Weekend sleepovers are good times for teenage girls to share their deepest, darkest secrets with friends. Some years ago, one of my daughters told me about the secrets she heard late one Friday night as she and three friends lay together in sleeping bags in the basement of our house.
First one, then two, then all three of her closest friends told their stories about being raped by an older brother.
You could have knocked me over with a feather. Not because I didn’t believe that such things happened, but I wondered, what were the chances that ALL of these girls had suffered the same perverse abuse?
All three girls were members of church-going families. I knew a bit about the first young lady’s home-life, and I didn’t find it hard to believe she was telling the truth. But all three?! I wondered if the others might be encouraging their friend with some sort of teenage bonding experience where they all share the same hardships, even if it meant confessing things that were not true.
I know that my daughter has a huge, loving heart, and that she has always befriended broken people. But was sexual assault by a brother really that common?
I don’t know. But I do believe a few other things very firmly.
I definitely believe the first young lady was a victim of rape. I wish I had known at the time, but I didn’t. I wish I could have done something.
I definitely believe that the other two teenagers deserved to be heard, to be
encouraged to tell their stories to an adult who might help them in one way or another.
I definitely believe that they all had/have the right to speak out publicly, if they ever chose to do so. They have the right to live in a society where they are not mocked or ridiculed; where they are not automatically disbelieved or disparaged because they had “waited too long to come forward,” or had not otherwise conducted themselves “properly” in front of others imposing their own, irrelevant, judgmental expectations about how “real” assault victims “ought” to behave.
I believe that they deserve to be given the benefit of the doubt. I do not automatically assume that every brother is a rapist. I say this despite the outlandish remark of one Republican woman who glibly noted, with a smirk on her face, about the charges against Judge Kavanaugh, “Tell me, what boy hasn’t done this in high school?”
Well lady, let me tell you. Most teenage boys are not rapists. Most brothers don’t assault their sisters. Whenever such serious charges are made, honest investigations are required by honest, impartial investigators.
But, tragically, far too many teenage boys and adult men ARE guilty of sexual assault, and they need to be held accountable and punished. Women need to be believed. Precious few ever make such charges easily, much less falsely.
I know that according to a study published in the Journal of Forensic Psychology “false and baseless allegations of rape constitute about 5% of all rape allegations.” (For a good investigation into “the threat” of false accusations against innocent men, read this article by Sandra Newman.)
President Trump’s glib warning that “these are scary times for young men” in America is another thoughtless projection by a sex-offender who is intimately familiar with attempted rape and sexual assault. Stoking conservative paranoia about raging feminists rampantly lodging false accusations against every man they’ve ever disliked is reckless fear-mongering spread among the already fearful.
I can’t help but wonder what some of these red-faced, finger-wagging, bloviating men (both in the Congress and on TV), who were so outraged by Dr. Ford’s testimony, have to hide about themselves and their own pasts. Could it be a massive, public display of collective guilt trying desperately to disguise itself as righteous indignation?
I can’t help but suspect that there was a mile-wide current of projection and personal identification on display as we watched powerful men behave so defensively on behalf of Brett Kavanaugh and so disparagingly towards Christine Blasey Ford.
My daughters and their friends do not deserve to live in a society like this, led by these kinds of men.
They deserve to feel safe and to be protected. They deserve to be heard, no matter how long it takes them to speak up. They deserve to be taken seriously. They deserve swift, impartial investigations, no matter how old the evidence may be. They deserve elected officials who don’t hide their grotesque partisan brutalities behind false pledges about “innocent until proven guilty.”
“Innocent until proven guilty” is NOT the issue facing us today.
The issue is discovering the truth.
The issue is the persistent abuse of too many women by too many men.
The issue is why men can come unglued, behave petulantly, rudely, cry,
pout, let the fur fly and still be taken seriously, whereas any woman who behaved similarly would be summarily dismissed as hysterical, out of control and unbelievable.
The issue is why so many who claim to be God’s people mindlessly repeat the partisan – and frequently hateful – Fox News talking points without an iota of mercy or grace.
The issue is that sexual abuse happens within the church as well as everywhere else, and far too many ignore it, warn the victims to be quiet, and then hide behind their religiosity.
