Keep Speaking Up, Even to Deaf Ears: How Sexual Assault Survivors Should React to Albany's Failure to Fix the Statute of Limitations

By Arthur Mccaffrey
New York Daily News
June 18, 2016

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/arthur-mccaffrey-speaking-deaf-ears-article-1.2678165

Failing to fix the statute of limitations (TIM ROSKE/AP)

Does a verdict without a sentence distort justice? Such a verdict was reached in Pennsylvania recently when the grand jury report on sexual abuse by clergy in the Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown — where hundreds of boys were abused by dozens of priests over a 70-year span — found “the acts of the predator priests and their enabling bishops . . . to be criminal.”

“However,” the report continued, “they cannot be prosecuted at this time. The statute of limitations for many of the loathsome and criminal actions detailed in this report has expired. In some limited cases the unnamed victim or victims are too deeply traumatized to testify in a court of law.”

Yet such hard evidence of real crimes proven but not prosecutable has yet to change the hearts and minds of political leaders in Pennsylvania or New York. Despite a valiant effort by this newspaper to shame them into action, Albany politicians once again chose safety over bravery, snubbing serious legislation to advantage victims of childhood sexual abuse.

Faced with this kind of legal impotence in at least two states, where do we turn for justice? Not to the Catholic Church. A year ago, Pope Francis raised our hopes when he proposed establishing a new Vatican tribunal to hold bishops accountable for complicity in criminal abuse.

But on June 4, he dashed those hopes by scrapping his plan after it ran into opposition from bishops and the Vatican bureaucracy. Now, instead of a special disciplinary tribunal to prosecute “enabling bishops,” such cases will be investigated by four separate Vatican offices.

So after all the properly constituted investigative grand juries over the last decade; all the evidentiary hearings, depositions, fact finding and determinations of guilt — after all of this — the Pope still needs four Vatican offices to vet local bishops. What further evidence is he waiting for?

When Volkswagen was caught cheating and lying about its auto emissions data, that global corporation fired top brass and recalled offending cars for correction. Is the Roman Catholic Church unable or unwilling to recall offending bishops for correction?

The lack of accountability and punishment for criminals, over so many years, is so frustrating that it is tempting to close our ears to reminders. One way to cope (as victims well know) is to refuse to talk about it. We shut out the unpleasantness because it reminds us of our helplessness. In the face of wrong, the shame of our impotence renders us mute.

But collectively, we cannot be silent. We must speak up louder than ever.

Why? Because a holy man, the German Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, once said, “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”

Because the famous, pacifist Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan, in his 1968 demonstrations against the Vietnam War, protested the silence of religious institutions: “We confront the Catholic Church, other Christian bodies and the synagogues of America with their silence and cowardice in the face of our country’s crimes.”

Adapting Berrigan’s language to the modern atrocities of abuse committed by members of those same institutions, we would say: “We confront the Catholic Church, other Christian bodies and civil institutions with their silence and cowardice in the face of these crimes against children.”

In the same vein, we must flatly reject casual institutional apologies. They are no substitute for punitive, remedial action.

Victims suffer lasting harm that no statute of limitation change will erase. But justice can provide a balm to soothe their hurt.

Whether private citizen or public servant, we all have an obligation to answer each and every victim who asks: “Is there no one left to speak for me?”

McCaffrey is a retired Harvard University psychologist.