Last night my eight year old son brought up my father whom he’s never met. In July of 2011, after my youngest sister Alex disclosed that she was sexually abused as a child by our dad, Mom and I reported him to the police. Not a day has passed that I don’t think about that day. Nearly a year after we reported, he received a 30-60 year prison sentence for sex crimes against multiple children. You can hear Alex tell her story here:
I don’t know what prompted my son to ask questions about my dad–his grandfather. He may only be eight, but he is a very deep thinker. “What was it like to report your own dad and send him to prison?” To be honest, the question caught me off guard. I wrote a whole memoire this year about our family’s journey but I never really thought about having to explain reporting my dad to my eight year old son. He knows that I loved and adored my dad growing up. He also knows that my dad harmed many little children.
My son is a spitting image of me when I was his age. He wears his emotions on his sleeve, just like me (yes, I cried during Bambi as a kid and I’m OK with that!). He is kind and curious, always asking deep questions about life and always (quite literally) wanting to know how he can change the world for good. I answered him honestly: “It was terrible. I hated it. I lost my dad the second I walked into the police station. He will die in prison and I think about it all the time. But I would do it again and again the minute I heard he was hurting children.”
Without hesitation, my son came over to me, hugged me, and said, “Dad, I love you with all of my heart. But if I knew you were hurting children I would report you to the police too. It would be sad to lose my dad but it would be sadder to not do anything if I knew kids were being hurt and I didn’t stop it.” Wow! His answer welled up out of his heart. He meant every word that he said. He said it with conviction and authority. I often walk away from training churches and wonder whether, if push came to shove, adults would actually make a report. Statistics show that reporting is rare. Cover ups are overwhelmingly more common than reports of abuse.
The first thing that struck me is that, if an eight year old gets it, what in the world is the excuse for all these adults who intentionally turn a blind eye to abuse. An eight year old admits he would be more willing to turn in his own father than to allow peers to be abused. It still blows my mind that adults can be so hardened that they would allow a child rapist to keep abusing child after child. This is not love. It’s certainly not grace. And it’s definitely criminal.
The second thing that struck me is that the reality of how much my family has lost is finally starting to hit hard. It’s not that I was ever in denial. But I think part of my coping with the layers of trauma was to immediately enter into other people’s trauma. As most advocates do, I immersed myself in hearing, understanding, and experiencing the pain of others as they tell their stories. Every story I hear reinforces the fact that we all have lost so much. Every victim, ever family member of an abuser–we all have lost so, so much.
The losses are too many to count–Loss of a father, loss of my brother who died unexpectedly, loss of the way our family used to be, loss of close friends, loss of my children only knowing their grandfather as a felon, loss of a church that once was full of laughter and joy, and on I could go. Abuse strips so much from so many innocent people. The ripple effects are never ending. It’s been ten years and I feel as weak as I did the day I was sitting in that police station. Perhaps this is why adults fail to report. Maybe for them the cost of losing so much isn’t worth it to them. Maybe they’d rather innocent children take on the pain rather than dealing with the inevitable losses that come with reporting.
But for me, the gains far outweigh the losses. When I realized that my son truly gets it–that he will be a warrior for the innocent–my heart was full again. To gain an ally in the dark world of advocacy is a gain that’s immeasurable. For all you protectors out there. . . keep fighting for justice. Keep exposing the deeds of darkness. Evil will not win!