, however, "to hasten the end of the affair."

But this wasn't an "affair." Neither was it a "relationship." What it was was child sexual abuse.

The first hint at that awful truth in the Presentment against Charles Bennison doesn't come until the bottom of page 3, where it's termed sexual misconduct. Well into page 5, John Bennison's behavior finally is labeled correctly as sexual abuse.

Sexual abuse is a crime, not an affair.

I bring this up because the words we use in the context of child sexual abuse are critically important to a child victim's understanding of, and ultimate recovery from, the criminal act(s) done to her or him. Calling it a relationship in any form is not only wrong but also cruelly insensitive to the child. How is a child to differentiate and discriminate between healthy human interaction and abuse if both are characterized as relationships? Likewise, substituting the word affair belies the assault that takes place each time the abuser touches the abused.

I'm a public health doctor and nurse practitioner in pediatrics who has been called upon to evaluate many young victims and give expert testimony in subsequent court proceedings. I'm speaking from sad experience when I say that the children may never be able to free themselves from the terrible sense that somehow they must have made a choice, that somehow they had to have invited it, that somehow they should have been able to prevent it or stop it, until we are willing to call it what is -- child sexual abuse.