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	The Impact of Time and Place on Our Understanding of Child Sexual Abuse ThinkFeelDoLearn June 16, 2008 http://www.higherportal.net/think4change/2008/06/faces_and_voices.html Philadelphia, PA -- Last week I happened to find myself sitting in the audience listening to the closing arguments in the case involving Charles Bennison, the Episcopal bishop who is before a tribunal investigating allegations that he did nothing to intervene when his brother (a youth minister at the time) was sexually involved with a fourteen-year old girl. I decided to attend because I was intrigued to see what it is like for a bishop, rather than a priest, to be in this situation. Curiosity perhaps. To see what it is like for one with so much power to be humbled. At least that is what I thought as I sat there waiting for the tribunal to begin the afternoon session. The judges processed in - all in purple robes - and walked up the steps of the dais at the front of the room. They sat in their assigned seats and settled themselves, as the one presiding called on the church's attorney to begin his closing arguments. It occurred to me that the bishop was probably more accustomed to that view from above than he was from his seat at the defense table. I tried to get a good look at him, but he only allowed a partial view of his face as he sat with his gaze fixed a bit to one side. I did get a clear enough view to see a rather unremarkable face. Grandfatherly perhaps. Not a particularly wise face. Ordinary actually. The attorney representing the church began his summation with studied precision. This was well within his comfort zone. No doubt he had seen many a courtroom, and has delivered more than his share of closing arguments. I sat amazed at the sight of a lawyer for the church actually prosecuting a bishop for "acts unbecoming a member of the clergy". I thought such lawyers were the ones who defended bishops like him. In any event he seemed skilled enough as he began to summarize his case by revisiting previous testimony. I didn't pay close attention until he began to speak about the woman - now fifty - who was the target of those sexual acts thirty-six years ago. He quoted a portion of her testimony in which she said, When you are not protected, you begin to believe that you are not worth protecting. The simple and profound truth of that statement, of that universal belief of children who are abused, hit me with the force of a hammer on an anvil. It was so clear, and so precise. It is just the way it is for children. So why, I began to wonder, is it so difficult for some adults to really understand the horrifying impact that such abuse had on children when it happened years ago, an impact that may last for their entire lives. And the answer immediately seemed obvious from the very context of this tribunal. It is all about faces and voices. The faces and voices in the room were the wrong ones. The faces were too old. Too many lines creased with the cares of the world. The voices too muted - unable to articulate the unvoiced screams that have lingered for so long in the corners of memory. Yet not muted enough, too practiced in the ways of the law to capture the child's psyche frozen with terror in those moments when the images, the sounds and the voices all return uninvited, as they are want to do. Abusing children is a secretive business, and children often get caught up in the secrecy. Years later, when they are well into adulthood, they are finally able to give voice to those traumatic experiences. But the voice they give is their adult one - the child's voice long ago silenced. And the face they present also is their adult one. The same is true of the predator (or in this case the enabler). When the violence occurred, he was a man in his prime, not the wizened grandfatherly type at the defense table staring off into space. Not the old, retired priests so often pictured in stories about such abuse. Then he was a man with both physical power and positional authority - a corporate player tending to his career ladder, as he keeps the violence to the level of a whisper, no more than a vague rumor about possible sexual indiscretions. The antidote to this unfortunate reality lies in the imagination. The next time you hear of such abuse that occurred decades ago, picture a child you know - either a boy or girl. Imagine the smooth face, the sheen of the hair, the slightly pitched voice, the eyes wide open and inviting to the world. And then imagine a man in his thirties or forties with soft hands and a seeming gentle manner, dark hair perhaps, a soothing - even pastoral - voice. Those were the people present when the crimes occurred. And they are only present again in the tribunal for a few fleeting moments. They are present when the bishop once again becomes the corporate suit worried about advancing his career, and how the truth of this violence, how the revelations of these illicit and illegal acts on a child, might dash his hopes for that coveted promotion. But more than that, those who were really present at the crime scene emerge when the child's voice returns with one simple, direct and irrefutable truth: When you are not protected, you begin to believe that you are not worth protecting. It is just as true today as it was forty years ago.
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