UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
Mariam Williams | Jul. 27, 2015
Shortly after we entered the 21st century, the 24-hour news cycle bombarded us with interviews and images regarding a sex abuse scandal within the Catholic church. For a while, it seemed as though every day there was a new allegation of abuse dating back decades. Victim after victim emerged, sharing one heartbreaking story after another. Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests became the common understanding of the word “SNAP.”
Then came our collective outrage as a society when we learned that priests (and deacons) accused of abusing children were never arrested, never turned in to law enforcement for questioning, never properly directed into the criminal justice system. Instead, they were shifted from parish to parish, their deeds covered up by bishops in personnel moves, their behavior hidden in a thickening cloud of secrecy. And once we knew about the efforts to protect the priests and not their victims, we as a society wondered, “How could this happen?”
I see parallels between the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic church and the slow awakening we are witnessing throughout the country about the realities of police violence against people of color. Names like Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Tanisha Anderson, Freddie Gray and Sandra Bland have reached the national and, sometimes, international news, but names converted into hashtags pepper social media every day, and the numbers steadily rise in “The Counted,” The Guardian’s tally of people killed by police in the United States.
According to The Guardian’s method of calculation, the number is expected to reach 1,100 before 2015 ends, with African-Americans twice as likely to die as whites and Hispanics or Latinos. Like a growing survivors’ network, people of color share their experiences with police violence, threats, harassment and other traumatic encounters in the comments section of these national stories and on their personal pages. Even if the encounters are not physical, these civilians describe fear they will never forget.
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