"Silver linings"
The Roman Catholic Church continued to make castrati into the 20th century, except that the point was to get them not to sing.The Dutch parliament on Tuesday called for an investigation into reports that Catholic clerics ordered castrations of young males in the 1950s in an attempt to cure their homosexuality.
There was no evidence that the youths in question were gay. But at least one had reported having been molested by the brother superior of his boarding school.When the former student reported the abuse to the police in 1956, he was brought to a Roman Catholic psychiatric ward, declared a homosexual and then castrated. The same surgery was probably performed on at least ten other schoolmates of his who tried to blow the whistle on abuse.
The "reasoning," such as it were, had to have been that the boys must have tempted the priests into molesting them and therefore had teh ghey.
Note that this incident had been left out of a "voluminous" report on sexual abuse in the RCC in the Netherlands, compiled by former cabinet minister Wim Deetman and released only three months ago. The Deetman Commission dismissed a complaint about the omission of the castrations, and it now claims it didn't investigate "for lack of sufficient leads."
The story seems to have been suppressed because of how it would have reflected on so many powerful Dutch Catholics in the 1950s - most notably, future prime minister Victor Marijnen, but also all sorts of businessmen, judges, doctors, politicians, and others - who colluded with the church and the police to have rape victims mutilated. Deetman himself is a member of the Christian Democrats, borne of a merger of the Catholic People's Party and various Protestant parties. The commission he headed "was set up by the church itself in 2010 after the sexual abuse scandal broke [there]."
I was thinking of the castration story when I saw this article about pro-liars infiltrating schools in the United Kingdom to tell adolescent girls that aborting a fetus conceived in rape is a "second trauma":“For some people who’ve been raped and had the baby, even if they don’t keep it, something positive comes out of that whole rape experience,” pupils aged 14 and 15 were told.
So, uh, what's the "silver lining" when a priest rapes a child? Or when, in the case of a boy who reports the rape, the church conspires with the government and the medical establishment to have him castrated? Because surely gawrd wouldn't let all that suffering happen without a reason, right?
If there is any trope I hate worse than that of mandatory forgiveness, it's the "when life gives you lemons" trope as applied to trauma victims. Trauma isn't merely unpleasant at the time you live through it. It rewires you with fear, doubt, rage, sexual dysfunction - all sorts of emotions and reactions, you'll note, that interfere with your ability to form and maintain relationships. It doesn't make you a worse person, but it can present serious challenges to becoming a better one, or even remaining a good one. Survivors of trauma need help, not platitudes, and certainly not someone else deciding for them that they need to be challenged in this way.
Unlocked.
This entry was originally posted at http://ms-daisy-cutter.dreamwidth.org/1803224.html. Please comment there using either your DW account or OpenID.
There was no evidence that the youths in question were gay. But at least one had reported having been molested by the brother superior of his boarding school.When the former student reported the abuse to the police in 1956, he was brought to a Roman Catholic psychiatric ward, declared a homosexual and then castrated. The same surgery was probably performed on at least ten other schoolmates of his who tried to blow the whistle on abuse.
The "reasoning," such as it were, had to have been that the boys must have tempted the priests into molesting them and therefore had teh ghey.
Note that this incident had been left out of a "voluminous" report on sexual abuse in the RCC in the Netherlands, compiled by former cabinet minister Wim Deetman and released only three months ago. The Deetman Commission dismissed a complaint about the omission of the castrations, and it now claims it didn't investigate "for lack of sufficient leads."
The story seems to have been suppressed because of how it would have reflected on so many powerful Dutch Catholics in the 1950s - most notably, future prime minister Victor Marijnen, but also all sorts of businessmen, judges, doctors, politicians, and others - who colluded with the church and the police to have rape victims mutilated. Deetman himself is a member of the Christian Democrats, borne of a merger of the Catholic People's Party and various Protestant parties. The commission he headed "was set up by the church itself in 2010 after the sexual abuse scandal broke [there]."
I was thinking of the castration story when I saw this article about pro-liars infiltrating schools in the United Kingdom to tell adolescent girls that aborting a fetus conceived in rape is a "second trauma":“For some people who’ve been raped and had the baby, even if they don’t keep it, something positive comes out of that whole rape experience,” pupils aged 14 and 15 were told.
So, uh, what's the "silver lining" when a priest rapes a child? Or when, in the case of a boy who reports the rape, the church conspires with the government and the medical establishment to have him castrated? Because surely gawrd wouldn't let all that suffering happen without a reason, right?
If there is any trope I hate worse than that of mandatory forgiveness, it's the "when life gives you lemons" trope as applied to trauma victims. Trauma isn't merely unpleasant at the time you live through it. It rewires you with fear, doubt, rage, sexual dysfunction - all sorts of emotions and reactions, you'll note, that interfere with your ability to form and maintain relationships. It doesn't make you a worse person, but it can present serious challenges to becoming a better one, or even remaining a good one. Survivors of trauma need help, not platitudes, and certainly not someone else deciding for them that they need to be challenged in this way.
Unlocked.
This entry was originally posted at http://ms-daisy-cutter.dreamwidth.org/1803224.html. Please comment there using either your DW account or OpenID.