When the darkness strikes and when you know that no matter how loud you scream, you will not be heard, the feeling overtakes you. When you want to wail out for help, but you know that you have no voice, the desire to cry out leaves you. And so you sit and accept the wrongs done to you because in your mind, if nobody cares, then what hope is there. Hope has been stripped from you. And you have been left.
Helplessness is a state in which everyone should find themselves at some stage, if only to appreciate just how much we should combat it. Take away dignity, pride, self respect, and a voice and we are left with nothing. Our State is there to ensure that helplessness is minimised and combated.
With our minds and bodies distracted by the announcement of the election, there is a fear that the most important story of this week will be overlooked; that there is still an institutional tolerance for allowing child abuse to happen right under the noses of our agencies.
For the past week, the movie Spotlight has been doing well at the box office. It covers the Boston Globe’s daring efforts to cover the extent of the cover-up of systemic child abuse that existed in the Boston archdiocese from the 1960s to the 1990s. It is a movie you all should see, not just because abuses carried out here in this very county get a mention in the rolling credits at the end, but to see just how uncaring those who we expect to be the most caring can be.
We tend to think that the heinous sexual and physical abuse is confined to the times when people in Ireland lived in black and white and dreamed in black and white; when the curtains on the squinting windows were pulled back lest we should see what was going on.
We tend to think too that if we were back in that time and that knowing what we know now, we would do all we could to highlight and prevent these happenings, that we would show the benefit of our civilisation and our maturity to call out those who are doing wrong or those who are simply not doing their jobs. But the failings of this week cast doubt on that.
It was a time when there was an even more unequal balance of power in our society, a time that we felt had long passed, but this week, the country got a wake up call again when it emerged that systemic child abuse still exists in this country. And that a reluctance to confront what allowed this to happen still exists.
And while we remember that all such allegations are at this stage just allegations, a tolerance of this possibility exists in our agencies, allowing children to fall through the crack, to become pawns at the hands of those who prey on the vulnerable.
Remember if it takes a village to raise a child, it can also take a village to abuse a child. If this week’s allegations are proven to be true, then people looked the other way and let down those they were assigned to protect. The time for tolerating this tolerance is over.
