It Isn’t Just Them

For some time I thought about the problem of sex abuse by clergy as a historian of religion and as a person who grew intellectually through reading queer and feminist theory. But over the last several years I have increasingly considered such abuses in the context of ongoing revelations about misconduct in higher education.

When I was thinking intensely about sex abuse in the lead-up to a conference, “Sex Abuse and the Study of Religion,” that I hosted with Robert Orsi and Terence McKiernan at Yale in September 2011, I came across this description of the web of emotions that occurs in sexually abusive relationships from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry:

The child of five or older who knows and cares for the abuser becomes trapped between affection or loyalty for the person, and the sense that the sexual activities are terribly wrong. If the child tries to break away from the sexual relationship, the abuser may threaten the child with violence or loss of love. When sexual abuse occurs within the family, the child may fear the anger, jealousy or shame of other family members, or be afraid the family will break up if the secret is told.⁵²

Within the documentary materials available, this standardized profile of abuse is rendered relentlessly specific to Catholicism. Sexual abuse is a practice within an existent relational dynamic, one that simultaneously transforms and calcifies the hierarchies and codes that determined the original affiliation.

For me it would be absurd to talk about Roman Catholic sex abuse in today’s context without also thinking about what learning about it can help us understand about the hierarchical spaces in which scholars spend so much of our time. If abuse is a ritual practice of hierarchy, then it might be inevitable that institutions—academic and Roman Catholic—include significant abuse. Consider the above description from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Note how it described that the child becomes trapped between affection for their abuser and recognition of the wrong they make; how they know what they are doing is wrong, but they can’t break from that wrong abuse because they might then experience other repercussions, including, most chillingly, loss of love.

How many situations of abuse in the academy occur on the exact same terms? That the abused person needs the relationship, needs that bad love, they think, more than the freedom from it. Why? Because if they say what is happening is wrong, they don’t just destroy this particular relationship. As is written: “When sexual abuse occurs within the family, the child may fear the anger, jealousy or shame of other family members, or be afraid the family will break up if the secret is told.” Nobody wants to break up with love—the love of a caretaker, the love of knowledge. Even more: nobody wants to break up with the container in which the love is transferred: the family, the church, or the university.

What if the secret of the academy is told? To tell the truth of one abuse of power is to show the abuse of power that suffuses the whole system. Because while every story is particular, every individual faculty member or student singular, the refrain once told is not: “I was afraid to tell the truth. I worried that I wouldn’t get a good letter of recommendation. I worried I wouldn’t get a job.” We are silent because the system keeps us in it by our desire to stay in it, to keep it, to keep open the possibility that we could become a part of it. I need the family, I need this job; I need these more than I need my security from the harm they do me.

This is a very, very hard problem to solve. Our love of learning, and of the institutions that facilitate our learning, is a tender thing. We want to stay in it: to be in that place. We want to be in it—we will lie to keep ourselves in it. We will cover up the pain it...