UNITED STATES
The American Conservative
By ROD DREHER • September 7, 2014
The New York Times had a piece this past week that added savage detail to the Rotherham story. Excerpt:
When parents reported their daughters missing, it could take 24 hours for the police to turn up, Ms. Jay said. Some parents, if they called in repeatedly, were fined for wasting police time.
Some officers and local officials told the investigation that they did not act for fear of being accused of racism. But Ms. Jay said that for years there was an undeniable culture of institutional sexism. Her investigation heard that police referred to victims as “tarts” and to the girls’ abuse as a “lifestyle choice.”
In the minutes of a meeting about a girl who had been raped by five men, a police detective refused to put her into the sexual abuse category, saying he knew she had been “100 percent consensual.” She was 12. …
As I’ve written here before, when I was writing about the Catholic scandal, you had outraged Catholic partisans on both sides who saw the abuse as vindication for their view of What Is Wrong With The Church. For conservatives, it was entirely about the lavender mafia and sexually permissive theological liberalism. They were partly right. For liberals, it was about celibacy, authoritarianism, and sexually repressive theological conservatism. They were partly right. What few people wanted to face was that their own side failed. Even after five years of writing about this stuff, when I didn’t think I could get any more jaded and mistrustful, I fell for the lies of a manipulative priest who played off of my frustration with liberalism in the Church — until he slipped up. And I can tell you from personal experience that there was and is in the media a fear of writing everything reporters know about the church culture that produced sexual abusers because of a fear of stoking anti-gay prejudice.
Nobody — not me, not you, nobody — is free of the desire to protect those we consider our own, and to protect ourselves from having to face painful truths. A very conservative, morally upright lay Catholic acquaintance of mine observed all kinds of sexual misconduct inside the seminary where he was teaching, and told his dear friend the bishop personally about what was going on. Later, when it all blew up, I asked my acquaintance why the bishop had not acted when he was informed. He had no answer — but he also could not believe that his dear friend the bishop had done wrong. It was an extraordinary moment, watching this man struggle with cognitive dissonance. I remember it like it happened yesterday. The confusion and panic in his eyes. It is hard to imagine how a girl who had been gang-raped could think it was her fault, but if we are conditioned to believe that the world is constituted in a certain way, we will not accept, or not easily accept, anything that contradicts it. We will believe absurd things before we will accept a truth we don’t want to face.
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