UNITED STATES
The Jewish Week
Heshie Billet
The time for serious vigilance of child abuse in the Modern Orthodox community is long overdue. It is time that lay and religious communal leaders have zero tolerance for child abusers and cease to cover up, enable or protect them.
In recent years, both in Israel and in America, our community has learned many painful lessons on this topic, and institutions that have owned up to mistakes made in the past and seek ways to create policies that would avoid repeating these mistakes have made some progress. But we have not done enough. The progress made has been insufficient.
The most severe consequence of sexual abuse of children (and of enabling abuse by protecting offenders) is suicide. Tragically, this has occurred in the Orthodox community. That makes it a form of murder. It is time that parents learn to overcome the taboo of reporting abusers to the authorities. Therapists tell me that it is in the best mental health interest of their children to do so. Parents who don’t report abuse often say they are trying to protect their children by allowing the incident to quietly blow over, lest their children become publicly shamed or stigmatized. But in fact the opposite is true. Children are harmed much more when incidents are not reported and dealt with.
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