Practical and effective solutions to child sexual abuse are not to be found in greater piety, nor in instantaneous fixes, be they building more walls to surround our children (based on paranoia) or in locking away perpetrators for life (based on a naive understanding of the law).
Like most ills in the community, they are complex and as difficult as it can be at times, we have to look beyond the raw emotion and sometimes sensationalist headlines.
(Just to be very clear, investigative reporting is to be commended. One of the reasons that many sometimes feel the community is not receiving a fair hearing in media is because of its own reluctance to take public ownership of a ‘negative’ story from within the community and control the narrative. With this avoidance or any reference or commentary, there is a vacuum created, and others take ownership of story and drive their own narrative. This is a significant and on-going challenge – to cultivate in-depth reporting, commentary and reflection on important news items – that many would otherwise wish away)
Individual Communities: A Call to Action
Wherever religious Jews live, delegates came from. From New York to Johannesburg, Jerusalem to Calgary, they brought not only their insights as to local instituted programs, but the unyielding demands of their local communities to drive further and immediate change.
Yes, it would be good for leadership to take a monumental role everywhere, but, and especially where lacking, concerned religious communities are doing it themselves.
Communities will no longer tolerate nuanced judgments or half-hearted responses from community leaders. They have one message to convey, “We are taking it upon ourselves to protect our children.”
It takes a community to protect a child. It takes a community for a child to be abused.
These individual communities realize that their children are only as safe as the degree of vigorous prevention in their community – which includes awareness, school prevention programs, working with law enforcement and community-wide support of heroic victims who bravely come forward in the pursuit of justice (and greater community security) through pressing charges with law enforcement authorities.
Collaboration: Develop Programs that Draw on Shared Expertise and Emerging Data
The diverse expertise shared by participants addressing the same problem of child sexual abuse was an eye-opener. Similar dynamics, similar cultural sensitivities – lessons we can all learn from.
Better programs through joint collaboration.
So to, the belated gathering of mental health data across the Jewish world is something all acknowledge that will only make for better mental health treatment programs and modalities that are based on empirical data, rather than common subjective criteria.
In closing, it can certainly be argued that the religious Jewish community has in certain ways lagged behind and worse still, has failed in certain ways to proactively confront child sexual abuse.
David Mandel, Chief Executive Officer of OHEL asked the audience at the conference to imagine if 1 in 5 girls and 1 in 7 boys were abducted or hit by a car chas v’shalom. There would be tehilim and fasting in stadiums with worldwide hookups. Police would blanket the community.
It is certainly a hope that this past conference can serve as a new foundation where the religious community can more comprehensively and aggressively tackle the menace of child sexual abuse – in all its many shapes and forms – and serve as a role model to others – a real Kiddush Hashem.
The 600+ attendees at the conference cannot do it alone.