Last week I watched the movie Spotlight, about a sex abuse scandal and the Catholic Church that was uncovered by the Boston Globe in 2001. This week I have been watching the Netflix series, The Keepers. It’s a docuseries about a sex abuse and murder cover up in the Baltimore, Maryland Catholic Church Diocese. One thing that these two cases had in common is that people knew about the abuse and kept quiet about it.
I’m not talking about the victims or their families staying quiet. They were silenced by their abusers and society with shame, fear and accusations of the abuse being their fault.
I’m talking about the ministers and police officers who knew about the abuse and kept it to themselves, moving the abuser from one place to another, rather than stopping the evil and putting the abuser in prison where they belonged.
When a minister, police officer or other person in authority, especially as a mandated reporter, chooses to remain silent, they are just as guilty of abuse after they were made aware of it as the abuser is.
Many people in authority work to silence the victims when the victims find the strength to finally confide in them. They may attempt to shame the victim by telling them the abuse was their fault. They may attempt to make the victim fearful of retribution by the abuser for telling. They might silence the victim with their disbelief of the story. They may make the victim feel overwhelmed by the questions they will be asked by the police and make the victim doubt if that’s what they want to do.
There are many ways that someone in authority allows abuse to continue by their decision to remain silent and not act on behalf of the victim of abuse.
When a person allows abuse to continue, as so many did in the cases I’ve seen, that person is just as much to blame as the abuser. The person who knows what is happening and just moves the abuser from church to church becomes an accomplice to the abuse. They have allowed the abuse to continue.
In the case shown in The Keepers, Sister Cathy was killed because she knew what was happening within her church and school and was going to expose it. Some “Christians” are more worried about how the abuse will cause people to look at their ministry than they are about the abuse.
I am currently involved in exposing a group of accused, admitted and convicted child molesters who were allowed to work around youth. Some were allowed to work with kids even after those in charge new the allegations about the sexual abuse.
One of the people who allowed an abuser to continue to work with children isn’t too happy with my friends and I telling people that an admitted child molester worked with him at youth camps and taking youth on mission trips to Mexico.
In my opinion, he is more worried about those of us who are exposing the evil that happened, instead of worrying about the evil and how to help the people who were hurt. He has had his attorney draw up a lawsuit against us and is threatening to file it in court if we don’t back down. However, the truth is the best defense against a defamation lawsuit and we have the truth on our side.
Truth will stop evil!
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