Noli Irritare Leones

I’ve been poking around the web, reading a bit about the adult side of clergy sex scandals – you know, the ones where both parties are actually over the age of consent. First thought: Eep! With people giving such agonized accounts of these affairs, I have this image of the Catholic priest in love as something like Rogue in the X-men, who has the misfortune to drain the life force from anyone she kisses.

Then again, it’s not just Catholic clergy. Going through AdvocateWeb (which I’ll get back to later), I see links to groups dealing with various sexual misconduct issues among Eastern Orthodox, Protestant, and Jewish clergy. Here’s a page just dealing with sexual abuse of children by Protestant ministers. Another web site has been set up by a woman who was raped by a fellow missionary while serving as a Southern Baptist missionary.

Dee Ann Miller, the former Southern Baptist, argues that

The author’s life experience in conservative religious circles in the South, coupled with the feedback she has gotten from her writing in the past few years, has validated her previously-held suspicions that clergy sexual abuse, clergy domestic violence, and incest (both in clergy and non-clergy households) is considerably more common in conservative groups than in mainline. There also seems to be a greater degree of physical violence involved in offenses, and a greater likelihood that victims will be minors.

Not sure whether this claim is actually true, since I only have this one web site’s word for it. But it reminds me of figleaf’s Return of the Repressed post (warning: blog not worksafe), in which he comments on the longtime chairman of the Oregon Christian Coalition being accused of molesting three of his female relatives. figleaf singles out one paragraph:

[The alleged perpetrator's] family members told The Oregonian that they called the child abuse hot line last month after several women in the family said they openly discussed for the first time what happened with [the alleged perpetrator.] The names of the family members have been withheld because The Oregonian generally doesn’t identify alleged sex abuse victims.

and then argues

Ok, so here’s the deal. First of all, as Alfred Kinsey famously said, sexual repression turns ordinary desire into obsession — ordinary horiness with no acceptable outlet leads over and over to sexual activity with totally inappropriate and often defenseless victims. Second of all, sexual repression prevents victims of obsession from coming forward — the horrific consequences of saying anything allows predators to reoffend with near impunity. Finally, both victims and predators, mired in guilt, denial, and often trauma, adopt grotesque denial-based behavior and often agitate to have their grotesqueries forced down everybody’s throats.

Color me skeptical about the “first of all” part. “Sexual repression” strikes me as a broad brush term, for one thing; any choice to avoid a consenting adult sexual outlet that others see as OK could be “repressed” in someone’s eyes. For another, just plain not having sex doesn’t make normal people want to go off and molest kids. I know this from experience. I’ve been not sexually active and all grown up. I didn’t want to molest kids. Lots of other people have been not sexually active, without their desires turning thoroughly perverse. Frustration doesn’t inherently drive people to want to go after the defenseless. But the second part of figleaf’s reasoning, the part where abuse thrives when victims are so shamed that they can’t expose their abusers, that part is true. I think, if there is a greater problem in more conservative denominations, it probably comes down to two things: silence, and patriarchy. I’ll get back to the patriarchy later, but first, I want to return to AdvocateWeb.

AdvocateWeb turns out to be an extensive site dedicated to discussing the ramifications of “sexual misconduct, exploitation, and abuse of clients by professionals in positions of power, authority, or trust.” A few definitions here, as best I can figure out how the terms are being used:

Sexual harrassment: Unwelcome sexual attention from someone in a position of power, authority, or trust. (Or “hostile work environment,” but I’m not going there right now, since this web site doesn’t seem to have much to do with that.)

Sexual exploitation: This involves adults, and doesn’t have to be unwelcome, but the argument is that it’s still an abuse of authority, because some professional/client relationship made one person not in a position to give consent. The most obvious example is a psychiatrist/patient relationship (or other counselor/patient relationship), like this psychologist, who convinced a patient that having sex with him in cars constituted “therapy” (via my husband’s Pax Nortona Annex blog).

Sexual abuse: Generally used for what adults do to minors (though some articles on AdvocateWeb seem to extend this term also to adult cases like the psychologist described above).

Sexual misconduct: Basically all of these (though the term sounds, to me, way too dry to describe actual abuse of children).

AdvocateWeb takes an adamant position that, in certain professional situations, adults can’t consent to any sort of sexual/romantic relationship:

Mental health professionals, psychologists, psychiatrists, counselors, therapists, doctors, nurses, clergy, attorneys, professors, educators, social workers, law enforcement officers, or other professionals who either pursue or even allow a sexual relationship to develop with their patients/clients often are taking advantage of an inherent power imbalance in the relationship. Sexual exploitation does not always include sexual contact — it can happen in a variety of behaviors by the professional. Frequently this is an exploitation of the client’s trust or emotional dependency and/or their need for the professional’s help. Sometimes it is the result of the professional imposing coercive power over the client. Either way, this is considered abuse, even if the client was a “consenting” participant at the time. It is an abuse of the client’s trust and dependence on the professional. It also is a betrayal of the trust imparted on the professional by society. This form of abuse often deeply violates clients and sometimes causes tremendous spiritual, emotional, and psychological harm.

I’m not sure how far I should believe them, or not, on this. On the one hand, some relationships, like psychiatrist/patient, seem very lopsided indeed. And very destructive: the overwhelming majority of patients who are sexually exploited by their psychiatrists get worse. We’re talking about a “treatment” that dramatically increases the risk of suicide. On the other hand, “professional” covers a pretty broad range – the graduate student TA who asked me out pretty much the minute the class was over for the year, the friend from college that I got to draw up my first will (back when we were both young and single – and not dating, but it’s not intuitively obvious that I should have been off limits for him as soon as I’d agreed to go to him for the will). Some power imbalances are a whole lot more of an imposition on consent than others. I suppose, though, that there needs to be a bright line, as to what people’s professional ethical obligations are (with some variation by profession in how long it extends after the professional relationship is over), since it’s not like people are naturally going to take full account of how authority and trust unbalance things, not when the person who has put trust in them looks sufficiently attractive.

And this is the thing that’s creepy, to me, about the “sexual exploitation” side of things, as opposed to the quite different thing that’s creepy about the child sexual abuse side of things. Pedophile priests are creepy partly because they’re so darn destructive, but also partly because it’s creepy to think that someone could even want to treat a child like that, let alone that that somebody could be a priest. The priest or minister having an affair with a parishioner is unsettling for, in a way, the opposite reason: it’s all too easy to see why someone would want to do that, so much so that I can’t really assume everyone involved is an obvious predator (though there are some calculating sociopaths in the mix), and still, people report really devastating experiences.

Which brings me back to patriarchy. The Interfaith Sexual Trauma Institute has an article by Elizabeth Horst called “Patriarchy: An Experiential Definition,” in which she writes about looking for gender differences in a qualitative study of intimacy:

I knew I was finally onto something when I put the transcript of an eighteen-year-old girl next to that of an eighteen-year-old boy. Both were talking about how they handled conflicts with their parents. Both were explaining that they generally avoided open expressions of anger and disagreement. The girl said, “Part of me wanted to be totally honest with (my father), but I knew that he didn’’t want to hear it, I knew that he didn’’t want to hear the whole truth.” The boy said, “What I want to do is what I want, and what (my parents) want is different, and it’s not gonna get anywhere if I just try to convince them that I’m right, ‘cause they won’t believe it.”

The difference, I was beginning to see, had to do with those “wants” — he wants, I want. Who gets to want? I was getting more excited at the prospect of grasping a real gender difference. I looked at more transcripts, and sure enough, the pattern repeated itself. In fact, it was so consistent that there were no exceptions among the forty interviews. In talking about conflict, girls and women talked about the needs of the other, boys and men talked about their own needs.

…

As I worked to get this pattern down on paper clearly, I began to feel sick instead. Forty people had all told me the same thing about conflict in close relationships: what men want matters more than what women want. Not that they would agree with so bold a statement. Many of them would probably even be angry at the suggestion. But like it or not, see it or not, they talked as if it was a rule that they followed, a pattern that shaped their lives and relationships….

This certainly isn’t what most of the people I know want for our relationships (whether marriage, or family, or friendship, or whatever). Everyone I care to associate with believes that both men’s and women’s wants matter. And we do, after all, have a give and take in our marriages (even if the give and take doesn’t always wind up expressing what we say is our ideal). But there’s still something that seems terribly normal about what she’s describing, and it’s part of the reason that what’s called “sexual exploitation” (at least if it’s seemingly consensual) doesn’t seem altogether distinct from normal relationships. Even if I feel a bit like Andrea Dworkin in saying so. If I had a nickel for every time, as a young woman, I didn’t speak up about something I should have spoken up about, because I was more worried about someone else’s feelings than my own, I’d be a rich woman. And I think if I had a nickel for every time some mostly well-intentioned guy presumed on my unassertiveness, I’d be even richer.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 20th, 2005 at 6:39 am and is filed under Feminism, News and Commentary, Sexuality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.