Tzedek-Tzedek
While many of us struggle with understanding why any adult would sexually abuse a child, we also struggle with understanding why any other adults would want to cover up such a heinous crime.
The cover-up phenomenon is pandemic.
To cite a few high profile examples over the past couple of years:
Jimmy Savile, UK pop culture hero and saintly charity worker – who reportedly raised UKP 30m for charity. His abuses of children only became public after his death. Hundreds of victims have since come forward to present their horrific experiences to a board of national enquiry. The abuses happened in the children’s hospitals where Saville volunteered, and even in his BBC changing rooms. Literally hundreds of victims have stepped forward since 2012; and it has become clear that hundreds more adults knew, including senior members of the BBC and staff at the children’s hospitals, and all who stood by doing nothing to protect these children from Savile for sixty years. …
The Catholic Church has become a by-word for sex abuse cover-up, due to repeating patterns of clergy who sexually abused children, and who were then protected by the Church hierarchy for decades. These scandals have rolled from Boston, USA, where the behaviour was first exposed in The Boston Globe in 2002, through dozens of other US locations, and then to Catholic communities throughout Europe, South America and Australia.
The Jewish community has also experienced increasing exposure of past child sex abuse cases, and the cover-up phenomena which have come to light parallels the behaviour in other cases, such as those above.
Many of these events have taken place in orthodox communities, which is a double-blow to the prestige and good names of these communities – the first is that these crimes existed in the most pious communities, and the second that the community leadership had often failed to side with the victims, rather denying, minimizing and covering-up the crimes.
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