Thought Picnic: Tragedy has no favouritism

All in a day of our humanity

The past 24 hours have been filled with rather unfortunate circumstances that, as observers reflecting on the truly life-changing issues, we need to be mindful of the opinions we hold and express, so we do not fall into the irony of becoming victims of our own views. More pertinently, we must also be mindful of the company we keep.

In both cases, the unfortunate and the unintentional have come to the forefront, with consequences including loss of life and loss of position, status, and prestige. We must wonder how parts of our past can have the power to haunt us into the present, shaping our future.

We are limited by our humanity

While we, as humans, can have anticipation or foreboding, we sometimes lack the foresight to consider the consequences of our current relationships. Yet, we can be judged harshly when situations and circumstances obscure any indication or premonition of worse outcomes.

Then again, what would be the thrill of living if we knew everything beforehand? Insight, ideas, and inspiration are useful, as some guiding principles can distinguish the wise from the foolish. Accepting our past foolishness and follies while seeking to learn from them, through personal experience and reflection on others' stories, is an important part of education in life.

What we exploit can also exploit us

What I cannot shake from my mind is how some have capitalised on resentment or exploited the basest instincts of human nature to gain advantage, often at our expense. We find ourselves acting against our better interests, persuaded by lies or obfuscations that have become the accepted truth.

The standard of conversation is now measured by groupthink, with risks of ostracism; everything is polarised, leaving no middle ground or room for disagreement without becoming disagreeable. Entrenchment is preferred over engagement; everyone is talking, but few are listening, unless they are only hearing what they want to hear. Confirmation bias is trending, rather than the challenging of assumptions.

The cost of such polarisation and the othering of differing viewpoints is often dismissed as irrelevant, inconsequential, or even evil. Victims are often not the purveyors of doom themselves but those who perpetuate a narrative that rarely presents the full truth, who also fall into the same doom. Occasionally, even the hunter falls into their own snare.

Victims are not just others.

Oh! The handwringing and the condemnation of consequences that would have created other victims long before it touched them, usually those safe and insulated within their privileged cocoon, are rarely naïve and often malevolent without any sense of hypocrisy.

They delude themselves into thinking they are safe. Yet, tragedy is often dispassionate, selecting its victims indiscriminately, to include those who have been the prophets of everything that ails us with their populist oratory.

If there is anything to ponder, it is to be mindful, watchful, considerate, and humane. The past holds us, the present is a gift, and the future remains unknown. May we, in the present, create a past that paves the way for a future filled with contented happiness rather than rueful regret. So, help us, God. Amen!

My thoughts are with fellow child sexual abuse survivors

Entertaining a doubt

My heart cries out for those like me who lost our sexual innocence long before we knew what sex or innocence was. To some, it was someone trusted and known who found the opportunity and the importunity to impose themselves on us and left us without the courage to squeak about the how, the why and for what we were violated.

Early this morning in Australia, Cardinal George Pell had his conviction for child sexual abuse quashed and he walked away a free man. He needed to go to the highest court in the land having been found guilty through the justice system that the Australian High Court was his last chance. [The Independent]

In the end, the judges unanimously decided the jury “acting rationally on the whole of the evidence, ought to have entertained a doubt.” That’s it; on the preponderance of the evidence before a jury of his peers, they were convinced that he was guilty, but on the consideration of law before the judges, they should have entertained a doubt.

Full justice is not ready for us

It made me wonder whether this supposed to be a doubt as to the veracity of the stories of the sexually abused, or the structure of reverence for authority that leads one to consider people in a particular office or of a certain stature cannot be thought to have committed such crimes. Either way, the jury believed the abused and were not cowed by the office.

Yet, what would it take for historic clerical child sexual abuse to run the course of a judicial system and deliver justice for the victims? How can our stories from childhood be believable today, if now we find the courage to speak up about the harm that was done to us as kids?

There are stories I have not shared with anyone of times when others found their sexual pleasures in me, the first from the age of 7. I reflect on it and appreciate that I am one of the survivors, with all the scars that came with the loss of innocence, the poor sexual choices that ensued and the inability to foster rewarding and lasting relationships of trust and commitment until recently.

Blog - My Sex Post

They don’t listen

There are only a few of us who have found an accommodation; not so much for what happened to us, but finding a new source of strength, hope and self-esteem that took us to another place where we could thrive and find some newness in purpose and relationships towards a fulfilling life.

Having seen attitudes and reactions to reports of child sexual abuse from the victims, I am sadly of the view that they will always have an uphill task convincing many of the facts of what happened to them.

Heck! I had a terrifying event that happened to me, everyone heard me scream in terror, our houseboy, my aunt, my parents, my mother’s best friend with her husband who were guests visiting and when I told them what I saw, it was dismissed out of hand by my father.

Blog - The damage done when parents fail to listen

Boldly tell your story, anyways

What chance telling anyone long after the event, maybe decades on about how the people they entrusted our care to liberally took sexual favours? We all know what happened to us and by God, we can differentiate between reality and the figments of our imagination.

Was it the grooming, the entrapment, the threats, the smell, the location, the acts, the pain or hurt, the terror, and how our temperaments and composure changed with no one, especially our guardians or teachers noticing?

Blog - A survivor does not owe you a convincing story

I concluded, whether I am believed or not, I will tell my story, it is mine to tell, in my own words, at my own convenience, in my own time. It is not to convince anyone, but to have it on record. Whether justice would be found after the revelation, one cannot tell because someone who matters in the quest for justice might entertain a doubt and with that dismiss my lived history.

It may be out of shame or embarrassment, the need to let bygones be bygones, the long passage of time, the statute of limitations, the desire to just carry on with one’s life or some other inexplicable factor, perpetrators of child sexual abuse will escape justice and accountability. What they cannot escape, no matter how much they plead their innocence is what they did to us.

A survivor does not owe you a convincing story

A sex story

In the main, I have kept my counsel on a developing story in Nigeria because the commentary covers the spectrum from the totally agreeable to the utterly reprehensible, so much so that one engagement can leave you mired in the completely incomprehensible.

She was twice his age when she called him into the toilet, closed the door and crouched down, then she pulled down his shorts and handled his member, brought him down, centred him to her exposed self and asked him to move in on her. That is all he can remember of that event. Like so many crazily eerie moments that litter over half a century of life, this one still plays back like a slow-motion replay in the inner recesses of the mind.

That was the only instance with her, probably she decided she should look for someone else, but in that seemingly insignificant moment, the seeds of an outrageous scandal had been sown whilst at the same time the treasure of innocence had been plundered by an act of senselessness that you probably would not impute on either party.

Other sex stories

However, beyond that day, there were other instances where those presumably entrusted with the care of minors whilst the parents pursued their careers in the confidence that their wards were safe completely unaware that were being fast-tracked into irresponsible adulthood for the personal pleasure of their male servants.

You wonder why the kids said nothing to those they trusted then because trust by proxy now went through the servants, not that the parents were too busy to engage the children, the parents just naively thought everything was fine on the home front and by inference, fine with the children.

Eventually, a report of one of the servants interfering with the kids got to the notice of the parents, they did all the motions, a hospital visit and a sacking of the servant without involving the police. It would have been too scandalous for such a respectable family. This was three years after that other episode, they had moved to another city by now.

Can’t forget sex

Little did they know that the report came at the instigation of another child, who found that they could easily confide in another child than go to their parents. Without the prompting of the other child, nothing would have happened, and the abuse would probably have continued. The parents were completely caught up in the trauma of the event, that first, they did not bother to inquire whether others might have been abused when one other was previously the plaything of that abuser.

I guess they thought with time childhood memories would be erased and forgotten, if only. If one were to add to this a greater indictment, it is after the servant was sacked the kids were told to watch out for his return, no adult with them as they were terrified of what might happen next, all they had for safety was the instruction to scream, a boy of 10 being the eldest against the servant, 29 years old.

The scars of child sexual abuse run deep and only a few survivors of such events go on to live in healthy relationships with a complete blank on the past. Sexual innocence once lost can never be replaced, but there is a lot parents can do in caring, in nurturing, in showing unusual affection and doing everything to regain the trust and confidence of their children being readily able to report any violation of their bodies.

Earn sex trust

Whilst some parents might find this strange, the trust a child can have in their parents to report sexual abuse has to be earned, earned beyond the standard of just being a parent and expecting every child to worship you from the day they were born. Parental provision is a responsibility on the shoulders of the parent, the child does not have to be thankful for that, but the child would be more exceedingly thankful for the opportunity to open their hearts to their parents long before the problems come.

Yet, what parents concentrate on is ensuring they are respected and obeyed at the cost of everything else. They lament about being disrespected, get out the whip to lash out at every opportunity, make all physical and economic provisions and have no concept of emotional engagement, then later in life think the child owes them everything.

That was lost on the day the child lost their sexual innocence when all the parents did was ignore, scold, treat the child as a commodity and leave to chance the healing of time. In most cases, the child never forgot, that today becomes a day of reckoning.

Unconvincing sex stories

This is a story told, personal and raw, there was a conversation where the legalism of a child became a matter of dispute, and though recent events need attention, past events are no less significant because the seeds sown then mature in the person affected from that time, they have just learnt to cope better with the hurt.

I wrote this because, within the commentary that followed the developing story on Facebook, someone said everything that matters to every victim, every victim of child sexual abuse whether you hear that story immediately after the abuse or decades after that it all seems incredible, implausible or even unbelievable, “A survivor does not owe you a convincing story.” 

To that, I would say, neither does a victim owe you a convincing story. There are liars and blackmailers out there, but to allow those few to determine your view every other story is a grave injustice and too many of these stories cannot be tested to their limits in court, you only need a good lawyer to get a murderer off the charge. What two sides of a story you are not convinced of that would allow you to side with the perpetrator against the victim, victimising them a second time, because the victim can't tell you a convincing story?

There are many stories left untold because the victim and survivor are left second-guessing themselves unsure of whether they would be believed about what was done to them, be it child sexual abuse or rape, they are heinous crimes against the person, to which there are rarely any corroborating witnesses. The victims internalise their trauma and their fate, there is courage in keeping silent and there is unusual courage in speaking out.

Tell your story

The many victims of child sexual abuse I have watched being told to shut up, they have a story they cannot tell about what happened to them, because they cannot make their story dramatic enough, fantastic enough, or convincing enough to the majority who think child sexual abuse or rape must follow a rational course of action by the perpetrator.

One can almost say a murder scene almost definitely yields more forensic evidence than a child sexual abuse or rape event, why that is the case when the victim is a witness to their own violation continues to baffle me.

In that story is a boy, an aunt, a sister, many houseboys, some distant relations and no strangers, all before he was 11.